To be clear, I’m Belgian and in favour of abolishing monarchy. But as the news about her is unavoidable: she did study at the royal military academy as all in line for the throne have too. Then she went to Oxford for her Bachelor degree. Plan was to get the master at Harvard.

The justification is partly elitism for those schools, partly getting exposed to other environments, and partly getting too avoid being to isolated in Belgian schools where the attention would be inevitable and security too hard.

I would agree that right now there are more choices. I don’t entirely agree they’re inherently safer. Nor that this choice would have been available as a choice when the original decision was made. (At a time when the US was at the very least considered to be an ally to Europe)

If you think security of infrastructure has anything to do with PGP you’re misunderstanding what I mean. Self hosting mail for an organisation like the ICC would require multiple FTE’s. In the same vein that the current US administration is retaliating against them other rogue nations are constantly specifically targeting them. It’s already hard to deal with this without being specifically targeted and a couple times being targeted usually causes you to be compromised, dealing with it full time is almost impossible. Unless your team is monstrously big and securing your groupware is one of your core activities.

I’ve literally had jobs like this, and the idea that the average university that self hosts is more secure than Exchange Online is just plain wrong. I’m sure you can point to a couple of them that are safer of course, but they 'll be the exception.

Which is why I specifically phrased the part you didn’t quote in that specific way.

If you think you can set up mail infrastructure with on premise everything that is available to your not on premise workers safer than Microsoft, you will be spending a huge amount of money to do so.

It just turns out that the US has become a rogue state that alligns with the type of war criminals and dictators that the ICC wants to prosecute. I really don’t think anyone would have predicted this 10 to 15 years ago when this mail choice was made.

Indeed, and the environmental factors aren’t the only problem with gas turbines. I’m not going to pretend I am an expert at what is the best solution but interviews I’ve read with experts that speak about the Belgian context. (Which is so densely built there’s not much room for anything) It was the best way balance the grid if more investments were made in solar and wind energy. The reason it didn’t happen is because it was deemed uninteresting because not profitable enough.

So the alternative that was chosen was doing nothing an extending the life of nuclear plants that are working way beyond their planned life and giving the commercial company managing them guarantees they’ll continue making money. Building new nuclear capacity will take longer than a gas turbine and they can’t just be shut down and torn down for something else when better alternatives come along. And this is usually cheered on by people who think they’re smart by pointing out that if you’re in favour of renewables you can’t be pragmatic about dealing with it’s current problems. While those people very often are against more renewables and just want unending nuclear as if that’s a magic bullet.

The fact that making money is one of the, if not the most important, considerations in this equation is the main problem with this. It simply should be a public service.

That won’t automatically solve all of the other problems but many of the solutions to this problems aren’t considered because they are not profitable, even though they exist. An easy example being gas turbine plants which are much easier to spin up and down as required. But perfectly meeting the needs of all people means there’s no artificial scarcity and thus lower profits.

And your arguments have the strength of the hobbyist with the homelab he’s constantly having to reinstall, not understanding why companies are so stupid to not do the same thing as him.

If you think SSO and easy profile migration doesn’t save time, there’s simply no point in discussing it with you. I don’t like MS and their near monopoly position as a company much either. But that doesn’t mean every product they make is utter trash for every situation.

There are undoubtedly other solutions but to pretend every one is too dumb to use them shows how little actual experience working in a variety of companies is.

Back in the nineties you might have had Novell NetWare or just plain old LDAP instead of AD, but unlike those competitors AD kept working and offered upgrade trajectories. And it offered decent integration with a decent mailserver (that ofcourse sucked to set up securely for outside access), and that mailserver was fantastic versus the utterly terror that was Domino combined with Notes. I don’t like MS for basically forcing you to go to their cloud now, but pretending it’s a bad product through and through on a functional level is just being willingly blind.

It integrates very well with your M365 you need at work, and it saves a ton of time when people can use SSO to basically get everything up and running immediately on a new laptop. Including bookmarks and passwords.

By default I install unblock on any user machine I touch because it’s equal parts user experience and security.

Fair enough, though from my use case, which was mostly support, it worked fantastic.

Well that’s cool at least.

I honestly don’t know. Just figured that if I see them on Formula 1 cars with other despicable companies they most likely are horrible too.

Salesforce specifically? Global availability for 1000’s of users simultaneously. While integrating with mail and VoIP services are easy ones off the top of my head. It’s extremely expensive but a hidden cost on top of that is actually configuring and maintaining it well. The initial fine-tuning for large orgs will take years for example. But if it’s done it’s actually a joy to work with, especially if you switched from a half-baked solution like a graphical shell over a FoxPro database or something.

At a previous employer of mine the helpdesk side was integrated to it and it was brilliant. All calls and mails were autoregistered and after using it for a while more and better answer templates were included. (Templates we could modify with situation specific parts as well) The template approval process was another great example as technical experts from different continents were part of a review committee to make sure only good solutions were allowed, and after that local experts could add translations of the templates.

I’m sure there are many things morally wrong with Salesforce the company, but a well implemented instance of it is a dream to work with.

That screen didn’t exist in Win XP. If it had, it would have been a different shade of blue. This is either Win10 though I suspect it’s Win11.

Thanks, will check that out.

Command line stuff on Windows (server) is in a pretty decent state now, imo. It’s not perfect but more and more is manageable with powershell. It took some time to really grok that you’re basically always working with objects but I’m a big fan and now quite dislike having to deal with just “text” output when I do something in Linux. (Probably also because I need to do a lot less in it so I’m not used to it as much)

Personally again I also like the naming scheme much more than how it’s done in bash. If I need to do something I don’t know I can search the command by using logical words. E.g. I want to change the properties of a service but don’t know the command by heart I can use

Get-Command service

And I’ll get a list of all commands that contain the word service.

When it comes to admin privileges you simply have the privileges of the account you used to start the session, which has its’ own dangers I suppose since it requires you to maintain account hygiene yourself.

There should be a good GUI for everything but a terminal offers more options to do certain things a lot faster. Especially in work environments. And once you’re used to this level of efficiency and control you’re not likely to stop doing that in your home network.