Posts by Dave K 1048 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Apr 2008
Indeed, I remember a story a few years ago about the student who went into the lecture hall, sat at the back with their laptop, plugged in a set of headphones and fired up some porn.
30 second later, the student glanced up and noticed everyone in the room looking at them. It was at this point the student realised they'd plugged their headphones into the mic socket rather than the headphone socket...
I generally insist on this as well, but I can accept occasional 5-minute favours with good reason. Examples being a particularly pleasant lady here who asked for help as an important customer was in the meeting room and they were having issues getting the projector working. A ticket with a 4-hour SLA isn't really much good here, so I popped along and fixed that one. The fact that the lady raised a retrospective ticket for us and left glowing feedback for the ticket also helped ensure that I'm happy to occasionally provide ad-hoc support for people like this if there's a good reason.
Agreed, anyone that deliberately lies about the scale of a job is someone that would go on my black list after that. Meaning they must log a ticket, and I'll only fix what is listed in the ticket.
I don't mind doing occasional favours for certain people, but at the very least I expect honesty from them when asking for a quick bit of unofficial help...
Agreed here as well. Decided last month instead of replacing my old LG G4, I just bought a new battery. Phone still runs fast, does everything I need and has a headphone jack. Modern phones don't offer enough new, take away essential features, often have too much crapware on them and cost too bloomin much.
I'm still not sure about 2 sensors being enough. We know that the 737 MAX is more prone to nose lift at higher thrust and hence more prone to stalling. Disengaging MCAS if the two sensors disagree is a start, but you still now have to trust that the pilots can fly the plane which has different handling characteristics without stalling it (given there's no longer any automatic trim). And as much as I have huge respect for airline pilots, MCAS was designed to allow the 737 MAX to avoid re-certification and hence additional pilot training.
Fact is, you're left with a plane which handles differently to those the pilots may have previously flown, they've not had additional training on the MAX and due to a single sensor fault you no longer have any automatic trim. Still sounds like an unacceptable risk to me - a risk which could be easily reduced with a third sensor and a computer system that could "vote out" a faulty sensor without losing MCAS altogether.
Yep, welcome to planned obsolescence. It will happen more. Not necessarily due to MS changing system requirements, but due to companies wanting people off older kit so deciding not to make drivers.
In the past, you bought a machine with the current Windows and had up to 10 years of support, plus probably support for the next version of Windows as well. Now? Expect a lot of more budget-oriented machines to be abandoned by the manufacturers after 5 years or so, then a new build of Windows comes along that needs a newer driver and you've then got 12-18 months before you are SOL with Windows updates.
It's already happened once with Clover Trail Atoms. Only MS's heavy-handed "free upgrade" offer and their fear of lawsuits saw them extend security support for Anniversary Edition to work around this. Soon, no such gestures will be on offer and manufacturers will be far more able to determine when they want you to bin their older kit and buy new ones...
It gets worse when you have about a dozen systems with no password synchronisation and differing expiry periods for the passwords (no, I'm not kidding sadly). My previous scheme for this was indeed to "cycle the digits" with a post-it reminding me which current digit it was for each system. Of course, the rest of the password was not written down anywhere, but it does illustrate the point thay having regularly expiring passwords will mean either that people write them down, or if a hacker obtains one that doesn't work, he just has to keep incrementing the digits until he gets to "this month's" version of that password...
It's certainly the better option if you need a Macbook, and likely (ironically) to last longer than a new one.
Personally I alternate between a 2010 ThinkPad X201 (my favourite laptop), or a 2014 X1 Carbon (lighter, so handy for travelling). At least with those, I can upgrade most the components and could probably bash on the keyboards for several more decades before anything broke...
Saying that, Macbook's 16:10 screen does appeal to me a lot (one of the reasons I love my X201). But I'm not buying something where the keyboard could crap out after a couple of years...
I'm actually impressed that Apple hasn't scrapped the butterfly design yet given that these issues have been ongoing for a while. Macbooks are expensive and the keyboards are a sod to replace, hence reliability is important. At the moment, would I risk buying a MacBook given the temperamental and flimsy keyboard on them? Not a chance, and I bet I'm far from the only person that is put off from a new MacBook as a result of the flawed keyboard design.
Virtually silent? I'd say completely silent. I run a Raspberry Pi as a media centre with Kodi on it. Makes zero noise, tiny little box buried out of sight, yet can stream and play high-def content over the network from my PC (or a NAS if you prefer this). It's also handy for viewing photos if you get family round, plus I've used it occasionally as a jukebox during parties for background music. For £30, it's a great choice.
Problem with Media Centre is that it required a full blown PC (noise, cost etc), and in typical MS fashion its format support (at least initially) was somewhat hit and miss. Kodi though has handled pretty much any format I've thrown at it. AVI, MKV, MP4, all manner of various codecs etc.
I'd define "Good" as "Doesn't contain stupid and idiotic bugs that make you roll your eyes in despair"
I know that's not exactly a high target, but MS still manages to miss it with alarming regularity.
Hence if it breaks your webcam, nukes your data, breaks mapped drives, blue-screens with some of the most popular AV products on the market or won't install if you have a flash drive connected, it's gets a nice big cross in the "good" column...
Hang on, you think it is the user's fault that Windows Update can't handle certain updates if you have external media connected? In what universe?
I've seen several users with laptops that have a large SD/Micro SD card plugged in constantly to effectively act as a second disk (particularly on ultraportables where manufacturers charge eye-watering prices for larger soldered SSDs). Why should these users know to eject this every time they want to update in case MS's shonky update handling objects to it?
As others have said, there are occasions when it is right for a workman to blame their tools if the aforementioned tool happens to be rubbish...
As a dog owner myself, irresponsible owners piss me off. Where I often walk our dog, you do occasionally see a discarded pile in a stupid place, yet the wheelie bins at the entrance to the park are usually pretty much full after a couple of weeks, showing that a vast majority around here do clean up after their dog. Unfortunately the odd tosser gives the rest of us a bad name.
It is correct however when some dog owners turn a blind eye, but IMO it does depend where it is. Leaving a pile because it is only "next to the path" is utterly unacceptable. My approach is if I can get to it, I'll clean it. On the odd occasion our dog has "done the business" half way down an overgrown river bank, I have to admit to leaving that one. I'm not going to risk slipping into the river to collect it and it is well out of everyone's way. Unfortunately, a minority of dog owners do look for any excuse to leave the pile behind, even when it is clearly visible and clearly accessible.
I'd expect most phone companies to love that! Look at modern phones and they are increasingly designed to be disposable. Held together with glue, no user-changeable parts, OS upgrades that make the phone run like a turd after a couple of years, etc.
Introducing another component that has a limited shelf life should suit them nicely!
You're welcome to do that, I often do it as well on home machines to be honest. However, I keep backups, and if I was told by my IT people that my machine needed wiping and re-imaging, I'd make sure they transferred that folder. I'd also probably give it a more obvious name as well.
If it is your data, you need to show some responsibility for protecting it. Users that show blatant disregard for the safety of their data are a danger to themselves and their companies.
Well, that depends on the provider. When a large company signs a deal with a provider for cloud storage, you'd expect that security, backups, encryption etc. are part of the contract you sign. If you're a small company just using DropBox, that's a different story of course.
Correct, because if you wipe an execs machine and lose some of their files, you'll probably lose your own job as well. Plus with about 1,000 users and 20-30 execs, it wasn't a problem to do it for the senior staff, and the company paid for a dedicated support engineer for the execs anyway.
However, for normal users, you often don't have the time/spare parts to swap several hard drives a week, or to add an extra couple of hours to each re-image by duplicating their Windows, Program Files folders etc. Hence you duplicate the profile, check the root of drive C for any user folders you see there, and leave it at that. Like I say, we quickly changed to ask users explicitly, however the fact of the matter is that you should *never* keep business critical data on a single laptop with no backup. Especially when you've already had pay £1,000 for data recovery two years earlier...
To be honest, this is the process we did use for senior management/executives, but we simply didn't have the time and the spare kit around to do this for absolutely everyone. As it is, the engineer did check the root of drive C in case he saw a "Documents" or "Files" folder or something, he missed this particular one due to the especially anonymous sounding name.
We did change things going forwards and started explicitly asking users to confirm where they kept data on their system. At least that way if a folder still disappears, we can state more explicitly that it isn't our fault. Plus the users are strongly encouraged to use server shares and cloud storage for all their work...
I had a data-loss incident a few years back which beggared belief IMO. The user's laptop no longer booted properly, it looked as if Windows had become corrupted. So, one of my engineers told the user the system would need a re-image. He booted the thing from a flash drive, unlocked the drive's encryption, then took a full copy of the user profile before rebooting from an imaging stick and setting the re-image going.
Once the system was re-imaged, the engineer copied the user's profile back across and handed the laptop back. 5 minutes later, "Where are all my files"? Turned out that the user had decided not to bother using the profile folders, but had created an anonymous-sounding folder on the root of drive C (called "System" if I recall, because "that's where I keep the files on my system"). As we hadn't captured that folder and the user hadn't seen fit to mention it originally, we asked the user what backups they had. "None" was the answer.
The sinking feeling quickly turned to disbelief though when the user suggested a local data recovery firm, saying "When the hard drive failed on my previous laptop, this is the firm we used to recover the data". So, he experienced a drive failure on his previous laptop and he *still* hadn't started making backups? That's right.
Some people are beyond saving...
Don't see the issue to be honest. My wife's experimental lab at university has a few Windows XP machines in it because they interface with kit that cost £50,000 and newer OSs aren't supported. Technically, support actually ended with Win2K, but XP works fine for it as well. These machines aren't on the network, so no security issue at all.
Where I work, we have a load of CNC machines powered by a mixture of Windows XP and Window 95 (yes, really) consoles. These machines cost millions originally and they won't be replaced just because the OS is old hat. They are networked, but are heavily firewalled so that only the absolute bare minimum of required connectivity works for them. Again, no security issues with this setup.
Old operating systems are often used to control specialised kit or to run expensive/custom software. So long as networking is sufficiently controlled and locked down, it usually isn't a problem. As it is, I doubt they were using that ultrasound machine to browse the Internet or anything...
Well, there's two sides to it. You're quite right that more and more manufacturers are designing their kit to be deliberately "disposable". However, the downsides are that warranty repairs for Apple also become much more tricky, and it also becomes much more difficult to properly dismantle the thing for recycling as well.
It does also depend on the product. People are used to tablets and phones being disposable these days, but for certain other types of product, people do usually expect some degree of repairability. Going too much down the "disposable" route can potentially cost you sales. For example, I owned one of the earlier Mac Minis and upgraded it a couple of times myself. When it became time to replace it, I looked at newer Mac Minis and didn't buy one, and one of the main reasons was the soldered RAM.
I have a Razer mouse. Wasn't too cheap, yet the scroll-wheel clips into an actuator via a tiny plastic peg. So, guess what happens after a couple of years? The peg breaks and the scroll wheel stops working.
Thankfully, replacement scroll wheels can be bought from eBay for a few quid, so I was able to resurrect it. Keyboard wise, I went for a Ducky keyboard rather than Razer. No issues at all with mechanical keys after many years of use, but I have had several of the backlight LEDs fail, meaning I've had to attack it with a soldering iron and some replacements...
Don't get me wrong, I like Office 365 from a features point of view, but it is buggy and annoying at times.
Random examples from the top of my head:
*Pull down a filter box in Excel and start typing to filter? The carat doesn't move to the text field by default.
*Copy a cell in Excel, paste it somewhere and change the colour, Excel will reward you by clearing the clipboard.
*Try to close Excel with 100+ cells in the clipboard, Excel will warn you about "lots of data in memory", even though it's only about 5k and my PC has 8GB of RAM.
* Try to view a mailbox in Outlook that isn't cached? Watch whilst Outlook locks up solid for 20 seconds.
* Same with opening large Excel files, just watch as every instance of Excel hangs for ages.
* When I try and export a sheet from an Excel file as a PDF, if I try to save direct to Sharepoint, I get an "Access denied" error. I have to save into Temp on my PC then move it in Windows Explorer to Sharepoint.
* Odd times when I click a meeting request in Outlook, Outlook crashes and has to be restarted.
* Skype for Business sometimes fails to reconnect when my PC comes out of sleep (sticks at logging in for eternity), so I have to cancel login (thus losing my conversations) then try logging in again for it to work.
* Try an open an Excel file from Sharepoint and specifically select the "Edit" option? Excel will still open in read-only mode, you have to click the button on the banner to enable saving.
etc. etc. etc.
Part of the issue here is that marketing doesn't care about reliability. Look at Office 365 for example. Can I think of many useful features to add? Not really. Can I think of any bugs, flaws and irritations to fix? Hell yes!
If MS were to say "We're not implementing any new features in 2019, instead we're focussing on fixing bugs, crashes and general irritations" I'd be delighted! Instead, MS (like everyone) decides to focus on questionable gimmicks when quality improvements would have a much bigger impact on user satisfaction.
It's a toughy, it depends on how dim the secretary was with computers. My main query is whether 100 floppies would fit in the case. A pile of 100 5.25" floppies must be a good 20cm high (assuming 2mm per floppy), so it'd have to be a very big case with a *lot* of free space in it.
As for the "dumb secretaries" part, I believe it's mainly because secretaries of the era were no better or worse than the average person when it came to computer literacy, but they were some of the first to receive PCs for work due to the nature of their jobs. Hence, lots of old stories about secretaries being poor with computers.
It depends, trust has been damaged but can recover. The DC10 suffered from a fatal design flaw and had to be grounded whilst modifications were made, but has then had a long service career. I don't think people will be the problem here. If the plane is modified, the modifications scrutinised and declared safe and the plane returned to service, I don't think there'll be too many issues with people using it. Whether airlines themselves get cold feet and stop ordering it (as happened with the DC10) is another story of course...
Without MCAS, the 737 MAX is more prone to stalling due to higher-than-expected nose lift as a result of the different engines being mounted further forwards.
Sure, the FAA could request airlines to disable the feature and resume flying, but can you imagine the fallout if a pilot (who hasn't had additional training because the 737 MAX supposedly doesn't require it) inadvertently raised the nose too much because he wasn't used to the different flying characteristics of the 737 MAX without MCAS, stalled the plane and crashed it?
You can't take risks with people's safety. Boeing needs to fix the 737 MAX so that MCAS relies on multiple sensors to determine AoA, has a clear warning device fitted as standard to notify pilots of an AoA sensor failure, can't drop the nose of the plane sufficiently to cause a crash, and to ensure pilots are trained regarding how to control the MCAS system (and to disengage it in the event of an emergency). Only then will the 737 MAX be considered safe to resume flights.
To be honest, having a shutdown button right next to the door is always going to ask for trouble.
At my previous workplace, each wing was controlled by mag-locked doors and the release button to get out of a wing was to the left of the door - right next to the light switch. Its quite impressive how many people head to the door, reach out for the release switch and hit the wrong button. I remember the lights going off then back on a good 3-4 times a day when I worked there.
Thankfully, these were just office lights. Emergency shutdown buttons though should be well away from doors and light switches, bright red and with a shroud over them.
Waseem, fully agree. And as stated, I have a valid Win10 Pro license for the one machine I have LTSC on. I can legally run Windows 10 Pro on this machine if I wanted to. If MS were to sell LTSC versions of Windows 10 for ordinary folk, I'd have been happy to obtain one instead - but they don't. The question is whether it is ethical to run a different edition of Windows that MS won't sell to ordinary people. Either way, MS has my money, so does it make any material difference to them if I pop LTSC onto my machine due to consumer Windows 10 versions being unsuitable for my needs?
Not saying it's an open and shut case here, people will always disagree about these things and it is a very grey area. However to be blunt, my attitude is that I want to run the version of Windows that suits my needs. If MS refuse to realistically sell me the edition that I want, I don't personally see it to be a problem with buying a different edition then sticking a cracked copy of the version I want on.
Of course, the reason MS won't sell LTSC to ordinary folk is that it'd mean fewer end-user-beta-testers for them to exploit...
In all honesty? Piracy I'm afraid (or use the trial and keep re-installing it).
Now, I'm not saying that I'm in favour of piracy generally speaking, but if you have a genuine license for Windows 10 and you instead bung a pirated copy of Windows 10 LTSC onto your machine, personally I find that OK from an ethical perspective. It's not my fault that MS makes LTSC such a sod to obtain legally, my machine still has a valid Windows 10 license (even if not for the edition of Win10 I'm using), and I personally refuse to use a copy of Windows 10 that keeps changing every 5 seconds at MS's control.
Out of curiosity, why exactly?
Not a criticism, everyone is entitled to their opinion, however I am genuinely curious. For me, Windows 10 has a terrible Start Menu, the Control Panel / Settings split is an absolute mess, Windows Explorer with the ribbon is overly complicated, Accessibility is an issue due to Metro apps not respecting the "disable animations" accessibility setting, the default sounds are bloody awful, telemetry/spyware is a major concern, Cortana is a pain in the arse, etc.
Looking at advantages over Windows 7, erm... DirectX 12. I honestly can't think of anything else...
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