Posts by RobDog 149 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2013
....is down to you and easily remediated, but you'll have to burn new CDs.
audiograbber is a great bit of CD ripping free software I've been using for years that gets the CD info from freedb
mp3tag is a great bit of mp3 tag editing free software I've been using for years.
Yep I supported the dealing platforms for a small but high-profile bank for this event. Months and months of prep, upgrading the many bespoke applications that had been running for years. They put me up in a hotel up the road at considerable expense as you’d imagine. I was a little keyed up about things, not the technical side but the reporting upwards side if anything went wrong…5am on site start… I went to bed nice and early and didn’t touch the mini-bar…and at 1am some dickhead pulled the fire alarm…we got evacuated and had to mill about outside for an hour. Obviously no chance of any more sleep so I showered and went in at 4am to witness - nothing. They noted my attendance and thanked me for my service with a generous OT rate. I’m still working for the same company.
Microsoft has clearly been in cahoots with Intel for years, each telling your you PC is ‘old’ and somehow slowed down (because Windows patches were written to do that over time) to get you to buy a new one, which feeds both their profits. It’s obvious even if I can’t prove it.
Few distros required with fewer bewildering options, and some of the persistent issues fixed once and for all. There’s too much variety and that makes it unappealing to the non-tech, while will need a personal techntommanage their desktop for them. And, dare I say it, it just isn’t consumer friendly. I’ll get hammered for that but we are all tech people who thrive in the challenges in tech, it’s why we do the job. Punters don’t want that, they just want things to work, and Linux desktop just isn’t friendly enough for them.
Makes me sick.
So does ChatGPT and CoPilot, enabling people to fool people that the are doing a job they really have no entitlement too, because they haven’t put the effort into learning the subject. Call me a dinosaur but I avoid it like the plague in my daily role, unless I am conforming to my own standards.
“ There are an almost ridiculous number of Windows-style desktops on Linux”
Yes there are, and too many distros, and those two facts hinder the take up of Linux.
Also, Linux has the problem that if something unexpected happens whilst e.g. installing something, the way back out to repair or replace it uninstall is very often unclear at best and at worst a mish mash of ‘techie’ geek nonsense. It’s what makes Linux appear the reserve of nerds but their sneering, competitive you-know-nothing-i-know-more-than-you attitude is equally unhelpful.
I use MacOS Windows and Linux in equal measure, since all of them were invented. I don’t have a preference, but Incan see why Linux isn’t more popular than it is.
Given that dogs on average have a life expectancy of 12-15 years, when you take on a pet dog you’re basically committing to watching it grow up and die, more than likely well before you do. Looking at it that way, KNOWING that at some point you’ll be saying goodbye to an unconditionally loyal being that just loves you from day 1 - why would anyone sign up to begin with? Crazy. Didn’t stop me.
I was gonna say, surely part of the issue lies with Trusts having the choice of defining and deleting their own products? Surely if that was removed and a single set of tools rolled out to all, progress would be much more achievable? The name of the central company is NHS after all isn’t it?
I live in a UK town of 13000 people. WHSmith has just told us they are closing the branch and with it the PO will disappear. Now we have one, but it’s in the middle of a housing estate and realistically 70% of its customers will have to drive there - many of them (pensioners etc) don’t drive. Those who do will cause massive parking congestion.
Ironically there is a Delivery & Sorting office in the town centre that could support a walk in branch but they won’t.
The ATM that was in the PO has gone, the one in Sainsbury’s has been shut, the Co-op had one but they have closed that branch too so now there is one single ATM in the town centre. Of course, several of the high street shops only accept cash.
I worked for a UK clothes and home retailer (defunct quite recently actually) in early 90s, and one morning we arrived at HO to find, on one floor, monitors disconnected and placed on the floor (15inc crt so some effort required), little piles of screws neatly beside the Elonex desktops, lids lifted and the 4MB/8MB sticks of RAM gone. Probably about 40 machines. Hey ho, we’d heard it was going on and we were a victim. You’d think a lesson would have been learned. Except that 2 weeks later, a different gang (maybe) returned and this time were not so civil, and a number of the monitor signal wires (fixed connection, not plugged) had been cut to speed relocation, the lids of the pcs wrenched off with some kind of pry tool and again, the RAM nicked. Just for good measure, they didn’t bin the remains of their sustenance; crumpled sandwich packages, crisp packets and coke cans.
I renewed my expired driving licence online the other day and it asked for just a passport number, not a scan of the whole or part of the passport, and offered me to use the passport photo it found on my new licence. Also, it didn’t matter whether the passport was expired; it explicit stated the passport didn’t need to be current. I was surprised.
They don’t want you to turn if off! They want you to interact with it like people do with Echo, they want Siri to be your got for information mgmt obviously but it can’t do that when the computer is powered off. Its soooo blindingly obvious. Put the power button out of the way to make people not bother their lazy fat selves putting the effort in reach for it.
Yearsnyears ago when I got my first credit card, and had just moved out of home, I splurged on the essentials…in Debenhams a new duvet set, and in the local in-car entertainment shop a brand new Pioneer tape/FM head unit and 4 speakers for my battered Triumph Spitfire. The assistant and Ingor on well, plenty of chatting, he broke out the card slip machine (not electronic) and took the card imprint…remembered he hadn’t given me some accessory or other, and promptly never got me to sign the card slip. Never got charged a penny or heard any more about it.
I went for an interview at a former High St electronics retailer in the mainframe room. The dc boss had an interview ‘technique’ where he had the chat, talked about the job, so far so good, but then asked a ‘controversial’ question that was designed to make me lose my temper, and he feigned an angry attitude trying to make me argue with him. It was so obvious and transparent I just talked normally and even slightly mockingly. When he was finished he reverted to normal. He just came across as a fool. I got the job but didn’t take it.
Running a:\Setup.exe /a <drive>:\<directory> copied and exploded the contents of the disks to a destination (usually you’d choose a mapped network drive) from where you could run setup.exe at the client PC and never load a disk.
Installed in ‘admin’ mode. And with an optional answers file if I recall, one of my first pc support roles.
I don’t want to run windows in my SFF computer but Jeff seems to think that’s a requirement. Newsflash - not any Pi users use the desktop very often.
Show me the desktopless NUC in his video? Linux would it be if t were there? H th en might as well run a Pi and forget the windows licensing, updates and intrusive telemetry and diagnostics gathering.
Anyway Jeff Geerling and people like him need to get real jobs.
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