Norphy

You could put SysPrep in as the last step of your task sequence?

Because that worked so well the last time. I won't argue that going by the published daily stats, things appear to be improving but "improving" does not mean "good". Infections are still at more than 100,000 confirmed daily cases, 1700 hospitalisations a day, close to 19,000 in hospital with it, R rate is still 1.2-1.3. I admit that I'm about as far from an expert on this as you can get but going by that, surely we should be mandating wearing masks in indoor public settings until all those numbers come down a bit?

No, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try and guard against brute force dictionary attacks. Locking the front door of my house doesn’t do any good if a thief wants to break in via a window - that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t lock my front door.

This is a piece of art, this one. I call it ‘Irony’

There was one article I read that suggested they’d gimped it to make it less attractive to currency miners and to improve the availability of the card a little. Even a crap card is better than no card, I guess.

A Precision from the Dell Outlet Centre? https://outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/SecondaryInventorySearch.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukdfb1&l=en&s=dfb&sign=PXhcOSHtr1T4IOw%2fPR7UddMzTcvWg7B48kV177ILpglkblBFTm8iCl15QZc4SI0EXbxgOpuidgAsS2vWSFPXsc8JRiUVyZecwpuxH8nJzIriYSWefG8FhKhbPwTeetugNzyX4d1k%2bhWqC7%2bZj%2fnTKvRNlr2BylZ6CI3hnGOezJI%2fJdl5myPAMMLhqGfxfNI5UWo6oaqBYcJqr7QkTSuVIiCHkjmgDwNilKxQBToZspGhYvBSrKI0mA%3d%3d

Bluetooth isn't an option without buying a third party module which would plug into the existing car's head unit CD changer control, for which I'd have to pull the dashboard apart. If I'm pulling the dashboard apart, I may as well put in a new head unit. In the time between my old car b0rking itself and taking delivery of my new car, I drove my FIL's new Tiguan around for a little while which has an integrated entertainment centre with CarPlay built into it. It's nice just to be able to plug the phone in and have a big picture right in front of you rather than sticking your phone to the windscreen or attaching it to a mount clipped to your dashboard. Safer too, I think, which is why I want a big screen double DIN unit. I want something that integrates into the look of the car rather than just bunging a tablet on the dashboard.

Yeah, I understand the principal behind Android Auto and CarPlay. The head units I’m looking at support both, but that’s not really what I’m asking about. I’m more asking about the cheaper head units from the likes of Joying and Xtrons and whether they’re any good or I’m better sticking with the likes of Sony, Pioneer et al.

I want to get a new head unit for my car. The one that it’s got is functional but it’s in a car that was built in 2007 and is a bit on the primitive side. It can play MP3s from a CD-R but that’s the extent of its functionality. No Bluetooth, no USB port, no Aux input. It has the room for a double DIN head unit, so I’ve been looking at aftermarket head unit which can do CarPlay. The trouble with those is that the cheapest is £300 plus I’d have to spend another £70-odd on a facia adapter, wiring loom adapter, Canbus reader and aerial adapter. Connects2 do a bundle with everything you need but it’s not cheap. I’ve also seen in eBay that there are a plethora of cheapish head units which run Android. Not only that, quite a lot of them do head units which are tailored specifically to particular cars and fittings, so they look more stock and have bigger screens as you’re not wasting space on facia adapters. I’ve done a bit of research and there appear to be a couple of brands (Joying and Xtrons) which have good reputations and sell from the UK. There is a particular one from Xtrons which has a 9” screen, a custom UI, has an 8-core CPU and 4gb RAM which runs Android 10, fits the car without an adapter and comes with all the cabling you need. It works out a lot cheaper than the branded units and has the advantage of basically being an Android tablet stapled to a car radio so you can get apps from Play store like Waze etc. This one: https://xtrons.co.uk/vw-skoda-seat-various-android-10-octa-core-4gb-ram-64gb-rom-ma90mtv-l, or possibly the 8” version which has the same spec hardware but has chunkier physical controls on it. I was wondering if anyone had any experience of these Chinese head units, or the brands I’m looking at specifically that they could share?

Microsoft were trialling underwater datacentre pods for Azure a couple of years back: https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/project-natick-underwater-datacenter/ I suspect that as cloud computing becomes more prevalent in schools, the need for data centres and in turn, data centre cooling is going to be much reduced in schools and maybe some universities too. It's interesting, for sure, but I don't think this is something that will be that common.

"Find me the best machine you can!" "Hold on, you actually expect me to spend money on this thing?"

Ah, the randomly changing MAC address feature on Hyper-V. That one was fun when it decided it was going to happen to our Smoothwall once. Windows seems to be a little more tolerant of its NIC changing MAC address, Linux/Smoothwall decided it was an entirely different network adapter and created a new binding for it. So I had to go into the CLI, work out what the MAC addresses were for the old adapters, see which were bound to which interface and put it all back. That was a fun afternoon. My own fault, admittedly, for creating it with dynamic MAC addresses in the first place, but still majorly irritating.

He was on Graham Norton's show on Friday, performing. God, he was awful.

Server 2019 is build 1809. If you want a newer build, you’ll need Server 2022. You used to be able to get Windows Server builds in the Semi-Annual channel but those were Core only and supported for 18 months. They’ve now been discontinued iirc.

Out of curiosity, why? Unless you’ve got a run more than 300m, OM4 multi mode fibre is good enough for most internal applications

Even then, there's a difference between what a first line tech should be reasonably expected to deal with than what they probably actually have to deal with. Example: User A: My computer gone done broken Tech: Have you tried turning it off and on again? User A: Uh... Tech: *sigh* I'll be right over *Tech reboots computer* User A: *Gets on with day* User B: Oh dear, this has stopped working. What can I do? *User B Reboots Computer* User B: Oh good, that's fixed it. *Gets on with day* If the problem is more severe: User C : Oh dear, this has stopped working. What can I do? *User C Reboots Computer* User C: Oh dear, the problem is still there. Let's call Tech Tech: Have you tried turning it off and on again? User C: Yes, that didn't help Tech: Try this, this and this. Is it working now: User C: *Tries* Sorry, no difference Tech: OK, I'll be over in X minutes There are always going to be problems which even reasonably tech savvy users aren't going to be able to fix. That shouldn't stop people from trying and just pushing crap onto techs that they shouldn't have to. I wouldn't take my car to the garage just because it needs its wiper fluid changing. However, if the wiper fluid pump stops working, that's when I'll go the garage but I'll make sure there's water in the reservoir first. People shouldn't be calling tech support for fundamentally simple things such as "Is it plugged in?" User B and C aren't putting Tech out of a job, they're just being diligent and considerate. User A us just irritating because invariably, they won't make the effort.

"IT Savvy" doesn't have to mean "Knows how to configure Arch Linux, can set up an Exchange Server in their sleep and can program a VCR", it can just mean "knows enough to perform their job role without having to ask where the Any key is all the time, can perform basic troubleshooting tasks before asking for help". There's a world of difference between someone having a problem thanks to a faulty bit of software or hardware between someone calling because the mouse isn't working because it's not plugged in.

Gromit

Hendersons

Damp..

Dragon

You sign into that Amazon page with Prime. It'll ask you to activate Prime Gaming, if you haven't already. It'll then give you a code which you can redeem on the Origin store. You'll need an Origin account and the Origin client if you haven't got that already.

I don’t know. This could go either way. I think it has the potential to be an interesting and powerful drama; however going by that trailer it could also be god-awful. I guess we’ll see when it gets released.

As far as a lot of these people appear to be concerned, "Research" actually means "Form a half arsed opinion and then search for other morons on Facebook who have formed the same half arsed opinion to reinforce said half arsed opinion. And when shown actual data from people who actually know what they're talking about, double down". The Internet has done a lot of good in the world, I won't deny it, but it can be a real pox when it wants to be as well.

You should be able to attached the VHD(X) to the Gen 2 machine, but you probably won't be able to boot from it as Gen1 machines are BIOS and Gen 2 are UEFI. You'd need to do some work in the image itself to convert that.