Not sure if this is weird, but I've actually started using a bluetooth keyboard with my laptop at home. I find it more comfortable not having the screen and keyboard so close together.

I'd really just like a thermostat that is designed to ignore whatever settings my wife and kids try and set. It would have to pretend that it hadn't ignored them, though.

I can't make the conference but I am interested in partaking in the scam, if you could PM me some more details @Minion-Queen

It's a tricky one for me. Traditionally I haven't been responsible for photocopiers and I liked it that way. Now these have become multifunction devices it impacts on me. But I'm reluctant to take ownership. I don't want people phoning me up saying "the photocopier is broke, can you fix it". So I try and take a back seat on the whole thing. But I then get grumpy when things don't go how I'd like them. I guess I want to have my cake and eat it.

Not really. There's a huge difference between covering for someone for 2 weeks and covering for someone for 12 months. If a company can easily survive without you for 12 months they should really question why they're employing you at all.

@scottalanmiller said:

The sky is the limit.

Does that include an unlimited budget? If so, I'd probably buy somewhere like this on the shore of Lake Windermere in the Lake District here in England. Failing that, somewhere more modest nearby.
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-40692617.html
There would have to be some money left over to buy a boat to go with it as well.

Link not working for me

Blimey. I didn't realise they were that big. I thought there would be about 50! What do they all do?

Looking at the stats, I have the lowest ratio of reputation to post count. Am I doing that badly?

Anyway, I've watched it now. Good work, boys!

@scottalanmiller said in Apple plans to scan your images for child porn:

We just have to trust them on that, if that's even what they are saying. The concern is that they are putting something on your device that scans your data (any data, it has to scan everything to look for one thing) and then sometimes reports what it finds to the government.

So the concern is about Apple doing something that they have explicitly said they won't do rather than any concerns about what they are actually saying they are doing. You could get tinhat with every tech company in that case.

@david.wiese said:

I like that there are no points here. I always felt like people just wrote up how-to's just to get the points, and those how-to's did not have any value to them. They were just doing it to get points to get to the next level. I always approached the points as one that shows how knowledgeable someone was, boy was I wrong about that!

There's "reputation". As someone with an embarrassingly low posts to reputation ratio, I'm sensitive to this!

@Bill-Kindle said:

"you HAVE TO HAVE A SAN to do virtualization."

I've heard this loads of times. It must be one of the biggest myths in IT. I'm not sure where it came from, the SAN vendors or somewhere else? Whatever, a lot of IT pros think it's true.

@marcinozga said in Apple plans to scan your images for child porn:

Again, read the article. You will get the software on the phone in iOS 15, and it will phone home. And unless you cut off internet access completely, there's not a thing you can do about it.

Which bits. I don't find the article that clear. It initially suggests the data is uploaded automatically from the phone, but ends with these statements which clearly say it is only photos that are uploaded to iCloud that are affected:

Apple’s neuralMatch algorithm will continuously scan photos that are stored on a US user’s iPhone and have also been uploaded to its iCloud back-up system

According to people briefed on the plans, every photo uploaded to iCloud in the US will be given a “safety voucher” saying whether it is suspect or not. Once a certain number of photos are marked as suspect, Apple will enable all the suspect photos to be decrypted and, if apparently illegal, passed on to the relevant authorities.

The article is also based on speculation and they haven't got Apple to comment.

@scottalanmiller said:

Don't forget that the MSPs provide the bulk of the content that makes them their money. MSPs have always "paid" by giving away valuable content.

MSPs equally could ask why they aren't being paid to participate. Until recently it was symbiotic. MSPs give content in exchange for a minuscule amount of advertising. MSPs give way more than they gain. It was not the MSPs getting the free ride. The benefit was almost all one sided then then tried to take even more.

I would guess that most MSPs are very geographical. I mean an MSP in Texas can advertise to me all he wants, I'm not got employ him when he's five thousand miles away. Whereas most vendors sell all over the world.

The geography is what I love most about SW. My boss asks me how I fixed the server last night, and I'll say "Oh, some guy in Montreal sorted it out for me. For free."

I see strategy as more 'what are your goals?' and tactics as 'how will you achieve those goals?'.

So strategy might be "we need to collaborate more" and as a result tactical might be 'we need to implement Sharepoint".

I was recently asked to give a presentation to our CEO on what our "IT Strategy" is. I basically refused on the grounds that IT Strategy is really just a response to "Company Strategy" and I wasn't made party to what our company strategy is. I was kind of "you tell me what the company strategy is, or what the business plan is, and I'll tell you how we can use IT to achieve it".

Too often I think IT departments work in isolation to the general business plan. They're off implementing Exchange, or ERP, or Sharepoint without asking 'how does this help meet the short to medium term goals of the company", or "how will this make the company more profitable". So they implement technology based on how the company is currently setup, blind to the fact that companies are dynamic things - they're constantly changing, expanding, retracting, moving into new markets, moving out of old markets. Without the vision, IT is always playing catchup to what the company is trying achieve tomorrow.

So I'd say I leave strategy to the CEO, and I only do tactics. As managers we know what our company looks like today, and we know what are weaknesses and strengths are today, but we have no idea what our company will look like in five years time. Only the CEO has (or should have) that vision of how he sees the company developing.

But what strategy I do do, I probably do it lying in bed at 3am unable to sleep. That's when most of my long term planning takes place, unfortunately. That's when my "vision" seems to be at its most clear.

If I understand it correctly, it's still only notifying anyone when it is uploaded to iCloud. It's really just moving the processing of the images from iCloud servers to local devices, but the end result is the same. I'm not sure this is an issue.

@scottalanmiller said:

The speakers don't even get in for free

Really?

I had a nightmare with a fresh install on a Lenovo laptop. They have an update manager that downloads all the correct drivers, but it missed off the WWAN driver and I just couldn't find it anywhere. It's put me off buying Lenovo again, so after a brief flirtation, I'm back to being an HP only boy.