* Posts by Alain

123 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Sep 2007

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Union warns of strike action against HP

Alain
FAIL

Except the customer doesn't have a choice

Working for a government organisation here in France, which has tens of millions euros in HP gear, from basic desktops to Superdomes and huge blade farms. We've seen pretty much all the support services we pay for being outsourced to Tunisia and India, and HP certainly didn't ask whether we were happy with that or not. It has started with the call handling facilities for h/w repairs, but now the whole tech support for their Intel line of product has moved to Tunisia. And it really sucks. The level of expertise and experience of the people we now deal with has dropped dramatically. I've more or less entirely given up opening calls for software support because software support has become completely useless. Repairs are a nightmare, with qualification being plain wrong more than 50% of the time. I sometimes end up fighting with people on the phone because I know what part needs to be replaced better than they do, but they insist on ordering the wrong ones.

Switching vendors? Sure, that might eventually happen, but the whole infrastructure currently is HP, when all the people are trained to HP's hardware, to their software, that would cost a whole lot. So our only recourse now is applying penalties to them when they fail to deliver to the terms of the support contracts.

As far as I'm concerned, HP can die. Their abysmal quality of support has costed me too many hours of sleep (among other things).

Heads roll at HP as Apotheker swings new broom

Alain
FAIL

HP's own tech support...

...(...) had "overexecuted operationally and underinvested strategically"

I wouln't use "overexecuted" but rather "underperformed".

HP, start providing tech support that does not suck to your large accounts customers and you might see them signing new support contracts instead of not renewing the existing ones.

Right now, being treated just like John Doe who just bought his Inkjet at Carrefour (make that Tesco or Walmart depending on where you live), by the same people with the same technical expertise when you sign support contracts amounting to 6-digit figures (in Euros) per year is no longer acceptable.

HP's tech support, especially for the server blade line of products, has really being going down the drain.

Natty Narwahl: Ubuntu marine mammal not fully evolved

Alain

Slackware

Been using it since its v3.0, however I was extremely frustrated to see that it has fallen for KDE4 as well. I hate its uncumbered UI. I probably want to give Xfce a try someday, but for the time being it's Centos 5 with KDE3 for me.

Brussels threatens to name ISPs with 'doubtful' market practices

Alain
Thumb Up

Oh yes M'am, please DO come see what's going on here in France

We have the worst of the worst with Orange and SFR. Please do come kick their butts!

For exemple Orange is throttling down traffic from Megaupload to a point it is completely unusable during peak hours, and they're strongly denying doing so.

At the same time people using other ISPs are having no problem with MU.

Seagate to buy Samsung's disk drive biz?

Alain
Coat

My mileage does vary

I have ~40 disks of various brands, sizes and capacities in USB enclosures at home, and the only ones that have failed on me are a few Seagates and one Toshiba.

On the other hand, the WDs and Samsung have never developed a single visible bad block.

At work, I manage a large farm of HP servers (mostly blades) and I consider the failure rate of their HP-branded Seagate disks above normal.

At this time I can not be convinced to buy another Seagate disk, even if it's cheaper than a WD or Samsung.

In which pocket did I put that bloody 2.5" disk?

Antennagate Redux: Consumer Reports condemns Verizon iPhone 4

Alain

Did I write this?

Nope. Just avoiding what I consider a quite aggressive picture when a guy is fighting cancer (this, at least, is not a rumour).

Alain
Unhappy

Not very smart picture choice

I don't think it was a particularly nice idea to use that crossed picture of Steve Jobs to illustrate this article when there are news floating around that the guy might be living his last weeks.

Not an Apple fanboy by any means. Happy user of a Nexus One.

Windows hits 25

Alain
WTF?

Dave Cutler was from DEC!

Shame on you Reg for mixing up Digital Equipment Corp, makers of the famous PDP and VAX (and later the ill-fated Alpha processor, killed by Compaq when they bought them) with Digital Research, a software company (aforementioned in the article).

Dave Cutler was the main architect for RSX and later VMS. He was hired to make a real operating system out of Windows, actually something completely different from the DOS GUI and task dispatcher it was. Rewritten from scratch, it became Windows NT. Unsuprisingly, Windows NT's internals were heavily based on the same concepts as VMS. Some internal data structures even had the same names. We all know the old joke about W.N.T. being V.M.S. + 1 letter in the alphabet don't we?

Using group policy: GPOs good, scripts much better

Alain

Confusing

I think you're comparing apples and oranges here. Of course scripts can be used to push registry settings (which ultimately is what GPOs do, as danj2k has pointed out), but they do much more than this. On the other hand how do you easily deploy a script to a well-known bunch of machines or users anyway? The easiest (and free) way to do so under Windows is... GPOs.

What I would really like to see is a less half-baked implementation. This machine/user schizophrenia is nonsense, and the 'loopback' trick to work around this is a ugly and very limited hack as one soon finds out when he/she wants to deploy user settings to limited sets of users working on machines found in a given OU. The whole concept of GPO is something I like in Windows (mind you, there aren't so many such things) but it's not really there yet.

Yes, GPOs are a nightmare to track, maintain and document. On the other hand scripts by themselves wihout strict coding policies and extra tools can be equally bad.

As for iptables, why would you need to know where a given distribution stores its configuration? make your rules a ...shell script, precisely. Have called from rc.local if no better place. At least this will be portable.

Almost 2,500 firms breached in ongoing hack attack

Alain
Grenade

With a little help from Symantec

This seems to come just at the right time when Symantec Endpoint Protection that is so widely used in big companies as their corporate anti-virus has failed miserably on Jan 1st, 2010 (see this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/09/symantec_endpoint_manager_bug/).

Because of this major goof tens (hundreds?) of thousands of PCs have been left with outdated signatures for weeks. I know from first hand information that in some big places, desktops with signatures 3 weeks+ old were not uncommon until very recently. Symantec has come up with a fix some time ago but due to propagation delays and intranet servers being overloaded in companies, it took forever for signatures to catch up.

Keeps me wondering why SEP is still so popular after so many failures of this basically broken product. On top of this the "corporate" aspects fail just any functionality tests.

Facebook goes lighter than Lite

Alain
Paris Hilton

Carrier support ?

I might be a bit dense (couldn't find a better icon, eh?), but I don't get the idea of support by carrier.

As long as you have IP connectivity to the site and you can render the logon page, what kind of "support" is this ?

HP's PC and printer sales back from the depths

Alain
FAIL

Got what it deserved

So much for HP's aggressive overseas outsourcing policy.

As a French customer paying 6-digit (in euros) maintenance and support bills to HP every year, we get to speak to people from the other side of the Mediterranean Sea all the way from the initial call to tech. qualification, spare parts delivery planning etc. "Speak" is too much a word though, as their control of French is less than adequate, and I'm not even talking of their technical skills. Recently one of them I called for reported ECC RAM errors on a Superdome partition asked me what version of Windows I was running on that (big) box.

The same people who pick up the phone for John Doe who's bought his Inkjet at Carrefour (or Tesco, pick up your favourite supermarket chain) and can't find the USB plug.

Mozilla's SeaMonkey 2.0 exits cryptobiosis

Alain
Go

Count me as #14

Been using Seamonkey and its ancestors since Netscape 3 and my mind would really require extensive retraining to switch to something else. It had tabbed browsing before Firefox even existed, hadn't it? Also I like being able to do Google searches right from the URL input box (I'm sure this can be done in Firefox too, but it's not native).

I love the v2.0. Being able to restart with all windows and tabs as previously is a great feature. I kind of hoped that it would leak memory less when left with multiple windows and tabs open for a long time, but it still leaks memory badly. As for the initial memory footprint, one can install only the module one needs. I for instance never install the IRC client.

Bootleggers jump on 'complete' Windows 7

Alain
Pirate

Just as if they cared

``A knock-off copy of Windows 7, therefore, will be a snap shot of the planned operating system that's frozen in time''.

Anyone who's lived in one of those countries will smile at this sentence. The kind of people who buy this bootleg software disks couldn't care less. And they trash/reinstall their operating system at least once every 3 months anyway... It's just for the *fun* of it, buddy.

HP printer, server, and PC sales in double digit dip

Alain
Alert

HP gets what they deserve

Of course these numbers only make sense when compared the performance of HP's competitors but it would appear that HP has been hit harder. My guess is that they pay a loss of confidence from their large account customers. I don't know about you other HP corporate customers around the world, but here in France the quality of the support we pay dearly for has dropped below the floor. Corporate customers now get to call the same hotlines (outsourced overseas) as Joe Inkjet buyer calls. Calls are lost, qualification is laughable, spare parts come DOA, field technicians (from subcontractors) completely untrained. I work for a large group of government hospitals and the feedback from all sites is the same : HP support sucks. Seems to me that they're quite likely to loose us as customers quite soon.

Three simultaneously cut undersea cables under repair

Alain
Unhappy

I can certainly feel the pinch...

Downloading stuff from an ADSL-connected box in S-E Asia daily, usual speed >50kB/s, today it's <3Kb/s, connection drops all the time.

Google adds audio, video tools to Gmail

Alain
Unhappy

How about being consistent, Google?

Just when I was starting to really like their Google Talk app... they implement video chat *outside* of it (or am I confused here?)

Give me video chat in Google Talk and I'll ditch Skype for good!

And of course, count my vote for Linux support too.

HP waves goodbye to 9,300 EMEA employees

Alain
Stop

HP is bound to lose big customers

Working in a government institution that pays multi-million euro maintenance contracts to HP every year, I can see them losing much of the share of the contracts for medium to big iron soon.

Here in France, we now get the same people in Tunisia on the phone when we call our so-called "dedicated" support numbers as Joe Average User who just bought a Deskjet printer gets to talk to when he wants to know how to put the ink cartridges in.

I suspect they're picking them up off the streets of Tunis and figure out they'd let them make some first level of diagnosis. When I call for an issue on my ESX cluster running on a farm of blades with SAN connectivity and they ask me "what version of Windows are you running ?" I find it hard not to lose my temper.

HP, continue treating your big account customers like this and they'll turn their backs to you. They've already started to, anyway.

The Google-isation of all the net's access points

Alain
Linux

Posted using Chrome

Wanted to be the first one :-)

Anyway, being a former software developer I kind of liked some of the points raised in the cartoon, especially the process separation stuff. I use Seamonkey (shoot me) and it has so many times hung at me due to faulty DNS resolution or Javascript loops.

I do hope, however, that the installer is a just beta far from the real thing. First, I hate bootstrap installers that download the actual program in my back. I want to download stuff by myself. Second, absolutely no questions asked and the .exe is installed right into my profile ! Hey Google, ever heard of C:\Program Files ??? how about letting me choose where I want to put that stuff anyway ?

Tux, because I want to see a Linux version right away.

French punters offered petite Eee PC rival

Alain

@Anonymous Coward (keyboard)

Usual here... they're generally too lazy to take pictures of the localized versions for their ads, so they use stock pictures from the manufacturer and you get to see the US keyboard on pictures. Unfortunately (I'm French but I *hate* AZERTY) what's in the box has a french keyboard, no way to order a QWERTY.

More likely explanation : by the time they are finalizing the ads, the first unit with a french keyboard hasn't been delivered yet.

Would by this box at 399 Eur (I told you, no Euro sign on my keyboard :-) when discount retailers have decent 15" regular notebooks from Acer at 388 Eur ? (saw one recently)

Ballmer: All open source dev should happen on Windows

Alain
Dead Vulture

"I would love to see all open source innovation happen on top of Windows".

Sure. Here's how: first, make the whole code development suite free, then have all the APIs documented online instead of asking us to buy half a dozen expensive books. Is he serious ? All the decent development tools that can be used on Windows come from the Unix world.

Thailand menaces YouTube - again

Alain

@Jim + Internet in Thailand

Jim, that's precisely what they should do. Even the less cynical exec at Youtube should consider that Thailand is very far from having the same business weight as e.g. China, so yes, that's what they should do.

I have lived in Thailand until recently, and freedom of expression in this country is getting close to what is it in the worst dictatorships in the world. The Internet, for some reason, is considered as a particularly sensitive media. Honestly, it started under the Thaksin's (deposed PM) administration, but the junta made censorship grow at an alarming rate. Since they don't even have a clue about how to implement local filtering (see below why) they have no choice but asking Youtube to take that content out.

This really makes the self-claims of Thailand bound to becoming a "regional IT hub" laughable. These claims come every 6 months, while at the same time Thailand lags more and more behind its neighbors in terms of datacomm infrastructure and even worse lack of qualified local engineers. I know what I'm talking about ... been working for an ISP there. You wouldn't believe what I've seen. Even Thailand's much poorer neighbors will sooner or later have a better Internet.

Dell beefs up Precision portable workstation line

Alain

That's Red Hat Enteprise, buddy

I can't recall using the (then free) Red Hat Linux 5.1, at that time I was (and still am) a big Slackware fan.

Anyway they're obviously referring to the paid-for distribution. Last time I've checked the latest version was 5.0.

This notebook is big iron. I woudn't like having to carry its bag on my shoulder though.

DELL has a long way to go to (re-)gain a trustable name in notebooks IMHO. Their boxes aren't especially reliable these days (used to be).

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