* Posts by pmelon

19 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Nov 2014

UK government awards chunk of mega-billions tech framework

pmelon

Accenture

I work with them on a daily basis so feel obliged to chip in where they are mentioned: they are useless, the work is of the lowest quality and they form the low point of my working time.

Wordpress sells 100-year domain, hosting plan for $38K

pmelon

Re: Do you remember?

The University I work at decided to offer alumni ‘lifetime’ email addresses many years ago. The commercial realities of that hit recently and we turned them off rather unceremoniously. Should have charged £38k.

Microsoft struggles to wake from PrintNightmare: Latest print spooler patch can be bypassed, researchers say

pmelon

Tired

54k users unable to print because of the MS shitshow. I am so tired of them and their sloppy standards. So, so tired…

We have disabled remote print across the estate.

I am going to retrain as a lumberjack. Possibly.

Partial beer print horror as Microsoft's printer bug fix, er, doesn't

pmelon

Tired of MS

At work I am responsible for ensuring the never ending stream of MS RCE vulnerabilities is taken care of. I resent Microsoft and what I perceive as their poor quality products for this.

I have been on friends and family duty dealing with the printer issue and have had money forced into my hand for dealing with it but still resent MS for it.

End of tether. Done with all things MS - they will never see another penny from me personally or professionally.

Microsoft fixes the thing it broke via another dose of out-of-band patching to deal with BSOD printing problems

pmelon

Re: testing

No, this is just poor and inexcusable. MS seem to be getting gradually worse.

Microsoft's GitHub under fire after disappearing proof-of-concept exploit for critical Microsoft Exchange vuln

pmelon

ABM

‘Anything but Microsoft’ seems like a sound mantra at times like this.

Kennedy was also asking why it’s okay that MS sat on this issue while it was being exploited for two months. I think more people need to ask that.

Another Windows 10 patch that breaks printers ups ante to full-on Blue Screen of Death

pmelon

MS top quality

Dealing with this and the recent glut of remote code exec vulns means I hate MS more than ever. Working in IT should not equate to being a Microsoft shit-shoveller.

Anyone know why they sat on the Exchange vulns for two months?

Back to the office with you: 'Perhaps 5 days is too much family time' – Workday CEO

pmelon

Totally agree. I used to sit next to a dickhead who would never stop talking crap even after being told to shut up. I could never get anything done. WFH FTW - I get loads more accomplished.

Splunk sales ace wins sex discrimination case after new boss handed her key accounts to blokes deemed 'flight risks'

pmelon

Indeed. Use it all the time, got the certs, value it but I’d question whether it’s really worth the exorbitant costs. Those figures are amazing.

ELK comes without cost, a support team or sales people if you choose. Speaking as a Splunk admin, that option is getting more and more interesting!

Intel NDA blueprints – 20GB of source code, schematics, specs, docs – spill onto web from partners-only vault

pmelon

Intel123

Gotta love that password. I password sprayed our accounts at work (I’m allowed, in the right dept. for that kind of thing) and was gutted when [my org]123 got me 70+ accounts. Feel less bad now.

If you have Microsoft 365 and Windows Virtual Desktop, do you need Citrix? Apparently

pmelon

Tread carefully

We use WVD at work for maybe a couple of thousand users. They get a black screen at logon sometimes. Seems to be pot luck whether the user profile loads correctly. It’s not been that great, YMMV. I’m not involved in the ongoing fixing, but the whole thing has the feel of a beta test.

This week, we give thanks to Fortinet for reminding us what awful crypto with hardcoded keys looks like

pmelon

I agree. I upgraded a search head to Splunk 8 yesterday, which I assume does nothing to fix this issue (it's early - I'll re-read once I am in work).

On the plus side - at least they found it rather than all their customers.

Kiss my ASCII, Microsoft – we've got one million fewer daily active users than you, boasts Slack

pmelon

Feel old

We're rolling out Teams and I use Slack. I don't really 'get' either. IRC with a different front end? What's all the fuss about?

Am I officially old and therefore unable to see the point?

Brit iPad sellers feel the pain of VAT-free imports

pmelon

Mark as gift with value lower than the threshold

That's how it's done. Far too easy. Quick fib on the declaration and nobody in the UK can compete. I would argue that genuine UK businesses need more protection than that.

Microsoft patch mashes Office forms and macros

pmelon

Understatement

"...it's starting to look a bit sloppy"

Safer to not bother patching. That's been the policy here since long before my arrival. Madness either way.

Pitch Black: New BlackBerry Classic is aimed at the old-school

pmelon

Re: Win

I feel your pain.

We switched to a fleet of 'sheet of glass' phones (I've had em all personally too - iPhone to Nexus blah) and they're shit. MDM is worse. Typing is worse. Build quality is worse (9900 to S5 being compared. S4/5 are very brittle).

The only thing missing, which seems to be the main thing people complain about with BB phones, is the numerous stupid, infantile ways to waste minutes of your life that Apple and Android offer - what everyone refers to as 'apps'. When they say that they don't mean 'ways to work', they mean they want to play with toys.

Anyway, whatever - idiots always seem to win in the end. All hail the rise of the idiots with their handheld twit machines. I'll stick with my Passport. The wife wants a Classic. Blend is excellent BTW.

The magic storage formula for successful VDI? Just add SSDs

pmelon

Re: God, where did the 1990s come from in here?

I'm really happy for you.

Every day I'm at work I'm firefighting a Citrix VDI environment that has reduced user experience and associated satisfaction massively. The users that used to have their own desktops have exactly half the CPU power they used to. Windows chewing user profiles at random (which it will do at some point, no matter what you do) registry files full of garbage that eventually brings down the odd server or two. All good fun. It's a perfectly standard ESXi/Citrix VDI environment. We're not doing anything wrong or anything particularly fancy.

I would never impose VDI on anyone. Anyone who says it's wonderful is doing so because it suits them. The end user experience tends to be awful.

BlackBerry's turnaround relies on a secret weapon: Its own network

pmelon

A good chunk?

No they don't. MS are nowhere in any of this.

FWIW we use Xenmobile to manage a fleet of Androids. Rubbish compared to BES, but the public (users) gets what the public wants (via hamfisted, clumsy consultations).

I agree with the US DoD - Blackberry are pretty damn good at security.

Oracle to axe over 450 jobs in Euro support centres – sources

pmelon

Marketing drones

I'm curious and perhaps naive: who/what are these people? Are they really (and obviously very indirectly) employed by MS to post things like they have here? If so, what a sad life.

I would prefer to think it'd be some kind of bot, but the posts have too much context.

For the record: I'd use MS SQL if I had to. I would never trust it or the underlying OS for anything critical however.