Posts by ShameElevator

Need a Linux admin? Ask a hair stylist to introduce you to a worried mother

Re: If you screw up, say so and say how

“the customer likely knows how to fix the issue quickly, or at least the steps to fix the issue even if they take time”

Also, sometimes you (and the customer) find out that the work involved is too much egregiou effort and because they aren’t really using the thing you killed, decided to just let it be dead.

One of my mistakes were shutting down my computer for the day, clicking OK to the warning about shutting down and suddenly see my real desktop. I shut down a customer’s Exchange server and had to call the customer while waiting for the long shutdown time to complete. I leaned to read the warning that pop up when shutting down a computer as it might be a remote session that warns me about the dumb thing I’m about to do.

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

Re: Purchasing Nokia was not the mistake.

Another big nail in the coffin was lack of apps. It was (kinda) good in the start worth Facebook app that connected into the People Hub (and LinkedIn?) that conceded the contents of the apps. The same with the photo hub, where photos from the different apps were available. But beside the things Microsoft paid for the development of 3rd party apps, there was not a lot of good things. Not even Microsoft’s own departments had any interest in creating apps, so why should other companies bother? And when Facebook and the few others dropped the platform, and the hub integrations dried up, all the cool stuff fell apart.

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

Re: Let's be honest

Windows 10 didn't support a lot of hardware. However, the big difference between Windows 10 and Windows 11 is that Microsoft didn't care about the hardware support with Windows 10 - if it ran, great, if it didn't, they wouldn't help you. But most of the time, Windows 10 just ran on the old and not supported hardware and nobody knew that their hardware was not supported. Windows 11 changed that by blocking you from installing Windows 11 on unsupported hardware.

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

Re: Well, we have 2038 to look forward to

I’m thinking that some of these “smart meters” could be handled centrally by the backend systems they talk to. Let’s say the the smart meter now reports the date as 01-01-1970, then the central system knows it’s talking to a 3K38-bug system, calculate the correct date and work from that date. This is of cause more of a temporary solution because it can quickly get messy with date calculations and working with summer and either time (if not UTC).

Microsoft Edge takes a victory lap with some high-looking usage stats for 2024

Report error to Microsoft. When I select it to use the default browser, it opens the link in Safari.

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

Copied the CD to HDD

Can’t remember when I started doing it, but I began coping i386 folder to the C: drive and then start the installer from there. That way, when Windows needed the installation files, it would have it available right away. Kept doing until Microsoft made Windows not ask for the installation files anymore…

The NPU: Neural processing unit or needless pricey upsell?

Re: I think a lot of AI implementations...

Apple (and maybe the others) try to let things get handled on device and then send any thing my complex to the cloud. Apple have their AI cloud that is supposed to be private for these things. At what point things get send to the cloud I don’t know.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

The same thing with Windows in general. “You must reinstall Windows every six months” was a thing for a long time. I started to know the fixes needed to keep it running. The only one I remember now was when the right click context menu was slow in Internet Explorer, was to run the Microsoft Registry Cleaner and it would clear out some entries related to the menu and then it would open instantly.

I made this network so resilient nothing could possibly go wro...

Damn remote desktops

The year must have been just around 2000. I was still leaning but one task was customer support. We hosted several customers “on prem” servers. One of these was an Exchange Server. At the end of the day I had to do some work on it, so I remoted into it with Remote Desktop. I did most of the work in full screen - low budgets meant crappy computers with crappy monitors, meaning not a lot of space to work on if there where in a window. Anyway, I’m done with my work, talk with a colleague and shut down my computer, but a few seconds later I see my real desktop. My first thought was “That was odd” but then realised what I had done. Also realised the pop up I had just clocked ok to when I shut down the server, was Windows telling me that I was on a remote server and if I was really sure of I wanted to shut it down.

I called the customer right away a told them of my blunder and ran down to the server room in the basement, where the server was still shutting down…

From that day I leaned to take extra care and attention when doing remote work. Always double check before doing potentially disastrous actions.

Post-CrowdStrike catastrophe, Microsoft figures moving antivirus out of Windows kernel mode is a good idea

Re: Bad response from Crowdstrike

I’m not a real programmer but only write PowrShell scripts and I use try-catch everywhere so I can gracefully handle any issues. I know C# has the same function and I’m sure most other languages has. Zero trust build into the code.

Re: Do we bounce between mirror universes?

I don’t hold my breath while installing Windows updates. Even when I ran the beta channel, I never had a major issue with any updates - only that the issues in beta, but that had nothing to do with the update process. Ran beta since launch of Windows 10 continuing with Windows 11 until start of this year when I switched to a Mac. Now I just have a VM with Windows 11.

As major web browser makers snuggle up to AI, these skeptical holdouts remain

Why is it build in?

My biggest issue with AI build into the browser is that it’s not vital in any way. The most integrated part is where a webpage can be summarised. For me they could just as well have build in a word processor - even that would be more useful when you have to write comments online. I can open an AI on a webpage and use it there.

I can only see two reasons:

- Because everyone else is doing it, we must as well

- Promote our AI so people start buying our services

So like another forced service in Edge.

Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all

Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

It depends on the business. We were a 15 person shop doing IT consulting services, development and an in house SaaS solution. Not having to maintain a physical infrastructure and internal network (ADDS, mail, backup and so on) made it possible to free up 1-2 persons that then could be sold to customers instead. Also gave us a much more stable infrastructure and much more freedom in where we had our office as we didn’t have to think in a server room with all that entails. I know it could be hosted another place but that adds in the 1-2 persons time again. When we moved everything to the cloud and turned off the server room, 95% of our power bill vanished.

Is it perfect? No. Is it saving a lot of money? Probably not. Can we focus on the more fun things? Yes!

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

Firefox on iOS

Firefox on iOS is so underwhelming. My biggest beef is the lack of being able rearrange the icons on the start page. You can’t just drag them or do some other easy thing, but have to pin and unpin the icons in the right order for the icons to be placed like you want. Just hope you don’t want to change something or you risk having to do it all over.

Musk's X caught throttling outbound links to websites he doesn't like

Re: Mr unlimited free speech strikes again

But Musk has free speech and is allowed to wait for five seconds before loading a website. Yeah, that’s it. Free speech restored!

Study: AI can predict pancreatic cancer three years ahead of human doctors

Re: Similar announcement

Problem with trying to “save a few lives” is that most deadly diseases is like that. If we throw more resources (money and man power) at the issue, things can be better but we can’t do this for everything. And if we do it for just one, what other illnesses are going to get less resources?

What we should celebrate is that these “new” ideas seems to get more traction. AI is yet another tool that could be used for many other diseases and with more breakthroughs, the systems will be able to help a broad range of people in the future. But for now, we must just hope for good results and that it can be implemented in the real world in not too far into the future.

I’m sorry for you loss. Losing love ones to unfair things like this sucks.