Posts by Chris Byers 72 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2007
It's a bit like when they move the brewign of Boddingtons from it's home in Manchester to Wales. It used to be called 'The cream of Manchester' now they have to call it 'The Cream'. Shame it now tastes of crushed slugs!
Just like when they try and brew foreign beers in the UK such as Red Stripe, they come out as pale imitations of their former selves. This is what happens when buisinesses try and run regional delicacies they have no connection with.
...someone actually sat down (just one person mind) worked this out and then thought 'Well, that sounds like a reasonable alternative!' and then expected everyone to be OK with it!
Steve Jobs, because he would have charged double, had old buses painted glossy white and would have filled every seat with fanbois all going on Apples 'journey'.
I've been suffering from really flaky connectivity recently (I live in Preston) and last night it was down to between 30 and 40K, I wouldn't care, but I'd not been on all day, hardly download anything and pay a premium for a 10Mbps 'service' which is being restricted for no reason at all.
In my personal experience they are blanket restricting users and not targeting individuals.
Paris because she's not inhibited in any way.
Blaming the network staff here is a little premature I think. Many times the advice of network managers and other IT staff is ignored and it is very possible the 'IT Change Advisory Board' has no one with any technical experience at all, or the senior IT bods on the panel are so out of date to be next to useless when forming any kind of sensible decision.
Please don't blame the techies. Chances are they know exactly what they need to do and how to do it. Unfortunately the 'customer' and management may be getting in the way here I suspect.
I've been using Vista as my media centre at home for the past year or so, and right up until I got my LG Blu-Ray ROM drive it performed flawlessly.
My pC sits in a very svelte case under a TFT TV and connects via a HDMI cable to an Onkyo AV amp and from there to the TV. As Vista Media Centre does not support HD DVD\Blu-Ray natively you have to download third party patches to enable it to recognise the disk and fire up whatever HD disc content you want to play. Fine I thought. Microsoft are a little behind on this. It was the part where I tried to play a disk and Vista threw up a message claiming that my amp was classed as a HD repeater device and will not play DRM content through it. WTF!!!
So to actually use Vista Media Centre is any reasonable way I had to download Slysoft's AnyDVDHD which basically turns off the highly restrictive DRM content in Vista just so I can play my legally purchased media over legal connections! Many aspects of Vista are poorly thought out (as a sysadmin, the frustration of actually trying to access network card properties in a quick way is something to behold!) and lac of new 'useful' features show that Windows 7 needs to be re-worked in a major way.
The security issue is when the user has forgotten their password (for some reason users forget their passwords easier when machines have been turned off) and need to reset it (repeatedly)
And the productivity issue is phoning their support guys to reset it or to ask where the 'on' button is.
A second call may be required to turn on the monitor too.
It's as bad when you watch some live interview from the BBC newsrooms at early o'clock in the morning to see all of their machines happily chugging away, doing nothing, swallowing up licence payers cash.
You have to remember that BSF is essentially a PFI initiative. Any contract winner\holder is going to skim a proportion of that cash for profits, and just because the money is allocated it does not mean essentially it will be spent on the school or spent wisely. It is very much like the previous method the govt used to improve ICT in schools which was to give the money directly to them (no bad thing as every school is different) and have them spend it on ICT as they wished with a few constraints in place. Unfortunately what happened in a minority of cases was that schools with little or no technical support to advise senior management spent the money on 'magic beans' and not on the things they should have been looking at (computers, servers, licences etc).
Now the govt is pushing a lot of schools down the BSF route many who have previously had excellent ICT infrastructures will find themselves 'relegated' to a default setup that whilst has improved the poorly managed schools networks has severely limited the potential of other better run schools. As I've always said about BSF. Some will be good. Some will be truly excellent, and some will be complete and total failures. It is still too early to see which will be which.
I think one problem here is that when many of us were children and interested in 'war' (BTW, I'm a former soldier of 13 years and know quite a bit about 'war' now), it was mainly in past wars involving foreign countries.
The problem now is that the main point of these 'documents' is to promote the killing, maiming and hatred of their follow countrymen (and women) or people of different faiths in the modern 'real time'.
Our childhood 'war' play was always done in a historical context and never actually promoted the hatred of anyone, after all, someone had to be the Germans in the playground :)
Fire warning sign because people don't know what's smouldering beneath them.
'Does anyone know where I can find an analysis of the Tornado F3? Lewis insists it's crap, and I've heard the same from other airplane buffs, but being the inquisitive little git I am, I'd love to know *why* it sucked.'
Because the wings kept falling off, it didn't go around corners very well and for years the radar in the front was actually a lump of cement due to the one it was supposed to have not working, although this may have been on an earlier variant.
Still, I have to stay loyal to British Aerospace as I live under the flight path in to their Warton plant and get very interesting things flying over every now and again.
'What kind of stupid fools are still paying them for their incompetence?'
We didn't. We were going to leave this year (after the passwords fiasco) but I woke up one day in May to find another whole years worth of dedicated server hosting had been removed from the EduGeek bank account by them without my permission or any reminders being issued, and they have steadfastly refused any refund as they wave their SLA at us (incidentally, it says 'we've got your cash now bog off you oik', so we have had to struggle on with them whilst we get some more cash together.
I would like to thank all the comanies who contacted us offering hosting, co-location and other services during this past week though. It's restored my faith in hosting companies (a bit).
I still don't know how they can sitll justify the price difference from home premium to the Ultimate edition (besides AD connectivity, which (most) home users wouldn't need anyway!). I would feel bitter and twisted about it if I'd had to pay for my copy instead of getting it through work.
I doubt that the dollar to sterling exchange rate would make the cuts in the UK though. Daylight robbery, hence the icon.
I used to be an army tank transporter driver (not civvy) and went to Donnington several times a month. We all knew the correct route, so it sounds like the civvies who can't read a map have been relying to much on technology to do their job rather than the ability to read a road atlas. The main route into Donnington is actually on nice big wide roads and just a couple of minutes off the M54.
I brought one of their quite mice Alquemi TVs a couple of months ago. I hope TimeUK will continue to honour warranties, although experience from Time in the past tells me they have a great deal of problems maintaining their own PCs before they went belly up last time!!
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