Posts by Stuart Castle

The funny thing about that is that a lot of people assumed it was Apple. I've read that Apple have taken the position that they are happy to support Windows on the M1, they just need Microsoft to make it Windows for ARM available to end users.

Re: Seventy years ago this week...

And about sixty-nine years, 11 months and 3 weeks ago this week, a user was advised to turn it off and on again to solve a problem.

While AppData/Local is often used to install programs to a user's folder, I'm not sure that's it's actual purpose (although IIRC, Teams does install itself there, so I could be wrong, but that wouldn't be the first time Microsoft broke their own guidelines).

I thought that folder was to give Applications somewhere to store user specific data that doesn't need to roam from machine to machine in an Enterprise environment. Things like caches. After all, as a Domain Admin, you aren't going to want your users clogging up the file servers with multi gigabyte profiles, and as a user, you aren't going to want to wait 10s of minutes to log in or out while your data is copied to or from the file server.

Re: "The infected apps ask for permission to make and manage phone calls."

This is bad UI design. It should ask you to if you want access to GPS on first startup, then if you say "no", it shouldn't bother you again, but give you the option to change your mind maybe in some sort of settings option.

Re: Physical key

The thing is, electronic cards can, and do, fail. I don't drive a tesla, but I use RFID cards for travel and to get into my office at work. I have an Oyster card for travel. Even though I keep both cards in wallets, away from any magnetic sources, I'd say on average, they fail every 2 to 3 years.

I also have a key ring filled with metal keys. I can count the number of times I've dealt with a failed key or door lock in my entire adult life (and I am 50) on the fingers of one hand.

Re: THis can be dangerous.

Re: Knowing the technology does not grant anyone special knowledge of the business ant The role of tech is to support the business

Where I work, we try and strike a balance, with the department needing the system and techies working together, sometimes with outside consultants, to complete the contract.

There is a good reason for this. A few years ago, a department manager was looking for small laptops for her staff. She saw PCs at around the £700 mark, and Chromebooks at around half that. She ordered 20 Chromebooks for her department, and when it was pointed out we are primarily a Microsoft shop, so don't support Chromebooks, she asked us to install Windows on them.

Not sure what happened to the Chromebooks, but our IT director created a rule that any purchases of IT have to be vetted by us, even if they are coming out of individual department budgets.

Ahh bean counters.. A few years ago, as part of my job, I supported a small TV studio for student use. This studio would have been state of the art, except the bean counters got involved. They slashed the budget half way through installation, with the result that we had a room that was designed from the ground up to be a studio. It had excellent sound proofing, a large green screen area, and curtains heavy enough to block out 90% of sound, with the walls being designed to block out 100% of sound from outside the room. The curtains were designed so we could curtain off sections of the room with near total sound insulation, and state of the art lighting. It also had tons of storage for the studio equipment, as well as full swipe card entry.

The one thing it didn't have was a control room. So, we had no control over the lights, beyond a small control box the installer had left so we could actually use the installation. We also had no mixers, beyond a couple of small ones we had to lend to students to use in the field. We were promised state of the art video and sound mixers, with "talkback" (where the control room staff can talk to the cast/crew), and a state of the art fully integrated lighting control system with computer control.

Re: Jpeg

Re: - the metaverse is mostly about VR, right ? Soooo, you don't come to even see/use a browser !

I don't think anyone is saying you will use a browser, but the various clients used to access it will need a standardised system for describing the models and scenes, much like browsers need a standardised system for describing web pages.

This, for all it's faults, is one attempt.

Re: Reminds me of a message I once got.

I think the problem is with email is a lot of what I get sent isn't relevant to me. Now, we actually do have excellent spam filters on the email system, so I only get one or two emails per week from outside the company that are actually spam. Of course, being a requisitioner, I get a *lot* of sales emails from our suppliers (even though I always make sure that whatever option is available for me not to have marketing shit sent to me is set). Thanks to a few rules on the server,most of these are directed to a folder that I check periodically for any important emails. Not found one yet.

My problem is internal spam. Stuff sent to various staff mailing lists by staff. Thankfully, the ability to send to these has been reduced to a few users, who do use them for official company business. But we used to regularly have situations where one user would send an email to half the company moaning about something (the fire alarms and stuff going missing from the office fridge being two examples), then you'd have a dozen people clicking Reply all, adding their own complaints, saying "I agree" or just trying to discuss whatever the problem was.

It actually got bad enough that one of my colleagues did a reply all to one of these email chains (which was all about the volume level of the fire alarms) where he asked all the users didn't they have actual important stuff to discuss, and work to be getting on with.

The poor sod ended up with a verbal warning for that. He was just saying what nearly everyone (on our team at least) was thinking. In his defence, that was the third such email chain that week, and we had each received well over 100 emails between the 3 chains. All of which were irrelevant to most of the company.

The problem with those emails was that while I could (and did) delete them, I had to be careful because in that dozen or so emails about the fire alarms being too loud, there could have been an email about something important, that I did need to read.

And how do you update it if the local computer cannot write to the image in any way? People are going to get pretty pissed off if you expect them to download a 15 Gig installer every time you patch something. Then, a lot of them will stop updating their OS. To get around this, the local computer needs to be able to apply patches to the image, updating the signature as necessary. The second this happens, you've given hackers a potential way to change the image, and you end up in exactly the position Apple are in now.

It's also worth noting that to some extent, this is what Apple have done with SIP, with the exception that you don't boot the machine from a signed image, but have signed executables on a partition that is usually protected against alteration.

Re: Will he get a job offer?

Re: 'I expect he'll start seeing job offers from Facebook soon - clearly he has a good understanding of the current way the world works."

Unfortunately, it seems with Humans, if you make someone enough money, you can get away with an awful lot that you wouldn't otherwise. This isn't a new thing. Look at Jimmy Saville. He abused hundreds of vulnerable people, and got away without being punished probably because those in power looked the other way when they heard rumours.

Re: RE: Give it time

I think Adobe need to do something Microsoft did during the XP lifecycle.

They need to stop adding new features to their suite, and re-evaluate their whole development cycle with a view to reducing exploits. People were finding dozens of vulnerabilities in Microsoft code each week. While Microsoft were patching these, more were being found. So, Microsoft paused all development, then had consultants go through every aspect of the process. This took months, and they even rebooted the development cycle for Vista in the process. The ultimate result is while Microsoft did lose a lot of money doing this, they cut the vulnerabilities found in their products to a fraction of what they were. Not saying any Microsoft product is perfect security-wise, none are, but they are a *lot* better than they were in 2003-2005

The problem for Adobe is they've switched to a subscription. If they stop updating it, a lot of people are going to wonder what they are paying for if it's not a continually updated product. At least (at that time anyway), Microsoft sold the software , so as long as people got their value from the product after a 1 off payment, they didn't give a toss whether it was updated or not.

Re: new "features" and "improved experiences" nobody asked for.

I think we need to take a step back from shoving everything on the browser, and work out what a browser needs to do, particularly the privacy, and reliability implications.

Everything you do on a browser will require server access at some point. That access can be (and probably is) logged and profiled. You also don't know what access others have to the data you store on the cloud, which has massive privacy implications. Even if you have it written in a contract that Microsoft et al don't have access to the data you store on their servers, all that says is you have some legal recourse if they do access it, which is essentially shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted.

I mention this, because Web Apps tend to store their data in the cloud, and even where they don't, they probably have to send locally stored data to a server somewhere so they can process it. It also means they won't work if you lose your connection. As you might on a train journey for instance.

I think we need to stop pretending it's good to bung everything on the web. We don't need our browsers to become almost replacements for our operating systems (as they seem to be doing), and start to move back to using locally stored applications. If the hardware we have is too slow, then optimise the code. Remove unnecessary bloat, such as features that aren't necessary for the core function of the suite or application. E.G. I need Outlook to access my email and manage my work calendar. I don't need Outlook to analyse my work patterns and suggest when I should break for lunch, and I don't need it to analyse my grammar. Yet it is using extra resources in doing so. And before you say Libre Office, I know there are alternatives, but I have to use Exchange 365, and our IT department have disabled access from all non-Microsoft apps, so I can't even use the built in clients on my iPhone any more :(.

Re: News at 9....

Ever since I've been at my current job, our Networks team has been fighting users who bring in their own home router because the corporate Wifi isn't good enough in their office. It has bad areas, but in most company buildings, the corporate WiFi is actually pretty good in my experience. One joker even used the same SSID.

Of course, when we discover someone has bought in a router. We report the matter to their line manager, and disconnect the device.

I believe we also have other devices (e.g. various Intelligent Assistants) that pop up from time to time..

Re: I thought LAN cables were shielded

This was my first thought. Take my building. We have, just in this building, over 200 PCs, various MFDs, several Wifi access points, hundreds of IP phones and various other devices (such as cameras, door swipe card readers and network switches) hooked up via ethernet. Most of these devices are left on, or in standby, 24/7.

The structure of the building itself makes radio transmission/reception difficult (hence we have a need for a lot of Wifi access points). This isn't by design. the building is hundreds of years old, so radio wasn't invented when the building was designed.

But assuming you can get a strong enough signal to read, you are going to need some processing power to sort out the thousands of signals to get the one you want. Assuming you have enough fast storage, you could dump the data to it, then process it off line, but even that's a hell of a lot of effort (and expense) for something that may not yield any useful data.

Even under a best case scenario, you would probably need physical access to at least the building, and if you have that, there are a number of far quicker ways you can get access to the data on the network, even if it's just hooking up a single board computer somewhere in a rack with a suitably large SD, using that to sniff the network links and sending the data out wirelessly in bursts to someone elsewhere with a laptop connected to the SBC via Wifi. Most companies, a suitably talented person could just go in and change the SBC's storage device every few days. No one would think the question someone who appears to be a cleaner or security guard checking the room.

Re: Found a shortcut

"It solves a very real problem (for Microsoft): how to keep corporates paying for Windows licences when their workloads are slowly-but-surely moving to Linux..."

Not as much of a problem as you'd think. The income from Windows as a percentage is a tiny fraction of their total income. In fact, the income for last year for their "Personal computing" division, which includes Windows, Xbox, Surface and advertising, amongst others was $15bn. Revenue from Azure was $14.6bn, and Revenue from their business and productivity division (which includes Office) was $13.6bn.

Don't get me wrong: Windows probably still accounts for billions of dollars a year in sales , but at the moment, Microsoft wouldn't be as massively impacted if Windows vanished from sale as they would have been even 5 years ago. They likely wouldn't even be worried,

Re: As a young broadcast engineer, unschooled in IT at the time

I've actually seen Applications that require the user to perform a specific, but randomly chosen sequence of actions to exit.

OK, nothing stopping someone really determined using task manager to forcefully exit them, but it actually helps prevent accidental shutdowns if someone needs to read, and then follow a sequence.

Generally, I find it best not to put restrictions like that in, unless they are necessary. People bypass them, sometimes causing more problems that the restrictions solve. For instance, at work, we have a restriction on all the PCs that the shutdown option is disabled if you are logged in. The idea being to force you to log out then shutdown (although as Windows logs you out anyway when shutting down, not sure what difference it makes). Most users do log out, then shut down, but there are a group who don't. They just hit the power button, and wait the four seconds or so for the power to turn off. Thus, potentially, causing themselves to lose any unsaved work.

Re: A Prob?

Re: “ But who in their right mind hooks up such a low resolution screen such that the system sees it as the primary screen?”

You’ll probably find it’s the only monitor hooked up, with any config changes being done via Remote Desktop, another software based method, IP kvm or just plugging in a monitor and keyboard/mouse as required.

In my experience, when a pc reboots, it generally assumes the first monitor it finds is the primary one and doesn’t care whether that device is an lcd screen, crt screen or even a grid of bulbs being run by display circuitry.

Windows usually remembers which monitor is the primary one, but when blue screening, tends to revert to whatever the pc has decided is primary.

Re: Autocratic governments, that's a broad brush nowadays.

I think the problem is that the whole remain campaign (and certainly David Cameron) assumed Remain would win. That's probably why Cameron didn't specify a limit for the referendum. He didn't think of it because he thought that once they got the referendum they were asking for, and lost, the Tory Eurosceptics would shut up.

The problem is, they didn't lose, and even when the remain campaign started fighting, they fought with facts. The problem is facts, while often correct, don't engage people's emotions as much as a good bit of lying. Put simply, the leave campaign said "Stuff is broken, we will fix it" (as did Trump in 2016), which engages people's emotions far more than the simply stating that the other campaign is wrong, and things are generally OK, which is what the remain campaign did in this country and what Clinton did in the US. Even if you are telling the truth.

Re: What exactly did the Register ask Microsoft?

Actually, as I understand it. Apple haven’t said they won’t supply drivers, they’ve merely pointed out that there isn’t currently a way for users to buy (or other legal way of obtaining) a licence for Windows’s. Even when they supported windows on a Mac, Apple required the user to obtain their own copy.

I had a problem that was pretty much the opposite of UCAPs (above)..

A few years ago, we bought a then state of the art Lexmark A3 colour Laser printer. I was primarily responsible for this (no idea why - while it was flasher than our normal printers, it was just a printer), with another technician helping.

It had a particular problem where the paper would jam in the Duplexer, and multiple engineers from Lexmark failed to fix the problem. There was a particular trick to getting the paper out of the duplexer and resetting it. Me and my colleague both knew the trick.

For the first time in *years*, I went on holiday, going to Vegas. When I got back, my boss was in a foul mood, and shouted at me that this printer he'd spent so much money on was not working (he actually hadn't, we provided support for the printer, but it was bought by another department). It had been out of order for a week. The fix was to push a tiny part of the mechanism back into the right position.

I told him to calm down, and I would look at it. Sure enough, the paper had jammed in the Duplexer. I cleared it, and left the printer clearing the huge backlog of jobs that had built up.

I asked the technician that supported the printer with me why he hadn't fixed it. He said he wasn't aware there was a problem. He worked for a different department, the one who actually owned the printer. My department supported it on condition our users were allowed to use it.

I suspect what had happened is our users tried to use it, failed, then complained to my boss, who didn't really investigate, just shouted at me.

I went to see my boss. I pointed out that there was another technician who could have fixed the problem, but no one bothered to contact him. I also pointed out that the entire department had my mobile number (I had my mobile with me), and in an emergency, they *could* have contacted me, and I would have taken them through the process of fixing it.

He said "but you were on holiday". I answered, asking why no one had contacted the other technician, and pointed out that while I am happy to carry the can if I have failed in some way, I hadn't failed, I wasn't going to take the blame for someone else's failure. He did sort of apologise..

Re: Long hours <> productivity

When I was younger, I was happy to work all the hours needed to complete whatever project I was assigned to. I still am to some extent, often staying a little late if needed. Sadly I don't get paid overtime.

I would frequently work 12 hour days, sometimes being tired enough that I'd go straight home, have my evening meal then go to bed.

That, psychologically speaking, isn't good, IMO. II don't think I ever got a great night's sleep, as I wasn't really relaxed when I went to bed. Even if I work late now, I prefer to go home, spend an hour or two doing something I enjoy at home, then go to sleep.

One project I was involved in was setting up an exhibit for a local artist. She used our equipment and rooms, and I was providing equipment, technical support and some staff.

We worked from 9am to 9pm, 7 days a week for nearly three weeks. By the end of it, I could barely think, or even remember what day it ways, let alone do anything remotely productive.

As a thank you, the artist concerned, who had been apparently handsomely paid for this exhibit, made a big thing that we was taking all the staff out for a few drinks after the first day of the exhibit. I, and the technicians helping me, gratefully accepted the invitation, hoping she'd take us to the local pub, and say we could order whatever we wanted in reason. Most of us would have taken a pint of beer or lager.

Nope. She did take us to a local bar. The ponciest, most expensive bar in the area. She also insisted on ordering Gin and Tonics. Not being a fan of either Gin or Tonic, I downed mine, made my excuses and left. I only downed it because that drink was the closest the Artist came to actually saying "thanks", and I was damned if I was going to let her get away without showing some appreciation.

Anyway, I digress. I took a few days off because I don't think I would have been productive without being rested. There have been times since where I've had to work excessive hours for a few days, but I always try and take time off.

In fact, I would argue that any business that relies on it's staff doing that day to day isn't being run efficiently, because those staff probably aren't working to the best of their abilities.

Re: Linux on the desktop

Re "The reason there are 200 Debian derivatives rather than 15 or so for Red Hat?"

I actually think that is the problem with Linux. Choice.

Don't get me wrong, choice is usually good, but when you hundreds of derivatives ,with little or nothing to distinguish them, it's hard to decide which to use. Certainly if your sole experience of computer is basic, such as maybe only having used Windows, and wanting to explore other options.

I think that's where the likes of Ubuntu, and even Raspian are good. They are both Debian derivatives, but are building brand recognition. They are both heading for the point where the average punter in the street who has a mild interest in computers (ie is a little interested in how they operate, rather than just using them as a device to do stuff on) will recognise the name. Ubuntu because Canonical have done an excellent job of marketing it, and Raspian because the Pi itself seems to generate a fair amount of publicity.

Re “ I was half expecting to find out that many 3D printers have strict DRM that connect to the vendors restriction servers”

Ahh, the unnecessary drm. Reminds me of a kickstarter project called “Juicero”. The project was essentially a Wi-Fi connected juice press that used its own bags of juice, each of which was rfid equipped (apparently this was so the company could ensure freshness). Iirc it was a subscription service and the user got so many bags a month..

Unnecessary drm. Us humans are perfectly capable of looking a a best before date. We don’t need to be told we can’t eat or drink something after that date.

Re: Wire-Wrap Gun?

Hands? Luxury.. I had to learn to manipulate my "hand" tool with Telekinesis..

Re "

Anonymous Coward

I once had a director ask if the firewall was needed between the public facing web server and database server because "it slowed traffic down"..."

That's potentially a bit harsh. Unless they were a director of IT they wouldn't be expected to know much about network security, so may not be aware of the problems involved in enabling direct access to the database server via the web server.

If they were a director of IT, then fair enough, they should be aware of the security problems, but even then they can't be expected to know everything about their subject areas, often having to rely on their teams for the specifics.