Even if a judge ruled that wasn't you testifying against yourself, you could still protect yourself if you simply said "I don't recall that password." You may notice that not being able to recall is used a lot when under oath. The reason is that there really isn't any way to challenge it.
If you are a geek, and your entire system has disk encryption so the only way to use the computer is to remember the password, then I doubt that will work...
(Really? You're telling me you have this super-awesome computer and you don't even remember the password to get into it? How long has that been?)
What about those that have VoIP for landline? Is it right to remove their ability to call 911 because their computer was infected?
That sounds like a very BOFH way to solve the botnet/spam/virus problem. If you're not tech enough to manage your computer, we cut off internet service as well as 911 service. Darwin will finish the job. Eventually we will have a super race of linux nerds...
The economy has fuck all to do with a lot of people deciding to roll out 7, either en-masse or as old boxes die and need to be re-imaged.
Also, I find it humorous that you are saying the economy has fuck all to do with rolling out Windows 7 in the middle of a depression and with an article that says ~66% of Windows users are still using XP.
I know, I know--correlation does not equal causation. But the primary motivation of a business is to turn a profit, not throw away money. My guess is they either don't see a profit/don't see profit in another area that can be spent on the upgrade, or they don't see a necessity to move off XP.
Most preferences and programs can be accessed directly from the search box on the start menu. If you can type then the start menu and control panel are largely redundant.
news flash: plenty of real businesses out there have volume agreements and get the upgrade to vista/7/whatever for free.
Yep--but a lot of businesses lost money when there was a huge gap between XP and Vista. They paid for a 3-year renewal and got nothing out of it.
fact: i've done back to back testing with a shitty 5 year old laptop running XP+SOE and 7+SOE on same hardware (windows + virus scanner + office 2007 + a few apps) and with 1gb ram 7 was as fast or faster once you let the initial search index complete.
Must be nice to have hardware that exceeded the XP recommended specs and were at or above the Vista specs.
A lot of our hardware was purchases with the minimum specs for XP and the business applications. We still have machines with 512 and 384. It sucks, but what are you going to do? When businesses are trying to save money in a bad economy, they don't want to do things that are considered unnecessary--like replacing equipment that still functions, give new healthcare benefits to employees, purchase Vista or 7, and even give raises to employees.
The economy has fuck all to do with a lot of people deciding to roll out 7, either en-masse or as old boxes die and need to be re-imaged.
Really? What 'company' do you work for that doesn't give a crap about the economy? The government?
Have rolled out 7 to about 30% of the company thus far and the problems to deal with have been exceedingly minimal, as they will be for around 95% of desktop workloads out there.
The company doesn't want to run a split platform. When they switch, they are planning to upgrade all the machines at once to everyone is 'consistent'. Reduces support costs apparently. But like I've been saying, there really isn't a business case for moving yet.
Stuff like branchcache and directaccess are a time and money saver as well, when combined with 2008 R2.
So you're willing to give up pervasive search abilities,
How hard is it to double-click on the Excel or Word icons on the desktop? How hard is it to double-click on the IE icon, or the icons for the two business apps that we run? Seriously. Give icons on the desktop. I don't need pervasive search for that.
separation of video driver from kernel (i.e., dodgy video driver crash = screen flickers while it reloads - carry on working/etc)
Meh. I haven't had a video driver crash in XP in quite a while. Even if it were once every two months, is it really worth buying a new computer with Windows 7 just to stop a bluescreen every two months? Maybe if I didn't know where the save button (or the auto-save feature) was in Office.
better networking support in general
That's hardly a business case for spending money on a new machine with Windows 7.
, future versions of powershell,
Meh--powershell runs on XP.
and SMB signing for a few clicks when setting an ip address on a network adapter - something done, at best once every time you move computer (assuming your network administrator is too brain damaged to figure out auto config).
SMB signing can be turned on by group policy, and we're competent enough to use DHCP and IPv6 autoconfig.
Powershell is only available on windows though, you're right about that. As for its relationship to the unix CLI experience, well it's got a lot of similarities but lots of differences too. The shell is dramatically better for scripting than bash, say.
Do you have an example? I'm hardly an avid PowerShell user, but I haven't seen anything that sets it ahead (or even along-side) BASH.
For a complex script you'd probably switch to perl/ruby at some point on unix or suffer the rather horrid bash syntax.
Ugh--out of all the languages on Linux, you picked two out of the three worst in my opinion. Perl is like masochistic C, and Ruby--hell, I'm 30 years old, I'm not sure what language Ruby came from. It looks like nothing I've ever run into before. I'm sure someone will tell me it's like $DEAD_LANGUAGE from the 70's like Smalltalk or COBOL.
The only language possibly worse is Erlang.;)
On the other hand, powershell's built-in abilities to run a bunch of jobs on an array of machines and collate the results in the background is a pretty big win for windows
Never done it on Windows. Try 'cssh' in Linux.
I use it for managing and updating about 40 linux spam filters and firewalls.
Took them about 25 years to replace their previous command-line shell.
Sorry--there are just so many things that annoy the crap out of me and hinder me from getting work done in Windows that I just can't decide on one.;)
By the way, there are free WMI tools.. Microsoft even provides some, and there are 3rd party tools. You don't have to buy MSC. Like all things, if your environment is large enough, than an expensive tool can save you money in the long run. If it's not, you make do.
Mildly useful tools that appear like they were designed for Windows 95 and have annoying problems running in IE8.
As for licensing, you don't typically buy software a le carte, you buy them as part of a volume license program that includes all your CAL's and other licenses for a pretty substantial cost savings.
Yup. Why pay the horrendous retail price when you can simply buy into something like eOpen where you pay a slightly less than horrendous price along with having to pay to keep your eOpen SA benefits every three years...and then Microsoft doesn't release Vista until 5 years later. Such a benefit.
But just to show you that I'm not totally anti-Microsoft, I'll tell you something I like: Windows 2008 Group Policy. The addition of the ability to do things like map drives, add/delete/disable local user accounts, map printers, etc...it's pretty handy. No more batch or VBS scripts sitting in NETLOGON to do that stuff upon login. I haven't seen anything in Linux that comes close.
You know what, it's a tough job market out there, enjoy 1999's technology to it's fullest.
Yeah--when the economy picks up and companies start wanting to drive dumptrucks full of cash to Microsoft HQ again, let me know--I'll be there to recommend against it, be ignored, and spend years billing them to update the infrastructure and write apps to fix all the new problems introduced or priced into existence.
vbscript is something you only have to work with on Windows XP.
Yes--and I'm sure by the time I've found time to rewrite my management scripts over the next year in PowerShell, I'll be hearing that PowerShell is something I only have to work with on Vista/7 and now I should be rewriting them in something tries even harder and utterly fails harder to work like the CLI in Linux.
WMI is only microsoft's implementation of the industry standard Common Information Model (CIM). This is used in Mac's, Linux, and other OS's as well. It's also known as WBEM (Web based enterprise management).
There are other ways to change computer names that don't involve WMI that are basically as simple as your linux example.
Ugh.
I suppose WBEM would be less annoying with a decent management app instead of having to type a bunch of SQL-like statements. A few minutes of digging reveals that apparently Microsoft System Center is one such front-end....and it appears to cost about $10,000 for one of my networks--but I can't tell for sure. Microsoft Licensing is sort of a pain in the ass to figure out.
(So you're telling me I just bought Windows Server, and then I bought Windows XP which is a client designed specifically for talking with your server product--and now I have to pay you more money to get your blessing--called a CAL--to let them actually talk?)
(So you're telling me I just bought Exchange Server, and then I bought Outlook which is a client designed specifically for talking with your server product--and now I have to pay you more money to get your blessing--called a CAL--to let them actually talk?)
The 'Connect to' menu and 'Classic Mode' control panel is enabled by our nlite CD.
So it's shorter in XP.
That's a BS response and you know it. It's shorter in XP because I spent time to create a CD that changes the default settings?
It absolutely isn't BS. My company invested a significant amount of time and money to create a customized XP CD. It saves us a ton of time. All the desktops look and behave the same. Installing XP takes about 30 minutes and we aren't prompted during the setup.
What is so damn technically advanced in Vista or 7 that we should toss out all our work and dump thousands upon thousands of dollars into upgrades?
I'm not trying to be smarmy and annoying. None of the applications my customers use require Vista or 7. I'm sure they will once the marketing droids and some developers get drawn in by flashy widgets or translucent title bars. But really--all my customers need to do in edit a document or spreadsheet in office (or OpenOffice), print to printers, surf the internet, and in a few cases interface with weird medical hardware).
Nothing there requires Windows 7. Hell--most of it would run just fine under Win95/98, but 95/98 wasn't too stable.
I'm astonishingly unconvinced that I need to upgrade.
Because technology advances. There are plenty of crap cars from the 70's and 80's that have no airbags or other safety features and still run. Which car do you want to be in when you crash, the 1979 Pinto or 2011 Focus?
The Pinto is a bad example. That's the OS/2 of cars. Lets call XP a 1970s era Volvo. I'd take the Volvo any day.
I used to drive a 2000 era Suzuki Swift. One day I saw the same make/model of car get into a wreck with an old Volvo (early 80s I believe). The Volvo was mashed a bit, but the Swift was utterly demolished. The Volvo driver survived, the Suzuki driver didn't.
The Suzuki had 'newer' technologies, a 'flashier' look, and awesome new 'fiberglass' and 'rubbermade' components--but that didn't make it better.
The shitty new UI in Vista/7 isn't an advancement. Switching to 64-bit isn't an advancement. (XP could have been recompiled under 64-bit--and indeed it has. I'm sure there are UI nerds out there who have ported a vista-like theme to XP.)
What exactly is the point in switching to Vista/7? And it has to be compelling to get my company to re-invest significant amounts of time and money to 'fix' all the annoying issues out of the box, and to spend tens of thousands to pay Microsoft for the privilege?
Like I said--I'm not trying to be a jerk. But there is no technical benefit to switching to Vista/7 that outweighs the huge cost of upgrading.
Ask me again in another 1-2 years when every damn app developer starts requiring Windows 7 because they want their program to have a translucent title bar and I'll be singing a different tune.
You don't have to go to Change adapter settings, it's available right there on the Network and sharing center, and it's not a double click.. it's a single click.
Single click network icon, single click open network and sharing center, single click Local Area Connection. Single click properties, double click tcp/ip. enter ip settings.
The XP network icon only appears on the taskbar if you set it to do so, not by default. Even if you do, you are talking the same or more clicks.
And, by the way... all the scripts for administration you developed in XP will work in 7 without change because the WMI api hasn't changed other than to add new stuff.
I do see that new feature in 7. It's definitely shorter by default. I stand corrected.
As for WMI--screw WMI. It's the biggest piece of crap put out by Microsoft since Vista, ME, and Bob. I feel like I'm updating records in a SQL table rather than managing a workstation.
Rename a computer?
strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" _
& strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colComputers = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
("Select * from Win32_ComputerSystem")
For Each objComputer in colComputers
errReturn = ObjComputer.Rename("NewName")
Next
How about linux?
ssh root@somecomputer 'hostname NewName'
The new IIS is ridiculously poor in design and instead of having two or three different areas of configuration(be it the website, the virtual folder, etc), you have 3 dozen different applets with 3 or 4 configuration settings each.
It totally reminds me of a crappy cheap webhosting providers control panel circa 2000. (Think webhost4life.com. What a joke.)
WinXP: Double-click network adapter in systray, double-click TCP/IP, enter an IP address.
Wired Network adapters don't appear in the systray on Windows XP by default, so this answer is extremely misleading. Likewise, My Network Places is also not shown by default.
That would make it like this...
WinXP: Start, Control Panel, (skip this if you have Classic Mode on) Network and Internet Connections, Network Connections, Local Area Connection, Change settings of this connection (or right-click and choose Properties).
The 'Connect to' menu and 'Classic Mode' control panel is enabled by our nlite CD.
So it's shorter in XP.
And before you say "Well, not by default", let me add that in order to get a similar effect in Vista/7 I apparently need to shell out hundreds for upgrades, along with figuring out how to master a Windows 7 CD similar to an XP/nlite CD.
I don't see a benefit in upgrading.
How about a DHCP release/renew?
WinXP: Win+R->'cmd'->Enter->'ipconfig/release'->'ipconfig/renew'
Vista: Win+R->'cmd'->CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER->Approve UAC prompt->'ipconfig/release'->'ipconfig/renew' (CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER is the biggest shortcut I can find so I don't have to take my hands off the keyboard, right-click, and pick 'run as administrator' followed by clicking OK.)
I don't have a Vista machine, but this worked on my (UAC-enabled) Win:
Did you notice it was one less character typed and had no UAC prompts?
Great--Windows 7 is slightly better than Vista.
So remind me again why we needed to go through two versions of Windows, paying hundreds of dollars for upgrades just to save having to press 'R' along with the Windows key in order to do a release/renew? I'm astonishingly unconvinced that I need to upgrade.
The easiest way is to left click the network icon in the lower right cornder and select "Open Network and sharing center" then click the "Local Area Connection" link and the dialog pops up. That's 3 clicks, which is actually shorter than XP. XP requires at least 4 (right click Network dialog click properties, right click interface, choose properties)
Everyone likes to think that 7 buries stuff deeper, but in reality, almost everything is 2 or 3 clicks away from the desktop.
WinXP: Double-click network adapter in systray, double-click TCP/IP, enter an IP address.
Vista: Double-click network adapter in systray...oh...wait, that's not a network adapter, that's the network sharing center or some such bullshit. Um...ok, network sharing center. Uh...where next. Change Adapter Settings. Then right-click on your adapter, properties, TCP/IP, enter an IP address.
It's like the saying "No single raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood". Vista and Windows 7 have tons of very small changes to the way things used to be done. Who wants to re-learn how to change an IP address in Vista? You might think the 'old guys' are stuck in their ways, but it's not just being 'stuck' for stuck sake. What is the *benefit* of doing it the 'new' way?
How about a DHCP release/renew?
WinXP: Win+R->'cmd'->Enter->'ipconfig/release'->'ipconfig/renew'
Vista: Win+R->'cmd'->CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER->Approve UAC prompt->'ipconfig/release'->'ipconfig/renew' (CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER is the biggest shortcut I can find so I don't have to take my hands off the keyboard, right-click, and pick 'run as administrator' followed by clicking OK.)
Not better.
Plus, Windows XP has had about 7 years where admins could come up with decent scripts, hacks, and tweaks to get what they want. Now that Microsoft has changed that and also shows every sign of releasing a new OS every few years, most admins probably won't be able to keep up with changing their scripts and finding tweaks and fixes for their windows issues.
What do you mean they don't have redundancy? Last time I checked there were something like 13 root servers. The entire purpose of having multiple root servers is to keep the internet up when one or even a few go down.
If I could get the hours lost back from Barren Realms Elite, I'd be young again. It was just an evolution of a game called Hamurabi for the IBM Model 5150 I learned to write machine code, Basic and APL on, but the addition of online opponents and leagues made it cool. We also had a Star Trek game, and football with random-generated game events and leagues and computer generated text play-by-play.
And then there was LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon), Solar Realms Elite, Trade Wars, and the other door games.
Ah, old times. Kids these days think games began with Quake.
/onion, belt, off my lawn and so on.
Every time I see these pop up, people fail to mention LOD (Land of Devastation) by Scott M(?) Baker. That game was hands-down the best. Roam the wastelands of post-atomic earth and fight monsters while trying to recover stolen parts to the puritron(?) that will help clean up the radiation. After years of playing, you slowly uncover the dark secret that an alien badass tampered with the nuclear launch systems and nuked earth so he could take over. Then you go kill him.
Am I the only one who played LOD? Am I the only one that thought it was awesome?
Are you using disk encryption as well? If you aren't I hope you are aware that anyone who has access to your server/drive has access to those banking credentials.
You might consider that an acceptable risk of course.
Nope.
My workstation is sitting in my house. If someone physically gains access to my house, I have bigger issues.;)
Even if that does happen, it's sitting on a server that is on a shelf behind my desk in a very bad/weird configuration. If I have to pull the thing out, I have to spend 15 minutes moving furniture to access it. There's no keyboard, video, or mouse access--just ssh.
because nothing could possibly go wrong putting your banking login credentials in something a script can access.
Of course microsoft money, quicken, etc do that so I guess it's not considered bad after all.
Microsoft money, quicken...those are windows programs. I can see why you'd think storing login credentials is a bad idea.
I actually have a cron job that uses CURL to connect to my bank, figure out which question they ask for their multi-factor authentication, login, and download the last 30 days of account history. I sleep quite well at night knowing that it's running from my linux server that only has SSH access.
If someone changes e-mail addresses and doesn't update you, are you really friends?
Also--I've had the same e-mail address since January 2000. My mail server (run by me) has never been down long enough to lose mail.
A domain through gkg.net costs roughly $10/year, and Google Apps can be setup for less than 50 users for free--giving you gmail, a calendar, docs storage, and a few other tidbits.
Slashdot Mirror
We could also finally kill off Daylight Saving Time.
Yes--right after we finish killing off the Imperial System.
Even if a judge ruled that wasn't you testifying against yourself, you could still protect yourself if you simply said "I don't recall that password." You may notice that not being able to recall is used a lot when under oath. The reason is that there really isn't any way to challenge it.
If you are a geek, and your entire system has disk encryption so the only way to use the computer is to remember the password, then I doubt that will work...
(Really? You're telling me you have this super-awesome computer and you don't even remember the password to get into it? How long has that been?)
What about those that have VoIP for landline? Is it right to remove their ability to call 911 because their computer was infected?
That sounds like a very BOFH way to solve the botnet/spam/virus problem. If you're not tech enough to manage your computer, we cut off internet service as well as 911 service. Darwin will finish the job. Eventually we will have a super race of linux nerds...
The economy has fuck all to do with a lot of people deciding to roll out 7, either en-masse or as old boxes die and need to be re-imaged.
Also, I find it humorous that you are saying the economy has fuck all to do with rolling out Windows 7 in the middle of a depression and with an article that says ~66% of Windows users are still using XP.
I know, I know--correlation does not equal causation. But the primary motivation of a business is to turn a profit, not throw away money. My guess is they either don't see a profit/don't see profit in another area that can be spent on the upgrade, or they don't see a necessity to move off XP.
Start -> type "network connections" -> Enter
Most preferences and programs can be accessed directly from the search box on the start menu. If you can type then the start menu and control panel are largely redundant.
*facepalm*
I never thought to try that.
news flash: plenty of real businesses out there have volume agreements and get the upgrade to vista/7/whatever for free.
Yep--but a lot of businesses lost money when there was a huge gap between XP and Vista. They paid for a 3-year renewal and got nothing out of it.
fact: i've done back to back testing with a shitty 5 year old laptop running XP+SOE and 7+SOE on same hardware (windows + virus scanner + office 2007 + a few apps) and with 1gb ram 7 was as fast or faster once you let the initial search index complete.
Must be nice to have hardware that exceeded the XP recommended specs and were at or above the Vista specs.
A lot of our hardware was purchases with the minimum specs for XP and the business applications. We still have machines with 512 and 384. It sucks, but what are you going to do? When businesses are trying to save money in a bad economy, they don't want to do things that are considered unnecessary--like replacing equipment that still functions, give new healthcare benefits to employees, purchase Vista or 7, and even give raises to employees.
The economy has fuck all to do with a lot of people deciding to roll out 7, either en-masse or as old boxes die and need to be re-imaged.
Really? What 'company' do you work for that doesn't give a crap about the economy? The government?
Have rolled out 7 to about 30% of the company thus far and the problems to deal with have been exceedingly minimal, as they will be for around 95% of desktop workloads out there.
The company doesn't want to run a split platform. When they switch, they are planning to upgrade all the machines at once to everyone is 'consistent'. Reduces support costs apparently. But like I've been saying, there really isn't a business case for moving yet. Stuff like branchcache and directaccess are a time and money saver as well, when combined with 2008 R2.
So you're willing to give up pervasive search abilities,
How hard is it to double-click on the Excel or Word icons on the desktop? How hard is it to double-click on the IE icon, or the icons for the two business apps that we run? Seriously. Give icons on the desktop. I don't need pervasive search for that.
separation of video driver from kernel (i.e., dodgy video driver crash = screen flickers while it reloads - carry on working/etc)
Meh. I haven't had a video driver crash in XP in quite a while. Even if it were once every two months, is it really worth buying a new computer with Windows 7 just to stop a bluescreen every two months? Maybe if I didn't know where the save button (or the auto-save feature) was in Office.
better networking support in general
That's hardly a business case for spending money on a new machine with Windows 7.
, future versions of powershell,
Meh--powershell runs on XP.
and SMB signing for a few clicks when setting an ip address on a network adapter - something done, at best once every time you move computer (assuming your network administrator is too brain damaged to figure out auto config).
SMB signing can be turned on by group policy, and we're competent enough to use DHCP and IPv6 autoconfig.
Powershell is only available on windows though, you're right about that. As for its relationship to the unix CLI experience, well it's got a lot of similarities but lots of differences too. The shell is dramatically better for scripting than bash, say.
Do you have an example? I'm hardly an avid PowerShell user, but I haven't seen anything that sets it ahead (or even along-side) BASH.
For a complex script you'd probably switch to perl/ruby at some point on unix or suffer the rather horrid bash syntax.
Ugh--out of all the languages on Linux, you picked two out of the three worst in my opinion. Perl is like masochistic C, and Ruby--hell, I'm 30 years old, I'm not sure what language Ruby came from. It looks like nothing I've ever run into before. I'm sure someone will tell me it's like $DEAD_LANGUAGE from the 70's like Smalltalk or COBOL.
;)
The only language possibly worse is Erlang.
On the other hand, powershell's built-in abilities to run a bunch of jobs on an array of machines and collate the results in the background is a pretty big win for windows
Never done it on Windows. Try 'cssh' in Linux.
I use it for managing and updating about 40 linux spam filters and firewalls.
Took them about 25 years to replace their previous command-line shell.
You've got a point there.
*sigh*
You keep moving the goal posts.
Sorry--there are just so many things that annoy the crap out of me and hinder me from getting work done in Windows that I just can't decide on one. ;)
By the way, there are free WMI tools.. Microsoft even provides some, and there are 3rd party tools. You don't have to buy MSC. Like all things, if your environment is large enough, than an expensive tool can save you money in the long run. If it's not, you make do.
Microsoft WMI tools
Mildly useful tools that appear like they were designed for Windows 95 and have annoying problems running in IE8.
As for licensing, you don't typically buy software a le carte, you buy them as part of a volume license program that includes all your CAL's and other licenses for a pretty substantial cost savings.
Yup. Why pay the horrendous retail price when you can simply buy into something like eOpen where you pay a slightly less than horrendous price along with having to pay to keep your eOpen SA benefits every three years...and then Microsoft doesn't release Vista until 5 years later. Such a benefit.
But just to show you that I'm not totally anti-Microsoft, I'll tell you something I like: Windows 2008 Group Policy. The addition of the ability to do things like map drives, add/delete/disable local user accounts, map printers, etc...it's pretty handy. No more batch or VBS scripts sitting in NETLOGON to do that stuff upon login. I haven't seen anything in Linux that comes close.
You know what, it's a tough job market out there, enjoy 1999's technology to it's fullest.
Yeah--when the economy picks up and companies start wanting to drive dumptrucks full of cash to Microsoft HQ again, let me know--I'll be there to recommend against it, be ignored, and spend years billing them to update the infrastructure and write apps to fix all the new problems introduced or priced into existence.
Try googling "set computer name powershell".
set-computername "oldname" "newname"
See http://poshcode.org/541
vbscript is something you only have to work with on Windows XP.
Yes--and I'm sure by the time I've found time to rewrite my management scripts over the next year in PowerShell, I'll be hearing that PowerShell is something I only have to work with on Vista/7 and now I should be rewriting them in something tries even harder and utterly fails harder to work like the CLI in Linux.
WMI is only microsoft's implementation of the industry standard Common Information Model (CIM). This is used in Mac's, Linux, and other OS's as well. It's also known as WBEM (Web based enterprise management).
Linux has SBLIM, for instance http://sourceforge.net/projects/sblim/
There are other ways to change computer names that don't involve WMI that are basically as simple as your linux example.
Ugh. ...and it appears to cost about $10,000 for one of my networks--but I can't tell for sure. Microsoft Licensing is sort of a pain in the ass to figure out.
I suppose WBEM would be less annoying with a decent management app instead of having to type a bunch of SQL-like statements. A few minutes of digging reveals that apparently Microsoft System Center is one such front-end.
(So you're telling me I just bought Windows Server, and then I bought Windows XP which is a client designed specifically for talking with your server product--and now I have to pay you more money to get your blessing--called a CAL--to let them actually talk?)
(So you're telling me I just bought Exchange Server, and then I bought Outlook which is a client designed specifically for talking with your server product--and now I have to pay you more money to get your blessing--called a CAL--to let them actually talk?)
etc...
The 'Connect to' menu and 'Classic Mode' control panel is enabled by our nlite CD.
So it's shorter in XP.
That's a BS response and you know it. It's shorter in XP because I spent time to create a CD that changes the default settings?
It absolutely isn't BS. My company invested a significant amount of time and money to create a customized XP CD. It saves us a ton of time. All the desktops look and behave the same. Installing XP takes about 30 minutes and we aren't prompted during the setup.
What is so damn technically advanced in Vista or 7 that we should toss out all our work and dump thousands upon thousands of dollars into upgrades?
I'm not trying to be smarmy and annoying. None of the applications my customers use require Vista or 7. I'm sure they will once the marketing droids and some developers get drawn in by flashy widgets or translucent title bars. But really--all my customers need to do in edit a document or spreadsheet in office (or OpenOffice), print to printers, surf the internet, and in a few cases interface with weird medical hardware).
Nothing there requires Windows 7. Hell--most of it would run just fine under Win95/98, but 95/98 wasn't too stable.
I'm astonishingly unconvinced that I need to upgrade.
Because technology advances. There are plenty of crap cars from the 70's and 80's that have no airbags or other safety features and still run. Which car do you want to be in when you crash, the 1979 Pinto or 2011 Focus?
The Pinto is a bad example. That's the OS/2 of cars. Lets call XP a 1970s era Volvo. I'd take the Volvo any day.
I used to drive a 2000 era Suzuki Swift. One day I saw the same make/model of car get into a wreck with an old Volvo (early 80s I believe). The Volvo was mashed a bit, but the Swift was utterly demolished. The Volvo driver survived, the Suzuki driver didn't.
The Suzuki had 'newer' technologies, a 'flashier' look, and awesome new 'fiberglass' and 'rubbermade' components--but that didn't make it better.
The shitty new UI in Vista/7 isn't an advancement. Switching to 64-bit isn't an advancement. (XP could have been recompiled under 64-bit--and indeed it has. I'm sure there are UI nerds out there who have ported a vista-like theme to XP.)
What exactly is the point in switching to Vista/7? And it has to be compelling to get my company to re-invest significant amounts of time and money to 'fix' all the annoying issues out of the box, and to spend tens of thousands to pay Microsoft for the privilege?
Like I said--I'm not trying to be a jerk. But there is no technical benefit to switching to Vista/7 that outweighs the huge cost of upgrading.
Ask me again in another 1-2 years when every damn app developer starts requiring Windows 7 because they want their program to have a translucent title bar and I'll be singing a different tune.
You don't have to go to Change adapter settings, it's available right there on the Network and sharing center, and it's not a double click.. it's a single click.
Single click network icon, single click open network and sharing center, single click Local Area Connection. Single click properties, double click tcp/ip. enter ip settings.
The XP network icon only appears on the taskbar if you set it to do so, not by default. Even if you do, you are talking the same or more clicks.
And, by the way... all the scripts for administration you developed in XP will work in 7 without change because the WMI api hasn't changed other than to add new stuff.
I do see that new feature in 7. It's definitely shorter by default. I stand corrected.
As for WMI--screw WMI. It's the biggest piece of crap put out by Microsoft since Vista, ME, and Bob. I feel like I'm updating records in a SQL table rather than managing a workstation.
Rename a computer?
strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" _
& strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colComputers = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
("Select * from Win32_ComputerSystem")
For Each objComputer in colComputers
errReturn = ObjComputer.Rename("NewName")
Next
How about linux?
ssh root@somecomputer 'hostname NewName'
The new IIS is ridiculously poor in design and instead of having two or three different areas of configuration(be it the website, the virtual folder, etc), you have 3 dozen different applets with 3 or 4 configuration settings each.
It totally reminds me of a crappy cheap webhosting providers control panel circa 2000. (Think webhost4life.com. What a joke.)
Wired Network adapters don't appear in the systray on Windows XP by default, so this answer is extremely misleading. Likewise, My Network Places is also not shown by default.
That would make it like this... WinXP: Start, Control Panel, (skip this if you have Classic Mode on) Network and Internet Connections, Network Connections, Local Area Connection, Change settings of this connection (or right-click and choose Properties).
The 'Connect to' menu and 'Classic Mode' control panel is enabled by our nlite CD.
So it's shorter in XP.
And before you say "Well, not by default", let me add that in order to get a similar effect in Vista/7 I apparently need to shell out hundreds for upgrades, along with figuring out how to master a Windows 7 CD similar to an XP/nlite CD.
I don't see a benefit in upgrading.
I don't have a Vista machine, but this worked on my (UAC-enabled) Win:
Win7: Win->'cmd'->Enter->'ipconfig /release'->'ipconfig /renew'
Did you notice it was one less character typed and had no UAC prompts?
Great--Windows 7 is slightly better than Vista.
So remind me again why we needed to go through two versions of Windows, paying hundreds of dollars for upgrades just to save having to press 'R' along with the Windows key in order to do a release/renew? I'm astonishingly unconvinced that I need to upgrade.
The easiest way is to left click the network icon in the lower right cornder and select "Open Network and sharing center" then click the "Local Area Connection" link and the dialog pops up. That's 3 clicks, which is actually shorter than XP. XP requires at least 4 (right click Network dialog click properties, right click interface, choose properties)
Everyone likes to think that 7 buries stuff deeper, but in reality, almost everything is 2 or 3 clicks away from the desktop.
WinXP: Double-click network adapter in systray, double-click TCP/IP, enter an IP address.
/release'->'ipconfig /renew' /release'->'ipconfig /renew' (CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER is the biggest shortcut I can find so I don't have to take my hands off the keyboard, right-click, and pick 'run as administrator' followed by clicking OK.)
Vista: Double-click network adapter in systray...oh...wait, that's not a network adapter, that's the network sharing center or some such bullshit. Um...ok, network sharing center. Uh...where next. Change Adapter Settings. Then right-click on your adapter, properties, TCP/IP, enter an IP address.
It's like the saying "No single raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood". Vista and Windows 7 have tons of very small changes to the way things used to be done. Who wants to re-learn how to change an IP address in Vista? You might think the 'old guys' are stuck in their ways, but it's not just being 'stuck' for stuck sake. What is the *benefit* of doing it the 'new' way?
How about a DHCP release/renew?
WinXP: Win+R->'cmd'->Enter->'ipconfig
Vista: Win+R->'cmd'->CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER->Approve UAC prompt->'ipconfig
Not better.
Plus, Windows XP has had about 7 years where admins could come up with decent scripts, hacks, and tweaks to get what they want. Now that Microsoft has changed that and also shows every sign of releasing a new OS every few years, most admins probably won't be able to keep up with changing their scripts and finding tweaks and fixes for their windows issues.
Because they don't have redundancy?
What do you mean they don't have redundancy? Last time I checked there were something like 13 root servers. The entire purpose of having multiple root servers is to keep the internet up when one or even a few go down.
If I could get the hours lost back from Barren Realms Elite, I'd be young again. It was just an evolution of a game called Hamurabi for the IBM Model 5150 I learned to write machine code, Basic and APL on, but the addition of online opponents and leagues made it cool. We also had a Star Trek game, and football with random-generated game events and leagues and computer generated text play-by-play.
And then there was LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon), Solar Realms Elite, Trade Wars, and the other door games.
Ah, old times. Kids these days think games began with Quake.
/onion, belt, off my lawn and so on.
Every time I see these pop up, people fail to mention LOD (Land of Devastation) by Scott M(?) Baker. That game was hands-down the best. Roam the wastelands of post-atomic earth and fight monsters while trying to recover stolen parts to the puritron(?) that will help clean up the radiation. After years of playing, you slowly uncover the dark secret that an alien badass tampered with the nuclear launch systems and nuked earth so he could take over. Then you go kill him.
Am I the only one who played LOD? Am I the only one that thought it was awesome?
Wildcat 4.11 forever.
blablablabla. i99% of the times, NAT is in conjunction with a stateful firewall. That's why people say NAT = FIREWALLED.
So if shoes are normally encountered in the presence of socks, shoes are the same as socks?
Seems a little lazy to me...
Regardless, NAT is not a security mechanism. It is not the equivalent of a firewall. And removing NAT will not prevent you from putting in a firewall.
If shoes and socks were sold as a bundle, pre-sewn together to the end user like most home firewalls, then yes--users would call them shoes.
Sorta like what you call a hand. It's really a wrist, palm, fingers, fingernails, etc...
Exactly. Haven't we been running out of them for at least the last 10 years?
Awesome that no-one ever cared.
I can't see why anyone would now either.
Is it all thanks to Microsoft? Other network equipment? Embedded systems?
There is no greater motivation than last minute panic.
Are you using disk encryption as well? If you aren't I hope you are aware that anyone who has access to your server/drive has access to those banking credentials.
You might consider that an acceptable risk of course.
Nope. ;)
My workstation is sitting in my house. If someone physically gains access to my house, I have bigger issues.
Even if that does happen, it's sitting on a server that is on a shelf behind my desk in a very bad/weird configuration. If I have to pull the thing out, I have to spend 15 minutes moving furniture to access it. There's no keyboard, video, or mouse access--just ssh.
because nothing could possibly go wrong putting your banking login credentials in something a script can access.
Of course microsoft money, quicken, etc do that so I guess it's not considered bad after all.
Microsoft money, quicken...those are windows programs. I can see why you'd think storing login credentials is a bad idea.
I actually have a cron job that uses CURL to connect to my bank, figure out which question they ask for their multi-factor authentication, login, and download the last 30 days of account history. I sleep quite well at night knowing that it's running from my linux server that only has SSH access.
there's not much the Pentagon could do about a torrent seeded in China.
Dust off and nuke the seed from orbit?
E-mail accounts frequently change. Facebook accounts remain constant.
If someone changes e-mail addresses and doesn't update you, are you really friends?
Also--I've had the same e-mail address since January 2000. My mail server (run by me) has never been down long enough to lose mail.
A domain through gkg.net costs roughly $10/year, and Google Apps can be setup for less than 50 users for free--giving you gmail, a calendar, docs storage, and a few other tidbits.