Channel 9 - Discussions by fatfrank

Coffeehouse - Microsoft outside the US

fatfrank — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 11:12:51 GMT

ZippyV said:

fatfrank said:

*snip*

And which dev centre is creating the localized versions?

Ireland localizes for all the European languages

Coffeehouse - Microsoft outside the US

fatfrank — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 11:24:43 GMT

ZippyV said:

Or speech recognition in Windows and Office.

Microsoft doesn't spend any money on development or marketing in Europe.

A lot of MSFT's dev teams are outside the US - EPDC (Ireland), Beijing, and India. there's quite a few thousand dev headcount in those centers.

Coffeehouse - MS in France

fatfrank — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:45:38 GMT

blowdart said:

ZippyV said:

*snip*

And China. And a little in Ireland.

A bit more than "a little" in Ireland. It's the biggest Microsoft dev facility outside of Redmond.

Coffeehouse - MS in France

fatfrank — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:48:40 GMT

ZippyV said:

pierreleclercq said:

*snip*

Development happens in Redmond and India.

Also in Dublin (localisation) and Copenhagen (Dynamics).

Coffeehouse - photostory team...wake up

fatfrank — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 13:58:26 GMT

what windows 7 build are you using? works fine for me

Coffeehouse - Developer Interview Questions

fatfrank — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 23:13:08 GMT

blowdart wrote:

Minh wrote:

That question is designed to show how superior the intervierER is to the lowly interviewEE

The ability to determine another person's destiny is a powerful drug! Don't OD on it, blowdart

Ah it's a good excuse that when you don't get a job isn't it? But frankly is a load of bull.

Do you think I want to spend 3 hours travelling to and from the office to go through what is a painful process interviewing someone just to show off? No. When interviewing you'll find that most people want the interviewee to pass, they're looking for someone to fill a position, there is a need for another body.

What they're not looking for is someone *wrong* to fill it.

Minh has a very valid point.

The question is a classical "halo effect" one, where the interviewer is looking to impose their perceived superiority on the candidate. Whilst this can go badly wrong in a number of ways, fundamentally it doesn't really assess the candidate ability for the job and just wastes everyone's time.

Where you really see it in reality is interviews where the interviewer talks most of the time. If the candidate isn't talking for at least 75% of the session then the interviewer is not doing their job right. This is where a lot of tech interviews fall down - deeply technical people are fundamentally not good at probing people's competencies. Instead they cover up their lack of social skills by talking about their comfort zone.

I've been interviewing for quite some time, and my conclusion is that focusing on pure tech in an interview is pretty pointless. You can always teach someone technology if they have the ability and the intent. Teaching someone common sense, interpersonal awareness, collaborative teamworking, and a positive work ethic is impossible though. So the latter is what you really need to focus on as an interviewer. And there's no specific question for that - it's not binary (which again is why deep techies are not ideal personalities for recruitment).

Coffeehouse - And this year's 'smug hypocrisy' award goes to ....

fatfrank — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 14:00:06 GMT

creditcard wrote:

Bas wrote:
I wonder what the Mac icon on Windows could look like. A turtleneck and beret? A hand with only an index finger?

Does Windows support NFS yet?

it has done for over 10 years...

Coffeehouse - Microsoft Certs, are the books any good?

fatfrank — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 09:03:20 GMT

W3bbo wrote:

dahat wrote:
Take a look at the 70-300 requirements page and read in horror and see that they aren't talking about variable names... but processes and standards.

Ugh, sounds more soul-draining than GCSE ICT coursework.

I wonder how many Microsoft employees had Microsoft's own certification/qualifications before they got hired.

Well in customer facing technical roles such as pre-sales, support and consulting, certification is something that recruiters definitely look for. It's not necessarily about the certification detail itself, it is more of a marker that you have a certain skills baseline AND are prepared to take the initiative to formally prove it.

If you're hired in one of those roles in Microsoft and you're not certified to MCSE/MCSD/MCDBA level (accreditation type dependant on role obviously) then you have 12 months to do so.

Coffeehouse - England's Tech Industry?

fatfrank — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 08:49:20 GMT

leeappdalecom wrote:

Ireland is pretty simuilar to england except the wages and cost of living are a bit lower.

too generalistic - the salaries in the north of Ireland are pretty much the same as the north of England, as is the cost of living.

Salaries in Dublin are generally a little bit lower than the south of England, but the cost of living is a bit higher.

The job market is pretty good for permies but there's less of a contract ethos compared to England.

Coffeehouse - Exchange Your Career

fatfrank — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 09:53:37 GMT

W3bbo wrote:

blowdart wrote:

W3bbo wrote:

FNGs at Microsoft get a corridor office with no windows or natural light. And according to the Internets, you'll be on ~$60,000

Perfect for you then. Apply; and beat them until they support multiple domains and catch all addresses easily.

And "Notes" in Outlook Web Access.
Removing "DoPostBack" from Outlook Mobile Access and make it all Request Resource-based
Making Outlook Web Access Lite not suck when it comes to compliance with the W3C specs

"To the spirit" too, so let's ditch the non-datatables, mmm'key?

Notes are in OWA, at least they are on my 2007 mailbox.

As for the other points - who cares, really. No, really. There are 100's of millions of Exchange users, pretty of much all of whom just want to send email and receive it.

Coffeehouse - Gateway laptop needs rid of VISTA

fatfrank — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 09:20:06 GMT

As per above, running under XP compat mode in Vista will address most of the common compatibility issues.

you could also try using the app compat toolkit (ACT) to create a shim to get the app working - it's pretty straightforward.

I've been involved in a number of corporate Vista deployments over the past few months and we've only had 1 app which would flat not work - that was resolved by running it in Virtual PC. not the most user-friendly approach but only a handful of people needed to run it anyway...

Coffeehouse - Scoble is bringing Zooomr back!?

fatfrank — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 15:08:49 GMT

I wonder how long before he reminisces about his experiences on his blog, or uses his selective memory to rebut one of the frequent comments doubting his experience and technology credibility...

e.g.

"... when *I* was rebuilding a major web 2.0 environment overnight..." or something along those lines.

as opposed to

"... when I was sitting in a corner eating doughnuts and twittering in a chat room..."

Coffeehouse - New laptop / 9 guy pics / crapware / windows MCE

fatfrank — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 22:25:53 GMT

jamie wrote:

haha maybe i could "sacrifice" one everytime Ballmer says something stupid...

hey jeff...got a few more boxes?

edit: re vista ui like this: (would be fun - not for everything though)

The Vista MC UI looks way slicker than this. A lot nicer than the XP one.

Any chance of using some punctuation and spellcheck? Way too tough to read your post - I end up paging down past them, although I know the content might be interesting...

Coffeehouse - I know its "naughty" and my schools tech-go-to-guy better not be here but...

fatfrank — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 00:47:25 GMT

W3bbo wrote:

AndyC wrote:

W3bbo wrote:
C'mon, why would someone want to disable Profile persistance? It just reeks of evilness. It means customized toolbars and Office settings get reverted every single time. It's a "one size fits all" that fails terribly.

From a teachers point of view, it helps if you know exactly how things are configured. You don't have to walk people through fixing profile issues during class time.

Also, there is the sheer cost of providing the infrastructure to support it.

Going by my own Roaming Profile, my Outlook OST is roughly 66% of my non-Documents profile, there's a rough 50/50 split between Documents and non-Documents in my Profile.

...now then, had the college mandated disabling Cached Exchange mode, they could save themselves a lot of disk-space. *rollseyes*

BTW Andy, do you have any words of advice for establishments securing their wifi only by a MAC whitelist?

Roaming profiles are a pain - only of real use in workgroup-type environments. You're better off with a good lockdown policy and persistence of user settings via the use of logon/off scripts. In conjunction with redirection (e.g. of MyDocs) you can achieve pretty much all of what roaming profiles do, without all the hassle of slow logons, failures if the fileserver is offline, lack of location awareness, etc.

The college probably mandated disabling cached exchange in order to avoid leaving user data on machines - that's certainly where I have seen a good justification for switching it off, considering it is on by default. Disk space is so cheap these days it is pretty much never a reason for disabling a technical feature.

Coffeehouse - I know its "naughty" and my schools tech-go-to-guy better not be here but...

fatfrank — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 00:43:31 GMT

AndyC wrote:

W3bbo wrote:
BTW Andy, do you have any words of advice for establishments securing their wifi only by a MAC whitelist?

a) Don't assume it is only approved machines on the network, defense in depth is critical
b) Isolate the wireless network from the physical network
c) Consider adding authentication to improve security

Authentication is key (pardon the pun). No "establishment" should deploy wifi without this.

MAC whitelists are a minor deterrent - useful as part of a defence in depth strategy, but useless by themselves.

Quarantine would also be recommended (with a self-remediation DMZ ideally)

Coffeehouse - I know its "naughty" and my schools tech-go-to-guy better not be here but...

fatfrank — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 00:40:22 GMT

W3bbo wrote:

mVPstar wrote:

Angus wrote: Someone worked out (I don't know how as they didn't really know what they were doing) how to send messages around the school network with "net send", this was never sorted out, even though it would be pretty easy to do. After they moved to Windows XP, it naturally calmed down though.

Heh, back when we were using Windows 2000 at my school, a guy figured out how to do it in the command prompt.

The command prompt was later restricted, for that reason and for other reasons.

Although, I found a way around it by simply creating a batch file with the net send command in it and executing it. Apparently, cmd could execute commands but not actually be opened.

Clever me.

A better way is using VBA (usually unrestricted in MS Access) and making use of the APIs in Windows to send the SMB blocks yourself. No amount of group-policy can halt that.

Well for starters, GPO can block Access or any other app with VBA by blocking the exe. That's a bit extreme though. A better way is to disable the messenger and server services on all clients - no more messages.

W3bbo wrote:

AndyC better be glad I'm not going to his university, I'd have rooted a few machines by now, circumvented all manner of filtering with encrypted RDP, and installed Firefox, regardless of Group Policy.

Leet Windowz skillz for great justice!

Script kiddie stuff.

With updated patches, least privilege controls and suitable standard hardening, you wouldn't be rooting anything.

RDP can be easily blocked in a number of ways. The easiest is probably to block outbound usage on all clients using the XP firewall. IPSec could come into play also, as could blocking of the client exe's, restriction of the permissions on the default RDP connection, and many more.

Without local admin or power user access, and with appropriate OS hardening as per the XP security guides, you wouldn't be installing any software either.

I guess in an educational environment you will find people with too much time on their hands who think they are beating the system by trying this type of stuff. In the corporate world (where most university students presumably aspire to end up in) not only would things be a lot tighter, but you'd get fired for even trying the kiddie stuff out because it would be a violation of acceptable usage policy.

You'd be better off spending your time studying, it will pay off a lot better

The part of the org I work in doesn't employ students (not enough experience) but if they did, and we were interviewing, we'd certainly check with their university IT guys to see if they were a kiddie. Not that we're concerned about "hackers", it's more of an attitude issue which would mean the CV goes in the bin.

Coffeehouse - Mail - Client or Web

fatfrank — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 12:49:29 GMT

W3bbo wrote:

fatfrank wrote:

W3bbo wrote:

But here's my list of gripes with Outlook:

LET ME CHANGE MY DISPLAY-NAME DAMNIT! (Right now Exchange users have to beg their sysadmins to change the .DisplayName property on their AD User objects).

Outlook allows you to change the display name, but not if it is an Exchange mailbox. Outlook with an Exchange backend is a corporate scenario. Companies don't want people to change their display names - it would be chaos and could easily result in undesirable situations.

Then make it selectable with Group Policy.

fatfrank wrote:

W3bbo wrote:
Tree view for threaded conversations

Turn on conversation view for the appropriate folders.

It's still not properly threaded (i.e. collapsable heirarchial trees showing who replied to who a-la Usenet)

fatfrank wrote:

W3bbo wrote:
Comply with more RFCs, make it user-selectable if you must

Such as? and for what tangible justification?

RFC 2822, for the reasons above; it makes it easier to keep track of conversations. Thunderbird does it fine, why not Outlook?

fatfrank wrote: You mentioned you were an edge case using Outlook/OWA/ActiveSync. This is pretty much the de facto standard nowadays for corporate usage. Off the top of my head I know of a few dozen companies, totalling 250,000 users in all, using this scenario. That's just my own experience. Pretty much every Exchange 2003/2007 deployment will have this in place - ActiveSync might have a lower number of deployments because not everyone in a company needs Windows Mobile access, but it is certainly not a rare occurrence.

It's an edge-case for me because this is my setup at home, i.e. just me and my family use it (well, I'm the only one who really uses it properly). Anyone using Enterprise-grade software for personal email is an edge-case scenario.

fatfrank wrote:

W3bbo wrote:
The UI in Outlook 2007 is eye-bleedinly bad, I'm sitting Office 2007 out until they come up with something more conservative (and maybe even respects my system color settings)

That's obviously a matter of personal opinion, some will agree and others will disagree. Personally, I disagree. I find the new UI much better.

In what ways do you find the new UI better?

Giving up on quote-for-quoting - too much hassle formatting the reply

Then make it selectable with Group Policy.
- Even if it was, the option would be disabled in any corporate deployment. Companies don't want people to do this type of thing, believe me.

It's still not properly threaded (i.e. collapsable heirarchial trees showing who replied to who a-la Usenet)
- I don't use usenet so can't make a clear comparison. the threading in Outlook works well enough in my opinion though.

RFC 2822, for the reasons above; it makes it easier to keep track of conversations. Thunderbird does it fine, why not Outlook?
- Probably because it is low on the list of requested features compared to what other people are asking for. In product development you need to make a tradeoff between time, features and resources. One of these has to stay constant, and due to versioned releases the less frequently planned features will have to get cut. Why spend x days adding such a feature whenever there are relatively few people who will use it? Again, in a corporate environment there is very little (if any) Usenet usage. OK so maybe R&D departments or Education would be the exception but I'm talking more in terms of banks, government departments, telcos and hospitals, which is where I've seen the first hand business requirements recently.

It's an edge-case for me because this is my setup at home, i.e. just me and my family use it (well, I'm the only one who really uses it properly). Anyone using Enterprise-grade software for personal email is an edge-case scenario.
- Absolutely. But that setup is NOT an edge case per se.

In what ways do you find the new UI better?
- I like the integrated task/calendar pane. Pushing the folder views off to autohide frees up more screen space for content. Categories are really easy to use and help me quickly figure out my diary at a high level by looking at the colours. Building follow-ups automatically into tasks by due date make triaging email much faster. OneNote and MOSS integration mean all my data is accessible in one place. Search is fast and accurate.

Coffeehouse - Mail - Client or Web

fatfrank — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 12:23:27 GMT

W3bbo wrote:

But here's my list of gripes with Outlook:

LET ME CHANGE MY DISPLAY-NAME DAMNIT! (Right now Exchange users have to beg their sysadmins to change the .DisplayName property on their AD User objects).

Outlook allows you to change the display name, but not if it is an Exchange mailbox. Outlook with an Exchange backend is a corporate scenario. Companies don't want people to change their display names - it would be chaos and could easily result in undesirable situations.

W3bbo wrote:

Better support for multiple mailboxes. When I send a mail using a different From: value, deposit the message in their account's Sent Items folder, not mine *sigh*

I use multiple mailboxes with Outlook 2007 and Exchange 2007. Copies of sent mail are deposited in sent items in both mailboxes. Maybe it is a new feature - I don't have Exchange 2003 any more to check.

W3bbo wrote:

Tree view for threaded conversations

Turn on conversation view for the appropriate folders.

W3bbo wrote:

Comply with more RFCs, make it user-selectable if you must

Such as? and for what tangible justification?

W3bbo wrote:

Built-in Usenet support. Stop outsourcing it to Outlook Express

Think about the Outlook scenario again - mostly corporate use. Usenet support is a real edge case. You mentioned you were an edge case using Outlook/OWA/ActiveSync. This is pretty much the de facto standard nowadays for corporate usage. Off the top of my head I know of a few dozen companies, totalling 250,000 users in all, using this scenario. That's just my own experience. Pretty much every Exchange 2003/2007 deployment will have this in place - ActiveSync might have a lower number of deployments because not everyone in a company needs Windows Mobile access, but it is certainly not a rare occurrence.

W3bbo wrote:

The UI in Outlook 2007 is eye-bleedinly bad, I'm sitting Office 2007 out until they come up with something more conservative (and maybe even respects my system color settings)

That's obviously a matter of personal opinion, some will agree and others will disagree. Personally, I disagree. I find the new UI much better.

W3bbo wrote:

Outlook's designers and UI people should use Thunderbird s'more and improve Outlook no-end.

Again, a matter of opinion.

Coffeehouse - Why Hang Out On Channel 9?

fatfrank — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 08:12:43 GMT

Such know-it-all, arrogant and dismissive attitude is so 1990's. Paolo, please remind yourself about the CPE principles, and quit undoing the good work everyone else is doing in this area. You may be a great dev or PM guy, but if you can't cut it in terms of the softer skills then you are in the wrong place for sure.

Coffeehouse - Brown for PM ?

fatfrank — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 18:31:03 GMT

eagle wrote:

There is no argument, Eire will be united and at peace with prosperity and all the British troops will be back in England fighting civil strife.

That's exactly the sort of small minded and arrogant attitude that caused and fed all the years of trouble in Ireland over the past 3 decades.

Thankfully the people who really understand the situation (i.e. those who live there) have gradually rejected such an attitude whole-scale. It's a pity that some outsiders, who are despised and ridiculed by 99.9% of the population, don't come to their senses. Sigh.

Still - it's good for the tourist industry, with the plastic paddy disposable income as a revenue stream

Coffeehouse - Brown for PM ?

fatfrank — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:31:15 GMT

eagle wrote:

It's called a Revolution, we had one in America in 1776 - 1783 and one in Eire 1916 - 1924, many lives were lost, but the outcome has been positive.

The only people that use the term Eire are the British army people who served up to the early 1980s.

What went on in the Republic of Ireland 1916-24 was a civil war, not a revolution.

You're a clueless plastic paddy. Truly. And that's being nice about it you eejit.

Coffeehouse - Kaspersky: "Vista less secure than XP"

fatfrank — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:02:36 GMT

http://blogs.csoonline.com/windows_vista_90_day_vulnerability_report

Coffeehouse - NSA Helped Build Vista?

fatfrank — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 11:58:14 GMT

SecretSoftware wrote:

Here is Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson talking about this in their NetCasts. Its interesting...

Well that makes everything true then

Gibson is a crank. When even the register charges him with spreading FUD, you know he's REALLY spouting bs...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/12/31/winxp_hole_misrepresented_by_fbi/

Coffeehouse - 2007: MS should leave web search game

fatfrank — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 17:54:40 GMT

Colin Angus Mackay wrote:

Cybermagellan wrote: My unbiased opinion...

I think they should, as if Google slips up I believe the pecking order for searches would be...

1. Yahoo
2. Ask
3. AOL
4. Microsoft Live

Really? Although I know a few people using Yahoo I don't know anyone that uses Ask or AOL. Or course that is just based on anecdotal evidence - is there a study of search engine usage that shows the ranking in popularity of each of the major search engines?

Same here - never heard of anyone using Ask or AOL. they're marginal players in the sector, by a long shot.

When you go to AOL home page to search (which I just did for the first time) it says "powered by Google". so if Google "slips up" then the AOL search functionality/results stand to suffer accordingly surely

Coffeehouse - Technical Account Manager Interview

fatfrank — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 13:53:12 GMT

So you're getting interviewed for a job you obviously know nothing about - if you had done any research at all you would know how much coding a TAM does (answer: zero).

I suggest you read up more on the role description - there are plenty on the microsoft.com careers site, that will give you an idea as to what sort of qualities you will be expected to have...