Re: We shouldn't have skipped the time when it was the Intranet of Things
"DAMN! I wish *MINE* was that reliable..."
Depends on how big of a boot you use. ;)
1872 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2008
I still have that remote capability. It's primarily executed by calling the moody teen who stays home in his room, and telling him to go turn the lights on/off, turn on the oven, shut the fridge door, do we need any milk/eggs/butter, etc. It's not a cheap system, considering how much he eats and wants to wear nice clothes, but it has worked out pretty well so far. Only had to reboot it a twice in the past 5 or 6 years.
So apparently this isn't Microsoft's first foray into this corporate Self-Service universe. I was searching around for the magical Powershell command to disable this, and found that Microsoft has already gone through this back in September with their Dynamics 365 self-service.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/developer/devenv-business-central-manage-selfservice-signups
Funny how on that page, Microsoft is fairly straight-forward about it, they aren't acting like a kicked puppy the way they are with the Power Apps self-service fiasco.
I guess MS is out of "good" dumb-ideas, so they are floating one from the "bad" dumb-ideas list.
I fail to see how this will make things better for corporate users or admins. Looks like it will just be a big PITA from the get-go. Because, you know, some damn VP will get the email and decide it's a BRILLIANT idea, and then hit corporate IT for support when he gets himself into a mess. Why should he have to talk to "Frank" in India for support when the company has an entire IT department? Isn't that what they're for? Oh, and God help if it's a small shop with only a few IT bods who know NOTHING about the POWER crap when this VP needs help. Will MS Support work with the company's IT folks, even though the licenses are in the VP's name?
Paypal - where the motto of the Customer Service drones is "Sorry, I can't help you with that!".
Years ago, I got a new credit card specifically to use with PayPal. Something on PayPal's end screwed up as I was trying to get the card registered, and the card number wound up in limbo within their system. Called their "customer service" and was basically told there was nothing they could do about it that I'd have to use another card. Stellar customer service there.
Not to mention the ridiculous amount they skim off when you use them as an Ebay seller. After PP and Ebay take their cuts, it's not even worth the time to use Ebay to sell old low-priced network gear.
98SE was good once you got all the non-Plug-n-Pray interrupts worked out, and assuming you weren't using a soft-modem with a flaky driver.
And I thought the big problem with ME was that MS had ripped out all of the "enterprise" networking stuff like their Novell Client and NT domain stuff, in an attempt to make it more "consumer" focused.
"The successor of Doom was Quake."
Could've also been zDoom or one of the other forks after id released the Doom source code in the 'Naughties. And I only say that because I would think someone who knew what Doom was, would know that the successor was Quake, but might not remember the names of the Doom forks.
"The unnamed company actually coughed £42.32 for the cable, which represented a 12,347 per cent markup on the supplier's cost, "
But it will give them the lowest 0's possible, and all of the previously subdued nuances of the 1's will now shine through, just like the artist originally intended.
But I thought useful quantum computers were still some ways off on the horizon, and were currently squarely in the realm of Mad Scientists. No? Or are these IBM machines still considered "experimental" and not really available to the general public? Or is it marketing hype? We had this story back in December https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/06/quantum_computing_slow/ where Uncle Sam was saying quantum was still years away. I admit, I am a tad confused.
"We had fun configuring those on Linux back in the day!"
Not ALL of us had fun doing that... I seem to recall that was a bit of a pain in the ass to get working. But if memory serves, the Linux modules from ReadyToRun were more solid than the "native" ones for Windows. In fact, I think if you've got $$$ burning a hole in your pocket, RTR is still in business and still providing FPSE for Linux and Windows.
Personally, I was OK with the drag-and-drop page creation in FP - it was pretty cool in 2000, and faster than hand coding. I just never liked the messy, messy HTML that it generated. Obviously the FrontPage guys (I forget who they were) didn't care much for line breaks or indenting, just fling it all in the file as a long, twisted string of text. Nobody's ever gonna see it, right?
As my CompSci Prof used to ask us "Would you trust your code to run an automated circumcision machine?" (or something like that)
He was a mathematics PhD, and made bank moonlighting and doing the hard, formal proof of correctness for local software companies. But even he said it was impractical to completely and totally prove the correctness of even a modest program - it took a long, long time, and cost a bundle.
Considering the eye-watering memory recommendations that FreeNAS makes regarding using their software on a headless server, it's surprising that anyone would use it as the boot FS for a full-graphical workstation. I mean, it does really cool stuff, but most of that seems like overkill for a workstation. And even if Canonical is turning-off or turning-down a lot of the high-flying stuff in ZFS, it's still gotta be gobbling RAM like it's Christmas morning.
Verizon (and perhaps others) not subsidizing their phones as heavily as they did in the past. Used to be, you could get a decent phone for $100-200 if you signed up for a 2-year contract. Now, they charge closer to retail, but allow you to spread the cost over 2 years. When my Samsung is paid off in another year, I'm going to keep using it until it just can't be used any longer (which, knowing Samsung, won't be long). Upgrading just to have new shiny-shiny is no longer the low-cost option it used to be.
As such, the company admits it might call it "Office for the web", or perhaps "...on the web", or maybe "...in a browser".
Those are stupid names. They should just tack an "e" on the front of it and call it "eOffice" to differentiate it from regular Office. Then it would have a modern, cutting edge name.
"Don't you just love being asked to contract for the company that made you redundant."
I told mine to go fuck themselves with a red-hot poker, because I may not be vindictive, but I am certainly a bastard. That was right after I told them it would take me about 5 minutes to fix the problem that their new Indian engineers had been unsuccessfully working on for the past 2 weeks. Outsource the guy who built the system, and you can fucking well take care of it yourself, starting immediately.
"Does not everyone think about everything all of the time? Or are we to be led to believe there are prepared pigeon holes available to restrict and/or block further free future thought?"
The great koans are the vehicles to enlightenment, but are not the journey itself. The Master can't choose which the students remember or comprehend, yet that is no reflection on the Master himself.
"Apps that get installed into a users profile don't go anywhere near the system32 folder."
EXEs that get installed into %AppData% are often blocked because that is/was an attack vector for several ransomware variants. And that blocking rule causes great grief throughout the land as many, MANY, small apps (*cough* SPOTIFY *cough*) think that %AppData% is the perfect place to put their EXEs, even though it's intended to be a DATA area, not an EXECUTABLE area (hint: it's in the name...).
I vaguely remember setting up an old scanner in the mid-90's (even then, it was an "old" scanner), and the software disks for it installed a stripped-down version of Windows 2.0, along with the driver for the scanner, scanning software, and some sort of viewer. I can't remember who made the scanner, seems like it was one of the big Japanese companies. It worked pretty well, for the time, and made nice scans. But the stripped-down version of Windows couldn't do much else, iirc.
it fell over for me right as I clicked the link to go to the Comments section for the Deep Nudes story. At first I thought the company webfilter was gonna squeal about so many semi-naughty words on a page, then realized the 502 message was coming from Cloudflare. Phew, that was close...
Not that I read El Reg for fun at work. It's "Industry News", not leisure reading. Yeah...
I remember in the early 90's Borland put out a "Student" version of TP 6 for $50 or so. I already had a sneaker-net copy of regular TP 6 from my college, and used it well and often. I did buy the full version of Delphi (maybe version 3) in the late 90's/early 2000's. Never did get on much with it, but was comparing it to VB 6 at the time, and VB 6 was enough for my simple Windows-programming needs, whereas Delphi had a bit of a learning curve, iirc. Now, as an admin instead of a programmer, everything is Powershell, which if you close one eye and look at it in a mirror, it almost ALMOST looks like a programming language, just don't look too closely or you'll lose your mind.
Isn't that cute - Microsoft holding hands and singing Kumbyah with the unshaven Penguinistas. Such a heartwarming moment that we've waited decades for. It's almost like watching warm and fuzzy videos of cute puppies playing in a bright green field. Puppies that unknowingly have cancer and rabies, but they're so cute to watch. So sweet and innocent. Awww. We should EMBRACE those puppies and show them all the love they deserve. They'll grow up so fast...
This reminds me of some old external print servers we had back in the late 90's/early 2000's. I can't remember if they were Intel or TrendNet. If they were powered on and off in a certain sequence, they took that as a signal to reset to factory defaults. Oh, the fun we had after Summer storms...
"You need to build a new wood burning stove before baking the cake. How do you do that? How to you run the machines to mine and process the metal? How do you make a stove in an age that no longer uses steam?"
Eh, didn't our earlier space aliens overlords originally teach us to make our stoves out of dried, and possibly baked, mud? Mud which was often, if memory serves, in the shape of bricks.
Just saying, a wood burning stove could be made out of bricks, which are immune to solar flares, and will be in plentiful supply once the post-apocalyptic loonies start dismantling civilization.
us quiet guys who stay in the server room and keep all the shit running so these "High Flyers","Curios Collaborators", and the rest can play out their soap-opera lives in their shiny corner offices full of windows? Some of us are in this because we were/are deeply enchanted by how all this techno stuff works, and have the social skills of a fountain pen.