Re: Wow

Fine, then let them develop without endangering taxpayer dollars. Had they defaulted on this loan, the taxpayers would have lost quite a large sum of money on absolutely nothing.

Re: Note that difference *loan* (with interest) versus old car maker (2nd or 3rd) bailout.

No, the US taxpayers made a loan for developing a vehicle that does little, if anything, to improve the life of the average American, but is, instead, a plaything for rich folks. This is not the same as funding development for mainframe computers or putting a man on the moon or even developing new ways to turn corn or algae into ethanol. This is entirely and totally a toy.

Re: 25 years too late

"my daily routine has never included talking about file formats."

Then why are you on a computer-nerd site talking about file formats? ;)

Re: Soon to get "upgraded" from Live@EDU to O365

Thanks, but it's all over now. Was really a non-event, in spite of all of the hype and hoopla coming out of MS about the "upgrade". The biggest problem has been getting word out to the students that the URL for webmail isn't www.live.com anymore. Other than that, it did require some major twiddling (and pondering) to my powershell script that creates accounts, but nothing show stopping.

Re: 25 years too late

I've been using a soft "g" for it since the early 90's. I remember reading somewhere in the docs for CompuShow (a popular DOS image viewer back in the day...) that it was pronounced with a soft "g", so that's what I've stuck to. I always assumed those using a hard "g" were newbies.

See...

this is what happens when a normal human eats AManFromMars' mushrooms. They start spurting gibberish.

Luckily, I think it wears off in a day or two.

Re: Minor correction to quote...

"I don't think there'll be a Blackberry anymore," said Heins

There, fixed your fix to my fix.

Re: Zenith Minisport

I still have and use an old Zenith Z-Noteflex. I've had the thing for around 15 years, and it was used when I got it.

The battery is toast, but the hard drive and screen are still working. I installed Linux on it in 2000, don't even remember which distro. I keep it around because it has a serial port so it's useful when I need to go into wiring closets to connect directly to switches. Hard to find affordable, modern laptops with a serial port, and I'm forever losing USB-Serial adapters. So the Zenith stays in my office.

Re: Azure has 4+ trillion objects...

Ah, I forgot about that. Yes, that could definitely explain the big number for Azure.

Re: quantum state or a Zen state?

True. And likewise, no reason it can't be neither at the same time.

Re: Who watches those watching everything?

"it will require extreme cold, a lot of energy, a dedicated staff of highly specialized operators and a building or two"

So, pretty much like computers in the 40's and 50's... at least that's how it looks on my Google Nexus 7.

Re: Crisp

But is "both understanding it and not understanding it" a quantum state or a Zen state?

Clean your soup bowl!

Re: ... Now I'm worried.

But, it might go the other way and we'd have Flying Tigers that don't need aviation fuel.

Re: @Ken Darling - Vista Part II...?

To some of us, 2000 remains the best GUI Microsoft ever produced. In fact, I dare say if I could run the Win2k versions of the Start Menu, Explorer, Control Panel, and MMC on Server 2012, I'd be a happy admin and 98% of my bitching about Server 2012 would cease immediately...

Re: Fastest Trip

"Having 2 identical engines would be a waste of resources."

But it would provide redundancy in case one engine experienced a mechanical failure.

Re: Quick - use the second amendment....

Probably not. A nuke warhead is a weapon, too, but I have been denied the right to put one in my back yard. DAMN! Even us gun-toting Merkins only get to tote pea-shooters. The big, fun stuff is still reserved for Uncle Sam. :(

Re: Lipstick on a pig...

The trick to 2012 is learning which control panel apps you need and then make shortcuts on the desktop to the .CPL files. That'll make it almost bearable (as well as shortcuts to needed .MSC files). For instance, to get to the screen that lists your network connections, make a shortcut that runs

control.exe ncpa.cpl

And to get "My Computer" functionality back, add a shortcut that runs

explorer.exe ""

the two double quotes start it where it shows all of your drives.

And if you don't like the ribbon interface in Notepad/Wordpad/MSPaint, you can copy the EXE's from a 2003 server and they'll run fine under 2012 and give you the good old menu trees back.

And learn to reboot by running "shutdown -r -t 0" and shutdown with "shutdown -s -t 0" (you may also use forward slashes instead of dashes, but as a Linux admin, the dashes are more natural to me)

I haven't yet found a way to change colors for things like Active Title Bar, Inactive Title Bar, etc. Yeah, I know that's niggling, but in the MOST EXPENSIVE and NEWEST version of Windows, why can't I change the color of the fucking title bars? It's all down to that horrible aero-lite interface that 2012 uses, and I think it requries editing the aero-lite resource files, but that's too much of a PITA compared to the old days when we had easy access via the Desktop Settings control panel.

I've spent the past month investigating how to make 2012 usable, as we are planning to migrate away from Novell this summer an go to Windows. It's sad, as Netware has worked so well for the past 16 years, but times move on and I don't really care much for OES2/3/whatever.

Re: Think I'll wait for Windows 9

I agree with hahnchen, the mouse does NOT work in Windows 8. Here's the proof - I insert a CD, and get a pop-up on the screen that says

"DVD Drive (D:) OFFICE11

Tap to choose what happens with this disc"

So I tap the screen with my mouse, but get no response. Nothing. Tap again. Still nothing. Tap twice quickly, but no difference. It's not until I CLICK that I get a response. Tapping does not work, so at least part of the mouse interface for Windows 8 DOES NOT WORK WHEN YOU DO EXACTLY WHAT THE FUCKING SCREEN TELLS YOU TO DO.

yep

Educational pricing was always cheaper, at least for MS software as well as Novell software. In higher-ed, eh, we're not afraid of *NIX, so MS knows they have to cut deep or we'll make everyone use VT-220 terminals again. ;)

And I seem to recall there was a large price increase in MS-SQL late last year, even for EDU. Not sure what the reason was, other than MS needed more money. Luckily, I haven't needed 2012 yet, as 2008 is still doing what we need.

Re: More proof...

You forgot to mention that businesses generally skipped Vista, in spite of Microsoft's claims that it was the bestest operating system they had ever produced (until they came out with Windows 7, of course). I think what you are actually seeing is a lot of cheerleading by Microsoft to try to drum up enthusiasm to their rather boring Operating System, when most regular Joe's couldn't give two shits about the Operating System, and businesses passing on operating systems that don't have any "gotta have it" features. Windows 8 doesn't seem to have any "gotta have it" features, at least not from what I've seen so far. In fact, it is a strange, alien, and possibly even hostile environment compared to the Windows versions we've had to put up with since 1995, so it's little wonder that business are voting with their feet by digging in their heels and sticking with XP or Win 7.

Re: XP is DEAD

I'm trying to think of when the last time was that Microsoft helped me "out of a hole" in regards to one of their OSes.

Nope, can't think of one. No, wait, I think back in '93 I had an issue with Windows 3.1 and called and they did help me out. Back when their telephone tech support was still free because they were still a hungry company. They're all fat and well-fed now.

Although I could be wrong, maybe the problem was in VB 3, not Windows. It sucks getting old...

Re: Snake

Funny, I think IBM felt the same way towards microcomputers/PCs and Microsoft back in the 70's. There was no financial software for those toy computers back in 1974, no COBOL., no reason to worry at all. IBM's mainframe business was HERE TO STAY and to think otherwise made "absolutely no sense for the thousands upon thousands of companies currently dependent upon customized industry solutions to switch to a non-supported OS and then use an emulator or code interpreter just to run a program that can be run natively on the original OS, with willing tech support (by the developer or the OS manufacturer, MS) to boot.".

It's a cycle, see. At some point, MS will fall and a new giant will emerge. Might be Google, might be Apple, might be RedHat, might be some little company that hasn't even been incorporated yet.

Re: Does Excel count? :o)

Here's even better - we run Groupwise here, and users are frequently wanting mailing lists created for one thing or another. I've tried in past times to teach users how to create their own Groupwise NAB files, but for most, it's waaay too much techno-magic-mumb0-jumbo. So now I tell them if they'll send me a list of the email addresses they want in the list, I'll create a file that they can import. So Excel gets primary duty to tweak the files they send, then Notepad gets cleanup duty of replacing commas with "," (quote comma quote) and a few other things, since Groupwise requires each field to be quoted.

I've thought about trying to do it in Powershell, but don't know if it would really save that much time. Excel + Notepad gets the job done in < 5 minutes for all but the most ridiculously long lists.

re: Notepad

So much Notepad hatred. Why? It's a very simple little text editor that does rudimentary things. It's not great, not snazzy, not bloated, not full of colored text. It's just simple, quick, and easy. And it's already on every single Windows server in the server room. True, it is dreadfully slow and search-and-replace on large files compared to NotePad++ or Cpad or pretty much anything that isn't relying on the default capabilities of a textbox. But it's always there and it pretty much always works the same way every time.

Re: A nitpick

Zawinski's Observation, from the Unix Hater's Handbook (http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf), down on page 168 (page 206 according to PDF Viewer):

Now at this point I should have remembered that profound truism:

“Some people, when confronted with a Unix problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use sed.’

Now they have two problems.”

There may be other versions, but strangely, I just read that one last week, which is why it was fresh in my brain.

Re: Dragons Lair

Beat me to it. I still remember reading the articles about how awesome Dragon's Lair was, and waiting months for the local arcade to get one. The graphics were way cool for the time, but I can't recall I was ever very good at the game itself. And, iirc, it was a 4-quarters game in the arcades around here, so playing was pricey. One game of Dragon's Lair where I was sure to die quickly, or four games of Galaxian? Wasn't too hard to make that choice. But when it first came out, DL was visually amazing.

Re: Balls!

I'd wager that if you get to a habitable planet, you can name it whatever you like as you'll be far beyond the remit of the InterNATIONAL Astronomical Union. Those bloody planet-killers...

Re: Quite frankly.....

@kb - so what you are saying is that in spite of the millions and millions of legitimate licenses that M$ sells in a year, those of us in IT would have to suffer thru SecureBoot because M$ is worried about a few percent being pirated? Fuck that. The whole PC industry shouldn't be borked just because M$ is losing a few percent of sales. We've already had to bend over and kiss our own asses for years to keep M$ happy. If M$ wants to make sure all copies of their OS are legit they should port it to the IBM mainframe and drop support for PCs, then see how long they maintain market dominance. The PC world should stay open and usable. Not all of us are total M$ whores, some of us have real work to do on these toy computers.

Re: CentOS for me

I'm not a purist, but I don't have X on my CenOS servers. Two primary reasons for that:

1. Takes up a lot of space (yeah, I know, disks are huge now) and adds unnecessary cluttering services

2. Keeps me from using a production server as a "one-off" desktop

3. Only a LAMER runs a GUI on a server.

Heh, ok, #3 is old-fashioned troll bait.

But, I do run X on my SLES boxes, since they are eDirectory servers and in a worst-case scenario, I COULD take some pills and run ConsoleOne directly on the server if I needed to. In fact, IIRC, it's a bit of a PITA to get the SLES boxes to NOT run a gui. DAMN YOU NOVELL!!!!

Re: Step 1 for Windows 2012 deployment:

I think you missed my humor...

Besides which, there is no button marked "Desktop". There is a Recycle bin, and quick-launch icons for Server Manager, Powershell, and WIndows Explorer. Anything further requires divining just which spot to hover my mouse over, because a Start button (like we've had for 18 years now) is just too god-damned ugly or difficult for Microsoft to include anymore. So we're supposed to pretend our 16-core HP DL380G8 is a fucking 10" tablet. The thing weighs 70+ pounds, it's NOT a fucking tablet, it is a server. But not in Microsoft-land. No, in Microsoft-land, it's the same as every other piece of equipment - tablet, PC, Server, phone. Users have apparently fallen to such a low level of intelligence (even the certified professionals) that they can't be bothered with complicated things like nested menus or on-screen visual cues as to where such menus might be found, Instead these poor, dumb bastards are given a mostly blank screen where they have to ferret out the magic spots to hover, or breakdown and finally learn to use the Windows key. And if they never figure out where these magic spots are, well, hey, at least they can't break anything.

Sorry I'm venting, but I'm going to spend the next 5-6 years of my life adminning the system I'm building now, and I fucking HATE the Windows 8/2012 interface.