Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: Poor IT Standards at this outfit

"Computers have been a basic component of damned near ALL businesses for well over a generation now. There's no excuse for skimping on an IT department"

Chairs and desks have been basic components of damned near ALL businesses for well over a generation now. Is it your contention that they should all have a chair and desk department to make sure they're all working OK, set to the correct heights & so on?

Re: Poor IT Standards at this outfit

"My parents and the rest of their 70-year old peer group have a problem with it"

You should help them out, install something better.

Re: Oh, yeah...

"That was embarrassing. But it's a good way to learn for the future"

Yup. Microsoft, read and learn.

Re: Oh, yeah...

"have what looks to be just under 150 members of staff. Deploying and maintaining the professional version of Windows Vista or 7 would be, in my opinion, the wrong choice in terms of administration and cost for an organisation of this size."

What size does an organisation have to be before, in your opinion, it takes on the extra overhead of specialised staff to run its IT system? Not that it matters, their finance department is likely to have the say over this.

"I would imagine that who ever is in charge of their IT function would have (or in this case should have) made use of Microsoft's volume licensing deals in order to get the best value out of the software that they are clearly using"

Whoever is in charge of their IT function might well have been told to keep their hands off studio kit. In fact, it may well have been bought in completely separately from any other IT in the business as a specialised hardware/software bundle for this purpose.

In any event there is no excuse whatsoever, zero, zilch, nil for a vendor overriding what the user is doing to display messages or initiate updates at arbitrary times. None.

Re: Oh, yeah...

"That just doesn't make any sense to man nor beast."

We're talking about Microsoft here - oh, I see what you mean: beast.

Re: @James 51 - Poor IT Standards at this outfit

"I periodically have a walk around Currys and spend a few seconds rebooting the systems from an USB stick with a live Linux distro."

You shouldn't do that. What happens when the customer gets home & finds that all he's bought is another W10 box?

Re: @James 51 - Poor IT Standards at this outfit

"I periodically have a walk around Currys"

If you walk round Currys hoping to find Linux in any guise other than Android you must have time to waste.

Re: Poor IT Standards at this outfit

"Any Computer running in a corporate environment that sees this message is an immediate red flag that your IT is not being managed correctly."

For some values of corporate. There are very many medium-sized businesses that can't afford a team of BOFHs to look after their systems.

They have been sold the idea of a small network of computers running Windows Professional as a cheap and simple way of meeting their computing needs. Maybe they should have known better. Maybe they should have known the salesman was lying because they could see his lips moving. Nevertheless they have bought this stuff in good faith and are now finding that faith misplaced. They are businesses in their own fields, not in computing; they should not be required to run the overhead of an IT department to deal with what they've been sold.

"Win7 Professional certainly is home software if you choose to use it at home."

And by the same token it's professional software if you choose to use it professionally. As per my comment above, they've probably been using a set-up that's worked well for them over the years. Why should they be expected to have had the foresight to set it up differently so that their vendor couldn't do this to them years in the future?

Re: GWX Control Panel might help here

"There are reasons not to?"

Yes, if you're just running on a VM for some occasional requirement W2K might do just as well.

Re: Do what I've done

"Windows 7 at SP1 level only. No Internet access allowed (Network adapter disabled in Control Panel)."

They probably needed a connection to get the forecast maps onto the PC in the first place. One doesn't just install a PC nor install an OS on it just for the sake of it. One does it to perform a job and the job will have other requirements beyond the hardware & OS.

Re: Oh, yeah...

"So, if this news station had been running an enterprise version of what looks like either Vista or 7, the popup would never have ruined their lovely weather report."

Disregarding for a moment the post which says your assumption isn't true, let's examine the implications a little further. At some point in the past, probably several years ago, they set up this system. They used what would at that time have been a perfectly appropriate version of Windows, Vista or 7, probably Professional. Now you're saying that they should have spent extra on Enterprise, even if they had no other reason to do so, because they should have predicted that Microsoft would do this and they should have protected themselves. They may be doing weather forecasting but that doesn't extend so far into the future.

Re: "There are countless problems" ... Indeed.

"[3] Standards"

3?

Re: @Meldreth -- Utterly unacceptable

"Am I on a different planet?"

You seem to be.

"Why wouldn't tech journalists call out Docker to share what they found when investigating this?"

Because they're sufficiently well-informed to realise that (a) investigations proceed best when the subject isn't warned of progress and (b) if the investigation results in court action such action might have to be dropped if prior publication were to be ruled prejudicial.

"This would be a terrible blow."

What would? The article discusses alternatives to enable Thunderbird to be better supported. I don't see that as a terrible blow, more like something to be welcomed.

Re: Thunderbird needed resources better spent on Firefox,

"Under the hood, Firefox is racing flat out to keep up with Chrome implementing the standard. If Firefox so much as pulls in for a pit stop, it will fall behind catastrophically and be lost."

And the corollary seems to be that Thunderbird, by using the underpinnings of Firefox has exactly the same problem in relation to Firefox that Firefox has in relation to Chrome. As far as I'm aware Seamonkey also has the same problem and so does Palemoon.

I recall reading that Palemoon were considering writing their own rendering engine. Maybe there's scope for all the Mozilla spin-offs and splinter groups to get together and provide themselves with their own common core, either as a fork or from ground up.

Re: Still around?

"So Thunderbird's a fully-fledged mail server now, is it?"

Read this carefully. Thunderbird allows you to download your mail from the server and keep, i.e. store, it anywhere you want, even with multiple copies in multiple locations. Was that too difficult to understand?

Re: Still around?

"you need your own mail server as well"

Yes, but you don't need to run it yourself. In addition to the usual suspect there are paid for service providers. Your ISP may include an email service although using it makes it harder to jump ship if they have problems such as, let's say, three security breaches in less than a year.

My own solution is my own domain with both the registration and email server handled by a single hosting company. Several years advance payment didn't amount to much and I can set up multiple email addresses within the domain.

Re: Thunderbird needed resources better spent on Firefox,

"Can someone else look after Firefox too?"

Palemoon?

Re: I use thunderbird, and don't want to see it go

"Seamonkey is still going strong for the truly nostalgic."

When re-homing Thunderbird with the Document Foundation was looked at some months ago one of the issues raised was the need to re-skin it to fit in with LibreOffice. In its Seamonkey guise the mail client wouldn't be a problem. Ironically it seems that LibreOffice (and OpenOffice?) had a good deal of Seamonkey code buried in it until fairly recently in order to have access to the address-book.

As a user of both Seamonkey and LibreOffice my preferred choice would be to see the Document Foundation look after the whole shooting match giving the option of anything between a free-standing email client and a complete package.

Re: Still around?

Given the existence of good email clients why would anyone want to keep their email on someone else's computer?

Re: They'll keep trying

"They will likely pick another case in the same judicial district as the San Bernadino case, where they already had a favorable lower court ruling"

Reportedly when they got the initial ruling they'd told the court that it would be easy for Apple & Apple didn't get to say their piece. If that's the case there's probably a magistrate there now who's a little upset about the whole thing so I doubt another warrant would go through on the nod in that court.