> Search Results

In 2015, the nascent Windows 10 was heralded as a return to form for Microsoft's Windows division, after a frustrating couple of years with the touchscreen-focused Windows 8 tarnished its brand. Windows 10 was mostly lauded by critics for jettisoning the things Windows 8 did poorly (the Metro UI, the Charms Bar, the ill-considered Start menu experience) and reinstating the things that Windows 7 did well. Generally, it was a positive release for Microsoft, in spite of dragging along the same ancient, rickety NT codebase that dates back to the early 2000s. As time went on, however, various 'feature' updates degraded the experience of Windows 10. These feature updates, along with Microsoft's more frequently released cumulative updates, often broke core operating system functionality, such as the ability to print, to connect to wireless networks, and to sign in using fingerprint sensors. I can't speak for everyone in the tech provider sphere, but managing Windows on both my personal computers and those belonging to clients, became more of a nightmare with each passing year. Microsoft's sysadmin tools for Windows have gotten better over time, but the Windows experience has gotten markedly worse. Besides the litany of functionality complaints that new updates to Windows 10 brought, there were also unwelcome changes to the user experience; to wit, Microsoft's idea that 'nagware' is something users would respond to. Enter Microsoft Edge. After the Windows 10 October 2020 update, users were hit with a specific nag from Microsoft to change their preferred browser back to Microsoft Edge. This was not well-received, as one might imagine. Not content to stop there, Microsoft implemented a perpetual nag that suggested users would be happier if they switched back to Edge, pinned at the top of the Windows Settings menu. As of September 2021, these nags cannot be disabled in consumer-facing versions of Windows (that is, versions other than Enterprise and Education). During Windows 7's tenure, such blatant intrusion into the user experience, a study in the definition of 'overweening', would've been rightly dismissed at the drawing board by the Windows division. The world has changed since Windows 7's introduction in 2009, alas. Advertising has become a dark art, and nowhere is sacred. This is not the legacy Microsoft should want for its flagship product. Now, in 2021, Windows 11 is set to release on October 5th, bringing with it a revamped user interface, 'deeply-integrated' Microsoft Teams, some changes to process/task scheduling, support for Android applications, and a few other technical odds and ends. Looking beyond the new coat of paint, Windows 11 is the same old Windows. Windows Updates will probably continue to break functionality and cause headaches for users and IT departments alike. Exploits that were deeply rooted in the Windows NT kernel, like the ongoing Print Nightmare exploit, will no doubt be carried forward into 11. As the Linux kernel continues to evolve, with major upstream software contributors such as Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and RedHat, Microsoft faces a technical hurdle with Windows that will likely be impossible to surmount without a total rethink of the operating system. Microsoft simply can't keep dragging the decrepit NT codebase forward, in perpetuity; to reach technical parity with Linux-based operating system and with macOS, the painful work of gutting NT must be done, and soon. As the already bloated Windows kernel grows ever larger, it will become harder to manage, less stable, more unpredictable, and easier for hackers to exploit. Perhaps Microsoft's work in the Windows Subsystem for Linux is telling of its future plans--perhaps to rebase Windows around the Linux kernel? Stranger things have happened, and it is Microsoft's historical prerogative to "embrace, extend, extinguish". The problem today is Microsoft's Windows product is a dinosaur in a rapidly changing world. Its cloud platform, Azure, is a completely different experience and receives the funding and development work a service with its client base demands. Windows, however, seems fated to wither and die on the vine, as it becomes nothing more, really, than yet another platform through which to serve ads. Microsoft's lust for technical dominance within Windows, which flourished under former CEO Bill Gates, seems a distant memory now. In spite of the tidal forces working against it, Windows will probably remain the dominant desktop operating system for some time. As malware, denial-of-service, ransomware, and other sophisticated security exploits become more commonplace, Geek Housecalls is here to secure your infrastructure and provide a path to data security and business resiliency, no matter what.

Atlassian, cloud software giant and developer of popular tools such as Jira and Confluence, suffered a service outage on April 5th, 2022, according to their service status page (https://status.atlassian.com/). Atlassian claims only around 400 of its 226,000 clients are affected, but that the process to restore service to those clients may take as long as another two weeks. In the meantime, Atlassian can't guarantee the affected customers won't lose data either due to the outage or during the rebuild process. Outages caused by botched updates or poorly-reviewed scripts aren't new in the cloud service provider world. Even giants like Amazon Web Services have unplanned downtime. The issue in Atlassian's case is that the company just doesn't seem to care very much about the losses this outage are causing for its clients. Aside from updates posted on the company's Twitter account, there has been a deafening silence about the prolonged service outage. The restore process appears to be very manual, requiring hundreds of Atlassian engineers to be deployed. Atlassian seems proud of the fact that they're working hard to fix an issue they and only they caused. The optics here really aren't great for Atlassian. Here, we arrive at a more general problem with the entire SaaS (software as a service) paradigm. We're entrusting giant tech companies who don't have very much accountability or external oversight with not only our data, but our livelihoods. Smaller tech companies have failed because bigger tech companies were incompetent. The trickle-down effects here are real. In absence of sweeping regulation of giant, abusive tech companies, having a local, proactive tech solutions provider like Geek Housecalls can only improve your chances of surviving a widespread or long-lasting cloud service outage. We are advocates, always, of local backups and on-premises infrastructure specifically because of the spotty reliability and ever-changing service terms of big cloud service companies. Your data is not backed up if it is only backed up to the cloud. Your software isn't really your software if it exists purely as a service on a cloud provider's servers. This isn't to say you don't *need* cloud services to achieve greater operational efficiency in your own business, or that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater; it is to say, however, that consolidation in tech is bad for all of us and that redundancy can mean the difference between life and death for your business. Get in touch with Geek Housecalls today for a free review of your business's IT situation and let us offer you peace of mind that, in the next outage, your business doesn't go down with the ship.

After two solid years of upheaval wrought by the pandemic, prevailing winds within the U.S. corporate edifice suggest a lot of managers and executives want their employees back in the office, even if their jobs are easily done from home. Is there some hidden rationale for the sturm und drang these managers feel about their employees working from home? Is there a justification for making them return to their offices? Considering that so many tech jobs, and jobs within the larger knowledge economy, can be done from any location with a decent Internet connection, no, there is no real justification for this managerial angst over remote work. So what is the impetus for dragging people back into the offices? It's fairly straightforward: in spite of the wealth of evidence that a manager might claim he has that employees are more productive in the office, the truth is that manager just wants to be able to keep the employee under his thumb. When did so much of work become adult daycare? Companies have long had access to tools to monitor employees' computer screens, check how long they're idle or away from their desks, as well as log which websites and services employees access on company time. In fact, these tools have only gotten more powerful in recent years; managers are not wanting for employee analytics. Given this, it seems self-evident that the drive to get employees back in their cars, back to sitting in rush hour traffic for a pointlessly lengthy commute, is not a function of any empirical evidence at all. It's just desperate functionaries in middle management, trying to prove their own relevance by having asses in seats to "manage". Perhaps this says more about the necessity of a great many managers than it does about employees not wanting to return to the office. "Too many chiefs, not enough Indians", as the saying goes. What can you do, in your own white-collar job? Don't go back into the office. Plenty of outfits are more than willing to let people work remote now, in 2022, pandemic or not. The status quo is dead, in so many ways. During this Great Resignation of ours, the worker has more 'hand' than he ever did, to borrow a euphemism from Seinfeld. Let your unwillingness to knuckle under to inferior minds on this particular issue serve as a larger message to brown-shoe corporate practitioners: you're an adult human, your work life has as much value as your non-work life, you have skills, and you refuse to be monitored in a cubicle for 40 hours a week.