Posts by TonyJ

Half of bosses out of touch with reality, study shows

Re: The onsite/off site binary is stupid here

Not sure I am seeing the same - there seems, if anything, to have been a surge in salaries over the last few months.

I used to work 18 miles away from home but the only routes took you through Nottingham city centre.

It was bad at the best of times - public transport wasn't an option and the route wasn't suitable for cycling for great parts of it. It could often take me 2+ hours each way. And the company had a real hard on for being in the office.

Then they closed one of the major routes in/out of the city due to structural problems on a bridge and for a few weeks that jumped to 5+ hours - suddenly remote working was acceptable.

I was long gone when lockdown hit but I know from ex-colleagues that they're still turned on for being in the office.

I wonder how long it will be before they are struggling to get staff to stay/recruit new ones.

Re: Bollocks statistics

"...I only have Outlook and Teams on my phone when the laptop is being flakey. Most of the time I quit Outlook and Teams on the laptop when I finish and then no-one can contact me till the morning. If anyone ever rang my phone they would be told I'm in the pub and can't get home till I sober up (i.e. the morning)..."

This.

You pay for me to work a set number of hours and other than the odd pre-planned thing (due to differences for time zones etc) or the odd emergency, that is what you get. Oh and if I have to work outside of my set hours you can bet your bottom dollar I will be adjusting my working week to compensate as well.

I have a *personal* mobile telephoned. I don't put work email on it (been down that route - stopped years ago). I don't answer work numbers out of hours and I very rarely answer unknown or blocked numbers full stop.

Nor are you controlling it - nope, I won't put the MS Company Portal onto it so I can use your apps.

I do not want a work-provided mobile phone. Why do I need one? You can get me during the day on Teams/email or even my own mobile.

Mind you, I am also at that point in my career where I don't give a toss what managers* think. I am not chasing promotion or trying to better myself.

*Or anyone else for that matter.

IT blamed after HR forgets to install sockets in new office

Re: Some years ago

I agree that some assumptions should never be made, but assuming that power will be provided isn't a stretch. Also, worth noting that the design also did state the usual caveat of power, networking, physical access, media, access to accounts and key personnel etc etc were all prerequisites - they were in the template.

Some years ago

I worked at a council offices. We were to put in some new Citrix servers.

The council were on the hook for infrastructure - new rack and cabling.

When I turned up, the rack was there and the networking was in but there was no power.

Their IT manager turned around and said "What? None of you mentioned needing power..."

Your app deleted all my files. And my wallpaper too!

Check out trusted locations. It will help you solve this problem.

Re: Even Worse

Indeed. But what an accident waiting to happen!

Or you could back things up or use a cloud provider such as OneDrive - or my own personal choice Seafile as it never leaves my control. Which you should be doing anyway because drives do fail.

Even then, if Windows is borked you can usually still get into the partition during the setup phase or a new installation to move files and folders. Bit of a faff but can be done.

Re: Even Worse

Used to see that in Outlook. Important emails in the deleted items folder!

Re: Concepts are hard to understand

The first issue re the network crapping out is down to poor IT - offline files and folders of some form or another has been a thing for a long time now. There are modern versions of it designed to work with OneDrive etc as well so it really shouldn't happen. Although I'm not a huge fan of files on demand because of this very thing but it's swings and roundabouts there in terms of less space taken up etc.

For the second part - again, for a few years now, Office will default to your documents folder and if you choose something under it - project etc - it will remember what you last used. What's more they don't care - if you want to save everything to your root folder, desktop folder, whatever - as long as you have permissions it'll do it.

One gotcha that still catches people out of course is opening an attachment because it'll save a temporary copy. If you forget that, edit and don't save it to a new location then you can expect to lose the changes and that is crap to be honest.

Yup other folders under there can appear a random mess for sure but I don't think it's quite as bad as you make out.

Citrix acquired by private equity, will be paired with Tibco in $16.5bn deal

Re: Tibco

I've worked with them a lot over the years albeit last time was last year.

As it's been for any number of years, it's been tricky to pitch where they sit and it feels that everything you can do with Citrix you can do much cheaper with other products/natively within e.g. Windows Server.

The one ever-outstanding product of course was NetScaler. They got in early when they bought that product line and they're still an outstanding product but for most places a la everything Citrix, they are crazily expensive and gain more complexity with every release.

They lost their way with virtualisation - XenServer was always a good offering but lacked a lot of Enterprise features that customers were used to having, even in free products. They broke some interesting ground about 6/7 years ago with XenClient - I loved that. A bare metal hypervisor for laptops/desktops and switching between them with keyboard combos. Much more graceful than any type-2 hypervisors and great for those of us working with different customers.

It's felt like their decline has been a very long and slow one but I suspect we will soon see more redundancies and chunks of IP being sold off.

Well goodbye Citrix. It was nice working with you all these years but that's probably the final nail in your coffin.

Privacy is for paedophiles, UK government seems to be saying while spending £500k demonising online chat encryption

Sure. Why not cull E2EE...?

...but - and I've said this before, here, it has to be across the board. After all, if our government, ministers, police forces, armed forces etc have nothing to hide they have nothing to fear.

Make it 100% mandatory across the board, but - and this is the crucial part - there can be no exemptions for MP's, senior police officers, etc etc etc. And anyone found using it at the point - those included - can be charged.

Let's see how far their support goes when they actually have to eat their own dog food. Let's see how they react when told that all their banking has to be done without encryption and that when they visit a bank in person, they can't actually talk in private to staff - a complete stranger has to be there to record every word, spoken or written.

Autonomy founder's anti-extradition case is like saying Moon made of cheese, US govt tells UK court

Re: Buyers’ remorse

"...Leo Apotheker was CEO, and by all accounts pushed the Autonomy purchase through...."

Indeed he was and indeed he did - against the advice of his then CFO. And worse, he threatened to fire her.

This was a man who had no place (like so many others) at the helm of this company. He announced he planned to sell their x86 business because it wasn't profitable enough... erm, ok, Leo. At the time it may only have had something like 0.8% margin, but it also made several billions a year in profits but sure.

It's very difficult to have any sympathy for HP. If they'd done proper due diligence. If they'd even listened to the advice of the right people, they may well not have paid over the odds.

But, it isn't looking very good for Lynch either.

Re: Buyers’ remorse

Not a bad analogy actually. Anyone with any sense will try to find out running costs vs upfront el cheapo costs of a printer. If you can't be bothered to do that (as opposed to not being capable) then don't come cryin'

Caveat Emptor and all that.

The inevitability of the Windows 11 UI: New Notepad enters the beta channel

Leave well alone...

...other than maybe making search not need to have a direction of search box ticked, NP is bloody handy exactly as it is,

For anything more advanced on your own machine, there is NP++.

Otherwise, MS, fuck right off with this shit.

Halo Infinite ups the nostalgia factor for fans of the originals, but it's not without limits

Confession: I am a massive Halo fan

....well, I am a massive Halo Combat Evolved (Halo CE/Halo 1) fan - I played it endlessly back in the day and still occasionally dip my toe in.

Halo 2 was pretty abysmal - the whole dual-wielding of weapons and playing great chunks as The Arbiter detracted from what otherwise would have been a good game (my personal opinion).

Halo 3 went some way to fix it but also by then the wholeadd-ons and gadgets thing had crept in and it became ever more difficult to master multiplayer.

Halo 4 and 5 were ok. But another thing that let it down for me, personally, was that 3, 4 and 5 were console only. Which was a shame.

"...Fortunately, one does not have to be a Halo lore boffin to appreciate the direction in which 343 has taken the series, and I have a sneaking suspicion that many long-term fans may hold Infinite as a return to form. The gameplay feels more like Bungie's Halo 3, widely regarded as the franchise's peak,.."

Personally Halo CE was the franchise's peak for many players. Halo 3 was more of a return to form, but Infinite is the most Halo CE of the sequels yet, in my humble opinion. The pace, the weapons all feel very much CE. Even the grappling hook adds to the feel rather than detracting from it.

I've played the campaign through and thoroughly enjoyed it but it does feel very unbalanced in places. Some bosses fold super easily. Others just pummel you into the ground time and time and time again until you catch a lucky break.

As successors go, I'd rank it very highly. If you're a fan of the original you're in for a treat.

Ooh, an update. Let's install it. What could possibly go wro-

I imagine those of us over a certain age will have lots of these tales

One that always springs to mind for me was a patch for NT4 Terminal Server SP6.

It was a fix for one of the more rampant viruses back then - might have been I Love You but I don't really recall.

Anyway it came out in a hurry but had a list of known issues so I could at least forewarn our customers.

Almost all agreed that it was worth the possible downsides to be protected.

The initial patch went on without a reboot. I tested it. I rolled it out to a couple of clients. All good.

A newer patch came out that mitigated some of the risks/issues of the original. Without thinking I downloaded it and rolled it to a customer with the infamous words "and it doesn't even require a reboot".

At which point their servers rebooted... wait, what?

Turns out the updated patch DID reboot. A sign of things to come, eh?

And a lesson learned. Thankfully it was one of my kinder customers.

More than half of UK workers would consider jumping ship if a hybrid work option were withdrawn by their company

Re: Losing

"...Don't get me started on employers not compensating workers for use of their homes as a company office..."

But they don't usually compensate for commuting, clothing (where there's a dress code, even smart casual) etc.

In the scheme of things I bet most people spend less working at home than they do for all of the above.

Whatever the reasons, most people would be mad to jump ship before having sorted something else anyway.

I don't think many people will be in a hurry to leave without having found something else, per normal, but they will start looking.

And I'm not sure about the scarcety - the job boards are full of remote/hybrid working.

We've been saying...

...for years that the technology to work from home has actually been available.

But of course, it hasn't been the technology, it's been the idea that managers cannot watch what their staff are doing and that lack of trust.

What lockdown has generally proven in my experience though, is that without 2+ hours a day commuting, people will work far more flexibly - they are free to drop their kids off at school before they sit down and can nip to the post office to send that parcel, for example. But they tend to be more productive overall because when you can get out of bed a bit later, you feel fresher from the get-go.

The only people who really want to push for people to be back in the office (notwithstanding those jobs that need someone to be in a specific place, of course, due to the very nature of that work) are those very same managers who must be wondering what their job is actually for.

How do you call support when the telephones go TITSUP*?

Re: Divert

What a strange thing to do. Other than costing the company money, why would she have done that?

I worked at an insurance company where it was found out that some of the call handlers were calling a silent number to make them look busier than they were. Apparently if you rang it, it connected but as the name suggests was silent.

When civilisation ends, a Xenix box will be running a long-forgotten job somewhere

Re: Talking of things long forgotten, chugging away in a corner...

Well passive cooling makes it even more important for airflow, really, but they did still have fans - mostly in the PSU's to be fair, but they had them.

Talking of things long forgotten, chugging away in a corner...

...years ago I was at one of my favourite sites - I genuinely enjoyed working there even if it could be difficult sometimes.

Anyway, a new rack in their server room had gone in, replete with a new (from memory) 4.5kVA UPS. Alas, said UPS turned out to be faulty so when the electrician wired his 40A commando plug in and turned on the power, the whole building electrics tripped.

Irritating but not the end of the world (we did it twice just to be sure it was the UPS).

Everything that had gone down, did come back up and all was fine. Or so we thought.

Suddenly, no voicemail. At all. Not even an option.

Queue much hilarity (and panic) as no one seemed to know what drove said voicemail systems.

Purely by chance, one of the postroom chaps overheard us saying something like "there must be a server somewhere for this thing!" and asked us if by server we meant a big computer? Because if we did, he knew where such a beast might be hiding.

He took us into the post room and in one corner, literally buried under a 4 foot high stack of hessian postal sacks was an ancient Compaq server. Upon restarting it, it loaded Netware 3.1 and sat waiting for a login.

Queue more hilarity when they called the company being paid to support it to be met with "You're who? It's a what? Running what?"

They did eventually track down the login details and we were able to reload the voicemail software, but I believe there were some rather pointed conversations to be had with the support company.

Hats off to that Compaq as well - no airflow, no effective cooling whatsoever and it just ran and ran and ran completely forgotten about.

Citrix initiates 'Restructuring Program' – jobs and facilities to go

Part of Citrixs's problem

Is that everything they do can now be done either cheaper and/or better and they've struggled to innovate for a long time now.

And when they have come up with innovative tech (anyone remember XenClient? A true, bare-metal, desktop hypervisor which was a godsend for people who work on multiple accounts) they have a tendency to drop it and/or sell it off.

Add to that their habit of rebranding their technologies again and again and again, so it becomes ever more difficult to know what does what then it's just not a good recipe.

There's something to be said for delayed gratification when Windows 11 is this full of bugs

Re: Dear Microsoft

@J. Cook

Just had a quick check and indeed they have.

Dear Microsoft

Reinstate your testing team.

Stop using users as guinea pigs for your half-arsed, rushed, releases.

Oh and whilst you're at it, can the telemetry.

It shouldn't be this hard.

I've stuck W11 on my daily driver just to try and get used to it. For me, personally, it's probably 90% meh and 10% what? Why the hell would you do that? And unfortunately, the 90% that is good news (good as in I don't notice anything), that 10% is utterly jarring to the point it actually interrupts what I am doing/wanting to do.

When IT pro's have to stop and think about how to do simple tasks, anyone with half a brain would think that there are things that need to be changed.

I wouldn't (yet) go quite so far as to call this utter crap. Just crap, but come on - most of that 10% is an own goal. Stop it.

Example of needless change/steps added: I want to give my NIC a static IP address:

Right-click on my network icon in the notification area. Don't left-click though because that brings up a whole different dialogue

Click Network and Internet Settings

Hmm ok - so far looks ok. Seems to have a fair bit of info that could be useful at first glance.

Click Properties

Another meh/ok - everything I might need seems to be here.

IP Assignment Automatic (DHCP) with an Edit button to the right.

Click Edit

Now there's a drop-down box.

Click the drop-down and I can choose manual.

Oh ffs - now I have to choose to turn on IPV4 and/or IPV6 and under each I can now finally set the static settings.

But wait... DNS encryption - ok... good... but NOW you need some narrative. What this does won't always be obvious to some users.

It's just messy. It's a metric shit load of extra steps that shouldn't need to be there.

Right-click the network icon. Click Network & Internet Settings. Now show me a summary of network cards, let me right-click the one I want and choose properties. Everything else can be put there.

I realise I am nit picking over things and I am not averse to change at all but it's change for the sake of change that adds no value - it certainly doesn't make things any easier or faster to achieve: quite the opposite.

The Ministry of Silly Printing: But I don't want my golf club correspondence to say 'UNCLASSIFIED' at the bottom

Re: Visited...

Not sure who that was aimed at but if it was me then a bit of reading shows I was responding to the original accusation of snowflakery.

Anyway once you drop into the use of "are you retarded", you've lost any credibility.

Also, after a quick flick through of your post history here, I think there's a bridge somewhere that you really ought to be under.

Re: Visited...

See - for non smokers the whole ban is a non-argument. Smokers on the other hand are arguing 15 years later of the unfairness and how it could have been done differently.

But non smokers are the snowflakes... sure....

Of course the end game was and is to cut smoking right down and anything that aids that is a good thing.

Re: Visited...

"...Back then there were not so many snowflakes around..."

Which is one of the reasons the ban was brought in. Smokers were (are) incredibly selfish. The argument was always "well if you don't like it go to a <venue> that doesn't allow smoking. It's our right to smoke and no one forces you to be with us"

Which completely missed the point - even at the time of the ban the vast majority of people didn't smoke and yet if went to a bar, we came back and both us and our clothes stank. Smokers won't realise this because you also stink (sorry to break it to you but on the whole your breath is utterly vile, not to mention the smoke has killed your own senses of smell and taste. And no, that mint you sucked doesn't work. Nor does that Lynx deodorant you bathed in, even though you think it did.

My own mum would sit in the smoking area of cafes etc or on the top deck of a bus right until I was old enough to sit elsewhere and give her the same ultimatum - sit with me smoke free or sit alone and smoke. I just wish we'd had the same choices of venues to be able to use the same arguments but we simply didn't.

Well except for one cafe. It opened a few years before the ban but didn't allow smoking. It was packed every day it was open to the point people would queue to eat there - showing if the choice was there' we'd take it.

But yeah sure - we're a bunch of snowflakes. Yet... we ain't the ones who bitch/bitched about the ban and we weren't the ones who got in such a huff about it that we stopped using pubs and clubs.

It's H&S gone mad I tell you There are no need for guards on moving machines, or to not send 8 year olds down mines or up chimneys...and don't get me started on PPE. Snowflakes can work with two less fingers or toes, surely! It'll make a man out of them...

Visited...

...an ex-high ranking military officer on a particular site.

His office was inside a much higher security rated section of the site so you had to go through extra rounds of searches etc to be allowed in even if you had the right clearance.

I think it was about 5 or 6 months after the smoking ban had come in and during our entire meeting he sat puffing away on a pipe.

At the end, I said something like "Errr... you do know that is illegal now, right?" and pointing at the pipe.

He took a good three or four puffs on it and said "Yep!"

Microsoft touts Windows 11 SE: A locked-down OS to give Chromebooks a run for their money in schools

Re: Privacy

So what's the privacy on a Chromebook? I've never used one personally as I am not in the target market but given it's Google-owned I'd suggest "non existent"?

Pulling down a partition or knocking through a door does not necessarily make for a properly connected workspace

Re: Working on that..

I am in the same boat. Fully qualified electrical and electronics engineer but at the end of the day I've used none of it for decades so I am not able to certify any work I would perform.

So that being said, unless it's minor, I prefer to not invalidate my insurance by having a go. Mind you, I am also of an age where crawling around loft spaces etc is less than appealing anyway so I tend to avoid that as well out of simple choice.

Red Hat forced to hire cheaper, less senior engineers amid budget freeze

Yup next step: "All these senior engineers who've been with us for years are too old expensive. Now we have a bunch of cheaper junior engineers who can be pushed around more easily trained up as required, lets get rid of the senior engineers to save money."

Microsoft: Many workers are stuck on old computers and should probably upgrade

What a crock of shit

Not that I am a cynic at all but clearly this is driven as an excuse to drive sales for new devices that will be supported by Windows 11 (apologies for pointing out the bleeding obvious).

I've upgraded a handful of friends older devices this last couple of years simply by dropping in an SSD. Even a 2.5" SATA SSD is an order of magnitude faster than spinning rust. Occasionally a bit of extra RAM to help things along and they are pretty much as snappy as a new machine.

What a clock up: Brit TV-broadband giant Sky fails to pick up weekend's timezone change, fix due by Friday

"...As a long-time Sky subscriber my experience tells me that the technical explanation for this is that Sky software is shite because they won't pay anyone enough to do a decent job.."

I used to subscribe to Sky but eventually got bored of them gouging me for ever more money every year and ditched them, despite their "we can half the price for a year" offer. Too little, too late. Freeview + Prime + Netflix covers 99% of what I would otherwise watch anyway.

But to your point - I tend to agree. A few years ago I was using their online chat and it said I was something like "4th in the queue.... 3th in the queue....2th in the queue..." :-)

Google's 'Be Evil' business transformation is complete: Time for the end game

And they will just lobby a bit more, pay off a few politicians etc and get a metaphorical naughty boy, slap on the wrist, must do better telling off, combined with being fined roughly 12s of global revenue and then simply carry on as usual.

IT god exposed as false idol by quirks of Java – until he laid his hands on the server

For the non-programmers amongst us...

...what was the actual fix for this in the end?

Scoot on over for a wheely tricky mystery with an electrifying solution

Yes - I mentioned this before on here.

Back in the mid-late 90's Toshiba ventured into the desktop PC arena with some quite nice units (and as a digression I LOVED Toshiba laptops - so well built and performed better than the then top-range Compaq's and Dell's etc).

A lady called in that her monitor had gone pop one morning.

A replacement was duly sent out. A week later she called to say that the same thing had happened, so once again a replacement was sent out.

Another week passed...yep, same call comes in. This time, Toshiba instructed that they wanted an engineer to visit and watch what was happening as a pattern had been noted - the call came in mid-morning every Thurs (or might've been Friday), so the engineer was despatched with a new screen and instructions to the lady to ignore them and just do what she would normally do.

It turned out that she had a potted plant on top of the screen with no bowl or saucer underneath. Every Thurs morning she would water the plant and a couple of hours later, the water would find its way through the pot and drip into the screen.

When the screen was being replaced, she'd obviously moved everything off so no pot to be seen and just enough water through to cause the damage but not enough to spot obvious water ingress.

Apparently she'd done this for years but the old screen must've had vents in different places as it never happened on that.

Microsoft turns Windows Subsystem for Linux into an app for Windows

Re: Found a shortcut

"...Just do not push WSL into the Linux ecosystem to do it with.

That's not a choice..."

Why isn't it? You are free to not install WSL, no? I don't believe (unless it's changed lately) that WSL has ever been installed by default.

"...It is part of the well known MS embrace, extend, and extinguish..."

Genuine question - when did MS last do this? I can't recall them doing it lately - though in fairness that may be more to do with their incompetence than desire not to.

Re: Found a shortcut

Indeed but playing devil's advocate for a second, articles like this always elicit the usual responses around "Oh I ditched MS <insert timeframe> ago and have nothing to do with it anymore" and therefore the response of "This is what VM's are for" isn't really a valid response to that sweeping statement/claim.

All power to you. Glad it works well for you and there are no reasons to have anything MS.

Meanwhile, the more pragmatic amongst us realise and work withing most business environments that are far more heterogenerous and so at the very least will have VM's with Windows on - I even have colleagues who use Apple kit with Windows VM's as well as others with Linux machines with Windows VMs - usually in those cases though, to be able to run Windows-based Office (and specifically Outlook) as their corporate masters require.

One of my biggest beef's with Linux users (and I am one of them, if not a hardcore one), is this insistence that choice is great...but seemingly only if others' choices align with theirs. I have never met a Windows Admin/User be quite so rabid about hating on other OS's or their users decisions to use them.

Config cockup leaves Reg reader reaching for the phone

I took a whispered call from a field engineer in the mid-90's.

He was holed up in a server room, hiding.

This was when Compaq's RAID controllers and hot-swappable disks were still fairly new.

For some reason, he'd been tasked with replacing a disk in a RAID5 array but had had literally zero training in servers in any way, shape, or form.

He did, however, have some desktop experience, so he booted to his DOS boot floppy and typed FORMAT C:

Of course, he hit Y because, well... because this is what he'd done on a fair few desktop computers when he'd been tasked with replacing the HDD in it.

Queue mayhem.

VMware to kill SD cards and USB drives as vSphere boot options

Re: Nanny

<i"...Had to roll back twenty-seven hosts to 6.7 after boot issues on 7.0.

Absolute f****** shamble costing me and my team a full weekend..."</i>

Pre-deployment testing? Rollback plan? Testing in between deployments?

I would be genuinely interested how you got to 27 hosts before you noticed any issues. Surely you tested a limited number some time before a mass rollout?

Fix five days of server failure with this one weird trick

Re: always in the last place we look

"...always in the last place we look ..."

Not my comment, but, "why would you keep looking after you found something...?"

Microsoft slips out Windows Server 2022 with extended support for 10 years

"...Yes I could use SCCM but the cost is ridiculous for servers and it is an awful product to use..."

"...I tried really hard to use 2016 Core server and manged to for some scenarios (DHCP servers, WSUS, DCs etc)..."

I am curious why you felt the need for Config Manager (it's actually not a bad product but the UI on both the client and the server is fucking atrocious making it incredibly difficult to do what you want easily) when WSUS will do most of the patch management management that you would need? You even went on to say you tried to use WSUS with core.

Microsoft's way of thinking, by the way, isn't necessarily to use core as the point of management, but rather to have a fire-and-forget system and then use the appropriate consoles from a management workstation where possible.

Re: Subscription

I can beat that... a well know retailer I worked at had a Citrix implementation that had been out of support for close to 10 years. That included, but wasn't limited to, Presentation Server & NetScaler products.

The NetScaler devices themselves were so EoL you couldn't even buy the physical devices, but, in that case at least, they could have updated to a supported version of the OS. Except, they couldn't because the version they were on was the last to work with their ancient version of PS.

Not that it stopped the Citrix sales/service manager from flogging them close to £250k of subscription advantage every year. He was not happy when I canned that and couldn't see what he'd actually done wrong.

Yes, I blame the retailer and their staff for allowing it to happen in the first place, but I also blame him for knowing it was happening and failing to advise appropriately just to get his slice of the pie.

Amazon delays return to office work until 2022 at the earliest

Re: Return to Office

"...I imagine that if your role is task based then WFH is fine but when you're driving change in a business you really need to be with people..."

Nice ego you have there. Reads more as "when you need to intimidate someone to get your own way"

I've done many a project where driving change through is a requirement - by which I mean, driving change where it's generally opposed for various reasons. I've also found it is actually quite rare to have to force someone as opposed to explaining the situation/drivers/bigger picture, though yes, it isn't unheard of to have to say what amounts to "suck it up, buttercup - this is happening with or without you".

Of course, sometimes face-to-face over a coffee with C level bods can be the best way forwards as well but again that tends to be rare.

Teams works just as well (your choice of platform may vary) for those ad-hoc calls to replace the tap on the shoulder chats. I also find that meetings tend to run better over these as there tends to be:

- Much less time wasted at the start of a meeting waiting for the multimedia screens to be connected to

- Ditto waiting for people to dial in over the phone

- It's far easier to mute people when they refuse to stay on track

- Much easier to minute meetings as it can effectively be done in the chat or simply record the meeting if required.

See my post last week about the kinds of boss - treat the people under you well, with respect and enable them to get on with their jobs and worry less about where/how/when they do it as opposed to their results and amazing things tend to come from it.

Electrocution? All part of the service, sir!

I recall the time I was working on a PSU for something. I had it out on the bench, upside down whilst I was diagnosing. I don't recall if it was a scope or multimeter I was using but what I do remember was that just as the service centre manager walked in with some potential new clients in tow, giving them the grand tour, the caps on the PSU chose that exact moment to go bang.

Bizarrely I didn't even jump. They did though.

And then after about a second of silence, the manager pipes up "And of course anything we can't fix, we just kill".

Microsoft's Cloud PCs debut – priced between $20 and $158 a month

Where to start...

Well for one thing they're doing what Citrix and VMware have been doing for years, so this is a bit of catchup (again) but by the sounds of it, they're doing it worse.

Why... why would the base offering have a single vCPU? I don't think anyone with half a brain would expect a performant option with this configuration. Especially on a hypervisor where RAM and disk are consumed far more rapidly than CPU. Even in my home lab, the minimum vCPU count is 2, but more usually 4.

Cost - also, I agree, one of the main disadvantaged of Citrix and VMware offerings - it's just way too expensive to deliver a usable machine.

Use case - I've never been a huge fan of VDI full stop. I just don't see many use cases for it that pure RDS/Server Based Computing models don't fill already. I can think of a small number but on the whole, it's taking a traditionally complex to manage desktop environment, throwing it onto a complex SBC hosting environment and then requiring tons of expensive tier-0 storage on top.

I just think that DaaS/VDI are [expensive and complex] solutions looking for problems.

Microsoft made $167m a day in profit, every day, over the past 12 months

Re: The first RANSOMWARE O.S...

A much lower cost and performnce enhanching upgrade would be an SSD. Even SATA ones perform SO much better than HDD's that it really will breathe life into your daughter's machine.

As of a few months ago as well, the free upgrade to Windows 10 was still working.

Just a thought - if you were to take an image first, as well, you can always roll back but I would definitely look at an SSD as a low cost option.

Undebug my heart: Using Cisco's IOS to take down capitalism – accidentally

Afraid not. The days are long passed since I had hiring responsibilities of any kind.