Firefox has a dedicated “memshrink” team. If you haven’t checked in a while, you might be pleasantly surprised now. It generally uses less memory than Chrome these days (often a lot less). Memory usage is an ongoing effort.
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Download an Ubuntu CD, check the hash to make sure it hasn’t been tampered with during transit to you (hello, NSA), and then pave the system with it. Solved.
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As in, they’re both how the farmers label their beef?
Goodbye Infernal Exploder, hello desperate Halo reference…
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Public schools. Most of them block just about EVERYTHING on the web. What most school boards and administrators don’t realize (but all teachers do) is that students know how to get around the block.
That’s a project codename, not a product name. They rename the projects based on PR, branding, etc. (like most companies).
I once suggested that we codename the new version of MSN Explorer as “Project Lusitania” but no one was willing to take me up on it. I did get a quickly covered snrk from my boss in the corner. Most people didn’t seem to recognize the name.
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You’ve never worked at a company that uses a standard ISO to pump out computers for the end users? That is impossible, or you worked for companies with the worst IT management in history.
hmm…Microsoft? A few startups. Spry (who made “Internet in a Box” about 21 years ago). Mozilla.
All software companies. They hand you a laptop, you do what you want with it. If you want a DVD image to reinstall, you go for it. Done.
Oh, and when you work in software engineering on Windows (in whatever group you’re in) and you’re working with nightly builds of Windows and “Eating your own dogfood,” you install new operating systems on an almost daily basis. That’s when you learn the cardinal rule of “The user data partition is always a different partition than the OS partition.”
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Well software engineering/dev is a lot different than the mechanical engineer, forklift driver, office drone. If you have regularly compile code/test/etc reinstall things or even in my case I just support the tool for the coders but since it requires admin rights to change the settings so I can get in and fix their screw ups I got admin rights. I was strictly a server admin previously and as stated elsewhere we really do not need local admin anymore for our workstations.
In zero tolerance schools subverting the Internet firewall gets you expelled. Afterwards you get to attend the “special” school with the chronic public masturbators and other non-violent offenders.
Lucky here… Our IT group is relatively Laissez-faire, but that is mostly because our CEO insists that they not be too draconian unless there is obvious abuse that impacts security or function.
since the most recent combination of windows 7 update and chrome update i’m having a lot more issues with flash crashing my browser. i can’t open more than two tabs or windows at cracked without having the flash plug-in crash the browser. i haven’t used ie or firefox in quite a while, especially since my school district shifted to chrome and google docs last year.
For some people, perhaps. But I guarantee you that when they hire someone in accounting, they hand them a machine that has been imaged with a standard ISO that’s been updated regularly with Office, AV, patches, etc…
I have spent most of my IT life working for companies that had a large number of engineers - coders, hardware engineers, etc… - and yes, they had machines that they could do what they would with them. But they were also issued a standard laptop for work - email, office, etc… and that came with a standard image that was created and managed by IT.
Most people in an office don’t even need an actual computer anymore. The move is towards the virtual and people stuck in cubes in an office 40 hours a week should have a thin client, and people working from home often should be able to BYOD and use a VDI or other presented instance of Windows.
I’m an infrastructure engineer working primarily on Windows servers and VMware on hardware running said stuff.
I don’t need admin rights on the laptop they gave me. All my work is on the stuff I manage. And it certainly has a standard image on it.
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Avid is such a bizarre kludge. There’s a wintel machine for sound/video editing at work, and it’s not allowed net access, because Avid doesn’t play nice with AV software. It seems to be some weird palimpsest of code that everyone is terrified to fix so it actually interoperates with things.
I used to do first line helldesk for Apple, and Lynx was a lifesaver, as it meant I could read The Register at work without pointy-headed bosses knowing WTF I was up to. Thank god for the Terminal. 
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Apropos MS, I’m nowhere near the high flyer you are, but as per my comment above, I did helldesk for them too, and they were far, FAR better to work for as regards such things (as well as trust, a nice working environment, training and hiring intelligent staff) than Apple, who were fucking freaks.
(also, Apple insisted on using Lotus notes for everything. Lotus. Notes. This was when the iPhone came out. What was that? 2006, 2007?)
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Maybe at Microsoft. Not at the others.
Actually, I never had a bad thing to say about how I was treated as an employee at Microsoft beyond our hellish review process. I always felt well treated and the place was very human. The worst environment I’ve been in is a start up where they treated people like dirt.
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Yes, I guarantee at MS.
At the others - that is lame and inefficient.
/types ‘top’ into Terminal, gives @albill the hairy eyeball
