Posts by K555 160 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jun 2012
"The primary blocker is slow change management processes. These can be slow due to bad planning, lack of resources, difficulty in execution (in highly distributed organizations) etc."
I'd say the primary blocker is having better things for you IT department to be getting on with than replacing one OS with another one that doesn't provide your organisation any tangible benefit (in terms of productivity) and pisses off half the users.
Going by the tone of the comments here, I'm gonna be judged.
I work for a customer that have no dedicated space for their IT kit and also love to have ideas on rearranging their office. Depending on who's doing the rearranging, they'll always elect to move the rack to the room they don't personally care about. So it gets relocated on a semi regular basis.
I've worked out that if I take the doors off their hinges, you can wheel the rack through them so it doesn't need to be stripped down and rebuilt every time.
I've also worked out I can wheel it across the entire ground floor within the runtime of the UPS....
I knew someone that had a sense of humour that dropped no hints and he didn't need to actually know someone to inflict it upon them. He briefly worked in a bank, which he hated every second of.
One of his colleagues asked if he could pass them a letter opener and, absolutely dead pan he told them "Sorry, after the last incident I'm no longer allowed to handle sharp objects near co workers".
I did say he worked there briefly.
We have to deal with many small 'web development' companies who churn out the standard Turdpress affairs. Every site comes stuffed with as many out of date untested plug-ins as possible that call APIs that are long since deprecated or make DNS lookups for non existent records. Then, when the front page takes 27 seconds to load (complete with a 3 minute full motion video they've uploaded with a codec suitable for distribution to HD IMAX cinemas) they come back with "something wrong with the server".
One of these companies had an e-mail signature with the logo of about 10 vendors they used across the bottom and the staff all had titles like 'Level 4 tech solutions expert'
So every time I responded to them, I'd make my own e-mail signature more preposterous, adding another company logo (I've got a western digital hard disk in this PC... add Western digital. I fancy a Sausage Roll... add Ginsters) and changing my job role to things like "Level 27 Support Mage"
I have one PC attached to the TV that runs Fedora because Debian distros simply won't boot reliably on it. It's a flat install and used for nothing more than the web browser.
It bricked updating 39 to 40, 41 to 42 and now 42 to 43.
But hey, 40 to 41 was a peach.
I just retired my personal Exchange 2003 server (SBS 2003!) earlier this year because Server 2003 didn't support the TLS standard my mobile e-mail client now demands.
It had a good run. I couldn't actually log into the thing for about 2 years because I moved the VM and tripped up the activation on it. The telephone activation is long since defunct but I eventually found out that you could activate it using the Microsoft Games telephone activation (which I guess they keep alive for people who want to play the original Halo on PC?) as it appears to use the same code generator! Then, during the uninstall, it prompted me for Disc 2 of the SBS 2003 installation.... that caused a lot of rummaging through the old action pack CD wallets!
Fun times.
To be fair - "just because a game launches doesn't mean it runs well enough to play" is equally applicable on a Windows box! I've spent many many hours trying to get rid of glitches in Windows games on running natively on Windows, if I ever have to spend 20 minutes googling and tweaking a Windows game to run on Linux, I'll give it a pass.
I've exclusively played games on Linux since 2020 and my experience is that nine times out of ten I actually have more of a fight with the bloatware launchers that big companies bundle that I do with the actual game.
I'd also say I have more luck with games than productivity applications. Because they want their own look and feel, they have their own in game menu systems which are a direct translation. If I have a glitchy application in Wine, it's usually the Linux desktop window dressing not quite matching up with where it would be in Windows, leading to blank or unclickable buttons or Windows bouncing off into the ether (Adobe, I'm looking at you).
I don't know if I'd call it a special case, because it's part of my day to day work, but I guess if you're not doing admin and support on systems that involve Windows you might.
It's incredibly handy to be able to quickly mount a disk image from a Windows VM as a loop device and then read and write files on it. Saves console access and recovery mode shenanigans.
That's because people in Norfolk will ONLY buy something from QD, a boot sale or if it's an object that's been chained it to a bin outside a house with a bit of cardboard hung on it that has "£10" scrawled on it in permanent marker.
If you want to get up to £30, it really needs to be an old lawn mower.
Indeed, It's a little harsh to call the PCs obsolete. Then consider them only in terms of scrap value. They're only obsolete to those that absolutely have to run Windows 11. For anyone else, we could call them 'a perfectly functional PC'.
I'm looking forward to grabbing a couple that get binned by customers. I'm not sure how much longer the 16/17 year old Vostro I have in my garage can withstand the spiders that call it home.
Good points. This isn't intended as a counter argument, just a different angle on the efficiency side.
Whilst these might not be the best in terms of compute per watt, they're aiming to replace a boiler so part of their job is to produce enough heat to be useful. My gas boiler does exactly zero compute, so it's even less efficient than a dedicated PC.
I had a little tinker with Grock just to see how it behaved. It's a less hell bent to agree with you than ChatGPT is (possibly depends on the subject and what you're asking it to agree with) and I quite like how it displays some of the logic used to generate responses.
However, it very quickly did the 'A is true and B is true so hugely-complex-issue C is because of A and B!' LLM thing. I asked it to clarify it's logic and sources (probably which corner of Reddit it scraped..) so I could understand it's conclusion and it told me off for, and I quote, "Nit picking".
Not exactly an extensive scientific review. Just my dabbling with the free version.
I do not consult on ERP / database / application type stuff. In so far as I don't really know what it does.
Yet I still recognise nearly all of that client behaviour when it comes to ERP 'not working' for them! I just get it via the route of "What's wrong with my PC / Network / Server?" when the question really should be "Why does this 386MB macro enabled, cross linked spreadsheet called 'calc v1' I keep on my desktop now display #VALUE! in every cell?"
I may give Pop a bit more time, but i'm not sure.
My home workstation has been on it for 20 and 22. 22 has clung on long enough I'm actually starting to notice software going out of date and I find that I'm actually missing features that I'm used to in Ubuntu 24 on my work machines. They're not game changing, but I do find myself thinking 'oh, this is the old version' more often than I'd like.
And the wait is in the name of moving to Cosmic, which I'm not really all that interested in (having not tried it).
The problem is, I must be basic. All I tend to do to GNOME is shove the dock down the bottom and tell it to hide if it's in the way of a window and I'm good to go.
So it's been in the back of my mind to just switch it back to Ubuntu for some time. The 'Pop! Shop' is a pain in the arse and caused me to switch my laptop away a few months ago.
Brings back memories. Someone wrote an application to make use of this where WIndows didn't
It was called 'RAIN' that you ran at idle priority and it chucked HLT instructions at the CPU. I just found it for download on a site that makes me wish plain flat HTML sites were a thing still.
If something is resistant to being fitted then STOP and use your eyeballs to work out why. Yet still, to this day, I'll occasionally give in to instinct and just push a bit harder because that's what any great ape would do first ;)
One Yaris brake caliper was my last victim, because I didn't think in the half a second it took between a bolt becoming tight before it was properly home and stripping a thread out.
The only place I now use btrfs is for a Steam library. It's pretty quick and I can make use of compression and de-duplication so I get something like 1.25x savings on space overall. If it gets damaged, I can just have steam verify/fix the files or rebuild it if the worst comes to the worst.
I spent so little time with Vista installed (on my first ever brand new laptop, and it ran like utter crap with Vista (but fortunately came with XP 'downgrade' media (yes, Dr Evil air quotes around 'downgrade')))* that I had no recollection of what the startup sound sounded like.
It's the Windows 7 one as well, isn't it.
*I think that sentence might actually be a spreadsheet formula.
"When it comes to disk encryption, we agree with this XKCD. Especially the mouseover text, which those afflicted by tablets can see here. Get over yourself, nobody cares. ®"
The XKCD cartoon points out that Encryption isn't an infallible solution (like most security, it has to deal with the meat sacks it's trying to protect). And yes, most people aren't guarding life and death state secrets.
Doesn't make it bad idea. Unless we want to start to follow the logic that one might as well use 'password1' for all your accounts because passwords are fallible.
I'm still encrypting my work laptop because it costs me nothing in real terms and, if I were to lose it (accidentally or otherwise), I'd rather not have to care about it. And I'll probably lock the door when I leave my house, even if you could get through it with a crowbar in a few seconds.
One of the longest running servers I've run into was a bare metal install Server 2008 server running an SQL for sage back end. When I came to it, it had started to randomly fail to make network connections.
I can't find the KB on it now, but it had a bug specific to non R2 2008 that caused it to run out of ephemeral ports after a specific period of time. This only happened after the server had been continuously up for somewhere in the region of 3 years. This one had done so and not been patched as the whole network was air gapped from the internet.
If I want notepad, I click start, type 'notepad' too quickly and it dishes up a load of web results for 'notepad'
If I then take the 'd' off the end, it has another good think about it and finds me thing program it has called 'notepad'... handy!
The fact that I've learned to type 'n o t e p a d backspace' as second nature is testament to how long the start menu search has been shit. It even used to go to pot in Windows 7 if you had DNS resolution issues.
(why I still use it rather than just start->run (which they hide by default) I don't know)
I might be able to modify it easily but I can only ever really be bothered to turn Window borders back on (so I don't randomly click on the wrong program because 2 have overlapped some white space and I don't know which if foreground and which is background) and give up there because, modify as I may, I can't get it so I actually LIKE using it.
Unless I'm missing something and it's easy to just install another desktop environment entirely. Is there an OS out there where I can just do that? ;)
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