Posts by cob2018

Thank you for today's belly laugh

"Microsoft's legendary quality control"

Need I say more ??

Praise $DEITY that I'm retired

... and don't have to deal with this level of idiocy any more.

Oh, and it seems to help when dealing with the ( much smaller ) user community that I support these days. They get Linux Mint on their systems, or they find another sucker to provide ( free ) support.

XFCE desktop with Thunar file manager: Folder named "Trash" that has icon of a deskside rubbish can ( yeah, it does have the 3-arrow recycle icon on it )

Evolution email client: Same as previous line ( hmm ...... wonder exactly how THAT came to pass ........ but I digress )

Thunderbird: Folder named "Trash" that has icon of an old-fashioned galvanized steel rubbish can ( complete with lid )

Gmail: Same as Thunderbird

If any of my users have had issues similar to those discussed here, they SOMEHOW have enough sense to avoid coming to me to whine and cry about it. Therefore, these days my "support" activities are pretty much minimum stress, and this is accomplished with pretty minimal training for some non-IT savvy users.

reconcile "the added trust of Microsoft"

Two things:

1) ABSOLUTELY FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2) Made me laugh so hard I nearly fell out of the chair.

Oh, and I also recommend that the person who created the phrase I'm using as a title here seek counseling immediately. The mind that can generate such a concept is in desperate need of help.

Short attention spans

From TFA:

"One might have thought that Canonical would have worked this out after the first such revolt, a decade ago."

Yeah, but this skates very close to the common error of applying logic to management/marketing decisions.

Obviously, what has happened here is that the Canonical manglement/marketing staff has had enough turnover to think that they can follow Mickey$not's lead about monetizing every possible part of their releases.

To those who might be considering alternate scenarios such as the aforementioned manglement/marketing staff thinking that their loyal user community has had time to forget the previous iterations of similar approaches, I ask you to reconsider the absurdity of notions like "manglement/marketing staff thinking" and head out for the week-ending beverage.

Manglement relations

Back in the age of the dinosaurs ( early 90s ) I was the one-person sysadmin staff for a small software house. In the first full year handling the position, I had multiple vacation requests denied, and had to go to HR finally to get a resolution on either allowing vacation at year-end, or deferring it to the following year. Strangely enough, I did learn something useful from the experience.

The following year, I scheduled two weeks of time off late in the year ( November ) and made arrangements for alternate support of normal operations while I was absent. All personnel involved with the alternate support were given VERY SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS about when it was appropriate to call me. After these were made clear, it was also plainly stated that since the minimum increment of vacation time was 1/2 day, any call to me that was made would result in a MINIMUM charge of 1/2 day vacation returned to me.

During the two weeks off, I was called twice, spent about 15 minutes total on the phone, and turned in a time sheet listing 9 days vacation expended and 2 half-days of work. This timesheet was APPROVED without a murmur from anyone.

Take heart, people. It CAN BE DONE.

"substantive response"

Just for the record, El Reg, please tell us how often this actually happens, vs how often it does not.

Inquiring minds want to know.

Answers to questions

No.

No.

F*** NO !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm one of the cantankerous old b???ards who left the Rubbish From Redmond behind years ago. The last iteration of the virus masquerading as an OS that I dealt with was Windoze 7 ( forced upon me by the final employer before retirement ) and then, no more than absolutely necessary.

I rode the RedHat/CentOS train for years ( through version 5 ) and when that went EOL moved over to Linux Mint. My computers come out of recycle bins and such ( eBay at times ) and do everything that I want while leaving the hassle and pain behind.

Of course, YMMV, but if you don't look you won't see the alternatives.

Speaker Choices

Once upon a time I received some training in electronics and sound performance at government expense ( US Navy ) and that led me to the viewpoint of evaluating audio gear by manufacturer's performance specs AND observed performance. Even when Bose DID publish specs on their gear, my comparisons led me to products that had better performance and prices. Even 30 years after doing performance comparisons I still re-run the process to confirm that the conclusions are still valid with current equipment. The most recent example is that when upgrading to home theater setup last year I picked up 3 Polk Audio speakers to go with the existing two Polk column speakers. Good prices with performance that satisfies ME, and the fact that the logos match on all of the speakers is just a cute little bonus.

This is why I don't drink when using the computer

This is the Bastard that we all know and love. So glad to see him back in full form, especially in this ridiculous age of "non-offensive" nonsense.

BRAVO !!!

A bit surprised

I was expecting to see more claims of the solution that I use for the family/friend support requests. I tell them that I provide Linux support, and if they want me to care for their computer, that's what to use. Requests to support the Rubbish from Redmond are either silently ignored, or provided with a suggestion to find someone conversant with that mess because it conflicts with my stress management program.

Backups

After nearly 30 years in the Unix/Linux world, I still rely on the old way. The "dump" and "restore" commands still work quite well for my modest needs, and the only issues I've had seem to always end being media-related crap such as bad tapes. The old simple approach works for me.