Tribalinius

I'm sure it will go as smoothly as usual haha. Tech 1: "Did you do the modification in Entra?" Tech 2: "Azure AD?" Tech 1: "Yeah." Tech 2: "Yeah." I get they want to put AAD under an IAM umbrella with all the other identiy products and consolidate some endpoints together, but I doubt Microsoft ID will resonate a lot with the pro community. Azure Active Directory is going to stick in workplace discussions, I'd wager 2$ on this. It's just going to create confusion in our teams, at least in the short term. I wonder how long they will keep it until they are fed up with admins telling them it's a dumb name for such a core product and re-establish the "AAD" name haha. While it's not actually exactly the same thing, they did something similar with Intune. Even when they pushed it as "Endpoint Manager", people were still referring it to Intune and basically tracked back and changed the branding of Microsoft Endpoint Manager to Microsoft Intune. I can see a similar scenario playing out where Entra becomes Azure Active Directory and the directory part being called Microsoft ID.

If anyone is desperate enough, I'm selling my Switch + my 250+ physical games for 16k CAD. Get it while it's hot!

I can't wait to see Bottas 3.0 in action too!

I was sure somebody, at some point, would bring up SQL Server licensing haha. To be honest, even if it does not cost as much, normal Windows Server licensing model is kind of whack too. I haven't checked 2019 licensing but it's probably the same thing as 2016. You buy 2 core packs until you cover all your cpu(s) for 2 vms then you multiply these core packs for the total number of vms you need. Honestly it costs a crap ton of money to get a local infrastructure up and running these days. Between the physical hardware, VMWare, Windows Server, Veeam, Exchange and SQL to name a few. The numbers add up quickly. That's the main reason why our company decided to focus primarily on AWS and Azure and mostly part ways with local infrastructures deployment. We deal with SMBs mainly and I haven't had a single case in the last 2 years where it was making sense to deploy a local setup over a Cloud one except in remote areas where we can't trust the Internet reliability / have redundancy available. One of the problem with deploying local infrastructure today in my opinion, at least in my sector, is the huge upfront cost the customer need to pay. I just dug out a random quotation I did on a whim for a 30 employees~ company 3 years ago. Nothing fancy, 4-6 vms + exchange iirc, To get them up and running, just in hardware and software (I don't even add our consultation fees, installation, migration, etc.), we were looking at 30k CAD$. I did not even include VMWare in it because the customer wanted to use Hyper-V but it would have been an another couple of thousands just to add VMWare in the mix.

I hesitated a lot last year between the WH1000XM3 and the Sennheiser HD1. I tested both and ultimately went with the HD1 because of a killer deal I could not turn down. I don't regret my choice because it's a super nice pair of can but I would have liked all the extra features the WH1000XM3 have over the HD1.

You can define static streaming keys in YouTube with your recording preferences. Even though you can "bind" the streaming key and "start" a stream (meaning that YouTube receives data) in OBS, unfortunately I don't think you can programmatically automate the process of pressing the "go live" button in YouTube Studio. It's been a while since I've done any stream but it requires to go through "preview" mode first than you commit to start the stream once preview is ok.

I really dig the Blad Runner vibe. I'd drive that around. I'm too old to give a f*** of people's opinion if they saw me with that anyway ?!

I work with them all the time to make sure that they don't have to do stupid shit and "bypass" IT. I'm there to make sure they can do their work properly and to secure things out for the company. I understand both the users point of views and management point of views and I'm paid to analyze these point of views, make recommendations and implement them in that environment. I don't have issues with people proposing stuff if they make sense. I have issues with smart asses who think who know better and tries to do stupid shit once new rules and procedures are in place. They will be reported if they get caught up, system will be patched up to plug these holes. Unfortunately, sometimes it leads up to people getting fired (happened twice in my career so far) because they don't want play by the company rules. Why I'm alone? Usually it's because the IT administrator before me left and the company calls us to take over IT to strengthen their environment and make sure their infrastructure runs smoothly before they find a suitable replacement admin/team. I'm just a contractor doing my work, making recommendations and implementing them. I'm in for a couple of weeks/months then I move to an another environment.

As @dalekphalm mentionned, the problem lies within the organization and how things are handled inside of it in your case. Unfortunately, if the external IT team mandate is just to make sure everything work to keep IT cost at a minimum, locking everything down is a "great way" to do it and you should not expect anymore from them. That's a business decision they took. The overall mentality varies from companies to companies regarding permissions. Some cares, some don't, some only want to cut cost. I've been catapulted in the middle of so many situations over the last 10 years, from completely locked down environments to wide open environments, that I can say openly that I prefer a locked down environment, especially if I'm the only one dealing with that said environment for a while. Usually it revolves around poor GPO/security planning/implementation in the first place anyway. At least it gives me time to work on them instead of having to do some sort of system restore because the CEO decided to catch a cryptolocker while watching a russian porn website on working hours. On a personal administrator level, after I'm done cleaning AD / creating/modifying GPOs / managing security/permissions, you better have a really good reason and good arguments to back that reason for me to give you special permissions ;).

I'll gladly accept any APU thrown my way. Those suckers are little beasts!

We sure hear a lot about PCIe lately. PCIe 6.0 will be bound for 2021 if news are true. It just feels like PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 were rushed and are just stop gap until PCI 6.0 is released.

Eh, I never noticed that / paid enough attention before, but it makes total sense since it's already hooked up to the network. Good to know though. I don't do fresh installs a lot anymore, apparently I'm paid too much to not let people under me take care of that ?.

The ISO must have been updated not too long ago, I installed a W10 Home 2 weeks ago and the option was still there. I'm not exactly surprised to see Microsoft go to that extent the way they got out of their way to try to convince you to use a Microsoft account. There's advantages to use a Microsoft account but man did they mess that up. Unless they backpedaled somehow, you can't even create a Microsoft account using a work email that has a domain associated to Azure AD anymore. But you can't sign in with your Office 365 account because Office 365/Microsoft accounts are not associated together. Ugh, that's some 2019 Microsoft right there.

That's some good news for the office space. I've bought a couple dozen of Lenovo M715q for customers lately and I've heard only good feedbacks from them. The 2400GE is a very capable chip so I'm glad to see an upgrade coming soon.

My default browser has been Firefox all the way since beta. It's not a perfect browser but it's been really stable since they released Quantum. I do need to use IE/Edge/Chrome for different reasons due to work but Chrome has been the most fun to watch grow into a mutant monster in the last years.

Don't underestimate people's laziness to learn it and the "almighty law 101". Unfortunately, there's a lot of people that don't have a "functional" level of English because they haven't spoke in English since high school/college or just don't care. Hell, most of my friends vocabulary is limited to yes, no, toaster and tupperware. I've started doing YT videos lately both in English (Tech videos) and French (Pokémon cards openings) and I'm seriously thinking about doing half and half openings from now on and just add subtitles manually because why not? There would be some merit to do some stuff in French but I don't see why they would cater specifically to a smaller market. I don't follow any French techtubers but I'm sure there's a lot of them already. LTT would only be a +1 in that space anyway.

I have a 3 months old baby at home, I'm in IT and my girlfriend is a psychology teacher in college. That's going to be a rough ride to keep her away from screens but that's our plan. I'm Sorry, but I don't see any real meaningful reasons to hand her a smartphone when she will be going to school. If she needs to call us, she'll just go to the reception desk and the school will find a way to reach us, you know, like we used to do 20 years ago. "but if...", she's going to be on the school bus from and to home. Snapchat and texting are not part of the curriculum.

I can't stop thinking about Lisa Su secretly wanting to be the first to use the words "kilocore" and "kilothread" on stage ?. Better get ready to hear that, we're not too far away from it.

I haven't had my morning coffee yet, but I kinda remember Microsoft had something that work similarly with computers running Windows 10 and are joined to an Azure domain where and administrator could push a fresh install over the Internet. If that's the case, they got something like that in the pipe for at least a year now. I may be confusing 2-3 things though.

Banned accounts are banned, meaning the person won't have access to that specific account whatever they do because it's been terminated. Suspensions work the same way since it's basically putting you in timeout. Nothing prevent someone to use a VPN and burner email addresses to create new accounts since your origin point is different and that email address is not registered on their system. Unless the provider can actually tell two accounts are linked together, they will be treated as separate entities.

Actually, I find the concept pretty interesting. The tiny form factor PC behind a monitor concept is nothing new but it's certainly the most efficient way of doing it I've seen so far. Need to swap the computer in the stand for something a tad more powerful? You just need to pop in the new replacement. You need a bigger screen? You plug in a new monitor and off you go. If Dell is committed to support this for a long time, I can see it being successful. It combines the advantages of both a tiny form factor PC and an AIO without too much of their disadvantages. You can change the computer/parts easily, you can change the monitor, it has a small desk footprint, it's aesthetically pleasing. To be honest, It checks a lot of boxes for businesses.

I live and breathe with my ThinkPad. We're an IT consultation firm and are allowed to pick whatever fits our work and need the best in the T / X1 series. We also get to order as many accessories we want as long as it's justified. You need 2 docking stations and 6 screens to be the most productive because reasons? Yeah, go ahead buddy. Money is not really an issue when it's your everyday tool and companies depends on you. I often jokingly compare our computer setups as F1 steering wheels in meetings as they all have a "special" something and the layout is different for each of us. I'll give credit to my boss for that, he's not stingy on hardware. He knows that we will be more productive if we have the right equipment.

Really cool to see AMD processors in T models. I'm was already entertaining the idea to swap my T460s for an X1 Carbon 7th gen at launch next month. I'll give the T495s some consideration.

Honestly, it feels relatively spot on for the normal consumers from my personal experience but I feel it's not painting the entire picture either. It's clearly targeted at consumers because it would be different in the commercial space. I would have probably put Acer further down the list because I had really bad experiences on multiple occasions with their tech support since the mid-2000s, especially with their consumer line. I'm done with them. The one I'm most surprised with is definitely Lenovo though. We resell Lenovo servers/computers/laptops at work and I deal with the commercial tech support on a fairly regular basis. Granted we're not necessarily using the same communication channel as the writer of the article but I don't recall having really bad experiences with tech support in the last couple of years. I usually call for standard stuff like blown up HDDs or fried server boards so it's pretty straight forward when dealing with them. If we need specific information that we really can't find in their online documentation or further information regarding a piece of hardware/software for, let's say, compatibility issues in a quote, I ping my supplier that forward my questions to a Lenovo rep that get in touch with me afterward usually in the day or at most 24h later. I had about the same experience with HP when I used to resell their stuff. It just felt a bit more convoluted when it came to their documentation but I always had helpful people when needed. I can't speak for Dell but if you buy 10 of thousands of dollars worth of equipment every year and you have a dedicated rep for your account, I'm sure you are getting a response back in a matter of hours if not minutes lol. I'm not sure I would get the same level of treatment from ASUS in the commercial space. But yeah, if we were not spending in the hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment every year, they would probably not care about us that much and I'd be stuck with normal communication channel with them.

We should also not forget they partnered with Aquantia for autonomous car networking last year. They probably have fingers in multiple pies at the moment. https://hothardware.com/news/nvidia-selects-aquantia-for-multi-gig-connectivity-on-drive-px-autonomous-vehicle-platforms