Posts by buckyball

'Windows 10 destroyed our data!' Microsoft hauled into US court

Got Backups?

(Apologies to the US dairy industry's funny Got Milk? campaign.)

My first experience losing data on a PC was in 1983 on a Franklin Ace 1200 (Apple ][ clone). Since that time, I have embraced the aphorism:

"There are two kinds of computer users; those who have lost data, and those who are about to."

Microsoft's reprehensible behavior aside, one of the problems that has always dogged personal computing is the unspoken reality of owning a personal computer: you are now a System Administrator. And as a sysadmin, YOU and YOU ALONE are responsible for the protection of your data.

The fact that MS have done a very poor job of providing tools with the base OS to perform backups (with a capability to actually restore them at need) is perhaps the real crime here.

Contrast this with the *many* other OS's that existed over the intervening years that MS have offered products which provide backup tools with the OS; indeed said products would have been unsaleable in their target markets absent such a capability.

Russia MP's son found guilty after stealing 2.9 million US credit cards

So smart?

So if this guy is clever enough to engineer this large-scale operation, why did he not encrypt the offending data on his laptop? #pwned-all #now-boned

Microsoft now awfully pushy with Windows 10 on Win 7, 8 PCs – Reg readers hit back

Lodged complaint to US Federal Trade Commision

I fixed(?) the problem on my machine. it only required a live chicken, rum, cigar....

Then I went to http://www.ftc.gov and lodged a formal complaint. I'm sure to hear from them soon... At least I feel a little better now.

Glad once again that I have Windows confined to a VirtualBox guest on my Linux Mint 17.2 setup. VirtualBox lets me create snapshots so I can roll back in case this happens, yet again.

This whole situation reminds me of a poster or t-shirt I saw years ago at a Linux con that said

"In a world without walls, who needs Windows?"

Got Linux?

http://linuxmint.com | http://distrowatch.org ==>> for myriad other choices

Thousands of 'directly hackable' hospital devices exposed online

Medical devices

Are hard to develop and have steep hurdles to overcome in terms of safety and compliance testing before they can flog^h^h^h^h market them. Changes must likewise be scrutinized before release.

I agree with earlier poster that questions the suitability of WinX for the task.

Don't want to upgrade to Windows 10? You'll download it WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT

The Windows Free Zone

Berekeley, CA is a "Nuclear Free Zone". My house is primarily a Windows Free Zone. My main machine maintains a bare-bones Win7 install in Virtualbox for work apps and my son's machine dual-boots Win7 and Linux Mint. Otherwise, all systems are Pure Linux (TM).

All Linux installs are Linux Mint 17.2 (Cinnamon Edition 64-bit).

http://linuxmint.com/

I should point out that the recent (entirely voluntary) upgrade from 17.1 to 17.2 was a single mouse click and single reboot, taking less than 30 minutes to complete. Now THAT's how an upgrade should be!

The last virus you'll ever run

For fun, a former colleague and I came up with the idea of a "last virus" which silently carves out space on your drive, installs Linux there, installs a window manager which looks like Windows and when complete, reboots into "Winux". Finally, it reclaims the space formerly used by Windows and adds it to the storage pool.

We had a lot of fun theorizing how it might be made to work and got a lot of laughs (some of them evil) along the way.

Any takers? (Bwahahahaha)

Boffins: Spooky, spinning SPACE PEANUT butters up Earth with close flyby

Not the Goa'uld then...

Whew, thought this was launched by one of the Goa'uld system lords. Can sleep ok now.

The Lazarus Effect: Saved by Linux and Cash Converters

Diversity is good

A few random thoughts after the article and comments:

The definitive bazaar for browsing Linux distros: http://distrowatch.com

IDIC - Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations (Star Trek) seems to apply to Linux as well.

Oracle VirtualBox is your friend when browsing the bazaar, since an ISO can be assigned as a boot device without needing to burn to actual media. Zippy boot times...

Booting (natively) from DVD is not necessarily evil, what with all of the aggressively portable malware out there. Infecting a USB stick is easy. Write-once media, less so, though not impossible. (I really wish a physical write-protect switch was available on flash drives. I had one long ago so equipped.)

And let is not forget to say "THANKS!" to all of the hard-working and generally altruistic members of the FOSS community who make this wonderful kit.

Ransomware attack hits Synology's NAS boxen

Intel FDIV bug

Reminds of how Intel handled that issue.

- Timely reporting

- Ongoing progress disseminated widely.

- Offered replacement for affected parts.

Still used as textbook example of how to handle product defect.

IT bods: Windows XP, we WON'T leave you. Migrate? Chuh! As if...

Whither Windows?

As a previous poster said, I don't want a flame war, but seriously - if you are going to do an upgrade anyway...

Linux + Virtualbox + Wine offers a variety of approaches to corralling the Windows beast.

A user running WinXX in a full-screen VM won't care that Linux is under the table. Linux can be configured very "lean" in it's use of resources, can be netbooted, etc.

Just saying.