Posts by TonyJ

Windows might have frozen – but at least my feet are toasty

Re: Manglement

"...In his defence, he had an MBA and had been a local council technical officer, so had no experience of proper work..."

Seems somewhat harsh! I bet he thoroughly enjoyed hard work. Watching others do it, that is...

Cats: Not a fan favourite when the critters are draped around an office packed with tech

Re: Dead mouse

There's small though and then there's small :-)

Dead mouse

Did once open up a fax machine that had come in for repair that had a dead mouse in it, which was a bit grim. I have no clue as to how it got itself inside the machine - I'd have to assume it managed it late on somewhere on the production line as there simply wasn't the space for even a rodent to squeeze through.

Exonerated: First subpostmasters cleared of criminal convictions in Post Office Horizon scandal

Re: I agree

This has gone on way too long.

I've said it before but anyone who stood up in court and stated that this system was accurate needs finding and charging. Along with every manager and director in the chain above them - these were not, and never could be the act of an individual acting alone on their own "initiative".

The individuals and companies need charging with at least corporate manslaughter for the poor souls who committed suicide because of this.

Every individual who was subject to these court cases should now be cleared and both the Post Office and Fujitsu made to pay punitive compensation. And I do mean punitive. They were happy to engage in lies that have literally ruined people both financially and professionally not to mention the psychological damage.

Cruise, Kidman and an unfortunate misunderstanding at the local chemist

Re: Hmm

Yeah I was thinking the same thing. Added to that, if they were regularly dropping off hundreds (or even dozens) of rolls of film, you'd expect the developer to know.

It also strikes me as odd that a company would think nothing of spending an awful lot of money on film and development without either their own dark room facility, or understand the savings that would have come with an (even that expensive) digital camera.

Oh, no one knows what goes on behind locked doors... so don't leave your UPS in there

"...WTF? An Atos office had a kettle? And a fridge?..."

It was some years ago now

"...one dodgy kettle and you're offline for hours..."

Talking dodgy and kettles, I worked at one Atos site that had a sign in the kitchen area that said "Please do not user the kettle to boil milk. Use the microwave!"

Who the hell needed telling that? Clearly it must have happened to justify a sign!

"...If the general public start reading this column, they're going to think all you have to do in "I.T." is "turn it off and on again" and in extreme cases "plug it back in" !..."

What? You mean you don't??

Staff reduction...

...can cause interesting issues as well.

I looked after a bank's back office in the North East of England.

It was staffed by lovely people with a small in-house IT team that knew their systems (and their stuff generally) so I only tended to get involved in project delivery or when things couldn't be fixed by themselves.

Alas the bank saw no need to have a support team so far away from their head office and made them all redundant. After all, it could all be done remotely, right?

Some months later I got a call asking me to head up there somewhat urgently as they had a server that wouldn't boot - it was giving a "Non system disk or disk error" type of message.

Of course, Compaq iLO (because it pre-dated HP buying them) wasn't much use for what was believed to be a disk / controller error.

So I drove to the office. Picked up a replacement RAID controller, cables and disk and then drove up to site.

Of course, it took the better part of an hour to find a security guard with access to a key to the room with the server in it.

And about .5 seconds to eject the floppy disk that had somehow been inserted, so the server could reboot.

All in all, a good 5 hours of faffing around to fix something their on site support would have done in seconds had they not got rid of them.

Google Cloud (over)Run: How a free trial experiment ended with a $72,000 bill overnight

Re: VISA gift cards

"... VISA gift cards

Always sign up for these sort of offers with those top-up visa cards

Ideally with no link to your real name / email address or bank details..."

I am not sure how this works in other countries but here in the UK, I don't believe that it has been possible to get even a top-up card without passing ID checks for anti-money laundering for some time now.

Google Chrome's crackdown on ad blockers and browser extensions, Manifest v3, is now available in beta

Re: The end of innocence

"...(And please don't mention Piholes and other nonsense: That's not a society-wide solution, it's just the privileged bragging about their privileges..."

Jesus, calm down. No one here said this was a ubiquitous solution.

Also this is the reg - have you not noticed the "I've never...", or "I do it this way", or even the "Choice is good. Your choice is bad" brigades all live here?

Have a biscuit or something.

I try to use a combination of methods

My XG Firewall blocks adverts. Even though they slip through when I search with DDG, clicking them gives an error;

I use the usual script, tracker and ad blockers

I run a Pihole.

Still get some garbage through but generally I find pages load a lot quicker and are a lot less intrusive with this combination.

But I prefer not to use Chrome as my browser anyway.

A 1970s magic trick: Take a card, any card, out of the deck and watch the IBM System/370 plunge into a death spiral

Re: Broken NFS

No shit, Sherlock... that was kind of the point that was being made!

Re: Broken NFS

"...I think it was ALT + 255 that gave a 'legal' space character in DOS (and Windows to some point, probably it still works if you can convince Win10 to accept your ALT+(0)255.."

Still works!

Drop to a command prompt:

copy con "Test(alt+255 on the num pad)File.txt" (no spaces typed)

This is a test or some other garbage text

ctrl+z to quit and save

type "Test File.txt" (with a space this time):

The system cannot find the file specified

The nightmare is real: 'Excel formulas are the world's most widely used programming language,' says Microsoft

Re: Sorry but ...

All of these comments are true.

I worked for a self-proclaimed Excel guru (to be fair he knew an awful lot but not how to make it simple). Many of his spreadsheets produced great charts loved by management but by christ if you even reordered the cells to be in e.g. ascending order it would break whatever witchcraft he'd come up with.

And adding in a column? Forget about it.

Which meant the only person who could make changes was him. And then he'd get arsey when you asked because "too busy".

Then there are entire finance departments running the whole business on Excel. Made worse because their applications export to it/have plugins for it.

I've had full on arguments in the past where I've point-blank refused to give entire Citrix servers to finance teams so they can load their ludicrous Excel spreadsheets but even then despite it clearly not being the right tool for the job the only concession I can ever seem to get is to get them desktops/laptops so they only slow their own systems down.

And the thing is, it's easy to say "IT should..." but it is -very- difficult if you don't have someone at director level that can understand and explain the issues in terms that other directors can understand (risks, costs, benefits) in order to drive change.

It becomes even more challenging in cost-sensitive environments where things also "just work".

There are two sides to every story, two ends to every cable

To be fair...

...it is not something I'd expect a typical user to have thought to check. And if the clip was broken on the plug, it'd be all to easily pulled out of the socket.

I once had to install some video conferencing kit at Barclay's in Northampton. I knew next to nothing about the kit but between myself and a guy on our helpdesk who'd at least seen it before we got it all set up. Bear in mind this was the early/mid 90's so it was ISDN based.

It was very high end for the day as well - the camera tracked the speaker as they moved around etc. and there was even a mini-mixing deck for the audio.

Anyway, my colleague and I did a handful of test calls each way and all was good. I brought the director in to see and show her it was working and she was happy and signed the work off.

A few days later, I got a call to say said director had called in a huff to complain it wasn't working and denied ever seeing it thus so I had to drive all the way back to Northampton (about 100 miles or so each way).

It turned out the ISDN line was shared and also terminated in her office. When she was connected in there, then obviously the line wasn't usable in the meeting room. Always nice to be able to say it's still working when you use it right and you need to get something else sorted.

LibreOffice 7.1 beta boasts impressive range of features let down by a lack of polish and poor mobile efforts

Re: Whilst I agree that cloud collaboration is important these days...

I personally solve that by drawing stuff out on a post-it note/sheet of paper then when I am happy, take a quick photo on the phone. If I forget the note, I still have the electronic copy to hand.

Amazon’s cloudy Macs cost $25.99 a day. 77 days of usage would buy you your own Mac

Re: Not just about cost

"...I imagine it makes sense for some companies during the current situation - it's cheaper to buy your own but what if you've got multiple devs/testers working from home and due to lockdown/social distancing? Renting Macs on the cloud is probably a reasonable short term solution. Buying a Mac for everyone may not make sense and you may not want to send people to an office or data centre to set them all up..."

Not really. If they're going to be used to the extent that they cost as much as above (but as another poster pointed out, you really want to be using intelligent provisioning of all machines in the cloud to power them off when not in use) then it would make more sense to put them in an office (or even data centre) and provide some means to remote control into them.

Costs can soon spiral if you don't manage your cloudy estate properly - the two things I usually see overlooked are the above power management* but also making good estimates of egress data costs.

*It's been a while since I looked at it but MS's Azure costs calculator used to default to 40 hours a week, and if I recall correctly, also made the assumption that you'd be re-using existing on-premise licenses to further bring the costs down.

I worked for a large retail outfit and had the devil's own time convincing their all-knowing EA that buy Citrix cloud licensing did not provide Azure licenses. Back of the fag-packet costings meant over £400k short.

I should've let the arsehole go ahead and put the order in rather than pulling him out of the hole he'd dug for himself but that kind of overspend at that point in time would've put the whole company at risk.

'We've heard the feedback...' Microsoft 365 axes per-user productivity monitoring after privacy backlash

Re: No more user names

"...Yes, I read "No one *in the organization* will be able to use Productivity Score to access data about how an individual user is using apps and services in Microsoft 365." (my emphasis) and wondered who, outside the organization, will be able to..."

I came to say exactly the same thing:

No one in the your organization will be able to use Productivity Score to access data about how an individual user is using apps and services in Microsoft 365...

Calls for 'right to repair' electronics laws grow louder across Europe

Re: Just because...

"...Real life example my Asus X205TA was bricked by a W10 update. One of the options to try and sort it out was update the bios. Downloaded the latest, downloaded ASUSs s/w to install which when run emptied the chip and crashed. Result its dead Jim..."

That is pants! 2020 and they don't have a non-writable area with a recovery BIOS? I thought this was pretty bog standard since the mid-90's

But it doesn't surprise me in the slightest - the one and only time I had an Asus laptop it was the single most unreliable piece of crap I've ever owned and they washed their hands of it whilst it was under warranty (only a few months old and had been back to them 3 times already).

Ticketmaster: We're not liable for credit card badness because the hack straddled GDPR day

Small Claims Court

I'd take them to the small claims court.

Chances are they won't even turn up to contest it. It's a small cost with no risk other than you don't get said compensation.

I've had recourse to use them once and it was a fairly streamlined, easy, process.

Retired engineer confesses to role in sliding Microsoft Bob onto millions of XP install CDs

No wonder...

He is bombastic...!

When even a power-cycle fandango cannot save your Windows desktop

Re: Too Many Stories!

"...No, emergency stop buttons for dangerous machinery aren't allowed covers. They're also supposed to be mounted where you can reach them easily while being dragged into the sharp spinny bits..."

Quite - this was an environment that had some hefty PSU's - not necessarily high voltage, but very high current. And DC lines at that. Combined with some high voltage, high frequency stuff as well. By the very nature of the work, it had to be exposed.

Re: Too Many Stories!

I just remembered - back in my electronics engineer days, the company that I worked for built a new workshop.

We weren't a big team of engineers - half a dozen or so.

The new workshop was actually a very nice place but for some reason the builders decided to put the emergency stop buttons on the front edges of the bench.

We all leaned back on them at least once before they came back and put a transparent lift-able shield over them (which I am sure was not compliant with any kind of regulations).

Toshiba

Ah Tosh again.

When they made a short foray into desktops they recounted a tale to me of a woman who had to have the monitor replaced due to going bang one Friday morning. A replacement was shipped to site and it was swapped the following Monday.

A week later, the replacement went the same way.

And a week later so did the third.

Someone asked her to leave the machine exactly as it was so that they could investigate the environment. When they turned up they immediately noticed that she had a potted plant on top of it. No saucer or plate or bowl. And yep, she watered it the night before. Water dripped through into the monitor and it inevitably blew.

The thing being that because she watered it on a Thursday night, she didn't make the connection. And because it was only a small amount of water, by the time it got back in for diagnosis, it'd dried without a trace.

Solving a big, yellow IT problem: If it's not wearing hi-vis, I don't trust it

Re: Live that everyday

No, no NDA for that and given that you could (presume still can) get a free bus outside the airport stating in big letters where it is going to, I suspect that they don't much care if people know the where. You had to show your ID to prove you worked there.

Another one would be the companies/people with offers of cheap accommodation for anyone working there on providing proof...given these were adverts on the site, in their accommodation assistance unit, again, see point 1.

Re: Live that everyday

Reminds me of a time well over a decade ago now. I was resposible for the co-design and migration from Exchange 5.5 and x.400 on NT4 to Exchange 2003 and SMTP.

There was one single Compaq server in a rack that no one dared to turn off for a cold P2V because of the very high probability it wouldn't come back up. Apparently it was prone to this. It also happened to be the NT4 PDC (with Exchange on it!).

I was working for Microsoft at the time and this was in Belgium at a rather huge site just outside of Mons so the user base was enormous.

It took me lots of persuasion to allow me to use non-Microsoft tooling but even then, eventually, we had no choice but to cold clone it because with all the best will in the world we could not get it to hot convert.

To mitigate as much as we could we did manage to buy a small number of second hand spares from eBay but it was still a nervous operation.

It was a long time ago so I may have some bits slightly out but you get the jist. :)

Who among you can resist an eight-core, 2.9GHz mini-PC or thin client that drives four displays?

Re: Not really embedded ready

"...And that's what testing is for... but very few embedded systems require an RTOS..."

Yep, agreed. It would've been fairer to say not suitable for RTOS rather than not ready for embedded use.

We've made it: Microsoft deems El Reg relevant enough to have a play with the nerfed version of its upcoming Xbox

Re: I don't get the "exclusives" idea...

"...Exclusives are the main reason to pick one console over another. So as Microsoft has no exclusives then there is little reason to own an xbox..>"

Halo?

Sony has been releasing older titles to PC recently, but I suspect a large part of the reason for that is to entice PC gamers to get a Playstation so that they can play the latest iterations of these older games without having to wait 4 or 5 years for a PC release

It doesn't really work though, does it? Whilst I agree my sample size is small, my own limited experiences are that people stick to their preferred platform in the same way that phone users stick to their own preferred OS of choice. I have never heard of anyone wanting to switch platforms simply to get an exclusive title.

I don't get the "exclusives" idea...

...if you break the mainstream gaming into three:

XBox,

Playstation,

PC

whilst ignoring the smaller consoles such as Switch for a moment, then surely all you do is cut off access to 2/3 of your market?

Giving earlier access to one system or the other, I can understand but to ignore the others completely? Seems daft.

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

Re: Brings back memories...

"...Now, I'm trying not to be pedantic, but failing so I have to point out that all hubs are half-duplex by their very nature..."

Well silly me forgetting that minor detail almost 20 years down the line. But thanks for correcting a minor error in a little anecdote. <rolls eyes>

Brings back memories...

...of a particular council.

It all started when I did a migration from NT4 domains to 2003 Active Directory. 2003 AD was new and shiny so it gives an idea of the timeframe.

Having done the migration fine, it was time to upgrade their Citrix farm. Half a dozen new ProLiant DL360's and a pair of Gigabit Cisco switches.

Again it all went fairly smoothly beyond a bit of application wrangling and the customer was happy and off I trotted.

A few weeks later I was asked to speak to them because "everything was suddenly slow...logons could take 3/4 of an hour" etc etc.

I did some remote troubleshooting and yes indeed it was dog slow.

So I drove to them. This wasn't a little jaunt but a 6 hour drive.

When I got there, I noticed straight away that there was a new network cable suck out of the top of the server rack door (which itself was left ajar), ran across to the server rack opposite and into the guts of said rack.

Traicing the cable and I came across a 3Com (who were pretty defunct by then already) 10Mbps hub. A. Hub. 10Mpbs half duplex at that.

And of course that cable was in the uplink of the Cisco switch pair and then off to the rest of the network. No wonder the thing ran so badly! I was not best pleased with their network manager.

Or the time an application on one server stopped working. Again, did the usual troubleshooting - nothing obvious. Nothing had changed (right...) but when I drove down again and looked at the server in question there was an MS VB6 CD in the drive. Someone had installed an earlier version of the full blown product (whilst live, with users on) that was older than the needed runtimes for tha application.

Oh yes. Happy days.

Oh Mi: Xiaomi shows off 80W wireless charging, claims battery fully fat again in under 20 minutes

Re: Wtf?

"...So wireless chargers don't need any of those?..."

I was going to say exactly this!

"... have dewalt tools with 4ah batteries and they are the size of 5 smartphones!..."

I have a DeWalt drill in front of me right now that takes 5Ah batteries and they are big (around 120 x 70 x 70mm) and heavy.

Death of the PC? Do me a favour, says Lenovo bigwig: 'I'm expecting the biggest growth in a decade... for 2021'

Re: I think Lenovo is right

"...The articles focus is obviously corporate buyers. Windows 10 is the default OS for corporate PCs now. We just rolled it out to over 2500 employees and the reaction was not at all bad from the user perceptive.

As much as the NIX crowd would love for there to be a usable NIX OS on the corporate desktop it just does not seem to be anywhere near the point of happening. Microsoft owns the office suite space along with the corporate email space. As much as we all would love an alternative there just isn't one. LibreOffice just does not cut it. Excel has just to much BI functionality that LibreCalc doesn't. Also, there is not a replacement for Outlook on a NIX desktop, Evolution is a buggy POS, Thunderbird doesn't fully work without some hacks. You cannot ask people to give up the tools they have used to decades just because you don't want to pay a license to MS..."

Totally agree.

And with Azure / Office 365 (M365 Apps as they are now as well) and the close integration of them all it is even more in MS's favour.

Store a document for collaborative working in Teams? Well that'll be backed off to OneDrive or SharePoint Online and accessible across devices even just a browser.

Someone mashed said document? Roll it back a version or two.

Don't want an on-premise domain infrastructure*? Fine - you can use Autopilot and InTune to manage Windows 10 devices as trivirally as if they were a mobile phone.

Of course all of these things require an ongoing subscription to Microsoft but we all knew that was where they were heading but the point is for the vast majority of ordinary (corporate) users it just works and works together.

For the ordinary domestic user - they will use whatever comes on the PC they bought from Dell or in PCW Currys as long as it looks like what they use at work or used to use before the new one they are buying.

Inertia is a very powerful force here.

*Granted it's easier with a greenfields site but the hybrid is heading more towards this every day.

It really is your last chance to see anything at Cineworld for quite some time, and this big-screen bork speaks volumes

Re: Cinemas in their current form are an artefact of the limited availability of reels of film

"...The cinema gets almost none of that ticket price.

The opening weekend ( which actually means a week) ALL of the ticket price goes to the studio

In subsequent weeks the proportion going to the screen increases.

But the profit is entirely made on snacks/drinks and booking fees..."

I did not know that but it makes obvious and clear sense now you mention it, thank you for the clarification.

Re: Cinemas in their current form are an artefact of the limited availability of reels of film

My eldest son and I went to watch Tenet last week.

Including the two of us, there were maybe a dozen people in the cinema.

But the flip side of course is that cinema's in general have been ripping people off for decades.

£33.50 for two adult tickets (including 2*75p booking fees) because the local Odeon has no competition and Tenet was only showing on iMax.

But then a couple of drinks and a couple of snacks coming to almost the same again? And yes, I do appreciate that people can take in their own snacks etc.

When people are trying to watch the pennies, charging vastly overinflated prices to watch films is only going to go one way for the cinemas.

IBM manager had to make one person redundant from choice of two, still bungled it and got firm done for unfair dismissal

Re: One day, out of the blue...

Yeah I am old enough to have worked for companies with a personnel department staffed with people who actually were there to help and protect employees.

Then almost overnight they became HR departments and employees became a problem.

Prepare your shocked faces: Crypto-coin exchange boss laundered millions of bucks for online auction crooks

"...And is prepared to hand over the cash before even kicking the tyres?..."

This is the thing. Are we now at a stage where non-face to face interaction has become so normal for some people that they are prepared to do just this?

Funnily enough I've just bought a car. Even though I know the dealer from the past and trust them, I still went to test drive it. I wanted to be sure it was as described (it was) but more importantly that I could actually get along with it - will the seats be comfortable enough for long journeys, meaning I won't arrive crippled with pain? Do all the buttons and switches work as they should? Does it drive properly? etc etc etc

And whilst I'd normally try for a bit of money off, I knew from the outset that this was a steal of a buy and in this particular case didn't bother.

But of course you can't do any of that when you buy something unseen off of a website somewhere.

I wouldn't even be duped into the "we need a deposit" without at least seeing the damn thing.

"...People who failed to understand jack and the beanstalk originally ended with him destitute with a handful of beans, but was retconned to a happy ending by the think of the children brigade who realised it was better for there pockets to show there was some upside for donating to their cause even if the value returned was questionable...."

Care to try again in English?

Uber allowed to continue operating in English capital after winning appeal against Transport for London

@Lee D

Hard to take issue with any of what you are saying.

I've worked extensively in various parts of London over the years as well as visited.

On more than one occasion I've flagged a black cab to be told things like you describe - "not at this time of night...too far out of my way" or simply ignored. Which is great when you've had to work into the night and don't know the area.

Don't get me wrong, I've had my share of charlatans with Uber as well - one who arrived late then proudly announced how he'd picked up some "foreigners - Jap I think" and dumped them in the middle of nowhere to get to my as soon as he could and two others who didn't know the destination address well enough in the centre of Nottingham* so dumped me half a mile away with a barely grunted apology and in both cases Uber weren't interested - just a shit-tonne of lies about only being able to get so close etc. but in those cases, I knew otherwise.

However, at least Uber do, as you say, turn up when they say they will (usually) and take you where you need to go (usually) and you can track the journey on the app, share it with friends/family if required and generally cost significantly less than a hackney carriage.

*Uber couldn't tell me why, in both of these cases, their drivers/cars were licensed in Wolverhampton. Something smelled bad about that but again...didn't care one jot.

Dynabook Portégé X30L-G: So light, you might even forget about its terrible keyboard

Re: Never mind the Terrible keyboard

That is such a shame to hear.

I repaired Toshiba laptops through the mid to late 90's and they were simply head and shoulders better made than any competitor.

And on top of that, they had a superb customer-focused ethos.

As well as a sense of humour - as I was accredited, I used to get the TSA - Toshiba Service Advisories. They came out usually monthly, if my crusty memory serves me correctly.

In each pack you would get a set of A5 cards to put into your TSA folder. Some replaced older ones, some were new etc.

I still remember their "left handed" laptop advert. The TSA ID was something like APRFOO01, it was obviously just a reversed photograph (the keys were backwards!) and yet they still apparently got inundated with calls.

Bork, Beer and Breweries: Three of our favourite things

Re: Sad omission

What always strikes me with stories like this - it was the same in a fairly recent documentary I caught a bit of about The Sun stopping page 3 girls - was that the ladies themselves all seem to have actually enjoyed it and to have been both paid obscenely well, and actually, for the most part, well looked after.

I'm not suggesting it wasn't a good thing to have stopped it, just that as in most things in life, there's usually another angle that is often overlooked.

Mate, it's the '90s. You don't need to be reachable every minute of every hour. Your operating system can't cope

Re: Perhaps

I have worked for similar bosses along those micromanaging types who get hot under the collar because you're not in constant contact with 15 second updates.

One thing I learned that I've stook to for close to the last 20 years - set your boundaries early and stick to them.

The company pays for 40 hours of effort a week. No, that absolutely doesn't include my missing a lunch break, working weekends and/or evenings except by exception. And that is in exceptional cirumstances and guess what? You're paying me for the privilege one way or another, whether in actual overtime or time off in lieu.

No, I won't be reading your emails past 17:30, or at weekends. No, I won't be answering my phone (if it is genuinely urgent and exceptional, leave me a voicemail and maybe text me as well).

Funnily enough, what caused me to adopt that attitude initially was when i joined large global company. During the interviews we agreed my salary and package to both of our mutual consent.

When I got the contract to sign, I noticed that the annual salary was 50 pence a year more than agreed which struck me as odd.

Still being relatively young and lackign in cynicism, I called their HR department to ask if they knew, was it ok, etc. and was told "Yes - that is how our grading structure just happens to work, don't worry about it"

And of course I had no reason to dispute it.

Fast forward a couple of months and I was asked if I'd work a weekend. Yes, sure, said me.

When I came to claim the overtime, I was told "Sorry you can't at that grade".

Indeed - up to £27,000.49p you were eligible for overtime. At £27,000.50p you were no longer eligible.

I told my boss there and then I would never work overtime again. Had they been honest about it, I'd have had a chance to discuss and argue and be aware but given the underhanded way it was handled I wad furious.

It was a bitter lesson learned hard (always make sure everything you agreed and even believe was agreed is in your contract. Always make sure calls etc to HR are followed up by an email) but it was also freeing - I realised you can tell management to suck it and by and large they just move on to someone more malleable.

Re: Perhaps

"...(which as far as I can tell appears to be a re-badged dumbed-down version of Skype formulated purely so that Microsoft can sell the same thing twice to unwary businesses)..."

Actually you cannot get Skype for Business now on a new plan with MS - it's Teams and it's going away soon full stop.

And whilst I found it quite jarring at first compared to the simplicity of SfB, Teams has some advantages such as persistent messages in the chat windows, file storage and sharing (backed off to One Drive for Business and/or SharePoint).

It still isn't always the most seamless of UI's (in my humble opinion) but it's not that bad once you start to get used to it.

'My wife tried to order some clothes tonight. When she logged in, she was in someone else's account ... Now someone's charged her card'

Re: Fabletics?

"...Because they thought that creating a portmanteau from fabulous and athletics was awesome?.."

Ohhhh, so it isn't supposed to be pronounced fable-tics?

Start Me Up: 25 years ago this week, Windows 95 launched and, for a brief moment, Microsoft was almost cool

Re: Win95 booklet

"...Icon: at work things got sane with Windows 2000. Very few issues. ME was utter madness...."

Weird how so many seem to think it went Windows 95, 98, XP.

Windows 2000 was a solid OS and of course was the first to introduce Active Directory. And was the first platform built on Windows NT, not XP.

Windows ME though...what the hell were they thinking?

PowerShell 7.1 Release Candidate is lurking around the corner, but first there's Preview 6 to poke and prod

Re: So What?

"...- There seems to be a command history feature, but you got to figure it out and configure it prior to using it, so that thing is junk for my purpose...

That surprises me - it's built into the Windows version (up/down arrow keys) and even remembers commands run in the non-preview version and carries them over.

I'm surprised they've made that a faff. Seems somewhat self-defeating.

CompSci student bitten by fox after feeding it McNuggets

Re: Foxes, rabbits, toads, et al

"... Foxes, rabbits, toads, et al

No place in Aus.

Not native.

Not dangerous enough..."

Reminds of the other Oz joke:

Scientists have just concluded the longest, most detailed study of the flora and fauna of Australia, to finally determine what is not harmful to humans.

And the answer is "Some of the sheep"

Faxing hell: The cops say they would very much like us to stop calling them all the time

Re: I used to repair fax machines...

Ah yes... I'd forgotten the "it doesn't go" errors - most of which, as you say, were down to things like the person trying to send a fax to a phone or my personal favourite on a line that did both, the receiving person either picking the phone up and not then pressing start on their fax machine, or despite being told "I am about to send you a fax" not setting the machine to answer.

Ahh happier, simpler times.

I used to repair fax machines...

...for Sharp Electronics UK.

Bearing in mind this was the -very- early 90's and home faxes were still new and to some folks, genuinely space-age.

I genuinely had to speak to customers (often of a more elderly persuasion) to explain one of two things: no, it really has sent it, even if you have the original in your hand (they honestly believed it somehow sent the original like a letter! Or (far more commonly) no, there is nothing wrong with either fax - try turning the one you're sending over...when they called to complain it was just blank at the receiving end.

You used to be able to put them into a diagnostics mode as well and one of the tests was the fax tones. I was so practiced, I could tell a duff modem chip just by the slight change in the warble.

Oh and then there was the time the MD brought a box in, plonked it on my desk and told me he'd told his mate I could fix his fax machine for him...he'd dropped it down several flights of concrete stairs.

The "repaired" one he got was made mostly of scavenged parts from previously scrapped units.