Posted on 01/09/2019 4:38:27 PM PST by dayglored
Quality Assurance? We've heard of it
Microsoft has doubled down on efforts to persuade users to migrate to Windows 10 by breaking Windows 7 networking for some.
Windows Server 2008 R2 is also affected.
While the last few monthly updates for the soon-to-be-obsolete OSes featured a known issue affecting an "unknown" number of "problematic configurations" that require manual reinstalls of network drivers, January's monthly update seems to have upped the ante somewhat.
2019's treat has seen some users finding their shares are now inaccessible, with RDP and other connectivity also suffering.
The issue, which affects both the bonzer monthly roll-up (KB4480970) and the more petite Security-only update (KB4480960, which has no known issues according to Microsoft at time of writing), leaves users receiving an INVALID_HANDLE when attempting to kick off a SMB2 connection.
A bit of sleuthing by a contributor posting on Administrator.de has pointed to the problem being related to Microsoft tweaking security settings in the update, with administrators on the host system being affected.
The post by "Andi" at Administrator.de reckoned it was down to "an extension of security".
This is of scant comfort to users who have had to back-out the patch to get connectivity up and running again. After all, there is important stuff in those updates that really needs to be installed.
The Administrator.de contributor suggested a possible solution, requiring a Registry change around Admin credentials.
Users have reported success, but The Reg has been unable to check it out for ourselves, so try it at your own risk. The usual health warnings apply: fiddling with the Registry could leave your system irrevocably borked.
Others have opted to uninstall and await an official fix to be emitted by Microsoft.
We contacted the Windows giant to find out when such a fix might be forthcoming, but have yet to receive a response.
In the meantime, a Reddit thread has popped up with users discussing their own experience of Microsoft's latest quality cockup, with one wag observing: "We are their QA and I think we do a fantastic job of finding problems. Just not pre-release."
Ouch. ®
Thank you for being patient with my persistence my friend. :)
Someday I will share a story with you about a friend of mine who used to work for IBM during the tape drive and 22” hard disk days who was personally involved to co-witness Bill Gates “STEAL” DOS from his own friend who actually wrote it.
His son was part of that click.
The tapes I have old programs and data backed up on are those multitrack cartridges that took quite awhile to do the job, but had multiple times the capacity of the hard drives of the day.
I have heard stories about Bill Gates from acquaintances who were earlyish (late 1980s) employees of Microsoft. Most of them made quite a lot of money because of their association so they didn’t have much bad to say about Mr. Gates or Microsoft. It would seem like your friend and his son were on a different side of this situation.
I have a few of the tape cartridge drives also. Yep they would hold a lot more than hard drives would. :)
George and Neal were in on the ground floor at the beginning. George started off coding in binary for IBM at the beginning and his son Neal apprenticed in under George. They were absolute geniuses and I was fortunate to have them both as family friend mentors when I got into computers. Only learned a fringe of what they had under their belts.
For a long time they were discretely the who’s who back then. They finally retired after their last decent project which was setting up all the computers, monitors, and coding for the Laughlin Nev Edison power plant. Quite a resume they had. But they knew and had clout with everyone in the upcoming computing business from the beginning.
They were quite a bit older than I so I’m not sure they are still around, although I got a very cryptic letter a few weeks ago from someone I didn’t know. But I am pretty sure now it might have been George. Absolute genius but a paranoid nut, someone is always after him. But... He may be right... :)
I have known more than a few characters like that. Creative people who are very intelligent tend to have vivid imaginations. My wife had a photographic memory in her youth. Instead of actually learning she could take a mental picture of whatever written material she was going to be tested on. She also has a great imagination. Her visual memory is still very good.
The problem that can cause these days is that she can take a mental image of something in the house and when we get back she will swear that something is out of place. But really she has just gotten her mental images of the same scene confused. So that makes her feel paranoid.
I learn completely differently. With me it is almost completely conceptual with memorization being fairly difficult unless I use some type of mnemonic system.
I was cursed with the photographic memory myself. Reading comprehension especially like your wife and the testing. Now that I am getting older I am starting to now forget some of it, but all my life I retained everything I had ever read. It really can be a curse sometimes rather than a blessing. There are somethings better off forgotten.
I would never have suspected that this could be a problem until I met my wife. And it is true. I have seen many horrendous scenes and have forgotten most of the details, which is a blessing. My wife has been through a lot of difficulties and she still has vivid memories of most of them.
I did not realize how much differently people's minds work until I had a work study job in college tutoring people with learning disabilities. That too was an eye opening experience.
Much of mine hit the dumpster when I remarried three years ago and my wife moved in with -her- stuff. A lot of my stuff had to go. Man, it was heartbreaking...
But I still have my c.1976 MOS Technology KIM-1, and a tube of spare 2102 1K-bit static RAM chips for it. And my F0RTRAN programming manual from my first engineering programming course in 1970... and a few dozen unpunched 80-column Hollerith cards, because ya never know when you'll run into an 029 Keypunch...
I lied, the Shugarts were 200KB. I got confused because I had two of them so I always thought of my system having 400KB of storage. Oh well.
The hard disk drive HD + ASTRA SYSTEMS
by David Plotkin
The HD + comes preformatted into two 10-megabyte partitions, and can be used within minutes of unpacking. The ST's operating system cannot recognize disk drives larger than 16 megabytes, therefore you're unable to use the whole 20-megabyte drive as a single logical drive. What you do, instead, is split the single physical drive into two logical drives (such as "C" and "D").
The hard drive includes an extra-long cable for connecting the built-in floppy drive, allowing you to place the HD + farther away from your ST than would normally be possible. There's a "floppy in" connection, but no "floppy out" connection, so the floppy drive in the HD + must be the last one in the chain (drive B in a two-drive system).... .
The HD + is solid and built like a tank. The hard drive mechanism is a top-of-the-line Rodime, and the floppy is of high quality as well—Panasonic or Chinon, depending on the vintage. The front panel features an on/off switch, hard drive light and floppy light. The hard drive unit must be turned on to use the floppy, even if you boot up without the hard drive install program (the hard drive won't be available if you do this, however). The unit is relatively quiet for a hard drive, the low hum of the fan being the most notable sound. .
Once you're tried a hard drive, you'll never go back. The increase in speed is astounding.... .
The HD + is relatively expensive, selling for between $850 and $950. https://www.atarimagazines.com/st-log/issue21/92_1_REVIEW_THE_HARD_DISK_DRIVE_HD_ASTRA_SYSTEMS.php
You can relive things over and over. And each time it renews the emotions all over again. What happens is certain things get hard to let go of and it creates a passion to prevent things that most would not consider very serious because it was in the past. No... It is going to happen again and needs to be prevented if possible. Nothing is ever “old news, forget about it” for folks like your wife and I.
There is no past, everything from the past is always in the present just as strong as it was back then. The “out of sight, out of mind” thing just doesn’t work. Everything is always in your mind and you see it again everyday, even in your sleep.
You can try to keep your mind so extremely occupied that it just doesn’t have time to go pull stuff out of the file cabinets though. It is the only way to organize the flurry of chaos. This is what helps me greatly and why I am always going after 20 different things at a time. Constantly processing a wall of new information can override all the old information temporarily.
But when you slow down it all comes back again and renews all those emotions and sentiments over again. Yep... Great tool for learning, but a curse that never lets go of the past. It can make you hold on to grudges forever. lol
Lol... That’s great, sorry to hear about all those lost valuable treasures, at least you kept the important sentimental stuff! :)
We are funny us humans... I think holding onto things is normal and those who insist we shouldn’t are abnormal. :)
Hey... 400 was a lot at the time. lol
It’s amazing the difference, I still have ram boards the size of an old huge mother board loaded with small capacity memory chips . I don’t even remember what the memory size of these are but it sure wasn’t much.
Those must have been difficult items to part with.
I still have my trusty old EICO 460 oscilloscope that I sometimes used when building electronic kits. It is not as fancy as your Tektronix was but it still worked a few months ago when I fired it up. Some people claim that EICOs are so limited that they are the Yugos of vintage oscilloscopes. My wife wanted me to give it away, but I know that there is an old TV or stereo that is going to need troubleshooting one of these days.
The thing that I would like to check is if all the floppies, tapes, and old hard drives still have any good data on them. I am also curious how much of the old equipment still actually works. Basically all of it still worked when it was stored, some of it nearly 40 years ago, so corrosion on the hardware and magnetic deterioration on the media may have made all of it unusable by now. But you never know.
My wife came from a family of teachers. Her mother figured out early that my wife wasn't necessarily learning anything in a normal way. She could parrot back what she had seen written on a page even if she hadn't truly read it or understood it. She actually is not as good at comprehending what she is reading as I am even though she still can often recite a page back later
My wife seems to face many of the same challenges that you mention especially having a difficult time letting go of bad experiences. She is also just much more aware of subtleties that would sometimes be best overlooked.
It’s hard when they never go away and are always there just as vivid as if it was happening right then. Like I say, it is never what “happened”, it is always “happening”.
I enjoyed talking with you today my friend. I’m done and finally wearing down. And that’s another thing... I have to make efforts to go to bed absolutely mentally exhausted so my mind doesn’t keep me awake all night. lol
Please take care and have a great evening. Maybe we will run across each other tomorrow. :)
Wow... an EICO 460 was my first serious kit project, somewhere around 1967. I'd built tube audio (guitar) amplifers before that, from scratch using RCA amp schematics and parts scrounged from other audio gear. But the EICO was a real piece of test gear. I treasured it! I didn't get the (Navy surplus) Tek scope until 10 years later.
After about a year I got fed up with the EICO's sync-recurrent sweep circuit, so I found a schematic for an early Tek scope that had triggered sweep, and I designed built a real triggered sweep for the EICO. I was probably about 16 or so. The result was primitive, and the timing capacitors weren't precision enough to really trust the 1-2-5 range sequence, but it did the job and taught me a lot.
> The thing that I would like to check is if all the floppies, tapes, and old hard drives still have any good data on them.
I wouldn't hold my breath, if they're really old. I went through mine and found that after about 20 years, the floppies were mostly unreadable, the tapes had delaminated (the oxide came off in flakes when the mylar flexed), and if the hard drives hadn't been spun up every few years, they only lived briefly when powered up after a decade of sitting on the shelf. I've read that part of the problem is the lubricant in the main bearing drifts down from gravity, and/or dries out, and so when you power up the drive, assuming it starts at all, it only has minutes of life before the bearing goes. Whereas if you physically reposition the drives on the shelf, turning them over every year or two, you can sometimes avoid that fate.
I read it on the internet, it must be true! :-)
> The ST's operating system cannot recognize disk drives larger than 16 megabytes...
Ah, those were the days... :-)
... using OnTrack's disk manager software and typing in the head/track/sector "bad block list" from the piece of paper taped to the top of the hard drive...
Well, I gather from Googling "horkage" that it's a software term meaning "a state of brokenness, or an action that causes things to break", so it looks like you were right about it being a good replacement for "borkage".
Thank you, I've learned my New Word For The Day!
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