Has anyone tried a really hot cup of tea?
Perhaps it was already mentioned.
134 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Nov 2009
Especially Microsoft.
Every day I have to fight all the monopolistic and virus like changes they make to the operating system and applications,
They don't pay tax
They blatantly copy other peoples stuff (slack, dropbox)
I propose they
- should be held responsible for every exploited weakness of their code and have to pay each and every holder of their licenses until the vulnerabilities are fixed.
- should have to pay the maximum local tax rate in every country they operate in for every license that they sell, based on revenue not on cost manipulations
- should be forced to unbundle everything and offer everything they sell as a pick n mix with no discounting or special rates for anyone
- ceo pay should be discounted by the number of vulnerabilities found each year. 100 vulnerabilities, sorry that is 100% pay cut for the month.
As an ancient outdated hack I can't help but start with 'in the old days it was better...' yes it wasn't on the cloud and available from Russia, but then in my experience sensible don't do their reports while bathing the kids after hours. I absolutely hate all the crapware in the name of efficiency dreamed up by huddles in Microsoft that clearly have never worked in a small business or had to configure or use any of it. Worst of all, if you do 'drink the cool aide' as above its likely they will kill it off randomly one day and you force a complete redo.
Don't even get me started on the lock in effect, I can't sell a business an alternative to the onedrive/teams/sharepoint garbage since they are already spending a fortune monthly on m365 so we may as well use those things as well. (I appreciate if you spend even more money for specialists / consultants / inhouse expertise then sharepoint might be right for you - I'm talking about 5-20 person SMBs that would be far better off with a simple shared drive.
I think fines should be a significant percentage of revenue immediately and then a continuing percent to be applied until proof that all the issues have been addressed. Additionally the companies have to put a banner on all their websites stating what fines they have paid and continue to pay and the reasons for it as approved by the regulator.
Additionally all the C suite personal also have to have a similar regime apply to them as well.
I am sick to death of these mega corporate companies and C suite pricks that get away with literally everything. Is it any wonder why so many people go 'down the rabbit hole' of conspiracy when this blatant abuse is page 1, chapter 1, sentence 1 of the typically 'American' play book.
Have you tried to set up and use 'family' settings for you kids on Xbox? I have, I'm a tech with 30 years experience and I suggest to you it is harder than working with O365 admin / Amazon / Active Directory / BGP mikrotik / Node/React all combined.
It is clearly designed as a legal BS excuse instead of something useful. As far as I could tell it's either kids have no access to anything - including actually playing games OR you turn it all off - including allowing X rated content (hence giving Microsoft the excuse of parental consent) just so the kids can share Minecraft.
I have no idea how any non tech parent could possibly navigate it.
Yes, with cloud you get access from anywhere without a vpn but.... so many issues and so unreliable. Onedrive - like MicrosoftWorks. I have many customers with multiple 'onedrives'. File access breaking because sync folders are placed at different folder depths (causing it to run over the <260 character limit). Now 'FileProvider' on Apple is doing the same thing but baked in.
And what is it with the abominable sharepoint/teams back end. Creating and managing shared access for a group is horrendous. Maybe its only me, but how is it that I (a one man band full stack developer) can create better UX than (presumably) teams of massively resourced, high paid Microsoft engineers. My only conclusion is that all the good ones left.
I sat through a promising speech at a tech conference once, a Microsoft employee talking about all the research they'd done on making the user experience better. What confounds me is that they clearly have never done anything with it.
Perhaps I should click on the help button; 'Please contact your administrator for assistance' ..... aaaaaggghhh the code words for 'we don't have a clue either'.
What I hate is the semi related 'grab the focus' thing that apps have a habit of doing. I'm working away typing and then randomly some weird pop up appears from something deep in the OS with a question like 'Do you want me not to not delete the critical files, 'cancel', 'close'.
Of course it has selected something and gone before I fully read it, or I'm stumped as to what the hell it means or I need a button option that is not there.
If there is 'help' of course it is 'contact your system administrator for help' - whom of course is sitting in the same chair thinking the same wtf!
All about better user experience and hiding annoying pop ups and making things better for the user. They must of fired that guy, way to 'out there'.
Business at the speed of thought..... unfortunately it seems many peoples 'thoughts' are more like Homer and less like Einstien..... Doh!
At Microsoft they eat their own dog food - apparently. So as an IT professional I guess I'm paid to pick up dog sh@t all day.
I realise windows 10 has been around for a while now, but many of the people I see are still emerging from Windows 7 and 8x - so common to hear I hate that 'new' interface. Which is after all this time is a half polished stone. They'll be pleased that it is all changing again.
I wonder what 'official document storage areas' are - funny I thought it was an apple thing to not cater for the idea of multiple logons, shared file storage, organised corporate data.
All or nothing permissions e.g. for the camera - fantastic, really must have got the entire c-suite working hard on that to come up with something so advanced and cutting edge.
I'd like to see something real to back up that no AV claim. Perhaps if any customer is hacked during the supported lifetime of Windows 10x then they automatically get .5% of our profit for a year. Some skin in the game eh? Instead of mindless BS.
Whole thing probably written by their AI anyway...........
just program the 'autopilot' to keep slowing down until it is crawling or stopped if the user will not conform to whatever eyeball scanning, hand holding or whatever it is that it checks for. Either user gets the message and conforms or it goes so slow that the cops pull it over for being dumb (it is an offense to go to slow as well as to fast) and if it crashes, well a slow crash is better than a fast one.
Clearly my basic reading of the issue needs some assistance;
What I understood is that due to processor running future commands making the assumption that they will run before they are officially called, and the fact that the results of those commands can be read, we have the meltdown issue.
Why isn't the answer to clear that pipeline and results whenever there is a kernel exception of the type that asks for privileged access? Or do kernel programmers use exceptions as their normal execution logic?
I expect I'm being too simplistic and it will need a pipeline to track the pipeline...
Two thoughts, sorry if I'm repeating someone....
1. Re one of the paragraphs, writing a registry key is going to require significant code work - yes that is what the text suggested, give me a break, a lot of software that is written by what I consider poor practise writes hundreds if not thousands of registry entries apparently for random fun and leave it behind when it is removed. Writing a single key is a very basic call. (I do realise re-writing your AV kernel driver thingie - now that might be hard).
2. The alternative to a single key is a folder where each vendor software has to put in a "i'm good" notification and if everyone is good, updates continue.
Having said that, with this registry thing, malware has a very simple way to switch off updates at will, simpler than borking windows updates - which lets face it Microsoft bork their own update engine regularly enough.
So perhaps what we should have is a better way to register applications existence on the machine in a protected place such that they can be checked against an online 'master' record of goodness maintained by vendors / Microsoft. Heap of missed opportunities there with the whole 'certified' application certificates etc.
This is turning into a bigger poo pile every day as we better understand the consequences!
Take away the tax break - sales plummit (as per evidence stated in article - 1400 to 100)
So, lets do that so we can earn a heap of imaginary tax on sales that no longer happen?
PS - did you not get the memo commentors re "tax breaks for rich" - oil running out, polluting planet to hell, electric is an answer, leading rather than following usually is where the profits are. Anyway, that is the American way isn't it, you despise the poor inside your country, don't you?
It is not just the solar industry with this issue, I think you could call it modern 'fast / first to market' strategy and if its not 'instant' it must be old technology / old hat. The google effect or the egotism of 'the new way'.
The difference is instead of testing and proving we've got release now and fix later. We won't need EMP to wipe out society, just a Friday afternoon cockup.
Tried onedrive for about a year. It couldn't sync 100 GB of files in the whole year we had it operational on a Win 8.1 machine, in NZ on 30Mb/s / 10Mb/s fibre internet connection.
Went back to dropbox, sync completed in the afternoon.
Don't know if it is because outside US land the service is worse, but I'd call it un-useable here.
Almost like this editor because of the ad refreshes.
I imagine that this is where the next tech 'crunch' will come from, ignoring the benefits in the particular mentioned use case in the article, there is the wider massive effort to get people locked into various cloud vendors, Microsoft being particularly active here and being very hostile to IT professionals that may be seen to be resisting their efforts. Coming back to the FPGA aspect, if there is less people that can program them, then it gives the vendor more power. Not to mention ability to add 'code' at a very low level for whatever other interests they have that would be very hard to detect higher up the stack. So cool technology on one hand, but massive enabler of the American dream - that is locking out competition and locking in profits!
In my opinion we need a new 'disruptive' 'Microsoft' to shake up the old incumbents which now are Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon? instead of IBM.
since microsoft makes the servers prefer it. but for what purpose? Why does the world need to know about our 150 devices at company x?
Very happy with NAT and very happy keeping it simple on the inside without all the hassle of all the extra ::
Regardless of that, the ISP's don't talk about them, that is where yo have to target, coms companies. Oh and making it a bit easier to configure firewalls to be reasonably assured things are still safe.
Lots of vendors still don't support it and drivers are problematic as well. So we couldn't go there even if we wanted to get the freebee. Besides the experience is terrible, particularly with half finished settings pains, the rubbish windows update, the spyware etc. Went to a IT conference and one presenter had w10 and it wouldn't work on the projectors - went split screen vertical?!
So despite the promise of getting the latest, always updated etc, as many have mentioned it is simply a recipe for crappy beta code that there is no impetus to fix.
Also the fact that a year in even vendors like autocad don't recommend it is astonishing!
There is no doubt that some (many) IT shops have been shooting themselves in the feet for years by having things locked down to the point that end users can't get on and do their jobs, however there is a big difference between an un-managed free-for-all and its associated risks of data loss, productivity loss and hacking risk and a system that has appropriate control, security and reliability.
If you (as an IT professional) start with the mindset of 'make it better than out of the box', it is pretty easy to add value and make almost everything easier for your users while maintaining appropriate controls. If you're an IT Nazi, they'll figure out how to bypass it and/or your company will suffer and if you leave it fully open then you'll be a failure / hacking statistic.
Does having the users as 'non-local-admins' restrict software install or has that been revoked as well for 'store apps'?
I just wish Microsoft would compete on quality rather than efforts to manipulate via monopoly, the past tactics that served well with windows and office simply don't work now.
Ironically as they continue to port their development software to Linux, iOS etc I come to the conclusion that they really don't want windows long term. They really seem to be actively destroying it.
Ironically any 'trust' or at least 'complacency that just goes with the MS way' is also being burned up. My end user experiences of everything MS Cloud based simply defines them at best a second rate player in that arena as well. So Windows is dying, but the 'cloud first' strategy doesn't have more that one gammy leg (office 365) either.
In my view if the OS writers spent less time trying to create lock in and more time trying to make things better, then this wouldn't be an issue. We have sandboxing, virtual machines, built in AV etc, why wouldn't the OS prevent anything dangerous happening when a device is plugged in?
Why isn't there the same thing for installing an application in windows downloaded from the net, should this program have access to these files, should it be able to use the microphone, camera etc, this is trying to access these websites / IP addresses which are registered to ...
I think we like to believe we are getting smarter over time, but I think we are getting dumber and American tech companies are leading the dumb and dumber movement at full speed!
I like Toshiba Portege laptops, they have been mostly very reliable and in my opinion more consistently better designed than the competition.
Granted they are not cheap, but I'd rather have a reliable work horse than a show pony that breaks down and spends more time in getting warranty repairs.
Shame they bloated into corporate malaise.
We've had office 365 personal for a couple of years.
We don't use onedrive because it is useless, it couldn't relaibly sync anything and was extremely slow even though we have fibre at home. Went back to dropbox. As far as I can tell features keep disappearing instead of being improved. e.g. there used to be a images and drawings repository for publisher. Now nothing.
Very unlikely to 'go cloud' at work, we simply don't have people working at internet cafe's and can do all the collaboration we want with other tools on their laptops or tablets if we want to take the productivity hit of not using a keyboard.
Here is my suggestion to fix this ludicrous aspect of the American way.
1. You must file your lawsuit within 1 year of discovering that the patent may be infringed. The one year is deemed to start as soon as it is deemed that a person in that knowledge field would have a reasonable chance of discovering the infringement. Beyond the 1 year the litigants have to prove the infringement and pay all costs. If they lose they have to pay the other parties the same amount they were claiming.
2. If it is a technology that government endorses for national security, then they must sue the government on behalf of the people and can not sue businesses or private individuals. Rules for 1 may still apply.
Although sailing off to sea is only real if it is a 30ft yacht not a cruise ship with 600+ people. Still the idea of not sacrificing your entire life (and kids growing up time) to the company should be applauded. Not very American I suppose.
That MS has completely lost the plot re OS and can't listen and don't envision a future that people want to be a part of is very regrettable.
Because though I do put the boot in - which they deserve - the reality is that there is only bits and pieces that I'd want to 'hook my trailer up to' from any of the other major players. I mean seriously yay Mac from the company that listens even less and you do what your told. Yay Google the company that defines data snooping.
Yay linux, oh but it won't run autocad or office or any of our multi-thousand dollar modelling applications. Yes I realise there are alternatives for some things, but our customers in multi million dollar engineering firms don't think how can I get cheap software, they think about getting the job done and the associated issue of retaining skilled labour that can use said applications.
Unless of course your ancient business software was written using a sql server 2000 (80) compatibility level...
But of course at least you can run that in sql 2008 - not in 2012 and presumably not in 2014 if you can still get those versions.
Never had any uptime issues with 2005, 2008 or 2012. Worst performance issues was shoddy sql code and crappy "treat it like a file" dump it all into c# objects and do all the sorting / joining / calculating etc there. I don't understand why you still want an sql server at that point....
Though I'm sure it is all very serious for people that enjoy wearing nice suits and sitting in the corner office, to me it is like a roller coaster at a fun park.
(since I'm not invested) - well apart from retirement thingies handled by third party so I have no idea or care - in fact super an seems a bit like taxes - they may bring about good or not, you won't know till your too old to do anything about it...
Anyway, of course all those companies are worth a fraction of what they were 30 mins ago. In the time that half the staff have read the paper and had a coffee, the fundamentals have clearly changed. I think they should make the market trading even faster - faster than light with those fancy new laser techniques. Then they truly might disappear up their own black hole, and we'd be all richer for it!
1But concerning the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that ye should be written to, 2for ye know perfectly well yourselves, that the day of [the] Win10 so comes as a thief by night. 3When they may say, Peace and safety, then sudden destruction comes upon them, as travail upon her that is with child or work colleagues; and they shall in no wise escape. 4But *ye*, brethren, are not in darkness, that the day should overtake you as a thief: 5for all *ye* are sons of Linux and sons of day; we are not of night nor of darkness. 6So then do not let us sleep as the rest do, but let us watch and be sober; 7for they that sleep sleep by night, and they that drink drink by night; 8but *we* being of [the] day, let us be sober, putting on [the] breastplate of faith and love, and as helmet [the] hope of salvation; 9because Linus has not set us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our command line, 10who has died on us, that whether we may be watching or sleep, we may live together with him. 11Wherefore encourage one another, and build up each one the other, even as also ye do.
In my experience with windows 2012 servers on a virtual environment, it is bloody hard to make the time stay accurate +- a lot more than one lousy leap second!
Especially if you have active directory which competes with a myriad of built in 'ms knows best' mechanisms all in competition to set the clock.
I presume they must use third party code to fix it on azure, because ms knowledge base can't even agree on what is the best thing to do.
I'd wager that MS servers will be all over the place time wise for a lot longer than a second. However since they explicitly exclude 'real time' as a thing they can do, what do they care!
A similar thing happened about 15 years ago.
That time it was 'lets test the backup fail safe system' with the outcome that the backup system wasn't getting updates as expected so radar controllers were left with a dot instead of the full info.
Presumably they decided that they'd give it another go.
Keep this between us, but I'm in the process of registering
.reallysucks
.totallysucks
.probablysucks
.sceoisaXXXX
.iscodedbymonkeys
and similar for my corporate wing
and I'm thinking a gtld like '.iscrapinbed' and '.isaloser' and '.gotsuckeredforthecostofastupiddomainname' for when I go after the defensive personal market.
Yes, can someone tell me the point of this, or is it just plain research learning etc, when we already can get information to travel at bagigahertz down a fibre using light, it just seems this is a bit late.
I get that quantum stuff may mean higher security, but I could hide 6 bits in 60 trillion bits over fibre and you'd have a hard time finding them
I have numerous sites I interact with that I have to click passed warnings because it is internal, registered in a different name etc. Of course I'm careful about what I'm doing and I realize there is a risk associated with this practice,
Unfortunately for Google I would add to the numbers that bypass the 'back away' button and they might not know that I'm fully aware of what I'm doing.
At the end of the day, some of these things are similar to 'Caution hot drink is hot'. If the users (you have / want) are that ignorant the issue the technology needs to change to cater for them - which could may make it unusable an inefficient in the short term.
As mentioned a key reason for error message fatigue is the facts that often they are misleading, attempts at automated help often cause more problems or are simply wrong or obfuscated with web links to dead ends or gibberish (thank you Microsoft) and any app on the machine can make them.
I think something like channeling through the OS / embedded AV (to check legitimacy) might be an option if you wanted to properly re-think things.