Now, when can I get Powershell integration into bash?
Now that's just evil! Share and Enjoy!
Posts by Chika
1774 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Oct 2007
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Bash on Windows. Repeat, Microsoft demos Bash on Windows
Mud sticks: Microsoft, Windows 10 and reputational damage
Tuesday 29th March 2016 13:47 GMT
It is Microsoft attempting FUD to claim that "only Windows 10" will run on those CPUs.
I suspect that the actuality is more about Microsoft making sure that the new features are only supported by the new system, not that the older systems cannot be made to support them. It's hardly the first time that they've done something like that.
FUD becomes unavoidable and, in some cases, necessary in the eyes of Microsoft and its fanboys. What they seem to have belatedly realised by holding back on this measure for another year is that if this action further pulls sales down so that other companies stop trusting them and may possibly even consider alternatives, they could suffer the same slippery slope effect that Nokia suffered in the mobile phone industry. It doesn't happen overnight but once it starts it is very difficult to stop.
So the balance has to be where to start choking off support without triggering this effect. Of course the ideal way to do this is as I mentioned before which would be to pull back and admit that the whole fiasco has done them as much harm as Windows Vista or Me did, let the whole situation die down then come back with something that is more likely to attract positive attention.
Of course the problem there is that they have left it a bit late unless they do to W7 what they did to WXP and extend the end-of-life. Doubt that will occur except as a last resort.
Saturday 26th March 2016 17:24 GMT
Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply
People don't like change, but no change is no progress.
And it's thoughtless comments like this that drive changes for their own sake. Yes, change can be a good thing if that change has visible benefits but a change for its own sake rarely benefits anyone.
If you look at the changes that happened between XP and Vista, Vista and W7, W7 and W8.x and W8.x to W10, you can see examples of where a change has occurred that actually benefitted users and you can also see changes that benefitted manufacturers. Then you see changes that benefitted nobody. XP wasn't perfect when it was first released and users of W2K and W98 were happy enough to stay where they were though WMe users couldn't wait to jump ship. Once XP was stabilised a bit, the shift happened naturally enough.
The biggest reason, however, why W10 is having such a bad time, data slurp and other such bothers aside, is that it hasn't gotten past the early XP bit and unlike XP there isn't a group that is in such a desperate hurry to shift from earlier versions. W7 is stable, familiar and operable and, like W2K years before, it has plenty of life left in it despite Microsoft's increasingly bullying attitude toward it. Actually, if anything, Microsoft's current attitude could do more harm to the industry than good with people with reasonably recent machines sticking with W7 until the hardware goes bad. Then, of course, should Microsoft continue with this attitude, alternatives to W10 may await the Redmond weary user.
The only real way of dealing with this, as far as I can see, is for Microsoft to back off, fix their product, remove the slurp, restore a reasonable update client, stop pressuring the W7 and W8.x users and lie low for a couple of years until the current bad press has died down.
Certainly continuing the nagware, sending the shills and fanboys out to publish their bull and pressuring the users to move off older systems by employing industry bullying tactics and making changes for change's sake will only further decrease their standing.
Friday 25th March 2016 20:55 GMT
Re: Don't blame users for the UI
NO WAY was Microsoft listening to *CUSTOMERS* when they did all that. NO WAY!
And here's the point. Of the totality of the Insiders used in this programme, how many of these were ordinary users? You know the type - home users that obediently download every update then bitterly complain when their system stops working. The type who run their systems by default in administrator because they have no idea how to change that.
The very people who are getting hit the hardest by the current W10 enforced rollout because they don't have any idea that a choice exists.
Friday 25th March 2016 20:48 GMT
Re: Don't blame users for the UI
when did you train people going from XP to 7 ?
There were sufficiently few changes to the UI that required a large amount of retraining in the general workplace when shifting between systems prior to Windows 8. Every version from W95 up to W7 was an evolution, not a paradigm shift and the changes that did occur were more of a problem for support than for users. Even on the support side things weren't that bad.
The only big problems tended to be where applications broke because of underlying changes made by Microsoft, and even there it was often something that could be worked around except on a few occasions where the software itself was heavily flawed (so-called "dirty coding" has always been a problem and not just in the world of Microsoft).
So training was quite often trivial as long as things weren't mucked about with too much. In my experience of XP to W7 rollouts, very few people really noticed much difference in what they were doing. W8 and W10 broke all that.
Microsoft to add a touch of Chrome to Edge
Monday 21st March 2016 21:07 GMT
In most cases I end up disabling Edge and setting IE as default, unless the user prefers Chrome
But here's the rub. Microsoft released Windows 10 and Edge in an incomplete state, Edge being bolstered by IE11 because they knew ahead of time that releasing Edge on its own, despite any speed or rendering advantage it might have had over IE11, was never going to work - it would actually provide as big a reason as any for home users in particular to stay away from the browser and, by extension, the whole system release. It was this that allowed Chrome and Firefox to gain an increased foothold in an area where Microsoft were already losing ground.
My thought is that putting the ability to import Chrome extensions is either a misguided attempt to swallow Chrome whole or, more likely, a tacit admission that Microsoft aren't really up to adding their own addon subsystem or providing the kind of services that Chrome, Firefox or Opera provide and have provided for a considerable time.
Hands on with the BBC's Micro:Bit computer. You know, for kids
Tuesday 22nd March 2016 15:03 GMT
Goes very well with the drag and drop school of IT management, where developers, regardless of skill are treated as fungible typing monkeys.
Today's musical interlude courtesy of the same person that provided the wrap-up for Portal, Jonathan Coulton. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA
Tuesday 22nd March 2016 15:00 GMT
Re: Sugar Free Raspberry Pi
I know we have a problem with obesity in kids, but why do we have to give them reduced sugar Raspberry Pi's?
Eh? I thought the low fat RasPi was the Zero!
Which is an interesting thought. Had the Micro:Bit come out before the Zero, would the Zero be as popular as it is? Could the imposition of a certain Merkan organisation and its propaganda frighten folk off from adopting a Micro:Bit, especially if it means that you need a PC to run it?
I'd be more likely to refer to this as a low fat Arduino than any sort of RasPi...
Tuesday 22nd March 2016 14:56 GMT
Re: The same memory as the BBC Micro Model A of 15 years ago...
Everything else (Econet, Disc, Tube, et al) were optional extras that required soldering.
To an extent. Certainly true if you were upgrading from A to B, though if you got a model B from new it would often have most of the soldering already done with just the various sockets needing population. ISTR that the speech synthesis bit was usually left out though.
Tuesday 22nd March 2016 14:51 GMT
Re: Old photo caption
I'm glad somebody mentioned this. You can recognise a BBC Micro very easily because of the "ashtray" hole (or overlaid gap or, if you fitted one, a ZIF socket) on the left of the keyboard which the Atom never had.
As for being the first "kids" computer, as I recall, the BBC Micro was part of a literacy project that was aimed not just at children but a general audience. It only really became a large part of the childrens' market when the government of the day put in a project to partially fund schools buying computers for the classroom as long as they were British which led to 75% (roughly) of schools buying BBC Model Bs (mainly), the rest tending to go for Sinclair Spectrums. Even taking that into account, the Beeb was never the biggest seller for kids outside schools, not even in its Electron form.
I didn't get one until I was well into my A level days. I still have it, too! ;)
Labour will create FUD and then abstain on UK Snoopers' Charter vote
Sunday 20th March 2016 10:59 GMT
Re: Abstention DOESN'T work!
Not voting is NOT voting NO!
It isn't, no. But it is a way of dodging the issue.
As I said before, the heart of the matter is that Labour actually support the idea (consider that not all snooping law was Tory built) but aren't up to the task of taking the fallout from public criticism.
They are trying to have their cake and eat it too since they can count on the Tories, naturally, to vote for the bill without too much meaningful opposition but can later insist that they didn't support the bill should something go wrong.
In other words, they are not providing a meaningful opposition. MPs and other politicians get riled up when ordinary citizens withhold their votes because they can't trust any standing candidate yet wonder why the public then view actions like this one with disdain. Like I said; "do as I say, not as I do."
Tuesday 15th March 2016 10:18 GMT
It's so blatantly obvious that the current government and its opposition want the Snoopers' Charter to succeed. Yes, a dose of FUD is likely but it is more likely that Labour will do nothing to stop the bill because it is in favour of it.
Consider the American model. Both sides were "horrified" to find that the NSA were snooping and slurping but neither has made any realistic attempt to stop it. To this day they are more interested in catching Snowdon and prosecuting him for "treason" or whatever than tightening up on data privacy.
That's the politician's mindset. The UK is no different in that respect, despite the surface noise MPs make about privacy. It's all "do as I say, not as I do" with them - the whole expenses row should have taught people that much if nothing else.
Microsoft will rest its jackboot on Windows 7, 8.1's throat on new Intel CPUs in 2018 – not 2017
Sunday 20th March 2016 10:49 GMT
So come July when the free upgrade deal for Win 10 expires, is the MS malware going to stop downloading gigs of install files to my laptop?
Possibly. Possibly not. I suppose it really depends on how well the nagware and the gigadump has taken. You may see a slight variation in that it may start nagging you to buy a copy, something like they did with WGA on Windows XP if you had a naughty install.
I expect that the next stage would be the imposition of subscription charges, though exactly how, when and how much is open to speculation.
Get lost, Windows 10 and Phone fans: No maps HERE on Microsoft's OS
Wednesday 16th March 2016 09:55 GMT
Re: Burning platform
As an office system, LibreOffice has pretty much everything there to walk all over anything that Microsoft Office can do. No ribbons either.
Except that it has no email client. If they could develop an email client that could do a better job than Outlook, I suspect that they'd clean up!
Hey Windows 10, weren't you supposed to help PC sales?
Tuesday 15th March 2016 10:42 GMT
Re: give WHAT a rest?
only when Microsoft and others *FINALLY* grow a brain, get a clue, and release an OS that reverses this ridiculous trend.
It won't happen. Historically, Microsoft only "get a clue" after the disaster has already happened. It was years after the event that they apologised for WME and I've yet to hear a reasonable apology for Vista, let alone W8.x. Microsoft never likes to admit their mistakes, preferring instead for them to fade away on their own, like Zune or Bob.
The only difference here is that Windows is a core business. It's quite obvious that it's a business that could end up doing the same thing as Novell Netware so they want to generate new business. That would be fine if they hadn't fired so many of their talented staff and pushed so hard on the whole "let's take over the touch screen universe because we're Microsoft" thing. They were hard up enough for originality back in the days when W7 was being put together but at least we ended up with a reasonably usable product.
Until then, it'll get the *NEGATIVE* attention it deserves. And MS will continue to try to save their own backsides, naturally. and you can't just let them get away with it. But I don't see MS releasing a 'Windows 11' that un-does the damage. And here we are...
Yes, here we are. However just harping on about it isn't really negative. We know that Microsoft have seriously mishandled the roll out of W10 and have gained a lot of negative press about it.
We know that W10's "free" offer isn't really free, and that users are being used as free beta testing labour.
We know that W10 is a data slurper on a par with such systems as Android despite Microsoft criticising Google publicly for that very thing in past times.
We know that W10, in it's default "recommended" form can seriously damage your data cap balance.
We know all that, and we know that even if you disable all of that as far as possible, it provides nothing better than W8.1 with Classic Shell added, and neither really provides any real discernible improvement over W7 unless you are looking for specifics (or you are one of those rare smartphone or tablet users with W8 on it).
But all of this is just repeating stuff that we have known for much of the time since W10 was released. There's nothing new there, and that's the biggest reason why I get sick of it. I get sick of having to research every single patch my W7 machines are told they should be downloading because Microsoft insist on slipping new nagware and other nasties in (the latest IE11 thing being a good example). I know that some people will be out there downgrading to W10 because they know no better, but who am I to judge them?
In the end, I tend to prefer to let W10 die in the way that Microsoft prefers - a long, slow, painful drift into obscurity. It won't die any other way, and continuing to complain about it just keeps it in the public eye where it certainly doesn't deserve to be. So there you have it.
Monday 14th March 2016 13:54 GMT 
To be honest, it's a subject that I've been getting heartily sick of. We all know where we stand as far as W10 is concerned and articles like this seem a little too much like gloating over Microsoft's failings just as other articles pushing the increasing numbers of installs seem a little too much like Microsoft and its shills either trumpeting their success, trying to keep the naysayers at bay or, at the very least, attempting damage control.
My combination of openSUSE Linux, Windows 7 and a Raspberry Pi running RISC OS will do me just fine, thanks. Now can't we just give it a rest?
Microsoft adds 'non-security updates' to security patches
Google-backed British startup ‘stole our code’, says US marketing firm
Wednesday 9th March 2016 12:17 GMT 
Looking at this small sample of code, I really can't see that they have got much to go on unless they can prove that the source was taken in the first place. Just changing a few variable names isn't proof.
If the desired objective is similar then there is always a possibility that the code will be similar. This could well be a case of a US group getting a little too greedy, looking for slights that didn't actually happen.
Then again...
UN rapporteur: 'Bad example' UK should bin the Snoopers' Charter
Knackered Euro server turns Panasonic smart TVs into dumb TVs
Microsoft wants to lock everyone into its store via universal Windows apps, says game kingpin
Tuesday 8th March 2016 19:15 GMT
Re: Deja Vu
The most galling thing is that it is being force-downloaded even in instances where someone has taken active measures to prevent it.
Ah, but have they taken the right measures?
What I have to worry about on my various W7 boxen of late is the repeated re-release of KB2952664, KB3035583, the various Windows Update Client releases and keeping an eye on what gets released on Patch Tuesday.
Yes, it's a bit of a slog but once it is done it's out of the way for another month and is likely to stop altogether once July is past. I hope.
Yes, it's quite obvious that Microsoft are ignoring the various settings, including the ones that they themselves advised us to use to opt out of this whole mess.
Wonder why?
Saturday 5th March 2016 19:52 GMT
Re: Deja Vu
Yeah, but Windows 8 wasn't force-downloaded onto peoples' computers.
I'm increasingly wondering whether this forcing of Win 10 onto machines was because they knew that it would be a "Win 8 revisited" scenario if they stuck to their normal routine.
Yet again they forget that users will buy a new operating system if they think that it is good. Win 7 proved that much.
Typed in from TDE under Raspbian on my nice new Pi 3! No Win 10 IoT for you!
Alice, Bob and Verity, too. Yeah, everybody's got a story, pal
Blah Blah blah ... I don't care! To hell with your tech marketing bull
Monday 7th March 2016 13:10 GMT
Re: 2 solutions to your gripes.
About DevOps...
DevOps will not necessarily put "Ops" people out of the job. I've worked at places where really skilled engineers have had to follow a 20 page Word document every time a release was needed.
True, but the Devs and the Ops aren't the problem here.
With some amount of work, these could have been changed into a "one command" install. Yes, traditional SysAdmin jobs are on the way out. But it just means you have to keep your existing SysAdmin skills and add some CM, some scripting and git and perhaps a sprinkling of Jenkins. MOST DEVS CAN'T DO THIS. They don't have the Ops Chops. They don't know where to look if an scp job times out for 30 seconds, and will stare at you blankly if you ask them to diagnose.
But as I said, this isn't where the problem is. OK yes, devs don't have the Ops Chops but the ones worth keeping around can usually be reprogrammed with a little effort, just as the better Ops bods can get their hands dirty with CM where necessary.
Yes, you'll need fewer people to do the same thing once you've automated it... but most companies want to do more of the things. And once you've upskilled with the above you'll be worth more anyway.
And this is where the problem is. Not the Ops, not the Devs but the Execs who count the beans, count the heads then swallow the whole DevOps spiel and use it as an excuse to kill off jobs. It's these people that you have to watch for because they are quite happy to put a sharp instrument where you least want it then endulge themselves in an oily grin whilst counting their ill gotten booty. You can "upskill" all you want - these bastards are your real enemy.
Ad-blockers are a Mafia-style 'protection racket' – UK's Minister of Fun
Friday 4th March 2016 11:00 GMT
Finally we get to the meat of the subject. The reason why ad blockers exist is because ads are becoming more intrusive. Just as television is stuffed full of adverts, reminders, bugs, dogs or whatever to the extent that it seems that companies are more interested in showing what is coming up next than what they are showing now, web pages are becoming stuffed full of ads that pop over, pop under, sometimes completely obscure, redirect, get embedded and generally annoy.
When I first came online back in the 90s, the most you might have expected was a simple ad banner. It got in nobody's way, it annoyed few. OK, it might have been animated but it was usually a GIF, not the flat out flash animations we expect today. Even here on El Reg the amount of banners, animations and whatnot got to a point where you might not be able to concentrate on the article in question! Enough people got fed up with this that ad blockers were developed and people used them.
Basically, Whittingdale is talking out of his arse but consider the reason why. He represents the Tory view of "fun" which means that he represents business. Part of that will almost certainly be that part which uses the very advertising that we farties block which hurts their bottom line and in turn hurts him and his ilk. What he needs to do is NOT criticise us folk for using ad blockers and NOT criticise the blockers themselves but investigate WHY people use blockers in the first place.
Advertising is seen as a way of amassing income, and marketing types don't seem to know when to stop, whether it is a simple static ad on a web page, product placement, embedded videos in a stream or Flash overkill. To them it seems that the more you advertise, the more you rake in. What they, and Whittingdale, need to realise is that there are limits to everything. A good, quality ad will do its own job and people will welcome it.
Ofcom should be the BBC's ultimate overlord, UK.gov told
Wednesday 2nd March 2016 15:02 GMT 
1984
Early on the BBC Trust indicated it was ready to intervene and kill off empire-building schemes
So what would that make this then? Ofcom is just another empire building scheme, no different from so many Government QUANGOs. This is just an excuse to build over the Trust which in itself was an attempt to build over the prior BBC setup, all of which was done to try to take away the editorial autonomy of the BBC just as Thatcher and her cronies did with ITV years before.
The BBC isn't squeaky clean, but putting a huge QUANGO like Ofcom in charge of them will change nothing other than make them more accountable to the very people that they need to be independent of.
Safe Harbour v2.0 greenlights six bulk data collection excuses
Even Google is abandoning Google+
Donald Trump promises 'such trouble' for Jeff Bezos and Amazon
Monday 29th February 2016 15:34 GMT
Re: Canadians enjoying the show.
All the while forgetting that the U.S. can just /walk/ into Canada -
Perhaps they could persuade Drumpf to build a wall there at the Canadians' expense.
same reason I don't consider anywhere in Latin America a viable bolthole come the day.
Oh, come on! At that rate, there wouldn't be a safe place anywhere in the world!
Now there's a thought...
Monday 29th February 2016 15:22 GMT
Re: Inherited Wealth #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain
You Brits should probably refrain from comment. You're hopelessly uninformed on this topic.
Oh really? Well I do know of one "Brit" who was pretty spot on about Donald Drumpf. Of course, if your one line of defence against comments that malign Drumpf is to fire off non sequiturs such as "35 year old virgin" and question the knowledge of those of us that comment about possibly the biggest mistake in Merkan politics ever, then perhaps it is us that should be asking you to refrain from comment before you make a bigger fool of yourself than you already have.
And for those with the necessary browser extensions that can be used to beat the inexplicable blocking of the YouTube video of the 22 minutes of hilarity that John Oliver put out on the subject of Donald Drumpf (or you aren't in a country that is being blocked, of course), the link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnpO_RTSNmQ
And remember to #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain
Biting the hand that feeds IT
