Posts by big_D 6778 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2009
We have a number of older Dells (6 -8 years old), we are replacing most of them, but some are being replaced, because the user need something more powerful, but most have had an SSD upgrade and new batteries and they are still going strong.
But next time around, they will probably be replaced, when the batteries die.
Given the hard lives they live, the laptops have done very well (they spend most time on building sites).
Windows has had its equivalent of Timemachine for years. We actually use it as part of the backup strategy on the file servers, for example. The first line of defence against damage or deletion is VSS, then the Veeam snapshots, then the Veeam backups and if that fails, a tape restore.
On the client front, if Windows crashes (a very rare occurrence these days, my Windows machines crash about as often as the Macs and Linux machines I use - once in a blue moon), Office has been able to recover with little or no data loss for over a decade and with the current versions (Office 365 Excel and PowerPoint), there should be no data loss if it crashes, as it supposedly saves every change "in real time" with autosave, the same as OneNote.
As to viruses and users changing configuration, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I can only say that I have been lucky so far. I have had one user with a virus problem in the last 20 years - it was a new crypto virus that slipped through - we get about 2 or 3 notifications every day about viruses being removed from emails and 5 cases of viruses being quarantined in the last 3 months (150 PCs).
All of the PCs are closed down so that users have no admin rights to change things themselves and with GPs you can restrict things even further. I don't think we've had a single case of a user screwing things up on their PC since I started here.
We have centralized patch distribution for Windows and application updates, the former with WSUS, the latter with a free add-in for WSUS, it makes rolling out new applications a breeze. Rolling out a new PC is takes a couple of hours, with about 20 minutes of work, the rest is waiting time.
Hardware problems with PCs are fairly rare these days, as is stability, IME. Most calls are user education on things like the ERP system, AutoCAD and the like, or mailbox forwarding / access for people on sick leave / leavers.
The most common questions coming from new starters are that the apps for HR and a couple of other areas (booking holiday, entering your personal information etc.) aren't in the Start menu. That they get in both paper form and on the company FAQ site, that these "applications" are web sites and they get the URLs provided to them, is neither here-nor-there.
I've worked at several companies with mixed fleets of Windows and Mac PCs. I can't really say that Windows has caused more problems / calls than the Macs. Different sorts of calls, maybe, but in general the levels on both sides of the fence were similar.
Mac users also tend to be more obstinate. I had one case, where a Mac froze solid, the user rang up and wanted somebody to come and unfreeze it. I told her, the only option was to turn it off and turn it back on. She didn't want to hear that and when I eventually got to her desk and informed her that, no, I couldn't rescue her document, any unsaved changes were lost (I even tried the debug interrupt button on the side of the case, but it was well and truly frozen solid) and threw the power switch, she got straight onto the phone to the head of IT to complain, because you can't lose work on a Mac... :-S
Macs aren't much better. The Pros seem to be losing the "Pro" features each year.
The current MacBook Pro is dreadful, I set one up for my daughter. The keyboard has to be the worst I've ever experienced, there is so little travel and it just feels terrible. They'd have been better off building an iPad into the base to use as a keyboard.
The lack of touch and pen support is also bewildering in 2017 on a supposedly high end pro machine. I love the 360° hinge on my laptop and using the pen in OneNote and graphical applications feels so natural, compared to the MacBook.
I have also always found the mouse / pointer in MacOS to be not exactly laggy, but imprecise, I'm not sure what it is, but Windows and Linux certainly feel smoother. I've used Macs on-again-off-again since 1987 and it was better than Windows in many areas for a long time, especially for creative tasks, but they seem to have lost the plot in the last 6 or 7 years.
My wife has spent the last 7 years turning the garden of the house we bought from a "golfing green" lawn to an insect and bird paradise. It certainly seems to have done some good, the lawn is covered in different "meadow" flowers and the borders and flower beds are left to grow naturally, with mainly native plants.
Although that isn't such a problem, where the studies are carried out, they are already protected areas.
Heavy industrial farming is probably the biggest problem, along with general air pollution.
The news here (Germany) last night ran the story and the emphasis was more heavily on the use of pesticides and turning traditional open fields into agricultural fields, with crops that aren't suited to the insects.
One positive effect of the German policy on agriculture is that there are little to no gene manipulated crops here. Consumers have come out strongly against them and there is a growing trend to organic fruit and veg.
Too true, although sometimes it works out.
When I first started, back at the end of the 80s, the company laid off a senior devops guy. He had been with the company 40 years and had a huge golden handshake... 3 weeks later the next month end came up and they realised that he was the only person in the company with any experience of nearly 40 different legacy systems.
He came back as a contractor to train up a replacement for the next 18 months and could set his own rates.
Exactly. I've used dozens of languages over the years.
Heck, I got a job as a website developer on the basis of having done half an hour of cribbing on PHP the night before starting as a temp, then the next day sorting out a bottleneck that had been driving the company nuts for months.
Yes, it is the little things, like Alt+Space+V+any arrow key, then move the mouse (V is German "Verschieben" - o for mOve in English?) in Windows, when a window disappears off the screen.
And having come from multi-user environments, where code had to be tight, it is often interesting to see how "young guns" code. They often have no appreciation for optimization, it runs fine with one user on their test rig, but load the code up onto a server and let several hundred customers use it at the same time and the whole thing grinds to a halt! 10 minutes pouring over the code later and I had re-written to queries to be SQL friendly, when not exactly human friendly, the result was the query dropped from over 60 seconds to under 0.03 seconds... That was on my second day as a temp at the company, but got me a full time contract.
At the moment, I seem to spend half of my time doing my work and the other half correcting the mistakes of the millenials in the department...
I remember the days of Computing and Computer Weekly, I could never afford a subscription, but I worked in an office with 30 employees and we got at least 40 copies a week...
I remember my mother complaining to Computing back in the 80s, she was a personnel manager, and asked them to stop sending copies for people who no longer worked at the company. The response was, that it was cheaper to keep sending the copies than to try and take them out of the circulation list!
At the moment I would be much more inclined to buy an autonomous vehicle from a car manufacturer than an IT company. Especially if the likes of Uber are behind it.
The "let's ignore all our legal responsibilities, we are disrupting," doesn't work, when it comes to products that need to be safe.
Yep. Although our production manager was a stickler for detail and our terminals passed on the first try, the TÜV examiner said most devices need at least one re-test before they get official certification.
Most big players get things properly certified straight away, because they need to have external certification in order to sell into many businesses. But for small production runs, it adds a large expense to the cost of the device - excluding your own time and destruction testing of devices, the certification process can quickly run into five figures.
We also did a TÜVit system security certification for one of our IT systems, that was also very interesting.
But at the end of the day, this is unlikely to happen to the vast majority of home networks.
Business networks are another thing altogether.
Because of the physical proximity and the effort involved, think of this as more of a phishing attack, as opposed to a normal spam attack.
This doesn't belittle the impact of the problem, but, at least at first, I would expect this attack to be limited in scope to targets that have something to lose. Your average home router probably has much easier to exploit, un-patched remote access vulnerabilities anyway.
It isn't a laughing matter. If the US DOJ wins, it means the end of cloud services with a presence in the USA.
The story is also a little misleading, the problem is that Microsoft USA is refusing to hand over data held on an Irish companies servers (Microsoft Ireland), which is a separate legal entity and beholden to Irish and EU law, which would make it illegal for them to hand over the data without an Irish or EU warrant.
The whole thing is a farce, there are decades old treaties in place for doing exactly this, the DOJ just needs to work with the Irish authorities and provide the evidence before a court in Ireland and if it has any merit, the Irish court will tell Microsoft Ireland to hand over the data.
That the DOJ hasn't done this makes it sound like they don't actually have a enough evidence to present to the court to get them to provide a warrant...
In Germany, you cannot fly them over any residential, civic, commercial or industrial areas (privacy and damage from crash landings - normal aircraft also aren't allowed lower than 500M over residential areas.
Similar limits to airports as have already been mentioned.
Basically, you can fly them over open fields, at model aircraft airports or over woods - within visual range of the pilot.
A new rule this month, all drones over 2 Kg in weight need a special pilots license.
For flying over towns, residential areas etc. for filming etc. you need to get a special dispensation to allow you to use the drone in a specific area at a specific time and date.
@Sirius Lee, like hell I would! I wouldn't send them the credit card, I'd get them to send me the account information for the landlord and I'd make a payment from my account. I'd also ask them, why they hadn't set up a standing order to pay the rent on time every month...
@AC, it is irrelevant, under the terms and conditions, it is illegal to hand over the passwords. Therefore Customs would, theoretically, require a court order to force you to hand over the passwords.
And if the person in question is coming from the EU, they would need the written permission of every identifiable person in that account, before they can hand over the information, otherwise the person would be liable to prosecution back in the EU.
In either case (handing over the password or copying the information in some form) would be at least a disciplinary offence, if not a sackable offence.
If we are talking about websites with discrete user access, the company running the service would be within its rights to immediately disable / delete the account for misuse under its terms and conditions.
You know, that long piece of text you had to read and agree to before signing up.
Exactly, Kernel.
I think in this case the EFF are barking up the wrong tree.
Just because something is convenient doesn't mean it can negate legal restrictions. Breaking the law is breaking the law.
The only exception I would see is the bank account. In that case, both my wife and I have Power of Attorney for each other's bank accounts, for emergencies. That means that we can legally access the accounts, because it has been legally approved (this is German law).
You can't do that with a Netflix account, for example. The Power of Attorney would only allow me to cancel the subscription or change the payment information, but not to use the account.
Exactly, Kevin.
We had a similar case, an underage child had taken out a subscription by listening to free material (a typical scam in the late 2000s, you offer something, E.g. a tune, for free and with blue text on a blue background you say that by clicking on the download button you are agreeing to a 50€ a month subscription) and a lawyer sent a letter asking for payment. A return letter from our lawyer, pointing out that a 12 year old cannot enter into such a contract, ended the matter.
Most people I know buy outright these days.
Certainly my extended family have all bought their phones outright (carrier free models) and are on SIM only contracts or use pre-pay SIMs.
That said, they expect a phone to last 4 years.
My employer buys its phones in bulk - they currently use Galaxy S6, but will switch to the S7 when current stocks run out.
and they want their game ads back.
This was big news in the late 80s, when the graphics in games got good enough that they started carrying adverts (Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and PC). ISTR that racing games were the first, with the roadside billboards having adverts for real products that had been placed for financial compensation.
A couple of MMORPGs that I played back in the mid-2000s also had in-game advertising for real products, as well as in-game products.
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