* Posts by TonyJ

1596 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Dec 2010

Demand for smartphones is drying up

TonyJ

Re: Innovation

"...There was also a huge increase in sales at the start of everyone needing to work from home. It's going to take a few years for that to work its way through..."

I don't understand why so many of these companies struggle to wrap their heads around this.

A brand new PC/laptop bought two years ago is still fine for the vast majority of use cases and not even Microsoft's attempts to force a purchase for Windows 11 will be particularly successful for another 3 years when Win 10 support ends.

Likewise phones - Whenever I have to buy a phone, I tend to go for a refurbished n-1.5 - by which I mean I get one of the previous generation just as/before the next one comes out. It tends to save a fortune and I get plenty of life out of them for e.g. updates.

And when I look at what has changed between those models? Naff all. It has more cameras. Uhuh. It has a brighter/bigger screen - ok so it also has a bigger battery that lasts just as short or even less time than mine? Gotcha. Oh we moved the fingerprint sensor. Ok, sure.

None of it is revolutionary. It's not even evolutionary, really.

And to top it off, wages are falling in real terms at their fastest rate in 40 years. The cost of living is spiraling. Is anyone with half a brain surprised that things like the latest shiny are the first to take a hit when people have to prioritise their spending?

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

TonyJ

Re: I started my career as an electronics engineer

@elsergiovolador - would you be so kind as to point me in the right direction of some such offerings? I've been toying with getting back into electronics as a hobby and it'd be handy to get some information on such things from someone already in the know.

TonyJ

"...

T'was ever the case.

How many steam engineers are still about eh?..."

Well... first off, a lot - high pressure steam is used in food manufacturing, power stations etc - I suspect your question is more "how many steam engine (trains) engineers are there?"

And secondly, you are comparing apples and oranges - there are fewer steam engineers because there are fewer steam engines. By extension you would be suggesting there's less electrical/electronics...

TonyJ

I started my career as an electronics engineer

When I did my degree at the closing end of the 1980's surface mounted components were not particularly readily available yet - we were just starting to see some of them creep in.

You could usually find a schematic (circuit) diagram of whatever it is you wanted to fix and, usually, source a suitable compatible [e.g.] transistor to replace the ones in your faulty radio/TV.

Then came surface mount components and expensive kit needed to do a repair.

And now everything is on a single chip or two. Almost always a custom component. Almost always impossible to source or source an alternative due to being custom and frankly unavailable.

And it's crap. It adds to landfill when you can't just repair something.

As for me - I changed direction in 1997. Until then I was working in workshops performing component level repairs and having fun. And then I saw an advert for a Dell (might have been an Optiplex) with a 15" CRT *and* a 3 year on site warranty for less than we sold a three year return to base warranty. And that's when I knew repairing kit was on its way out.

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

TonyJ

Re: It's still going on

"...MS Onedrive. Save a file to my Onedrive folder. Go into Outlook, try and attach that file to a message - "Sorry, you don't have permission to do that"

WTF ?? I own that soddin' document! What extra permissions do I need? MS has no idea...."

I've found I get all sorts of weird errors if I try to attach a document from OneDrive that is currently open in e.g. Word.

Just as a check - make sure it isn't open anywhere before you try to attach it. It may or may not make a difference.

1.9m patient records exposed in healthcare debt collector ransomware attack

TonyJ

Re: Criminals hack criminals

I came here to say exactly the same thing.

It was always "sophisticated"

They always "detected and stopped" it

Which I always assume means "someone opened an email attachment and when their computer locked up with a ransomware message, they called IT, who basically said 'shitting hell we'd best tell the boss'"

I am not sure what is to be gained out of stealing the details of people from a debt collection agency (and what kind of first world culture puts their own citizens into debt to be treated medically anyway?) - surely there's not much point trying to open e.g. a credit card with their details?

Not the point at all, I know, but it makes me wonder why the hell the perpetrators bothered other than "they could".

Watch a RAID rebuild or go to a Christmas party? Tough choice

TonyJ

My rule of thumb for a server with a failed RAID disk when I was hands on - make sure you have a reliable backup* before you do anything else. And if it's Exchange, where absolutely possible, stop all of the MS Exchange Services and do an offline backup. Believe me you will thank me later for those few hours of downtime that you are currently cursing.

*I appreciate it isn't always possible to prove the integrity (or even the overall usefulness) of said backups before commencing work but at least take one before you start and do everything you can to verify it, however little that might actually be - but being able to stand in front of the big cheese and demonstrate that you did everything possible to ensure you covered all bases can be a career saver.

Elon Musk’s brother buys Intel’s fireworks-replacing drone biz

TonyJ

Re: Strange Times

"...If the boss stays, it's one rule for the boss, a different rule for everyone else, which is not how the world should work..."

It's not how government should work either, and yet...

Getting that syncing feeling after an Exchange restore

TonyJ

Re: Exchange...

I knocked up a powershell script back in the day to do just this - worked from Exchange 2007+ and it was a great last resort backup.

There used to be limits in PST file size in Outlook though which made it difficult if the mailbox was over a certain size.

TonyJ

Re: Exchange...

As I say it has been a long time but you did remind me that before I did any work on an Exchange server that might cause any harm* I would insist on an offline backup being performed first.

*Which was pretty much anything, really.

TonyJ

Exchange...

...was never easy to back up and restore. I remember when the first "bricks level" backup utilities arrived. Ah yes...years of a product before you had any easy way to restore a single email from backup.

I haven't worked hands on with Exchange for years, and even then the most recent was moving from on-prem to hosted online. And in my personal opinion, it's one service that is better looked after by someone else. :-)

Rufus and ExplorerPatcher: Tools to remove Windows 11 TPM pain and more

TonyJ

Re: Just goes to show..

"...The tone and the username are eerily familiar, but I thought the person in question was dead. Did you sue three ISPs, back in the day?..."

If that's being asked of me - no, not me.

TonyJ

Re: Just goes to show..

Check out a machine based VPN rather than user based. Alwayson VPN offerings. They do help with scenarios like this.

TonyJ

Re: Just goes to show..

"...Honestly, this is EXACTLY the sort of snidey, malinformed comment that infests the Reg's comments sections and makes me hate reading them.."

Well first off I've spent most of my career in and out, and around, what we'd now call EUC - so long in fact, from way before it was called such a thing.

I've been involved in some massive rollouts and upgrades over the years and Microsoft have a habit of making things more difficult than they should be.

Worked with MECM lately? The interface is a mess and has been for a long time. Deployment tools are increasingly cluttered and difficult to untangle. Co-management *should* help but tends to add a large overhead on with diminishing returns that mean group policies are still required. A support mix that can be hell to unravel.

Why not just provide a mechanism to import group policies, convert them and apply them*?

During lockdown I was involved in a refresh for a council that had begun some time before C19 so we had to move it to a remote deployment.

It was painful for a number of reasons. But, as part of the programme, said council had bought around 4,000 new laptops (purchased mid-late 2019) to support Windows 10. The vast majority of them won't be supported by Windows 11 despite being core i5 and i7 devices with plenty of RAM, SSD's etc.

Now, if Microsoft are truly stating that the TPM version is that important, a) there would be no mechanism to bypass it and b) they would put the requirement into Windows 10.

Since they don't do either of these things, it makes it arbitrary and clear to any idiot that it is a strategy designed to keep the uptick of laptop sales we saw during lockdown going for their partners and actually, the end result is the exact opposite - places will milk out their investments into Windows 10 and the devices it runs on for as long as they possibly can, even if that's beyond their usual refresh windows. But then lets also not forget that Windows 10 was the last version you'd ever buy and it would be rolling updates.

Likewise - what is the justification for not allowing me to have a local user account? Let's look at Intune for a second - I can create a deployment profile that creates a local user. I can even make that user non-administrative (yay!). If Microsoft believed that any kind of online account was a necessity then they would insist on an offline domain join and a domain user being used, but they do neither.

Still think my comments are snidey and malinformed?

*Something they've been promising for a long time though I will confess I haven't checked their progress on this recently, the last time I did it was still unavailable. You could do a kind of group policy import that would tell you if the settings could be done in Intune or not but not actually import them to use).

TonyJ

Just goes to show..

...how false these "requirements" from MS actually are.

(Which I know everyone here at El Reg already knew, but you would expect it of this audience).

Windows 11: The little engine that could, eventually

TonyJ

Re: Sliding down the hill - backwards

I assume it's because I have the Enterprise version coupled with a PiHole that I don't really see the advertising but I know what you mean - my dad and brother in law both use Home versions of 10 and the adverts are dreadful and even on a home PC they have no place scattered throughout the entire OS.

I also don't understand MS's constant need to fiddle with the UI. I am not a Luddite but I often have to stop and wonder if the likes of me, a veteran of IT since before Windows 3 sometimes struggles to find the way to do what I want to do, then how is the average user supposed to manage?

Things like removing the task manager option when I right-click the taskbar. Why? What possible reason is there to do that? Did it really take up so much real estate that it had to go?

Why are there *still* duplicated ways to change settings in Control Panel and Settings? And what the fuck MS...why have you removed all the OK dialogues and apply the changes in real time?

Ok I know most of these are Windows 10 related as well but it just highlights this constant need of theirs to fiddle in ways that make users' lives harder.

And of course there's the elephant in the room: working in the EUC space for the last few years I've seen companies go through the pain of moving to Windows 10. Often they bought new hardware to do just that.

Why the hell would these companies then want to move to Windows 11 so soon? Given the ridiculous hardware requirements combined with Windows 10 support being good for another 3 years?

And no...I absolutely do not want to use an online MS account to log into my Windows machine. Stop it.

NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe

TonyJ

I used to visit a particular council...

...who I won't name and shame because despite their lack of technical nounce they actually had a lot going for them from my perspective, such as:

Everything was well documented. Amazingly so - they had records of installs going back over a decade so when it came time to upgrade servers, we had ready access to detailed install docs for all of their applications - including any gotchas that had been encountered!

They were actually incredibly pleasant people to work with (well the IT peeps were - some of the users were... difficult... such as the woman who logged a complaint because someone had deleted her username from the Windows login box and how could she be expected to remember it? Or the one who complained because the roving IT helper moved one of the icons on her desktop an inch to the side and she "couldn't find it" etc) and they had that very unique feature that they knew they had limited knowledge.

Not that they let that be a barrier to their occasionally randomly trying / changing things.

And even now, almost 20 years later, that site still features regularly in my anecdotes.

Start using Modern Auth now for Exchange Online

TonyJ

Re: Hello trackers, now MS knows more accurately where you are

Or - and I know it's old school but you can print things out as a backup. And take screenshots of e.g. QR codes on your phone so they work offline.

I am yet to check onto a flight or into a venue that requires an *online* version of anything.

You can always, you know, try to plan ahead a little.

TonyJ

Re: The whole thing is a worsening nightmare

Genuine question - I've had a lot of prompts to prove it's me when buying online, which you expect but I've never had to approve a transaction made in person yet. Is it something that is common now?

I have previously used MS Authenticator on a phone without a SIM in it, just a WiFi connection. Happy to stand corrected though, as that was a while ago now.

I do know that my Barclays app used to shit itself on dual-SIM phones so I can well believe MS Authenticator IS tied into the SIM now.

TonyJ

Re: Hello trackers, now MS knows more accurately where you are

"...At any rate, reading emails while on holiday is a challenge as the account invariably gets locked out because I logged in from an unusual location..."

Good. Do yourself a favour and stop reading work emails on holiday. There is rarely, if ever, anything of such importance that it won't wait until you return.

It's your time off. Your time to unwind.

Always remember this little mantra: "If you drop dead tomorrow, the company you work for will have replaced you within a couple of weeks. Your family will be impacted forever."

I've posted before, but I point blank refuse to work beyond my contracted hours (except for the occasional, pre-planned requirement, or for say a P1 incident that affects me/my team). I've said that now for around the last 13/14 years.

Weekends are family time. Evenings are family time.

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

TonyJ

Re: 32A commando in the garage

I was just coming back to say this - the previous owner had a welder. I am going to assume a *faulty* one that if earthed, kept tripping the board in the garage.

Oh and talking about the garage. There is one, single, solitary dual socket that is not actually fed off the supply to the garage/from the garage distribution unit.

Oh I've had so much joy. The heating is another - there's a massive water tank in the garage and I was digging around looking to see what would be involved in, if possible at all, heating the water occasionally from the log burner in the lounge on the other side of the wall where the tank sits.

Except from all my admittedly basic plumbing knowledge, the boiler itself looked like a combi. It was tricky to tell by the model number as the same model can be either a combi or system.

So I asked a friendly plumber.

Turns out the boiler IS a combi.

Also turned out that the tank was isolated so every morning when the water heating came on, it was heating the same tank of water every day.

Why? No one seems to know. Backup to use an immersion heater? Possibly but that'd be incredibly expensive given the size of the tank.

And you can't have both on as the back pressure from the tank would cause the boiler to detect a fault.

I am seriously starting to wonder if the previous owner had a hard core drug addiction. :-)

TonyJ

Re: The BS 546 Brexit connector next

Not to mention that being green and yellow it's the only dual-coloured wire. The other two being solid blue and solid brown.

Except the cables where it's bare copper and you supply the required insulation of course but these tend not to be used to run e.g. your kettle... :-)

TonyJ

Re: Charge the chargers

That's part of the issue though, unfortunately. If you know the problem you already know what to look out for (3 quid for an "official" Apple/Samsung charger on Amazon etc won't be official anything). And conversely if you don't then it becomes a minefield.

And the folks who don't know, needless to say, don't even realise they need to educate themselves.

TonyJ

Re: Charge the chargers

Worse - I've seen them on Amazon advertised as "genuine" chargers. It's a minefield for anyone who doesn't understand the risks.

Mind you, electricity in general seems to baffle some people. Moved house last year and most of my time to date has been putting the botched electricals right. Primarily, the previous owner seemed to either not understand, or have something against, earthing things (e.g. all metal cooker hood - not earthed. 32A commando socket in the garage - not only not earthed, but the earth bent up out of the way in a way that made it clear it was done on purpose. Various sockets - not earthed. The list goes on).

Sorry - went off on a bit of a ranty tangent there.

TonyJ

Re: Optional Chargers

Some already do, I believe.

PowerShell pusher to log off from Microsoft: Write-Host "Bye bye, Jeffrey Snover"

TonyJ

Re: "Admins don't want command line interfaces"

Well users loved the move away from a command-line (D)OS so admins must have been the same, right? RIGHT?

No, MS, absolutely not!

You can always tell an admin apart from a user because we, the former, have a tendency to drop to shell (be that PS or CMD) to do things in Windows - whatever the version.

You need to RTFM, but feel free to use your brain too

TonyJ

Re: Check you can complete before you start

To be fair - it was 30+ years ago, I suspect it was more specifically worded (as in read and follow the instructions 1 and 2 below, before answering any questions) rather than "these instructions" and the failure was more my faded memory :-)

TonyJ

Re: Check you can complete before you start

Late 80's, early 90's I had an RAF recruitment test do exactly the same thing:

READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE ANSWERING ANY QUESTIONS:

1 - Read the entire paper to the end before proceeding

2 - Write your full name and the date in the boxes above

...

Bottom of last page: Complete step 2 of the instructions and hand in your paper. Do not answer any other questions or write on any other part of the paper.

TonyJ

I once did a set of documentation to install and configure an Altiris solution.

I've always prided myself in always assuming that the reader of such documents may be coming at it with zero knowledge and try to avoid skipping steps because they are obvious to me. So mine would be down to a screen shot with which button to press, what text to type etc - always with a bright red box around the relevant part of the screen shot.

During the development of the build, I was being shadowed by an ex-Royal Navy chap who was brand new to IT. One of his jobs was to go through the documentation to ensure it was up to muster.

The next thing I know I am dragged into an "urgent" meeting with the programme lead because the test was an unmitigated disaster and the chap's response was "Don't blame me - I followed Tony's document".

Only he hadn't. It was clear from 30s of basic tests that he'd skipped over entire sections because he "thought he knew it and didn't look at the document for that part". He then doubled down and took humbridge when it was pointed out that he was there to test the document, not his personal knowledge which he'd only proved to us was lacking.

The next time he ran through it, I made him tick every section to prove he had read it as well as shadowing him to ensure he was actually following the document. And to no one's surprise it ran exactly as expected.

TL/DR - never assume the person reading your document has any knowledge of the system they are looking at.

Woman accused of killing boyfriend after tracking him down with Apple AirTag

TonyJ

Re: Ban cars?

"...We didn't, as a nation, kill and pillage our way across the world in the latter half of the last millennia in cars. The UKs economy didn quite well without them..."

Indeed. Big ships, big guns, an army and navy and a perpetual world view of "Oh nice country you have here old chap. I now call it mine".

Whatever you do, don't show initiative if you value your job

TonyJ

Re: "So was James truly the guilty party?"

This line "...This being XP it's entirely possible that the the system wouldn't even run without the user having admin rights." never fails to amuse me.

With simple tools such as Regmon and Filemon from Sysinternals it was always possible to get software running as a non-administrative user.

Document the changes in case an update decides to re-apply perms (rarely happened) and it was trivial.

This used to be the refrain on poorly built Citrix servers all the time - oh it needs admin rights so we made everyone a domain / local admin. Lazy and needless.

HP pilots paper delivery service for Instant Ink subscribers

TonyJ

Re: having to go buy paper [is] heavy, very painful

I bought an HP LJ Pro MF478 a few years ago.

About two years ago it started to warn me that the toners were low so I bought a set of genuine ones. I chose genuine for two reasons - firstly to maintain the free three year on site warranty it came with and secondly because I've previously had issues with non branded ones that ended up trashing a printer.

I haven't fitted them yet - I don't print loads but I do print.

I think these new toners will outlive the printer at this rate.

Buoyant tech sector bucking the UK trend, says consultancy

TonyJ

At no point did you mention contracting, let alone being inside IR35.

And the flip side is also true - how many contractors have minimised their tax payments over the years so that they pay *less* than those employed at the same numbers? Even taking into account operating costs, no sick pay, no holiday pay etc, it was still very much in the favour of the contractor.

TonyJ

Re: Atrocious

Common misconception with taxes.

For your first chunk up to you tax code you pay zero. So someone on a tax code of 1257L will pay no tax up to and including £12,570pa

Anything you earn between £12,571 and £37,700 is taxed at 20%

Anything you earn between £37,701 and £150,000 is then taxed at 40%

And anything over £150,001 is taxed at 45%

Which means for someone on £60,000 a year it would break down as:

0% of £12,570

20% of £25,129 (£37,000 - £12,571) = £5,025.80 tax paid

and 40% of £22,299 (£60,000 - £37.701) = £8,919.60 tax paid

So the total tax paid for someone on £60,000 is £13,945.40 or just over 23%

Yes, I know that doesn't take into account National Insurance etc but this idea that you pay half of everything really is wrong and it's always disappointing to hear people say things like "I can't do any overtime otherwise it all gets taken in tax".

Edit: By the way, I didn't downvote you. Seems a tad harsh for a common misunderstanding.

Majority of Axon's AI ethics board resigns over CEO's taser drones

TonyJ

Re: This isn't a solution...

"...I want to take the loonies off the streets BEFORE they can act, instead of removing one inanimate object out of many that they can use to lash out. This is having issues, in your mind?..."

And how do you do that? How, exactly, do you identify someone who walks into a gun store and legally buys a firearm(s) and then uses that to shoot children? When that someone has no previous convictions or prior mental health issues that were flagged?

Here's the one, simple fact that you and others like you cannot and will not accept: gun control works. Even in your own states where there are gun control laws, the vast majority of shootings are done with firearms brought in from a neighbouring state that has no such laws.

Look around you - no other country in the world has these issues and yet you would prefer to hold on to some out of date notion than protect schoolchildren.

Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL

TonyJ

I've heard all kinds of stories like this

Including a commissioning engineer (this was the early-mid 1990's) who used to think it was funny to upload hardcore porn into the company kit during commissioning, believing it would never be seen or even found.

As you can imagine, it was. I am not sure what the whole story was but he did lose his job, unsurprisingly.

It is simply never a good idea to "hide" something unsavoury inside code or on drives etc. It will eventually be discovered.

Only Microsoft can give open source the gift of NTFS. Only Microsoft needs to

TonyJ

Even if they did...

...you can bet the first comments here would be "I haven't used anything Micro$oft for decades and wouldn't start now" types etc etc

But, joking aside, the article is right - these days NTFS isn't (shouldn't be) a battle ground. It's winning them no new business - no one, ever, is going to choose Windows because of NTFS*. It's just another filing system at the end of the day.

Well ok, I guess you are if, like the article states, you need to plumb into an existing NTFS infrastructure but that's a shitty way to have to justify an operating system choice.

Citrix spreads its Desktop as a Service across Google and Azure clouds

TonyJ

Re: Citrix? Oh no...

I have to agree with AC. If you do it right then it works and it works well.

I've designed and built Citrix platforms that I've upgraded or replaced 7+ years later and they still worked as well as when they first went in and it was only the march of progress that got in the way of keeping them alive.

I've replace systems over a decade old that despite creaking at the seams were, again, well run and maintained and just carried on.

One caveat here is the team supporting them - all too often they are not kept in sync (patches and updates not applied evenly, apps creeping into some but not others and lots of other things that keep the platform running well).

Outlook bombards Safari users with endless downloads

TonyJ

Who expects Microsoft to test their stuff? against Safari ??

FTFY

Apple's return-to-office plan savaged by staff

TonyJ

Re: Options

@pcranness - I couldn't agree more. I posted here a little while ago about when I was in charge of a team of architects. This was around 2007-2009 or so.

I didn't care one jot where or how they worked. My rules were very simple:

The work gets done on time.

If there's a problem, I want to know about it before I have a customer shouting at me down a phone.

If you do need to be on site for some reason (e.g. meeting) then so be it but beyond that the where and the how don't matter to me - if you want to work from 7am to 3.30pm every day or nights or split your day so you have a 3 hour break in the middle, so be it.

And finally, don't abuse my trust - you will only do it once.

And you know what? We had the most productive and profitable team in the company.

Microsoft exposes glue-free guts of the Surface Laptop Studio

TonyJ

"...Sacrificing replaceable memory in pursuit of ever-thinner devices has never been a good thing for this writer..."

I agree. It is also not beyond the realms of engineers to design a slot on the edge of a PCB that would allow e.g. RAM or SSD to plug in therefore not raising the profile of the board. It's lazy and it's designed to get puchasers to overprovision when they buy.

Twitter faces existential threat from world's richest techbro

TonyJ

Musk doesn't want to "fix" twitter

He wants his own platform where he can have his own version of "freedom of speech" i.e. a world where his view is the only one and no one can challenge it.

Too many people (especially monied and/or powerful) people equate freedom of speech to mean freedom to say whatever I want without consequence. And they aren't the same thing by a country mile.

Windows 11 usage stats within touching distance of... XP

TonyJ

@Paul Crawford - you'd be amazed (or perhaps not) how often I've seen a corporate build mangled to the point it becomes almost unusable. And that's across the desktop and server estates.

Part of the problem seems to be things like group policy sprawl - settings applied that may have been relevant once upon a time but not anymore. Contrary settings (turned on, then off, then back on in subsequent GPO's, for example).

And then their idea of "security" - because someone, somewhere read the NCSC cloud document and tried to apply it to desktops rather than realising that there is actually an associated desktop variant.

And a million other little checks and ticks that slow a machine down or otherwise make it unusable.

I put Win 11 onto my daily driver because I'm in a position where I need to know the differences and other than the weird UI choices (but let's be fair - MS have been making batshit UI choices since even before Win 8 but they really hit the drugs for that one) it's not terrible. I've had no odd BSoD's or restarts. No issues with any apps yet and it seems as fast as Windows 10 was. And my laptop is two years old now but meets the hardware requirements.

TonyJ

"..."Although the rate of adoption is increasing bit by bit, it's obvious that Windows 11 upgrades aren't going as fast as Microsoft had hoped, especially within the business environment," said Roel Decneut, chief strategy officer at Lansweeper..."

Go figure! When you rule out companies deploying it to new hardware because it doesn't meet some arbitrary hardware requirements, AND your existing OS is good for another 3 years of support, why would anyone be surprised at the slow adoption?

Add to that, that rolling out a new OS even with MECM (SCCM as was) etc is still a fundamentally large, slow, process for many companies then you just hit the point where the barriers to doing so are too high. And they really shouldn't be.

Intune can help - especially since the introduction of offline domain join (though the few attempts I've had at that on my home lab have been very hit and miss) but the biggest (artificial) stumbling block is that needing a new machine for so many. Especially given so many companies and individuals upgraded in 2020/21 - there isn't a new hardware refresh due for years.

Windows 11 growth at a standstill amid stringent hardware requirements

TonyJ

Re: High requirements

"...At work, in some labs we have HP Desktop that are around 10 years old with i5 CPUs and 4GB of RAM....they are totally happy with Win 10 so long as you don't expect to do masses on them..."

Slap an SSD into them and you will see a spring in their step that'll pretty much match anything modern for those basic tasks.

TonyJ

Re: Why move to Windows 11 ?

Correction to myself - I meant to say in Win 7 - 10 it launches another copy of CMD

In Win 11 it launches PS.

TonyJ

Re: Why move to Windows 11 ?

Oh and try this:

Win key + R -> CMD

Ok you get a nice command window as you wanted and would expect.

Now in Windows 7 - 10, if I hold shift and click on command interpreter icon to launch another copy of command, it launches PowerShell.

Now I get it that PS is the default shell environment, and that is fine and all that, but if *I* as the user of the system has chosen to launch a command shell then you can probably expect I want *another* fucking command shell.

Win 11 in and of itself isn't bad from a number of perspectives and it does seem snappy. What I find bad is the UI design elements that have changed for no apparent reason. Again.

DNS - can be changed globally or per card but if you do it globally it sometimes (on my system at least) doesn't warn you of that and it overrides it if you set another per-card.

Secure DNS is present. Good. But there's no narrative around what it does for your casual users.

Getting into network settings alone can be multiple more clicks than it used to be or needs to be.

And yeah no right-click task manager for me is annoying. I know there are plenty of other ways but my 20+ years of muscle memory kicks in.

Halo Infinite ups the nostalgia factor for fans of the originals, but it's not without limits

TonyJ

Re: Great game, but it's not HALO

Been a while and I hope you're getting on more with it but to answer some of your comments:

"...It feels like the HALO team did the original cutscenes, then got laid off and the Modern Warfare 2 guys had to finish it from their notes.

There's literally nothing aside from "kill aliens" so far. There's a dig site I'm supposed to get to, but I have no idea how, and a team of guys on a hill apparently that I'm supposed to save, but I have no idea how to get there..."

I agree that some of the routes are less than obvious to put it mildly - some of the objectives appear to be right in front of you but take time to learn where they actually are/to get to them and some feel illogical. Just persevere.

"...I've found a tank, but there's nowhere to take it because it's hard to drive and the trees and rocks are in the way, and there's nothing obvious to attack with it..."

The vehicle driving mechanism in all Halo games has never changed. Unlike most others where you use the keyboard to change direction and the mouse to look, in Halo it's always been the mouse to look and the vehicle basically follows in that direction. It takes some getting used to but eventually feels more natural in my personal opinion.

"...There's ghosts scattered around that I can't drive.."

These are damaged beyond use, simply. If you look closely you will eventually see how to tell them apart.

"...The marines are stupid. I saved a bunch and now they're all clustered around the tank and won't leave to come with me...

Yep. The marine AI has always been odd like that - pretty dumb across the whole franchise.

"...I have had a couple boss fights but I've learned almost nothing from them, except one guy's name. There was "sooper dooper sword elite dude" who instead of attacking me with his sword, just spammed me with impossibly accurate grenades from an absolutely impossible range..."

Per my comment above - sometimes it feels like a breeze (especially some bosses) and others you just get pummeled time and again and that does get frustrating.

"...The "new girl" is too perky and idiotic. I feel like I'm traveling with Mr. B. Natural from MST3K..."

She's supposed to be. She's meant to be a throwback to naivete and innocence

"...The Pelican somehow has an unlimited supply of vehicles and doesn't mind coming to drop them off, but won't pick me up and take me anywhere..." there are ways you can move around the map built in, but come on... it's be a short game if you could call a lift every time you wanted to get anywhere!

"...I'm playing "normal" and Brutes and Elites fall instantly with simple faceshots, then there are these "fast attack" brutes that land and you have to grenade spam them..."

Interesting - I never felt that ease with general opponents. Perhaps you're a better player than you realise? (Not sarcasm)

I guess I'll go shoot some more aliens. I don't have much else to do.

Edit: and I started the game, and got "you are not the fireteam leader" and it refused to play the game.

I googled the error and "halo infinite" and "campaign" and got NO HITS. I updated my HALOBOX and it played. Yay. Is this fuckin' Windows 10 or what?

Help, my IT team has no admin access to their own systems

TonyJ

What about other systems? I doubt everything was AD integrated and that it was all left unlocked ready to go.

"...

I used to be the IT Manager for my company many years ago. I insisted that all admin passwords had to be printed off, placed in a sealed envelope and securely stored. Got taken out for a beer a couple of years afterwards by my successor - that strategy had saved his bacon when someone responsible for managing a critical system left the company without doing a proper hand-over..."

There should always be at least one break glass account per system where the accounts are stored offline, in a secure place (fire safe, for example, or some equivalent even if it's digital).

Sealed, confidential IBM files in age-discrimination case now public to all

TonyJ

Re: Experience

"...One of the fundamental issues of the milennials right there when it comes to practicality.

Unable to think for themselves, do research etc. Blind to commonsense, blind to knowledge of the 'elders'

We'll be in caves again in the next few hundred years if we allow them...."

Without a constant influx of new ideas and fresh thoughts that come out of educational institutions we also run the risk of stagnating.

There is a flip side to these discussions which is rarely mentioned and always biased towards "the yoof need to listen to the experience" - some (not all by a long stretch) older/more mature workers are too set in their ways to change. They view new ideas with too much skepticism rather than taking a balanced view and giving new ideas and approaches a fair shot.

Yes, it's true that the younger crowd if let loose will often repeat the mistakes previously learned from, and need that guiding hand of experience to temper the overzealousness, but... you can learn a lot by listening to them as well.