Posts by Brian Souder 1

From the search - this repeats a lot:

Brief CommentI am in favor of strong net neutrality under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. Sincerely,

http://deadline.com/2017/05/john-oliver-donald-trump-fcc-net-neutrality-ajit-pai-1202086601/

But, “if it seems too complicated, don’t worry,” Oliver assured. “That’s why we bought the URL ‘gofccyourself.com’,” which he said will take care of Steps 1-5. Use it to tell Pai “you support strong net neutrality backed by Title II oversight of ISP’s,” Oliver said – that last part being really important.

Required?

Forget their experiments on gravity - how did they train the cat to readily do what they wanted.

Why hasn't IBM or Someone just bought them outright?

I am surprised IBM or someone have not just rolled in and do a hostile take over of SCO. Put it to bed already.

HP Desktop

I tried to upgrade my video card in one of the business desktops only to find HP's power supply was not only not powerful enough, but it had no additional leads for a larger GPU. I went to replace the power supply and discovered it was of course a non-standard size, so I had to stick with the GT630 that came with my system. Disappointing on an i7 system. But that is what I get for not building my own system.

Channel Still Bloated

Part of the numbers being off is that the distribution channel is still bloated with WIndows 7 and Windows 8 machines. I had a client just order a new machine today and the only options were for WIndows 7 or 8.1. Not a single PC in their distribution list is Windows 10 even though it is now supported under the contract.

I have been migrating users over to WIndows 10 for several months now with zero issues. Obviously each company had one system upgraded and tested fulling with all software suites before moving forward. While you do not have to have WIndows Server 2012 R2 on all your server, the more advanced feature integration with WIndows 10 require it. I have done a few server migrations in the last month to Server 2012 R2. This is the first time I have ever had clients purchase software assurance because Server 2016 is so close to release.

Cop pulls over Google self-driving car, finds no driver to ticket

http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/13/us/google-self-driving-car-pulled-over/index.html

Sweet! I Win

Called it - I win the pool. lol

Offerings

Maybe they should fire the product development teams. The price points and offerings are off. 5400 RPM drives in business laptops? I was expecting maybe one large 7200 RPM drive and the rest SSD and mSATA drives. 4 GB of RAM anymore - really? Everything should be 8 GB min. They can't figure out what they are doing with docking connectors. Strange 1990's UBS 3 offerings with very little details. HP still does not have the WiGig stuff. It's like all these new technologies came out, but inventory is like 2 years old. I am hoping dome of the tech specs were wrong. I found both HP & Dell with SATA 2 listed for the drives they were putting in.

How about a reliable 15 inch laptop with options for 8 and 16 GB, maybe a 1 TB 7200 RPM drive option, but then 256, 512, 768 GB SSD drive. 802.11AC and Bluetooth, A docking station that supports dual monitors. If you look at the inventory it is all Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 with Windows 7 downgrade. This inventory has to be old. They should just blast through it - take the hit and move on. Probably burry some of these designs with the mac Lisa.

Does Microsoft User Stat Counter On Their Site

I have done about 14-15 Windows 10 upgrades for various reasons ranging from testing it to bailing out friends that did the upgrade and then had issues ranging from a virus already on the system to upgrading a hard drive. In many of the cases I clean installed the prior OS (7 or 8), and then upgraded to Windows 10 with the force update. (See Link Below) During the upgrade process, for example on Windows 7, I would have to go to the Microsoft site for various things like IE 11. I would also have to go out to manufacturers websites checking for drivers, HP Support Assistant updates for BIOS - etc. I would imagine all those feverish hits to the OEM's are being counted if they use stat counter. Which then only a few minutes later they got the Windows 10 upgrade. I would imagine many of you would do the same thing, which may skew the results as well. Just a thought. I would take the numbers for what they are, a curiosity. The other side of this too is that the manufacturers seem to have not embraced Windows 10 yet with all the extra inventory in the channel. I know of at least two dozen people waiting for new inventory with Windows 10 out of the box because they had old XP or Vista machines they could not upgrade. Some of those people are not even online to be counted.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Windows 10 Media

I was looking into Windows 10 replacement media for clients that were upgrading to Windows 10 from Windows 7 or 8. We are doing some preliminary testing for an upgrade in a domain environment in the next few months. They wanted to take advantage of the free upgrade. Of course the subject of what do we do after the free 12 month download is over, and we need to clean install a machine because of a virus or something like that. I initially talked to the support line (which now seems to be 100% in India with this transition HP is making). They told me you would have to buy a full version from Microsoft. I figured this had to be wrong, so I called the HP Parts department. They still do not have a SKU for Windows 10 Media, but they seemed to think it might be as long as 6 months before you can purchase replacement media. It would be nice to use a Windows 10 Pro OEM CD to do a full clean install. Remove the old 7 and 8 restore partitions (on machines that had them) that would no longer be used. I was thinking El Reg might want to follow up with the various OEM folks to see what kind of response they get.

Move On - Nothing To See Here

I have just started removing Flash and Java where I can. Solves the whole problem.

If Adobe was that concerned about moving forward, they should come up with a tool for the Adobe Flash developers that are still out there that takes their files and converts them to HTML 5. This way the poor developers do not have to learn a new tool right away, and we can move on. Plus Adobe can sell another tool that forces their users into the cloud and paying them endlessly. But that is another topic all together ...

Rough Edges but spin it up

I have been testing it on an old Vista laptop that I don't think is even supported. It found all the drivers without an issue. The last two updates that went in this week have caused the new IE to crash a few times and restart. It may be driver related. Other than that, it has been really stable for me. It still needs some polish though. Even after release I would probably wait for a few months before anything production, and then I would be setting up a test box. Most of you should probably find an old machine or VM and fire up a copy so you can get used to it a while. It really is not that bad to work with and it has seen performance boosts. I recently installed this for a friend on a laptop he was rebuilding. (Brave Soul) He is gaming on the laptop without any issues and it is much faster then before. He is even playing the Beta of World of Warships. (So beta on a beta)

Certificates

One of my clients that deals with DoJ and DoD stuff was having problems with the websites not long ago. All of the website certificates had expired.

Darwinism In Reverse

They will have to add a new category to the Darwin Awards. Scientists too smart for their own good that got killed by their genetic experiments.

Get It Right

I would rather have them get it right and not be patching like crazy - like when they usually release an OS.

Melt Down

I wonder if they had one sort of melt down a bit. Probably freaked out some lawyers in the back room. Imagine the bad press from that! I think they would rather take the hit from people being upset over a missing feature vs. hey this product catches fire. Don't buy it. I would have taken this action too. Especially with the limited OC benefit.

WSUS

I have not seen how they are planning to work WSUS into this. Though I would imagine it would not change much.

Just Buy The Bankrupt Company

Why don't IBM and Novell just buy up the bankrupt SCO and put an end to this.

Equipment Lagging - Mandate the equipment

I had looked into IPv6 when it was first introduced. I found a lot of equipment was lagging, and even manufacturers could not give answers on it. You are seeing it trumpeted more in Routers, but it was not clear if legacy IPv4 switches could pass the traffic for IPv6, how they would handle IPv6 - would it just drop it - could it convert it, etc. I think the lack of information and over all investment costs has slowed the adoption even here in the states. Places where I can slip the IPv6 enabled equipment in I do. So then you think hey - let me look into what is left to switch them over. Oh - no info on the switch (even on newer kit with Gigabit managed ports). Well - I don't want to be the one that breaks things. We will come back to it later on. I just looked through some of the SOHO switch manufacturers and you are starting to see more mention of IPv6 now. I would be inclined to try it at home. Plus I have found many times when you are having trouble with a Windows 7 or 8 box, and it is a strange networking issue, turning off IPv6 in the NIC seems to clear a lot of that up. Not saying there would be no issue if it were IPv6 only, but with an IPv4 network, it is the only choice. So you basically have a lot of equipment you would have to change for what an administrator would see as little or no benefit. Maybe if they regulated the equipment that is available in the UK (or whatever region) was required to have IPv6 full support, or it could no longer be sold. Give it an April 2014 date. They can then shuffle the older equipment to regions not enforcing it. But it would also change manufacturers mindset, hey - this needs to be in everything going forward. Lets clear the channel of IPv4 only equipment before we get left holding the bag.

Japan rivals Scotland in race for best whisky

I am new to all this. In fact, I have to admit, I normally am not a fan of scotch. Trying the Laphroaig got me drinking it over the last few months. Someone was telling me about the article below how the Japanese came in and duplicated the process. I have not tried any of it yet.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/24/news/japan-whisky/

Virgin Galactic - Spaceship Two

Virgina Galactic SpaceShip Two just crashed on test flight. One person dead, one injured. Bad week for space flight.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/31/us/spaceshiptwo-incident/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

XP

To be clear - I do realize if you read the KB it does not list XP, but I would assume that since support for XP is dropped. It does say Server 200; it should in theory patch IE8 on Server 2003 then. One would think it should do the same on XP.