tegs07

36 minutes ago, Paul S said:

So many of these I don't recognise and/or haven't heard of.  

 

Here are two of mine.  Roger Glover.

 

Chris Glenn

 

Who

Never heard of them!

😉😀

11 minutes ago, Frank Blank said:

Man, some great gigs there, good times.

strange to think some of us probably were at the same place, same time but had no idea …

Anything that you buy from a dealer be it a car, instrument, watch, antique clock is going to cost more than from a private sale. The reasons have already been listed.

I don’t think musicians have any reason to grumble about prices of instruments. If you’re not looking at the vintage or premium end of the market then prices and quality are still fantastic compared to most other periods in history. G&L tribute series, Harley Benton etc etc are still stonking good value for money.

A couple that are broadly goth:

Old

New

Simon Gallup, Hooky, JJ Burnel, Jah Wobble and Aston Barrett have already been mentioned. This leaves me with this fine gentleman:

Horace Panter

9 minutes ago, vbance said:

🔔🎬

I have nearly recovered from my decades old irrational loathing of this bloke and you post this 

😀

The reality is that £1500 for a bass is not necessarily mad. £100 for a bass is and reflects a unique period in history when interest rates, inflation and economic co-operation were very favourable.

6 hours ago, Nicko said:

The £ is weak against the us$ and the Euro, but not that weak against the Japanese Yen,  Korean Won or Vietnamese Dong.  If you are looking at Far Eastern manufactured instruments there really isn't an excuse for rises in the last 5 years aside from "market forces".

 

Similarly the £ vs the Mexican Peso IS down significantly in the last 5 years.  But - and it's a big but, the exchange rate is roughly what it was in the 90s with the £ having rallied against it 10 years ago and then losing the gains in the last 5 of years.  I do not recall Mexican made instruments becoming cheaper between 2014 and 2020 so it seems when the £ is strong the importers are ripping us off and when it's weak they use it as excuse to up prices.  The big F of course has a habit of moving production somewhere cheaper and maintaining prices - so a Standard P Bass used to be MIA, and is now MIM, the Squier brand used to be  MIJ and is now MIC.Indonesia but they never reduce the prices.

I would hazard a guess that the cost of living/standard of living is also going up in all of the countries you mentioned. The far east is no longer as cheap as it once was. If anything their GDP and wage growth is outpacing the west.

The era of low interest rates and rock bottom prices is pretty much over. 

Last year I was criticised on here for saying I always thought Eurovision was a bit of light entertainment. A big spectacle of camp theatrical nonsense. Allegedly this is British arrogance and Europe takes this seriously and enters their best songs and entertainment. 

So I watched a bit this year and can say I feel as the French or Italians might if this was an international food festival and a chance for the nations of Europe to showcase their finest local produce and everyone turned up with processed cheese and boil in the bag fish curry.

I enjoyed it. It’s a romanticised tale set in an era many of us grew up in. It’s neither gritty drama nor black comedy. A bit of a pastiche. Don’t expect too much and it’s entertaining nonsense.

It’s good for my bank balance that every bass I want to buy is located up north!

GLWTS

how about that tone wood or tailor swift folks …. zzzzz

7 hours ago, chriswareham said:

 

Good joke. You are joking aren't you? Actually it seems like you're not.

 

Well f*ck me.

 

Microsoft are utterly incapable of making secure software. They've made a rod for their own back by having to be backwards compatible with the horrendous APIs they've put out since the 1980s. APIs that are absolutely so full of holes that they simply can't be fixed without breaking the legacy software that are the sole reason they still exist.

Yep they are clinging on to existence thanks to all that legacy software.

I will leave it here as I am far from a Microsoft fanboy but just recognise that they are far more than the Windows operating system.

1 minute ago, Stub Mandrel said:

 

I think what I am suffering from is organisations who know how to set up their internal security, but can't cope when their subcontractors have different arrangements. I have my own, one-person, company. I have my own data protection registration, policies, automated off-site and on-site backups, anti-malware, anti-ransomware and independent licences for an impressive array of software. Also, I am Windows based while they are largely Mac based. This causes everything from minor irritations to major issues now and again with software and even issues with policies - no I am NOT going to implement YOUR safe working policy because I have MINE, and it applies to ALL my work not just yours.

In your circumstances I would most likely create a guest account in our tenancy and add sort out your PC so it goes into an exception group for the various policies you need to bypass.

12 minutes ago, Jean-Luc Pickguard said:

So, Which companies are dead to you?

Increasing those that don’t provide a human being to speak to and hide behind layers of automation.

Most companies have issues and go through rough patches. It’s how they deal with them that counts. Usually there is an explanation and solution. It’s getting to a human that is empowered to help you that is the problem.

Since Covid this is getting worse and some companies are now horrendous which is a shame as their products are actually pretty decent (not going to name and shame) but in the tech and services sectors it is getting worse.

Edit: Stubsy would be a happy camper if he was using systems set up by my place of work and using our support:) Things would work and if they didn’t we would make them work. 

26 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

 

Teams is for online meetings, greatly inferior to Zoom for online meetings.

It took 30 minutes for a consultant to set up a Team meeting last week, in the end had to set up a new one and re-invite everyone.

I once had one with a Local Authority, utter disaster - their security rules meant their meeting had to be teams. After over three hours of increasingly frustrated emails and phone calls, I set up a meeting on Zoom or Google meet in about five minutes, which they could join as it was an 'external' meeting.

Teams is an absolutely useless productivity killer.

What you are experiencing is the difference between software run in a corporate environment and bound by the policies and security settings of that environment versus software that is not tied down by any restrictions.

If I set up Teams for you on a bunch of managed desktops I can guarantee it would work fine, similarly I could hamstring zoom so that any legacy product would have to update to the latest version before running, block access for people who don’t have up dates or no anti virus, i could prevent people from specific countries joining your meeting etc etc.

These are the kind of policies and restrictions that are running in the background and causing issues when you use Teams on a work machine or attempting to join meetings in a managed tenancy.

These things are not designed to be awkward, they are designed to stop the kind of embarrassment that the german military experience recently. Your private meetings may not be as private as you imagine.

In addition Teams is way more than just for meetings. Teams voice is replacing VOIP and call centre services, it’s a far more user friendly front end to share point, it is replacing shared mailboxes and distribution groups. It is an incredibly powerful tool that when deployed correctly can save companies a lot of time and money.

Anyhow I am not a Microsoft evangelist. I run macOS at home, use an iPhone, use Linux for most web applications and it’s the backbone of most the firewall and monitoring software I use. At work we are advocating the use of iPads and Chromebooks for people that don’t need a PC and use Macs for most design work. There are benefits and use cases for most devices and software. 

11 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

 

Exchange is virtualised these days, but it gets itchy about security and that starts a very awkward path.

No idea- I would imagine this has something to do with compliance and conditional access policies rather than  exchange but not much to go on.

Personally email and printers are tech I loathe and would put in room 101.

The functionality of Teams (or slack or whatever else you like) is infinitely preferable than email and printed copies).

Just now, Stub Mandrel said:

 

I have to use a physically installed version of Office as it's the only way to keep my Office 365 separate from a client's (I use the somewhat simplified and less versatile online version for this). Otehrwise their Exchange server tries to take over my system as they have a 'higher' level product.

Sounds like they are running physical infrastructure from the dark ages. I haven’t dealt with an on premise exchange server for nearly a decade…

5 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

 

Yes, it would be wonderful if they could invent a version of Teams that allows me to run the app in less than twenty-five minutes and four log-on attempts (I just use the online version now).

 

Or perhaps find a way to send me updates without rendering my computer unusable for half a morning.

Or even, just possibly, sort out why my laptop boots from cold in half a minute and my PC takes ten minutes plus, running the same O/S when the (less than three year old) PC is far more powerful and also has an SSD.

This is most likely not down to Microsoft. We support about 2000 laptops and have a whole bunch of remediation running in endpoint for issues like you are describing. They range from switching off elements of Dell optimiser through to opening ports on firewalls. The end user never sees the impact.

I would clarify again I don’t use Windows at home and it’s the last OS I would recommend any home user to run.

4 minutes ago, asingardenof said:

Honestly having Office 365 is one of the main reasons my home computer is still Windows, because if Microsoft developed a Linux version I'd happily move over completely; as it is I have a 21 year old laptop running Ubuntu out of curiosity more than anything. I imagine most applications where there isn't a Linux equivalent I could run in Wine or something though.

I run office 365 on a Chromebook and a Mac?

Physically installed software is no longer required for office applications (and a whole heap of other SaaS applications).

2 minutes ago, Jack said:

Well thankfully I was responding to Baloney talking about being a home user.  

 

Yes and again I do appreciate the benefits of all of that, I even understand most of it. However, again, I don't know that any of that is something that only Microsoft can give you and also, none of this was in the original discussion. I responded after several posts from home users and non-IT professionals (as far as we know!) talking about how much Windows sucks for them. Specifically, I responded to someone saying that Linux was an inconvenience. I didn't even mention the wider MS ecosystem until you did! Me saying "linux can be much more user friendly than windows" and you saying "but how we possibly start to introduce a data risk management strategy across our 10,000 strong user base whilst still ensuring high availability without Purview?" are kind of two different points.

 

God, no. I take my security very seriously. I have just managed that without an annoying ping every 37 seconds that I need to perform a scan or that such and such a program wants to make changes to my pc.

The thread is about companies that are dead to you. The idea that Microsoft should be included because people don’t like the OS is for me silly because a) the OS is a tiny piece of what they do - particularly for the domestic market and b) if the OS is causing woes in a corporate environment then it is the sys admins that are at fault not Microsoft.

14 minutes ago, Jack said:

I got the impression that you did which is why I was careful to state that, whilst I play an IT person on TV, I'm not actually an IT person. I'm a teacher.

 

I will surely bow to your more significant expertise but, and I mean this sincerely, HOW are they the glue that's holding all of this together? I totally agree that device and OS are mattering less and less, which is a bloomin' great thing as now we can finally ditch Windows!

If you know what endpoint (intune), modern authentication (app registrations), CA, Entra, Purview, Sentinel etc are it would make sense.

Physical infrastructure is even slowing becoming obsolete. Pretty soon a couple of switches and a router is all that most sites will need. You don’t need phones or servers, maybe just a few printers.

Run whatever OS you want, on whatever device, from wherever you like and it can all be centrally managed including app deployment, SSO to the applications you want with remediation of software failures or security issues. 

Its pretty powerful stuff.

6 minutes ago, Jack said:

I think you think that's a pro, when it's actually a con.

 

I'm a digital learning consultant by trade. Whilst I'm not technically an IT professional I am IT-adjacent and I fully appreciate the benefits of integration and management for an organisation. Active directory, single sign on and centralised MFA are all very useful tools to name just 3 and I do appreciate that my job would be extremely different without Teams. I might actually have to go into the office. Like, in town. My work provides a Thinkpad, it's a great piece of hardware and the Windows stuff doesn't bother me because I don't have to manage it. But I did have to wait 4 days last week for someone to reinstall Adobe Creative Cloud because a mandatory Windows update had broken CC, which meant that I couldn't actually use any of the Adobe apps that were already installed and working fine on my PC. But, the apps rely on CC... This is an Adobe problem for sure but if I hadn't been forced to upgrade and if all of the updaters actually talked to each other then we wouldn't have had this problem. Like, I dunno. sudo apt-get upgrade?

 

However, firstly all of those management things are possible on Linux too. Hell, our Windows servers are all virtualised anyway, running on Linux machines for stability. And secondly, none of that matters for a home user. Home users want to turn a computer on, have it work, and do something. They don't need an AI assistant, adverts, integration with xbox, adverts, candy crush, a million free trials, adverts, forced updates, adverts, an army of widgets vying for attention, adverts, everything starting on startup, adverts, antivirus software, or adverts. And if they do, they can install them.

I also work in IT and what people run as an OS is becoming less and less important to us, nor is the device they are using whether it’s an iPad or a PC.

Microsoft are supplying the glue to hold all of this together and make it secure. 

CA, modern auth, Ark, sentinel, intune(endpoint), office 365, team’s voice etc etc etc

Btw a properly implemented auto pilot deployment with a sys admin that knows how to use endpoint will solve all the problems you have listed.

14 minutes ago, Jack said:

I have been Windows-free (aside from the occasional gaming pc) since 2007.

 

I boot up my gaming rig once a week or so to play and it's just horrible. There was a time when Linux was an inconvenience compared to Windows, I was there, but those days are long gone. Modern distros like Mint and Ubuntu are user friendly in ways that leave Windows in the dust. What Windows has going for it is momentum: one knows how to do something on Windows almost by muscle memory, so Linux seems harder. It's not.

Microsoft has moved a long, long way from a PC operating system. I can’t explain just how much an E5 license brings to an organisation.

Microsoft has been phenomenal in reading the direction of travel in technology. 

Just to complicate matters I prefer Birchwood Casey Tru Oil

Used mainly for gunstocks but find the finish nicer than Tung or Danish.

From the smell I would say it contains Tung but isn’t as thick to apply.