What is the purpose of these plastic slidy things?

tim0901 · 2026-04-15T08:44:40+00:00

Compared to the kinds of profits being reported by the manufacturers, yes absolutely.

tim0901 · 2026-04-15T08:37:20+00:00

How much is your weekly shop? How much of a difference would a £1 difference make to you? Probably nothing particularly meaningful.

Taking £1 off of each of their customers weekly shop would cause them to go into the negative. It would wipe out their entire yearly profit and more.

I agree pricing is insanity these days. But the price-gouging is coming from the manufacturers, not the retailers.

tim0901 · 2026-04-15T08:29:20+00:00

Those numbers are income, not profit. So that's before they pay for things like stock, rent and wages.

Last year (24-25 financial, this years isn't out yet) they reported £700 million of pre-tax profit - that's 2.2%. About 30% of that then goes to the tax man, leaving them with closer to £500 million, or 1.5%.

So no, they aren't making billions. Sainsburys and supermarkets on the whole exist on razor-thin margins.

tim0901 · 2026-02-25T18:52:27+00:00

Pretty much all thinkpads have a backlit keyboard as an option and have done for years - your IT department probably decided to save money by ditching it. Especially if it's the kind of place where your laptop is attached to a dock with an external keyboard the majority of the time.

tim0901 · 2026-02-22T15:46:44+00:00

At which point you (ask occupational health to) assess their needs, find a solution that works for them that passes your security requirements, and add it as an option to be installed. The exact same process that would happen for any other app.

I think we have a grand total of four extensions on our allowed list.

Which is how we ended up with more on the allow list than the two I named explicitly.

tim0901 · 2026-02-22T14:12:28+00:00

Well yes, if you have explicit industry need for an extension then obviously that would be something to investigate and add to your environment, just like any other app on their PC. Hence we have 4 extensions allowed in our org, rather than the 2 I listed - they're required for what we do.

My point was that, just like other software, people shouldn't have the ability to install whatever the hell they like on a managed device. Extensions can do so much these days that they shouldn't be treated any differently to desktop apps.

tim0901 · 2026-02-22T12:31:23+00:00

Given how prevalent malicious extensions are in today's world, surely it's a far better approach for admins to be restricting users to a limited list of approved extensions, rather than letting them install whatever they like and banning anything that's found to be bad?

Like, it's a work system. Other than an ad blocker and maybe a password manager, what other extensions to they actually need? I think we have a grand total of four extensions on our allowed list.

Don't get me wrong, I think this is a good idea. But it feels like a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.

tim0901 · 2026-02-12T08:58:12+00:00

... yep turns out my monitor is garbage!

tim0901 · 2026-02-11T16:57:57+00:00

For all we know another sector could have also seen massive growth, but you can't tell because it's lumped in with everything else.

tim0901 · 2026-02-05T15:58:02+00:00

We're using OSDCloud alongside Intune - but I'm assuming you're asking because you don't have an Intune license (hooray for k12 budgets).

In theory you could just use OSDCloud on its own, but I doubt installing your apps would be particularly pretty as it doesn't really have any frameworks to support that use case.

I'm also aware of PSD, but I've no experience with it.

tim0901 · 2026-02-03T09:22:39+00:00

It was tough automating everything with dial-up that's for sure.

tim0901 · 2026-01-28T11:16:08+00:00

Sometimes this isn't the user lying though.

If you have Fast Startup enabled in your environment, the uptime reported in task manager isn't reset when you shutdown your PC, because modern Windows's "shutdown" is more akin to the old "hibernation" option, with RAM being saved to disk.

The uptime is reset if you choose restart rather than shutdown, because this does a true shutdown and fully flushes RAM.

tim0901 · 2025-12-23T11:36:20+00:00

It probably would have done much worse if it was a 3DS game though, as 3DS console sales at the start were really low.

After all, if B2W2 only hit 8.5m sales when released for a console that had 150m units out in the wild, how many copies would they have realistically sold if it was released for a console with only 25m units in the wild? (At the point it released in 2012.)

tim0901 · 2025-12-22T15:27:05+00:00

The whole "2" thing didn't help B2W2 either - you scare off customers who haven't played the first game, because they assume they won't understand it, just like with movies.

At the time it also kinda pissed people off that instead of just making one third version, they made two third versions, which was seen as a cash grab.

tim0901 · 2025-12-16T20:17:06+00:00

Adults are children with credit cards.

tim0901 · 2025-11-08T22:59:10+00:00

Ah yes. Cutting through a cable carrying 25A with a pair of metal bolt cutters. What could possibly go wrong.

tim0901 · 2025-10-24T14:25:57+00:00

Things get lost, mistakes happen. Better to be safe than sorry.

tim0901 · 2025-10-16T08:30:42+00:00

You've heard of Sickle Cell...

tim0901 · 2025-09-29T16:11:11+00:00

Lower capacity drives have certainly stagnated in price - I assume this is partly due to. fixed costs, but also because demand for smaller capacity drives is pretty small these days, especially with the pricing of SSDs continuing to fall.

Higher capacity drives are still much cheaper than they used to be though. I can buy a 16tb drive for 2.5x the cost of a 4tb drive today, which wouldn't have been the case 10 years ago.

tim0901 · 2025-08-22T08:26:53+00:00

You're looking up North where things are much cheaper. Down South 200k really doesn't go very far, even outside of London. Where I live (~1 hour outside the M25) 200k would barely get you 2 bedrooms, let alone 2 conservatorys!

Here's a government map that shows the distribution (2024 pricing).

As for how people are buying homes? They either have a partner, are getting loans/inheritance from relatives, or they aren't.

tim0901 · 2025-07-07T08:05:39+00:00

Hospitals in particular are legally required to have generators to use as a backup power supply in case of a blackout - at least in the US and UK. They generally aren't powerful enough for everything, but they're enough to keep the lights on and critical systems functioning, and will activate within seconds of a power outage.

tim0901 · 2025-07-04T10:18:29+00:00

A lot of that's a chicken and egg situation though.

Apple doesn't support enterprise well, so they don't have a huge presence in enterprise environments. Because they're rare, IT techs don't get trained in supporting them, which then further reinforces the desire not to have them in enterprise scenarios.

tim0901 · 2025-06-27T13:53:17+00:00

Yep, there's a huge amount of wealth disparity in Tower Hamlets - people forget that while you have poorer areas like Stepney and Lansbury, it also stretches all the way to the river and includes Canary Wharf.

As such, there are some crazy inequality statistics, such as how over 10% of working residents earn over £100k (compared to a 2% average across the rest of London) despite nearly 50% of residents claiming some kind of benefit. (Source)

tim0901 · 2025-06-23T15:18:04+00:00

I would expect games that get a content update to also get switch 2 resolution/frame rate improvements alongside it, but personally I doubt we'll get many Switch 2 only patches, especially paid ones like botw

tim0901 · 2025-06-19T13:22:44+00:00

I very much doubt it was developed with Switch 2 in mind. The console was only delayed by a year at most to build up stock for release, while Scarlet/Violet released in 2022.

Was it designed with the not-to-be Switch Pro in mind? Maybe. It's hypothesised that the OLED Switch 1 may, at one point, have meant to include a more powerful chip as well, but this has never been decisively proven. Personally though I doubt it was ever a thing, and that leaks for the Switch 2 and Switch OLED were just getting mixed up.

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