* Posts by Pirate Dave

1872 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2008

Windows Subsystem for Android: What's the point?

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

So, ehhh...

MS could push this as the replacement for Flash on Windows. Meaning - once it's polished up and idiot-proof, it gives run-of-the-mill users access to scores of mind-numbing, generally pointless games by way of the Amazon or Google stores.

Windows XP@20: From the killer of ME to banging out patches for yet another vulnerability

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: at least in XP you could easily revert to the win 2k interface

I use that sometimes. Mostly when I have to restart MS Teams, as it's quicker than scrolling down to it. But a lot of stuff, mostly control panel stuff like ncpa.cpl, doesn't show up there, and other stuff like "dsa.msc" are just as easy to run as to wait for the search, especially since the Run box has history.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Trollface

Re: XP IP stack

"Microsoft must have been the last software maker to understand the IP stack."

They were probably convinced world+dog would adopt NetBEUI once they saw the awesome potential of the protocol. IP was for greybeards and spooks.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: at least in XP you could easily revert to the win 2k interface

I haven't looked at 11 yet, no interest. From what I've read, though, it just going to make me cuss non-stop every minute of the day. I'm hoping MS doesn't transfer that stupidity to Server - maybe I can hide out there for a few years.

I've looked at Classic Shell in the past, but never switched to it full time. I can't remember why. I just managed to make do with Explorer, and once I learned enough executable names for the Run box and figured out how to create some special short-cuts on the desktop, I wasn't as reliant on the Start menu. Actually, I rarely ever use it now on Win10, other than maybe right after I install new software. But I've got a desktop full of shortcuts, and a brain full of commands, so I make do.

Life was so much easier prior to Windows 8...

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: The interface is not the OS

One thing I noticed in Server 2019 is that the window manager no longer draws a border around non-maximized windows, so if you have multiple windows open, and they're pulled up near the top of the screen, it's impossible to differentiate their title bars to know where to click to drag - it turns into just a big white area.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: at least in XP you could easily revert to the win 2k interface

"But Micros~1 made Fisher Price tech hip with the XP look and feel. "

ISTR people referred to it as the Crayola Interface.

I stuck with Win2k until I got a new box in 2013 and put Server 2012 on it. I still miss the stark simplicity of Win2k.

Good Grief! Ransomware gang has only gone and pwned the NRA – or so it claims

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Money talks...

I wonder if any of the released documents detail how much of the annual dues were wasted on LaPierre's opulent lifestyle?

I've let my membership lapse until they get rid of that gas-bag. Well, the other reason is I'm not happy about how they went after Col. North, but I consider that a side-effect of LaPierre's (lack of) leadership. So until LaPierre is GONE, my money is going to the GoA.

Florida man accused of breaking Mastodon's open-source license with botched social network launch

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Yet another "Oops!"...

"What's Darl McBride doing these days?"

Sadly, still breathing.

Brave's homegrown search claims to protect your privacy but there's a long way to go if it's to challenge the big G

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Change is inevitable

Wasn't Yahoo! originally a search site? And don't forget AskJeeves.

Windows 11 Paint: Oh look – rounded corners. And it is prettier... but slightly worse

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Paint.net is good for those times when you need layers. For me, that's mostly when trying to get floor-plan images into some sort of order that they can be used for wifi heatmapping. But for day-to-day pixel manipulation needs, Paint is still my go-to.

I agree about Irfanview, it's great for graphics viewing, image cropping (especially screen caps pasted from the clipboard) and does a better job of saving JPGs than Paint, IMHO. (although I am using the ancient Paint from Windows 2000/2003, so maybe MS has improved their JPG export since then)

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Confession time

I confess, I keep a copy of the binaries handy for the Paint from Win2000 (or maybe it's the one from Server 2003). It just works, doesn't have ribbonitis, and looks like we're still in 1995. Yeah, some of the cool functions of the newer Paints are missing, but for those times when I need to do more heavy-duty graphics manipulation, I have a beer and remind myself that I'm a network admin, not a goddamn graphics artist. Paint it is, then.

I've also got squirreled-away copies of Notepad and WordPad from 2000/2003. Again, they just work with minimal fuss.

User locked out of Microsoft account by MFA bug, complains of customer-hostile support

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Staff who are that smart would already be working somewhere else.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Nothing has changed

I ran into something similar in the mid 90's (before the Internet got big). There was a bug in the VB docs for some Windows API call I was trying to make, seems like the docs gave the wrong constant for one of the variables. This was way back, when there wasn't much online to supplement what was in the printed books in front of me. After screwing around with it for a day or two, I finally called Microsoft's VB tech support (back when it only cost as much as a long-distance call) and was told the value was correct, even though I showed them the value was wrong. It didn't end well - younger me eventually lost his temper and said some Bad Words. I was asked to never call Microsoft Tech Support again. And I didn't for about 17 years. Even then, I felt the urge to use a pseudonym...

Microsoft turns Windows Subsystem for Linux into an app for Windows

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: WSL-as-app

Well it is October. Maybe they're updating their Halloween Documents to version 2.0...

Windows what? PC makers have bigger things on their minds

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

It's the freaking browsers. Always. Palemoon, Chrome, IE/Edge, they all think memory grows on trees and they can gobble gigabytes of it and the user won't notice. And with so much stuff having "web" components now, it's not going to get better. The only thing that comes close to my browser's memory gorging, is the ridiculous and pointless waste of memory that the Teams client engages in. All while doing NOTHING but having an icon in the systray. Why the hell does Teams need 1.5 GB of RAM just to keep an icon in the systray? Does Electron really suck that badly?

Get real: Say what you like about your app but don't be surprised if I trollsplain

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Ah yes, just in time for the Christmas ads

There's an up-channel "outdoorsy" clothing catalog here in the US where every-fucking-thing in the catalog begins with "The".

The red flannel shirt.

The brown hiking boots.

The bluejeans.

It's as if they think God (or the FSM) ordained all of their stuff as "The" greatest of whatever it is. Pretentious beyond belief.

BOFH: You. Wouldn't. Put. A. Test. Machine. Into. Production. Without. Telling. Us.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

"a rubber mallet and a Bible – with the instruction that if the Bible doesn't work he's to hit himself with the mallet."

It's gems like this that make the El Reg subscription price worth every penny.

This book doesn't have any answers!

What if Chrome broke features of the web and Google forgot to tell anyone? Oh wait, that's exactly what happened

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: The choice of available browsers is lame

Pale Moon has been borking lots of sites for me over the past 4 or 5 months. I've been using it for years and this is the first time I've had major site issues to this degree. Something's wrong somewhere.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: The choice of available browsers is lame

"Edge - Microsoft? We might not hate you like we used to, "

My hatred for MS hasn't dimmed. I still hate them with the fury of 10,000 suns. They're fucking with the Exchange Admin Center for no good reason other than they just feel like fucking with stuff.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Absolutely agree

Front Page wasn't absolutely horrible, imho, at least for simple pages. It could have been better if MS had figured out how to put linefeeds in the code, maybe even indent a little. I mean, for the time, as the web was transitioning from simple Geocities-level pages to the more graphical pre-Web2.0 stuff, it served a purpose for a few years as a somewhat decent wysiwyg editor when lots of us didn't yet know how all the "new" stuff worked in the newer HTML standards. But yeah, server add-ons and database stuff was crappy. FPSE for *nux was a pain to install, if memory serves. The page-hit counter worked pretty well, though.

I must have mental illness, as I recall preferring it to CoffeCup's editor.

Even at its worst, I think it was still better than the gunk pages we have now. So many pages today are loading useless java crap, pulling junk from Google, sending junk to Google, hey, let's load a megabyte of obfuscated javascript, then see if the user has a facebook account.

Microsoft's problem child, Windows 11, is here. Will you run it? Can you run it? Do you even WANT to run it?

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Our simple plan - continue running that mangey-dog Win10 (which really isn't that great) until we can no longer put off moving to 11. Then retire.

Telegraph newspaper bares 10TB of subscriber data and server logs to world+dog

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Does "TB" mean something less in the UK than here in the States? 10 TB for "subscriber data" and http logs seems way over the top, unless it's years' and years' worth.

As Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

Pirate Dave Silver badge

I thought we were the "product"? Or at least our eyeballs and clicky-fingers.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Toy extensions won't mess with their revenue stream.

"since the new version of Firefox they introduced in the summer broke all sorts of things for me."

I've noticed similar in Pale Moon. Sites and pages that were working fine in the spring suddenly started crapping-out around mid-summer. I get lots of blank white pages now, and have to resort to Chrome to get some things done. Bleh. Too bad the Web lost its original promise of universality. I guess precise pixel placement trumps all else. Fucking marketing departments...

Microsoft warns: Active Directory FoggyWeb malware being actively used by Nobelium gang

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: We need a modern OS that is secure by default and no it isn't your favourite Linux distro.

A ground-up rewrite of Windows would just open an entire new, and hereto unknown, set of vulnerabilities for the Bad Guys to dive into. This is Microsoft, it would happen. Might even be "worse" on the other side than what we've got now, and would take another 10 years to get back to here. This is what happens when the Marketing department gets equal footing to the Engineering department.

Maybe it's time to move back to Banyan Vines? lol.

This is your final warning to re-certify, Red Hat tells tardy sysadmins

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Certs - worth it?

I used to trust the Novell CNE certs. Back in the 90's, those guys generally knew their stuff inside and out. Then MS came out with their paper MCSE's in the early 2000's, and that bunch, well, some of them just weren't all that. Some were, though, but it was hard to sift them out from the guys who just knew how to take tests well.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Car mechanic analogy

I once had a '79 Ford Courier (rebadged Mazda B2000, iirc). It had a valve for the choke actuator that ran off of suction from the crankcase. Once a year, it would go out and I'd have to replace it ($15, I think, and took about 5 minutes). Younger me never thought to try running a bicycle brake cable into the cabin so I could activate the choke manually. No, younger me liked wrenching on that little 4-cylinder engine whenever the opportunity presented itself.

CutefishOS: Unix-y development model? Check. macOS aesthetic? Check (if you like that sort of thing)

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: We need a Windows simlation plugin

I remember when the progress bars in Windows only counted linearly from zero to 100. Silly concept. Now we've got the Progressive Progress Bar, which has naught to do with what you're installing, but instead displays random stats from Bing searches - frequently it shows the current number of Bing searches for "how to disable Cortana", or the number of hobbits seen in Las Vegas in the past week. Useful stuff that people need to know.

Microsoft Exchange Autodiscover protocol found leaking hundreds of thousands of credentials

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

I think you're giving them too much credit. MS has known their software is security swiss-cheese since the mid 1990's, before Exchange and Outlook were even much of a thing. So they've had at least 20 years to figure out that "the Internet is Bad" and code accordingly. But they haven't learned that lesson yet, in spite of the thousands of vulnerabilities discovered in their various softwares. I mean if this was a vulnerability in a version of Outlook released in 2000, yeah, maybe I could let them slide. But this bugaboo exists in even their most recent version. Hard to cut them any slack for that.

It's time to delete that hunter2 password from your Microsoft account, says IT giant

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Oh...

"In a Twitter poll, 20 per cent of respondents "

Ah, so MS is basing their design decisions on Twatter polls now? We are well and truly fucked.

IT is over, time to turn out the lights.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

It's Microsoft. so of course they have considered this scenario.

However, it's never happened in Redmond, so they've decided it will never happen anywhere and have designed accordingly...

Tech widens the educational divide. And I should know – I'm a teacher in a pandemic

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Who at home knows enough about the tech?

It's not just kids and schooling. It's was almost physically painful helping the Marketing and Customer Service departments get setup to work from home last year. My <deity>, how can people that deficient walk around unsupervised?

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Maybe I'm just stupid

Agreed. How do we know what the counter-argument is until we've seen it?

Big Blue's quantum rainmaker jumps to room-temp diamond quantum accelerator company

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

I thought of the indelible, write-once ships logs from Donaldson's "Gap" series. That was rubies or diamonds, wasn't it?

Only 'natural persons' can be recognized as patent inventors, not AI systems, US judge rules

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

So...err

does this mean AManFromMars can or cannot be granted a patent in the USA?

Alpha adds to tally of exploding rockets, takes out space sail prototype with it

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Close

The last 30 seconds, those kids run towards a piece of debris that landed right across that field and pick it up. (which I thought was Federally illegal, but whatevs) That's pretty close?

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Close

Eh, that falling debris at the end sure seemed to land uncomfortably close to the camera and other onlookers, considering the rocket had burned for a good two minutes. Seems like it should have been further downrange than that.

Microsoft Azure deprecations: API changes will break applications and PowerShell scripts

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Rationale?

I've lamented the lack of coherent documentation a few times for different things. For example, a couple of times I've been trying to setup something where MS says "use Powershell", so I go looking for docs on how to do it in Powershell, but all I can find is a super-dense 40 page document about the underlying, obscure .NET class. Thanks, MS, that's helpful.

I now have something else to be thankful for - we aren't using any rights-management stuff here.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Rationale?

"My impression is that it's arrogance, combined with a perceived need to keep the dev team occupied."

I always thought it was so MS could do press releases around whatever the "new" thing is they've done this week. It makes them look hip, like they're "leading" and "innovating", when all they're really doing is pointlessly screwing around with stuff that most of us are trying to use.

Whoever thought it was a good idea to let Microsoft become a cornerstone of the new Internet was a complete idiot. MS can't seem to stop piling more crap on, then changing the whole thing on a whim. It's highly annoying.

Power users of Microsoft OneDrive suffer massive inconvenience: Read-only files

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Welcome to the Microsoft Cloud. Out the door, line on the left, one cross each.

OneDrive, and in fact, all of Office365, might be much more tolerable if Microsoft weren't constantly fucking with it. It's like they think they can't leave it alone for a month or they'll all be fired, so they stay busy as a hive of bees twiddling, changing, tweaking, and outright completely renovating anything and everything. So as admins, we have to constantly read those damned "Major Change Notification" emails with a lump in our throat, wondering what previously working service they're going to pointlessly fuck-up this time, thus forcing us to rework our scripts and other doodads that we use to try to build our systems on. It's like we're all a bunch of crack-heads and the dealer (Microsoft) is constantly lacing the drugs with random other unknown substances - we never know when it's going to a sweet high, or send us straight to the morgue. But we gotta keep smoking that Microsoft crack.

In Microsoft's world, cloud email still often requires on-premises Exchange. Why?

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

I second that. I ran a Groupwise system for a long time, and it was always solid as a rock, other than the occasional GWIA barfing on a weird email. We eventually moved to O365 because Microsoft included the licenses free for academic Volume Licensing Customers, so that was three less servers I had to keep running. (although the spark that convinced us to move was Novell selling itself off).

I still consider Groupwise to be the better email system from an admin's standpoint. We (very) briefly considered moving to Exchange in 2011, until we found out MS had removed single-instance storage. When MS came out with O365 a year or two later, we started planning our move. I wouldn't wish a Groupwise to O365 migration on my worst enemy. What a freaking nightmare.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Confused.com

Same confusion here. My current employer is an O365 shop, but we have no Exchange servers anywhere (although we apparently did until a few years before I started there), and use AADsync (or whatever they're calling DirSync now). We do have one query-based distribution group that's a PITA to edit and has to be done in ADSI, but we usually only change that at most once a year. Most normal stuff is just ADUC or Powershell, and I've never known it to be considered "unsupported".

My previous employer was a Novell/Groupwise shop and we migrated to O365 back in 2015. We never, ever had an Exchange server (and would have laughed heartily at the thought) before or after the migration. I did have to run the Exchange installer to extend the schema though. I remember doing that, hoping it wouldn't screw up my shiny new AD. But that's the closest we ever got to having an Exchange server.

Start or Please Stop? Power users mourn features lost in Windows 11 'simplification'

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: starting Task manager change is a disaster

"starting task manager from a right click on the task bar is gone."

4634.

That's the number of days I have left until retirement. I've never had a need to calculate that number before, but now I have. Thank you, Windows 11, for opening my eyes to the future.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Windows 10 to be the new Win XP?

Equating Win10 to XP as the "great old OS" just shows the sad state of affairs MS has allowed their Windows product to devolve into.

Not that I even liked XP. I preferred 2000 and ran it until Server 2012 came out. 2012 was actually a fairly decent desktop compared to Win8.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Wasn't ME the one that MS decided to make un-friendly to corporate networks and leave out several very useful network components (the Netware stuff, if memory serves). Or did they start that with XP Home? ISTR there was something (or things) important they explicitly excluded, and that's why we never even looked at it where I worked.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

You forgot Windows Millenial Edition. I never ran it, but I understand it was complete and utter crap as an OS, but played some media decently, sometimes.

COVID-19 cases surge as do sales of fake vaccination cards – around $100 for something you could get free

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: A long way still to go

We had it in the first wave last year, in late Feb/early March, before it became "a thing", when it was still "just another virus from SE Asia", and nobody was talking about quarantine yet. One of our kids is in the military, and came home for a week to visit. We figure he brought it in with him, although he never got sick from it. We think my wife brought it home again earlier this year - she's an elementary school teacher, and some of her kids tested positive at various times.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: A long way still to go

Maybe. We paid the misfortune part up-front when we got the virus in early 2020. Felt totally miserable for a week and a half, then felt like crap for another two weeks, just lying on the couch counting the minutes until we felt better. But eventually we did get over it. The second time wasn't nearly as bad and only lasted about a week.

Microsoft, flush with cash, raises cloud office suite prices for businesses

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: In 2020 alone we released over 300 new capabilities

I'd offer to print out the list of 1200 vulnerabilities, but it seems IT has disabled printing on my box. Hmm, I wonder what that's all about...

Eight-year-old bug in Microsoft's 64-bit VBA prompts complaints of neglect

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

IMHO, Powershell is worse than VBA as a "language". However, MS has exposed almost everything imaginable via .NET, so, in spite of Powershell's annoyances and shortcomings as a "langauge", it's still the better hammer to use when you've got a box full of screws. Just my opinion on the matter.