Ok, for the array, that's weird... I've done my share of C and C++ programming and reading this I was like "I don't know what parametrised types are". So, I googled it and it seems you talk about templates. See, there... failed your interview already. I know about them, don't particularly like them because you never know who will maintain your code and this stuff isn't exactly simple.

Anyway, just wanted to say that.

Ow, sorry... For some reason it looked as if you replied to my comment. My mistake.

Uhm, that's a quote from the Wizard of Oz. What prompted this tirade?

Don't mind the man behind the curtain....

I can provide an ISO for Vista Business EN. You need to have the license sticker, though. If it's not "Business", I can't help. A Home variant will not work with Business.

Worker protection and Luxembourg? You do realize you can be pretty much fired at will in my country of residence, don't you? Luxembourg has pretty liberal employment laws. Also. Unemployed? Got one year to find a job... Then you're on your own. Just you know.

Luxembourg is a nice country, but you're highly mistaken about worker rights. Go read the Code du Travail if you've got some time. You can find it on legilux.lu.

... oh and I just *explained* you the default behaviour; It's broken.

Yeah, try doing that with anything a "little larger". Ever worked with dataminers? These people do insane things....

Try using CSV in a localized setting. For example, in a country where the decimal separator is the comma and the list separator is the ;. Now, you get a CSV from a co-worker in the US. Now, you think this would work... the C stands for comma, right, right? Well, Excel makes the import locale dependent. so your co-workers CSV will fail to import. Inversely, the one you generate with commas between the numbers and semicolons as a separator, will fail to import for your co-worker.

Now, I haven't read the standard. Excel might as well implement it correctly, and even the Free alternatives might do this (I don't know, I rarely use CSV in a setting where I have only Libre/OpenOffice), but that is very damn confusing for the end-user.

Yes, I have to admit that the DHCP situation you described is indeed quite weird.

I think the worst part about being in a small and previously questionably-run IT environment is that the expectation is that things will be bought once and work forever. It's not a matter of whether I could have upgraded these seven-year-old machines, but whether I would have to explain myself if something fails on an old machine we just spent money upgrading.

I wouldn't blame it on IT. You see, I have tried here too to make the best of things. I try (but apparently fail) to pass the message that you need to replace old stuff, because of the increased failure rate. Case in point, I have now been waiting for three weeks for our only PoE enabled switch to come back from warranty repairs. In any shop, you'd get the budget to buy a second asap, or even better before such a thing happens. Right now, only two people can use the phone and only because I had two power bricks for their IP phones. I think that's unacceptable, my boss doesn't seem to care. As long as there are no absolutely unavoidable costs that make him look bad in the reports. (Hey, would it hurt to give me a budget for stuff like this? But noooooo!). So, I just stopped asking. If something breaks, it's easier to ask for money.

As best as I can tell, several years ago it was automatically syncing to somewhere, but it had been years since that stopped working...

You can sync Windows machines by both NTP and by Samba (Not sure, it's the "net time" command, it seems to suggets ntp these days but it definitely wasn't in the NT4 days). I'd suggest NTP to one of the first-level stratum servers with your domain controller and make that a second-level stratum machine for the rest of your machines. NTP servers are best not virtualized. Just get a small cheap dedicated machine for this, or so.

I hope you get the resources to streamline the mess left behind. It gets doubly hard if there is never money for IT. I know how that is. *sigh*

If it weren't so very complicated to actually sign your own binaries and have a nice keystore... userfriendly and all (within the firmware of course), perferably standardized that once you know it for one machine, you know it for all... Yes, then it would be nice...

Because it causes all kinds of problems. Doesn't even have to be Linux. Talk to people who tried installing 7 on their 8 machine... If you don't know about secureboot (We're at the high end of the tech spectrum here, but just a few steps down there are "Windows reinstallers"... e.g. Windows power users who may not know about secureboot).

I said "it's not so bad, you can disabled it", and then we get many people posting that on their machine they couldn't .... yeah, it is a big problem... Perhaps not for you, perhaps not for me... but for many people... And FSM knows I'm going to curse a lot if I get a machine where I can't disable it completely.

Okay... That's annoying. Isn't there an option "legacy BIOS" or something. The wording is not standardized (typical for BIOS). Anyway, yes, it's terribly annoying if it can't do that. I'll believe you on your word that some manufacturers fucked this up.