Posts by El blissett

That's a pretty fair deal for Education customers. Assuming 10000 users a year, that will be more affordable than buying new kit (which nearly everyone will need as we all run the crappiest laptops known to mankind).

Pretty sure COBOL programmers can now charge far more than overtime and a pizza for any work, as if you need them you're totally fucked if you can't get them.

I'll cop to having done something similar as a PFY. The scream of the BOFH, as 3 hours of work was wiped out by my careless (but dutifully following instructions) switching everything off when I left for the weekend, will never leave me.

Just goes to show that in IT we have always been at war with Eurasia...

"Why does this keep happening?" asks no-one about company this keeps happening to

For volume printing, soy based inkjet technology (what we used to call Risograph) is the only sustainable solution compared to printing with the same volume of plastic (laser toner).

For individuals who don't need to print much - which is quite a few people these days - or for those who can't refill their cartridges - also most people - the lack of maintenance or inks drying out with a cheap laser printer blows the impact of the ink vs the toner out of the water. I'm in the same boat as commentards above, my old Samsung printer is going to stop working with Windows before it runs out of ink on my usage patterns. The horrific amounts I used to spend on inkjet printing in the 90s and 00s to get something splodgy out at the end is a distant memory.

Amazed that you would bother accusing a client this size and risking it over one drive? All the Greeks in Delphi could have seen it coming but apparently not at this laptop company.

I guess there really is one of all sorts under the celestial body in the daytime sky.

Hope that the unnamed company in question learned to place contracts with suppliers that have professional approaches to working with large enterprises, not just supply the cheapest laptops.

We restored a Mac Classic to working order in a middle-school computing project during the early 00s. It would complement the all-Mac computer suite by allowing people to work on real computing things and code in a safe, no Internet environment.

Reader, it lasted 1 week before it was relegated to Risk duties only.

Ultimately doing something different is really hard. You're on your own. I followed the development of Mezzo/Symphony in the 00s, which correctly identified the upcoming obsession with convergence and tried to design an accessible UI for all screen types not just the CUA/HIG terminal and keyboard. The developers would post these updates that showed their research was taking into account all types of users and not assuming the Win95 shell was the foundation. Unfortunately it was abandoned before it was completed and didn't get beyond putting menus in 4 places. http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/17107

Full-fat Enlightenment being vapourware is almost a meme a this point. Then of course there was the Moblin/Maemo/Meego fiasco which did a huge amount of work on fundamentally reimagining the interface of a computer for the 2010s, but again didn't go anywhere. I would argue it never got the chance to be offered as a serious alternative. The problem becomes that all the software you want or need to use has been built on the older paradigm of the CUA/HIG and developers have no interest in changing that. Unity/GNOME3 had to beg developers to make some applications compatible with the global top bar, but trying to reinvent the interface is just not people's priority when the people who have done it get burned.

Boss is right - by showing there is a business case for 24/7 infrastructure call out support, Derek has destroyed the factory's shaky bottom line and maybe the whole company.... or even worse, denied the Boss's mates in infrastructure a nice call-out fee in a few days' time!

On my first weekend job as an extremely untrained PFY, I was told to just do what I normally did for the same client during the week - look after the Mac kit on a bus/ring network during the day, make sure the OS X server was happy, then switch off and lock up when I leave. With a line of sight to the doors, I could live the life of Larry sitting in the server room doing whatever I liked, like fixing up an old Mac II to play Risk clones on or messing around with the likes of Photoshop and Captivate that I would never afford.

If someone quiet came in, and I was otherwise engaged, I wouldn't see or hear anything different if I missed them coming in the door. The server room was out of sight of the main room, and they hadn't told me anyone else was in - I couldn't see anyone else on Sunday night and wasn't expecting anyone. However, there was indeed someone in doing a sensitive sequential backup. As I left for the night, sending the shutdown command (which had been set to be ignored this time) and flicked the switches, I'll never forget the blood-curdling "NOOOOOOO!" my long haired silent colleague screamed as I wiped out his day's work.

Oddly enough I didn't lose my PFY status, at least until the long haired silent colleague became the long haired silent boss, but I never got asked to do weekends again.

That would explain why the space age combination of an NVME boot drive and a RAID 0 storage array flunked the Windows 11 install out. If only I'd been using more common hardware, like a punch card and a magnetic tape, the slimmed down installer would have worked.

Very tempting for all my needs until I looked up how heavy it is (they don't say on their website). It's heavier than my Xiaomi Poco which is a real brick to hold for extended periods of time. Still, this is the closest I've come to getting one since the original.

Would rather they "visually refreshed" Outlook by completely rebuilding it to be functional, competent, and compatible with actual emails that people send, but that sounds too hard.

Sticking with eM client until O13/V4 has exchange support, but watching closely. Vivaldi has rapidly advanced to the point where I don't need to run multiple browsers / software / profiles to get what I need - so just like Opera used to be.

A wholesome story with a happy ending - Merry Christmas!

.... an IRC service still had staff?

Not the most stimulating work day, but there are certainly harder ways to earn a wage (and a tip, and a bonus).

My LG v30 (2017 flagship) is the most durable flagship handset I have ever owned. Barely a scratch on it despite dropping it maybe twice a week, and the battery life is still as good as new. The software and security updates delivered have been a running joke with LG and never really went anywhere despite their promise to improve.

While I'd love to have upgraded to something like the V60 or the G8S, they were simply too expensive and didn't offer enough of a reason to switch off of the V30. And LG's V-series niche in hi-res audio, while still top of the pack in terms of quality and engineering has reasonably similar technical equivalence in Xiaomis and other manufacturers selling better handsets that won't last as long but are half the price and run modern chipsets/Android.

LG as a manufacturer need to innovate to show off what they can do in terms of screens for other manufacturers, hence experiments like the V50 dual screen and the Wing flip screen, but it's not a commercial consumer oriented strategy for survival in a challenging market.

I definitely used the screensaver speed trick once.

Who out there has positive views of the McAfee brand??

When I think of McAfee, I either remember the omnipresent crapware of the early 00s, or John McAfee waving a gun around and absconding from Latin America with a murder charge.

Not much point blurring the address underneath. The QR codes are so huge because, for some reason, the QR code encodes the full plain text details of the address of the venue rather than an ID... meaning poor Adil will need to set up an entirely new one as his checkin data is worthless now.

Great. Now, can they shut down the ad targeting gender AI as well? I get dresses punted at me several times a month before the content abruptly shifts to more male coded things.

Tactical Networking? Thought that was when you use black velcro to hold a broken cable in.

Another vote for Edge Lords from me.

Tired El Reg Subeditor: Suspect this ought to be in the Who, Me? category and not Data Centre...

Codeplex for Business?

Me at work: Bloody European Union legislation making me change all my perfectly secure processes...

Me reading this: Choo choo mother forkers, all aboard the GDPR express to a brighter, opt-in only future

Ah, the Nokia approach to disaster management.