Norphy

IIRC, QLED is a backlight or filter type for an LCD, rather than emissive elements that form a picture like OLED and AMOLED. I don’t think they suffer from the same issues as OLEDs, but they don’t have the same benefits either.

This was more than five years ago at this point, and I've not been in the job for three years. We're way past that

I don't have the wallpaper any more, but a long time ago I requested a wallpaper from our marketing department as we were doing a domain rebuild and I wanted something a bit better than the annoying RM background. I waited and waited and it got to the point where I needed something. I took one of the built in Windows backgrounds which had flowers on it, put a massive gaussian blur on it, turned it monochrome and then tinted it to the school's colours. I put the school crest with a small drop shadow in the top left corner and left the bottom right for bginfo. It was never supposed to go into production but the marketing people didn't provide a wallpaper, no-one complained about it so it lasted at least three years. It might still be there for all I know.

That's not to say that I don't think it's not worth looking at alternatives to Smoothwall. Maybe you'll find something, maybe you won't. But I think it's always worth reviewing what you're running every so often, if only to keep the vendor on their toes.

Coming out of the same factory doesn't make them the same. A lot of chip designers use TMSC to fab their chips, but you can't argue that an Apple M4 is the same as an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

Agreed. A DNS filter like Umbrella can do URL filtering but Smoothwall does content analysis as well. Umbrella can be a useful supplement to a content filter but for a school it won’t replace it

It absolutely blows my mind that when you buy something like Garlic from a supermarket, it's from China. Garlic is something which grows, quite literally, anywhere yet it's more economical to sell those stupid tiny little bulbs than it is to sell a local product.

Newer Microsoft keyboards have an Office key on them, which seems to be the equivalent of CTRL+ALT+WIN+SHIFT. Pressing it on its own brings up the MS Webpage. Pressing it with O, X, W, P or L brings up an Office app (Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint) or LinkedIn. Lord alone knows why MS decided to hardcode this into the OS rather than through an optional driver, but there you have it.

Delete me

Hmm. Are you going to be selling these to end users? For £150 I might be interested. I take it that's £150 without the very awful tax?

Naked Gun reboot? /scurries off to Google Seth MacFarlane? Dear god, no!

I want to say I like the sound of this, but: John Candy Joan Rivers Both gone Rick Moranis Effectively retired I can't help but feel that it's too late for this. Those three people were absolutely crucial to the film and a new film without them would miss them hugely. Hopefully I'm wrong though!

I don't know how it compares in price, but the last time I evaluated backup software I liked Arcserve UDP. I liked it better than Veeam, tbh. If you have a System Center license, there's always DPM I suppose, but I hated that the last time I used it. Other backup products aside from Veeam, Arcserve and DPM that I've used: Backup Exec. Do not touch with a bargepole. Just don't. Commvault: It works but it's über expensive and overly complex. I spent a lot of time on the phone with their support the last time I used it. I got onto first name basis with one of the Dell engineers that supported it, that tells you a lot.

She used her NZ accent when she was in Battlestar Galactica, didn't she? Or am I misremembering?

Dell have the Command suite, one component of which does this.

Do you have any Microsoft licensing? Have you looked at MDE?

I can only speak for Stone and even then the experience for that is close to ten years ago, so make of that what you will. That said, back then they were very good and I'm sure they probably still are. Decent quality cases and PSUs, branded motherboards and RAM (MSI when I last looked) and very good support; onsite techs that knew what they were doing and were usually there the next day. I'd look hard at them alongside VeryPC. For laptops, they used Clevo as an ODM (and they most likely still do). Their laptops are OK, nothing special but are mostly robust enough. The disadvantage of them over the likes of Dell comes back to what I was talking about with driver/BIOS support. With Dell and other Tier 1s, you get driver packs from one source which are regularly updated by the OEM and you often get management packages which integrate into your endpoint management systems to automatically update the drivers and BIOS/firmware on the computers. Stone didn't have that back then so driver management was a bit more awkward as I had to pull drivers from multiple sources. They either weren't too good at keeping their own repositories up to date, or they plain didn't supply drivers, I forget which. The other (possible) advantage of Tier 1s is that they can customise the hardware a bit more, in terms of cases etc. Dell, Lenovo and HP all offer "Micro" form factor PCs, which are very very small whereas the smallest that Stone seem to offer is based around a Mini-ITX form factor case which is small but not quite as small.

Again, it depends on how you do it. If you ramp up a couple of new DCs then demote and decommission the RM site servers, all you're going to be left with from RM are a few inactive schema extensions in AD which won't be touched ever again. There's no RM software left over at all. If you try to keep the RM site servers in place and just remove the RM components from them then yes, I'd agree that you're asking for trouble. For what it's worth, I've performed or helped to perform two RM removals in my time. The first was done by spinning up new DCs and everything worked fine post removal. The second was a complete rebuild from the ground up, as the domain was in a poorer state and a rebuild was considered easier than a removal. And everything worked fine there too, in the end.

I prefer Dell to the other tier 1s. Their support website is better, getting drivers and BIOS updates is easier. Driver support is better. Their tooling is better. Their integration into packages like SCCM and Intune via the Dell Command suite is better. Their automated driver update tools are better. There has been talk about moving to Lenovo and Thinkpads, but my team and I are very resistant to it. Thinkpad hardware is good but the support... nah.

Ok, but how much of that skill set do you now use in your day to day working life? I think that is the point that Psydii is going for here. COBOL still has its place, but for most people it’s legacy. Psydii is saying he’s looking forward to the day that AD administration is the same. Possibly Netware may have been a better thing to compare it to

Yes, but there’s a fairly major difference there. Macs have the full weight of Apple behind them and for the foreseeable future they’re going to have Apple designed ARM CPUs. All of the MDM tools that manage them plug into Apple APIs, which haven’t changed between CPU architectures. Chromebooks aren’t changing their management tools, and the method of managing them doesn’t differ between CPU architectures. Linux is open source, as are most of the endpoint management tools you use for Linux. Recompiling software between Intel and Arm is relatively trivial compared to with Windows Whereas Windows ARM devices… well their history isn’t good, let’s put it that way. Windows RT devices could only be managed with Intune, and couldn’t run anything not from the Store. AFAIK, you couldn’t manage Windows 10 Arm devices with SCCM, and it wasn’t until recently that they could run x64 code. But because the performance of existing Windows Arm devices sucked, no one bought them and they didn’t care about managing them anyway. Now the situation is (allegedly) a bit different. Support from MS is a bit more mainstream, there’s a Rosetta-like translation layer which allows you to run x64 code and is performant. Manufacturers are actually making them this time around and corporations are going to want to buy and manage them. Can they use their existing tools, are they going to be forced into using Intune or will MS do an Apple and introduce an API to manage them?

Maybe, but the question is still valid. How are these things going to be managed in a corporate setting?

Looking at this some more today. All of the tier 1s have or are releasing models in their business lines; Dell are releasing Latitudes, Lenovo is releasing a ThinkPad and HP is releasing an Elitebook, not to mention the likes of the Surface, Asus and Acer. The question I have right now is - it's going to be inevitable that someone is going to see one of these things and say "Ooo, 18 hour battery" and demand one. How are these things going to play with management software? I have no doubt that they'll go straight into Intune, but what about the likes of MECM and KACE?

So people will just use Chrome or Firefox to take screenshots instead? /edit That said, thinking about it a bit more, these are presumably corporate desktops, so you could have it so that the only browser that's installed is Edge and users will be prevented from installing or running any others via GPO, Intune or Applocker. Still doesn't get around the whole mobile phone problem though.

Your average laptop isn't designed for gaming either. The graphics core in them is comparatively weak compared to what you get on a desktop. That said, ARM CPUs may make their way into normal desktops and it's entirely possible that GPU vendors will make drivers and firmwares that are compatible with them. PCIe isn't something that's exclusive to Intel CPUs, after all.