Microsoft and its partners advertise Exchange Online and Outlook.com as having one of the best spam filtering. Well, every email service brags about it. But in reality things are not so good. Prior to switching our incoming and outgoing email traffic to Exchange Online we were using a local hosted solution. Well, we are still kind of using it as not all mailboxes have been migrated yet. But all the filtering is done on the cloud side now. Hosted solution consists of Exchange 2013 server and IronPort firewall/anti-spam. This is managed by a service provider and we do not have control of it (aside of creating mailboxes and tweaking some minor stuff). We had a number of filtering rules created for us by our providers. It wasn’t perfect. IronPort seems to not be that flexible. But as we have switched to Exchange Online the hell broke loose.. Well, not that bad actually. But we certainly saw the increase of spam. And sometimes it allowed emails with just a link to “learn how to please your girlfriend” to come through. Well, i wouldn’t call SUCH filtering as a first class service 🙂 Read More
This game can easily be included among the party games (hence the part Party in the name). Because there is no lack of laughter or emotions during its play (sometimes very strong emotions though). This is my second game from Renegade Game Studios. I’ve seen its review long time ago, but when i saw it on my FLGS website with a discount and a very attractive price, i thought “Why not? It can be handy in my collection”. So far a few plays of it were truly fun. It can be hard though, especially for those having trouble imagining geometric shapes in their minds (like myself). But when using only the easiest level cards and with less strict rules, it can be also used with kids. It will help developing their dexterity skills and analytic vision, and maybe also cooperating skills 🙂 There can be permanent or temporary pairs of players during the game. Each pair must decide who will be the architect (telling what and how to build) and the builder (the one actually building the thing) during each round. The architect must also choose which card among ones he or she has will be built (there are 4 types of cards of varying levels of difficulty). And all this is spiced up with special rules cards, one of which is flipped before every round and dictates how things should work. Maybe the architect must remain silent and only use gestures to give the instructions. Or maybe the builder has to build it blindfolded. It will be hilarious either way 🙂 It can be very difficult to obey the rules sometimes and not put the right brick into builder’s hand or to be silent, when you shouldn’t speak. In time you start to see what works better in different situations, how you can better describe things when one or another rule is in play. When you become the builder, you start to realize how it was for another player, when you was the architect and vice versa. It’s a very simple game with a very few components and all the figures on the cards are fairly similar. So the freshness of it can evaporate quickly. Though, there are a few blank cards for those who want to create their own rules. The game can also be created with a few spare Lego bricks and paper sheets for figures and rules. But it’s a fairly cheap game, so it’s probably not worth it to invest time to build your won copy. Simple, but fun. Strong 7/10.
At some point in 2015 computers running Windows 7 or Windows Vista started having an issue with a very long updates check. It is probably affecting Windows 8/8.1 as well. Freshly installed Windows 7 machine can spend many hours or even days to complete a check, when it was just a few minutes normally. Machines with less resources wouldn’t be able to complete a check even when doing this non-stop for days. CPU usage would stay abnormally high during the check.
Issues with an expired Windows (AD) password was always a bane of system administrators/helpdesk operators. But Microsoft managed to get things worse by removing the nagging dialog asking you to change your password (present in Windows XP) and changing it to a subtle tooltip popup (since Windows Vista). So subtle, that even i miss it often.. As we are slowly transitioning to more mobile workflow (working from home, from mobile, in your browser) this will generate even more issues and users’ frustration with technology. So we looked into options to more actively remind our users about the eminent expiration of their passwords. I’m still puzzled why nobody at Microsoft thought about adding this option (to send a reminder via email/sms) to Exchange or Office 365. There are a number of paid tools on the web. Most of them do a lots of other stuff and password management and reminders is usually a single module. Same is true for ManageEngine’s ADSelfService Plus suite and it’s standalone freeware 
After completing a a few first plays of this game i thought i wouldn’t like it. But 