Posts by TonyJ

Re: WFHSS

I once worked from home for a straight 17 months and in that time, went into the office fewer than 6 times.

After spending the previous few years living a nomadic lifestyle it was, initially, blissful.

But I did eventually start to miss the social side of work - the actual face-to-face interactions with colleagues.

Since then I've tended to work a day or two at home here and there.

I did learn some valuable lessons:

If you can have a completely separate working space, do so. I was fortunate enough to have had an office built in the garden and it was both a lovely place to work (especially over the summer) but also meant that at the end of the working day, I physically closed work off. It makes a surprising mental difference.

Stick to your contracted hours. Obviously, there will be the odd time where things happen that push that out of the window, but again, per the above, it will do wonders for your mental health not trying to work all the hours in the day to prove you're valuable.

Be flexible and set expectations thus. If you have school runs (remember those?) then do them. If you need to hang the washing out, do it. You will find this again helps your mental health because it's a diversion from the grind. Before you start to feel guilty, remember that even at work in and office you have "dead time" - time spent at the watercooler, or otherwise chewing the fat.

Your IT is usually set up just how you want it and because you're not waiting for someone to open the dial-in conference bridge, work out how to get the big screen/projector working etc that meetings open - and close - much more efficiently. Not always, granted, but mostly.

Enjoy the fact that, if you're following the advice from point 1 and working contracted hours, you can even be flexible in your start and finish times because you're now not sitting in traffic for an hour or more each way to and from work getting worn out by it.

Set boundaries - both with colleagues and bosses but also with family. It took a while before my then wife understood that when I am working from home, I am working and no I can't just go shopping or for a long walk at the drop of a hat. Make sure your bosses and colleagues don't expect to be able to get a hold of you 24/7. Try to remember they do not own you. I had one boss who had a go at me because "...well I work 07:30 to 23:00 why don't you work longer?" he did not appreciate my response that I'm contracted for 40 hours, I am paid for 40 hours and they get 40 hours and I, like him, have a family. But unlike him, I am not a moron.

Remember to take a break occasionally and walk away from your desk. Again, you'd tend to do this at work, so do it working from home.

You will have bad days and good. Don't beat yourself up about it.

Re: Lacks the Polish?

"...@TonyJ

MAGA!..."

That brought nothing to the discussion. Grow up and take your medicine again.

For one thing I'm a Brit. For another anyone with half a brain found and finds Trump loathsome.

Don't you have a bridge you should be under?

Re: Lacks the Polish?

However if you read my first post you would realise that I said MS cocked up by allowing the ribbon to become as cluttered as the original menus they were trying to move away from, hence the big push to simplify it again. I am far from an MS fanboy and I will call them out on here (see recently my comments about their cock up allowing Defender services to be stopped, for example).

I do feel very strongly about this for a few reasons. As I say, I have literally 10's of thousands of users migrated without any notable complaining about the ribbon.

If it were such an obvious failure, why have LO incorporated it? I notice no one ever seems to answer this one.

You're right - the user base here is anything but the average worker drone and I would even go so far as to say the concept of a power user here is nothing like the average office power user.

There is almost always the same comment about the ribbon on here - Office 2007 was when I stopped using Office... fine. No one is/was forcing you to use it (unlike the majority of office users again who don't get any say). This is another thread that is apparent on some of the commentards here - "My choice is good. Any other choice is bad"

Likewise the folks saying about compatiblity - for chuckles, a little while ago. I fired up a very old copy of my CV that was done in Word 2000, in .DOC format and has quite of bit of heavy styling. Opened fine. No issues whatsoever.

Also...clippy? It's as relevant as Bob - different times with different concepts of how to make a product useful to the untrained masses but says more about where your mind is with Office as opposed to where Office itself is today.

Re: Lacks the Polish?

"...Weird that that "ton of user research" failed to spot the spectacular drop in productivity when they introduced it, something that I experienced myself - they induced a prolonged "where the flying f*ck did they stick that now" period of mining for things that used to be easy to find or lived under an easy shortcut. That was actually the point I totally dropped MS Office 365 and only have it on a machine somewhere to "translate"..."

So... hit any Alt + combination and even now, W365 will give you shortcuts to legacy key combos.

As for the spectacular drop - in all of my time working in EUC I witnessed very little of it. Mostly in finance teams because they had incompatible plugins.

What about the flip side you so conveniently overlook? People like myself that have to write endless documents in Word and have since back in the day of Office 2003? My productivity increased because I suddenly had easy and fast access to things I knew were there but had to dig around for them because it might not be something I used that often?

If you include the beta versions of Office 2007, the ribbon has been around since 2006. Pushing 15 years. If it was as horrible to use on a day-to-day basis as the vocal minority on here claim, then MS would have been forced to roll it back and LO would have continued to completely ignore it. So - even if you claim that MS were mulish sticking to it, LO still didn't have to adopt a version of it, did they?

And.. there are an awful lot of people who've grown up with it.

I can guarantee for every Linux user on here that hates anything that MS do with a passion and will denigrate any changes as change for change's sake, that I can show you at least the same number - probably more - of "ordinary" or even somewhere between "ordinary" and "power user" (like me) of Office that found the ribbon to be a massive productivity boon.

I work in the EUC space. I've migrated tens of thousands of users from various versions of Office to newer ones over the years on all flavours of Windows including Server Based Computing and into the latest versions of 365 and as above I can count on one hand the people who didn't like the ribbon and I'd say zero since at least 2010 if not before.

And you can downvote that as much as you want, but my direct experience will always trump your imagined problems and very real personal dislike.

Re: Lacks the Polish?

"...LO is far superior to MS Office 2003 in GUI and Writer works better than Word. The mistake is to use doc or docx for saving. Only use them to import or export. Use Styles properly. The undocked Style and Navigation windows are superior to MS Word 2007..."

Or... as a business user, just use Word. You know it's compatible and you're not messing around with different formats to save or to export. You may be happy to do this but your average user doesn't want extra steps just to do their day job.

And here's an oft-overlooked point with regards to the ribbon in Office 2007.

MS did a ton of user research into the next features for Office.

And found out that a huge percentage of them were actually already available but users didn't know and/or couldn't find them.

So the aim of the original ribbon was to simplify that mess of sub-menus.

Which worked. For a time. But if you look at the last few releases of O365 you'll notice that MS are once again working hard to simplify the ribbon because like the original menus it's become cluttered and far less than intuitive to find things anymore, utterly defeating the whole object of having it in the first place.

I work in the EUC space. If you ask users, then the ribbon never comes up as being an issue for them except perhaps where some addon to e.g. Outlook or Excel has failed to put their icon onto it.

Rather than the ribbon, personally I find one of the areas where Word in particular is still ropy is collaborative working. Once a document gets above about 100 or so pages, it becomes a mess. Changes not saving or disappearing when someone edits a completely different part of the document. Corruption etc. That really is something they need to sort out properly because it's tedious as fuck working on an online copy and having to save a local backup just in case it decides to shit on the online one.

Re: Been there, done that.

The thing is, though, that's a fair response for when she is actually meant to be on call. But that shouldn't be 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

I had a role as a principal architect. I was the go-to for the people reporting into me, the directors above, the sales staff alongside me and customers.

I'd be getting calls at 2am sometimes when something went wrong.

I did the maths and worked out what a piss-poor hourly rate it translated to because whenever I brought the topic up, I was told some bullshit about a blended salary yada yada yada.

Genuinely when I put the figures for utilisatioon into the company spreadsheet (we had to be able to justify new hires so this was standard) I was actually coming in at somewhere not much North of minimum wage.

I therefore decided to do my homework some more. I went and checked out the market and to add insult to injury I was underpaid for an architect role, let alone principal.

So armed with all the details - copies of the jobs listings and my utilisation etc, I sat down with my boss to discuss. And got told there was no money for any kind of raise.

I left three months earlier and went back to my unwritten rule of work is for work.

For the last decade I've always made it clear. Contacting me out of normal hours is the exception. Overtime is the exception and is paid for. I am contracted to work 37.5/40 hours a week (whichever it is) and ok, if I am working away then I don't mind doing extra hours Mon-Thurs but that's on the understanding that I am out of there on a Friday morning.

I still get random calls at 9pm or later. They don't get answered. If it's urgent they'll leave a VM but surprise, surprise, it's rarely that urgent that they don't leave one and just move onto someone that does answer.

My holidays. My family time. My weekends. They are mine.

Re: RE: doing things behind the curtain

"...Windows often doesn't "just work". There are too many crappy software engineers and programmers out there that don't seem to understand what the user needs to do. I have had to deal with finding solutions to software that doesn't work for a standard user and the product tech support "team" solution is to have all users log in as an administrator. As for the crappy Microsoft brainchild of 'dll's, I once had to support a computer with only 4 applications on it. There were two which were incompatible with each other to the point if one were run, the other wouldn't work until the computer was rebooted because each manufacturer had a custom dll with the same name. Printer drivers can be troublesome as there is no standard way to install printers. And of course, Microsoft want to install WSD ports for printing, which constantly breaks the ability of certain printers to work. I switch to TCP/IP and a Microsoft update (or some other strange event) switches it back to a WSD port, once again breaking printing. Microsoft constantly changes the look and feel of Windows, deprecating things or moving them around so trying to debug an issue becomes an Easter egg hunt, except there isn't always an Easter egg to find. True, the more you understand of Linux, the faster you can solve problems, but the Linux community has solutions easier to find than most of the Windows issues I come across and seldom can I find the correct solution on the Microsoft website. The usual Microsoft solution is to reinstall Windows and that is seldom anywhere close to the real solution..."

Genuine question here. How many of the above issues are actually down to Windows and how many down to the applications?

As for troubleshooting applications, make your life a lot easier and use the Sysinternals tools. It makes tracking down things like registry and file permissions trivial and you can unlock the necessary bits rather than the oft-taken lazy approach of "make the user an admin".

Re: RE: doing things behind the curtain

Ok let's take some of your comments in turn:

Put a blank SSD in your Windows laptop. Grab a vanilla Windows 10 .iso image created via the Microsoft tool. Do this from nothing on the hard drive: keep a note of how many steps it takes.

Since this is effectively what I do with a new release of WIndows every so often anyway I can answer this.

Step 1 - Download the latest ISO from Microsoft.

Step 2 - Kick of the installer from USB to wipe the partitions.

Step 3 - Allow Windows to update drivers during install

Step 4 - Get the latest NVidia Driver

Total time on my Dell: Around 45 minutes start to finish.

Also note how many third party sets of drivers you need to get the graphics card working.

See above. 1

Everything else from sound, NIC and TPM for example were just found and the latest available drivers were installed.

Check how long it takes to download the sets of Windows updates when you then first go to Settings and run update and how many times you need to run settings to get up to date.

Well this depends but if you get the latest version of the ISO rather that using that one you have lying around from 2-3 years ago, the answer tends to not be too many and as above the upgrade to 20H2 was 45 mins start to finish, including updates.

And since as a consumer you can only usually download one version of Windows 10, which is the latest, I'd recommend everyone does it prior to any build/update.

You can do this more readily with (most) Linux distributions and a lower number of third party packages - and I install both OS fairly regularly from nothing, so have done this relatively recently with Windows 10.

For bonus points: install Linux first, then install Windows to make it dual boot (and then reverse the process). Which OS doesn't find the other?

The Debian folks are talking right now about building a better download page: most people seem happy in the original thread if the installer can be made to prompt the user once to install/not install firmware.

I can't comment on this because I don't dual boot. My machines with Linux (r/Pi, couple of laptops, few VM's) are purpose built and my use-cases mean I don't need to do this.

But - given the crux of this is, as you say, making a version of the ISO that someone can expect to just download and for it to work, I would ask how many consumer users would you also expect to be dual booting? I don't have an answer for that. But I wouldn't imagine it's a huge number.

Re: RE: doing things behind the curtain

"...Ah, so you freely admit that you did not install W10 yourself. So, you admit that all the hard work of matching the OS to the laptop hardware had already been done for you..."

So you chose to ignore or didn't see this bit then?

"... I always wipe and replace..."

Re: RE: doing things behind the curtain

"..Windows may give the appearance of just working if it get it preinstalled but installing from scratch can present all sorts of challenges about missing divers or hardware which just says 'not working' even with the right driver. And how many times have we all spent hours trawling dodgy-looking, malware-ridden 'drivers' sites in the hunt for that specific missing driver - sometimes it's for a cheap Chinese device but I've definitely had to do it for big brand hardware as well..."

Just wrong.

I had a brand new laptop in 2015 when Windows 10 was brand new out of the gate and it had a few missing driver issues.

Since then every one has had drivers available either via MS or the vendor.

I bought a spanking new Dell last year. It came with Home but I always wipe and replace with Pro. Didn't miss a beat despite again having brand new hardware.

I really do believe a lot of Linux commentary along these lines is from Windows XP ot earlier.

I've just done a 7 to 10 migration for a council. A mixed bag of hardware from years old to brand new. The configuration manager images were almost trivial to create. Over 4,000 machines.

Re: ...you never appear to have bothered...

"...It's very childlike of you to believe that arguments in El Reg forums are taken seriously...

But I guess you can't stop yourself telling other people your opinion, regardless of whether they want to hear it..."

You might benefit from learning this, A/C

Also... you ok? Do you need a hug?

Re: ...you never appear to have bothered...

Reasonable response. I was typing in a hurry whilst trying to multitask. Never a good combination.

It just amuses me how people expect an argument to be taken seriously with silly name calling in it. Even where there may be a valid argument, it immediately detracts from that and makes it infantile and difficult to treat seriously.

"...The real crime is having to the Rejects of Redmond..."

No. It's that sentence...

There are advantages to the corporate/education users though, to be fair.

Compatibility. We've all seen businesses that run on spreadsheets. Yes, we all know it's wrong in the extreme but it happens. Still.

The ribbon. Yes, I know most people here loathe it with a passion but you have to remember it's been around for an awful long time now and it's what some people are just used to. Even LibreOffice gives you the option to have a ribbon now (caveat - it did. I assume it still does? Been a while since I checked)

OneDrive. Again, I know that there are options out there for hosting your own cloud storage such as Seafile but given the tight integration into Office, it makes life a lot simpler for some businesses. And it has all of the nice file rollback and version control built in - the former of which can actually become a real boon in the event of malware.

Easy collaboration. Ok again I happily admit that it is again far from perfect. The implementation of it seems to struggle with larger documents but it does help with the problem that we've all experienced where people are all working on their own offline copy of a file and some poor sod has to merge all of the changes. Sling it on OneDrive and share a link.

Outlook. I may be in a minority here but I quite like Outlook. It just tends to work.

Other hosted services. Such as Exchange Online. Makes life simpler for smaller businesses that can't afford dedicated teams to feed and water on premise resources.

Now I think it's worth pointing out that I am not trying to gloss over the inadequacies of the software/solutions, nor am I trying to suggest that there aren't viable alternatives to most of what I've just typed, but for most businesses / educational establishments, the ability to have all of the above features neatly packaged and accessible, and supported is a tempting offer for a few quid a month per user.

Except the ribbon. Whilst I personally like it, I know...

Or used hacked copies. I had several neighbours get arsey with me when they were told they needed a full reinstall because of nasties they'd picked up due to XP not updating because of the hacks.

The expectation always seemed to be that I'd "help them out" and they didn't seem to appreciate being told they either had to buy a licensed copy or scrap the lot and put Linux on.

Another of the many reasons I eventually refused to help non family members.

"...

Not that I want to defend HP, here... it was up to them to investigate before being parted from their money..."

That's the thing though.

Firstly you would be questioning that figure - such an order of magnitude of profit, whilst I wouldn't argue is impossible, is, however, very unlikely.

Hence you do due diligence. Proper due diligence. That you don't rush through because you want to give the investors a big showy acquisition and all the bells and whistles and "ooh aren't I smart?" accolades?

It may also be that you're not an expert in that field but others around you - let's suggest a financial director/CFO here, is an expert. And let's postulate that said director is stating that this isn't / can't be right and that the purchase of this company doesn't fit with yours anyway - you'd be daft not to listen, right? You may decide to still go ahead with the purchase, but you would surely have to give that person air time and seriously consider what is being said, no? Or would you threaten to fire them?

And finally - a few million/tens of million in your scenario is a huge percentage of the overall valuation. In the case of what HP paid for Autonomy, it's a rounding error and they've probably shelled out more a month on redundancy payments.

Re: A hard lesson...

No I am talking about hardware.

Re: Apple Car

"...

..."

No, I think they are called BMW's.. ;-)

Re: Apple Car

@Mage...I wish I could upvote this more than once.