Posts by mikus 137 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jan 2008
Windows doesn't always suck because it's buggy and needs patching like XP certainly did, it sucks because it is nothing more than a spyware and adverting delivery platform for microsoft now, people just also happen to still try to use it as a desktop OS unknowingly. The bloat is simply astounding when using an unmolested home version of the OS packed with ads and games down to the desktop, taskbar, and menus. Even notepad shows you a persistent ad for Copilot now, because what the hell else would you do with AI in a notepad?
I've been using claude code lately, and it's honestly a changing experience for me, so I get why agents could be useful built into the desktop, but it's not useful when you can't trust the tool, and you simply cannot trust Microsoft for anything privacy related anymore.
At this point they've mostly enslaved an entire generation or two of the world population, knowing only Windows for a PC experience, trained on it in schools from early on through college, and having watched it for 25 years as a linux/unix user it genuinely disgusts me. It's like letting the drug dealer set up shop in your schools with your children, first hit is always free you know.
Now you'll take this AI slop we give you and damn well like paying for it too.
I've been tinkering with server 2025 for a customer, and refreshingly most is dark mode ala other windoze, until you hit the circa 1998 admin MMC's that still dominate any real Active Directory or windoze service administration use at all.
Almost microsoft, almost. Fix the admin tools, please!
Everyone forgets when Godaddy went down in 2012, much of the internet stopped working. Certainly not because they hosted most of it, but because most used them as a DNS registrar. That day a config glitch sent them spiraling down to take down their entire DNS anycast network globally, causing glue records for some 70M domains to stop working at all. It took a good 12 hours to fix I think with network vendors involved.
Much the same, too many eggs in one basket, and AWS has very large baskets.
He's a nice, stable fellow, what could go wrong? Why go with a lesser evil when Larry is willing and available?
It'll be nice and secure like Oracle products with their 500 security patches at a time they regularly release.
I guess we ought to be glad it wasn't merged into Truth Social.
I assume they eventually realized they can't find parts on ebay for ancient dialup dsx hardware anymore, and it was simply time to cut losses.
I've not looked, but curious if any vendors still make modern wholesale dial bank hardware, and if not, what AOL was actually still using...
> This writer recently had to configure a new Surface device and was struck by the sheer volume of nagging and pleading within the operating system to stick with Edge rather than opt for an alternative.
As a full-time Linux user for 20 years, I just went through the same thing, a friend having given me an old Surface to play with fresh win11, and like everyone else, the only thing I use Edge for is downloading librewolf, finding that it literally fought me! First, trying to click a link through bing would refuse to take me there, and just hang mysteriously in the redirection process like some technical glitch. Second, it would refuse to download as "suspicious", and I had to click through a bunch of windows telling it to bypass and indeed download, then keep the file. Third, trying to set it then as a default browser they hide it in system settings now and force you to click every option manually to change to use another browser.
Any normal user would get scared and stop, just giving up and use Edge, which is exactly what they want. Absolutely disgusting tactics, Microsoft is just so sleazy about it now, they should get taken down a few notches. It's a shame our governments are run by luddites or worse.
I have to assume those quick to move toward abandoning X11 for Wayland do NOT use Nvidia, as Nvidia drivers have been mostly rubbish for any Linux Wayland desktops until quite recently, and then still iffy at that. With the dominance of Nvidia in the GPU market share, x11 won't die until Nvidia finally makes drivers work right for it. Because Nvidia has already said there is no major priority for them to support all the graphics features needed for Wayland, it will remain a second-class citizen, thus any distro and desktop that moves away from X11 is directly tying their success to Nvidia to fix their drivers long-term.
As a KDE user, it's made Wayland mostly unusable until the latest beta 570 drivers for me, to the point I'm look at my next system being AMD. Trying one of the latest KDE Plasma desktops, kernels, and drivers with Wayland got me at least 6 crashes in 24 hours, but otherwise rock solid on x11. Have fun Gnome team.
I'd mostly given up on using gpt4 for doing complex development as it's forgetful and annoyingly so. Using o1 was refreshingly intelligent and usable, until it's not. I don't want to talk to the simpleton version that forgets every few sentences, I'd rather have the smart one.
Oh, that's $200 dollars, a month... I'll get back to you on that.
What happens when you take the most technologically disinclined part of your business and clash directly with complex software, technology, and clueless consulting/outsourcing? Miserable failure, always.
Now add Oracle being an unmitigated disaster to work with as a company and a solution.
"There is no place for fraudsters and crooks scheming to manipulate the government bidding process for personal gain."
Too bad everyone in government does exactly that eventually, usually equally for good or bad. IT procurement systems are so dysfunctional either way they end up having to game the system to get anything done, it's just down to the nature of the managers whether they use them for good or bad.
It was probably the history of ANYONE ever across time that has ever been delinquent with comcast that they sold the bill to those guys to collect on.
What do bill collectors know about IT security? The owner's kid runs the bill payment website from his house. They're akin to used car salesmen and 20x worse for the nature of doing bill collections.
If microsoft did this, they'd be up for regulatory action against them, but since *only* apple, it is glossed over. This is exactly what Microsoft had their little private security conference to discuss how to better windoze security, but not fsck over all the vendor - apple simply didn't care to fsck them over.
Having worked for dozens of companies consulting over the years, I can say from experience orgs with Teams, it's always an unhappy place that people only use when necessary, and act like big brother is always watching. Slack orgs actually like to communicate and do so freely, spawning non-work interest chat for mutual hobbies, and in general is a much friendlier experience.
Not to mention if you use Teams on anything NOT windows, the experience is downright miserable as anything Microsoft on non-Microsoft devices.
I actually quit a job once because they moved to Teams, or at the time OCS, as it simply didn't work with Linux which I use, so it hobbled my ability to work effectively there.
Microsoft is in a rock and hard place here, either they boot out of the kernel 3rd parties and anger every AV vendor, again, not to mention regulators that force them to allow compatibility, or they are forced to create a new way to allow visibility for these products to work, and anger every AV vendor to re-engineer their software and probably reduce effectiveness.
The one product that won't be impacted is Microsoft's own product Defender for sure, and who will be able to compete with native solutions afterwards?
Either way this is going to probably up-end the "make microsoft secure again" party and cause riots of everyone vs Microsoft, so of course they didn't want publicity for the sh*t show.
The reasons all AV software is so fragile is that to protect Windows as a perpetually insecure operating system with new exploits found weekly, and they can only protect so closely to the OS kernel that runs the entire thing before they end up destabilizing it accidentally as we saw. Even when they orgs use endpoint security on Windows, it's still not a guarantee to protect the OS and users. Almost every security software has had their Windows enterprise-breaking moment they've done the same prior, only now with the market dominance of Crowdstrike among enterprises, it was far more pronounced.
At this point enough windows source code has leaked over the years or employees leaving after having been exposed to it, and with Microsoft being hamstrung by billions of lines of legacy code across 3 decades no one even remembers now, it is no wonder how easily found new zero-day exploits are still today.
If you want secure computing, you should start with pretty much anything BUT Windows. You can only blame yourself otherwise.
Considering it took Israeli Cellbrite, the worlds favorite mobile malware vendor for government agencies, 40 minutes to unlock the Trump assassin's Samsung phone for the Secret Service, Samsung is obviously not paying the right people enough where other more nefarious suitors are more than willing.
Seems only people still using skype are largely international, and it's probably more hassle than worth to try to keep up with locally relevant advertisements, particularly with EU cracking down on that whole exploitation of human rights thing. Besides, if you're using skype, you're using windows, so they'll just feed you the ad to your desktop anyways!
It's funny a company like Broadcom can be so single-handedly polarizing. They're behemoths that drive probably 70% or higher of the Ethernet switching world, but they're just so terrible with anything software, much like Cisco was/is. They bough bad software companies and made them worse with CA and Symantec, the dregs of the enterprise industry at that point in their lives, but buying VMware everyone knew it would be bad - and is!
VMware is used by enterprise shops with more money and bad admins than management brainpower, usually windows shops that are too scared of linux to use it natively, and Broadcom is betting that those customers are so bad they'll take a good reaming to not complain too much, only they are now. What are windows monkeys to do, actually have to use HyperV finally?!
If Hock Tan throws a dog a bone, he doesn't want to know if it tastes good or not.
For 25 years, Microsoft pushed the most commonly abused malware engine as Internet Explorer, at its core ActiveX as part of their own dotnet programming languages, ever to be unleashed on the populace, and only then begrudgingly admit to defeat in killing it off having found better adware and tracking in Google's Chrome engine now. Exchange servers are still a constant liability people misuse and abuse, and Active Directory every time remains the common denominator at the heart of most infections due to it's ubiquitous presence in 99% of enterprises today.
If people haven't learned by now to mistrust Microsoft products, they impose their own blissful ignorance.
Salesforce is like the lesser evil of that world that they with Oracle and SAP all divvy up. Even Slack's acquisition can't make them great again as a cool kid, as most of the user base that would use SF just uses Microsoft Teams by default, and people are already over the hype of AI replacing humans to improve their bottom line.
When I met my SO 10 years ago, she used an old iphone, and said it was telling her it was full, even though she had deleted everything. I told her it probably was making shadow copies of everything, and it was. After some googling, I found that the only way to delete them was funny enough to use linux to connect over usb (windows drivers disallowed something needed), and use a special tool built to access and delete files for that exact reason. This fixed her problem, but she asked what the heck, and I told her it's so the government and hackers could make sure to get a copy of her naked pics in perpetuity. She changed to Android shortly after that.
Apple is a cult, you're either in, or you're not.
He's building his secret villain/zombie-survival lair underground, he shouldn't hear the dogs anyways. Bad as Zuck buying up his Hawaii survival layer and displacing all the natives like a good colonization strategy.
What is surprising is that people are only now realizing just how bad Microsoft really is.
Just look at the history of Internet Explorer, where Microsoft crammed it down everyone's throat, and then left it perpetually open to exploit to hackers for it's entire lifecycle via ActiveX, their own programming framework pushed to businesses to use heavily. It wasn't until literally the rest of the world moved on to Chrome or Firefox (after choking out Netscape) that they eventually stopped, but now has the same thing via Edge, their Chrome-based but Microsoft-tainted clone in an attempt to stay relevant.
Exchange server, their at one-time almost ubiquitous business email server solution as well has been under perpetual attack and exploit for it's entire lifecycle, so much so their "solution" was to move everyone to Office365 email services to finally get them to stop people buying it and kill off the product. Still many organizations run Exchange, generally poorly, and particularly now suffer constant exploit by nation-state actors.
Thanks for the lulz Microsoft, jokes on your customers.
Their customers will be the ones to pay for their own stupidity and laziness, not them. They obviously learned nothing after the first, paid the ransom like a fine, and went back to operating poorly. Now they got got again.
Hopefully the CIO and CISO were at least fired as part of this.
This is Microsoft's way of trying to remind people they still make a hypervisor, same way they beg you not to download Chrome when it's the only thing you use IE/Edge for. Most well-heeled Microsoft-y admins pay VMWare today for *good* virtualization, but with Broadcom pissing on everyone now, they need another easy button since being allergic to Linux usually. Anyone that isn't afraid of Linux will just use KVM or KVM-based solutions.
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