Posts by 43300 562 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2021
Agree - and it's the same with maginging it all too. Constant change and updates which give "improvements" (which mostly nobody asked or wants, even if they work) make administration a constant battle to keep on top of the "improvements" and avoid / work around borkages and users getting confused. Cloudy and subscription services have just meant that eveything is in perpetual beta and nothing remains stable for long.
Indeed - the two main roads I travel on most often normally have a camera van lurking somewhere every day, especially this time of year with light evenings. Of course they always choose the places where they are most likely to get people (i.e. sections which aren't dangerous but where they can remain out of sight until the last minute). Rarely see them on the sections which are actually dangerous! Many drivers who use these roads a lot are therefore very careful about not straying over the limit.
Saw them last year on a road right up in the hills - presumably fancied a skive that day, as the limit is 60 there but anyone who tried to go at close to that would rapidly end up in a field!
"Yes, well please don't bother bringing that to Linux (or anything else) running on a Pi (or anything else)."
There's already a penguin section in Intune! Only sub-sections in it so far are Compliance Policies and Configuration Scripts, but I expect it'll expand in due course. There's also a section for Cheome OS in there too (that one's stil marked as (preview). Clearly, they want to suck all devices into Intune, no matter what OS they are running!
The attitude of most 'Big Tech' companies seems to be that if the profit in doing it is greater than the fines if they get hauled up for it, then they'll do it.
The most effective way to change this would be to make the directors personally responsible, with imprisonment being a possibility - the attitude would soon change then!
What exactly is the point of organisations like this if they can't even be arsed to provide a proper helpline for those who they claim to be there to help?
The idea that a chatbot is in any way appropriate for any sort of mental health related helpline is ridiculous. Many of the people contacting them are likely to have really struggled to get as far as even contacting them, and to then be fobbed off with a chatbot could just make things worse.
But you actually try to establish a "fact" - in many cases it's very difficult, especially where modelling of what might happen in the future is involved. The problem is that the approved narrative is then pushed as "The Science" and any other viewpoint becomes "Disinformation". The internet and especially social media has caused such polarisation that a reasoned debate is often impossible.
You are sassuming that there is a direct correlation between lies and 'disinformation'! There isn't - disinformation is whatever doesn't fit the narrative (often, it will be true). Lies are fine so long as they fit the narrative, as the government and media have demonstrated so well over the past few years.
Going off at a tangent here, but it pisses me right off when large retailers (Tesco, Argos spring to mind) don't have an email contact option any more and the equivalent they offer (apart from sometimes online chat, which is no use outside of their 'chat' hours) is Facebook Messenger and/or WhatsApp - I don't have accounts on either and have no intention of signing up for an account on them just so that I can contact a third party. There should be a ban on this and all retailers with an online prescence should have to provide a customer enquiries email address.
"First sentiment feels wrong to me, but web search is a tool and the results you get are dependent upon how you use the tool."
It's a while since I read the book, but as I recall one of the main points was that the results of web searches are to a large extent dependent on how the search engine works and how it ranks the results. This of course makes them highly suscpetible to reflecting the ideology of the company which provides them,
From the screenshot, it looks like it still has a single-line view for each email in the list (as opposed to the three-line view in Outlook). Might seem minor, but that's always been enough to discourage me fromm using it.
As regards the title - you'd want an email client because every webmail interface I've ever come across is shit by comparison. And the current Microsoft iteration is one of the worst of the lot!
If they do bring out a Windows 12, I wonder whether they will return to there being a server version of each major client release, as was the case up until 2012 R2? Currently the last three all look like W10, and they aren't massively different from each other (although 2019/22 do have Storage Sense, which is very useful indeed for anyone with terminal servers).
Yes, Dell does - but creating and installing the image (which is in the form of a recovery image rather than an installer) takes a lot longer than a clean install with generic media, plus you need separate images per model. We just have one set of USB sticks with the latest generic Windows installer, and one with the storage and ethernet drivers for all the models which need this. Once we've got them installed we just use the Dell COmmand Update utility to pull down the full driver pack.
It's not a Lenovo thing - the latest W10 or W11 generic MS installer doesn't have drivers for the ethernet or the SSD on the latest Dell Latitudes - have to pull in the storage driver from a USB stick at the partitioning stage of the setup, then Shift-F10 at the region screen to get a command prompt to allow the ethernet driver to be installed off the USB stick.
I commented elsewhere in this thread about the Latitudes before noticing that you had already done so - the 5xx0 range seem to have had it from the 5x20 models onwards (currently on 5x40). I assume the equivalent models in the 7 and 9 ranges (where they exist), and possibly he 3 range, will be similar.
Agree about the Latitudes getting plasticky - they really are. The move from black to silver is also not great as it's far more prone to showing scratches and scrapes. They are now also much harder to repair (ever tried replacing the keyboard on a recent Latitude?), and the keyboards are crap compared to models of ten years ago.
"I have worked with Windows 8.0 and and 8.1 in the past, but not very much. I don't recall now if they automatically created a recovery partition during installation, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did."
Yes, they did, as did their server versions. I had a similar issue to the one you describe with a bare-metal Server 2012 R2 install. The bootloader for the OS was clearly corrupted and It booted to a sort of 'safe mode' with big W8-ish buttons which did nothing useful - the repair options all failed to fix it and I had to clean install it from an ISO in the end.
Recent Dell Lattudes do have something similar to the Macbooks now - if they can't boot (I've tested it by completely wiping the SSD) they have a cloudy recordery option. The one I used for testing (a 5430) offered W10 or W11. Select the one you want, and it downloads and deploys the OS image, then boots to the first setup screen. Works quite well, but is pretty slow even on a fast internet connection.
"Strangely if your company can be bothered they can setup a system as described using VNC(or any other remote desktop system) running own their own servers with their data completely under their own control."
Indeed - terminal servers have been around for many years. Microsoft likes to make things difficult now though, e.g. not supporting the Office 365 apps on Server 2022 for several years until there was sufficient customer pressure that they had to back down, What they wanted of course was to push people to Azure VIrtual Desktop which, coincidentally of course, is a subscription service on Azure. The only way you can run it legally on-prem is using Azure Stack HCI, that wonderful idea which MS have come up with whereby you pay monthly subscription charges to run your own VMs on your own hardware (I'm told by a consultancy who help us with servers that Azure Stack HCI is proving unpopular because it's so expensive).
Seemingly a thin client which requires a full 'fat' Windows install!
I appreciate this might change in future - proably to a device with a Microsoft 'thin' bootloader nicely locked down in firmware so that, as with phones, it's very difficult to install an alternative OS...
The govenrment always uses the 'think of the children' line - which works with a lot of the population although it's clearly not about that at all (and how are they going to stop people engaged in criminal activity from using encrption anyway? By definition, such people aren't going to follow laws!).
I don't necessarily think most are 'fine' with it (they know little about it, too little to form much of an opinion), but you are right that there is a lot of apathy - and it's about the whole political system, not just particualr issues. Labour will probably win the next election simply because enough people in the relatively few seats which will decide the outcome are sick of the Tories, not because Labour or its lacklustre leader are regarded with much enthusiasm by most.
"The British have rarely actually believed that 'the Government knowns best' (Thatcher railing against 'the nanny state' and all that), just that there is very little we plebs can actually do about them, so it is usually best to just keep your head down and carry on* and try to ignore them as much as possible."
And there's also the problem that the other lot (i.e. the other half of the UK branch of the globalist uniparty) won't be better, and few people actually believe what they promise. Whichever lot isn't in power will rant on about how they are going to improve the NHS and whatever else they think will play well with the public. Then if they are elected, bugger-all will change. A lot of people just don't see the point of participating in this performance now - I certainly don't: I've never voted Tory, but there is absolutely no way I would vote for Starmer's lot either now after the way they've carried on over the past few years so for the first time in many years I probably won't bother to vote at all in the next election.
No doubt you will be able to explain, then, why if you look across many countries (and US states) there is no correlation between measures taken and the outcome?
Look at the UK stats - numbers had already peaked and were heading downwards before thye did anything in March 2020. There's no evidence that the measures make any real impact - the rise and fall of the waves take pretty much the same trajectory whatever. Sure, by timing the restricitons carefully (as some poltiicians probably did) it may sometimes be possible to make them coincide, but if it was acutually the restrictions doing anything then that would be seen across the board, which it isn't.
Incidentally, why do Covidians have this tendency to accuse anyone who doesn't believe the same fairy stories as them of being "Trump supporters" or similar? Is it simply that early on Trump made a few unusually sensible comments about this, and therefore all those who hate him feel that they have to take the opposing view?
If you seriously believe that any UK government-commissioned report is going to conclude that they shouldn't have taken the measures at all, then you don't have much understanding of politicians! ALl of these type of 'should have' reports are based on make-believe modelling which bears not relationship to relaity. If they were right then Sweden should have had some of the worst excess mortality as it had the lowest restriction level in Europe - it didn't, far from it: its average for the period 2020-22 was actually the lowest in Europe.
"precautions" which don't work? Are you seriously credulous enough to believe that a loose-fitting cheap face nappy and standing on spots on the floor is going to have a major impact on an airborne virus which spreads mostly as aerosols? There's no credible evidence that any of these things make any difference at all - as indeed was the accepted wisdom before 2020.
On it's own, it's very rarely fatal. As with flu, most of those who die 'with' it are over the average live expectancy and with multiple comorbidities. People who would likely die from anything worse than a mild respiratory infection.
And what the Covidians are also keen to ignore is the very real harm which has resulted from the paranoid and useless "safety" measures. The so-called Cost of Living Crisis is actually largely the result of inflation caused by all the money printing and suppressed consumer demand, followed by the inevitable increased demand. Kids who will never really catch up on lost education in many cases, mental illneseses across all ages form being largely isolated for long periods, and so on.
A large number of deaths were 'with Covid', which was intentionally a mmeaninglessly wide category and often based on the meaningless tests - e.g. people with no symptoms of Covid could be in the stats because they 'tested positive', or people who were barely ill, recovered, and then died in a car crash.
The 'of COvid' data is entirely meaningless and they could be and were massively gamed to increase the sense of fear (this was a UK government strategy) - look at the excess deaths as that's about the only measure which can't easily be gamed. They show nothing worse than a bad flu season, which always crop up every few years.
Coronabollox was the trial run to see how easy it was to get large numbers of people to do and believe ridiculous things, and to turn on anyone who doesn't follow the flock. It proved that it's very easy indeed and if the sheep are told to hide behind the sofa as much as possible and to dutifully wear their face nappy and follow the arrows on the floor if they have to go out into the big fearsome wild world, then most of them will do so. Likewise if told to get repeated injections of an experimental drug which doesn't do any of the things it was initially claimed to do.
"You are free to NOT buy or use Office 365, and the fact that it includes a 'bonus' teleconference app, that has PLENTY of competitors, does not force you into buying into Office 365. You have a choice as Office 365 is *not* bundled with Windows, you must both choose to install *and* [pay] subscribe to it in order to get the (added) Teams functionality.
No case."
Most companies won't pay for something else if they already have Teams anyway. As for your claim of 'no case;, good to know that we have highly experienced lawyers on here who can make their jiudgement from a news article! If you have a look at what happened with Internet Explorer bundling a few years ago, you will see that it's not as simple as you appear to believe. There is also the question of interoperability with other Microsoft services - is this available to other software providers, using published APIs?
The biggest problem is that this is too late - they should have acted before Teams became so ingrained.
Given that politicians and civil servants are involved, they probably don't actually know what they mean because most of them won't know anything about it! It's all just soundbites which they think sound impressive: whether or not they are actually workable seems not to concern them.
See the UK Online Safety Bill for another clear example of this.
Indeed. If you wanr to replace switches and routers - well, you just do it. And last time I looked there were tools to convert VMs between the common hypervisors (although I'm not sure that many people would want to move from VMWare to Hyper-V - I'm familiar with both of them and would always choose VMWare).
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