Posts by David Lawton 189 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2009
In 95/98/ME that was more of a profile selector screen and/or a place to put your network credentials for accessing services on your LAN. Hence you could press esc on the Network login box (has the 2 computer image on the left hand side) and a second login box would pop up with a picture of a key instead which was to select the local profile to login as incase they had different passwords.
iPads are a touch first device, Mac's are curser keyboard/mouse first devices. They should not mix. Microsoft really screwed things up with Windows 8 trying to do a 1 device solution , in fact it was Windows 8 that made me buy my first ever Mac after using nothing but Windows for 20 years previously and always being more anti-apple.
Apple have got it right, there is usually a trade off when you cater for 1 type of input. I use the right device for the right moment. I'm not against Apple allowing the user to install MacOS on an iPad Pro with M1/M2 should they wish to do so, add a keyboard and mouse to it and it would function very well as a Mac. I think this is what they will do at some point as MacOS keeps getting more finger friendly each OS. Spacing on menu bar in Big Sur, change to Settings from System Preferences in Ventura.
If you watch Apple closely you can see when they are up to something well in advance, such as removing 32 Bit app support in Catalina, looking back this was in preparation for moving to ARM based chips so they only have to port x64 support over, if they did not MacOS would be much bigger if it supported x86, x64 and ARM. Also the iPhone 5S was the first 64 bit phone ever, it seemed odd and unnecessary at the time, but this was Apple working on their own chips years in advance to eventually put them in to Mac's.
Windows 10 great? Where have you been since 2015? Do you forget how painful an OS this was when first released? It was hated and for good reasons! Give me Windows 2000 or XP anyday over the junk Windows 8/8.1/10/11 is. They were designed by blind people at Microsoft.
The more and more i see how the EU act i know Brexit was the right choice. Had they just kept it as a common market which is what we originally joined i'm sure most would have been happy, but its turned into a monster nobody asked for and its over reaching into peoples lives now for the worse. The UK since the 80s had been warning over and over again to stop this ever tighter integration and they just kept doing it the are surprised Brexit happened, they were warned over and over and over again.
The EU will learn a hard lesson on why having the Euro was a big mistake. Their Central Bank has been running at -0.5% interest , what do you think is going to happen to Greece, Spain, Italy etc when interest rates go up to curb inflation? Green has a national debt of 200% its GDP for example , with Italy not far behind.
This could be the straw the breaks the EU's back.
Apple did always joke, 'Redmond start your photocopiers' . You don't have to look far to find endless counts Microsoft copying Apple.
Apple : MacOS we're now giving it for away for free. Microsoft : we will make Windows 10 free .
Apple : Spotlight introduced Microsoft : badly copy it, make it slow and buggy and add to Vista
Like Apple / MacOS or not, why since about 2010 on a Mac can I just hold down CMD + R on boot and it will download MacOS from the Internet for recovery and install the OS version currently on the system. CMD+Option+R for the latest MacOS or SHIFT+OPTION+CMD+R for the MacOS the device originally shipped with.
Yet 12 years on in the Windows PC space this is still not a thing? It is so much better not having to mess around with install discs or USB drives.
What vile looking laptops they are, my eyes bleed a little just looking at it. We give our employees Macbook's , decent screens, best trackpads, decent speakers, decent microphones, battery life between 10 and 20 hours. They appreciate it too as most spend their own money buying protective cases for them.
The masks doctors wear and not the same as the piece of useless cloth people were forced to wear, of which a lot even have a label in saying this is not PPE. Doctors might likely be using N95 grade single use masks and if they touch them, its a bin job and get a fresh, they are completely different to what the public have been putting over their faces.
When you wear a real mask, one that actually does something you wont smell a thing when wearing it, with what the public have been wearing I could fart the other side of the room and you would be getting a smell of it within seconds.
Unfortunately the Mac you require has not yet transitioned to Apple Silicon and is still on Intel, that's the higher end 13" Pro which has 4 USB C ports.
These are very very very impressive devices, I'm typing this on an M1 13" Pro my self, but this is their entry level processor aimed at the very low end products they sell. Since it's taking Apple so long to get those devices out and the A15 is now in production I'm going to guess they will skip the M1x and just have the M2x for the higher end Mac's that you actually need that will support more screens.
"We asked the UK's Department for Education for its thoughts, too, and will update with any reply." Why would you do that? It's nothing to do with them, the school is free to pick what ever MDM they want to use, which does NOT have to be Jamf School which use to be Zulu Desk before JAMF bought them.
We use Jamf Pro instead for our 1600 iPad deployment.
So glad my parents, grandmother, aunts and uncles all got iPads, its stopped my weekends being taken up fixing Windows laptops! The iPad gave me my weekends back. The fact iOS is sandboxed means I don't get to remove malware and other things that would take over their Windows devices and make them unusable. The iPad fits their needs well too, so its win win!
Might not make Netflix any faster, but it's not just the CPU speed thats impressive. Its the up to 20 hour battery life in the 13" pro, or the fact the you just never hear fans on these things
On my desk right now i've got 3 laptops, 2 Mac's 1 Windows. One Mac is a 16" Pro with an i9 Intel and the Windows is an i5. I do not have to do much on either of these to make the fans kick in and the battery drain quicker.
The other Mac is a 13" M1 Pro. Everything seems to open extremely fast, things just feel instant, and as hard as i have tried the battery just will not drain fast, and i still have not heard the fans. I was even playing Cities Skylines on this thing, smoothly on an iGPU no fans blasting and it was not even an ARM app it was a translated Intel App. My i9 16" Pro even with dGPU and running natively goes bonkers on fans with this game.
The Apple Silicon is exciting, because it absolutely obliterates its competition, this M1 is the Macbook Air chip really, which would normally have a Y Series intel in it. It not only wipes the floor with the Y series, it can put up a good fight against processors not even it its class, all while not sucking up much power. What happens when Apple releases the bigger, faster M1's for devices that would traditionally had a U or H series processor in them? Then the following year Apple increase the performance of them all by 20 to 30% on M2's? Then 20 to 30% again over that on M3's? Exciting.
A case? You put your iPhone in a case?!? and hide its beauty! I'm just as confused why people use cases. I don't , I just got the 12 mini this weekend, after having my iPhone 8 for 3 years and 2 months NOT in a case and only has 1 small light scratch on the back. I love the glass finish, I must be lucky as I've never ever in 22 years of having mobile phones had one break or get smashed.
Really excited for these ARM based Mac's. So much potential, they can be 'always on' (at least according to a slide at WWDC) like an iPad so you can push settings and stuff to devices even with the lid shut so even better from a sysadmin point of view if you manage Mac's. If they do bring back that really thin 12" MacBook, and they put an Apple Silicon A14X in that and you are talking Intel i7 performance, with a 15-20 hour battery without fans blasting like mad and GPU performance like a radeon 5500M. Thats impressive for such a compact device, but not even touching the surface of where Apple will go with this over the next few years, they keep making big gains every years, so A15, A16 could be insanely fast. Imagine these processors scaled up with cooling in the bigger MacBooks when we have already seen what a 2 year old iPad Pro chip can do with the A12Z in the developer kit and how that compares to the A14X in the iPad Air 4th Gen, they are going to start leaving Intel for dust, they are already on 5nm with 3nm planned for in a couple of years.
Add to this Microsoft Office and Adobe are already to go with ARM support on the Mac, and unless the developer opts out you can run iPad/iPhone apps on the Mac with the interface/controls being mapped correctly these really will be interesting devices.
25 Million could pay the wage of some very talented PHP or ASP + SQL people to make an in house solution, thats web based, so hopefully platform neutral so it would work on Windows, Linux, Mac, iPad OS, Android.
I'm just more surprised to not see the word CAPITA in the article, who i'm sure would love to make some crappy bloated thing that requires a Windows client and the NET Framework.
5 years on and the UI and Start Menu are still horrid in Windows 10. The endless updates still break things, i have no love for Windows 10, just pure hate, its something i have to suffer to run some applications.
I actually enjoyed using Windows 3.1, Windows 95, 98, ME, NT4, Windows 2000, these had really nice clean UI's. Yeah they blue screened and did other crap but thats just Windows. The PC was exciting during these times too.
Windows XP is where it started going wrong, the default UI was 'fisher price mode' , control panel by default had this weird simple view, and file sharing went from easy to complex with simple file sharing, which is just ironic. Luckily it only took 10 mins to turn the shell to classic, control panel to classic, and file sharing to classic. XP also felt quite bloated at the time of release and ran sluggish compared to Windows 2000 on the same hardware.
Windows Vista had a very nice look UI with glass, and again some of the simple things like simple control panel could still be put back to classic, the problem this time is until SP2 it was a very bad OS, was bloated, and slower at most tasks compared to XP like just copying files! Coupled with PCs not being shipped with enough RAM or graphics power to run it correctly in a lot of cases it was just a disaster.
Windows 7 addresses most of Vistas faults, and again you can turn classic mode on for a lot.
Then we have Windows 8, with its jaring startmenuless UI. This is the OS from hell and is the first time i have ever got raged by an OS, i just wanted to smash things up everytime i used it, and 8.1 only made very slight improvement.
Windows 10 and the UI is still garbage, and remember we are on about the 10th version of Windows 10 now since its 2 new versions a yeah, and don't forget how much crap we have had to put up with during that time.
I just run MacOS as my main system now, i've had enough of Microsoft Windows, i'm quite happy to pay the 'Apple Tax' to not have to suffer Windows anymore. They have demonstrated how incapable they are of making decent design choices when they make UI's and their OS's have been getting worse since Windows 2000. Windows 10 is an inconsistent mess that aggravates, nags and gets in the way of doing any actual activities on a device. Whilst things may be different in the current release of it, i'm sure i'm not the only one who's gone to make a drink only to come back to the PC to find Windows 10 has rebooted and is now updating when you are trying to get on with work!
Nobody at Microsoft should be proud of Windows 10 or Windows anymore, they should be ashamed at what it has become.
Even worse is apart from Settings being a mess and badly designed with endless wasted space so it now takes up a full screen, I could in Control Panel have multiple Control Panel Applets open at the same time, I cannot do that in Settings. It has improved NOTHING but made many things Worse.
Maybe that should be Microsofts new slogan? Improve nothing and make things worse.
Apple, Google or Microsoft are not sin free and they all at some point do questionable things, but Microsoft is the worst of them all and did extremely bad things back in the 90s and early 2000s
Microsoft forcing PC manufactures to only pre-install Windows, almost killing all OS choice and giving Windows a monopoly.
Once they had the OS monopoly they start bundling Internet Explorer with the OS to kill Netscape, so now they have a web browser monopoly because everyone is now running Windows because of previous naughtiness.
We even had competition in the Office suite market, but Microsoft somehow killed all that, Lotus 123, Word Perfect Works...
Now they break web/HTML standards so web pages work differently in IE then say Firefox or any type of competition, things like ActiveX. Taking almost 15 years to break the stranglehold of IE, and even to this day.
Even if you hate Apple products you should be thankful they exist, as them releasing the iPhone is the only thing that turned the whole industry upside down that was Microsoft dominant.
Competition is good in the market, lucky when Microsoft released the dogs breakfast that was Windows 8 I was able to say enough and get my first Mac ever, now I just sit back and watch the s**t storm that is Windows 10 laughing while I enjoy MacOS that just keeps out the way and lets me get on with things, all my family have iPads which just work and generally behave themselves so I don't have to spent my weekends like I did last decade fixing their Windows laptops because they had looked at a picture of a cat and got malware somehow.
Don't get me wrong if Apple start to annoy me like Microsoft did I will look around, and they are not perfect, its just better in the MacOS/iOS world than Windows world at the moment and has been for almost a decade.
What Microsoft did 20/25 years ago is way way way worse than what Apple and Google are doing at the moment, and the only reason I don't 100% hate Microsoft at the moment is because they are at least very Multiplatform with their Apps now, just hoping for Microsoft Office for Linux, so those not willing to buy a premium end only laptop (aka as a MacBook) have more non Windows choices.
Actually the Mac's are no harder to manage when you have the correct tools like JAMF and MacOS gives you less grief than Windows generally. We have hundreds of Macs, thousands of iPads and hundreds of Windows computers (SCCM/Group Policy used for Windows, JAMF for MacOS/iOS), Windows is the one that is the pain and causes the most problems, like MacOS in the home, MacOS in the work place just sits there and works.
IBM now has over 200,000 Macs deployed worldwide and is the biggest corporate user of Mac, Facebook has over 13,000 Macs deployed, and Google has over 40,000 Macs.
Interestingly too Macbooks are not overpriced, if you go to say Lenovo's website and pick say X1 Extreme Thinkpad at £2059 and then customise it to match closer to the Macbook Pro 16" like upgrading the screen to have the higher resolution close to the Macbook Pro's and guess what? Hardly any price difference and the Macbook will hold its value longer and be worth something on resale, will have the best trackpad in a laptop you can buy and looks smarter. When you have the same class hardware inside (ie same speed/quality SSD's) the price gap suddenly disappears.
Microsoft can try all they want, people don't run Windows for enjoyment. They run it because either their business has software that is reliant on it or on the consumer side it's what they are familiar with from using it for 20 years or they game.
Everything else has moved to mobile, so you need to program for iOS or Android not Windows. The rest who want a bigger screen but not the complications and hell of maintaining a Windows computer will just use a tablet, which again means you program for iOS or Android.
If we go back to 2009 and look at what percentage of devices hitting websites were running its
94.8% Windows
3.6% MacOS
and the rest are all well under 1%.
Go forward just 1 decade to now and its
39.1% Android
33.1% Windows
17.2% iOS
8.2% MacOS
Basically in just 10 years Windows usage has dropped by 2/3rds, even MacOS usage is 1/4 that of Windows usage now, which is not bad considering bar a few hackintoshes you only get that OS on the most expensive laptops and desktops out there, and they had a bad 4 year run with dodgy keyboards.
Microsoft have not helped this situation at all, last decade they released the worst operating systems ever made, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. They are so bad they made me do something i thought i would never ever do, buy a Macbook i got so sick of the daily Windows experience and Windows 7 is now dead. Microsoft might tempt me back if they put the beautiful Windows 2000 GUI on the Windows 10 kernel so my eyes don't bleed, but we know that is not going to happen so i will just stick with MacOS. it's crisp, clean, consistent and at least designed to be driven by a mouse and keyboard and not that nasty duel personality GUI of Windows 10, if i want touch i will use my iPad not a laptop!
You do know Apple released the iPhone SE last week? Its £419 which fits in your budget only needing £17.45 a month put in a pot over 2 years. It is basically an iPhone 8 design but with newer internals.
I was tempted to buy, but I'm happy with my 8 still though and have no complaints, still nippy on iOS 13 and battery is still great almost 3 years on so i really could not justify it. The new SE is surprisingly well priced i think, at least by Apple standards.
So as it stands , according to December 2019 stats from Netmarketshare which is who Microsoft favours. Windows 7 has around 25% usage share, and Windows 10 around 56% on desktop (non mobile browsing).
So Windows 10 has only managed to double Windows 7 Market Share 5 years after launching, and during those 5 years they disgustingly hammered it down end users throats with the auto upgrade trickery and basically almost all new machines came with it. Wonder what percentage it would be on if Microsoft had not been dirty handed. Feels like Windows 10 is only used when you put a gun to somebody's head. Constantly changing, vile UI, forced updates, telemetrics and step backwards like Settings being worse than Control Panel and you have one disaster of an OS that is being forced on everybody.
If they are home users just tell them to get an iPad and be done, it's just easier that way. Windows 10 is a fine example of why even if you hate Apple you should be pleased they exist and hope their market share increases (along with Linux), because until real competition comes along to threaten Microsoft they will continue to do crap like Windows 10 and you have nowhere else to turn.
Windows 10 UI surpasses Windows 7's? Have you even used both OS's? Just 1 example off the top of my head is Windows 7 Control Panel interface is VASTLY superior to Windows 10 stupid dumbed down Settings. Windows 7 lets you have more than 1 control panel at a time open, Windows 10 settings does not. You can find countless steps backwards all over Windows 10 like this, and that is just 1 of the many gripes I have with Windows 10. When you add the shit Windows 8 added I'm glad I moved to MacOS as my main OS last decade, yeah the devices are not cheap but if you seriously want off this crazy Windows ride it is a viable alternative , its interface is at least clean, clear and consistent. How I would love Windows 2000 again, that was near perfect UI wise....
Its also very easy and justifiable to slam Microsoft and not Apple, if you compare say MacOS over the last 20 years most things are still where they were 20 years ago in the interface and have remained there for 15 versions of the OS nice and consistent. Microsoft have moved things around so much in the 2000 to XP to Vista to Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 I'm dizzy and there was no need for it (and that does not include all the sub versions of Windows 10, how many are there now 11?)
Ultimately Windows has gone backwards not forwards since Windows 7, and my love and excitement for Windows died with it too, I actively avoid an OS I use to enjoy toying with and that shows how sad it has become.
I quit Facebook, then went back because i was the awkward one when people tried to organise things like stag parties via Facebook groups. Now the bulk of the traffic for some of my favourite communities which have their own websites and forums are going to Facebook groups instead which just makes me mad.
I've settled on just having the messenger app installed on my mobile using it as a kind of contacts/address book, and maybe once a week going on the Facebook webpage to check the groups. I would not miss Facebook its self if i deleted my account again, its just everybody else seems to be there now which makes not having an account harder. I just hope Facebook has hit its peak and its more downhill from now.
I'm not buying any more PC's i'm swimming in devices at home.
2 Windows desktop PC's
10 Windows laptops
1 Linux laptop
4 iPads
4 Macbooks
1 Mac Mini
Plus a few shitty Netbooks
They all work, it is NOT Brexit, it's i don't need anything else. I am not alone, everyone i know has endless devices in the home, even my Nan has 2 iPads and 1 laptop. Yeah i would love a new Macbook Pro, but i am not spending £2500 just for the sake of it.
Even if you hate Apple i hope this makes more people switch to a Mac. The other platforms need more share of the market so when Microsoft do make dog food like Windows 10 there is more viable choice and Microsoft might actually be forced to stop pumping out this crap. Its usually software compatibility that stops people leaving Windows, Linux and MacOS are great but if you cannot get the applications you absolutely need you are trapped in Microsoft Windows 10 hell. If the other OS's have more share, more applications will be developed for it and we all win.
Safari on Mac and iOS has been doing this for a few years now. I prefer how Safari use to be and have separate URL and search boxes on the toolbar. I like to be able to glance and know where i am, yeah i'm technical so that info i want, but the normal people with inquisitive minds cannot ask questions about things they cannot see!
When we hire new tech's the amount who cannot do basic under the hood things with Windows is scary. I'm convinced its because i was brought up with DOS, Windows 3.1, NT4, Windows 95 where there were very few wizards and you had to learn how things worked and get dirty. Younger people have been brought up with Wizards and auto things masking everything so they have never been exposed to the inner workings or because its all hidden away never had the chance to play as much.
Its bad enough already with URLs, expose users to them even less? This will hurt in 10 years time....
Its for reasons like this i have Zen as my home ISP. Yes it would have been effected the same as the others BUT when raising faults they do not read scripts, are actually knowledgable and technical , and last time i had a nightmare with my line they even laughed a little and said we now have to open a case with open reach and now things can get difficult.
IPv6 can be made easy to remember. If you get a /48 from your Business ISP (or /64 if we are talking residential) You would only have to remember the first 3 sections /48 ie 2001:db8:a0b:: . That is not too hard, not as nice as IPv4 but still not too bad. Then since we manage the rest of the address space(host part) just use all zeros until the last segment. So 2001:0db8:0a0b:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001
Once you get use the rules on shortening the IP's you can now express it as 2001:db8:a0b::0001
IPv6 did really baffle me but i was determined to get my head around it so spent a day just reading and reading until i got it. Biggest problem is waiting for the ISPs to support it so you can play properly.
Zen here too, i am willing to pay extra to have a knowledgable and technical person at the other end of the phone when i do have an issue, not a script monkey! I did leave Zen once when things were tight moneywise, but the tech support at Virgin made me run a mile. Router's WiFi status lights are off, power cycling wont make them come back on and i cannot see any SSID's being broadcast. Tech support say open web browser and type http://192.168.1.1 , i tell them I am not connected to any networks this will not work, support agent just try anyway it might work, me scream with rage and run back to Zen.
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