Posts by Sandtitz 1715 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2010
"Actually, OneDrive is a new product, NOBODY was used to it before ... since average Joe punter is keeping clear of Windows 8+"
It is not a new product. Onedrive/Skydrive was integrated in Windows 8, but it predates Windows 8 for several years.
BTW, have you noticed how the average Joe Sixpacks also keep clear of Linux?
"Microsoft release notes ?"
I took offense with the OP's statement 'because it is closed source, you don't have a clue what bugs have been fixed'. I wasn't concentrating on MS, Linux or any particular product, just the RMS school of dissing anything non-GPL.
You don't obviously get diffs with closed source, but with most cases there are release notes stating what is fixed, and thus "you do have a clue of what's fixed". Similarly not all open source patches are well documented, many times it includes a blanket statement of "several small bug fixes".
"because it is closed source, you don't have a clue what bugs have been fixed"
That's some strange logic there. Closed source software never get release notes listing bugs? Nonsense!
"let alone how long they have been there."
Usually true. Now tell me what do you gain by learning that your closed or open source software had a bug for years? Do you rage at the closed source software for having yet another bug, or are you satisfied with the open source software that the "many eyes" theory worked perfectly once again?
"But monitors with a Thunderbolt input are pretty much non-existent outside of the Apple realm."
That is true, but I don't think Thunderbolt equipped monitors are that important. Having a TB input would be pointless without the monitor also acting as a dock with lots of ports, or powering the computer via the TB cable.
I've been dabbling with a couple of HP laptops with Thunderbolt docks. The TB cable has the bandwidth for 4x USB 3 ports, 2x DP 1.2 ports (4K), GbEthernet and such. I see it just as a replacement for earlier side/bottom docks but when you are mobile (not docked) - the same port can be used for regular USB-C devices or whatever TB devices there are on the market. The bandwidth still is 4 times that of USB 3.1 gen2, TB carries things like PCIe protocol, so you could have e.g. external PCIe cards attached to your laptop. It can also supply power unlike HDMI.
HDMI 2.1 is going "ludicrous speed", but the standard isn't even published yet and we're years away from seeing it in consumer electronics since for most people the HDMI 2.0 standards are already "enough". (no 640k quotes, please!). The new tech required for it will probably be quite expensive for some time.
"meaning there is *SURPRISE* a confirmed bug in Windows 10"
Ryzen has been a bit problematic launch for many operating systems. ESXi 6.5a apparently gets a pink screen of death, and several Linux distros equally crash unless upgraded to the very latest kernel.
My up-to-date Mint installation is at 4.4 and I could bypass the official repos and install the latest kernel but then I'd be in charge of keeping it up-to-date instead of the distro update mechanism.
"An advanced cloud storage service fails to accept telnet connections. Shocker. Telnet and ping are not reliable test tools. I'd expect these services to drop such fake connections as security risks."
How is telnet to port 443 a 'fake connection and a security risk'?
How can you drop telnet connections to port 443 but allow legitimate SSL traffic to the same port?
"And of course, to actually buy something from the app store you need an account with MS, so they get to slurp some details, at bare minimum a contact email."
How does that differ from Google Play / App Store / Steam etc?
With Linux you don't need an account, but then again you can't BUY anything from the software repos.
"So much this. We just bought 40 HP G9's, and even with a warranty and a support contract, getting drivers and firmware updates is a royal pain in the ass."
All drivers and firmware are there for anyone to download without any login required. The only problem with HP(E) is that the website is damn slow and I get occasional 404 errors.
Denying BIOS download without login sucks, but I have not had problems to login and download after registering a server.
HP had a somewhat similar product a decade ago, "Mozilla Firefox for HP Virtual Solutions".
Perhaps the virtualization layer was working as advertised, but HP didn't keep up with update cycle of Firefox 2.x so the product was quietly killed.
This 'bromium VM' thingy seems as just another sales gimmick.
"Yeah, Similar story - phone support - trying to talk users through downloading the hotfix whilst having a command prompt open ready to type "SHUTDOWN -A" repeatedly was hilarious."
That would have been the extra hard way of doing things.
I just instructed users to turn on the built-in firewall in XP.
"I regarded Win9x and ME as game consoles. Never sold or installed them for business."
Clearly your clients didn't use laptops then. Win3.1 or NT4 had zero power saving features, they didn't support PCMCIA removals nor USB, and the driver selection for the laptop hardware was also rather poor. NT4 also required more resources (RAM) than Win9x.
Many small companies opted for the less expensive Windows 9x purely because the usage was email, browsing and printing which works even in game consoles.
Until Windows 2000 came around and laptops started to have >64 MB of mem your only reasonable PC laptop OS was Windows 9x, preferably that 98SE.
IANAL, but typically businesses buy equipment "as is". The warranty (or service contract) is there just to assure the buyer that they will get some use out of the equipment for at least the warranty/service period.
If Cisco had sold these products knowing they were destined to fail soon the customer could take them to court for fraud.
'AMD have a series of numbers than mean nothing to "normal" folk'
At the moment Intel has no less than:
- 13 different Kaby Lake i7 processors;
- 17 different i5s;
- 11 different i3s;
- 5 Pentiums
- 3 Celerons
- 2 Xeons
- 1 Core m3
The processors are divided into 5 different, easy to remember power usage categories: H,K,T,U, and Y. Throw in the mix 7 different kinds of weak 2D GPUs.
Is AMD processor naming really more complex? I thought their numbering scheme is rather simple: bigger number means faster.
Poor quality and Finnish subtitles, but I guess Smith&Jones wanted to show how many people see computer repairs - black magic.
"I bet that MS has kept your profile data. The slurp is one way traffic."
LinkedIn propably already kept profiles people already deleted before MS. This rule of thumb applies to all social networks, Google, Dropbox(!) and others who offer free services. If the deleted data still lingers the companies can always blame bugs or rogue coders...
"the procedure needed to unlock the controls."
The procedure needed to unlock is to know the Parental Control password. If the kid has admin rights, well... there's really no way to contain the kid/user.
Disabling any kind of chance for external boot should mitigate greatly for offline attacks but won't help if the user can remove the HDD - and Windows Home versions do not support Bitlocker.
"Applocker requires a server os, enterprise, or academic licensing."
Correct.
With a regular Windows Pro the Software Restriction Policy can stop running executables, scripts etc from users' folders. If the end user has admin rights then this is of course easily circumvented.
And with Windows Home edition you can use the Parental Controls.
"15 years ago I was telling everyone they needed a second hard disk to put the swap file and make Windows faster."
If computer is slow due to heavy swap usage the very first thing to do should be adding more RAM if possible.
But, congrats on getting onboard the SSD wagon!
"Apparently, this also prevents any XP, 2k, or Win '9x machines from using your Samba server."
While that may not be concern for many, in Small and Medium Businesses ("SMB") there are plenty of smaller MFPs which support direct scanning to a network folder - what a surprise that even some rather recent HP models only work with SMB1...
"And this is still better security than Hillary and the DNC had"
No, you're just wrong or trolling.
Giuliani Security & Safety is supposedly a "full service security consulting firm". AFAIK neither Hillary nor DNC provide such services.
giulianisecurity.com (which doesn't even resolve as of now!) got an F from the SSL test whereas Hillary gets an A+ and DNC gets an A with the same test.
I'm not going to port scan either site nor check the underlying server side software for defects.
"As a long term iOS user, I'm sadly watching it get worse and worse with each software release due to sloppy bolt-ons (the new lock screen and everything that resides on it)"
As a very short term IOS users I find it astounding that I can't disable the camera on the lock screen. My sturdy Lumia finally had a one knock too many but I could disallow camera on the lock screen there. (not to mention I found the Windows 8 UI way better)
"But the first iPhone was a revolutionary game-changer and it is disingenuous, mean spirited and short-sighted to write otherwise."
I agree.
If also add that before the iPhone there were fanboys for all phone platforms but the iPhone was the first one with loudly illogical fanboys with the RDF symptoms. :-)
"Apple did not invent networking by far; but with the simple plug-and-play operation of LocalTalk, you suddenly didn't need an engineer any more to set up a home network."
These things are always easier when you design everything to work only with your own proprietary systems. With emerging markets it's always way faster to come up with your own solution (LocalTalk) than wait for a standard organization to finalize a standard (Ethernet).
Apple is the B&O of computers. Products that are pleased to look at, they work with all their own peripherals with ease, the output is at least sufficiently high quality, and price double that of their mainstream rivals. And both have traditionally been the antitheses of interoperability.
On topic: Localtalk was easy since the Apple computers had the tech built-in. The much faster 10Base2 from around the same time was also as easy to lay on the office floor and connect to computers but required more work on the OS level (drivers, protocol settings) as well as requiring the physical NIC installation.
They've probably got one set of three letter agencies telling them to put the security holes in and now another one suing them for doing so.
Unlikely.
D-Link is a Taiwanese company. While that doesn't exclude ties to TLAs, keeping things like these under wraps for years/decades is just impossible since some hw/sw engineers would eventually sell the secrets to other agencies or just send the evidence to Wikileaks or reputable newspapers for them to publish it. That would be damn costly for D-Link.
D-Link is also just one of many home/smb networking manufacturers and the TLAs would need to pay off so many companies that the truth would surface even sooner. (and cost a lot more for TLAs in bribes)
I've had the "pleasure" of working with D-Link gear every now and then for close to two decades now and the company has never been the paragon of security. More likely TLAs can just tap into the security holes than command D-Link to produce them.
The only products I'd consider from them would either be non-configurable devices (L2 switches, antennas etc.) or if the firmware can be replaced with DD-WRT or similar.
"And there's a possibility that technology may have advanced in the 80-odd years since then, and Amazon's version could be considerably larger still."
Technology has advanced a great deal, but helium or hydrogen will still give the same amount of lift as it did 100 years ago.
Why would any spreadsheet program default to sorting a single colu... Oh, Excel - carry on.
My Excel 2013 works exactly as LO - i.e. it asks whether columns with data should be included.
I just tested OO 1.1.5 (released in 2005, couldn't find earlier ver) and it didn't have such prompt. (and it also asked wheter I'd like to install Java!)
It also capitalized the first letter in a cell as I typed data for the sort test, which Excel certainly doesn't do!
"Rubbish compared to NT3.5"
Except that NT had much tougher hardware requirements, and had poor backwards compatibility with DOS software. On purely architectural merits NT and others beat it hands down, no question.
"Plus: The new desktop instead of Program Manager."
Compared to DOS/Win3.1 there were more than just that. Long file names and just a general ease of use for the home users not accustomed to using command line. With Windows you could just plug in hardware and have some expectations of Windows finding it and having it working instead of guessing the serial port addresses and interrupts for COM3 or finding the correct mouse driver and not worrying about having the base 640k exhausted and thus not having enough memory for programs to launch.
"Only later OEM Version b had USB"
WIndows 95, released surprisingly in 1995, predates USB. NT - released in 1996 (post USB) didn't.
"Encouraged bad practices on Program Application development."
Please explain. Microsoft has been offering coding guidelines since before Win95.
"It's been downhill since 1995 for MS"
"All they needed was to put the new shell on NT3.5 and have a game console with Win95. Idiots."
Are you from Bizarro world??
Bill Gates and his cohorts weren't idiots - still the richest man alive? The company is still a behemoth and steadily making money and ruling on PC platform. They've made lots of stupendous mistakes but Windows 95 was really the point where they left the competition behind on personal computers.
OP: "If something breaks in Linux due to an update you have so many options to work around, fix or revert."
AC: "Uh, you can uninstall updates under Windows 10, and there is a workaround (netsh winsock reset)."
GL: "That's a lot of floor walking for IT"
In this case there's a lot of walking if network doesn't function. If a Linux box has its network disconnected you would equally need to use Adidas networking.
The OP was speaking in general terms ("if something breaks"). Therefore you could normally uninstall the offending update via WSUS, Powershell or via a remote connection - just like you would with Linux.
We hid the SSID and even got a new router, still got in.
Hiding the SSID is a rather pointless exercise.
In the mid 1990s there were already lots of chips clocked way over 10 MHz, even some at over 100MHz, and they were the ones lots of non-Intel people were working with, even if you weren't aware of them. This at a time when 33MHz and 66MHz was "industry standard" for 486.
Your timescale is way off. I bought a 100MHz Intel system in 1995 for my home and it wasn't even the fastest Pentium model.
DEC Alpha (if that's what you're referring to) had double the Hertz (and performance), but that was also reflected in the price tag. Mere mortals didn't even consider buying the home. Uni Compsci students extoled the virtues of the Alpha workstations and downplayed Intel but none ever bought one with their own money... ;-)
"[...] All things I've seen happen with new devices in new systems."
Indeed, I've seen similar too, with various vendors kit.Your examples could equally happen in an x86 system to
I think BillG wouldn't refute that since Intel has had their plentiful share of erratas as you mentioned.
The question is just whether and how a "newcomer" with their whizz-bang CPU can work it all out when the shit hits the fan. The FDIV debacle didn't reflect well on Intel since at first they downplayed it and just offered poor workarounds until they gave up and started a replacement program.
"Why SAS?"
Dualport SAS would be nice for redundancy on the server room. SAS also would offer 12 Gbit speeds - double that of SATA. SATA has been a bottleneck for SSDs for a years. (And so is SAS and even NVMe)
"NvME or the M.2 interface is going to be much faster."
Yes, NVMe can be several times faster than SATA/SAS.
M.2 is an interface standard, but the drive can still be SATA. M.2 SATA drives are just as fast as regular SATA drives.
M.2 can't be hot swapped at all and the NVMe hot swapping (or adding) is in its infancy.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
