Posts by TonyJ

Re: Subscription

I can beat that... a well know retailer I worked at had a Citrix implementation that had been out of support for close to 10 years. That included, but wasn't limited to, Presentation Server & NetScaler products.

The NetScaler devices themselves were so EoL you couldn't even buy the physical devices, but, in that case at least, they could have updated to a supported version of the OS. Except, they couldn't because the version they were on was the last to work with their ancient version of PS.

Not that it stopped the Citrix sales/service manager from flogging them close to £250k of subscription advantage every year. He was not happy when I canned that and couldn't see what he'd actually done wrong.

Yes, I blame the retailer and their staff for allowing it to happen in the first place, but I also blame him for knowing it was happening and failing to advise appropriately just to get his slice of the pie.

Re: Return to Office

"...I imagine that if your role is task based then WFH is fine but when you're driving change in a business you really need to be with people..."

Nice ego you have there. Reads more as "when you need to intimidate someone to get your own way"

I've done many a project where driving change through is a requirement - by which I mean, driving change where it's generally opposed for various reasons. I've also found it is actually quite rare to have to force someone as opposed to explaining the situation/drivers/bigger picture, though yes, it isn't unheard of to have to say what amounts to "suck it up, buttercup - this is happening with or without you".

Of course, sometimes face-to-face over a coffee with C level bods can be the best way forwards as well but again that tends to be rare.

Teams works just as well (your choice of platform may vary) for those ad-hoc calls to replace the tap on the shoulder chats. I also find that meetings tend to run better over these as there tends to be:

- Much less time wasted at the start of a meeting waiting for the multimedia screens to be connected to

- Ditto waiting for people to dial in over the phone

- It's far easier to mute people when they refuse to stay on track

- Much easier to minute meetings as it can effectively be done in the chat or simply record the meeting if required.

See my post last week about the kinds of boss - treat the people under you well, with respect and enable them to get on with their jobs and worry less about where/how/when they do it as opposed to their results and amazing things tend to come from it.

Re: The first RANSOMWARE O.S...

A much lower cost and performnce enhanching upgrade would be an SSD. Even SATA ones perform SO much better than HDD's that it really will breathe life into your daughter's machine.

As of a few months ago as well, the free upgrade to Windows 10 was still working.

Just a thought - if you were to take an image first, as well, you can always roll back but I would definitely look at an SSD as a low cost option.

Afraid not. The days are long passed since I had hiring responsibilities of any kind.

Re: The Usual Suspects

It couldn't fine the last one...?

When I put our companies first mail filter in back in the late 90's it would send the whole email when it found some keywords to another - in this case shared - mailbox for us to review. Not sure in hindsight how they get away with it because there wasn't such a thing as an acceptable use/monitoring agreement policy in place back then.

I had a rather stern female colleague from sales come badgering us aggressively because she wasn't getting emails through from a colleague (if filtered on all emails both internal and external).

I pulled up the shared mailbox they went into and the first one she hadn't received was pure filth. As was the first one from her that was blocked.

She was outraged that it was interfering with her love life (oh - they were married as well, just not to each other). I tried to explain that whilst I really didn't care one way or the other, maybe sending pornographic emails to one another via their corporate accounts wasn't a good idea but she was adamant she was going to report us to the IT Director... as far as I know she never was that daft, but maybe he just laughed her out of his office.

We still got the odd email flagged from them with the same explicit descriptions of what they planned to do to one another so some people just don't learn.

Re: Always an important consideration

I am sure there will be cat calls. I've made a few myself over some of the odd UI choices MS have thrown through.

The thing is, my personal feeling is that Windows 7 struck the right balance from a usability perspective.

Windows 8 could have carried that on - indeed, the beta releases had a registry key that would restore the Windows 7 style start menu, but MS decided to try and force a touch-based UI onto a desktop device with a mouse and keyboard (I obviously include laptops in that). Underneath the madness, Windows 8 itself wasn't even a particularly bad OS

Moving things for the sake of moving them - or even moving them but giving no clear guidance or explanations as to why they're being moved just tends to frustrate people.

And remember - we here in the El Reg forums are NOT your typical user by a long stretch. I have had to deal with users who are still so computer illiterate that the slightest of changes can cause them days or weeks of pain to relearn their day to day tasks.

The UI changes from Windows 2000 -> XP - Vista -> 7 were fairly modest. Things tended for the most part to be where people expected them in the language they knew. 8 was a travesty and 8.1 barely made it any better. 10 started to bring things back to a normal that people recognised, but again there was this disconnection with e.g. some things in control panel, some in settings and some even in both! You could resize elements of the UI (I accidentally resized part of the taskbar icons once accidentally with a touchpad and swipe gestures).

Part of the problem seems to be that MS are trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, to make one OS for all but fucking it up.

It shouldn't be hard, either:

Home edition - no domain join, gamebars and other shite that have no place in an enterprise and forced updates (I know that will win me no prizes but I think enough of us have had to deal with the horrors of activation-hacked versions of XP or just never-updated versions of later versions to justify this).

Professional/Workstation/Enterprise (call it what you will) version - can join a domain, has none of the tat, has no telemetry, has control over deploying patches.

Leave the really handy small applications alone like Notepad and Paint and add a decent snipping tool back in because lord knows those things are really really useful when you just need to grab something quickly, note something quickly or are generating e.g. install documents.

MS seem to have really lost sight of the fact that whilst yes, it's expensive and time consuming to do bulk upgrades every 3, 5, 7 years or whatever a place chooses, it's just as important to have a stable system that people understand, can find things, and aren't battling a constant change and that under-pressure support staff aren't having to relearn every 12-18 months!

Something they actually do with LTSC, but oh wait...yeah it isn't a day-to-day general purpose OS apparently.

TL/DR - stop moving stuff for the sake of moving it and/or at least explain why it's being moved :-)

Re: System requirements?

To be fair that spring-lamb bounciness would've been more down to the SSD than Win 10 itself.

Re: Typical slander

I believe it is libel, not slander, when written.

But then I also believe it needs to be proven to be untrue to be either, which may be a slight problem.

Re: Coincidence?

"...IR35 drives flexible, lower-cost, independent contractors into the arms of the big companies since it rapidly becomes pointless to be anything other than a paid employee with accompanying benefits.

The big companies then have to be used because of a shortage of other options and can continue to charge outrageous prices for simple tasks..."

Whilst some of that is true - IR35 is certainly pushing contractors into the arms of big companies like Atos, this deal and others like it were inked way before that kicked in.

As above, this is simply how these things are written.

It's like "clould" - you have to be very very careful to compare apples with apples, ignoring short term offers to use e.g. current licenses, or be aware that the costs have been worked out assuming everything is shut down outside of 40 core hours a week.

And then there's the assumption that HA, DR, Backup etc etc are all part of the headline price.

All compounded by the small (ha!) fact that in many cases, the very people qualified to tell you that you're about to cost your company/organisation huge amounts are the very ones you are getting rid of...so not much incentive, eh?

Re: Bloatware

I was about to say that the last time I checked, both Enterprise and Professional versions (which, at the end of the day are the same thing just a different license) both installed the xbox crap as default, so I thought I'd check again now.

And that said, my latest updated Enterprise version (21H1 and Azure AD joined) doesn't have the xbox gamebar enabled by default anymore, so maybe they've finally cottoned on to at least that bullshittery.

Re: Illegal in the UK and EU

I had an ex colleague wander into a Porache dealer. Now to be fair he did generally look like a hobo, but was loaded.

Oh and the dealer was owned by his brother in law.

The salesman that told him that they didn't have anything in his budget was fired after a quick phone call to resolve the issue.

I also had the same treatment when I went to loom around some show homes.

Both these incidents were 20+ years ago and I'd really hope sales drones are trained a bit better these days

Re: I don't understand something

Why? An item of equal value is returned hence there has been no financial transaction. He didn't buy the second drive, it was replaced under warranty. Net zero transaction.

I genuinely don't get it.

Re: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish......

So... the flip side being show me your proof they exist.

No corporate is guilt free and I wasn't saying it. In fact if you read through my posts I've been very critical of MS at various times.

How about attacking the argument, not the person?

Re: I'm pissed off...

Yeah Ninite is usually the first stop for me post-fresh install. You're right - it's how I found Greenshot.

Re: CPU usage

"...Why does clicking on https://wormhole.app/ put my 4 core i5 into a stress test?!?

This is using Firefox 87.0..."

Christ you're not wrong - it adds a good 30% CPU load to my quad core i7-9750H CPU.

Hmm second time of launching was more in the 10% range but still...

Re: Alot of that...

"...Then there's the issue of legacy compatibility. No-one needs to support anything older than a couple of years right?...

I know this was tongue in cheek, but part of me responded "You'd think, right?"

Bane of my life with the types of customers I work with. Want everything modernised...good. Oh but we need to run our 20+ year old crap application the work experience kid knocked up as a bit of a project we threw their way.

Re: At JGH re: checks...

"..If a foreign bank sends me money via the post, might my Czek cheque be in the mail? =-)p.."

You should probably check...

Re: Tired of MS

"...It's the perfect storm isn't it. A version of Windows that force-installs updates, combined with a woeful lack of QA testing for those aforementioned updates.

People with sufficient skill know how to wrestle some control of the update process back from MS so that patches are only installed once we're pretty sure they're trouble free. But for all the normal folk out there, they are left picking up the pieces from yet more crap coding from MS..."

I wouldn't argue that the QA is woeful and needs to be sorted (like it has for a long time now with updates), but, (and I've been downvoted for saying this before, but I stand by it), having spent an inordinate amount of time over the years with friends, family and neighbours that have never patched their systems (and in some cases, can't, patch them because they used godawful activation hacks, I would prefer to deal with the fallout of borked updates compared to the malware-riddled pieces of shit they become because of a lack of said patches.

And to that end at least, I actually believe home users should get automatically patched.

Corporate users, no - they should have the understanding. If you're using KMS keys then it should allow control of the patching by the org.

Re: On call Legend

I remember being in Ibiza the same year as that documentary about Manumission aired.

Clubs then (mid-late 90's) were charging the equivalent of £15 for a bottle of pils, let alone anything else.

Re: Most apps are trash anyway

I'm ok, Jack...

Re: Fuck uber

One of my local private hire firms has an app. You can book on it, see the price you'll pay and pay upfront if you so wish.

Their drivers are smart and (usually) pleasant and polite and their taxi's are always spotlessly clean and warm.

You do pay a slight premium over the other PH firms around here but you get all the convenience of Uber, knowing that you are using a firm that pays it's drivers fairly etc.

Re: Smoking

And these are the things smokers don't usually realise. It really doesn't matter how effective the filtration systems are, it permeates into everything and it stinks! Because of the damage to a smokers' sense of taste and smell they really don't realise how bad it is.

I remember getting home from pubs and restaurants before the smoking ban and my clothes absolutely reeking of tobacco and making everything else in my wash basket smell just as bad.

It staggers me now but when I was a kid, my parents used to smoke in the car with me and my sister in the back - I can still remember how sick it used to make me feel but neither of them would stop. They wouldn't dream of doing it now with their grandkids in the car (well my mum wouldn't - my dad quit cold turkey 30+ years ago).

Whilst I wouldn't call Windows 10 the worst UI by a long stretch, (Windows 8, anyone?) I agree about the inconsistencies.

Things in Settings and in Control Panel.

Things you'd expect to see in one but they're in the other.

It just adds a feeling of frustration. One example being when they made it multiple clicks (and associated head-scratching) to just get to a network card properties. Absolutely no discernible need to do this shit.

Re: Back in the 90's...

"..I know the names of senior people in my organisation so I could code keycard with their names. That doesn't mean they were involved in any misbehaviour that resulted from the use of those cards. If someone is smart enough to steal the keys and access cards to get in, it is not too much of a leap to assume they won't use their own names or the name(s) of their inside man (or men)(*) - unless they are going to deliberately sacrifice those people - which does not bode well for the rest of their names being kept secret for long.

(*) or "inside woman (or women)". Or whatever else the thieves might want to identify as...."

Think you missed the point:

That being that they'd nicked said cards, as well as master keys, in the first robbery. The cards weren't deactivated. Locks weren't changed.

They *already* knew which cards had been taken. There wasn't supposed to be any suggestion of wrongdoing or involvement of those people.