Re: How very British
Wait a minute--what if Russian AI reprograms your drone strike force and turns your shed against you? Would you have to have a contingency plan of sharper tools in your sheds?
326 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Aug 2008
As soon as MS made the announcement to customers, my church lady coworker asked me what she could do to continue her work for her community. She *was* using the MS 365 suite.
It's LibreOffice for her and maybe Scribus is she has to open old publisher files at some point.
She is happy to cancel her MS subscription and go open-source. It's long overdue--maybe for many people.
Mortgage companies and banks once had a policy of redlining on a map zones of exclusion for home loans. This practice was outlawed as racially discriminatory and banned by all levels of government.
Now, it looks like Amazon might face some attempt at forcing them to deliver to any and all. The problems of maintaining a business model in high-crime areas might differ from the outright refusal of services, but it will most likely be debated.
for the man who has everything. There must be any number of alternative phrases and suggestions that would sell this monster. Just a few samples: The ideal remote BBQ lighter! The modern way to start your traditional bonfires! Purchase the optional programmable action pack to automate your pest control tasks!
Not too long ago, the H1B program had a grant funding portion that provided additional training for citizens that was supposed to provide support to training programs, public and private, as long as it was tech related. Trainers and their facilities were compensated based on attendance.
I made a few friends attending these training sessions which were Cisco, Microsoft or Oracle curriculum, either official or close parallels.
After the usual shady bookkeeping and double-counting of students to claim H1B training benefits, the grants to training programs were dropped and a few local training outfits disappeared.
It's not at all surprising that grift continues to survive in anything related to the H1B visas. It's the way of most government programs.
For that kind of money, I don't understand why Apple is thinking they get something out of this by enriching Google who should be their competitor given ChromeOS and other attempts to keep people somewhere other than on Apple products. Apple could improve their own co-financed search engine, maybe even pick up the ashes of AltaVista. But it's probably must easier to just accept the Google dosh.
Microsoft sent me notice just this morning that if I didn't login again on my OneDrive account that they would freeze it and my files might disappear. One would expect them to take the hint after two years of non-use that I didn't care to participate in their file manipulation scheme and won't be using it again. This AI thing makes me determined to keep it that way.
I heard that Microsoft was making the Surface devices easier to repair as a selling point to contract with Apple anythhing.
But with the right-to-repair movement catching some momentum, I wondered if they are more motivated by a foreshadowing of compliance mandates.
So, I read the subtitle of this article as "Replacement components available in US, Canada, France--only for now"
Before the advent of 7zip, WinRAR could compress a SQL Server backup file to one-tenth of its original size and unpack it before any of the contemporaneous zip applications could even get started. Defeating the payment nag was trivial once you found the free version.
After Microsoft began to include a compressed backup option in its Standard versions of SQL Server, the compression was only about one-fourth and recovery was slow, but predictable. So, no extra steps necessary and we lived with it.
Yes, it's all 7-Zip now if you roll your own file compression, on Windows at least. I just like to remember why some of the older stuff was great in its day.
When I worked under a Microsoft support contract, answering the phones as Microsoft Tech Support, we had the occasional call for NT4 on an Alpha. Our callers would tell us that they would not give up their machines because of the 64-bit processing and the calculation rate being much faster for their large batch processing tasks, frequently performed with the assistance of custom applications.
One of the supervisors of the contract had a side hustle as a recycler of old circuit boards and harvesting the gold from them. Believe me, he made some cash that way. One day, he ran across an old Alpha system which had by then been discontinued. He brought it in and we could finally see what we were being described over the phone.
The trouble usually was that when NT4 had a new service pack, many of the older Alpha systems would not update. It seems that the firmware necessary for boot would burn in and not accept updates. We had to tell the Alpha people that we could not fix hardware, that they were stuck unless they could replace the relevant parts.
It's not always Microsoft that is at fault, they're just a convenient target because of their tendency to create faults.
Where did the backlash to The Cloud go? I heard briefly, most likely on this site, that some were awakening to the absurdity of The Cloud and paying by the minute and the byte for all server operations was not cost effective. Only those without the capacity to manage their own infrastructure needed the assistance of the Giants (Amazon, Google and Microsoft). Only feeble-minded management followed the trend of The Cloud, but the realization of the expenses and new points of failure were beginning to take hold.
Oh well, on to the next big thing. What is it? Globally managed block-chains for user IDs on subscription services for any device. Got to be a security related thing in there somewhere-and a fee structure, of course.
I worked in a shopping mall back in the day. I remember when a new large department store opened with the latest in energy conservation measures. Their claim was that the specially designed climate control system gathered body heat from shoppers to recycle it throughout the premises, thereby lowering energy consumption. All of the local media repeated these claims whenever the mall was mentioned in the "news."
The fact of the matter was that the store was in a desert climate and didn't need to be heated. With a daily high temperature of 104-degrees F (40-C) for over 100 days a year and the average annual low about half that, most commercial buildings had massive cooling systems and rarely used heating.
When the environmental pretense begins to take hold, what happens is that the claims of extraordinary and magical properties increase instead of the beneficial and practical stuff.
OpenShell does indeed work with Windows 11, though a simple jpg file is necessary to replace the Start button if you want to open the menu with a click and not just the Windows key. Even older Classic Shell skins work with it, the ones that let you choose colors and fonts. It almost makes the rest of Windows 11 tolerable.
Just so you know--I've got half a dozen Linux VMs for various services as required by the people I support. Windows 11, run by the institutional support people, is getting less and less use. It's just more stuff moved around into more places. Not what myself or many others wanted.
Microsoft owns your computer, keyboard and all. Any choice of what functions in what way is not your concern.
This may mean that I can only get screenshots like I want them from other operating systems. My work involves that often enough that Windows is getting to be less useful daily. I'll be looking for the registry hack fix for this or just stay on the Linux VM all day.
Couldn't be that the MS people actually believe they make bulletproof software, thus preventing them from improving anything and eliminating this threat also?
We have all seen management like this. They won't allow improvement since they only approve perfection. No changes necessary, ever.
It's like the Microsoft version of a Mac Mini. One mini-DP port, two USB C ports, one Ethernet port, three USB A ports and two different power buttons. One of those is for a UEFI boot and one is for a USB C device boot.
I hope the two power button options mean that I could run any flavor of Linux for ARM that I can muster onto a USB stick. By muster, I mean compile and abuse as I like.
Now to find the time to break this thing at work while I tell them I'm testing Windows 11 before we have no choice but to use it in our corporate environment.
All four data centers would be in basically the same place. Hickory, Conover and Maiden are all adjacent, and on the same Interstate 40, except for Maiden being just a few miles south.
The author might just take a look at a map. But this being Microsoft-based, maybe he used Bing...
I'm not sure that any of this further automation of Microsoft patching will help anything.
Having been a sysadmin for too many years and having to run Microsoft domains for most of that time, I have often wondered how much of my life has been wasted waiting for Microsoft to patch their software, reboot my systems and keep me waiting at the spinning balls until the update completes at 5%, 23%, 74% and inevitably hanging at 100% for what seems like hours. Not to mention the unpatched defects, vulnerabilities and other unknowns that make me test every system for some basic functionality after patching.
I once thought of figuring out how many days, weeks or months it added up to over the years. I'm afraid to know the answer.
VMWare, even the free ESXI, was once much more useful than any Microsoft or Oracle product for virtual servers, especially for spinning off Linux web servers so you could do real sites without the cringe-worthy IIS. Now, Microsoft has learned from (or stolen from) VMWare, AWS et al.
Times have changed and, like everything else, not always for the best.
Doesn't that eliminate the possibility of purchase of this thing in multiples for larger organizations? Keyboards are usually the first thing that users damage and replacing them is commonplace. But pairing the ID device with only the original keyboard is Apple gone arrogant again. Right to repair not an issue for them, then.