Posts by FirstTangoInParis 604 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Nov 2021
If MS ever had a customer helpline, I’m sure it would have the following message:
Your call is totally unimportant to us. Even if we bother to answer this call, we won’t be able to help you because (a) our management are bar stewards and (b) we don’t understand the problem either because we have no idea how the code works. Some marketing droid in a suit comes in now and again and tells us to mess around with something and then just ship it. We’re not even sorry. Goodbye.
Windows 11 gives you more efficiencies etc.
My experience to date is that it absolutely doesn’t, and actually it’s far worse. As well as MS keeping messing around with the UI on Outlook. Windows 7 and 10 worked. 11 is in the same heap as 8 and vista. I almost said roll on 12, but I’d rather roll back to 10.
Trouble is the customers here spent all their budget and more in migrating their previous system to SAP. Being forced now to basically go through the whole thing again because SAP decided on a major architectural change is just horrible.
Some companies will absolutely refuse to move to whoever’s cloud underpins S4/HANA, for reasons of cloud non availability we all know about. If SAP is underpinning their production system, and that’s down for a day at a time, that could lose them millions in your fave currency.
$bigCompany did just that. After the most humungous fallout, big boss got everyone together and said “let’s not do that again, shall we?”. Do it in stages so when you finally realise you are trying to boil the ocean you can take a step back and have a grown up conversation with the customer.
I wonder if that’s because it likes customers to leave their private going’s-on on their servers so Gemini can have a good look through them. But even long ago they would unhelpfully try to categorise emails as important and a bit junky. Having said that, their anti-spam filters are the best around by a country mile.
Indeed. Anyone who has ever done more than just sit on a pew quickly discovers there are politics in that church, intra-denomination politics and inter-denomination politics. Even more so now where under-attended churches are closing and merging with a different denomination church up the road, becoming a Local Ecumenical Partnership. I’m told some LEPs have as many as seven different and potentially competing denominations. That must be quite something to navigate when change is needed. AI might well be able to summarise who believes what (to a point) and how they might interpret the Bible and what the big ticket sticking points might be, but you wouldn’t want it doing much more.
I suspect the issue is one of capex versus opex. Building your own ADC costs capital and our fellow counters of the beans don’t like that, I believe. Pushing it to opex as buying a service makes the balance sheet less up and down. Same reason UK Gov went for PFI all those years ago. Capital comes from someone else’s bucket so no longer their problem.
But then this happens as the techs always said it would. “reliance on big cloud providers”? Actually, reliance on any outsourced infrastructure. If you can’t kick it, you can’t control it.
> This creature breathes in API calls and exhales erratic error codes.
I missed a connecting flight last week. I was sent to the transfer desk to get rebooked. The transfer desk is now a bank of self service machines with human slaves. On entering my details, the machine returned, believe it or not, “Generic Error”. WTF? A senior human came and took me to another desk where a lady sorted this out in less than five minutes. How much did these machines cost?
And … at the same airport the new passport e-gates might scan your passport but are staggeringly missing the UI to tell you what to do. It currently displays only numbers, not words or pictograms. This is not a new feature, e-gates have been with us for some time. Perhaps the HMI was an optional extra …..
And indeed if your IT is staffed by locals then you’ll get better service with some give and take on hours for out of hours work. Most forget their business runs on IT, literally. IT down, business wastes hourly rate x number of employees until it’s working again. Plus invested staff are more likely to understand and care about some of the weirdness in the IT systems so can help to fix. Outsourced staff will just fix it over and over and never bother to suggest improvements because it’s not in their SLA.
It would be really useful if cars in UK and Europe could be switched between left and right hand drive headlights rather than having to stick a bit of tape on them. Shirley it must be possible what with them cars being awash with software (and my latest one has a little play with levelling the lights when you power it up in the dark). I asked VW about this for a newish T-Roc and got told that the beam isn't bright enough for oncoming vehicles if you're driving in Europe if you have a UK car. I didn't believe that. Wouldn't want to cause one of these -->
cos Xfce is actually more like a normal (well I suppose I mean Windows XP to 10 (and not 11, cos that's gone off the rails), but I wish I didn't) desktop than Ubuntu's default thingy, and hence familiar-ish to many. I wouldn't start newcomers to -buntus with Unity, it's just too bold and brash.
So various software houses have deprecated on prem and said they are or will be cloud only. SAP and Atlassian being two of note. So who’s paying when the underlying cloud goes feet up and businesses can’t do ERP or software development for a while. Even a few hours outage multiplied by all those customer companies must be in the billions of your currency of choice.
But then I guess what’s a few billion to Bezons and co?
This is getting tedious. DNS update borks $cloudMegaCo and takes authentication with it. World+dog+cat unable to do everyday stuff.
Surely the answer is to flog home hubs which cache credentials etc so Internet of Thingies can blissfully carry on while said borkage is resolved?
This assumes job roles called the same or similar names do the same things in different companies. Everyone knows that isn’t the case. Your average job role does describe in any detail the skills of the person actually doing that job. So that’s a big mistaken assumption.
If there is a leader board, that’s a big list of companies not to work with or for, because you know the BS meter is off the scale.
MS shooting themselves in all appendages as ever.
The retrenchment going on in UK universities was always going to happen one day. The average free thinking university student could tell them that. The massive expansion/deregulation (to an extent) driven by tuition fees / loans (many of which will never be paid off) with huge salaries for vice chancellors bubble was always going to pop one day. I’m not sure if the massive building projects that resulted to accommodate the extra students have been paid off, but I’m sure the universities have a big pile of debt to worry about. And now it’s happening. We told you so.
Yes but it keeps coming back. Or leaves icons that will turn it back on (looking at you, Outlook). This is yet another thing to burrow deep in the innards and snip the red wire.
It might be fun to let it read a PDF and then watch it get into a fight with Adobe Reader that can already do that for you.
I’m using Office 2021 and I notice no difference over any of the previous releases since they faffed with the movable toolbars, apart from all the OneDrive nonsense. I do wonder if M$ just rebadge the product every couple of years and make a big song and dance about “meet the new version” which is of course same as the old version and then charge bucket loads of money for it.
The first IETF meeting after Snowdon was quite something. Basically a massive wake up call to encrypt as much as possible with better crypto suites, and mandatory statements on security aspects. There has been significant increases in peer review and oversight which is all very welcome. If you consider the RFC for BOOTP that you could drive a truck through, that would not be allowed today.
But it’s up to everyone to use them.
I do wonder if hobbling Office programs on a Mac is deliberate. All office progs in Mac have little differences to the Windows version, leading to your situation above. There is no reason why they need to be like that, even with different UI regimes.
Ok let’s start with the phone. Androids are like Windows, nothing is integrated and as a result it’s all very frustrating. Trying to run Android Auto, getting gmail to work with Exchange, even trying to get WiFi calling working. With iPhones it’s all built in and works really well. The number of personal iPhones far outstrips Android amongst my colleagues who are forced to have Android as a work phone. I even went BYOD because I couldn’t stand the works Samsung any more.
Then the Mac vs PC. Apple silicon Macs beat the heck out of Windows for speed, battery life and usability. Having managed W10 and 11 machines and the lengths to get them up, running and managed, I recently watched an Apple OOBE video for businesses and was utterly impressed. MS can only dream of that level of onboarding. As a small charity admin, MS do not allow you the tools to make them properly secure until at least one tier higher.
So yes Macs are higher cost, but you get what you pay for in battery life, better display and easier management. Oh and the antivirus is still needed (Malware Bytes is good) but a lot less heavy.
Perhaps the data goes back to MS development so they can learn how to fix Windows and its entourage of over complicated management tools.
I’ve just discovered MS Graph interfaces need about another four things turned on since the last time I refreshed it. I have no idea why.
This is the big problem with calendar-driven releases. There’s always going to be some stuff that slips the net. You can either delay until it’s perfect or release with some shortcomings and fix up later. However Apple have had years of practice at this so are a lot better than most.
I got asked to change the battery on a gen 1 iPhone SE. All good until trying to remove the battery. Fixed down with some incredibly sticky strips that I almost broke the battery trying to get it out, and trying not to blow myself up in the process. Given there is no free space inside, why does it even need to be glued in the first place?
> I have never used Internet banking.
You already have no choice in this matter. Branches are closing or have already closed en masse with staff powerless to explain why, even when the branch is in a prime position in the local well-used shopping centre and regularly has queues of people waiting to be served. You cannot even speak to a human who works for the bank unless you hold a considerable bucket load of money with them or are a business when they will allocate you a human. You get a chatbot who is dumb as can be and will parrot the web site you have already read to get an answer. On asking to chat to a human, one bank at least effectively emails the one human who still works there, who sends back the same web site garbage after at least 2 hours.
If you have offspring, they will have to do the internet banking for you. Give them Power of Attorney and let them haggle it out with the bots.
so you’d like me to run personal software on my work computer? And get me arrested under the Computer Misuse Act, be put on a major disciplinary for contravening company security policy leading potentially to dismissal? And this will also apply in Microsoft’s offices in this country.
This should have not got past the grown ups in the building it was thought up in, let alone made it to the outside world.
Just say no. See also https://scarfolk.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-dont-campaign-and-kak-1973.html
Just idly wondering if Cisco really can’t be bothered to continue to support these devices because it wants companies to buy new boxes, in true Microsoft style. They may of course be good reason, hardware obsolete, etc, but firewalls don’t necessarily need to be faster stronger etc every few years, surely?
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