Posts by Wensleydale Cheese 1381 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jan 2011
"Oldfogey
"as does Office 97. Does far more than I want, why would I need to change?"
There were times I would have gladly paid for an upgrade just to get rid of that damned paperclip. I know my boss would have authorised its purchase because the thing sent him bananas every time it popped up.
"Outsourcing does work quite often"
Payroll is a classic example. Anyone who has worked on payroll will tell you it is a pain. It has to be 100% right or people get upset and you start to dread new budget day rules which can mean that no matter how much you have parameterised the thing you might have to rewrite chunks of it.
It is best left to companies who specialise in payroll.
"[WIndows 2000] Doesn't count since it's pre business/consumer merge. The versions listed is actually correct as far as chronological order of consumer versions goes."
From a business user point off view it does count.
Many of us managed to avoid the 98/SE/ME hassles by going straight from Win3.11/Win95 to NT 4.0.
@Malcolm 1
"It's an early adopter offer (although the end date is currently undefined)"
From the url you gave:
"If you prefer to shop at a local store, a packaged DVD version of the upgrade to Windows 8 Pro will be available for $69.99 during this promotion.
This upgrade promotion for Windows 8 Pro both online and at retail runs through January 31st, 2013."
The DVD version is good news for those without decent broadband (or those who don't have the right flavour of credit card for that matter). Apple's "download only" policy for Mountain Lion has upset quite a few folks who live out in the sticks.
"The $40 is a fee to downgrade your current Windows version to 8."
That's how I understand it, and that gets you the full version, multiple languages and all. If you find Metro acceptable it could be a good way to turn those XP Home or Windows 7 Home Premium systems into Pro versions.
"However, I do now have a mental image of the house lights flashing 3 times when you lock up..."
Nice one!
Back to the article: "AlertMe's plan is to up-sell those British Gas customers on automatic door locks, smoke alarms and window sensors – all controlled from the hub and via AlertMe's cloud."
Automatic door locks controlled from the cloud?
What could posibly go wrong?
"If your business critically depends on the use of a third party API - and these APIs are provided almost universally free of charge - then you need a business relationship with the third party to ensure that they provide you with an API with some form of SLA."
That is precisely what concerned me when I looked at the HTML source for the new gov.uk beta site. It's relying a lot on googleapis.com, wordpress.com and wp.com. Shouldn't what is supposed to become a central point of government services be somwhat more self-sufficient?
Ref:New gov.uk site hits beta, flashes SINGLE typeface to punters
@Cpt Blue Bear
BBC: Salman Rushdie claims victory in Facebook name battle
And weren't Google+ insisting on real names?
@Joeman
"When being pressured by the boss to get something done quickly, ensure you are on CCTV when you hand him the keyboard, and tell him to have a go."
Aaargh no!
You've brought back bad memories of a company secretary who would wander in while I was running weekly payroll and do something out of sequence.
He always disappeared sharpish once he realised what he'd done, leaving me to clear up the mess.
From the article:
"One thing that non-IT types find hard to grasp is that the scale of the consequences and the cause don’t correlate at all - although RBS management probably gets that idea now."
As I was taught in my first IT job:
"To err is human. For a really big cockup you need a computer."
"Windows Home Server if it's HTPC work you're after. OEM copies can be had for cheap (as in, ~£40) and I can't imagine it being more resource-heavy than Vista."
Yep. I got WHS 2011 for roughly that price. Although the installation insists on 160GB disk and 2GB RAM as a minimum, it happily runs on less once installed, and swiftly too. The built in backup feature has been as solid as a rock for me. You can also backup connected Windows PCs and restore them by creating a bootable USB stick and booting from that. It's all driven by simple GUI dialogues so it's pretty easy once you figure out where they are.
There is a caveat here of course. Delete a PC from the WHS 2011 console and put it back again with the same name, and it's likely to pick up old backups on a restore.
Good luck using the monitor with any fancy drivers or high resolution, the idea is that after the initial configuration you unplug the keyboard, monitor and mouse,. and use a separate PC running WIndows 7 to access it.. XP will work, sort of, but I couldn't get access to the WHS 2011 Dashboard from XP despite many attempts (workaround: use Remote Desktop or a KVM).
@toadwarrior
"Saving one hour in comparision to how many will be spent cleaning up malware and viruses doesn't sound like a good deal."
Having just moved my home system to Linux I installed Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 afresh as virtual machines. Several reboots in each case just to get all the patches up to date, and each time forcing a check for new updates until done, rather than waiting for Windows .to do its own thing while not fully patched.
Applying updates to various flavours of Linux I was asked for one logout/login and possibly one reboot. Much easier and less labour intensive.
Yes I know there are ways of automating Windows installations for multiple systems, but it's a learning curve and an unwanted overhead for a home system.
When I was in France it was common practice for a bar waiter to give you a printed receipt with each order.
When you paid they ripped the receipts almost in half to signify the receipt was paid. Add in the fact that I hardly ever saw a receipt with the correct date and time on it, and the wisest course of action was to submit them to the French accounts department, not the English one.
"I occasionally have a similar problem when having to bounce through too many machines to get at the one I want (all Windows, combination of RDP and Dameware)"...
I've got a mixed language combination of RDP bounces which won't let me get at things like ~, [, ], \.
And folks wonder why my command prompt has these weird characters in it :-)
@moonface
There are times that I hate those who mandate "special characters" in passwords.
I'll hazard not one of them has had to use the wide variety of foreign language keyboards that I do.
And don't even mention "dead key" keyboards to me...
And that's assuming that the login prompt is configured for the same keyboard layout as the user session.
Mine's the bag with the US keyboard in it.
@Evan Essence
"Really?"
Yes. We are talking about CA here (and I have the scars), but the same principle should apply to all third party software. Even top quality products can break in your environment.
What nobody seems to have done yet is ask whether that CA software update was tested first in a non-production environment.
A proper test environment does not mean a machine with the bare essentials on it. You need to have a test environment which reflects the other products installed, naming conventions, data volumes, and in this case the number of jobs, that the production environment has.
@Dr. Mouse
"Anyone can make a cockup when under pressure or not concentrating properly on a menial task. I hate to think of the panick the guy who did this went through. Bowel emptying indeed"
I was once called out by a panicking operator when disk space was running dangerously low, with only 45 minutes to go before the night shift started.
By the time I arrived, word had got out and anxious line managers well arriving in droves.
"Can we have a meeting about this?"
My response was to barricade myself in the computer centre and ask the operators to keep all the managers out.
Fortunately they had the power to do that and I could concentrate on the problem in peace and quiet.
@TeeCee
"Even experienced people drop a bollock sometimes. A colleague of mine had over 15 years experience of the systems concerned when he heroically deleted the entire environment for ${country}."
Of course experienced people make cockups. Backups and well tested recovery procedures aren't there just to recover from hardware failures, but human error too.
I've never kept a tally, but my real life restores due to human error far outnumber those due to a hardware failure, probably by a factor of 100.
@Thorne
¨Does my RAID drives mean I've broken the law because I have two installed copies of all my software?¨
Dunno to be honest. The one that makes me laugh with many software licenses is the bit about keeping only one copy for backup purposes.
I´ve been doing some combination of daily / weekly / monthly / quarterly / yearly backups of full systems all my career. Where do my employers or customers stand with such licences? What about off-site backups? Or disaster recovery plans?
And then we get on to Trevor´s overly complex link. That makes my brain hurt.
¨Can I use Windows 7 Professional like a "server" to host applications?
No. The Windows desktop operating system cannot be used as a "server". Device connection is allowed only for certain purposes (such as File Services, Print Services, Internet Information Services, Internet Connection Sharing and Telephony Services). If you want to host applications and access them from multiple devices or for multiple users simultaneously, you need to license Server/CAL products¨
Fine. At work I´ll get proper server licences. But at home?
It quite makes me want to be done with it all and move to Linux and/or OS X.
Watcha mean that I can´t host anything other than
"If one of my admins collected alerts to be delivered at 6am, he'd be looking for a job working for someone else."
Not so fast.
It depends on your SLAs and what cover you have with your hardware support folks. When I was an admin for a large development and testing environment we only had hardware cover from 7am onwards. A 6am alert was quite adequate to get in early and either fix things yourself or place a hardware support call.
Production systems were a different matter of course.
Any software which triggers a load of work at the same time on multiple systems can cause this type of problem.
And don't pick times like 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 because some other software is probably using those times (Windows update with a default of 3:00, default times used by backup products etc). Stagger them instead.
And the experienced sysadmin might collect alerts and deliver them via SMS at say 6:00 am.
@Tim Worstall
"If Apple decided not to integrate Google search, would people be turned off iOS altogether – feeling that if one cannot easily Google then what's the point of iKit?"
There are other search engines out there. I have been using a selection of those for several months and I don't miss Google search one bit.
"WTF is a sight hound kennel?"
"Sighthounds, also called gazehounds, are hounds that primarily hunt by speed and sight, instead of by scent and endurance as scent hounds do."
Well, ya learn something every day.
@johnnytruant
"I can't believe that inverting the screen is such a common operation there's a shortcut key for it."
Inverting or rotating by 180 degrees? I could see the value of rotating for showing a screen to someone sitting across the desk from you.
"They made some fantastic, well thought out, functionally excellent and solidly built phones back then..."
Indeed. I had a Nokia 6110 from 1998 until it died circa 2005. It had a really imtuitive text based menu where you could address items via their number within successive menu levels (e.g. you could bash in 4.2.3), and there was a section in the manual detailing the combinations.
Then on a course a couple of years ago there were two of us working together, both with more modern Nokias, and we couldn't find the calculator function on the wretched things (it had been buried inside the Organizer menu). The sad thing was that we had both bought Nokia the second time around because we had been so impressed with their earlier models.
I read a couple of years ago that Nokia had something daft like 80 models in their line up. That was enough to tell me not to hope to much for their future.
A sad day indeed, but somehow inevitable.
"Are they planning on not selling a single copy of Windows Server 2012 with its metro hell as well if thats the case?"
They are recommending that you use the Core (GUI-less) installation for Server 2012, and in the current preview version, that is the default installation method.
I gather that their idea is that you use Remote Deskltop or similar from another system to actually get stuff done. Or get used to writing lots of stuff in PowerShell...
@Charlie Clark
"At the same time a policy for Ipads has been rolled out and Iphones are due next. Once management migrates completely away from Windows based desktops you can expect them to allow the plebs to do so as well."
Once management start using iPads and iPhones, Microsoft had better watch out for their Office marketplace too.
Microsoft Will Launch Office For iPad In November
Will November be soon enough? Possibly not for your management. What they do meanwhile could have a long lasting effect.
Also, if Microsoft doesn't get Office on iPad right first time, they could lose an awful lot of business.
@K555
"The author mentions a 2003 AD structure. I assume this means running a 2003 exchange server too?"
I was thinking the same thing about Server 2003 AD itself and joining the domain. I personally would only expect restricted functionality without an accompanying upgrade to Server 2008 or later.
@pixl97
You might simply need to alter some settings in the existing BIOS, just as I had to do to get VirtualBox working on a now 2 year old AMD system.
See this earlier comment for the items you probably want to look at.
Smily icon, 'cos I've just realised I have enough posts to use HTML links.
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