I'm trying it on a Mac now, where it's being rolled out as an update / rebrand of Microsoft Remote Desktop. The core RDP functions are unchanged, all that's added there is a Favourite option. We don't use RemoteApps (apps hosted on Terminal Server), but that was there before too. The new functionality appears to be for Azure Virtual Desktops in particular, which we don't use either. So it's a nothingburger for existing Microsoft Remote Desktop users

Today the problem is a CrowdStrike update causing a BSOD. It's only a "Cloud" problem in that the update got to a lot of PCs very quickly. Microsoft's own Cloud services are not involved.

The problem is Crowdstrike on Windows causing a BSOD. Microsoft's own services are not part of the problem.

Attacking your opponent during Primary season is no obstacle to a Veep nod. George HW Bush was very harsh on Reagan's policies in 1980, and invented the phrase "voodoo economics" in the process, but still spent 8 years as Veep.

I think I spotted one during a second interview earlier this year. The first interview with two people (HR & Tech) went OK, but for the second interview I was called to a private meeting with the department head. He wasn't obviously aggressive but seemed abnormally focused on something he had been told about me from the first interview. Something vague about not being quite as enthusiastic and driven as he expects from everyone there. I got the impression that he was hard on his people and had fixed expectations about how they would perform the job. At that point I could have faked more enthusiasm, but the workplace and his attitude put me off and I basically "spiked" the interview by not trying much harder. I never heard from them again, and still think I dodged a bullet there.

I'm happy with Firefox on my home PC, iPad and Android phone for general use, but on the two portable devices I also use Firefox Focus for those quick "just find something" situations. On the PC, recent versions of Firefox have actually gotten a little better in resource usage terms. but it has 24GB of RAM, so I don't mind if it uses some of that.

I dunno ... I heard good things about this, got to see it, and thought it was awful. I don't know if it was the direction or the editing, or the combination, but I thought it was really badly made. By 1/3 of the way through I could see where the story was going to go, and hoped it would subvert my expectations and surprise me. It didn't. Brendan Gleeson did his best.

An early film by Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants), starring Matthew Broderick as a high school teacher and a young Reese Witherspoon as an ambitious student. They clash over the election for school president, which doesn't sound like much at first, but there is a lot going on. Witherspoon is absolutely terrifying, not just for what she is but what she represents. It's an early career stand-out performance that only helped her rise. In the first minute we think we already know her type, then by the third minute we get a "wait ... what?" revelation that reveals a whole side to her that has the potential to change the whole complexion of the story. I won't say any more, except that by the end I was left wondering what the hell had happened. You could write a thesis on the "why".

You can just stop right there. Healthcare - at least essential care - is not a free market and can never be. Local monopolies form naturally, with many areas being served by a single HMO. Ambulance companies do not compete on price, since a patient that calls 911 has no say over what happens next. You do not have a choice of hospital: they do not compete on price either. A patient on a ward is a captive, essentially, with only the option of refusal of treatment available if he or she is sufficiently conscious.

The USA needs to catch up with the rest of the world and stop trying to make the "free market" do everything. State healthcare, such as the NHS in the UK, is not even "socialism", since healthcare is not a "means of production". It is a service supporting the overall health of a country, through the health of its people i.e. it's naturally a government role, even if you are a capitalist (as I am).

Another huge contributor of CO2 is the production of Portland cement for concrete: the current method produces about 10% of global CO2 emissions.

Note that Ticketmaster UK handles processing for Ireland too, so if you've used ticketmaster.ie in the last 6 months, the advisory applies to you too.

I have never liked the phone, for one simple reason: a phone call is an interruption. The caller is interrupting me, and unless I'm calling a call centre, I'm interrupting someone else. I worked in a call centre for a while, both making and taking calls, and saw how massively inefficient the whole call handling business is; all the wasted time and frustration that goes along with that.

Apart from prearranged calls, I now view phone calls as for emergencies only, mostly for things that genuinely cannot wait and which justify interrupting someone else's work. Nearly everything we do does not fall in to that category.

As I expected, there's a guy in that article telling people that they have to "proactively upskill". That's great: but upskill in what? The IT industry is so fragmented, it's near-impossible to pick a direction in which to upskill, Courses cost money, and doing it yourself could cost you hundreds of hours, and for what? Time and/or money wasted on a niche technology that will be out of fashion next year?

Employers need to do more than just sit back and wait for the resumés with the skills they want to land on their desks. If you expect older employees to upskill, they need guarantees that the effort required will pay off, and not be a dead end. And no, "follow your passion" is not going to cut it. Who has "passion" for (say) yet another Javascript framework?

"Fewer."

One of my computers is one of those cheap hybrid tablets that Walmart sold a few years ago, with the detachable keyboard. It's OK as a tablet for casual browsing while e.g. watching TV. It's a bit underspecced, and struggled to run Firefox, but FF57 is much better on it. Faster and memory usage is lower (so less swapping). My only annoyance is the lack of NoScript, but uMatrix is covering that requirement for now.