FishCustard

Just like M&S had "St Michael" for their higher-quality stuff. Tried to give it an air of sophistication.

@mikeprice - wasn't that "Berketex"? I recall seeing the ads in the 90s.

Brand recognition - if you just buy the brand name and build a different (read: hopefully better) company under it, it can be successful. It's not the name that causes companies to go bust, it's the business mechanics. There are exceptions where the name is so tarnished it'd be a bad idea ( ).

At which point I'd probably schedule an email with a script once I knew I wanted to cancel. Which I probably would if the contracts are this customer-hostile.

I completely agree. I would review it at least 6 months ahead if I was thinking of changing (which I'd probably have known long before then). However, it's the fact that they claim their extended notice period "helps customers plan ahead" that gets me.

I agree that it is best practice to start reviewing products early, but how exactly does a 90-day-notice period help customers?

Would be very interested to see this - sounds like the sort of thing I'd do!

What a load of codswallop.

Not a new show, but I've recently found a few documentary channels (e.g. Discovery, other smaller Freeview ones) that show Air Crash Investigation/Mayday and have gotten hooked on it. It's fascinating to see how the industry learns from failure, and how despite all the safeguards, accidents still happen - usually due to the "Swiss cheese problem" of small errors adding up to a big issue).

This probably isn't what you're looking for, but I have the Apple Series 4, and love it. Very useful.

I'd probably say the King's Cross fire is of a similar importance, perhaps? Anyway, we're drifting!

Wouldn't bother me personally, although I can imagine that some would be. That said, Chernobyl was a hugely important incident - both in terms of scale, how unprecedented it was and the systemic failures of management that led to it. I wouldn't put it in the same category as Grenfell.

Yep, we just redirect the Desktop to their home folder. That way they can put whatever they want there and nobody cares! If they want to use it for icons, fine. If they want to save every file they ever use there, okay.

It's almost like they want people to use OpenJDK/Coretto/something else.

Attach a debugger (e.g. windbg), get a crash dump, see where it's faulting perhaps? Happy to look at a crash dump.

Mac tax is exactly right.

I imagine this is partly aimed at photographers/videographers who often have to transfer footage around from cameras etc via USB.

Does anyone have any experience with Square tills - specifically the stand+receipt printer+cash drawer setup? The printer on one of ours is refusing to connect properly. I suspect from what I've read elsewhere crappy hardware that I'll have to struggle to make a warranty claim about, but I'm open to clever ideas from anyone who's seen this before!

Yeah, we have the same issue with the Hikvision software. Our reception monitoring PC locks up every so often, even on a current-gen i5 with 8 GB RAM and an SSD. I've described the iVMS software as being written by drunk lemurs in the past - a judgement I fully stand by! I believe it has a memory leak somewhere - even figuring out where wouldn't help as I couldn't fix it! I'm still figuring out a decent way to do web monitoring - having to work around the fact that the easy-to-consume MJPEG streams are single-view only.

Now you're thinking with portals - I like that idea and will look into it.

50 sounds like an arbitrary limit. They should've made it 64, then we'd have just gone "oh yeah computers".

Ohhh so this only applies to non-domain PCs. That makes more sense.

Really?! If this is true, then Server 2019 will break over half of the corporate software deployment systems in the world. Does it work if you give "Authenticated Users" read access? That's how we do it on 2016.

Yeah, this is the kind of thing I was thinking of doing. We hire out rooms commercially, so I'm sure the HT wouldn't mind us hosting (I'd be happy to pay the commercial rates, which are pretty good, but she'd probably just let us use a meeting room after school anyway).

We use a 301 redirect for this - a CNAME can't be pointed at a URL, but if you point it at $some_web_server and have a redirect page it'll work nicely. It's what we do!