There are some opensource Minecraft alternatives out there. Like Minetest.   i heard they were forced to change their name or something.. but last i heard, still alive, not a gamer so not following but i did hear about it 2nd hand. 

For me, the answer was piracy. It is always the answer for me - when corporations block me in a way that feels... unjust. 

Hacking, cracking, bypassing. Often - breaking laws. 

The problem is always the possible repercussions - which weren't a problem in my teens and early 20s, when I had nothing to lose. 

I think Microsoft seems to be big enough that they're IBMing themselves currently.

From your lips to God's ears, my friend.  I talked about that happening decades ago but my timeline for it was woefully short.

Let's hope it is inevitable.  I don't care if the company is still around, I just want Windows to become not-a-thing.

When I had to reset my Surface Pro i7 (Gen 5) recently - I lost my copy of Office - which was a "perpetual license." 

Yeah, that's the scumbag change they made when no one was looking.  "Perpetual" licenses are now tied to the machine they were installed on.  It's usually pretty easy to find an "OEM" build of Office 2019 for $30 or so, but it's grey market and will definitely only activate on one machine.  Newer versions will be available only in specific variants (Office 2021 Extra Ads Edition) and will cost more.  They really want you on the "pay forever" train.

Thankfully, the days of document fidelity becoming unusable unless you upgrade to the bleeding edge version of Office are largely over.  MIcroslop itself created some of this problem when they introduced the web versions of the Office apps, which have about as much fidelity to their desktop apps as LibreOffice.  Now you can use a competitor or an old version and still be good enough most of the time.

I think Microsoft seems to be big enough that they're IBMing themselves currently. 
When I had to reset my Surface Pro i7 (Gen 5) recently - I lost my copy of Office - which was a "perpetual license." 

There are ways around it - but not ways that Microsoft supports. My support for my perpetual license has been EOLed - and because it was digital distribution - I had no idea where my original download and keys were... so... Ahoy Matey, raise the Jolly Roger! 

Sat Jan 10 2026 19:42:48 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Microslop Co-poop

So apparently Microslop (always call them microslop, they apparently hate that) has renamed "Microsoft Office" to "Microsoft 365 Copilot App".

And when confronted with this stupidity, their response was basically "We didn't rename Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot App, we only renamed Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot App."

Apparently nobody wants Copilot and Microslop is having a tantrum.  Satya in particular is offended that people don't want it and is demanding that we stop calling it "slop."  And thanks to the streisand effect, the name has caught on fire and is everywhere now.

Meanwhile, the market share of Windows 11 is actually decreasing.  Yes, you heard that right.  Between people downgrading to Windows 10 and people moving to Linux (both increasing now), Windows 11 is actually in freefall.  It's glorious.

So apparently Microslop (always call them microslop, they apparently hate that) has renamed "Microsoft Office" to "Microsoft 365 Copilot App".

And when confronted with this stupidity, their response was basically "We didn't rename Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot App, we only renamed Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot App."

Apparently nobody wants Copilot and Microslop is having a tantrum.  Satya in particular is offended that people don't want it and is demanding that we stop calling it "slop."  And thanks to the streisand effect, the name has caught on fire and is everywhere now.

Meanwhile, the market share of Windows 11 is actually decreasing.  Yes, you heard that right.  Between people downgrading to Windows 10 and people moving to Linux (both increasing now), Windows 11 is actually in freefall.  It's glorious.

I do it so naturally - I don't event realize the ridiculous hoops I'm jumping through just to get things to work. I got my newly refreshed i7 v5 Surface back on all my printers in 15 minutes of when I needed them. Which is once in a blue moon.

Again,  this is what pisses me off... I am really good at IT, but can't get hired. Reasons. I'm sure.

Wed Dec 24 2025 15:41:31 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

We've gotta give Apple credit where it's due.  Once driverless printing and IPP Everywhere and Mopria became a thing, Apple basically said to printer manufacturers "you're going to support this if you want to be able to print from an iPhone or iPad"

But yes, if you're trying to send a print job to a printer on a different network than the one you're on, a bit of help is needed.

We've gotta give Apple credit where it's due.  Once driverless printing and IPP Everywhere and Mopria became a thing, Apple basically said to printer manufacturers "you're going to support this if you want to be able to print from an iPhone or iPad"

But yes, if you're trying to send a print job to a printer on a different network than the one you're on, a bit of help is needed.

I feel like with MS printer queues - you're trying too hard - if you have if/true statements to make it work. I don't script, I'm a Windows admin - it sucked - but never if/true statement suckage. 

Usually it was just mapping it by IP rather than named server. 

Mon Dec 15 2025 00:48:05 UTC from darknetuser

I have many nice stories about printer drives developed by ofshored teams.


if (true); then (...)

Also lots of

while (true); do
if(condition); then break
(...)

They don't.

And ya its old. I think it was their first USB desktop sized laser printer? Or at least one of the first. But, like mentioned wasn't to be replaced over time with new stuff as its used so rarely and since 'made' it work it was good enough.    its old enough HP no longer sells toner cartridges for it ( as far as i could tell anyway ) and had to go with a 3rd party clone cartridge a couple of years ago when it *finally* ran out.  

Fri Dec 12 2025 03:57:03 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

Ok, so you have a shit printer. I didn't think they made "winprinters" anymore.

In the beginning there was no way to print from Linux, it required firmware ( really.. as dumb as it sounds.. it did ) to be pushed to the printer every time it prints, which was only possible via windows and their proprietary drivers.  Eventually cups and stuff supported it so the 'print server' went into the closet.

Fast forward a couple of years and after some recent Linux updates this spring, i cant print anymore.  Its usb, and keeps disconnecting, then connecting, repeat until i unplug it. Not even a print driver thing, but at the USB device level.

I dont print but perhaps 4 times a year.. so it wasn't worth spending too much time on it to figure out what happened and if it could be undone, or go out and buy a more friendly one.. I still had the print server/nuc in the closet, so it was trivial to 'fix'. ( i saved it, just in case ).  if need ever changes, ill go out and get one that 'just works'. 

Thu Dec 11 2025 20:28:45 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

Regardless of operating system I am surprised that you have a print server at all.  Most people just print straight to the printer over IPP (or LPD or JetDirect for older printers) unless they're part of a huge corporate network that needs a server-managed queue.

Thankfully, I'm now daily-driving Linux at work again.  After ten years of having to deal with Windows ... I am back home.  Viva las penguinistas.

Regardless of operating system I am surprised that you have a print server at all.  Most people just print straight to the printer over IPP (or LPD or JetDirect for older printers) unless they're part of a huge corporate network that needs a server-managed queue.

Thankfully, I'm now daily-driving Linux at work again.  After ten years of having to deal with Windows ... I am back home.  Viva las penguinistas.

Windows 10 NUC Print server ( long story, a fairly recent Linux update, wont work now native so had to go back to win10 to print ).

"do you want to opt into backup bla bla bla ( full screen ) .  No. "reject"

Then another "you should enable backups"   grrr 

So for the last 2 days teams ( web ) had no spell check.

Now its back. and guess what. they changed it to be like OWA left click ..  arrgh. F- Microsoft 

Bit of a MS rant.  ( might have complained before. i donno )

I'm off a few days. People post in a 'shared' teams channel. It sends you an email.  "you have a message" but ZERO details. To force you to login and use their freaking product.  No.  its also why i tell people if we are on fire, txt me do NOT use teams. 

Personally i think the cloud is a scam for the most part. However, to me it has one purpose, as a backup plan in case my datacenter goes up in flames. Not rely on it for daily ops, but if we go down hard, gives us breathing room to get back up locally.  Far cheaper than a setting up 2nd facility.   

And i guess for a 2nd off-site backup use. Just in case the storm takes out my DC and the 'safe place' i have the 1st one stored a town or 2 away... ( it happens.. not often, but it can )

Not sure how wide spread but i hear Azure was f-ed today. 

Was effecting mail, authentication ( so took down a LOT of things for us )

Ok so not stolen, licensed. I knew it wasn't 'their idea' but wasn't sure the history.  Its been too long.

Tue Oct 28 2025 02:36:59 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Re: Microsoft Bob

Xenix wasn't an original Microsoft creation; they licensed the unix code from AT&T like so many others did. They added a bunch of stuff to it, and if you ran it on 8086 or 80286 hardware you got the Microsoft C Compiler instead of AT&T C, but it was a real, actual unix. Now, because it was a port of System III at a time when many vendors had already switched to System V, and because of the weird compiler, it was considered a difficult unix to port things to ... but it was real and it was there and it worked better than any version of Windows ever did.

Fun fact: Microsoft originally intended Xenix to be the successor to MS-DOS.

I donno, back then i had to support 3.51, 4.0 and for a while OS/2.  2k seemed a lot more stable for me than the NT ones.  None of them came close to the real thing, OS/2, but i did think 2k was their best effort ( even if it was using a lot of "stolen" code ).   Of course it all went down the tubes after that.  Had NT3.51 on a DEC Alpha server for a bit. Until they took it away from me and recycled it. ( was a failed experiment. i got it after that and kept it quiet..  i guess finance ran across the hole in the books 'hey, where is....' )

I agree with Xenix, but didn't they steal/re-brand/modify that too, much like MSDOS? i didn't think the core was truly theirs, i could be wrong and it was licensed. not stolen.. its been far too long and too lazy to research.

And i do put stolen in quotes for NT.. as it was technically shared with IBM.. they worked together, so it was really both of theirs to own and do with... But i can still hate them and call it stolen :)

( and unrelated: googles spell check does not even recognize Xenix as a word )

Sun Oct 26 2025 02:22:47 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Re: Microsoft Bob

Architecturally, the best Windows was Windows NT 3.51. It looked like shit, but it worked pretty well because it still maintained most of the architecture that Dave Cutler put into it ... before the 'softies started larding up everything in the Win32 layer instead of playing downstairs in the microkernel clients where stuff belonged. That's how you ended up with printer drivers that could bluescreen the whole system in the next few versions.

But the best operating system Microsoft ever published? Well that was Xenix.
[ https://uncensored.citadel.org/readfwd?go=Skeptic%20Tank?p=882354635 ]

They don't care what you want or don't want.  If they did, they would be selling win2k. I was still not a fan of Microsoft then, but i do think it was their pinnacle. Uphill there, and downhill ever since. Of course it had a lot to do with code they stole from IBM from the OS/2 partnership years before...  IBM was stupid. you dont partner with your enemy...

Fri Oct 24 2025 21:50:02 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Microsoft Bob

It's been 30 years and Micros~1 still hasn't figured out that we don't want this.

ill pass.

Fri Oct 24 2025 12:03:35 UTC from Nurb432

 

Annnnd clippy is back. With a new name "Mico"

Ya.   ( tho the idea wasn't bad in principle, just not practical ) 

Annnnd clippy is back. With a new name "Mico"   https://www.theverge.com/news/804106/microsoft-mico-copilot-ai-assistant-clippy

Related to MS failures, i was one of the few people who thought the *idea* of Bob wasn't bad at the time. Adapt the interface to non-techies in a way they could identify with ( sort of like apple was doing with the newton ).  But implementation was horrendous and it needed to fail..   Of course today, that ship has sailed.  Most people dont need that level of abstraction.  ( but we are going to get it anyway, with stuff like Mico.. "hey Mico, do x" and wont even know how its being done in the background )

Thu Oct 23 2025 20:56:43 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

“The vision that we have is: let’s rewrite the entire
operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes
truly the AI PC.”

This sounds as ambitious as the time they tried to put a database in the filesystem.

Not necessarily a bad outcome..

Fri Oct 10 2025 17:58:47 UTC from ZoeGraystone

With the way the economy is here now..  many wont have much of a choice.

Fri Oct 10 2025 02:19:00 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

I just felt a great disturbance in the Force ... as if millions of people suddenly switched to Linux

 

Windows 12. From their own mouths.

“The vision that we have is: let’s rewrite the entire operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes truly the AI PC.”

Related to the above, a friend pointed me to the below tidbit.  I wonder when your stuff is no longer yours.  I think ill be repairing my Nikon with the bad switches, so i can switch to it from my phone when that happens across the board, with no opt-out.  90% of my pictures are cats and dogs, but its still none of their freaking business.

"Meta has rolled out an opt-in AI feature to its US and Canadian Facebook users that claims to make their photos and videos more “shareworthy.” The only catch is that the feature is designed for your phone’s camera roll — not the media you’ve already uploaded to Facebook. If you opt in, Meta’s AI will comb through your camera roll, upload your unpublished photos to Meta’s cloud, and surface “hidden gems” that are “lost among screenshots, receipts, and random snaps,” the company says. Users will be able to save or share the suggested edits and collages."

I suspect its planning ahead for the expanding 'know your customer' laws.   Wonder if you cover up your camera ( like many of us do ) if your PC stops working.

Microsoft is adding AI powered facial recognition to OneDrive.

And it can be disabled, but get this: “You can only turn off this setting 3 times a year.”

WTF, microsoft?

With the way the economy is here now..  many wont have much of a choice.

Fri Oct 10 2025 02:19:00 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

I just felt a great disturbance in the Force ... as if millions of people suddenly switched to Linux

I just felt a great disturbance in the Force ... as if millions of people suddenly switched to Linux

No online account so we cant track you, use your data, and send you ads, then no windows 11 for you.  ( which is fine by me.. no loss. at all ) 

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/microsoft-clamping-down-on-windows-11-local-account-setup-latest-insider-build-removes-local-only-commands-skipping-microsoft-account-sign-in-will-crash-setup-process

I want it off totally, go back to right click and just use the native browser one.   But apparently you cant do that, its blocked somehow.  Some JS somewhere. 

Tue Sep 23 2025 21:53:30 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

Yeah, their whole grammar check thing is pretty awful.  It flags a lot of stuff that is not technically wrong but it has stylistic preferences.

And of course turning off the checks for "non-inclusive language" was my very first change.

Yeah, their whole grammar check thing is pretty awful.  It flags a lot of stuff that is not technically wrong but it has stylistic preferences.

And of course turning off the checks for "non-inclusive language" was my very first change.

And to add to this nonsense, i guess it also checks for "non inclusive statements" or "sensitive geopolitical references".  F-these morons. Entire Woke culture needs to burn on a stake.

Will be soooo glad when i'm no longer having to deal with anything microsoft.      soon..... really soon. 

Fri Aug 22 2025 11:30:26 UTC from Nurb432

Like many, while i dislike M$ greatly, im stuck with it for some bits of office work. ( no pun intended ) To get around using their OS on a regular basis, 95% of what i do now is web, including O365. Today in OWA, i find they have moved spell check from the right-click on the mouse to left-click.  Right-click now gives you emoticons.   Even the rest of O365 remains 'standard' right-click, that the entire planet does... 

 

Really Microsoft? 

Like many, while i dislike M$ greatly, im stuck with it for some bits of office work. ( no pun intended ) To get around using their OS on a regular basis, 95% of what i do now is web, including O365. Today in OWA, i find they have moved spell check from the right-click on the mouse to left-click.  Right-click now gives you emoticons.   Even the rest of O365 remains 'standard' right-click, that the entire planet does... 

Really Microsoft? 

Hmm  must not have been all regions, ours didn't die at the office.

Sat Jul 12 2025 01:07:04 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Outage-look

Yesterday was fun. Microsoft Outlook was down for 19 hours.

For it to be that bad, they probably made the mistake of running it using Microsoft software.   hehe

As I like to say ... I could write a better mail system than that in my spare time.   Oh wait ... I DID.

The fact that the world is still suffering with this insufferable garbage after decades is more proof that Bill Gates ought to be shredded alive in a wood chipper.

Yesterday was fun. Microsoft Outlook was down for 19 hours.

For it to be that bad, they probably made the mistake of running it using Microsoft software.   hehe

As I like to say ... I could write a better mail system than that in my spare time.   Oh wait ... I DID.

The fact that the world is still suffering with this insufferable garbage after decades is more proof that Bill Gates ought to be shredded alive in a wood chipper.

And that is why many of us wont use online products and run our models locally. We get to control things. And what we ask, wont be added to their list.

Soon, you wont get a choice. It will be nearly impossible to avoid, but even if you do, it will be reporting back everything you do. Even OCR's screenshots, to feed the model. So in effect, you are using it. 

Tue Jun 17 2025 00:45:09 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Why I always use Grok instead of Copilot

Also, Copilot refuses to do what Grok will do 

Just heard through the grapevine that M$ just did another round of layoffs.  The massacre continues.

They're still trying to peddle the lie that the affected jobs are being replaced by AI.  This is of course a lie.

The truth, according to the inside scuttlebutt, is that as they continue moving software onto the cloud, they know they can get away with less AI because they've crowdsourced QA to their users and can fix shipped defects on the fly instead of having to send out a fix like they used to.

And a portion of the jobs are moving to India.  This is consistent, of course: if you want to know what M$ is up to in any given year, just look at what IBM was doing 30 years prior.  IBM and M$ have always behaved like master and apprentice sith lords.

Ya, its bad enough having a 'windows' key on nearly every "PC"  keyboard now.       ( of course apple has their own version, but they are within the walled garden.... )

Interestingly, one of the companies we all hate, in essence is supporting Israel due to selling stuff to them, bla bla.      So they now have employees bypassing bans on politics to send out company wide pro Palestine rhetoric.   

Banning politics at work, also a point in their favor. And it pains me to say that.

With luck the offenders are taken out back and turned into fertilizer.  Firing them for breaking the rules, isn't enough.

Too much of that happens, there wont be new machines to buy. And lots of people out of work.

At this point in time, if i have to buy something because what little i have left dies, ill just go with backmarket or something. My last phone and previous ( not current ) Chromebook came from there. And while it wont meet your requirements for hurting the supply chain, no one is making a dime off your purchase, other than them.

Sun May 18 2025 03:08:34 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: How to make Microsoft lose money?

everyone in the supply chain loses money. 

Even if not, 1% of his wealth is still 10000% more than we have. 

He wont notice the difference in his daily life and gets to pretend hes 'doing good' ( and might even think that. who knows. hes sick )

Fri May 09 2025 22:06:13 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Die Bill Die

So the latest news is that billy-boy is dissolving the "foundation" and giving away 99% of his wealth. Upon further investigation, he plans to do this over the time span of 20 years.

I'm really hoping that 20 years is a gross overestimate of his remaining lifespan and that he dies very soon, catastrophically and spectacularly. Gates is, after all, the worst person ever to exist.

Apple was like that the last time i had to deal with it.  No machine to do MFA on since the device had to be replaced and it was the only registered device on the account, " we will call you in 3 weeks with a recovery code"  ..  um, the device was my phone..  

Ended up not bothering, just turned in the new phone and went with getting a reimbursement for using my own phone, which was not apple.

Well, isn't that just nice of them.

"Microsoft has confirmed that it's removing a popular command line that allowed users to bypass connecting to the internet and signing into a Microsoft Account when setting up a new Windows 11 PC."

Sorry its a cop-out to invoke the magic octopus.  People need to take action while they are alive.  With luck, those ***** push too far, someone snaps, and they find out what happens.

Wed Mar 26 2025 17:29:34 UTC from SamuraiCrow

Let God get a hold of Musk. At least he recognizes the original command God gave: "Be fruitful, multiply and cover the earth." :)

Let God get a hold of Musk. At least he recognizes the original command God gave: "Be fruitful, multiply and cover the earth." :)

Id prefer to see both of those hypocritical elitist scumbags in the public square. Hanging from a rope after the standard stoning has taken place. And since we are speaking family in other rooms, add their family to it.  Wipe out the entire line before it can grow and fester more.

Then after some time on display to serve as a warning to others, they can be turned into fertilizer, and all of their business and homes are burnt to the ground and reclaimed for crops and trees.  ( and any farmland they stole, which they both have, returned back to the farmers )

And yes, i'm actually serious. 

Not sure which is worse, gates or Musk.  ( since you used his product )

Tue Mar 25 2025 22:38:05 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Re: Bill Gates Meets Gruesome End in Wood Chipper for '640K Debacle'

(yes, it was generated by Grok, but the results were too good not to share.)

(yes, it was generated by Grok, but the results were too good not to share.)

By Lester Hacksmith, 25 March 2025

In a scene straight out of a tech revenge fantasy, Bill Gates, erstwhile Microsoft overlord and perennial punching bag for nerd rage, met his maker today—shredded to bits in an industrial wood chipper. The sentence, handed down by a shadowy tribunal of sysadmins and retro computing enthusiasts, was the climax of decades-long fury over his alleged quip: "640K ought to be enough for anyone." The billionaire’s demise marks a bloody full stop to a saga that, in the eyes of his executioners, saw him single-handedly kneecap the digital age.

The execution, broadcast live on a glitchy 480p stream (a nod to the memory-starved era Gates supposedly championed), took place at an undisclosed junkyard littered with beige PCs and floppy disks. Gates, 69, clad in a vintage MS-DOS t-shirt, reportedly muttered, “I still think Windows 3.1 was fine,” before being unceremoniously fed into the whirring maw of a 1997 Timberwolf 5000. Witnesses—mostly neckbeards clutching Amiga manuals—cheered as the machine spat out a confetti of billionaire bits, later collected as "relics" for eBay.

The case against Gates hinged on that infamous 640K line, long debated but here treated as gospel. Prosecutors, led by a wild-eyed coder in a “Free BSD” hoodie, claimed Gates didn’t just say it—he enforced it. In their alternate history, he bullied IBM, bribed regulators, and sabotaged memory makers to cap PCs at 640 kilobytes through the '80s and '90s. The result? A world where Tetris ran fine but Photoshop choked, where the internet stalled at Gopher, and where humanity languished in a purgatory of 8-bit purgatory. “He stole our gigabytes, our dreams, our Counter-Strike LAN parties!” bellowed one juror, brandishing a 286 motherboard as evidence.

Gates’ defense—delivered via a grainy Zoom call (bandwidth limits, naturally)—was predictably lame. “It was a hardware limit, not my policy,” he whined, adjusting his specs. “We shipped Windows 95 with 4MB minimum!” The tribunal wasn’t buying it. Exhibits included a doctored memo from 1981, “Gates to R&D: 641K is communism,” and a tearful testimony from a Commodore 64 that “could’ve been so much more.” The verdict: guilty of “crimes against computing progress.” The sentence: wood chipper, because “it’s the only way to defrag a legacy that toxic.”

Tech historians—those not busy selling Gates-shred souvenirs—called it poetic justice. “He capped memory, so we capped him,” quipped Dr. Ada Bytewell of MIT, sipping a Jolt Cola. Others noted the irony: the chipper’s control software, running on a modern 64-bit OS, owed its existence to the post-640K world Gates unwittingly enabled. Microsoft, now a trillion-dollar AI behemoth, issued a terse statement: “Bill’s contributions speak for themselves. Also, buy Copilot.”

As the dust (and Gates) settled, the crowd dispersed to tinker with Raspberry Pis and mourn the megabytes that never were. Whether the 640K quote was real or apocryphal hardly mattered—decades of blue screens and Clippy had sealed his fate. Somewhere, a TRS-80 beeped in approval.

Comments are disabled because our server’s still running on a 386.

Networking with *bsd has always been an issue. ( as far as drivers, not actual networking )

it was one of the 2 reasons i left that camp decades ago, the other being video drivers, specifically CUDA related.  I prefer BSD, but if i cant use it for a major use-case, its academic.  

Fri Mar 21 2025 02:19:34 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

NomadBSD booted up and didn't lock up.  And it actually looked pretty good.   Unfortunately, the network interfaces were not recognized.

So I found a really good solution: I ripped out the parts I put into it and threw the damn thing in the garbage.  I spent way too much time trying to breathe life into a machine that was already low spec when it was built a decade ago.

NomadBSD booted up and didn't lock up.  And it actually looked pretty good.   Unfortunately, the network interfaces were not recognized.

So I found a really good solution: I ripped out the parts I put into it and threw the damn thing in the garbage.  I spent way too much time trying to breathe life into a machine that was already low spec when it was built a decade ago.

Oh forgot and, while ill get eggs tossed at me: try Flex.  Its just Debian with a different window manager, might be more stable than X11 or (ick) wayalnd. 

OR OpenFyde if you want to stay as far away from Google as possible. Its just the 'free and open' parts of ChromumOS. 

you will take the spam, and you will say thank you can i have another.

Kidding aside:  Check into Tiny11 instead of screwing with your laptop. You basically download a clean ISO from Microsoft, run a script and gives you a stripped down ISO, including removing some of the requirements like TPM and CPU family as well as getting rid of most of the crap that gets installed automatically normally.     its out on github. ->  https://github.com/ntdevlabs/tiny11builder

Mon Mar 17 2025 17:03:17 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

omg, it's intolerable! Constant notifications to do things, try things, constantly getting in your face.

I've got to try some other things. FreeBSD with a desktop might do the trick if that doesn't make it lock up. Something with LXDE maybe ... although I'm skeptical that'll work because I got lockups on both X11 and Wayland based versions of both GNOME and KDE. But anything's going to be better than this.

Worst case scenario, I guess, would be I clone my work laptop and clean it off to get a pirated copy of 'doze 11 Pro. But this machine's a little small for it.

with ammo prices these days...  

Mon Mar 17 2025 16:30:06 UTC from LoanShark

I vote for something larger caliber.

Or a .223.

Sun Mar 16 2025 12:04:56 UTC from darknetuser Subject: Re: Windoze sucks

Try a BSD on it.

"we are sorry, it appears that your computer is not eligible for mandatory upgrade to windows 11, therefore we are disabling your computer at midnight tonight. You will regain access to your on-line Microsoft one-drive account once you upgrade. Thanks for choosing Microsoft"

"Microsoft is having issues, including delivery of email, why am i not getting calls created from my system, via email"

lol 

And i know we are supposed to hate them too, but when was the last time Google had a nationwide ( as in more than on data center, tons of people, perhaps not all ) cloud outage, unrelated to telecom issues. 

Mon Nov 25 2024 19:11:55 UTC from Nurb432

Cool. Some sort of MS outage today.

Glad im off this week so i don't care.   No wait, even if i was working id not give a FlyingF....

Cool. Some sort of MS outage today.

Glad im off this week so i don't care.   No wait, even if i was working id not give a FlyingF....

The sheep don't know any better.

Fri Nov 22 2024 03:20:25 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

Naah, just toast the machine. Anyone who willingly installs Windows doesn't deserve a computer.

Along those same lines, i guess MS is now sending out full screen ads to get you to upgrade your PC .. They forget to mention that Win10 will continue to work..  and even is supported for a while longer for those who have a PC before the arbitrary date they chose, to help their buddies sell computers since the last few generations are more than good enough. 

Scumbags.

Need to create a virus that erases windows. Replaces it with Linux or something.  Do everyone a favor. 

People are getting 'upgraded' t windows 11 this week at office. It started late last week for a few unlucky people. Complaints are already starting, "this interface sux, i cant find anything" "i cant read any of these icons" etc.  

We are slowly losing admin rights too. ( except for servers, and only if you are on the server team )

Now that they have turned on 'zero trust' crap ( i forget the brand name ), every exe you run has to be whitelisted, and if something needs extra rights, once ( if ) that is approved it runs. But 'general' rights, mostly gone. Not totally yet but i figured by summer.

Thu Nov 14 2024 16:50:26 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Block ads from Start Menu

Does your workplace suck like mine and forces you to use a Windows machine?
Are you unable to use the registry hack to remove Bing garbage from the Start Menu because it's overridden by Group Policy? Me too. But I think I finally found a workaround that actually works.

From a powershell prompt, as administrator:

Set-NetFirewallRule -DisplayGroup "Windows Feature Experience Pack" -Enabled True -Action Block

This seems to prevent the start menu extension that adds Bing garbage in the start menu from accessing its mothership.

From what i hear via some email traffic at the office, Dynamics 365 went down for a couple of hours.

Microsoft aside, that is what you get for relying on cloud services. You deserve unexpected down time.

No, i didn't just become a windows fan.  Just an observation.

As mentioned elsewhere i now have to use windows to use AWS VDI to run windows.   To do this i ran the tiny-windows script that takes a stock windows 11 ( or 10 ) ISO and strips out all the crap. ( not even a browser is installed ) and shoved it into a VM.

Surprisingly it actually runs pretty well. Of course i'm not using it for anything other than VDI but startup, shutdown, login, and just clicking around is speedy.

We all know it wont happen, he's part of the protected class.

Wed Oct 23 2024 16:17:39 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Bill Gates Must Die

He must be made to suffer like no one has ever suffered before. And even that would be lenient.

All I really want for Christmas is for this to be real:

2099492721@Uncensored

its all about the lock-in and money.

And im being told that the fix is to upgrade the VM to Windows 11...    really? Grasping at straws aren't we?

Not that i care about getting it upgraded, win10 dies soon anyway, but as a fix?  

Wed Oct 02 2024 08:49:45 EDT from Nurb432

Not exactly Microsoft's fault, but ill blame them anyway .. lol.    Was checking some reports into source control, noticed the dates "why is.. oh...." the timezone on VDI was wrong.

 

 

Not exactly Microsoft's fault, but ill blame them anyway .. lol.    Was checking some reports into source control, noticed the dates "why is.. oh...." the timezone on VDI was wrong.

And more related to MS..  so as i have bitched about recently in another room, our change in MFA killed the Linux/android/web VDI clients and im forced to use windows.  So i dont have to screw with a laptop all the time, i built a 'tiny' win11 vm for my regular desktop that basically just runs the VDI client. Originally didnt even have a browser, but i needed it for authentication.. Grr    (  installed some minimal 3rd party thing, not edge or chrome )

But...  i dont have a license, and now its got the watermark..  I assume it keeps running like this forever, or will it die at some point? I have looked around online, get different stories.  I dont care if anything else works, just the VDI client and that browser for MFA. 

I saw that too

Ya, more nuclear is good. Using it for Microsoft's crap, is not. 

So like many paces we are upgrading/refreshing to windows 11 ( ick ).   My CDMB is not showing them as 11 so we cant do reports and such..  We get our data from SCCM scans.  "so, what does SCCM show, my system should be creating a new entry for a new OS level and associating"

I get a screenshot of that field from SCCM : "Microsoft Windows NT workstation v 10.0"

lol.

I think he is now pushing the mosquito narrative.  I did see a blurb as i hit close on some news feed "if we don't go to war soon the thing that scares me most is another pandemic"

No, that isn't what scares him. its the serfs taking back control.

Fri Sep 13 2024 14:18:26 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

You know what really blows? Worldwide, about 170,000 people die every day, and none of them are Bill Gates.

I want Bill Gates to die. Preferably by being shredded alive in a wood chipper.
Feet first, to maximize the duration of the experience.

There is a community where I remind people of this fact every day. But here I will simply ask that you come back and read this message every day.

Because it is important.

ya all we need is to end up with a bunch of potterings making it worse :) 

While true, they do still make tons of cash off desktops ( OEMs ) so they would want to do as much as they can to lock you in.

And its not all about money, its about control too. ( ok, control over you so they can get more money down the road when you cant climb out of their walled garden, but not immediate money.. )

Thu Sep 05 2024 09:17:44 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

 and they benefit from that regardless of the operating system being used.

M$:  "Chrome has a security bug, we suggest you stop using it, and choose another browser" "Oh, and here are all the details of how to exploit the bug"

Sure, security flaws should not be kept secret, but lets not search for them for the sole purpose to be used as a marketing stick against the competition, which you actually are riding on the back of, for free...    I foresee another IE coming, a proprietary browser from M$ that has extra lock-in features. ( i also can see the chromium project being shut down soon. f-opensource, it cuts into their bottom line and companies like M$ are not helping matters, at all )

Once again, i'm reminded why i am glad my time in this ***** industry is almost over.  

"Coming as a surprise this afternoon is Microsoft deciding to contribute the Mono Project to be stewarded by the Wine development community."

Dont trust them. I bet they are getting out of the .net business.  Coming up with a new proprietary subsystem. "here, you can have our old dead crap, we care about the community!!! "

From  LXer's  feed. People still do this. A surprise to me.

[#] Thu Aug 22 2024 02:05:39 EDT from rss <>

Subject: Microsoft's Patch Tuesday borks dual-boot Linux-Windows PCs[Reply] [ReplyQuoted] [Headers] [Print]

Microsoft says it's investigating issues with a patch intended to plug a two-year-old flaw in the GRUB open source boot loader that is crashing some dual-boot computers running both Windows and Linux. In that crash users are aptly told: "Something went seriously wrong."

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/21/microsoft_patch_dual_boot/

Until you drop a card deck as you walk across the datacenter.

( not that i have done that, but i know someone who did )

Sun Aug 18 2024 22:32:22 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Literally anything is better. Punch cards are better.

Remember kids, paying for Microsoft Office is gay; use LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice instead. Granted, using software made by The Document Foundation or Apache might be gay, but it's less gay because you don't have to give them money.

Here, in teams, people actually use those things.

I make fun of them when they do.

Tue Aug 06 2024 21:32:22 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

That doesn't bug me as much as the little menu of auto-generated replies that they attach to things now. I disable that whenever I see it.

Whomever at MS thought it was a good idea to add 'emojis' to emails as an option instead of forcing people to reply, needs to be taken out back. 

This morning:

"Network Infrastructure - Issues accessing a subset of Microsoft services -  Starting at approximately 12:00 UTC on 30 July 2024, a subset of customers may experience issues connecting to Microsoft services globally."

wonder who gets blamed for that one :) 

Sat Jul 27 2024 19:42:04 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

They'll blame everyone but themselves, but they only have themselves to blame.
The outage is 100% Microsoft's fault and they should be fined trillions of dollars for it. Top executives should be in jail for it. Bill Gates should be shredded feet-first in a wood chipper for it.

LoL. M$ is now blaming the EU regulations.

"the forced us to allow 3rd parties to integrate with windows. If we could just force everyone to use MSDefender this would never have happened, so its their fault"

Reports are estimating 8.5 to 9 million machines cloudstrike directly hosed.  No way to count indirect effects due to services being down.

If they still exist in 6 months, ill be surprised.

and trusting a cloud service for something so critical 

Sat Jul 20 2024 12:39:54 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Re: Happy "Global Blue Screen Of Death" day, everyone!

Can we agree to blame both?

We can blame Crowdstrike for pushing bad code without proper testing and staging. We can blame Microsoft for publishing an operating system so fragile that it crashes at the drop of an electron. And we can blame IT consumers for continuing to accept the worst operating system ever built.

And speaking of windows and VMs

Seems this apple i have from the shop and running a win10 VM. its only a gen 6 CPU so no win11 VM for me ( its only a couple of years old... the last of the Intel powerbooks .  Intel was shipping past gen 10 .. what is up with that, Apple? )

thier botched patch caused BSODs everywhere. Desktops, servers, ( and embedded devices?  donno ).  Talking to our server guys, the fix is reboot in safe mode, login with local admin, remove a file, reboot.     Not hard but requires touching .. and time..   so remote users, are f-ed and  have to come in. And if you dont have remote KVM switches, VMs, or whatever on your servers, people are going to be digging out crash carts and spending the weekend in the data center..

And ya non-windows OSs were exempt from this.  Or if your machine was off during the update window. ( which apparently saved my VM at home, and my VDI session, tho we couldn't access our PDCs from AWS for most of the day, so they were still in effect, dead. )

Sat Jul 20 2024 07:17:27 EDT from darknetuser Subject: Re: Happy "Global Blue Screen Of Death" day, everyone!

What happened?

Can we agree to blame both?

I agree windows is designed poorly.. But crowd strike was acting recklessly with thier patch, not properly testing, no easy rollback, etc.

Fri Jul 19 2024 23:30:28 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Re: Happy "Global Blue Screen Of Death" day, everyone!

Never blame CrowdStrike for a problem that is clearly Microsoft's fault. The operating system has no business letting the CrowdStrike software have enough privileges to crash the kernel. That is faulty operating system design.
It always has been (printer drivers in ring 0, anyone?).

Remember: our policy is to ALWAYS BLAME MICROSOFT.

100s of toasted servers for us this morning.

1000s of toasted desktops, and the calls keep coming in ( i watch ticket trends, since its my system ).  Seems that the only ones that survived were the ones that were turned off last night. Which in theory should be none. But we all do it at home at least.

Cloud Strike is accepting responsibility tho.   Improperly tested patch.  Fail. 

Lol for once i have  a better opinion about the masses than others?  

Most regular folk i know, are like that tho. Tired of the fake upgrade treadmill.  Phones, computers, cars. etc.  They know its a scam

Ya most people see thru the marketing nonsense. "what i have works fine, i know how to use it, it does what i want why are you forcing me to buy new stuff"

Another reason i hate this industry now.

Mon Jul 15 2024 07:24:53 EDT from darknetuser

A lot of people does not care for the latest Windows shit. .

Along the lines of Tiny11, heard about "government edition" this afternoon.  A stripped down version for some governments that refuse the extra crap...

Personally cant say if its safe, but most think its legit, at least in concept. Who knows about the ISOs around, could be legit, could burn your house down and eat your wife.. who knows.

Ya arbitrary obsolescence. It should be illegal. 

AI isn't yet part of the formula tho, its  mostly TPM > x ( i forget which version ) and CPU rev > X ( again, not sure the # ).     Totally arbitrary and its just because intel and AMD want to sell stuff.      AI mandate will do it again in a couple of years im sure.  I remember it happening with drivers too "well, win 7, we don't have video drivers for that laptop so you have to upgrade to 10 as well", or "nope, cant upgrade to 10 or you lose your video and network, that hardware does not have new drivers" ( getting a machine with vista and trying to put on 7.. had that problem too , but there were hakarounds )

Consumer electronic are way past the stage of 'new = better and faster' and what they have now more than meets thier needs so this sort of tactic is all they have left.  Really only need so much power to watch cat video.. Beyond that its not going to be noticeable. 

Have to give Google credit on this. ChromeOS Flex will save a lot of those from landfills. Part of why they created it.  Now, if they would just add android support like 'real' ChromeOS has.. it would be a no-brainier for many.

My old xeons that can still eat current 'average model' desktops for lunch ( not super high end desktops .. ill admit they are slowly slipping ), cant run 11. So first hand, it's got zero to do with actual need.

Apparently so does some ( most? ) apps.

Found out this the hard way when i attempted to move my home directory to a NAS when i was having some hardware weirdness, so as a plan B if it went up in flames all i had to do is power up a 2nd box, poof back and running. Not done that in decades so did not expect any issues. Plenty of bandwidth ( 10g network ) and NAS speed was fine too..  But, it was unusable.  Even my freaking music player bogged down.   

Sure i could have done some mapping of cache folders locally and stuff, but was not about to go thru that much trouble 

Thu Jul 04 2024 18:24:45 EDT from darknetuser

Windows past 10 made SSD mandatory too, since it preforms so much gratuituous I/O.

While not a fan of MS, Win2000 was decent.

Took them a long time to get there, then its been downhill ever since.

I donno, i might say "less bad" as 10 still sucks. Even if you do strip it down with Tiny...  

And dont hold your breath on ReactOS, while its a nice idea and i commend the goals, they have extremely low funding and they are chasing a moving target that gets more and more 'walled' as each MS version hits the street.    Switching to wine subsystem some time ago helped them, but its still not enough.  

Thu Jul 04 2024 13:55:33 EDT from SouthernComputerGeek

Tiny10 is working MUCH BETTER! :)

 

Too bad Microscum is about to kill off Windows 10. I hope the ReactOS developers eventually get it together, we need a functional ReactOS now more than ever!

Tiny10 is working MUCH BETTER! :)

Too bad Microscum is about to kill off Windows 10. I hope the ReactOS developers eventually get it together, we need a functional ReactOS now more than ever!

Just wait until copilot is mandated, so reads all your activity and saves it.

"where did my resources go.."  poof  

Well I needed to run some Windows exclusive software, so I installed Windows 11, and BOY OH BOY IT SUCKS! It eats SO MANY MORE RESOURCES than Windows 10! GUI bugs. Defender eating resources and stopping me from installing software I need. And get this, I was using Tiny11, a stripped down version of it! It ran so much worse than non-stripped-down Windows 10! I'm trying Tiny10 next.

And no the specs are not that bad. Dual Core i5. 8 GB RAM.

sort out in left field.

So for work i use O365 since there are no Linux clients.   The SINGLE tab for outlook sucks up on average almost 1G ram. wtf Microsoft...  even at rest its like 400mb.. 

And 3 days later, it works, sort of.  But acts differently between edge and chrome ( and the web link from owa, still no dice on chrome ). 

Tue Jun 04 2024 13:57:40 EDT from Nurb432

And related to the above .

 

Seems some stuff in outlook will NOT work in chrome it MUST be edge ( not important what. .i just ended up going to the new Azure admin stuff as something was not working.. then magically worked. Was on shop VM at that point, edge is default there ).       We are heading back to the old days of walled browser gardens, fast. 

"Windows 10 users will soon be greeted with repeated full screen prompts to upgrade to windows 11. Even if their computer cant support windows 11. in that case it will remind you to also replace your ( fully functioning ) PC."

And related to the above .

Seems some stuff in outlook will NOT work in chrome it MUST be edge ( not important what. .i just ended up going to the new Azure admin stuff as something was not working.. then magically worked. Was on shop VM at that point, edge is default there ).       We are heading back to the old days of walled browser gardens, fast. 

What is this about them re-branding Azure AD to "entra" ? 

Re-branding for the sake of re-branding.  Grrrrr more crap to remember. 

Only for the big players, i like where we are now, and soon to come. It does have valid use cases.

Tue Jun 04 2024 12:41:03 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I really hope the next AI Winter comes soon.

"On the hardware side, Microsoft has lobbied the PC OEMs to add a dedicated Copilot key onto the keyboard to the right-hand side of the space bar and alt key—something that it is also charging a license fee to do."

no. do not want yet another freaking Microsoft dedicated key.

"Microsoft removes yet another work around for requiring online accounts to install windows 11"  ( using a fake email or something )   "Windows 11 will soon show a watermark on your desktop at all times if you not have AI enabled hardware" "windows 11 users will see increased advertisements in the start menu"

So if you are not online, and dont have an MS account, your computer is a boat anchor as far as they care.

Sad to say Apple is better in this regard.  "no, i dont have an online account, dont want one" and it installs anyway, does not block you.    ChromeOS, well, they do require it during setup if you dont want to be stuck in guest mode ( hey, at least its an option.. )  and being online later is not required.  But i get that its meant to be an on-line platform, so i give it a bit more leeway. 

I heard, that some privacy branch of the UK is investigating them.  Im sure they will just be paid off to look the other direction tho. 

But, im afraid its just the beginning. the foot in the door to 100% monitoring. Of everything. Everywhere. All the time. ( see related thread over in google im about to post )

New "copilot PC"  ( i think a MS branded box.. im sure it cant run anything other than windows and like Apple they will have propitiatory drivers they wont give out ) Snapshots *everything* you do for months, and feeds it to a locally running AI. even logins and passwords...   Ya. that is safe and secure. 

And from another thread i saw, it looks like the AI alone requires 16gb ram + 256gb disk space ( unsure CPU, GPU, or TPU )..   I bet they come up with a 'cloud option' and feeds you data to their data center AI...  

I dont trust her motives, whatever they are. 

Teams V2.

Among other suckages they have added, your mic will come off mute on its own randomly.  Found out the hard way. 

Who in the hell thought it was a neat idea to add emoticons to outlook so you can 'tag' an email with a heart or other such childish nonsense.. .. and now i get a freaking 'daily review' of all the tags.

Grrrrr 

Sat Apr 13 2024 15:37:36 EDT from Nurb432

"if you just used our cloud offering, you would not have these issues. we will even give you a discount on your first month"

"If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you."

"if you just used our cloud offering, you would not have these issues. we will even give you a discount on your first month"

I've been trying to be kinder to Microsoft in the latter days, since they're far more open standards friendly these days, their clown is better than Amazon's, and a lot of their stuff either runs on Linux or is friendly to *ix systems.  But the entire Windows ecosystem is still complete and utter garbage and deserves to be shredded in a wood chipper almost as much as Billy-boy himself.

I cannot get Visual Studio Code to start up on my ${work} computer anymore.  Every time I launch it, the entire computer locks up.  Browser windows freeze, filesystem access blocks, and eventually the network stops passing traffic.  Because of one application.  Dammit Microsoft, we knew how to do better than that 30 years ago!

And I don't care whether the problem is or is not VS Code.  The problem is that Windows is, after all these years, still a bullshit design of an operating system that should never have seen the light of day.

lol

It always killed me that Windows didn't have one of my favorite small but near-indispensable features of most Linux window managers, namely the ability to move and resize windows by using the Alt key in combination with the mouse buttons. Today I found the Altdrag utility, and my life is immeasurably better. Highly recommended.

Heh heh heh, can't argue there.

Mon Dec 25 2023 13:58:53 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

Some experienced a fate FAR WORSE than death: they had to use Microsoft Windows.

While I'm no fan of Gates I think there are some people who were worse than him; the low-hanging fruit being Hitler, Stalin, Mao etc. But, for whatever reason, no one seems to talk about the Roman Emperor Nero. Seriously, read up on the things he did, he even killed his own mother. And the Apostle Paul. (Although that last one is according to "church tradition" rather than the Bible, so take it with a grain of salt)

Tue Dec 19 2023 22:10:29 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

Once again ... Bill Gates is the single worst person ever to exist in the history of the universe.

So Bill, has over 100 patents on fake food, and is the leading investor in 'impossible foods'.  Thus his reason for buying up all the farm and supporting banning of meat.

Source https://usrtk.org/bill-gates/radical-menu/

But, he loves his meat. .Just not for us.. https://www.benzinga.com/general/entertainment/23/03/31610567/bill-gates-loves-pizza-tandoori-chicken-and-sushi-his-5-favorite-foods

Looking around it seems no, the base, have to use something like Brave, which you cant.

But ran across a script that does it in the background, could run int as a daily scheduled task or something im sure .   -> https://github.com/mkorthof/chrupd

Mon Nov 20 2023 16:42:00 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

Is there a self-updating Windows build of Chromium?

donno. i just sudo apt update... and if there is one it grabs it too.

I cant say on windows.. 

Mon Nov 20 2023 16:42:00 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

Is there a self-updating Windows build of Chromium?

What about base chromium? 

Mon Nov 20 2023 09:25:38 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

 ended up going back to Chrome. Ugh.

Ya edge is worse than chrome for that stuff. But there is one issue we have that makes us stick with it at the office. My app, if you have large images embedded, Chrome freezes. Edge does not. its weird.  Same engine, I would think it would act the same.

I saw that too about the uninstall mandate, my first thought was yay, but after the initial glee, I suspect there will be 2 versions of windows. one for UK, where you can remove, one for US, where you cant.   They have had more than one regional version before so there is a precedent. 

( of course only reason i have windows is for work, where i cant do much with it, so its sort of academic to me personally. just was nice to see. )

Looks like that dickhead Altman is going to end up at Microsoft.  I figured either that or Musk would hire him.  Feathers of a color....

What id have preferred is no one would touch him, he would try again, and go bankrupt, and black listed from the industry.

Lock-in works well for apple.  So they of course follow suit.  

Wed Nov 15 2023 13:59:11 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

So it looks like "copilot" is the next thing M$ is going to force on Windoze users whether they want it or not.

It's already non-removable from their Edge browser, and they're working on making it non-removable from Windows 11.

This comes after a long line of such behavior, of course. Windows 98 + Internet Explorer, Windows 8 + the "Windows Phone" UI, Windows 10 + Cortana, etc. etc. etc.

So they're back to their bad old habits. Fuck you, Microsoft. Die in an AI fire.

Sort of is that way already.  

Wed Nov 08 2023 10:30:32 EST from nonservator

Bill Gates: "Digital ID's" Will Be Mandatory To Participate In Society

 

Bill Gates: "Digital ID's" Will Be Mandatory To Participate In Society

Fuck this retarded nigger.

They wont lose a dime. They will just increase cost of their products to make up for it. Then not drop it after the bill is paid.

Now, i do realize its not ALL Microsoft's fault and our security team has a huge hand in this...

But today due to the temperature on my floor i decided to work in a different part of the building( instead of going home ). Since it was planned to be rest of day thing, I took the shop laptop and such with me ( normally if i just hang out somewhere for an hour or so, i use my Chromebook.. ~ 10 hours of life ). Decided not to bother with my windows VM since 95% of my work does not need it. And the 5% that does could wait if something came up. Noticed battery life was around 6+ hours.  Last time i had the VM going and tried going portable for a meeting, it was under 2 hours of life and had to drag a power cord with me.

Man, what a resource hog.

Tell a lie long enough it becomes the truth. 

My thought too.  Not that i was short on space, ( 1TB m.2 in this one ), but even if its 'nice' and 'unencumbered' im still going to stick with native Python tools.

For the curious, its a NanoPC T6.  Next generation above my beloved T4.  They skipped T5.  Not sure why.

Sat Sep 30 2023 11:32:15 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Seems like a pretty heavy thing to preinstall.

Bleh.  Reloaded one of my RK ARM boxes the other day. Switched from the vendors OS to Armbian to see how they were coming along with the new-ish chip for GUI use.

Installed my normal stuff. Checking the installs, next was Thonny. ( dont always need or want the bloat of Spyder ) But, I noticed something called "vscodium" was pre-installed. 

Was thinking: 

• normally Armbian is pretty stripped down, how odd
• wtf is vscodium?

Looked it up.  Sigh. its a community version of vscode.. 

wtf. no really. wtf.

Gates says "The climate is not the end of the planet"

https://fortune.com/2023/09/20/bill-gates-climate-exaggeration-bloomberg-prince-william-earthshot/

Did i just wake up in the twilight zone today?? Rod.. is that you?

Im sure even Hitler did something right..   I know he cared for his dogs.

Sun Sep 24 2023 16:46:56 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

We might have to change the name of this room to Bill Gates Bashing because Microsoft seems to be doing a few things right.

Just now, on office machine, a popup on Bing home page  " dont lose them, you have earned 200 Microsoft reward points"

i do think its legit and not a phish, but why is that crap not blocked via GPO?    ( and what the hell are Microsoft reward points anyway? )

Shop machine, ya, im stuck.  Home machine i can, but i only use it for 2 apps, that open on load, so i dont see the new "crap tab" page anyway.

These 2 tabs opened 100% on their own.

Mon Sep 18 2023 23:00:06 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Yeah, when you use Edge you need the "New Tab Redirect" extension so you don't get bombarded with MSN propaganda. But if I remember correctly you aren't permitted to install extensions.

Grrr AND a tab just popped up all on its own. 

"We are changing our terms, dont like, it go away" ( in effect )

Oh and i meant to include my rant:

How typical of them, steal someone else's product ( chromium ) change it, claim its their own then try to put them out of business.  Since they cant buy Alphabet, they will try to use FUD instead.

i really really really hate them. 

Start up 'edge' this morning ( i know.. i know.. but its required for work stuff )  Full screen tab " this is why chrome sucks "  ( well paraphrased, slightly, but same idea ).

So over them. Ill be so glad when i can either retire edge ( and windows! ) next year, or retire myself and flip the industry the bird as i exit. 

Same here, i was using that on Linux to get into the office.  ( VPN was on my host then. 90% of what i did was Linux friendly, the other 10 % id use the VM for, and just did a NAT on it to get to the office ) 

At the same time the multi-route stopped working and i had to switch to an 'official blessed client' ( which surprisingly they added a Linux version ). I assume it worked, but i never tried as i just switched over to the guest having the VPN instead and just lived with the single connection restriction there. 

Related, had to fight to get them to open up VDI access to Linux hosts when that started to become a thing. ( the client reported back what OS, and promptly failed "not allowed, f-off "  )   If i had boot up windows anyway, why bother? 

Mon Jul 24 2023 09:14:52 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

OpenConnect client works well, unless the server is using SAML authentication.
I was very happy with OpenConnect until our server went to SAML, then at that point it just said "this mode isn't supported blah blah blah" and I had to go back to the Cisco client. (As a side note, OpenConnect *server* is pretty damn good, and I'm using it in a project right now.)

I used to as well, until they f-ed with the VPN connection. Then it quit. Now if the host was just on internet, i could have a single guest do VPN ( which is what i do ).  One connection only.  If you had a 2nd device ( even a phone ) connect it would drop the first. They also have geo-locking, so if you are not where you are supposed to be ( basically in state ), it locks you out too until you call and complain. So if you go on vacation in FLA or something you need to plan ahead.  ( and if you are out of the country, forget it , you cant even get to our public websites )

Sat Jul 22 2023 03:38:49 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

That's *exactly* why I was using VirtualBox. The back end of its NAT implementation looks like a userspace application, not a network interface, to the operating system. It wasn't until we changed VPN vendors that I was able to do anything else.

Fun fact: the "interface-less" NAT implementation is based on SLiRP, an old hack that allowed you to run SLIP or PPP from a remote shell account. It basically implemented an IP endpoint and NAPT in userspace, so your client computer thought it was talking to a real router. That use case is obsolete, but the code was adopted by QEMU and later by VirtualBox to provide NAT networking to virtual guests and containers without requiring a "real" interface on the host.

Our office VPN kills network for VMs.  "sorry, not supported, you want that, you have to come into the office and get on the wire". Dev guy at work recently was stuck with learning docker ( they are moving local apps to AWS via docker, the contractors we have in to do the moves dont even know how to setup a container and now its his job.. wtf.... ) . Could not get docker or wsl to talk to the network after he connected via vpn.  Told him its the vpn client on the host and hes hosed.    Didn't believe me until the network people told him the same thing.

I do understand why they changed it years ago, but they should allow some exceptions. But no. no exceptions. 

This may surprise you but i was ok with the concept of Bob. Making the thing more user friendly and not 'computer geek like'.  Sort of like apple tried to do with the newton. 

The implementation sucked but i think the intent behind it was good.

Clippy, well, he sucked no matter what.  ( and i have said this before I am sure... but i replaced Clippy with Japaneses characters s at least they were fun to look at.  That was back when i worked for a Japanese company, and discovered they had different ones than us.  A school teacher, a dolphin... and another i honestly cant remember row.   Having the dolphin spit out characters was ok, but Clippy, kill it with fire.

MGR for the win.

( used it on vSTA and later linux.. )

Wed Jun 28 2023 04:24:27 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

The universe is punishing us for not universally adopting the Amiga's window system.

Been wondering for years: Is there any way to make Windows windows behave in a civilized fashion? And I don't mean a tiling window manager, I mean something very simple that I first noticed and loved in Openbox and still rely on in XFCE and every other environment worth a damn: I am able to grab and move windows by clicking them ANYWHERE AT ALL while holding the Alt key, and resize them by doing that near a corner or side and dragging to contract or expand. Having this feature in a GUI makes it a slightly less sucktastic pile of crap.

So a 2nd windows 'upgrade'..  kicked off after lunch.  reboots. no asking, and really no warning either. just "hahahah we are rebooting you".

I know its partially the poor management from our OS team to make this happen during the day , right after a previous 'upgrade' but still, a real OS does not need to reboot every time you blink.  "you upgraded an app, reboot!' no... idiots.  

isn't that what promoted his divorce? He was discovered to be friends, with pictures, and his wife bailed. 

Fri May 12 2023 04:34:36 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Have you seen the latest on Epstein and his calendar? Lots of high

Bill Gates is known to be a client of Epstein's child prostitution service.
No doubt about it.

:)

Thu May 11 2023 01:59:40 PM EDT from nonservator

How many years has it been and the right-click menu for removable drives still puts "Format" right next to "Eject", without even a separator?

How many years has it been and the right-click menu for removable drives still puts "Format" right next to "Eject", without even a separator?

Why the F id Microsoft screw with the standard mouse click menus.. For spell check now its left click, which does different things depending on the app an browser..   standard. dammit...!!

Left click is now some dumb ass 'insert emoticon' . No i want you to fix my freaking typo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

While i dont disagree.. 

Have you seen the latest on Epstein and his calendar? Lots of high ranking CIA and FBI officials.  Been rumors for a while he was an operative.  ( perhaps in exchange for not being tossed in the can for being a sicko )

Fri May 05 2023 03:45:33 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Bill Gates (who *did* say "640K ought to be enough for anyone" despite denying it) is a pedophile. He kept company with Jeff Epstein (who *didn't* kill himself).

[ https://tinyurl.com/2mfjprjj ]

As a reminder, Bill Gates is the single worst person in the entire world.

so my VM didnt have enough space.  extended it another 50gb.. went into SSMS to kick off the 6+ hour "update" and let it run overnight.   No updates listed..  bleh.. 

However GIMP is sitting there in the approve app-list.  Was not expecting that.  Security hates OSS...

This week we will be pushing out the latest windows "patch".  Please have at least 30gb free on your disk. It will take at least 6 hours, if you are in the office.

That isn't a freaking patch.  And that is nuts anyway. 

So we now have to take optional training during the year as part of our performance reviews.

Not that i really wanted to, but got an email for a thing from 'Microsoft open source day with Azure'  ~ 2 hour seminar.  ok, i could live with watching that i guess, and score a point for optional training.

Register.

Wait a week.

The link goes to a financial product sales pitch.  wtf.

And that will be about it ..  its no longer a fun hobby, so that is out. 

Thu Feb 02 2023 06:50:34 PM EST from IGnatius T Foobar

You have to say "...but continue to compute recreationally, especially with my friends on Uncensored."

im glad i wont have to care about certs or anything much longer.

i hate the industry. and its almost time i can exit, with a finger on the way out the door.

next month we are being forced to learn ADO..  so we can use that to also track our time, along with 10 other places.  even tho im NOT a freaking developer. 

Wed Feb 01 2023 04:04:29 PM EST from IGnatius T Foobar

I passed a Microsoft exam today. AZ-700 - certified Azure network engineer.

As a devoted penguin blood, I may be forced to commit ritual seppuku.

Although, after studying for this certification it is clear to me that Azure networking is totally running on Linux. There's no way this is Windows underneath, because (1) it actually *works*, and (2) all of the concepts and structures it exposes map cleanly to the Linux networking model, not the Windows crap.

So as many people i am stuck with stuff like outlook. With my office vm i run the desktop client since that is what they give me to use.  Its their machine, their rules. But on my own machine its web outlook ( aside from being Linux i would not install office even if it was available. f-M$ ).  

Interesting tidbit today as i had both running, a message recall request came in from someone who botched an email to a group. Only OWA showed the request and gave me the option to deny, in desktop client it hid it.  lol.

The ideal demise for Bill Gates requires technology that has not been invented yet.  He needs to be kept alive and conscious until the moment his brain is consumed by the wood chipper.  Like that episode of "Stargate" where the dude was locked in a sarcophagus with a creature that ate him while the sarcophagus did its best to keep him alive for as long as possible.  I immediately thought of Bill Gates when I saw that.

He really is the worst person in the history of the entire world.  Worse than Hitler, worse than Mao/Obama, worse than Mark Zuckerberg.

While i understand and share the sentiment about the man, that is still too fast.  After a few seconds the shock would insulate him from future pain and suffering.

What would be neat ( and i think it exists ) is to give a person a drug that effects their perception of time. Toss them in a box, while the drug makes them suffer for what they think has been decades.. when its really only a few days Even better would be to include controlled amnesia during sentence, so all the things they enjoyed in life due to their terrible behaviors is removed from their memory,  ( and yes, i know that does not exist, yet )

:)

With luck, they keep going until they work and the $ isn't wasted.

At least they didnt ask zukerburg ... 

In our case, moving to Microsoft cloud ( AD, exchange,etc ) doubled our local support staff, and increased the license fees.

That is all people have been doing at my place for 3 years now.  And get pissed when you dont answer. Normally i ignore them unless i'm expecting it. Just like with a real phone :) 

Sat Oct 01 2022 04:48:04 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I have to assume this is starting to become part of tstandard corporate culture -- I never get a Teams "call" unless the person has already asked me via instant message if I have time to talk. I like it. I like it a lot.


Meetings are another story...

We used to pay for webx, but that was stopped when teams was adopted and you cant use it now even if its free. Zoom client is hard to get permission to install.

I hear that once we have 100% roll out of teams phone for regular folk, ( 30k users ) jabber gets uninstalled automatically and we drop our current VoIP provider. Unsure about the call centers.  We have several BUs using something, tho i forget the name. Donno if that continues or they move to teams too.

When they switched my BU, the next day telecom crew went desk to desk looking for physical, phones to repossess. Mine was long gone, i was part of the pilot group for jabber years ago and gave up my device as it was dead weight to me, but they had no records of who still had one.  lol.

zero alternative

only consolation is you can forward incoming to a real phone but no way to call FROM my office number without teams

Grrrrr

Just announced today that MS is now our phone provider.  Via teams crap.  Was using VoIP via an actual telecom company. 

F- Microsoft.  

Ya ill still be around. i wont drop out totally. But i can finally give things the bird i dont like..

Sat Aug 27 2022 05:59:11 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I trust you will still be hanging out here with your fellow nerds even after you retire professionally?

Spam you cant stop..  Neat.

I'm still glad my professional days are nearing the end, and i wont ever have to see another windows machine ever again and to be honest, i hate what the 'it field' has become. ( even if i were to strike back out on my own in retirement, i would get to choose.. )

Not my theory, just saying there is an established theory about that very thing you mentioned. My theory, is hes just an *** and wasn't technically working for them, under their direction, but towards their cause, on his own.

I cant put my dislike for Pottering in words.

Sat Jul 09 2022 03:12:22 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Your theory, although I don't agree with it, is EXACTLY my theory about Miguel de Icaza. And also Nat Friedman.

Oh, and few reach this point of hatred, but id like to meet him at a conference. And punch him the face.

There is the theory that he has always worked for MS, as a sleeper agent, so to speak. He infiltrated the Linux community with intent to screw things up, which many of us believe he has done, regardless if it was his handlers, or his personal vendetta against opensource that drove it.

But, good ridden to him and his nefarious actions ( even tho its too late to fix the damage he has done. he has seeded the eventual destruction of the Linux kernel. )

My understanding is they were going to remove it from our computers at the office. Hasn't happened for me

Mon Jun 20 2022 01:13:46 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

We cannot allow any more time to pass without observing that Internet Explorer finally expired last week. Support has officially ended for all versions.

May it rust in pieces.

Right, but they didnt turn web on so stuck with fat client.  But hey, Linux client works so its good enough for me personally.  Just short sighted on their part.

Sun Jun 12 2022 12:54:25 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

If it's web based then that's even easier. Just hack your user-agent string.

Be hard, since AWS has the source.

BUT after my complaining to management, they opened up Linux clients late yesterday just before i went home for the day.   Still no web client however. 

Fri Jun 10 2022 01:11:34 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

So you have to hack your client to masquerade as a Windows machine.

Meant to include that they ARE allowing people to use their virus infected personal Windows PC ..  

I hate this place that i work at. 

So i got in to the new VDI today.   Turns out they have disabled Linux and web client access. WTF  freaking idiots.

Speaking of windows suckage, i hear we are dropping Azure VDI soon.  Moving to AWS instead. Unsure the reasoning, i'm not part of those groups. 

Consolation is there is a native Linux client. Assuming the monthly charge does not cause management to prevent us from getting it.

But from what i understand much of their 'windows server' offerings is not really true windows, but something else, who knows if its even worth me asking.  Its why my vendor is getting away from them ( their stuff is still native windows, including windows services that have to run.  And SQL, several limitations on AWS that go away in Azure. )

Right, i was meaning the average person that does run win 10.   I suspect they will get 11 forced, and if they dont have a machine with all the stuff intel wants to sell you, then it dies.

You may not get a choice.  I heard they are just going to force it at some point. ( well, other than not being online )

Sat May 28 2022 04:07:05 AM EDT from Woodpusher

My wife shares the home computer, so i try to keep the changes at a minimum, thus i'm resisting Win 11.

2099301911@Uncensored

My wife shares the home computer, so i try to keep the changes at a minimum, thus i'm resisting Win 11.

im less worried about visuals than the underlying stuff. Stability, intrusion, restrictions, wasted cycles on stupid crap, bla bla.

Ya, im boring.

Not a fan of them as we all know, but i guess they are releasing a ARM based PC, and are going to release dev tools ( like Visual Studio ) for native ARM code. 

 I hate it when the enemy does the right thing.  But i am willing to give them credit when they do.

I wonder what happens when most everyone is using a zero client and pxe boot ...   Will your OS be forced down your throat via contracts with your ISP, effectively killing alternatives? i wonder. 

( sure, we wont see that in our lifetime, but i suspect its inevitable )

Sat Apr 16 2022 10:54:03 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

This is why Windows has declined, and will continue to decline, everywhere except the desktop. Because when people feel that they CAN move away from Windows, they DO.

Yes.  I keep planning on moving over now that they are mature enough for a daily driver.  But laziness is in full effect.  I suppose the next time i have to rebuild my desktop ill force myself to go ahead and do it.

The only nice thing about Ubuntu was in the older days they did offer non-free drivers during setup. Saved some extra work.  Debian now does that too, at least on an optional disk, so that is no longer an advantage.

They also adopted sysD early on.  ( not getting into that debate here, just that i disapproved ) and started the pesudo walled garden of 'snap crap'.  Not any better than the apple and Microsoft 'stores'. 

Thu Apr 14 2022 06:44:41 PM EDT from darknetuser

I remember thinking, back with Debian 5, that the installer was quite ok. Simple enough that you didn't have to fight with it, but you could dig into advanced options if that was your thing.

fvwm ? 

Thu Apr 14 2022 06:34:59 PM EDT from darknetuser

lxde is quite nice. That is what I used before I switched to fluxbox. Then I switched from fluxbox to things so hardcore that I will scare you if I tell you their names.

lol

Every time I make this point, I feel like both of you stick your fingers in your ears and start chanting, "nyah nyah nyah, we can't HEAR you!" 

Does it MATTER? 

Most used IS most popular. I mean... this whole thing with you and Ig gets tiring - because you're arguing on semantics and not on the practical reality.  It is all deflection from the fact that in 40 years, Linux has made little real direct and actual progress for computing for the masses *except* where it is hidden on their Android, Chrome or iOS device, or some other embedded appliance. 

And a huge part of that has to do with the philosophy I keep coming back to about Linux *itself* as the base foundation. It is difficult, obscure, inconsistent, and from an end user perspective, UNRELIABLE. It can be more STABLE and yet less RELIABLE, too... which is something that Linux advocates seem to confuse. Reliability is in, "Will it allow me to get done what I need to get done in a timeframe I can count on." 


Even if it takes 12 reboots, that is more RELIABLE than wondering if you'll even be able to figure out how to INSTALL your application in the ti

Tue Apr 12 2022 17:32:51 EDT from Nurb432

" Most popular" or just "Most Used"? ( you could say the same about windows.. is it popular or just used as as that is what came on the device? ) 

Due to the dumbing down of installers, a lot of people dont really understand they can change what they have..  "it came with it.. "    Sure, Debian does at least show you options during the install, but last time i installed Ubuntu i wasn't offered a choice, so i doubt lots of people realize its a choice and not a mandate.  ( and for the record i hate Ubuntu and the ONLY place i will run it is on my NVIDIA Jetson hardware, as it has all the drivers and tools supplied by NVIDIA to actually use the hardware, else its pointless ) 

Tue Apr 12 2022 04:57:51 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Gnome is the most popular 

 

" Most popular" or just "Most Used"? ( you could say the same about windows.. is it popular or just used as as that is what came on the device? ) 

Due to the dumbing down of installers, a lot of people dont really understand they can change what they have..  "it came with it.. "    Sure, Debian does at least show you options during the install, but last time i installed Ubuntu i wasn't offered a choice, so i doubt lots of people realize its a choice and not a mandate.  ( and for the record i hate Ubuntu and the ONLY place i will run it is on my NVIDIA Jetson hardware, as it has all the drivers and tools supplied by NVIDIA to actually use the hardware, else its pointless ) 

Tue Apr 12 2022 04:57:51 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Gnome is the most popular 

 

More precisely - go into Best Buy today and see if you can buy a Windows Machine, an OS X machine - and an *actual* Linux machine, off the salesfloor. Go into any retailer. 

Oh... you can't? It is an OPTION you can tick on Dell and HP's websites... but - no one is selling them through channels. They would just sit there. No retailer wants to touch that shit. 

"But teh cHr0m3b00k iz teh LiNuXZ0rZ!" 

No. It isn't. It is something HIDING the Linux from the end user designed to be disposable that is only really gaining a foothold because Google flooded schools with them cheaply. Nobody *dreams* of owning a Chromebook. Nobody would want iOS or Android if the LINUX of them was the immediate, default OS and not hidden behind a root or jailbreak. 

Linux is only successful when you don't have to be exposed to the Linux of it. 

To wit, Gnome is the most popular UI for Linux to this day in part because Debian uses it as a default, and Ubuntu uses it as a default because it is built on Debian - and Debian actually delivered, despite its reputation as a "developer oriented" *nix - the first Linux that really worked well for people who just wanted a machine to compute productively on - not to dick around with strange and powerful arcane CLI commands all day and chase endless dependencies in order to get a simple program running. Ubuntu took it one step further, and polished the Linux turd to a bright shine. 

KDE was PRETTY - but it wasn't stable - and it simply didn't get the market MINDSHARE that Ubuntu brought to Gnome and Linux as a whole. Lots of *real* Linux people HATE Ubuntu... and don't really care for Debian. There is no argument that among a broader USER demographic, Ubuntu and Debian are by far the most successful Linux distros ever. 


Because they tend to do things the way USERS want - someth

KDE was such a piece of shit for so long - it would take remarkable resources to get people to go back to it. 

The migration from Windows to Linux, Nurb - that you talk about - see where they are 18 months ago - if the initiative is a success, or if there is a new CIO and IT manager and they're migrating back to Windows on the desktop. 

The goalposts haven't changed. The fact that Ig is championing KDE as "as good as OSX" shows how far you can trust his subjective opinion on matters like these. He sees everything from a Developer/Engineering practical utility perspective - he doesn't really understand userspace - and he thinks that the users should be happy with what they get - but I don't think he understands 

A:What users WANT
B:What they experience


Most of his interfacing with computers is done far away from Userspace - he isn't a Desktop GUI power user or any sort. He hops into it for a brief while, does whatever thing he is FORCED to do in it,

Im still using lxde. 

I agree its just as or more user friendly from a GUI point of view, but Is KDE still as bloated as it used to be?  I stopped using it long ago due to resource use, and that i didn't need an 'integrated' desktop ( and all the advantages that go along with one ) as i was using non-kde apps anyway. Tho i guess now machines are so much faster and larger i wouldn't notice...

Fri Apr 08 2022 04:02:16 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I call bullshit. KDE is just as usable as Mac OS, and the Linux underneath is way more unix native than Darwin.

Exactly.  Mac OS having a unix kernel is about as useful as Windows having a microkernel; e.g. not very useful at all.

I knew it did ( QNX ) but not really looked at it for 20+ years now. 

ya i also remember mach being at the core of OSX with a lot of FreeBSD user land + a custom GUI overlay ..  convoluted mess ( and i *think* i heard iOS as based on mach too, but never verified that. )

I remember early on "coo, apple is doing FreeBSD!".. then looking closer, nah, not really. Still better than Windows, but too hacked up to like it.

So me bitching about local install of office suddenly not working and the only solution was to reload from scratch as we couldn't even remove it to start over.....

Well, it started working today.   We did get an update of something over weekend. ( who knows what ).  Accidentally started word locally on a brand new document on my desktop, forgot to move it to one-drive so Online Word could see it ( or wait for it to sync on its own ) and the damned thing opened just as i said 'dammit'..  tried outlook, it works now too.

Stupid system. 

And it is funny how the entire 'personal computer' market was created out of a desire to get away from the 'back room leased resource' model of IBM and others.

Yet, here we are again. We have come full circle.

Unfortunately they also destroyed the age old lesson: "cheaters never proper"

ya, they do.

Mon Mar 21 2022 09:11:03 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

. This discussion originated with a laughable claim that Microsoft dominated the desktop by having the best product, rather than by using shady and often illegal business practices. This claim has of course been thoroughly destroyed.

I work in a windows centric world, and i do see a slow shift away from it.  Agreed its slow, but its a movement and large enough to see it happening. Just found out the other day that an entire agency dumped windows off their desktops.  And we didnt try to stop it. ( not sure how we are supporting them now, other than hardware and connectivity. Perhaps we are not. ( all our Linux people are on the server side and wont be supporting random desktops )

As a matter of fact, the fight you just described between Atari and Commodore/Amiga - is likely what will happen with Linux/Windows platforms... 

Something else will come along while they're busying fighting the same paradigm with ONE another - someone with something unique and innovative and completely different than both. 

That is what it takes to disrupt Microsoft's incumbent corporate momentum. Linux has been chipping away at Microsoft's dominance since 1992... right, Slackware distros you mailed away for on CD... 

Frankly, it is almost 40 years - and you really haven't made a lot of progress. 

Shit in one hand and wish in the other. You did dominate the personal appliance market - as long as the end user doesn't ever have to see the Linux framework underneath the interface they operate. 

They said the same shit about Windows 8 - the same studies about how Windows XP machines were still dominant throughout corporations, that they couldn't be upgraded enough to run Windows 8, that the interface sucked so bad - that corporations were refusing to budge... yada... 

yada... 

yada... 


I've heard ALL of this before, over and over again. 

The last gig I worked has 4000 employees in California alone, and they are all on Windows based NUCs, mostly running Windows 10, with some 7 still floating around out there. 


When the paradigm changes completely, someone new will come along - and MAYBE they'll build that off something with a foundation of Linux - but more likely, it'll be something ALL new, and all of this shit will be like an IBM selectric typewriter. 

You Linux guys are all broken records. 

Sat Mar 19 2022 17:25:15 EDT from Nurb432

And i could be wrong, but it 'feels' like the foundation is starting to show cracks in desktops too..   I think the coming windows 11 debacle where they obsolete so many functioning machines may be a tipping point.  Most people are smart enough now to go 'wtf' 'why do i need a new computer it was fine yesterday'

You work in a bubble, Ig. 

I'm getting about 4 hits a week from headhunters for major IT departments for large corporations that want Windows server experience. Microsoft lost the Internet server - and a LOT takes place on the Internet... 

But there are still huge industries built on Microsoft technologies that have the same basic concerns about Linux systems as they've always had. This is such a ridiculous argument. It is the same one I've been having with Linux evangelists since 2007. "Whut about AWS and Google and Facebook and..." 

Sure... the shit that internal IT departments don't want to deal with, that they outsource to hosted services - is all ran on Linux... sort of. A lot of time those Linux hosted services are hosting WINDOWS based Virtual machines where the actual business is being conducted. You end up with a Linux server that is hosting a bunch of Windows based published apps or Windows RDP servers or other Microsoft platforms - and they're being accessed

Sat Mar 19 2022 17:22:32 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

You're going to remain a niche. Especially if you're doing it so much
it kind of becomes the calling card of your platform. Linux, the
"RTFM" OS for brilliant, socially maladjusted neckbeards. There is a
REASON this stereotype exists of Linux. 

Dude, that ship has sailed. Microsoft has lost every OS sector except the desktop. Believe me, I work in the data center business. *Everything* is Linux. The cloud is Linux, telecom is Linux, supercomputing is Linux, mobile is Linux, no one runs Windows Server anymore except to run Microsoft's own server software, and even that is questionable (SQL Server now runs on Linux, for example).

And the fact that the desktop is the only place where an oddball OS is still dominant, is kind of an albatross around its neck at this point. If you're comfortable with rebooting, you and the rest of the 99% can keep doing it.
The other 1% are the IT people who keep the world running.

And i could be wrong, but it 'feels' like the foundation is starting to show cracks in desktops too..   I think the coming windows 11 debacle where they obsolete so many functioning machines may be a tipping point.  Most people are smart enough now to go 'wtf' 'why do i need a new computer it was fine yesterday'

Sort of like the 2 drivers in 1st and 2nd place.. get out and start punching each other in the face as one cut the other off.  Meanwhile the dude in 3rd place, 10 laps behind, just slowly catches up and rolls past without any extra effort, giving them the finger as they *still* were punching each other, not paying attention. 

I agree with the fight. But not so much that it shouldn't have been. They really targeted 2 different markets and the 'fight' made them both improve as innovation wont take place without some competition. 

Problem is for a while it was ONLY about the competition between us, and we stopped paying attention to what as around us, as IBM/Intel/MS strolled past and took the prize while we bickered.

And while i dont like modern apple, back then at least they did have the internal goal of 'doing better'.   Tho at the cost of, well, cost .. man their stuff was expensive for what it was.

Sat Mar 19 2022 09:48:40 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

ST and Amiga started out as a fight amongst EACHOTHER that shouldn't have been. It should have been one platform - instead of two different companies fighting one another on small differences and dividing the market.

More or less, if there is something mission critical I am serving that needs 100% uptime, this can be practically achieved on Windows as easily as on Linux, if you have that kind of corporate budget to put the right infrastructure in place (and we know, even with all those checks and balances and redundancy in place, getting true 100% uptime is a unicorn, on ANY platform, even Google, Facebook and Amazon have had downtime). 

If you're not that important - if 20 seconds of downtime doesn't measure in a 7 figure revenue hit... or even a 5 figure one... then 10 minutes of downtime, 30 minutes of downtime, a WEEK probably doesn't matter - let alone a few minutes to reboot a server. 

It is this benchmark that *nix users pride themselves on that is a leftover of the days when you would get BSODs 2 or 3 times in a 8 hour day and you would lose hours of work if you hadn't saved often... and it took 10 minutes to get back to where you were each time - which WAS a problem at one point. That ]]>https://uncensored.citadel.org/readfwd?go=Microsoft%20Bashing?start_reading_at=2099295791Sat, 19 Mar 2022 13:55:05 -00002099295791@Uncensored

As for the "If you have to reboot Linux, you're doing it wrong..." 

THIS... exactly THIS.... what I've been saying about Linux and the people who love it and why it will never work, and exactly why Microsoft and Apple continue to dominate. 

If you're telling the end user "It isn't the OS, it is you're an idiot who doesn't know how to work it..." 

You're going to remain a niche. Especially if you're doing it so much it kind of becomes the calling card of your platform. Linux, the "RTFM" OS for brilliant, socially maladjusted neckbeards. There is a REASON this stereotype exists of Linux. 


Every time I apply a security patch on Debian it REQUIRES a reboot to apply the changes - JUST like OS X or Windows. 

If there is a way to do it, an EXPERT level way to do it, that avoids this - the same COULD be implemented into OS X (probably already exists) and Windows... 


But the fact is - it is almost ALWAYS easier to just reboot... es ]]>https://uncensored.citadel.org/readfwd?go=Microsoft%20Bashing?start_reading_at=2099295790Sat, 19 Mar 2022 13:48:40 -00002099295790@Uncensored

ST and Amiga started out as a fight amongst EACHOTHER that shouldn't have been. It should have been one platform - instead of two different companies fighting one another on small differences and dividing the market. It was the TIME though - right... where there would be a schism among the founding developers and architects, and instead of figuring it out, they would tear the baby in two and go in their different directions to try and prove to one another that one team was right and the other was wrong. 

Then they would get bought out by some company and suits would come in and demand certain parameters and metrics be met, and both things would get wrapped up in the shady corporate side of the business. Atari and Commodore both had it all going for them and big head starts and managed to piss it all away through bad management, marketing... 

The Mega, the Falcon, the Amiga 1200/3000/4000 - you're absolutely right about that - by the time Atari and Commodore got the product right, t ]]>https://uncensored.citadel.org/readfwd?go=Microsoft%20Bashing?start_reading_at=2099295714Fri, 18 Mar 2022 14:49:44 -00002099295714@Uncensored

I do agree with that.

it is a shame tho, perhaps if he was not involved it might have become something as it IS a better design concept. But then again, without him the overall free-movement would have been decades later i think.  He had a place and got things moving, but he should have stepped aside after that... "my job here is done, thank you" and exit stage left.

I forget who else ( other than Minix ) is using a microkernel. I think QNX does, and a few others.  Not as much into operating systems ( or ISAs ) as i was 20 years ago. These days i just want it to work.

Fri Mar 18 2022 10:28:56 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Doesn't matter much at this point.  Hurd will go down in history as an interesting research experiment but not much more.  Linux succeeded because others did what Stallman only talked about.  And then Stallman has spent the last three decades doing little more than bitching about it.

Doesn't matter much at this point.  Hurd will go down in history as an interesting research experiment but not much more.  Linux succeeded because others did what Stallman only talked about.  And then Stallman has spent the last three decades doing little more than bitching about it.

You can get Hurd kernel with a Debian user space. So not sure it qualifies as never finished.

I agree, it has issues, partially due to its leadership. but conceptually nothing wrong with micro kernels. I think its just a matter that monolithic was there, getting resources and marketing and acceptance.  Microkernels, while a better idea didnt offer enough to undo the damage. They do still exist but never hit 'mainstream'. ( tho if you include embedded minix, there are more microKernels on 'pcs' than anything else now )

Mon Mar 14 2022 03:04:57 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Even after kernel upgrades, its optional and you dont *have* to
reboot. And yes, that could be avoided if it was not a monolithic
blob.  but hey, at least its just the kernel that needs it, not the
rest of the system. 

Remember the old days when all the computer science types were claiming that everything would go to microkernels?

Linux didn't, and still took over the world.

Windows did, and then they screwed it all up by continuing to put stuff in the kernel instead of building everything as kernel servers.

GNU Hurd *did* , and sucked so badly that it was never finished.

So maybe microkernels are a bad idea after all?

You should have liked TOS/GEM too. Very similar.

I agree we have lost something over the decades, adding flash and fancy stuff just to sell it as 'new' , not really an improvement. 

Mon Mar 14 2022 09:09:41 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I *liked* Mac OS Classic. It really was a shame that they gave up that UI when they finally put a real OS underneath it. Seems like that was the last time almost anyone was willing to do a sensible desktop where every element actually looked the way it acted and acted the way it looked.

Then you are doing it wrong.  Only time i have to reboot Linux is with a kernel upgrade. Never due an app upgrade.  I have up times in the realm of months, and not longer only as i am to lazy to get a UPS and our power here blinks a lot ( we have overhead power, so trees )

Even after kernel upgrades, its optional and you dont *have* to reboot. And yes, that could be avoided if it was not a monolithic blob.  but hey, at least its just the kernel that needs it, not the rest of the system. 

Mon Mar 14 2022 12:29:47 PM EDT from nonservator

Snarky meme poster obviously hasn't used Linux, which these days demands reboots more often than Windows.

Snarky meme poster obviously hasn't used Linux, which these days demands reboots more often than Windows.

From my view, ultimately the ST was primarily marketed toward musicians due to its early adoption of MIDI, which i think limited its market potential too much to survive even in the best of situations.  ( and built-in scsi was ahead of is time too, even if it was SCSI-1 ).  With such a small target market they sort of sealed their fate. I do think they could have been a 'low cost alternative' to the Mac as the hardware was there, but due to lack of solid business programs and bad marketing, they missed the boat.   Sure we had Calimus, AtariWorks, etc and they did function, but it wasn't what business really wanted at the time.

While i am still a hard core fan ( no news there ) Atari dropped the ball whey they didnt keep advancing the OS.  It wasn't until we got MiNT, which was 3rd party at first, that we had a modern OS.  ( sure you could run Minix, CP/M, or a few others, but those really didnt matter in the practical picture ) But by the time MiNT became official it was too late anyway, the WinTel boat built by IBM had already left port, and left us behind. ( and the Amiga people, and Digital Research crowd.. )  Apple was in a life raft trying to not drown, but the rest of us were all standing on the dock looking at each other wondering what happened while we fought among ourselves.

We did have custom sound ( but really it was meant for MIDI so onboard sound was 'well, we need to make noises' ) and the blitter chip in the STE ( and newer models ).  but i agree, too little too late. 

The Falcon was a beast for its time. But again, it was so late in the game and so few people even knew it existed due to piss-poor marketing.  And dont get me started on the ATW.. Damned idiots didnt know what they had. It could have been a game changer and changed the entire market.

Truckers at Rest stops don't count. 

On TOS/GEM... 

It wasn't a terrible OS. There just wasn't a lot to do with it. It was squarely aimed to be an affordable and direct competitor to Mac OS Classic. There was even a focus on paperwhite mono screens at release - they were going after the DTP niche originally. 

And the hardware itself was *faster*... but unfortunately, without the custom graphics and sound chips - it simply couldn't deliver the kind of multimedia experience that the Amiga pioneered. Side scrolling platformers really suffered... You would get from the left side to the right side of the screen, and the entire scene would freeze as it scrolled the entire next screen back to the left side. Being that it was *ATARI* and most people expected it to be very competitive with entertainment - no amount of OS was going to make up for the machine shortcomings. By the time they started to close the gap, it was already too late. 

But if you wanted to make ch

I donno, Even back in the old days its all i ran, and i got more than most people i knew... 

:)

Actually, without a doubt, in a world of bees and honey and flies and shit... 

Linux is clearly where the flies swarm. 

Fri Mar 11 2022 19:18:00 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

That is because the ST and TOS/GEM was so much better

/me ducks :) 

Fri Mar 11 2022 03:25:27 PM EST from ParanoidDelusions

The Amiga is a great example of technically superior on paper - but failed to deliver what the market *wanted*, allowing someone else with a technically inferior product, but better marketing, distribution, and delivery of market demands to eat their lunch. 

I

The Amiga is a great example of technically superior on paper - but failed to deliver what the market *wanted*, allowing someone else with a technically inferior product, but better marketing, distribution, and delivery of market demands to eat their lunch. 

It is *exactly* what people like yourself continually fail to comprehend. It is why you code and develop. It is exactly what I've been saying - you do not understand the human element of success. 

Fri Mar 11 2022 13:32:20 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

I said Microsoft BEST UNDERSTOOD the consumer desires and made their
shit easy to use to do MOST of what people wanted to achieve - that

Wrong again. If it was all about the best user experience and nothing else, we would all have Amigas on our desks right now.

Microsoft captured the market by lying, cheating, and stealing. Period.
The fact that they eventually made their products tolerable enough for most users is a DISTANT side effect.

Somebody needs to invent an emoticon for jerking off. 

Fri Mar 11 2022 13:45:06 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

And it is why you'll never *win* the market. Maybe *segments* of it
will put up with the pain - especially those hungry against huge

It's the other way around, actually. The increasingly irrelevant desktop is the only place where Microsoft still holds a commanding market dominance.
The rest of the industry has moved on.

There's this thing called the cloud, maybe you've heard of it. It runs on Linux and open source.
\

No... you're making straw man. 

I said Microsoft BEST UNDERSTOOD the consumer desires and made their shit easy to use to do MOST of what people wanted to achieve - that they focused on USER experience to the detriment of security and reliability, and that Linux failed because it was dominated by people who do not understand that TECHNICALLY better isn't superior if average people give up before they master it. 


As typical with Linux arguments - you're all over the place and mostly in denial - and when you get cornered, you'll rephrase what your opposition is saying. This all started with a conversation about how Linux is favored with developers who also like to be BOFH types and tell the Lusers, with open contempt, to RTFM. How they design things the way they see as logical and rational - but usually not user-friendly at all. Blender can do amazing things - being user friendly has only RECENTLY become a criteria they even consider. GIMP is the same way. Powerful, with shitty

Thu Mar 10 2022 14:34:50 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

Linux fundamentally lost. It doesn't *really* matter if it was
Microsoft playing dirty pool and the Linux/FOSS community never

It matters because you were arguing that Microsoft dominated because they had the best available products. They didn't have the best products. They played, as you correctly point out, dirty pool, and then continued leveraging network effects. Windows as a desktop environment was completely unusable until 2009 or so, and by then the network effect had long since blocked any real competition.

It's also disingenuous to consider the entire open source community to be a single entity. Our software is used by thousands of different organizations, some of which are multi billion dollar companies, each with its own product line and its own objectives, some of which are worth tens of billions of dollars.
If that's losing, then I'd like to lose please.

Apple and Digital Research beat IBM by making the mainframe irrelevant. Open source is beating Microsoft by making the desktop irrelevant. Today, IBM still dominates in mainframes, and Microsoft still dominates in desktop, again becau

It wouldn't be that severe, and there are other non-Microsoft products that do what i support. Getting a new solution would actually be trivial.

Its that we have all our business processes tied into the thing is why we stick with what we have.  Aside from the architecture, the system sucks now. Badly.  In the past it wasn't so bad, but now it is.   But due to cost of change, we are still using it. Sure, all our processes can be modified too, but there is still a cost involved ( both $ and time ). Oh and we are also on maintenance pricing now, replatforming id estimate about 2 million or so upfront just for the retail price of a new package. 

But technically, alternatives exist, and other companies use them.

Thu Mar 10 2022 11:49:58 AM EST from ParanoidDelusions

I mean - sure... and some places do decide to throw the baby out with the bathwater to get off Microsoft's tit - and it has become easier to achieve over the last 10 or 15 years. 

And in related news, i heard they pretty much killed any future for vb.net   "its still there, for now, but nothing new for it, have a nice day"

I mean - sure... and some places do decide to throw the baby out with the bathwater to get off Microsoft's tit - and it has become easier to achieve over the last 10 or 15 years. 

And it is possible that we'll see radical changes in computing paradigms that will make all the legacy OSes largely irrelevant. The framework of those technologies may be an evolution of frameworks already in place - Linux is a very popular contender... 


But - THIS era of computing and computing interfaces - Microsoft dominated - and it is unlikely to change - especially at the corporate level - before something else comes along and makes all of this current paradigm as relevant as an IBM selectric electric typewriter is to society *today*. 

Linux fundamentally lost. It doesn't *really* matter if it was Microsoft playing dirty pool and the Linux/FOSS community never coming up with an effective counter-strategy, or if it was because Microsoft made apps with user *experience* in mind while

Wed Mar 09 2022 17:59:42 EST from Nurb432

Not 100% true that no other solution can do it, but it would require re-engineering the back end of the product i currently support. The same 'service' we offer can ( and is ) be provided with other tech that is not in bed with Microsoft, but its what we purchased, and i support it in my current position. Resistance to change prevents it today, but In 5 years ? Who knows, but i wont care by then as it will be my replacement's problem. 

Wed Mar 09 2022 01:37:42 AM EST from ParanoidDelusions

 

Not 100% true that no other solution can do it, but it would require re-engineering the back end of the product i currently support. The same 'service' we offer can ( and is ) be provided with other tech that is not in bed with Microsoft, but its what we purchased, and i support it in my current position. Resistance to change prevents it today, but In 5 years ? Who knows, but i wont care by then as it will be my replacement's problem. 

Wed Mar 09 2022 01:37:42 AM EST from ParanoidDelusions

One that no other solution can provide. 

 

"A job requirement". 

One that no other solution can provide. 

That incumbent momentum is hard to stand fast against. 

And it isn't what YOU want - it is what EVERYBODY else wants. 
*mic drop*

Sat Mar 05 2022 12:56:13 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

That incumbent momentum is hard to stand fast against. 

It is. Even when literally EVERYONE else has a better product.

Again, the user experience that end-users actually love is not any Linux based Java or Web Browser based VM host (Android/ChromeOS). People generally have the same kind of complaints about Android and ChromeOS that they had about Windows. Shitty user experiences. 

No... FreeBSD seems to have won the day there... oddly enough, it seems to be the most popular OS framework with developers and other SQLMonkey/Developer types too... that is OS X. 

End users who are bought into the Apple ecosystem *love* it. Roughly half the developers I meet prefer it to Linux or Microsoft frameworks... with the remaining split about 60/40 for Linux. 

But in user-space... Linux, raw Linux - exposed Linux - is still HUGELY unpopular. 

Cuz... the USER in experience sucks BALLS. It is the same reason DAZ3D is hugely popular and Blender isn't, despite Blender being a far more powerful CGI platform. Blender has a Mt. Everest Steep learning curve - it is almost vertical right

Mon Mar 07 2022 10:20:01 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

Just like MS-DOS and Windows won by being forced onto the users *despite* a shitty user experience.

You understand this, right? It could be DR-DOS, or CP/M, or GEM/TOS, or OS/2. 

They're appliances. No one gives a shit if it is Linux or Windows or any other OS under their appliance. Linux won by *not actually being relevant* to the end user experience. 

Sat Mar 05 2022 13:55:24 EST from Nurb432

nah, just like android, underneath there is quite a bit of Linux. A browser isn't going to manage your hardware.

 

:)

Sat Mar 05 2022 05:38:30 PM EST from IGnatius T Foobar

Not sure what you think you're getting at here. Microsoft is bad, Microsoft products are crap, and if you disagree, you're wrong. This is really simple and not difficult to understand.

nah, just like android, underneath there is quite a bit of Linux. A browser isn't going to manage your hardware.

The Android example is *the same thing*. 

Nobody roots their Android phones - except Linux geeks. The rest of the world, doesn't want to know. 

Linux serves appliances that users want - but users don't want Linux. 

There is no LINUX to ChromeOS - it is a web browser. You've basically proven my point. 

Otherwise - why would they choose ChromeOS? Linux *only* is commercially accepted on appliances where the end user doesn't have to see or know shit about Linux. They would just install Debian or Ubuntu on some old machine. 

Same net result - but - you've got to deal with LINUX then. 

 

Sat Mar 05 2022 08:12:25 EST from Nurb432

I donno, i have yet to find a 'regular' person really dislike ChromeOS and there are a lot more of those out there than people realize. So many more its sort of scary actually. 

Sat Mar 05 2022 01:40:58 AM EST from ParanoidDelusions

End users *hate* Linux. 

 

 

I donno, i have yet to find a 'regular' person really dislike ChromeOS and there are a lot more of those out there than people realize. So many more its sort of scary actually. 

Sat Mar 05 2022 01:40:58 AM EST from ParanoidDelusions

End users *hate* Linux. 

 

 

But this is exactly what I keep saying... 

"A job requirement". 

One that no other solution can provide. 

That incumbent momentum is hard to stand fast against. 

And it isn't what YOU want - it is what EVERYBODY else wants. 

It isn't "shilling"... it is simply pointing out the obvious. 

Fri Mar 04 2022 15:26:02 EST from Nurb432

Not really a 'desire' but a job requirement.   It has a feature i need to do my job, that web outlook does not have. So i'm stuck.

Same reason i'm even using windows at all at the office, a couple of items that my job requires.  Tried to get around it several times, but too many hurdles i cant get past.

Mon Feb 28 2022 04:53:32 PM EST from ParanoidDelusions

I find it somewhat amusing that most of the private industry I've deal with in the last 10 years has moved to Google Office... by a significant margin. 

And yet you're stuck with a specific desire to have local MS Office clients installed - despite - you know... being on team Fuck Microsoft. :) 

 

 

The only time end users like Linux is when you hide it beneath a JAVA Virtual machine. 

That is how bad Linux sucks from the perspective of User Space. 

Everyone knows it. 

2% of the market. Ever. 

If not for Android - it would still be 2%.

End users *hate* Linux. 

Fri Mar 04 2022 13:38:18 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

Wow PD, 1998 called and it wants its Microsoft apologetics back. You know why I'm here right now? I'm taking a break from work because I just had Microsoft Office running on Microsoft 365 with a Microsoft Edge browser LOCK THE FUCK UP on me. You know why? Because as an ultra-technical user I had the uber-hacker audacity to ADD A FOOTNOTE to a document. I hit "footnote", started typing in the little box on the bottom, and when I got to the end of the line, the whole thing locked up. It went into an active loop that wouldn't go away until I clicked "end pages" and switched it to a sad tab.

Microsoft dominated the market. No one is arguing that. But it takes serious brain damage to think that they dominated the market by having superior products.
They didn't, they don't, and they all need to die in a car fire.

Not really a 'desire' but a job requirement.   It has a feature i need to do my job, that web outlook does not have. So i'm stuck.

Same reason i'm even using windows at all at the office, a couple of items that my job requires.  Tried to get around it several times, but too many hurdles i cant get past.

Mon Feb 28 2022 04:53:32 PM EST from ParanoidDelusions

I find it somewhat amusing that most of the private industry I've deal with in the last 10 years has moved to Google Office... by a significant margin. 

And yet you're stuck with a specific desire to have local MS Office clients installed - despite - you know... being on team Fuck Microsoft. :) 

 

A real one.. :) 

Fri Mar 04 2022 01:38:18 PM EST from IGnatius T Foobar

they all need to die in a car fire.

I cant count the number of times that drivers f-ed a windows install.  It was a constant headache.  How many times an upgrade killed a system and you had to redo it from scratch.  It wasn't just the 'tech types' that felt pain.

The guys who would edit a config.sys and autoexec.bat expressly to make their machine more stable... 

Became the Linux guys who do a Linux build, set up all their monitors and gauges and beautiful background and carefully organized desktop, fine tuned and post screen shots of it on the Internet. 


It is like custom car modding. BUILDING it is more fun for these people than DRIVING it. Customizing it and tuning it and making it PERFECT for them... they're NEVER happy, either - they constantly want to do THAT again... and find some way of improving it. It is a LOT like car modding in this sense... 

Because doing the BUILD is the endorphin rush for you guys. 

Most people want to get that shit out of the way and just do the THING... drive the car, play the game, visit the website... 

You want to make it so that doing the thing is BETTER for yourself than for anyone else who just gets on their PC and loads an app, or gets in their car and goes ou

What are you talking about. By definition, consumers weren't editing autoexec.bat and config.sys to get extra uptime. The guys doing that kind of thing in Autoexec and Config were ALREADY on their way to "prosumer" level and going to end up in the industry... and hell... the people doing what YOU'RE talking about - were taking their first fledging steps toward becoming SCRIPTERS.



Most consumers, if they went into their autoexec and config.sys at all... were adding a mouse driver, or following a card that told them how to set their IRQ on their new modem, or how to add himem sys for a video game they wanted to play. 


This is basically EXACTLY what I mean, and what I've been saying. You've got this warped, developer/coder level view of what the AVERAGE and typical experience was - and it has absolutely no bearing on the reality.  

YOU did this. YOU were trying to figure out how to maximize uptime between BSODs by really TWEAKING your autoexec.ba

Thu Mar 03 2022 09:37:21 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

Yeah, those consumers just LOVED having to edit AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS all the time just to get a few extra hours of uptime before their next crash.
The truth is, Microsoft captured the market *despite* having good technology, not *because* of it. Their success in the market is because of *business decisions*, many of which were illegal and predatory, not because they had the best products. Seriously, when was the last time a desktop user actuall felt they had a choice? For that matter, when was the last time they even *knew* they had a choice?

Microsoft had the best software in the same way that Al Capone had the best liquor supply chain.

I'm talking about the philosophy of the design. They were keenly interested in consumer feedback as a company - and that is what influenced their approach to "least restrictive permissions" for security that later became an issue for them. They figured, "make it wide open by default so that home users and desktop users have no hassles, and let the professionals lock what needs to be locked down..." 

Which is actually a logical approach. Consumers shouldn't have to learn advanced security concepts to run a PC... and back then - it actually did work pretty well. Always on connectivity changed the playing field for that - though. At one point, Microsoft's "security through obscurity" method *was* appropriate... "Out of the millions of people connected through a DHCP lease at any given time, even if your system isn't secure, the MAJORITY of you won't get hit for any vulnerabilities." It is kind of a schooling fish approach to predators. "Sure, some of the fish on the outside are going to die - but

Wed Mar 02 2022 17:10:39 EST from Nurb432

I have to disagree to an extent. They forced their way into a virtual monopoly and gave the public what they wanted to give them.  Customer be damned  you get what we feed you, and you cant ( realistically ) go elsewhere..  And when you are the only game in town, you get to do that.

If it wasn't them, it may have been someone else. Wold they be worse? Better? Who knows, as it didnt happen that way.   But if someone had offed bill when we had the chance, it would have been different. 

I also think that regardless of how it went, the free-society woudl still form.  It was brewing long before micro crap screwed us all.  Perhaps it would have taken longer, or even faster.. again, .who knows..  Unlike Gates, someone like Gary or Woz actually supported openness, so might have got "here" sooner..

Wed Mar 02 2022 03:25:09 PM EST from ParanoidDelusions

Seriously. Hate on MS all you want... but it was the mass consumer market that had the most influence in most of their decisions you hate. They were just giving the public what the public demanded, because they weren't smart enough to figure out how to put an Apple spin on YOUR ideology of Do It Our Way Our Get Lost. 

 

I have to disagree to an extent. They forced their way into a virtual monopoly and gave the public what they wanted to give them.  Customer be damned  you get what we feed you, and you cant ( realistically ) go elsewhere..  And when you are the only game in town, you get to do that.

If it wasn't them, it may have been someone else. Wold they be worse? Better? Who knows, as it didnt happen that way.   But if someone had offed bill when we had the chance, it would have been different. 

I also think that regardless of how it went, the free-society woudl still form.  It was brewing long before micro crap screwed us all.  Perhaps it would have taken longer, or even faster.. again, .who knows..  Unlike Gates, someone like Gary or Woz actually supported openness, so might have got "here" sooner..

Wed Mar 02 2022 03:25:09 PM EST from ParanoidDelusions

Seriously. Hate on MS all you want... but it was the mass consumer market that had the most influence in most of their decisions you hate. They were just giving the public what the public demanded, because they weren't smart enough to figure out how to put an Apple spin on YOUR ideology of Do It Our Way Our Get Lost. 

The thing is... I remember OS/2 and OS/2 Warp. I used to sell... or try to sell it. The ONE guy I knew who was all gung-ho into it and certain it was the future and the alternative to Microsoft's evil empire... 

Ended up being a die-hard Linux geek. Whatever superior technology he picked... he also didn't like IOMEGA because the alternative, those little clear yellow removable disks - were better on paper, as far as tech specs... whatever he picked, FAILED in consumer markets. If he picked something, you could be certain it was the best technology, and that mass consumers would NEVER accept it. 

Often, because of disregard for backward compatibility, convenience, and consumer oriented features. 

And the guys like you STILL don't get it right. It took Apple to find a middle ground between Microsoft and Intel's - "Make it consumer friendly," and FOSS/*nix "Fuck the Luser, make it stable and secure" dichotomies. 


Apple went, "make it appliance like for th ]]>https://uncensored.citadel.org/readfwd?go=Microsoft%20Bashing?start_reading_at=2099294058Wed, 02 Mar 2022 15:36:43 -00002099294058@Uncensored

you can't afford it/you're not allowed

I find it somewhat amusing that most of the private industry I've deal with in the last 10 years has moved to Google Office... by a significant margin. 

And yet you're stuck with a specific desire to have local MS Office clients installed - despite - you know... being on team Fuck Microsoft. :) 

Mon Feb 28 2022 10:23:37 EST from Nurb432

I guess i'm stuck with web office. "we need to reload your system due to a botched application install".  No thanks. too much trouble especially since i'm going to start using VDI soon.   They tried all the stuff i did first. I was hoping the desktop support team had a trick up their sleeves since they do this for a living, and i dont anymore.

There is one feature i do need from time to time, that isn't in web outlook.  But ill survive i guess.    Disappointing. 

lol

Back in the late 90s, i thought i had heard they were going to do that, start over.

Sun Feb 27 2022 02:23:04 PM EST from IGnatius T Foobar

They could have done it right. They didn't. Now they can't -- not without basically starting over again. Windows is a developmental dead end.

its 2022, you would think they could improve things..  at least a little..

Fri Feb 25 2022 04:30:16 PM EST from IGnatius T Foobar

Windows is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed. You already know that.

i wonder if bit-locker botched my office install. 

I'm going to end up having to rebuild my machine due to a botched application install. how teh hell does someone design a system like that? And why the hell do i have to reboot several times just from an app install? Should not need to do that, have they ever heard of caching? 

What are you talking about? I just said I did not trust Microsoft's Bitlocker solution. 

Tue Feb 22 2022 16:06:40 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

How much did Micro$oft pay you to write that?

I find the deprecation of TrueCrypt with the recommendation to go to BitLocker very suspect. 

I understand TrueCrypt is compromised and flawed beyond repair - but I think that the failure of a replacement outside of the development of Big Tech like Apple and Microsoft speaks to the fact that there must be backdoors in these solutions. 


Literally, if you can get admin console - you can generate the bitlocker key in Windows. 

I don't feel a lot better about Linux volume encryption. I mean - there is something I prefer about having an encrypted volume that has a separately maintained password or decryption method. 

I don't believe every CIO in America is *in* on it - but I feel like the conventional wisdom that they're getting is from people who *are* in on it. Ultimately - the encryption is good enough to keep criminals and bad actors at bay - but not good enough to keep the WORST actors out of your shit if they really want to see it. 

The th

Fri Feb 18 2022 10:51:25 EST from Nurb432

"please leave your computer on all weekend" "you are scheduled to have McAfee encryption de-crypted, removed, then re-encrypted with bit-locker encryption." "if your computer no longer boots you will need to call the help desk for a decryption code"  "good luck'

 

Great.

I think I'm facing a biased panel here. 

I suspect Nurb is the closest to actually ever working in an Enterprise class Windows environment - and from what I've picked up from him - his workplace is pretty platform agnostic for end users and back-end. 

My work involved mostly corporate and healthcare enterprises that were anywhere from Medium to mega-sized corporations. 

We certainly had occasional issues with compatibility between versions of MS-Office suites - but they were all fairly easy to address. 

The pain with alternative FOSS office suites was an entirely different level. Application stability, interface stability, feature stability as well as document compatibility (face it, those MS platform compatibility issues between MS versions were introduced specifically to make FOSS alternative compatibility even *more* difficult. If you were having trouble with MS-to-MS version document format compatibility - you were having WORSE Free Office to MS Office c

yes, i tend to agree on that one.  To be fair, after we moved to o365 at office i have not see that problem a lot in-house, but in previous versions, ya. every upgrade was a nightmare. 

Sun Feb 20 2022 02:08:47 PM EST from darknetuser

Actually I have faced bigger issues sharing document files generated with Microsoft Office with users of different Microsoft Office versions, than sharing documents generated from open suites with Microsoft Office users.

I have converted several small companies.  No one felt they were getting an inferior tool.

Sun Feb 20 2022 08:39:52 AM EST from ParanoidDelusions

I spent my career working for large companies that were standardized on MS products - and they often *attempted* Free office suites - and quickly ran back to MS Office - for the specific reasons, time and time again, that I outlined above. 

But you've moved the goalposts. You said it was FUD... and I said, that wasn't the case... and then you moved the discussion to TODAY, and to personal use and to a lot of things outside the scope of the original statement and my response.   


I spent my career working for large companies that were standardized on MS products - and they often *attempted* Free office suites - and quickly ran back to MS Office - for the specific reasons, time and time again, that I outlined above. 
OpenOffice, Libre Office, Star Office - all of them were *inferior* to MS Office for most of the history of using Office Suites. 

I did note that has had a shift - and where it has shifted, Google's web suite is the reason for that... (none of the Open Office alternatives. They're as irrelevant in the face of Google's app suite as Microsoft...) Free office alternatives failed - and they largely failed not because of Microsoft FUD - but because the real world experience with free Office alternati

Oh, and 2/3 of home windows users are just treating theirs as a terminal. and 99% of ipad/android users..  Sure, there might be a local app to make it look pretty on a small screen, but all its doing is accessing cloud data.. it could have been HTML instead.

And to be fair, most of what everyone does on a 'average' basis is online.  Exceptions sure, but most ... So its not a MS bash, in this case.

I honestly see more Linux people having locally installed apps than i do windows and mac.  But even there. so much of it is accessing online data, its a wash.

"please leave your computer on all weekend" "you are scheduled to have McAfee encryption de-crypted, removed, then re-encrypted with bit-locker encryption." "if your computer no longer boots you will need to call the help desk for a decryption code"  "good luck'

Great.

I donno, using the open formats available and staying away form proprietary ones seemed to work just fine for me between all the suites. All the people i personally talked to was more of the 'its free, it cant be good, is it a virus?'  or 'its not office, and we are supposed to use office' and of course ' what? '

( databases being the one exception )

I don't think FUD was the problem with the Linux Office alternatives. 

I think lots of companies tried them - and first went, "this is awesome..." 

And then shortly went, "Nope... this won't work." 

They *seemed* awesome. They were not, if you needed interoffice compatibility with locations/partners that are not using the same free Office. 

I try to get that across to Linux people all the time - and few of them get it. Linux Office solutions (and lots of Linux things) work well for a small office that doesn't have a lot of partner interaction. 

But for the large fortune 500 corporations I worked for - most of my career - the *consistency* of MS Office was the *biggest* reason that companies stuck with it. You didn't have to worry about being in NY and having someone from some other company share a powerpoint document and when you go to display it, everything is moved, rescaled, distorted in your Free Office alternative. 


Google

I think LibreOffice/etc is a smaller player due to marketing and lock-in. If you are in the Microsoft ecosystem its hard to get out of it, for anything.  Plus millions still have never heard of alternatives. And FUD has been effective, "if its free it has to be bad, or a virus"

Blender i agree is top tier.  It still has some annoyances for the hardcore-pro but its come along way since it came on a single floppy and you paid for a licence.  ( i still have mine :) )

Read my post in Hardware about Blender. 

It is possible that we might see a fundamental shift in HOW we interface with computing that might finally ACTUALLY make OS platform so irrelevant that these habits of the entrenched incumbents will push adoption of the alternatives you're talking about. 


For decades now *nix/FOSS people have been holding out GIMP as being equal to or more powerful than Photoshop. Honestly - I can achieve the same results in Paint Shop Pro that I can in Photoshop, and often the tools and methods in Paint Shop Pro are superior/easier. 

But - the overall stability, speed/performance, reliability and consistency of Photoshop is unmatched. I understand why Linux geeks create something that LOOKS as impressive as something done by a professional graphic artist on Photoshop, for free, using GIMP, and they think to themselves, "why would the industry pay so much for Photoshop when I can do the same thing with this FOSS application." 

B

Tue Feb 15 2022 19:03:49 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

It's probably safe to say that there will always be a tier of computing that is unencumbered. Look at how much you can do with an ARM or RISC-V rig. And it's only improving. Maybe you'll be forced to run Linux but that's a feature, not a problem. Look around -- entire ecosystems are springing up to bypass the establishment.

I think Microsoft just has you flagged and trolls you. 

LoL ( not laughing AT you of course, just does not surprise me )

Playing with this VDI today, seems even folders on my desktop ( one is where i toss temp files, just to get them out of my face ) were magically migrated to one-drive. We didnt get a choice.

I heard one of our developers had a similar problem, onedrive didnt support all the source files in his working directories of his current project ( and they use azure devops.. ). During our forced migration it wiped some of them for him instead of asking what to do with them ( i dont remember if it was due to size, or extension ).   At least all my project files are in a sqllite DB, accessed via fossil :)

"We have published the latest windows patch to sccm software center for manual install" " if you dont do it by 6pm Friday we will force it" "have a nice day"

6gb.. 6+ hour ETA.. "several reboots"

wtf 

LoL  M$ screwed up again. Glad that isn't my problem to fix.

https://hothardware.com/news/microsoft-y2k22-bug-brings-down-exchange-servers-and-mail

Im not.

Tho i do have to admit i fund them, we all do if we buy normal stuff.. . But i do try to buy products 'less tied' to the CCP than others when i can.  ( i do realize they ail are, but some less so than others, like lenovo, or xiaomi, Pine64, etc. )

Yes, but sometimes i wonder, if they are not just a western proxy for China..

Mon Dec 20 2021 04:02:20 PM EST from ParanoidDelusions

The Russians are hiring, too. 

 

 

The Russians are hiring, too. 

Mon Dec 20 2021 13:40:30 EST from Nurb432

lol

 

I hear there is more money to be made than at a 'regular' job, however you end up having to work for the Chinese at some point. 

Yippie Kie Aye, Franz... 

Yippie kie aye... 

Mon Dec 20 2021 13:29:19 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

I'm pretty sure Ig just wasn't a very good Exchange admin. ;) 

I am an exceptional Exchange admin, Mrs. McLane. And since I'm moving up to global cyberterrorism you should be more polite.

lol

I hear there is more money to be made than at a 'regular' job, however you end up having to work for the Chinese at some point. 

It helped i was an electrical engineer by training. Understood plant 'business' but I could work along side a lineman, an engineer, or even office people, and have a clue what they were talking about and needed since we were all in the same boat.

Admittedly i learned a lot at my first 'real' job at GM years before ( mainly dealing with the stupid-ass politics ), but i still had the mentality going in. Grew up in a paint/body shop my dad owned.  High school, was involved with my future Father-in-law service shop ( cars ). And came from a family where our first thought was to do it ourselves, not matter what it was.  At GM we were an OS/2 shop ( and IBM mainframe, and some vax thrown in for good measure ) which helped a lot when i ended up at ford as a contractor as it was about the same. Must have been something with that. Donno about Chrysler.

Being only about 300 people total at that last plant ( varied on season and workload out on the floor ) we were a family.  Never really got that anywhere before or since. it was also cool tech. At the time the only company in the US that woudl injection molding of aluminum. Cool stuff

Before that, ( and after GM ) when i was with a contractor, they always sent me to all the 'plant' customers, which i was thankful of.  After that contracting company went belly up and closed down ( idiots profiting off the IPO, killed a 20+ year company, one of the largest service companies at the time .. but i told that story before ) ended up in a company that did PMI insurance sales to credit unions ( still IT .. not selling the insurance. there was so much profit they gave the credit unions free PCs, free servers and us.. ) and hated every minute of it. The customers were great, and my management was really good, but did not like the business. It was a novell shop, and i was a CNE which got me the job, but they were wanting to migrate to windows, and since i was a MSCE at the time too ( and several others, i was the token cert guy at the previous place being senior.), i became the windows guy, ironically. No one else had a clue.. So it was all on me.  ( NT 4 days ).    Also helped them move from

Was so glad when i found the new plant to work in, ( the one i loved ).   Until it went south. Again, by management that killed it ..  a pattern :(

And now i sit.. in freaking government ..  Ya. How some of us have fallen :(  But at least it wont go under.. if that happens, there are bigger problems to worry about.  Tho i will say my time at GM sort of prepared me for the insane politics.. 

and once again, rambling and things are out of order a bit up there.... perhaps i should just create a blog instead of dirtying up waters in the rooms...

Sun Dec 19 2021 11:46:20 PM EST from ParanoidDelusions

As for the rest of your story -  

As for the rest of your story - reminds me of my early days at MCI, Legato/EMC and Intel. At Intel they hired me for this team that was tasked with turning the company entirely eBiz by 2003, starting in 2000. They didn't care about our education, they didn't care about our specific experience, and they told us, "The normal Intel P-100 rules don't apply to you - you just need to make this happen by the deadline..." 

So basically what they did was searched around the bay area and hired guys with a reputation for being unmanageable and working outside the parameters of their companies - guys who had a reputation for doing outrageous things and pulling it off. I had developed a reputation as a very non-orthodox "break fix" guy at MCI and Legato... and at the time I was so young it never occurred to me that this reputation was preceding me. We had a security issue at California Firearms Information System at MCI... the boxes were coming back with Doom installed on them, and it was supposed to be lo

I'm pretty sure Ig just wasn't a very good Exchange admin. ;) 

It's ok. I'm terrible at writing code. 

Sun Dec 19 2021 17:33:01 EST from Nurb432

I honestly dont remember much trouble with mine.  However, we were a small shop. Perhaps 100 local mailboxes ( most of our employees worked in the plant, didnt need mail ). It 'just worked'.

 

I *do* remember when the i-love-you virus came out and it was when i was babysitting the 5.5 install ( i was it. the entire IT staff ).  I unplugged from our corporate network as fast i humanly could.. For a good 3 days until the rest of the world got it under control.  Funny story but it culminated with me noticing the incoming Q filing,  reading it, "oh crap attack of some sort, the president... arrgh!'   running thru the office and unplugging our president's PC "then running back to computer room and yanking the network cable out of my exchange server. Broke the wire actually, the connector was still in the server. Then i shut down the ISDN line, not as forcefully :) Everyone knew something bad had just happened, i dont run.. panic, or do things like that out of the blue.  President just sat there at his desk patiently, waiting for me to return to explain.  He was Japanese, and was just about to click on a message from an Indian at another division. I could see it in his in box and his mouse ove

Was running CA backup "something-or-other". ( its what was there when i started. it worked. didn't bother shopping for something else )  Also ran CA antivirus, which at time worked on the English PCs fine, but not so well on the Japanese ones. ( funny story with that. remind me later )

Dude before me liked trek: He named all the servers and print Qs after star trek characters.   Printer out in shipping = Worf.  PDC = Picard, primary file-server = Kirk,  Exchange = Enterprise ( in a strange way, to me that fit. i actually left it alone after i re-did the rest ).  I of course named them to things like "shipping Printer"  i'm boring :) 

When it came time to replace the file servers it was of course going to break 1/2 the excel sheets and shortcuts in the place unless i rebuilt with the same stupid-ass name. Everyone used unc path instead of drive letters  ( which was refreshing for a change, BUT it broke the easy-out ). I dont know if it can do it now or if it was just a hack i ran across and didnt realize it was not 'supported', but i setup a redhat ( it was still free back then.. ) SAMBA server that had 2 net-bios names. i needed to rebuild a 2nd file server too. ( it actually had a decent name, just full ). Let me collapse both into one, and gave people forever to migrate names, or not, it didnt matter. For the primary stupid named server, when it got full instead of adding space, he added a new server with a new name and no migration plans.. really?  Yes i might have been able to do it with DNS records, but from what i remember i tried that, and something didnt work right. Been too long now, some 20 years and i dont remember detail

Used to crack and email everyone's passwords to them once a month "Ok, here is what you used, try to do better next time".

Or the guy that was surfing porn at night after i got us "real" internet. "dude, look i dont care that you are doing if off hours, as bandwidth wont hurt us, but i have to give logs to HR.. you need to quit doing it"  couple of weeks later "ya, um i got yelled at, i know. i'm a dumbass"

We were all in our mid/upper 20s too..  and no rules against fraternization with coworkers..  I miss that place. Fun times. Only place i ever liked working at, planned on staying forever. Until "the destructor" came and blew the place up, they ended up having to file bankruptcy a year after i was gone he did so much damage.. Been in business some 10 years prior. and was making money.

 

aaaannnnddd im rambling.  sorry folks.

 

Sun Dec 19 2021 04:30:13 PM EST from IGnatius T Foobar

And for corporate e-mail - Exchange 5.5 was rock solid - if you
actually *knew* Exchange. 

...and if you shut down the server right after installing it, and kept it that way.

But if you actually tried to keep it running, it would crash at the drop of an electron.

 

I honestly dont remember much trouble with mine.  However, we were a small shop. Perhaps 100 local mailboxes ( most of our employees worked in the plant, didnt need mail ). It 'just worked'.

I *do* remember when the i-love-you virus came out and it was when i was babysitting the 5.5 install ( i was it. the entire IT staff ).  I unplugged from our corporate network as fast i humanly could.. For a good 3 days until the rest of the world got it under control.  Funny story but it culminated with me noticing the incoming Q filing,  reading it, "oh crap attack of some sort, the president... arrgh!'   running thru the office and unplugging our president's PC "then running back to computer room and yanking the network cable out of my exchange server. Broke the wire actually, the connector was still in the server. Then i shut down the ISDN line, not as forcefully :) Everyone knew something bad had just happened, i dont run.. panic, or do things like that out of the blue.  President just sat there at his desk patiently, waiting for me to return to explain.  He was Japanese, and was just about to click on a message from an Indian at another division. I could see it in his in box and his mouse ove

Was running CA backup "something-or-other". ( its what was there when i started. it worked. didn't bother shopping for something else )  Also ran CA antivirus, which at time worked on the English PCs fine, but not so well on the Japanese ones. ( funny story with that. remind me later )

Dude before me liked trek: He named all the servers and print Qs after star trek characters.   Printer out in shipping = Worf.  PDC = Picard, primary file-server = Kirk,  Exchange = Enterprise ( in a strange way, to me that fit. i actually left it alone after i re-did the rest ).  I of course named them to things like "shipping Printer"  i'm boring :) 

When it came time to replace the file servers it was of course going to break 1/2 the excel sheets and shortcuts in the place unless i rebuilt with the same stupid-ass name. Everyone used unc path instead of drive letters  ( which was refreshing for a change, BUT it broke the easy-out ). I dont know if it can do it now or if it was just a hack i ran across and didnt realize it was not 'supported', but i setup a redhat ( it was still free back then.. ) SAMBA server that had 2 net-bios names. i needed to rebuild a 2nd file server too. ( it actually had a decent name, just full ). Let me collapse both into one, and gave people forever to migrate names, or not, it didnt matter. For the primary stupid named server, when it got full instead of adding space, he added a new server with a new name and no migration plans.. really?  Yes i might have been able to do it with DNS records, but from what i remember i tried that, and something didnt work right. Been too long now, some 20 years and i dont remember detail

Used to crack and email everyone's passwords to them once a month "Ok, here is what you used, try to do better next time".

Or the guy that was surfing porn at night after i got us "real" internet. "dude, look i dont care that you are doing if off hours, as bandwidth wont hurt us, but i have to give logs to HR.. you need to quit doing it"  couple of weeks later "ya, um i got yelled at, i know. i'm a dumbass"

We were all in our mid/upper 20s too..  and no rules against fraternization with coworkers..  I miss that place. Fun times. Only place i ever liked working at, planned on staying forever. Until "the destructor" came and blew the place up, they ended up having to file bankruptcy a year after i was gone he did so much damage.. Been in business some 10 years prior. and was making money.

aaaannnnddd im rambling.  sorry folks.

Sun Dec 19 2021 04:30:13 PM EST from IGnatius T Foobar

And for corporate e-mail - Exchange 5.5 was rock solid - if you
actually *knew* Exchange. 

...and if you shut down the server right after installing it, and kept it that way.

But if you actually tried to keep it running, it would crash at the drop of an electron.

lol

5.5 was what I was God tier on. I had one of my guys migrate to the version after that - and all I know was that it was even better. 

And for corporate e-mail - Exchange 5.5 was rock solid - if you actually *knew* Exchange. 

Fri Dec 17 2021 19:36:31 EST from Nurb432

I believe ours does. I know we have both. 

But i'm not in that world now, thankfully. I stopped supporting exchange when it still had real version numbers and not dates. ( 5.5 rings a bell.. )

Fri Dec 17 2021 07:14:09 PM EST from IGnatius T Foobar

It's likely that Exchange 365 doesn't even share any code with on-prem Exchange.

 

Ok ignore that last post.  I shouldn't post when drugged.  I thought you said "data" not "code".  

sheesh.  im done. cya all tomorrow. before i make a total fool of myself

I believe ours does. I know we have both. 

But i'm not in that world now, thankfully. I stopped supporting exchange when it still had real version numbers and not dates. ( 5.5 rings a bell.. )

Fri Dec 17 2021 07:14:09 PM EST from IGnatius T Foobar

It's likely that Exchange 365 doesn't even share any code with on-prem Exchange.

We got fined by both them and a network monitoring company where im at now, perhaps 15 years ago ( net-something or other ) The net* company agreed to let the fine go if we renewed, as we planned on dropping them.

MS tried to audit a company where i was the CTO, and *knew* i was compliant. i told them to F-off unless they had a court order.

Fri Dec 17 2021 12:06:36 AM EST from ParanoidDelusions

They actually ended up bringing Diloutte and Touche in and fining us around $750k for license violations that I warned the C level staff we needed to fix. 

We negotiated down and settled to the tune of $250k. 

I had been tempted for years to turn the company in and collect the reward. I wonder which one of my staff actual did act on that thought. 

 

Wed Dec 15 2021 09:58:14 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

How much did Microsoft pay you to say that?

 

They actually ended up bringing Diloutte and Touche in and fining us around $750k for license violations that I warned the C level staff we needed to fix. 

We negotiated down and settled to the tune of $250k. 

I had been tempted for years to turn the company in and collect the reward. I wonder which one of my staff actual did act on that thought. 

Wed Dec 15 2021 09:58:14 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

How much did Microsoft pay you to say that?

lol

Wed Dec 15 2021 09:58:14 AM EST from IGnatius T Foobar

How much did Microsoft pay you to say that?

It didn't - if you knew how to manage it. The problem is that most Exchange servers were not managed or administered correctly. I'd give you the argument that it was so complex that managing it correctly was a nearly impossible task... 

But - once you gronked it - it was excellent. I administered a 250 user Exchange server for 5 years. Heavy volume users. Lots of medical data. Never had a single problem with it after I spent... I dunno... seems like it was probably a 6 week week period building, destroying and rebuilding test servers until I knew it inside and out. 

Tue Dec 07 2021 09:07:24 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

...and it crashed and corrupted if you even breathed on it. I spent a lot of time in the late 90's and early 00's fixing Exchange servers for customers that just fell over and died for no reason.

I could write a better mail server in my spare time. Oh wait ... I DID.

I love that a Linux guy thinks Exchange was so difficult that only Microsoft could reliably run it. 

I loved it. Totally scalable, easy to support, easy to restore. You just have to put a lot of effort into *learning* it... but once you do... it is SUPER powerful and convenient. I could make Exchange do *anything* I wanted it to do. 

Sun Dec 05 2021 18:11:37 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

so now edge says bad things when you try to download chrome....

Who would have thought that the end game for Exchange would be "this software is so unstable that we can't let you run it anymore; just pay us forever and we'll run it for you."

One reason became really clear last week: It detects if you are buying something then automatically offers a payment plan..

so now edge says bad things when you try to download chrome....

In my case it does not work that way.

We have to give out our rate for 'seat' each year before the other agencies do their budgets.  Its a flat rate, not a 'per-use', cant be touched for another year and if it goes up, we have to justify it to the controller in the statehouse.  We also are legislatively required to break even.

You've got to model your access on charge per transaction to the clients. I mean, that is what Microsoft wants. 

It turns IT from a cost center into a revenue generator. Departments can only use your services if they are in turn profitable. 

Ideally, it would work great. 

Sun Nov 21 2021 16:49:23 EST from Nurb432

So after watching yet another demo from our vendor, they are really going full speed with 'logic/power apps'

Tho my azure account has no access, i thought id watch some videos.  The subject of pricing came up.  Damned things are billed based on transaction. 

 

WTF. why are they going down this path? Idiots. How the hell are you supposed to budget when you cant predict your monthly cost? Depending on the workflow and what it does, we woudl easily have several hundred K triggers a DAY.. 

Rumor is the are moving their services ( like sending email.. ) and data validation on forms to power apps.   wtf wtf

Email alone = 200k or more... 

So after watching yet another demo from our vendor, they are really going full speed with 'logic/power apps'

Tho my azure account has no access, i thought id watch some videos.  The subject of pricing came up.  Damned things are billed based on transaction. 

WTF. why are they going down this path? Idiots. How the hell are you supposed to budget when you cant predict your monthly cost? Depending on the workflow and what it does, we woudl easily have several hundred K triggers a DAY.. 

Rumor is the are moving their services ( like sending email.. ) and data validation on forms to power apps.   wtf wtf

Email alone = 200k or more... 

*shudder*

Fri Oct 15 2021 03:41:41 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

In fact, they should make Wayland the native graphics system for Windows
:)

Microsoft Stores are awesome. The one here was *always* busy... I assume Covid killed it. They held events, I have a full Xbox driving rig (seat, steering wheel, peddles with clutch, manual shiftter) because they had one out in the mall in front of their store around Christmas... 

They have a full line of Microsoft computers - but showcased particular brands... HP, Toshiba... also... 

And if you had *any* machine with Microsoft OS on it, even if you bought it somewhere else - they would fix any problem you brought in - almost always for free... Their geniuses were *actually* useful. My experience with the Apple Geniuses was usually I found myself telling *them* things about Mac OS and iOS. 

They did mimic the Apple store - but they were *better* at everything that Apple does... except phones. 

The fact that they failed shows that it isn't superior quality or superior service or superior user experience - because Microsoft Stores were designed to beat Apple a

The same people who buy an M4 because it is the most expensive 4 series BMW - and then drive it like a grocery-getter to pick up their kids from school - put an Apple sticker on the window of that M4. 

Other than a surface and Xbox, what did they have to offer in a store experience?  At least Apple had a product line they could stick on the tables/shelves. 

Note: never been in either, but i walked past an Apple store once, it had tables lined with phones and tablets and computers..

Mon Oct 04 2021 12:34:02 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Went to the mall today, the Microsoft Store there has folded. Apple won that round. 

 

 

Went to the mall today, the Microsoft Store there has folded. Apple won that round. 

Wed Sep 29 2021 17:12:51 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

You know what ... after settling on a permanent Version 10, Apple released Version 11 of their operating system. And then in a move that surprised no one ... Microsoft, having settled on a permanent Version 10, is moving to Version 11 of their operating system.

I have a message for Microsoft. Listen closely, Satya. Microsoft will NEVER be as good as Apple until you arrange for Microsoft's founder and original CEO to be equally as healthy and alive as Apple's founder currently is.

Do it, Satya. Do it now. Get a brick of Cobalt-40 and invite Gates to bring his pancreas over.

All part of the plan " just upgrade "....

Sat Oct 02 2021 04:27:07 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

. Some people have reported up to a 25% performance degradation when VBS is running.

Hes not 100% wrong either however. ( having been in automotive myself close to 20 years, before i went pubic sector.. )

Sat Oct 02 2021 10:52:05 AM EDT from LoanShark

He just likes to complain. We all know that hardware keep improving and that it doesn't make sense to support the old stuff indefinitely.

Some of it sure, but there have been advancements in tech too so it wasn't always 'planned'. ( which they often use as a tool for forced upgrades.. )

Its all a marketing scam.

I'm still looking for the reference. I didnt have enough time to read it closely, it could have just been their interpretation of planned changes. Tho to be honest, i can see them doing that. I can see them dropping all local install support of servers at some point unless you are really special. Its the end goal...  endless revenue stream.

And i agree on that last point, we dont use it either. Anything on site is vmware.  It's Why i didnt read it really close when i had it :)  It was interesting, but wouldn't affect my life any.

Mon Sep 06 2021 12:22:40 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Re: hyperv

I find that hard to believe and I hope you're able to find the reference.

What I would believe is that they'd replace the conventional Hyper-V with Azure Stack, forcing users to deploy virtual machines in a way that they can be shifted to their cloud in an obvious migration path, similar to how an on-premise Exchange server can be joined to, and then supplanted by, the 365 service.   That would be more consistent with Micro$oft's typical behavior.

Of course, no one who is serious about virtualization is using Hyper-V anyway.

I find that hard to believe and I hope you're able to find the reference.

What I would believe is that they'd replace the conventional Hyper-V with Azure Stack, forcing users to deploy virtual machines in a way that they can be shifted to their cloud in an obvious migration path, similar to how an on-premise Exchange server can be joined to, and then supplanted by, the 365 service.   That would be more consistent with Micro$oft's typical behavior.

Of course, no one who is serious about virtualization is using Hyper-V anyway.

So i cant find the article now to get all the details, but i read this last week that there is a good chance microsoft may drop hyper-v on locally installable windows server.

If you want virtual machines for a production environment, i guess you will have to use Azure soon.. ( or another solution of course )

So, Microsoft has a new AI that helps you code, by looking at all the stuff on GitHub. But you have to pay for it. Really? isn't that violating the IP of open code ( in many cases, not all but many )? No wonder MS wanted to buy GitHub, in the past they would have never allowed that sort of nonsense but now they are one in the same and have no choice.

Its our cloud, our data, and you will like it. Oh, and pay us more.

I see them milking it as being the "provider of the cloud OS you run on your computer".  

Sure things are changing, but i dont see them just walking away from ti as long as they can still push it, or do some browser trickery and require edge ( or whatever its called by then ) to access their cloud apps. Sort of like how we were trapped into IE due to OCX. Then slowly 'oh, it wont run on other peoples OSs now.'  sort of like how Google took away the API keys from chromium and now some things just dont work..

I see this Linux thing as them hedging their bets if they do lose control. Not a plan to give it up.  But who knows what really goes on inside their little heads out there. 

As long as they can keep milking businesses, its not going away.

Hey, I'm fine with that.  Why run Windows software on OS/2 when you can run it on Windows?  The modern version will be, why run Linux software on Windows when you can run it on Linux?  Given the choice I will stay pure.  But if they are finally going to phase out their botched abortion of an operating system, good.

I dont know, it may just be the appearance of 'good'. "look, you can trust us now, be our friends, buy in to our ecosystem". Regardless, im not going to give them the benefit of the doubt.  Never trust your enemy. 

Fri Jul 23 2021 02:31:40 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

This isn't the old Microsoft, 

Maybe.  Maybe not.

There is a fairly new school of thought [ https://archive.is/elfO1 ] which suggests Microsoft is aware that Windows is no longer the weapon of market dominance that it was in a previous era.  In the past, their position was "run all of your workloads on Windows."  Today, it is "run it on whatever you want, but run it on our cloud."

CBL-Mariner, many applications ported to Linux (SQL Server, Edge, Teams, etc.) and the continued development of WSL -- which is about to get GUI support with a built-in Wayland server -- could indicate that Microsoft intends on a long slow phase-out of Windows.  Today they make most of their money on cloud services, and it's an open secret that the majority of Azure workloads are already Linux.

This isn't the old Microsoft, where Gates and Ballmer (may they die horribly) insisted that non-Microsoft software was "cancer".  They're a cloud services company now, and the maintenance of a proprietary operating system is becoming more of an albatross than a competitive advantage.

They're also aware that the new unit of computing is the container, and Windows containers are such crap that they're not worth using.

Ack. no.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-released-cbl-mariner-linux-distro

Are they still in the extend phase? Or has the extinguish phase begun?

Yes. whoever owns the stuff now was rumbling about suits again.  

Novell's existence kept food on my table for a few years. ( had a couple of netware certs, so kept me employed )

Funny thing was that i was also considered the Windows expert at the time.   Funny how that stuff works.

This comes back to the Democrats vs. the Republicans argument. 

I am more concerned about the evil that is able to actuate their evil more effectively against me. The POTENTIAL evil that is impotent is just an annoyance. The evil that is realized is a *problem*. 

Fri Jul 09 2021 20:20:13 EDT from Nurb432

I also agree on #1, But not on #2.

And they are still scum of the earth, not to be trusted.  Less evil still is evil :) 

Fri Jul 09 2021 08:15:37 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

I agree that Microsoft is "kinder and gentler" - Also probably a lot less confident, arrogant and annoying. 

 

I also agree on #1, But not on #2.

And they are still scum of the earth, not to be trusted.  Less evil still is evil :) 

Fri Jul 09 2021 08:15:37 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

I agree that Microsoft is "kinder and gentler" - Also probably a lot less confident, arrogant and annoying. 

I agree that Microsoft is "kinder and gentler" - Also probably a lot less confident, arrogant and annoying. I also agree that Microsoft still does completely disagreeable things - mostly with personal privacy and burying Opt-Out things that should actually be OPT-IN things. 

But with all that said - those things can be said about ALL the major players right now - and I think I probably trust APPLE the *most* in that regard. Apple really values being the Kings of their Kingdom - and their kingdom involves owning their user's data - jealously. They don't want to share it with anyone - *including* the Federal government. 

But I don't trust Apple either. And Linux has been infiltrated by the spooks and owls long ago - and was the *easiest* to infiltrate. The Free and Open Source development team model made that a piece of cake to do. The first time the FBI, CIA and NSA had a bust of a high profile hacker who was also a respected member of the Linux community - they had their foot in th

Fri Jul 09 2021 16:58:53 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I declare that bashing Bill Gates is acceptable here even if it has nothing to do with Microsoft.

Today's Microsoft could be considered "kinder and gentler" compared to the Gates/Ballmer Microsoft, but they still suck. I had to reboot today just because everything became sluggish. Application windows would take seconds to respond to mouse events. Nothing outrageous was running, it just decided it wanted to ruin my day.

I believe that Microsoft acquiring Canonical is inevitable. It's just a question of when. Windows Server can become a set of services that run on top of Linux, obviating the need to maintain a high-sucktitude OS underneath.
Just like Novell did. Desktop will take longer, of course.

Because cloud.

I really hope not, as if fear what may happen up stream to the real source..  Debian. 

Fri Jul 09 2021 04:58:53 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I believe that Microsoft acquiring Canonical is inevitable. It's just a question of when.

😂

Thu Jul 08 2021 14:56:10 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I call bullshit on your bullshit on your bullshit. You're cherry picking on both sides. Hey, 1998 called and John Dvorak wants his talking points back.

Linux has wrappers that certainly make it easier for a novice to get up and running - but the minute you try to do anything that it didn't come out of the box with - you get back to that same old bullshit. 

Every improvement in the Linux user experience over the last 30 years has been Linux catching up with what OS X and Windows offered the average user experience in their *previous* version - more or less. Linux tends to catch up right about the time that OS X and Windows are showing their next big thing. It is a very reactive development model. The few times they've caught up (The Compiz Cube was a cool concept in Ubuntu)... Linux does a 180 degree turn and goes with something far less attractive and exciting to end users. Usually for... reasons. 

Generally with Windows or OS X - if you want to do something that isn't stock in the system, you download an installer or .dmg and either click Yes a bunch of times or drag and drop the app into the folder on your Mac. WHATEVER it is. 

Thu Jul 08 2021 09:13:30 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Honestly, i have not had to do this for years as a 'end user'. Things
'just' work'. As in a graphical install that asks a few questions,

Right. Linux has become better than Mac in that it's easy when you want it to be, and complex when you need it to be.

Gone are the days when you had to hand-configure X11 to make it work with your video hardware. No one compiles their own kernels anymore. Editing configuration files, for a typical end user, is now a thing of the past. Most end users also don't have to compile programs from source to get what they want.

And that's why I call bullshit. Anyone who claims Linux is the same as it was in the past, is lying about having used Linux in the past.

I understand what you're saying - but c'mon...  it is far more difficult conceptually than Microsoft or Apple's file hierarchy. There always seems to be some reason or logic to the file folder directory names when you read up the history - but in practical application, it was often clever nerds being witty and unintentionally making things much more difficult than they needed to be. 

To be fair, I love Amiga-OS - but it suffers the same kind of bullshit. 

/opt /var /libs /devs /etc /usr /bin C: dev: DF0: .system /wbstartup /blah blah blah... 

Both are a confusing mess and things get dropped all over the place - they're very similar in this regard - and it is one of my least favorite things about BOTH OS platforms. And both Windows and OS X do a better job here, in general. 

This kind of statement is what I mean about how Linux is not ready for the user desktop: 

"Sure, they are not 'stock'

Thu Jul 08 2021 06:27:56 EDT from Nurb432

As far as file systems go, 'arcane'? Its not worse ( or better ) than what Microsoft has done. And its not all that much older, really since windows FS was built on top of DOS.. Sure, Linux is not 100% identical across 'distributions' ( a beef of mine ) but it is generally the same. Users stuff goes in to home, instead of users..  program files go in a couple places depending on their use.. Libraries go over here.. config files mostly go here..

For Microsoft: programs go iin program files, or was that program files x86? Or was it in windows\bla bla  See, they have the same problem really.  Just a matter of getting used to it. A lot of it is just learning where things are, how they work and you are good. Even moving from distributions, its an adjustment not a re-learn.    You cant pick up a windows box and suddenly know what you are doing. Had to learn it too at one point. 

Don't like cli to manage your system? Plenty of GUI management interfaces to prevent you from having to do it.  But if you want CLI its always there ( which ill give MS credit on that, since after decades of people asking they finally added that stuff )

System processes ( excluding systemD which was a huge change and another topic ) UNIX world basically did things the same for decades. Much like windows has.  Just incremental 'improvements'  So learn the core once, and keep up, then you are gold.

The only thing Microsoft has going for it is remote management ( GPO ), and you can do that too in the Linux world in several ways, just may not quite as transparent and takes more front end effort. But even that is improving as time goes on.

Mainframes? Same thing, they are just 'different' and need learned.

 

 

 

"Here is the dirty little secret of the IT industry. The majority of online security breaches that have happened, the worst ones - in the last 15 years - have almost entirely been on LINUX based servers - that were poorly administered. "

Not really a secret, people who do not take the time to learn their job cause problems.  Regardless of their job or indutry. Be it managing Linux, windows, routers, hell even door access systems or flying a plane. Its not the "system's" fault. Its the lack of experience, or lack of caring to do it correctly. Even when people ARE experienced, they cut corners. bad things happen.

As far as file systems go, 'arcane'? Its not worse ( or better ) than what Microsoft has done. And its not all that much older, really since windows FS was built on top of DOS.. Sure, Linux is not 100% identical across 'distributions' ( a beef of mine ) but it is generally the same. Users stuff goes in to home, instead of users..  program files go in a couple places depending on their use.. Libraries go over here.. config files mostly go here..

For Microsoft: programs go iin program files, or was that program files x86? Or was it in windows\bla bla  See, they have the same problem really.  Just a matter of getting used to it. A lot of it is just learning where things are, how they work and you are good. Even moving from distributions, its an adjustment not a re-learn.    You cant pick up a windows box and suddenly know what you are doing. Had to learn it too at one point. 

Don't like cli to manage your system? Plenty of GUI management interfaces to prevent you from having to do it. Sure, they are not 'stock' but its trivial to add them. But if you want CLI its always there ( which ill give MS credit on that, since after decades of people asking they finally added that stuff )

System processes ( excluding systemD which was a huge change and another topic ) UNIX world basically did things the same for decades. Much like windows has.  Just incremental 'improvements'  So learn the core once, and keep up, then you are gold.

The only thing Microsoft has going for it is remote management ( GPO ), and you can do that too in the Linux world in several ways, just may not quite as transparent and takes more front end effort. But even that is improving as time goes on.

Mainframes? Same thing, they are just 'different' and need learned.

"Here is the dirty little secret of the IT industry. The majority of online security breaches that have happened, the worst ones - in the last 15 years - have almost entirely been on LINUX based servers - that were poorly administered. "

Not really a secret, people who do not take the time to learn their job cause problems.  Regardless of their job or indutry. Be it managing Linux, windows, routers, hell even door access systems or flying a plane. Its not the "system's" fault. Its the lack of experience, or lack of caring to do it correctly. Even when people ARE experienced, they cut corners. bad things happen.

Honestly, i have not had to do this for years as a 'end user'. Things 'just' work'. As in a graphical install that asks a few questions, you wait then poof its done. A graphical app installer ( which i dont use, but its there ).  All the stuff t he 'average person' does is all 'above ground' now to speak. Updates can  happen on their own too. 

Sure, when i want to do something special, its there and accessable. But any more, that is rare for me even. 

Wed Jul 07 2021 08:24:05 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Are you claiming that the fundamental functions of Linux are different in any significant way than they were 30 years ago?

You've still got to navigate around through an obscure, arcane file system to find files and configure them with a primitive text editor like vi, just to get DNS to work right, just to configure your network correctly, just to set up dozens of things that any decent modern OS does automatically and reliably. 

Are you claiming that the fundamental functions of Linux are different in any significant way than they were 30 years ago?

You've still got to navigate around through an obscure, arcane file system to find files and configure them with a primitive text editor like vi, just to get DNS to work right, just to configure your network correctly, just to set up dozens of things that any decent modern OS does automatically and reliably. 

The developers rip out and replace features at their whim. Gnome has flipped several times in the last few versions on if you can place icons on your desktop. What could is a desktop that you can't PUT things on? You might be able to kludge a solution - but your GRANDMOTHER isn't going to be doing that - and most typical users are going to be intimidated by the process. 

Linux is not ready for average desktop users. Period. Without a propeller-headed neck-bearded, pony-tailed Uber Nerd to set it all up so that the Linux need *never* be seen - th

Wed Jul 07 2021 13:53:05 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

There is still a Linux foundation underneath it all - and Linux
itself hasn't changed significantly at all in the last 30 years - and
things can still break at that foundation layer that require advanced
Linux skills in order to fix. 

I call bullshit.

Please describe the problems you had with Linux 30 years ago.

Operator error. 

Mon Jul 05 2021 23:44:20 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Grr.

Came back from vacation, connected my work laptop to the dock, intending to get it booted up, logged in, and ready for my first day back at work tomorrow.

About a dozen failed boots later, I'm now sitting through Windoze reinstalling itself.

Garbage of the worst kind. Complete shit from version 1 through version 11. Windoze will never not suck.

But... is it really? 

There is still a Linux foundation underneath it all - and Linux itself hasn't changed significantly at all in the last 30 years - and things can still break at that foundation layer that require advanced Linux skills in order to fix. 

The best Linux can do is to be just as bloated and insufferable as any other OS - eventually suffering slow-downs and clutter and strange failures that MOST users will resolve with a reinstall - app and system crashes that they'll resolve with a reboot. 

With the added bonus of "I want to do App X"

And being told, "Yeah - we don't have that on Linux - instead we have this ALTERNATIVE..." 

Your grandmother may just want to watch Cat videos - in which case, an iPad is actually the BEST bet for her. 

Linux really has no place on the desktop, except for with Grandmothers who like cat videos who have grandsons who are Linux evangelists. It is a VERY small niche. 

Wed Jun 30 2021 16:26:06 EDT from Nurb432

It does not have to be complex. And for the average person it can be less complex than windows if done right.  

Sure 1995, you had to know what you are doing and people were not as technical.  In 2021, just follow the bouncing ball in a graphical installer no worse than you get with Microsoft, and poof you have something that lets you watch your cat videos.   

If my 80 year old mother can one day say, 'why do they changing things, is there something else i can use' and when i give her Debian the next weekend she had zero problems and was happier..  Didn't even have to tell her how to use it. I put in lxde, which was close enough to win7 for her to understand the menu and task bar. Dropped a couple important icons on the desktop. Done. happy camper again.

If she was going to be into installing apps on her own, then id have done ( gag ) Ubuntu + lxde. While im not a fan personally due to ethical and political reasons out side of this topic the reality is that the snap store is easy enough to use, no worse than other app stores ( apple, Microsoft ). But she had her browser and really all she needed. Everything she wanted was a favorite in her browser that she was already used to using ( chrome ), even stuff like Netflix or google docs. I still say most people, all they need is a browser. Not all, and their needs may be different but most. 

 

Hell, even gaming is moving to cloud.. OS wont matter there much longer either. 

Wed Jun 30 2021 03:55:15 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Linux is not a good user-space platform. It sucks at it. It is too complicated. 

 

Not quite the same but my first back in office.  100% cpu. Petty much unusable 

Some crap about a secondary firewall and reading that Cisco umbrella can do it.  Tried to stop the firewall thing first, instant blue screen... so  I disabled umbrella ( who knows if it will stay disabled ) then print spooler @100%..   i dont ever print, so disabled that too. 

After that 15%..

Id use it!

Sun Jul 04 2021 06:12:08 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Re: Windows 10 + MacOS Dock + Ubuntu material design == Windows 11

I'm actually tempted to build a backup/recovery framework for Citadel *just* so I can call the sending system a "master" and the receiving system a "slave" -- JUST to piss off the woketards.

lol

Sun Jul 04 2021 06:12:08 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Re: Windows 10 + MacOS Dock + Ubuntu material design == Windows 11

I'm actually tempted to build a backup/recovery framework for Citadel *just* so I can call the sending system a "master" and the receiving system a "slave" -- JUST to piss off the woketards.

I like forth.  Down with C++

:)

Sun Jul 04 2021 05:48:49 AM EDT from darknetuser Subject: Re: Windows 10 + MacOS Dock + Ubuntu material design == Windows 11

Language manipulation is quite a strong weapon,

Never a good idea.  Even if you and your chat partner are 100% in agreement, you never know what 3rd party may run across it in an audit or something. 

Fri Jul 02 2021 12:23:20 PM EDT from LoanShark Subject: Re: Windows 10 + MacOS Dock + Ubuntu material design == Windows 11

I must be insane to have held this discussion on the company chat server. 

"will" it be ok.. That time is coming. Faster than any of us think.

Fri Jul 02 2021 04:29:04 AM EDT from darknetuser Subject: Re: Windows 10 + MacOS Dock + Ubuntu material design == Windows 11

Now consider whether it would be ok for a political party to stick a notice in your house's door which reads "This House Now Belongs to $Party."

I agree with that, however i do think they kept MS out of the education arena. 

For those that didnt want Apple for whatever reason ( cost, lack of central manageability, whatever their reason was ), Chromebooks stepped in and pushed MS out as the 2nd option. for a variety of reasons.

Wed Jun 30 2021 03:55:15 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Chromebooks did not cannibalize much of the Windows market share, either. They had a major effect on APPLE's marketshare in the *education* niche. 

 

It does not have to be complex. And for the average person it can be less complex than windows if done right.  

Sure 1995, you had to know what you are doing and people were not as technical.  In 2021, just follow the bouncing ball in a graphical installer no worse than you get with Microsoft, and poof you have something that lets you watch your cat videos.   

If my 80 year old mother can one day say, 'why do they changing things, is there something else i can use' and when i give her Debian the next weekend she had zero problems and was happier..  Didn't even have to tell her how to use it. I put in lxde, which was close enough to win7 for her to understand the menu and task bar. Dropped a couple important icons on the desktop. Done. happy camper again.

If she was going to be into installing apps on her own, then id have done ( gag ) Ubuntu + lxde. While im not a fan personally due to ethical and political reasons out side of this topic the reality is that the snap store is easy enough to use, no worse than other app stores ( apple, Microsoft ). But she had her browser and really all she needed. Everything she wanted was a favorite in her browser that she was already used to using ( chrome ), even stuff like Netflix or google docs. I still say most people, all they need is a browser. Not all, and their needs may be different but most. 

Hell, even gaming is moving to cloud.. OS wont matter there much longer either. 

Wed Jun 30 2021 03:55:15 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Linux is not a good user-space platform. It sucks at it. It is too complicated. 

 

Yeah - this is bullshit too. Those users aren't using a PC to do these things anymore. They've all moved on to mobile devices. This graph kind of illustrates that. 


https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share

If you were to replace Windows with Linux on the majority of use models where a real computer is needed - tens of millions of users would reject Linux, just like they always have, and go right back to Windows if possible, Mac OS X otherwise (assuming Windows were no longer available). 

Linux is not a good user-space platform. It sucks at it. It is too complicated. 

Chromebook basically operates in competition not with real desktop OSes, but with mobile content consumption and light productivity OSes like iOS and Android. 

If you compare Linux, OS X and Windows as the only actual real operating systems - it isn't even close. The market expanded to even LESS capable users with mobile OSes - but the share distribution among real OS platform

Chromebooks did not cannibalize much of the Windows market share, either. They had a major effect on APPLE's marketshare in the *education* niche. 

Wed Jun 30 2021 11:20:47 EDT from Nurb432

Depends.  since 90% of the world just use their browser to watch cat videos on youtube and look at Facebook.. they wont even know what OS they re using as long as it runs chrome or something. 

Wed Jun 30 2021 10:12:23 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Heh. If tens of millions of people are forced to try Linux. 

You'll have tens of millions of disappointed consumers. 

 

I was joking....

Depends.  since 90% of the world just use their browser to watch cat videos on youtube and look at Facebook.. they wont even know what OS they re using as long as it runs chrome or something. 

Wed Jun 30 2021 10:12:23 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Heh. If tens of millions of people are forced to try Linux. 

You'll have tens of millions of disappointed consumers. 

 

Heh. If tens of millions of people are forced to try Linux. 

You'll have tens of millions of disappointed consumers. 

Tue Jun 29 2021 17:04:20 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Has 'doze 11 been RTM yet? I wonder if they're just keeping the demo pool controllable until RTM.

I can't imagine Microsoft doesn't understand that if they end support for ... what, tens of millions of still very usable computers ... in one swift action, it's going to create a gigantic pool of equipment on which people will try Linux for the first time? And like it? And maybe not bother buying a new computer to run 'doze 11?

And the BDSM crowd is offended by all this hate on master/slave. Dont their lives matter?

IBM made a fatal mistake like that. This might be their moment of stupidity. "assuming" and "underestimating" are never good things.

I suspect They are banking on the business market to play along like good dogs ( many will ) and pull enough consumers with them to remain compatible to pull it off with minimal casualties. Long haul planning. Like Democrats. Lose a few battles but the war is generations long.

Or...   the OS market isn't big enough to care now, and their $ is being made on the cloud side. Could just be a last hail-mary, or helping out Intel and AMD ( and the PC companies ) as they exit the OS market since nearly all their core products are running on the lased-cloud model now. And since they are clearly supporting Linux for their current stuff ( even edge and teams.. )  they are about to walk away from a true desktop OS. ( windows 12 )

or im just dreaming and my hatred is clouding my view of what is happening, and they just feel they still control enough market to force it down everyone throat. And you will ask for another.

The fridge guy yesterday had an iPad in what looked to be an otterbox case.

Used it to look up service manuals to get this POS into service mode, look up the part number he had to order, and ordered it. 

Also... there is a distinction between the kind of "field tablet" that is often a ruggedized PC with a touch screen. Some practices use them too... they're almost always resistive, not capacitive touch screens, they're designed for stylus use, and they're very industrial and industry specific. 

Then you have the more modern "tablet/slate" aimed at consumer users... 

You sometimes see them used at kiosks. The Vape company I buy eJuice from has one mounted on a counter that spins around to get your signature. There are some business models where they can be used... 

I mean, don't the Apple employees at the Apple Store all walk around with iPads now. :D 


But in general - they didn't replace traditional PCs. They supplement them. 

I do hope that this does not make TPM mandatory on future motherboards.  Have it there, sure whatever, but continue to make it optional for it to be enabled or not.  

Someday i might upgrade. Might be an x86, who knows.  

Hmm another article says TPM 1.2 is ok, but they recommend 2.0

Sounds like no one really knows what is going on, making guesses from a leaked pre-alpha? 

( and i installed it as a vm with NO TPM or secure boot.. it 'just worked' )

Seems they are also limiting how old the processor can be. Something like generations that are 3 years or newer.  ( dont have details, just listening to people trying to install  it )

They really needed to get that upgrade treadmill running again, Intel and AMD must have been hurting. Machines from the last few years are now good enough you dont need to keep upgrading..  just replace when you break it.  Sooooo gotta obsolete everything and force millions to start over. ooooo revenue! 

Glad i have no plans on running it at home. Now its the office's problem to replace upwards of 30000 machines. ( wont be all, but we are so far behind on refresh, i bet its a majority )

lol

While sales agents/field agents - and some other retail agents were the first legitimate use of tablets... 

It was always a niche segment. It is kind of like VR in that it seems like it has so many potential killer applications and scenarios... 

But getting it to really work in those - the real world application is often less thrilling than the conceptual application. 

I forget the model number, but other than the brick, one of the early think pad tablets was geared to sales. Came in that fancy case with its own printer.    I used to have one. I was its 2nd owner. Was a gift from a sales guy at IBM. It left with the great purge.  I did keep the drive tho. PCMCIA spinning disk. 

Dont "forget field support" ( service guys.. )  great for them too.

Mon Jun 28 2021 04:31:06 AM EDT from darknetuser

Actually, what I used tablets used the most for is for easing the work of sales agents. Sales agents can have their catalogues loaded up in their tablets, fill in customer data and place orders in the name of their customers, while working in the field.

ZDNet is a CBSi property - like Tech Republic. There was a huge coup at CBS back around... um... 2015, I think, maybe earlier... where basically nearly all the staff of both internal writers/editors and content contributors were canned en masse. 

Jason Heiner is kind of the chief architect of that - and he has always wanted to be part of the ZDNet editorial and writing staff. Tech Republic is basically the F2 league of the CBSi tech properties, and ZDNet is the F1. 

But the actual monoculture is being purely dedicated to the agenda of the political Left. 

Sat Jun 26 2021 11:56:17 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Re: Windows 10 + MacOS Dock + Ubuntu material design == Windows 11

I stopped reading The Register when they started publishing a lot more out of their San Francisco office.  The moderators are apparently over there too, and they censor anything that even remotely strays from ... let's call it San Francisco values.  That's why I had wandered in to ZDnet in the first place.  I figured with the Microsoft monoculture largely over, they'd be more tolerable.

TPM was something the free world was originally concerned about because it interlocked with M$ "Trusted Computing" effort, which they introduced at the height of their monopoly.  There was legitimate suspicion that the whole thing was a plan to lock other operating systems out of the hardware.  And maybe that was their intention, but the industry changed and other things became important and it didn't turn out that way.  UEFI Secure Boot was part of that too, I think, but on a desktop computer you can turn it off when you're installing the legitimate operating system of your choice.

To be fair ... I *like* UEFI.  I just wish it would work better.  Considering how old it is at this point, the frequency with which we still have to fall back to BIOS booting is ridiculous.

I stopped reading The Register when they started publishing a lot more out of their San Francisco office.  The moderators are apparently over there too, and they censor anything that even remotely strays from ... let's call it San Francisco values.  That's why I had wandered in to ZDnet in the first place.  I figured with the Microsoft monoculture largely over, they'd be more tolerable.

TPM was something the free world was originally concerned about because it interlocked with M$ "Trusted Computing" effort, which they introduced at the height of their monopoly.  There was legitimate suspicion that the whole thing was a plan to lock other operating systems out of the hardware.  And maybe that was their intention, but the industry changed and other things became important and it didn't turn out that way.  UEFI Secure Boot was part of that too, I think, but on a desktop computer you can turn it off when you're installing the legitimate operating system of your choice.

To be fair ... I *like* UEFI.  I just wish it would work better.  Considering how old it is at this point, the frequency with which we still have to fall back to BIOS booting is ridiculous.

Let me enlighten you - 

They're almost ALL assholes, and of the assholes in technology journalism, Perlow is one of the most tolerable. 

But yeah - you are absolutely *never* going to be on his favorite reader's list. Heh. :) 

Fri Jun 25 2021 11:30:13 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Re: Windows 10 + MacOS Dock + Ubuntu material design == Windows 11

I didn't know who Perlow was until I wandered in to ZDnet not too long ago.
He seems like a bit of an asshole to me. It's like he's a holdover from 20 years ago and the days when the big tech rags all had to bow down to Microsoft because M$ was their biggest advertiser by far and basically controlled the trade press.

So yeah, he wrote some asinine things, I called him out on it, and next thing you know I'm banned. So I'm not surprised he's a commie.

That could have been what i was remembering, i just knew there were issues with it working at all, and also something unrelated to do with the keys coming from Microsoft and them being an ass about it.. And since i had no plans on doing it myself i didnt care. :) 

But i do need to look into the VM stuff for KVM. Id hate to lose that ability on my office machine. Perhaps it can pass-thru the TPM stuff. I donno.   Got some reading to do. No huge hurry tho as at the rate we move, i might be retired first.  We still have several thousand windows 7 machines and i can drag it out as long as possible, as the 4 pieces of native software i need dont die.... Crystal reports, SSMS, ciscoVPN, and fossil. 

Fri Jun 25 2021 03:16:32 PM EDT from LoanShark

In both cases I have been able to dual boot these machines just fine. Like I said, the TPM is present but I don't use it. However, for a while there was a Linux kernel bug that affected the laptop that caused kernel boot to fail if TPM is enabled. So I had it disabled for a while. Linux does have TPM support, the bug was in the TPM driver, I believe it was a temporary issue that was probably fixed; prior to the bug there were no problems.

WIn 11 Home edition requires internet and a MS online account to install.  

Requires TPM enabled. ( that kills dual booting Linux/BSD/Whatever, right? I dont have that turned on anywhere so not sure but its what i heard ). Wonder what that means for VM systems like KVM.  ( ya i know, i can go look it up, just mind wandering for the moment )

+ of course moving the bar up for required hardware to obsolete a lot of older machines.   Gotta let Intel and AMD sell more product when what we have is more than enough.

I keep thinking in a few years i dont have to care anymore... 

Do you know Perlow? He was a friend for a while - then during the height of TDS - he unfriended me because I'm a "racist". 

He still follows me on Twitter. He also told me if I ever wanted to write in the tech industry again, I needed to change my public political opinions. Robert Scoble told me the same thing, and also unfriended me - but Scoble basically had a breakdown shortly thereafter and got caught up in the MeToo thing, if I remember right. 

Perlow was a Microsoft evangelist and is a cloud proponent - and did get me killer deals on Office 365. But he left them for someone else, so that well dried up. 

Thu Jun 24 2021 17:23:18 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Windows 10 + MacOS Dock + Ubuntu material design == Windows 11

You won't read this anywhere else, because I got banned from ZDnet.  Jason Perlow took his head out of Satya Nadella's ass long enough to see that I pointed out all of the bullshit he was spewing.  So until my DHCP lease changes, you'll only hear the very best information about Windows 11 here on Uncensored.

For starters, no one got to see the release video in its entirety because it kept cutting out.  Microsoft apparently can't do a webcast with a large audience reliably.  They are probably using Microsoft products and services to do the streaming.  They should have had Google do it for them.

As the subject line states, Windows 11 basically looks like they took Windows 10, made the taskbar look like the MacOS dock, brought in the material design from Ubuntu, and called it a new OS.  It is, in all respects, singularly unimpressive.  People are going to be upset when they find that the Start Menu has been moved back into the middle of the screen.

For those of you who don't use Microsoft Teams, you do now.  It's built in to the operating system and cannot be removed, because that would cause the entire operating system to fail, just like Internet Explorer and Windows 98.

Windows 11 will supposedly run Android applications.  But for some poorly explained reason, you have to get your Android apps from the Amazon app store.

That's all for now.  May Bill Gates die painfully and soon.

when Microsoft released 10, they made noises to the effect that it would become an "evergreen" version of Windows; the "last" version of Windows, if you will.

It's kind of funny.  They said that 10 would be the last version, but then Apple went to 11 so Microsoft went to 11 as well.  Supposedly it is a free upgrade, but I wonder if the free upgrade requires an activated license.

Oh, and this is hilarious: they knew that their webcast was failing, and they had to tell everyone to switch over to YouTube.

Oh. sorry. My humor sensor is still broke. Still not feeling well.

Not on win 10 at least. I have installed it totally off-network. Sure it bitches about 'you really want a Microsoft account' but it will do it.

Also installed the leaked win 11 with no network.  Of course its not final build by any stretch, so subject to change.

Im still waiting for them to say "pay up to keep using what you got, and you will get upgrades even if you dont want it as you have to be online for your stuff to work, and we will shove the update down your throat"

Google is a direct competitor.  Amazon, not as much. And i'm sure they spend a lot of $ on Microsoft crap on the back end, where i doubt Google does. They have their own OS, their own chips.. 

Thu Jun 24 2021 05:23:18 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Windows 10 + MacOS Dock + Ubuntu material design == Windows 11

 

Windows 11 will supposedly run Android applications.  But for some poorly explained reason, you have to get your Android apps from the Amazon app store.

 

I'm forced to at the office. I hate it. Convoluted, confusing, unstable piece of cow poo.  Its like SharePoint on the wrong kind of steroids..  and i never thought anything could suck more than SP

Thu Jun 24 2021 05:23:18 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Windows 10 + MacOS Dock + Ubuntu material design == Windows 11

 

For those of you who don't use Microsoft Teams, you do now.  It's built in to the operating system and cannot be removed, because that would cause the entire operating system to fail, just like Internet Explorer and Windows 98.

 

You won't read this anywhere else, because I got banned from ZDnet.  Jason Perlow took his head out of Satya Nadella's ass long enough to see that I pointed out all of the bullshit he was spewing.  So until my DHCP lease changes, you'll only hear the very best information about Windows 11 here on Uncensored.

For starters, no one got to see the release video in its entirety because it kept cutting out.  Microsoft apparently can't do a webcast with a large audience reliably.  They are probably using Microsoft products and services to do the streaming.  They should have had Google do it for them.

As the subject line states, Windows 11 basically looks like they took Windows 10, made the taskbar look like the MacOS dock, brought in the material design from Ubuntu, and called it a new OS.  It is, in all respects, singularly unimpressive.  People are going to be upset when they find that the Start Menu has been moved back into the middle of the screen.

For those of you who don't use Microsoft Teams, you do now.  It's built in to the operating system and cannot be removed, because that would cause the entire operating system to fail, just like Internet Explorer and Windows 98.

Windows 11 will supposedly run Android applications.  But for some poorly explained reason, you have to get your Android apps from the Amazon app store.

That's all for now.  May Bill Gates die painfully and soon.

ChromeOS is mostly Linux anyway, with a funky GUI.  And newer versions, you can run Debian Linux in a VM ( fully supported, not some hackjob ), and Android apps too ( which is really Linux at its core ).   So you get all 3. 

And for me if i need windows, might as well just RDP to a box. so dont matter what im using. 

Not trying to sell anyone on one..  just that for me it works out well most of the time when im out and about.  

Wed Jun 23 2021 08:35:03 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

 

Which really - Linux and OS X still have this focus too. If the "All apps are in the cloud," paradigm was as powerful as Ig believes it is - we would all dump ALL of our favorite local OSes and run Chromebooks. 

 

I always had a docking station + BT keyboard and mouse available to use for when i need to do something more than click and drool. ( or something quick ).   Perhaps im just different than most. But i see people with covers that have built in keyboard/stand.

That said, just before we got sent home was carrying around a chromebook with a fold around keyboard.  So same idea, just one package.  And normally its tablet mode..

Thu Jun 24 2021 10:12:13 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

  Touch-only devices probably work better there.

 

Nobody really succeeded though. Again - as a content consumption device there is a segment of the Computing Appliance demographic who likes and has found use models for the tablet - but the forecasts that tablets and touch UIs would be ubiquitous fell far short of expectations - and all manufacturers dialed back the focus on this design - or adapted it. Phablets were scoffed at - but at a certain size, they make a lot of sense - especially with functions like DEX where your Note 10 becomes basically a laptop core and interfaces with a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Laptops that have a tablet function like the Surface Pro have had a successful niche and lend themselves to certain applications... 

Tablets are something we throw to our kids to keep them quiet in the back seat, or to our mother-in-law so she can see family pictures on Facebook. That is their basic niche. 

But the majority of productivity work is still easier done on a traditional Windows GUI. I don't care if it is OS X,

Thu Jun 24 2021 10:12:13 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

In 2010 I wrote a block post called "Sacrilege: I don't want an iPad" [http://uncensored.citadel.org/readfwd?go=Skeptic%20Tank?p=1518380187].  It seems to have held up remarkably well.

Tablets aren't popular with "computer people".  My 16 year old uses her tablet and her phone all day long, and doesn't own a computer.   When she has to do school work that requires a computer, she reluctantly uses the Chromebook issued to her by the school.

Part of it may be related to the fact that she hates sitting at a desk.  She would rather sit on a couch or in a comfy chair.  Touch-only devices probably work better there.

Any way you slice it, though ... tablets were a Bill Gates obsession, so it was quite pleasing to see Microsoft fail hard in this space where others succeeded.

In 2010 I wrote a block post called "Sacrilege: I don't want an iPad" [http://uncensored.citadel.org/readfwd?go=Skeptic%20Tank?p=1518380187].  It seems to have held up remarkably well.

Tablets aren't popular with "computer people".  My 16 year old uses her tablet and her phone all day long, and doesn't own a computer.   When she has to do school work that requires a computer, she reluctantly uses the Chromebook issued to her by the school.

Part of it may be related to the fact that she hates sitting at a desk.  She would rather sit on a couch or in a comfy chair.  Touch-only devices probably work better there.

Any way you slice it, though ... tablets were a Bill Gates obsession, so it was quite pleasing to see Microsoft fail hard in this space where others succeeded.

Yeah there is absolutely "Magical and Revolutionary" fatigue going on with personal electronics. But - tablets hit the wall in particular. There was a time when I was looking to buy something for portable emulation - and things like the Nvida Shield had fallen off the map - you couldn't get them new - the newest version was a step DOWN from the previous version, and the people who had used ones to unload knew that. Same thing kind of happened with the Samsung Note tablets... iPad still generated a little excitement with a new release, but only among those who were fully bought into the Apple ecosystem. Their WWID events were falling off the face of public awareness. I think the people who found a use model for tablets of a particular sort that justified a tablet... they've all been found - and a lot of other people found that their tablet was forgotten for so long at a time when they *wanted* to use it, it was dead and needed to be charged first. 

And this had a subsequent impact on the people

The touch UI was a bust. It is good for Kiosks and sometimes for art and a few other things - but in general, the GUI rules. Microsoft realized that, and never got their Modern/Metro UI interface with enough developer support... the touch apps all suck... Twitter and Facebook - and other web apps avoid it altogether because Microsoft, like Facebook - is simply uncool. 

So... I have a Surface Pro 5. I *never* use it in tablet mode - in part because if I'm going to be using Facebook on the Surface - the web based app is superior to the Modern UI App. Better integrated, more powerful... and that is the example with everything. Microsoft has no place in this market. Android and Apple have it cornered - but Microsoft has decided, rightly - it isn't the threat to their market that it appeared to be. 

The cloud itself is a big part of their strategy - but so is continuing to provide a great local app user interface and internally hosted experience.

Which really - Linux and OS X

Wed Jun 23 2021 13:11:14 EDT from Nurb432

Next version of WiFi standards is supposed to do stuff like that.  ( the tracking part, not the AR part )

I agree the hype is gone, so now its just 'yet another boring toaster'.  People buy new ones when theirs break, but not a huge need to keep upgrading or standing in line for them.  ( much like all other devices these days most have reached a 'practical' plateau and its all incremental improvements. no 'wow factor' )

Wed Jun 23 2021 01:06:35 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

We were all supposed to be working on touch-screen workstations, swiping and using other gestures that mimicked real world actions and activities - like in Tom Cruise in Minority Report of Tony Stark as Iron Man. 

Next version of WiFi standards is supposed to do stuff like that.  ( the tracking part, not the AR part )

I agree the hype is gone, so now its just 'yet another boring toaster'.  People buy new ones when theirs break, but not a huge need to keep upgrading or standing in line for them.  ( much like all other devices these days most have reached a 'practical' plateau and its all incremental improvements. no 'wow factor' )

Wed Jun 23 2021 01:06:35 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

We were all supposed to be working on touch-screen workstations, swiping and using other gestures that mimicked real world actions and activities - like in Tom Cruise in Minority Report of Tony Stark as Iron Man. 

Oh, people use them. They're not the disruptive paradigm that people forecast they would be. I think we've lost the thesis. Microsoft's development of the Modern/Metro UI was a response to this. The Live Tiles were their answer to this. Microsoft was afraid that the traditional Windowed UI was going to disappear and that the future *was* touch interaction. They weren't alone - that buzz was going in throughout the industry and among technologists and technology evangelists. 

We were all supposed to be working on touch-screen workstations, swiping and using other gestures that mimicked real world actions and activities - like in Tom Cruise in Minority Report of Tony Stark as Iron Man. 


Tablets and VR were the future. 

Only - not so much - or at the very least, not quite yet. 

The public perception and demand for tablets has also declined. There isn't a mad upgrade cycle - and the manufacturers aren't putting a lot of R&D or advertising into pushing

Wed Jun 23 2021 12:46:33 EDT from Nurb432

I actually see a number of people using them. Often times for watching movies and reading books. 

And i wouldn't say i'm exited, just pleased i guess.  Useful tools, not some 'wow look at that" device. 

I actually see a number of people using them. Often times for watching movies and reading books. 

And i wouldn't say i'm exited, just pleased i guess.  Useful tools, not some 'wow look at that" device. 

You may like them... but when is the last time you saw anybody really excited about getting a new tablet - or any buzz about a revolutionary new tablet? Lots of people ended up with tablets that they used a lot for a while, but then became another object sitting in a drawer collecting dust - because it really is a weird niche between phone and laptop. 

They're mostly devices for kids - they killed the "built in DVD entertainment system" in cars... I guess in a lot of cases, they became the drivers entertainment and information console too - e.g., Tesla and BMW iDrive units. 

They're good to get your mother-in-law on Facebook. Kids and AARP users. That is *actually* the tablet demographic, once the novelty wears off. 

I've got an older iPad of some sort - every now and then I have a use model for it - but most times, either my phone or my laptop is a better choice. 

Wed Jun 23 2021 10:16:22 EDT from Nurb432

I like my Android tablets.   but again, that is android not windows :)

Doesn't powershell do most everything the management GUI does now? ( not having to manage servers now, i have not looked into it much, other than for automation scripts in workflow tasks )

Windows 8 was Microsoft saying "we're going to give you the same interface on your computer, your phone, your video game console, your tablet, your television, and everything else we can jam it on to."

The users, who were 99.99% on desktop/laptop computers, responded with "WTF?  Why does my computer now look like the seat back display in an airplane?"

Wndows Server has been able to run "headless" for a while now.  Originally it still required another Windows machine running the GUI to run its admin tools, but over the last couple of years they've moved some amount of functionality into Windows Admin Center, which exposes a web interface.  I haven't tried it, but it's got to be better than bloating up a server OS with a GUI, which is what all sensible people said when Windows NT Server first came out some thirty years ago.

I like my Android tablets.   but again, that is android not windows :)

Tend to agree. Windows 7 was pretty awesome too. 

Windows 8 had potential as an OS for Appliance Media devices - but that market kind of fizzled on its *promise* and instead just became... I dunno... I can't think of anybody who is excited to get a tablet, anymore. 

Tue Jun 22 2021 16:25:10 EDT from Nurb432

I tend to agree, the interface they presented with 95 was usable. NT4, was kludgy.  Of course i was already used to something similar with ST-GEM.  But still, ill give them credit for copying the better parts.

 

Win2k was their pinnacle, both GUI and Backend.  Took a long time to get there , and has been downhilll ever since.

I tend to agree, the interface they presented with 95 was usable. NT4, was kludgy.  Of course i was already used to something similar with ST-GEM.  But still, ill give them credit for copying the better parts.

Win2k was their pinnacle, both GUI and Backend.  Took a long time to get there , and has been downhilll ever since.

The "Live Tile" thing goes way back. Then it was called Modern UI, and then Metro, in Windows 8. It comes from a time when the entire industry was certain that the Windowed GUI desktop was dead, and that touch interfaces would be the preferred way of doing *everything* going forward - and that wasn't the case. The traditional desktop rallied back once people realized a Mouse and Windows GUI is the *best* way to get most productivity work done in most cases. It is also why productivity software with a GUI hasn't been replaced by CLI - no matter how many people insist that vi is all you need to efficiently write a document. 

Each interface has advantages and disadvantages, and lends itself to certain tasks and not to others. 

So, anyhow - I think that Microsoft continues to look for an innovative interface that works equally well with CLI, Windowed Desktop GUI, and touch input - and they'll continue to tweak that - but will probably focus their OS on the GUI. 

As for adop

https://mashable.com/2014/10/01/windows-10-preview-vs-os-x-yosemite/ - 2014


Here is the thing - they all look pretty much alike, anyhow. But I've read any number of articles where internal Windows previews looked JUST like OS X - but the final release ends up looking nothing like the preview, over the years. 

They probably enjoy that the Apple faithful fall for it every time, like Charlie Brown thinking he is finally going to get to kick that football. 

With the product i support moving to HTML 5, originally they declared it 'finally browser agnostic, other than IE or old Edge" ( which made sense ). Legacy version was using OCX, so we were stuck with IE

In the first week i found problems with Chrome, Firefox and Safari. ( but not consistent across platforms different issues on different browsers and OSs ).

Now its " we suggest you use Edge ". I installed edge on my Linux desktop to avoid windows as much as possible.  it felt dirty.

Tue Jun 22 2021 10:43:18 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I found that on my Windoze machine at work, the latest Edge works just fine as a Google-free Chrome version, but you have to install a couple of extensions to keep it from constantly sending you to MSN.

I dunno. I kinda quit MS IT right around the time that Windows 8 was hitting. 

But, no - as a Metro UI app/widget thing. Either way, enabled by default - and pulling data by default - yes. You had to go in and select things to turn it off. 

Mon Jun 21 2021 19:30:12 EDT from Nurb432

Installed by default? Down by the clock.  And in enterprise editions?

 

Mon Jun 21 2021 07:26:20 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

There has been a weather and news widget in Metro since Windows 8. 

 

 

Installed by default? Down by the clock.  And in enterprise editions?

Mon Jun 21 2021 07:26:20 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

There has been a weather and news widget in Metro since Windows 8. 

 

 

There has been a weather and news widget in Metro since Windows 8. 

Mon Jun 21 2021 09:31:35 EDT from Nurb432

Yet another update at the office.   Now i have a weather/news widget.  Thanks Microsoft, i always wanted more crap pushed in my face.

Yet another update at the office.   Now i have a weather/news widget.  Thanks Microsoft, i always wanted more crap pushed in my face.

Picked up a copy of WIn11. Just curious.  Installing now. ( VM, no network. Who knows if its full of virus )

Figured it was, but the 'concept' was ok. Just they ruined it. 

Thu Jun 17 2021 09:29:18 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

"Bob" was a ripoff of The Little Computer People Project. Don't think for a minute they actually created something.

You mean how they both resembled Atari GEM?   just kidding, we have to give Xerox the ultimate credit i think. and its been incremental ever since, with everyone chasing each other's tails.

For the non-techie  i think the only real radical divergence in GUI was 'Bob'.  I know i'm in the minority , but still think the underlying concept was ok, even tho REALLY sucked in implementation. And i'm sure they stole that from some one else. Nothing else the gaming world. I guess what we had on the newton was a different concept too. But PDAs were just getting going so it had to be 'different'.   

Thu Jun 17 2021 01:12:56 AM EDTfrom ParanoidDelusions

 

Which has been the case since... well, Windows 95. Maybe Mac OS Classic 6. 

I agree... the design changes I saw looked more like OS X, and overall - it still looked pretty much like Win10. 

I think it is more of a case of convergence where all OSes look pretty much like one another. 

Which has been the case since... well, Windows 95. Maybe Mac OS Classic 6. 

Wed Jun 16 2021 10:14:27 EDT from Nurb432

The image i saw looked more like OSX.  *shrug* either way, just eye candy, nothing really tangible.

And sounds like they did almost nothing underneath, and its just a market/attention grab ( as i suspected )

Wed Jun 16 2021 09:56:10 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Back to the 'soft...

[ https://www.xda-developers.com/hands-on-windows-11/ ]

"Leaked" (probably deliberately) screenshots of Windows 11 are starting to show up ahead of their big announcementfest. Spoiler alert: it looks like Linux. Seriously. I guess now that Apple has stopped innovating they needed someone new to copy so they've been looking at KDE and Ubuntu builds to figure out what to do next.

 

The image i saw looked more like OSX.  *shrug* either way, just eye candy, nothing really tangible.

And sounds like they did almost nothing underneath, and its just a market/attention grab ( as i suspected )

Wed Jun 16 2021 09:56:10 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Back to the 'soft...

[ https://www.xda-developers.com/hands-on-windows-11/ ]

"Leaked" (probably deliberately) screenshots of Windows 11 are starting to show up ahead of their big announcementfest. Spoiler alert: it looks like Linux. Seriously. I guess now that Apple has stopped innovating they needed someone new to copy so they've been looking at KDE and Ubuntu builds to figure out what to do next.

Ya, its hard to agree with him. But, he is correct so i guess i got no choice.

Well, until we can tap into dark energy.. Then i might change my tune.

Mon Jun 14 2021 10:43:52 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Nuclear is the only practical future for abundant energy production. Gates is making the right move. Nevertheless, I hope he falls into a reactor and is toasted.

Might just be he sees a personal advantage to nuclear. but the side effect is good for all of us..   Even a clock is right once a day, if even for the wrong reasons.

Sun Jun 13 2021 09:00:02 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Maybe he realized he needed some positive PR and this was the one they identified as most likely to resonate with the people MOST likely to damn or absolve him. 

 

Maybe he realized he needed some positive PR and this was the one they identified as most likely to resonate with the people MOST likely to damn or absolve him. 

It is weird. 

Oh, and I never hit the paywalls, either, it seems. 

Sun Jun 13 2021 15:56:11 EDT from Nurb432

Darn. Gates supports nuclear power and thinks we should increase its use. Even founding/funding a nuclear energy research company. 

I hate to agree with him.

Darn. Gates supports nuclear power and thinks we should increase its use. Even founding/funding a nuclear energy research company. 

I hate to agree with him.

its weird how i never get hit with the walls in these cases.  sorry about that ( again ) 

Thu Jun 10 2021 07:48:44 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Non-paywalled version: https://archive.ph/36LgC

Hopefully Gates chokes on those fries.

Another reason to avoid food at MCD.

https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-farmland-potatoes-mcdonalds-french-fries-investment-2021-6

I assumed it was gone 10 years ago, so it was the last thing on my mind to be honest.  Was going to ask one of our developers if he had an extra..  "wait, i ought to try it anyway"  

It does seem to offer fewer resources than it did.  but Studio, some servers and Windows 10 were there, and all i cared about was the windows 10 license. 

Tue Jun 08 2021 08:44:16 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

I know everything changed with MSDN a few years ago - but this would have been the FIRST thing I would have tried. 

 

I know everything changed with MSDN a few years ago - but this would have been the FIRST thing I would have tried. 

Worst case, by the time Microsoft audits your organization, it'll be some other IT employee's problem. :) 

Tue Jun 08 2021 15:20:58 EDT from Nurb432

I think i found a solution..

My old MSDN account from back when i was still on the dev team is still alive ( back when i did multiple duties ). I pulled down a key for both PRO and Enterprise. With 'multiple activation' .  I figured they would have let it expire since i changed teams so long ago. 

Soooo in theory one of those 2 should get me back and running once i move it back to its final home. ( just before i go back to office ill move it to my shop laptop.. and leave it there ) Wont risk trying it 2x, as im unsure how many times i can use the code before it tells me to take a flying leap. 

AND im not cheating..  its my account, and tied to my current employer. 

 

Fri Jun 04 2021 08:52:16 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Can you ask THEM to do it for you? 

"Hey, I've got this problem, and I think you can probably fix it for me..." 

I think i found a solution..

My old MSDN account from back when i was still on the dev team is still alive ( back when i did multiple duties ). I pulled down a key for both PRO and Enterprise. With 'multiple activation' .  I figured they would have let it expire since i changed teams so long ago. 

Soooo in theory one of those 2 should get me back and running once i move it back to its final home. ( just before i go back to office ill move it to my shop laptop.. and leave it there ) Wont risk trying it 2x, as im unsure how many times i can use the code before it tells me to take a flying leap. 

AND im not cheating..  its my account, and tied to my current employer. 

Fri Jun 04 2021 08:52:16 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Can you ask THEM to do it for you? 

"Hey, I've got this problem, and I think you can probably fix it for me..." 

There is some of this in every large company. 

At Intel, I started out with a "Special Ops" team. The conventional wisdom was that if you weren't moving every 2 to 4 years, you were stagnant, and you would get shitcanned. I was coming up on 3 years, there were Involuntary Redeployment Plans going on all throughout the company, my boss had been replaced by a boss who thought I had it in for him (turns out - her)... 

So I moved to an organization with a manager I got along well with. And a week after announcing the change, the manager of THAT department was let go and replaced with a manager who disliked me. 

It gets better - once I joined that group, he asked me to rack some servers. I went down to do this, and our team had no tools. I couldn't install the bolts to hold the slides that hold the server in the rack. So, I went to my old group and borrowed tools from them. 

My boss called me in and told me "you can't borrow tools from your old group." I

Mon Jun 07 2021 08:00:06 EDT from Nurb432

Ya, its why i mention politics and 'agencies' instead of departments.  And why each one operates under its own sets of rules, complicating everyone's lives. We are not one cohesive org. Even tho we get funded by the same people and report up to the same person, if you go far enough up the food chain. Its really like 200 different companies that outsource their infrastructure to us. Even tho they have no choice now, and some still hate us for it ( we didnt make that decision to consolidate to save money and in theory become more consistent... not our fault )

We also are not supposed to do IT work for the other 2 branches..  "independent branch" sort of thing.  

Oddly, when i first started 20 years ago ( as the automotive market was imploding. I was in automotive basically from getting out of school until then ) it wasn't a lot different from my days at GM and Ford. just more of it. I always thought their politics was f-ed up, with plants doing their own things, managers horribly political, etc.  They were amateurs, but a good learning experience.

 

 

Mon Jun 07 2021 01:20:51 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

So you do public sector IT? 

Sun Jun 06 2021 16:25:12 EDT from Nurb432

Ya i could also move back out into private, and nearly double, but after being here 20 years, it would be a huge cultural change.  Plus until recently it did have perks, such as stability and fairly decent benefits.  Lately, stability is becoming less as people are being booted out purely on personal reasons " manager x just does not like person y, so they are gone ".

Tho, my current manager is thinking of retiring next fall. Depending on who i end up with ( as i will NOT do it.. even tho the idea was floated a couple of times ) it might make some decisions for me.

 

 

Ya, its why i mention politics and 'agencies' instead of departments.  And why each one operates under its own sets of rules, complicating everyone's lives. We are not one cohesive org. Even tho we get funded by the same people and report up to the same person, if you go far enough up the food chain. Its really like 200 different companies that outsource their infrastructure to us. Even tho they have no choice now, and some still hate us for it ( we didnt make that decision to consolidate to save money and in theory become more consistent... not our fault )

We also are not supposed to do IT work for the other 2 branches..  "independent branch" sort of thing.  

Oddly, when i first started 20 years ago ( as the automotive market was imploding. I was in automotive basically from getting out of school until then ) it wasn't a lot different from my days at GM and Ford. just more of it. I always thought their politics was f-ed up, with plants doing their own things, managers horribly political, etc.  They were amateurs, but a good learning experience.

Mon Jun 07 2021 01:20:51 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

So you do public sector IT? 

Sun Jun 06 2021 16:25:12 EDT from Nurb432

Ya i could also move back out into private, and nearly double, but after being here 20 years, it would be a huge cultural change.  Plus until recently it did have perks, such as stability and fairly decent benefits.  Lately, stability is becoming less as people are being booted out purely on personal reasons " manager x just does not like person y, so they are gone ".

Tho, my current manager is thinking of retiring next fall. Depending on who i end up with ( as i will NOT do it.. even tho the idea was floated a couple of times ) it might make some decisions for me.

 

So you do public sector IT? 

Sun Jun 06 2021 16:25:12 EDT from Nurb432

Ya i could also move back out into private, and nearly double, but after being here 20 years, it would be a huge cultural change.  Plus until recently it did have perks, such as stability and fairly decent benefits.  Lately, stability is becoming less as people are being booted out purely on personal reasons " manager x just does not like person y, so they are gone ".

Tho, my current manager is thinking of retiring next fall. Depending on who i end up with ( as i will NOT do it.. even tho the idea was floated a couple of times ) it might make some decisions for me.

Ya i could also move back out into private, and nearly double, but after being here 20 years, it would be a huge cultural change.  Plus until recently it did have perks, such as stability and fairly decent benefits.  Lately, stability is becoming less as people are being booted out purely on personal reasons " manager x just does not like person y, so they are gone ".

Tho, my current manager is thinking of retiring next fall. Depending on who i end up with ( as i will NOT do it.. even tho the idea was floated a couple of times ) it might make some decisions for me.

I'm good with people. I just don't have the networking in that segment of the industry to make it happen, anymore. 
If I buckled down and found a "real" job - I could make easily 35 grand more a year than I make now at least - probably double or more... but... right now, I have a lot of leeway in all aspects of my job. 

Sat Jun 05 2021 10:03:45 EDT from Nurb432

I actually thought of that a few times over the decades, or even be a TAM sort of thing, but i dont like people enough to do it.  It would wear me out.

I actually thought of that a few times over the decades, or even be a TAM sort of thing, but i dont like people enough to do it.  It would wear me out.

My wife keeps telling me I should get into technology sales. I've got the background in both to do it - and maybe that will get me away from this shit while still bringing in a decent salary. 

Sat Jun 05 2021 08:04:06 EDT from Nurb432

Its a lot worse than it sounds :) 

Sat Jun 05 2021 01:15:40 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Everything about your job sounds like IT Engineering Hell. 

 

Its a lot worse than it sounds :) 

Sat Jun 05 2021 01:15:40 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Everything about your job sounds like IT Engineering Hell. 

 

Everything about your job sounds like IT Engineering Hell. 

Fri Jun 04 2021 21:47:33 EDT from Nurb432

You are running a VM we cant support you. ( as dumb as that sounds, its their answer )

Fri Jun 04 2021 08:52:16 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Can you ask THEM to do it for you? 

"Hey, I've got this problem, and I think you can probably fix it for me..." 

You are running a VM we cant support you. ( as dumb as that sounds, its their answer )

Fri Jun 04 2021 08:52:16 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Can you ask THEM to do it for you? 

"Hey, I've got this problem, and I think you can probably fix it for me..." 

Can you ask THEM to do it for you? 

"Hey, I've got this problem, and I think you can probably fix it for me..." 

Fri Jun 04 2021 14:05:57 EDT from Nurb432

ya, but i'm not in the teams that do that sort of support, or the license people, ( they are a separate team ) so i dont want to piss anyone off. 

People here are VERY protective of their silos. 

 

Fri Jun 04 2021 12:22:06 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

An Enterprise key that disables for a hardware change? There *has* to be a way to take care of that. I don't know that I ever encountered that in my career - but if I had... I absolutely would be calling my Microsoft Enterprise licensing rep and first being very polite about, "how are we going to fix this?" and then raising holy hell if I ran into any resistance. 


A big part of being a Microsoft shop is learning how to navigate Microsoft's licensing labyrinth and spending lots of time on the phone with the right people doing things that shouldn't be part of your job. 

 

Trust me, if i could i would.  I still have a few windows based apps i have to use for the office. Crystal reports and SSMS and Cisco jabber ( for softphone/voip ) are the 3 main ones that i cant get out of using.

My main app i support, while is windows on the back end, the front end is now html5.  But any automation i want to do, is powershell on windows servers.  Sure i can RDP for that, but not the other apps i need. They wont install them on VDI either. Nothing 'special' will go on them. 

Fri Jun 04 2021 07:37:13 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Switch the machine to Linux and you'll never have a license error again.

ya, but i'm not in the teams that do that sort of support, or the license people, ( they are a separate team ) so i dont want to piss anyone off. 

People here are VERY protective of their silos. 

Fri Jun 04 2021 12:22:06 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

An Enterprise key that disables for a hardware change? There *has* to be a way to take care of that. I don't know that I ever encountered that in my career - but if I had... I absolutely would be calling my Microsoft Enterprise licensing rep and first being very polite about, "how are we going to fix this?" and then raising holy hell if I ran into any resistance. 


A big part of being a Microsoft shop is learning how to navigate Microsoft's licensing labyrinth and spending lots of time on the phone with the right people doing things that shouldn't be part of your job. 

 

An Enterprise key that disables for a hardware change? There *has* to be a way to take care of that. I don't know that I ever encountered that in my career - but if I had... I absolutely would be calling my Microsoft Enterprise licensing rep and first being very polite about, "how are we going to fix this?" and then raising holy hell if I ran into any resistance. 


A big part of being a Microsoft shop is learning how to navigate Microsoft's licensing labyrinth and spending lots of time on the phone with the right people doing things that shouldn't be part of your job. 

Fri Jun 04 2021 09:11:44 EDT from Nurb432

Its an enterprise key. They wont touch it im sure.  "contact your local support"

Fri Jun 04 2021 01:01:19 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

I kinda shrugged one shoulder - cuz, honestly - if you call them up and go through their little routine, they'll reactivate the key, most likely. I've gotten them to do it at least a half dozen times. 

 

Thu Jun 03 2021 16:52:01 EDT from Nurb432

lol

Thu Jun 03 2021 03:52:06 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

A call to Microsoft support will probably get that sorted right out. 

 

 

 

 

Its an enterprise key. They wont touch it im sure.  "contact your local support"

Fri Jun 04 2021 01:01:19 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

I kinda shrugged one shoulder - cuz, honestly - if you call them up and go through their little routine, they'll reactivate the key, most likely. I've gotten them to do it at least a half dozen times. 

 

Thu Jun 03 2021 16:52:01 EDT from Nurb432

lol

Thu Jun 03 2021 03:52:06 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

A call to Microsoft support will probably get that sorted right out. 

 

 

 

I kinda shrugged one shoulder - cuz, honestly - if you call them up and go through their little routine, they'll reactivate the key, most likely. I've gotten them to do it at least a half dozen times. 

Thu Jun 03 2021 16:52:01 EDT from Nurb432

lol

Thu Jun 03 2021 03:52:06 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

A call to Microsoft support will probably get that sorted right out. 

 

 

Bill Gates to build next-generation nuclear facility in Wyoming.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/6/3/bill-gates-to-build-next-generation-nuclear-facility-in-wyoming

lol

Thu Jun 03 2021 03:52:06 PM EDT from ParanoidDelusions

A call to Microsoft support will probably get that sorted right out. 

 

A call to Microsoft support will probably get that sorted right out. 

Grr moving my shop vm around. didnt set the cpu architecture the same and it decided to report me as not being authorized.  I really really really hate windows.

Wonder if i killed the load.