Posts by Wensleydale Cheese 1381 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jan 2011
"How long before Microsoft cut short Windows 7 and Vista support lifecycles to force people to this shit?"
It's not necessarily the official support deadlines. As I witnessed in early Windows 7 days, a whole bunch of free downloads from the MS site suddenly became unavailable unless you were running Windows 7, and in many cases that meant "Windows 7 Pro or greater".
"if you are compiling your code in the background, and doing something else in the foreground, you are multitasking."
Ah, that's what I did 30 years ago on a dumb terminal. I couldn't say that I was multitasking, but the computer certainly was, for the rest of my team of 15 were doing the same thing.
OK, I'll admitt I was multitasking in the sense I might read my newspaper while waiting for a compilation to complete, but that had nowt to do with the computer.
It was another half dozen years before I got an editor which supported multiple windows. Yes, still on a dumb terminal but by that time I had 2 of them, and that is the point where I can say I started multitasking on a computer.
"So much of a regular person's day job however...simply doesn't require 100% of their ability."
Exactly.
I used to run software which monitored a whole bunch of servers for a variety of things (jobs failed, disks getting full or going offline, security violations etc). Once I had completed my early morning routine of checking messages generated overnight, I could minimise the monitoring app windows and settle down to doing other work, but if one of those monitoring icons changed colour, it got my immediate attention.
P.S. This was done on a large for the time CRT monitor. The box it came in had large warnings that this thing took 2 people to lift :-)
@Steve Davies 3
"http://www.osnews.com/comments/26022#520120
Reports the things like the Start Button is being ripped out and not only from Win 8 but from Server 12"
Yes, the default installation is without the GUI. I gather that the intention is that you now run the GUI-less version and use the shiny new Powershell extras to control your servers from elsewhere.
The trouble with that is that I get the feeling you now get to write your own GUI to do it, albeit that GUI can run on the platform of your choice (Linux et al).
"We’ve just passed the 500 million licenses sold mark for Windows 7, which represents half a billion PCs that could be upgraded to Windows 8 on the day it ships. That represents the single biggest platform opportunity available to developers."
When shopping for a new PC I found that the cheapest way to get what I wanted was to buy one that came with Windows 7 Home Premium thrown ih, and buy an OEM copy of Ultimate to put in its place.
I therefore own 2 copies of Windows 7 but have only one computer to put them on. Even in the unlikely event I'd want to upgrade tio Windows 8, that would be only one copy required.
Another story about open doors.
At one customer I had to be signed in to the server room every time. That was fine until the time we did some weekend work. Little did I know that the operators cleared off half way through Saturday afternoon and I couldn't get access to bring the production system back online.
I rang my contact at his home to ask to be let in. He told me about the loading bay door at the back, and sure enough it was left open.
@PXG
"Why don't they combine the ID cards you need to use the company toilet et all as a proximity login that also has you type in your micky-mouse password."
We had this more than a dozen years ago when I worked at a bank. We had a personal smart card which plugged into a reader attached to your PC before you logged in. You entered the master password for the card and it logged you on to your workstation. It could also save login credentials for Windows apps and websites and fill them in for you at the appropriate prompts in the same way that modern browsers do. These cards were separate from the ones used to gain access to the building.
If you needed to leave your desk for any reason, you just pulled the card from the reader and the password protected screen saver automatically kicked in.
These were separate from the cards used to access different buildings and server rooms.
Another part of that solution was that if you used your card to log in at another computer in the company, say in one of the training or presentation rooms, it would promptly download and install the apps you were authorised to use, along with the settings you had on your main PC. This was great for monitoring the systems I was managing while attending a course.
The technology is out there if you look for it.
"Correct Horse Battery Staple = Insecure
Passw0rd! = Secure
Go figure."
From Microsoft Technet http://bit.ly/KGxWq5
"7 characters Minimum password length
Password must meet complexity requirements (capital letter, small letter and one digit or non-alphabetic, also not more then 3 characters from the username)"
Wiith Active Directory as it comes out of the box Passw0rd is fine.
What about all those cash back offers HP were doing last year?
100 USD / GBP off HP Microservers (nice piece of kit at the price), and my local retail outlets were offering cash back on a variety of HP PCs,
I even found a couple of HP Xeon servers for the price of one.
Excess stock or price war? Dunno, but the profit margins were bound to be affected.
The very nature of cash back means that turnover may increase, but profit will go down. Yes, in the UK at least, that cash back came in the form of a cheque from HP.
It was a Philips model. The "remote control" was actually a torch which you shone into either of two light sensors, one on each side of the screen. One muted the sound, the other changed channels.
The channels were changed by an electric motor physically rotating the channel knob. It sounded rather like a machine gun as it went through the channels.
"Or Switzerland?"
Switzerland is still stuck with prices calculated when the USD was worth more than 1.5 Swiss Francs. The Franc is currently worth slightly more than the USD,
It's daft that I can buy a Mac Mini for not much more than the full retail price of Windows 7 Ultimate.
Apparently Switzerland will see a drop in the prices of Microsoft's products as a result of the realignment of prices. In my opinion that is long overdue. As far as I am concerned they are too expensive at the moment.
Ah well, it's given me a taste for running Linux. Not everyone's cup of tea, but it suits me fine and I don't feel like I'm getting mugged by the prices.
@mikeo
"Oh come on, it's refused to function for far more feeble reasons than that..."
I brought my office Windows 7 tower system home for a weekend. Minus the external USB disks, plus a change of IP address and hey presto, it claimed that I had a stolen copy.
I'd been looking for an excuse to install Linux instead, and that was it -:)
Another scenario: Dual boot with Home Premium and Ultimate. Boot from recovery disk and watch one of them get deleted.
"if you want to leave prevent fraud you should combine that with a picture of the actual card owner or you might as well not bother."
The credit card I got 10 years ago had my photo on it. The technology is there, but the UK banks don't seem to want to bother.
Michelle K wrote:
----
When you search for, "michelle knight" then you instead get a page showing the results for "michele knight" (single l) with a clickable entry below asking if you really wanted to search for "michelle knight".
----
They've been doing the same to me for quite a while. It's quite infuriating to be told you don't know how to spell your own name.
I assume someone is paying them to do that.
As in the referenced blog article at
http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2012/04/16/announcing-the-windows-8-editions.aspx
"For new apps, the focus for Windows RT is development on the new Windows runtime, or WinRT, which we unveiled in September and forms the foundation of a new generation of cloud-enabled, touch-enabled, web-connected apps of all kinds. "
@Tim99
"Libre Office requires Java to be installed for full functionality on the Mac"
LibreOffice does squeal a bit when you run it for the first time without Java installed, but it still runs fine. You lose the database side of things and some accessibility features, but the rest runs fine.
From a recent LibreOffice changelog I found, it appears that the developers might be actively reducing Java dependency.
@Kevin 6
"People often wondered why I had old MB's on the desk as decor not knowing my passwords were in plain sight"
That reminds me of the manual for some demo software. Nobody knew the initial password and tried all sorts of combinations without success.
The documentation had the initial password in plain sight: "XXXXXXXX"
"[I]f you notice sign-ins from countries where you haven’t been or devices you’ve never owned, you can change your password immediately and sign up for the extra level of security provided by 2-step verification."
That 2-step verification meaning you give them your phone number?
No thanks.
'"Windows Internals" (as they were before Microsoft's lawyers hunted them down) were offering this utility in the mid-90s, if not earlier. For comparison, you'll struggle to find a copy of Linux from 1992 and you certainly won't find a copy of Gnome from the mid-90s.'
By 1998 I was using a CDE (Common Desktop Environment) system (X11 really) which had multiple desktops. Multiple desktops are extremely handy for managing separate groups of computers - one desktop for Development systems, another for Test systems and so on.
"Microsoft seems to be moving to GUIless servers."
They have tried to with Server Core,. but everyone is so scared of the command line interface* that the latest recommendations seem to be to use Remote Desktop into it.
* the Windows CLI is just about the most hostile I've come across, and I've used a few. Powershell is one answer, but it wasn't available on Server 2008 Core.
Not that either. The Paris Metro works fine, and even the name of the line tells you which direction you are going.
Superman's or Fritz Lang's Metropolis?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_%28film%29
*Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia".
Dystopia says it for me.
"And it probably means many of us will have to move to using either an unsupported OS (which many do with XP now) or start using a Server OS instead (I know several that use Win2K8 for that purpose)."
When I used Win2K8 for the first time I immediately thought "This is fine, I don't need anything fancier". I don't want Aero, I don't want Transparent windows or cute sound effects, and I want a backup solution that isn't the crippled thing that comes with Win7. I'm not a gamer, not a graphics designer and the Win2K8 interface gives me what I need.
Typed using Remote Desktop from an aging XP system into WHS2011, which is fine but comes with licensing restrictions I could do without..
@ Tom 7
"7 bit ASCII is universally understood (almost)"
Yes, but it's actually 7 bit US-ASCII, which is unfriendly for Latin based languages with accented characters. Just moving to 8 bit would have solved a large part of that problem without going to full blown Unicode. But yes, that would also have involved someone else's software, and hardware drivers too.
@admiraljkb
"Upon success, Astrolabe would also be entitled to sue (or get settlements from) Cisco, IBM, Oracle, Mozilla, Google, and many, many others worldwide for some real money."
Yep. There's usually a flurry of patches for updates to TZ tables twice a year, just before DST kicks in or out, to cater for the irresistible urge governments seem to have for fiddling with the dates.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheeses_of_Switzerland
Yes, but neither should you ignore what's on your own doorstep:
"British cheese has made a comeback":
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2009/10/map_of_the_week_cheese.html
British Cheese in Swittzerland:
http://www.cheeseclub.ch/en/thebritishcheesa.html
Believe me, this guy's customers aren't just expats; he has plenty of Swiss customers too,
I managed to skip Vista, but under 7 Ultimate once you have got Windows Update working, you are presented with 35 or so optional updates which cover all the languages you will probably need.
Unfortunately, if I remember correctly, you need to log out and in again after selecting another language.
I'm well used to switching keyboard languages. Swiss German keyboards really slow you down for programming though, so I bought a US keyboard for my main Apple system.
But I use a Swiss German keyboard for writing correspondence in German because it has the accented characters.
@Qu Dawei
I feel your pain and have a similar experience with German versions of Windows software. A lot of software gets this right and offers a language selection either for the installation or afterwards through the settings menu, but some doesn't and you are stuck with it. I'm pretty fluent in German, but when I'm supporting an English speaker I want to see the same screens and menu options that they do.
Apple gets this one right .- my OS X systems are set up for English yet I can still set my time zone and date, time and currency formats to my local variations without having random apps dive into German. On OS X I can select a different language either by user or at run time if I want to, and this is very handy when I have guests or for support.
Another thing that Microsoft gets wrong here is that even if you buy a multilingual version of their software, the license will tell you that you are only allowed to use the language used on the first installation. Bang go your rights to select one of the other languages in that pack if you decide to pass your computer on to someone who speaks another language.
P.S. I also hate websites that decide which language I want for downloaded software based on my IP address, but that's a story for another day...
LOL @deadlockvictim
Nope, not in Zug. I've got a great selection of Swiss, French and Italian cheeses 100 metres away from where I am sitting, and in either direction too, but cheese is one of my vices: I also have a good supplier of carefully selected British Cheeses in Switzerland. I picked the moniker when I was enjoying one of them.
"My American friends need not worry - no changes for you (that I am aware of) - and my Swiss friends, well you are actually going to see a significant price drop if all goes to plan. Unfortunately I don’t have any Swiss friends so I can’t celebrate with you."
Hurrah for that! Long overdue in my opinion too. Microsoft's Swiss prices make me cringe, simply because they haven't changed since the days when the dollar was worth a lot more than the Swiss franc.
I've just had a look at Swiss price comparison site toppreise.ch for Windows 7 Ultimate. While you'd be a fool to pay the top prices there, the upgrade version of Win7Ult comes in at up to 469.90 Swiss Francs and I know I have seen the full retail version in shops at over 500 Francs.
It's a similar story for Microsoft Office, once you get above the Home & Student version the prices are silly.
To put those prices into perspective, the retail price of a Mac Mini is 649 Francs. Yes that's right, I can currently get a whole computer, OS included, for less than WIndows 7 Ultimate plus Office, and if a Mac Mini isn't your cup of tea, a reasonably swift Intel or AMD box with no OS can be had for a similar price and you can put the *nix of your choice on it.
(For comparison, 1.00 GBP = 1.454 CHF,1.00 USD = 0.918 CHF )
@Chris 68: "Google is already pissing around with search terms, offering up what it thinks you probably meant..."
They've been doing that with my family name for a year or two now.
It's bloody annoying to be told that you don't really mean your own name.
And this morning Gmail started giving me personalised ads:
"This ad is based on emails from your mailbox. Visit Google's Ads Preferences Manager to learn more, block specific advertisers or opt out of personalised ads".
Er, they've based that on a total of 4 outgoing emails, all to the same person :-)
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