Welcome to the first entry in a new series… er… category… maybe tag… hell I dunno… where I sit back and spill the beans on some of the true tales of my life being an IT guy. I hesitate to call this a “series” because who knows if I will actually keep this up. But I figure that somewhere, somehow, these short anecdotes deserve a small corner of the Internet to be forever preserved. I’m pretty sure I’ve told these tales to my kids, but just in case I didn’t - maybe they’ll read this someday and they can hear me tell it in my voice.
Extremely hot rumor that Microsoft is releasing an emergency Windows patch for 2016 and 10 tomorrow. It’s such a hot potato that there are threats being made that it must be installed within 24 hours or be kicked off the wire. Looks like everyone is getting a rough start to 2020.
Microsoft will be killing off “Microsoft Paint” in the next release of Windows 10 (the so-called “Fall Creator’s Update”).
This article on the Verge points out the various things that are being shed. Microsoft Paint seems to be the most significant user-facing thing, but I can imagine some enterprises will have difficulty with other changes.
If you’re plagued by the Apple Software Update popping up every day to remind you that iCloud for Windows 5.1 is available to install… even when you already have it installed… you need to go registry-diving.
This community post on the Apple site worked for me. Whew. Finally. That was super annoying.
Hope you’re all well. Reach out to me and let me know how your life is going.
It looks like Satya Nadella’s strategies are paying off. Microsoft reported some gains in Windows 10 and its cloud business.
That’s good news for overall competition. I’ve also witnessed Microsoft become more and more “Internet friendly,” by way of embracing multi-platform applications and developers. This is what needed to happen.
Just think if Ballmer was still around… maybe Microsoft would be folding by now.
They do need to do something about the Windows handset business, but I’m betting that Satya has a plan for that.
Last week, Hell froze over in one of the deepest freezes in the history of the United States.
This week, Paul Thurrott finally speaks the truth about Windows 8/8.1. It’s not pretty.
It’s going to be a very interesting 2014 in the tech world.
Speaking of which, I hope you’re having a fantastic start to this new year. I need to get back to blogging and updating my websites.
Here’s a gem.
The overall point of this blog post is:
Bonus:
If you have a Lion server behind a NAT router (for example, an Airport Extreme or Time Capsule) that is running a VPN service you may have difficulties connecting to it with Windows 7 using L2TP despite the correct setup.
I won’t go into the deep dive on this now, but just a total quick tip. You need to change the encapsulation parameters on Windows 7. Do that by setting a registry key:
Description of Update Rollup 4 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 3
It looks like Exchange 2007 SP3 RU4 has a lot of goodies in it. At least 5 of the items in this list are impacting the environment at my day job.
While it’s good to see progress, I’m always wary of these updates because of the regression bugs they often introduce. Test and patch carefully, gang.
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Image via <a href="http://www.crunchbase.com">CrunchBase</a>
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A coworker sent this along.  I’ve had this issue on a few contacts and didn’t really have time to delve into it.
Name removed to protect the innocent and good intentions. Â Be very careful with this and make sure you have a backup of all data that you plan to manipulate.