Posts by ScottK

Re: Eustace

Are you sure you didn't imagine him?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_of_Kin_(novel)

Re: Ughhh...

https://mobile.twitter.com/BrentTerhune/status/1600273638892134405/mediaviewer

Re: For what it’s worth

There are not many vodkas sold in western countries that are actually made in Russia or have any links to the place even the ones that try to look Russian.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemicallef/2022/02/26/ditching-russian-vodka-heres--where-your-favorite-vodkas-are-made/?sh=2414e4f12350

Re: Yeah, DONT try a DC snapshot restore

"But when you do that, what happens to the Workstation Passwords?"

Nothing. Everything keeps on working as normal. If the generation ID is incorrect as the result of a snapshot restore, it will just do a non-authoritative restore from another DC and keep on working.

If you do something silly like only have one DC, or snapshot restore all your DCs at the same time you can probably get yourself into trouble, but otherwise nothing to see here.

More details here if you are interested:

https://blogs.msmvps.com/acefekay/tag/msds-generationid-attribute/

Re: Well....

"Maybe the jabbed are contributing to the rise of a more virulent, harmful strain??"

In a post full of drivel, this is possibly the most idiotic comment.

Viruses have the chance of mutation every time they reproduce. The more they reproduce, the more chance of a mutation producing a more dangerous strain (as already happened with Alpha and Delta before vaccines were widely available).

What do we have that can limit the virus reproduction and try to inhibit new variants? VACCINES!

So the truth is the exact opposite of your statement.

Re: Why bother with 3D printing

Try to imagine a society, where for every 50,000 people there are a few who hold illegal weapons. Most of these weapons are ones that were not handed in during an amnesty or are "deactivated" guns that can be re-activated. A much smaller number are illegally imported guns. Anyone who has one of these knows that if they use it, the Police will put all their effort into tracking them down. Once they are arrested, the courts will come down on them like a ton of bricks and they will spend a considerable amount of time in the big house. On top of these few people who use illegal weapons, there are another small percentage who legally hold weapons (farmers who need a shotgun for vermin control, feral pig hunter, etc). They have to go through a stringent check to get their license and it has to be renewed annually. Their license has a lot of measures to ensure they store and use their weapons correctly (in a gun safe, ammunition stored separately) and the Police have the right to randomly inspect that they follow these measures. The vast bulk of the rest of the population (90%+) have no need for firearms, or any real desire to own them. When Police stop someone, they are extremely unlikely to be armed, so they will treat them accordingly.

Now imagine another society, where in the same 50,000 people, half of them are probably armed. Some legally, some not. The legally armed pass paper thin background checks, assuming they need to do any checks at all. Where the illegally armed will use their weapons with little regard for the consequences as the Police are stretched so thin with other weapons offences they are unlikely to be caught. Where the Police are likely to assume that anyone they stop is armed so are much more likely to shoot first and ask questions later.

Which do you think has daily shootings and which has almost no gun violence whatsoever? Which would you rather live in?

The NRA keep insisting that the answer to gun violence is more guns. "Arm the teachers, Arm the traffic wardens, fuck it, just arm everyone!". Yet, as the number of guns increases, the number of shootings keeps going up. It is almost as if the number of guns in society has some sort of strange correlation to the number of gun related deaths. Who would have thought!

Re: Business Model

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-07/adelaide-lawyer-wins-defamation-payout-over-bad-google-review/11942064

I had the same thought a few years ago and stuck my musings on line. Apologies for the longish read and it being on Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/scott.knights.33/posts/10153031717036038

Re: suffering because of Brexit

As the pound crashed after the referendum, costs of imports increased. Come Brexit day, if (when) it ever happens, the pound is likely to crash some more. On top of the cost of the goods, cost of transport will also increase as fuel is priced in USD. Even goods manufactured in the UK will still need transporting and will still rely on a foreign supply chain in many cases. About the only thing to really benefit is the domestic tourism industry as people holiday at home and overseas visitors benefit from the cheap currency.

The higher costs leads to higher inflation figures. The usual fix to try counter inflation is to raise interest rates, but the BoE lowered them after the referendum to try stimulate the economy (which lowers the value of the currency even more) and they have been stuck at record low levels ever since. They don't really have many other levers to use.

If there is no deal, then under WTO rules UK has to apply the same tariffs globally. If they don't tariff imported goods while tariffs are applied on exports, then overseas imports will flood in, leading to manufacturers that cannot sell overseas going to the wall. In addition, politicians are likely to find themselves being lynched by UK farmers (so maybe not all bad...).

All in all, a shit pile of the highest order with the poorest people in the country the worst affected.

Re: Facebook was down?

Stupid enough that the local plod had to issue a statement asking people to stop ringing 000 (999 equivalent in Oz) to report Facebook being down.

Just where do you get your information from?

Part of my job as an administrator in RDS environments is keeping an eye on exactly what is written into registry hives to keep them as small as possible for fast logons. Some applications (looking at you Samsung printer drivers) are very chatty and will write a lot of unnecessary garbage into user reg hives, so I just remove it again or exclude it from being saved in the first place if using something like Citrix profile manager.

The registry does not record all information about everything you do. I don't know which conspiracy theory site you read this on, but it simply is not true. If it were, then registry hives would be growing at an absurd rate with all this logging, yet somehow I am able to always keep user registry hives down to less than a couple of megabytes in size. If I see that a users NTUSER.DAT file has unexpectedly grown, I will analyse it to see which application is doing something stupid and fix it. It might save a recent file list for some applications, so that you can go back to what you were last working on, but that is hardly a key logger.

Every key and value that is written into the registry has a date/time stamp, in the same way that files have a date/time stamp. So yes, when you install or use an application, it will record the date and time for any values that are written for that application, in exactly the same way that config files will get their date/time stamps updated when you install or use an application that uses config files. It is just more granular as you can see when a specific value was changed, rather than just knowing when the whole file was changed.

If you are that paranoid about what is being saved in the registry, you can always export it to a text file. That way you can look through every value that is in there along with their date/time stamps. There are also some excellent utilities such as REGSHOT and Sysinternals PROCMON and RU for analysing what has been written into registry hives.

Alternatively set up mandatory profiles for your users. These are preconfigured profiles that are read only. All changes are discarded at log off. That way you can be sure nothing is being saved. They are a pain in the arse to manage though.

Re: Ah, is that why....

I also use Dodo for the simple reason I am unable to get NBN and they offer a cheap unlimited ADSL service. I am in a fixed wireless NBN area and the installer could not get a consistent signal.

The ADSL is on a telstra line and I can find no difference in performance between this and my previous much more expensive and capped internode connection. The only problem I have had in two years was a Telstra issue. I am using my own router rather than the crap they supply.

I have not had to contact their support, so can't comment on it. However, they did manage to spell both the username and password I asked for incorrecty, so I wouldn't hold out too much hope.

Re: MS spreading more poison

Microsoft, like every other BigCorp is not anti anything they are simply pro money. They make money from Linux VMs running in their cloud so they want to support it.

Under Ballmer they saw Linux as a threat to Windows sales so made life hard. Things are different now.

The desktop (and to some extent, the server) OS wars have come and gone. MS are looking at a different future where you pay them to run your VMs on their tin and they don't give a shit what OS is running on them.

Same with SQL server. Whether you run it on Windows or Linux you still give them money for the licenses.

You appear to be under the mistaken belief that MS do things for ideological reasons. They don't, they just want your money.

No they haven't. Expats can vote as long as they have been registered to vote in the UK within the last 15 years:

http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/register-to-vote/british-citizens-living-abroad

I am in Oz and have registered to vote with no issues.

Re: Indian in Oz

I have found 3 takeaways in the Darwin Area. Saffron in Parap (as mentioned by another commenter) Memories of India on Sabine Road and a place in Palmerston whose name escapes me. Memories of India is the best by a long way, but they are all absurdly expensive and don't taste as good (to me) as the food in the UK.

It is probably due to competition. Having lived in the Leeds/Bradford area where there are a lot of great Indian restaurants, the crap ones just wouldn't survive. Here, they can get away with it, due to the lack of competition.

I did find a couple of great restaurants in Brisbane.

@Ivan 4

3000 x 2000

Re: Enough of this trivia...

Haven't seen the launch, but you can't beat Thunderstruck. Great tune.

The local Aussie Rules football team play Thunderstruck when they walk on the pitch (they are called NT Thunder).

However, for extra epic points when using the tune it needs to be this this version?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT3SBzmDxGk

Re: All households?

Past experience of the horrid latency on satellite would mean it would be totally unusable for me as I need to regularly RDP to servers.

Maybe I just need to go chop down all of my neighbours trees.

Re: Yep Central Australia .....

Had somebody die last week in remote WA because he didn't stay with his car:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-01-08/man-dies-after-car-breaks-down-in-remote-wa/6006916

If going on some serious bush bashing, take a PLB and a lot of water.

Re: Supposed to be internal testing.

It looks like the BBC have confused 2 bugs into one. From what I have read so far, there is an issue which has existed in the client OS since Windows 95 that was discovered by IBM. This is different to the SChannel server issue which appears to have been discovered interally. BBC are reporting them as one and the same.

Re: That's a shame

It would be very nice to be able to roll out my old pre Win 8 GPOs to manage Windows 10, instead of spending days trying to work out how to manage the new version as I have had to with 8/8.1.

As a great example, which total dribbling moron decided that it would be a good idea to put the configuration for the 8.1 start button right click menu in a folder called WinX in the LOCAL part of the users' profile? The upshot of this is that with roaming profiles that clear the cached copy at logoff, the second time a user logs on the menu disappears as the folder no longer exists! I had to put a GPO in to recopy it back out to users at every logon.

It is idiocy like this that makes me want to shake Sinofsky warmly by the throat.

Re: Lack of integrated email/contacts/calendar?

As noted in my original comments Outlook wasn't my choice, it was the users. We tried them with the web client but they didn't like it. They also didn't like the native Zimbra client either. Even if they did though, this also pulls the mail down and caches it locally so would heve been no better in our RDS environment.

Regarding the other posters comment about storing PST files on a network drive, yes they will break as well. It isn't supported and nobody with any sense should try. Since a ZDB file IS a PST file with a different extension it beggars belief that this was Zimbra's suggested fix for the lack of an online mode.

We asked them if there was client on their development roadmap which could work online without having to cache the mailbox. If there was, we may have stuck with it. There wasn't so we went to Exchange.

You may not like it, but the fact is that Outlook is a popular mail client. If you want to make a successful groupware product you need to provide decent support for it.

Re: Limericks

Don't forget the awesome name of my current place of residence - Humpty Doo.

When is the party in the top end?

Re: Cute people work for tech support too

About 10ish years ogo My girlfriend had an AOL account at her house (she got it before I met her). When she switched from dial up to a broadband conenction they sent through a CD with the software for the router. On installation it just reached an OS check then hung forever. I had a look on the CD and found an XML file with OS checks. The PC had Windows 2000 with SP4 installed. The XML file had checks for Windows 2000 gold, SP1, 2 & 3 but nothing for 4. I had a bash at modifying the XML file but couldn't get it to work so took a deep breath and called their support.

I tried to explain the issue but the support rep insisted on running through their standard support script. After wasting 30 minutes plus on this I tried to explain that all I needed was for them to send me an updated install CD that supported SP4. She went quiet then put me on hold while she went to discuss this with someone else.

After another eternity spent on hold, she eventually came back and said "don't worry, our software doesn't need service pack 4". At this point I gave up in despair and hung up. My solution (apart from telling the gf to change to another ISP as soon as possible) was to flatten the PC and install Windows again. I installed the AOL software then re-applied sp4. I figured this would be quicker than attempting to resolve it through their tech support.

Re: ok... I'll go sit in a dark cave

This reminds me of an interview a few years ago on BBC breakfast with Adam Hart-Davis. He was telling everybody how they needed to stop flying as it was killing the environment. This was shortly before he then started waxing lyrical about his various shows in different parts of the world. No doubt flown there in business class at license payer expense.

A classic moment of do as I say, not as I do.

@c:\boot.ini

Not entirely sure what point this post is trying to make. It mentions using linux to get a decade of support in an article discussing a Microsoft operating system that has had more than a decade of support.

Any discussion of OS choice on el reg always seems to ignore the main point. What software do you need to run? If the software I need to run is only available on Windows, I will use that. If linux, I will use that. If I am running up a terminal server to provide Windows based applications to end users, I don't have much choice in the matter.

OS choice is a practical consideration for me, not a philosophical one.

Regarding the hardware, since almost all servers I work with are virtual, the hardware is irrelevant. Once the hardware becomes out of date, I can just get a new host and move the existing VMs. The software refresh cycle becomes completely independent of the hardware cycle.

Re: See - that's fine. That's a constructive, supportable criticism

One other issue with the search functionality that drives me up the wall.

Example, I hit the windows key and type notepad. After a while, I want to open another notepad, so I hit search and type notepad again. It takes focus back to the original notepad instead of launching another instance. Very annoying. Even more so when dealing with control panel applets or MMC snapins and constantly ending up on the wrong one.

Every time I fall for this, I swear then remember to hit Windows-R to bring up the run box instead.