jaclaz

Nice, very, very nice : OT , but if I would be in the NSA that would be a nice new project to build upon a public proxy "translation" service. jaclaz

Curious how in other places you publicly badmouth some of these same people.... jaclaz

I will repeat what I said before, and that bhplt expanded in detail : try with LESS things added/integrated, first. There may be on a DVD a known issue about it's size. Basically a number of files in the"early" booting part may not be able to "reach" beyond a given LBA address. You may want to check the actual build. See: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=20248 http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=16802 but the errors I have seen related to this are different. The STOP: 0xC0000221 unknown hard error seems more connected to a corrupted file: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/101096/en-us http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314474/en-us but with Windows errors you never really know . I personally DO NOT suggest to use IMGBURN to "burn from folder", ONLY to burn from .iso to physical CD/DVD, an install CD/DVD .iso should - in my perverted mind - be built by mkisofs (or oscdimage) ONLY, and with the "proper" settings", I seem to understand that you changed these settings for mkisofs? Just in case "good" set of settings is the following: mkisofs -v -iso-level 4 -l -D -d -J -joliet-long -volid "XPSP3" -A XPSP3/MKISOFS -sysid "Win32" -b bootsect.bin -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -hide boot.catalog -hide bootsect.bin -allow-multidot -o .\whatever\XPSP3.iso ROOTor: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=20248&st=0&p=136024entry136024 Optionally one could use a "pe_sort.txt", if the issue about "high" LBA is confirmed. See: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=8053 jaclaz

Well what happens if you deploy cmdkey to the target machine and run it remotely from the machine itself? Still, it seems to me foolish to wait for the issue to happen and repair the problem as opposed to preventing the issue to happen at all. I have no idea about (and I am actually not at all interested in the details of) the management procedures that you have on that site/whatever, but I have rarely seen someone proposing a no or little cost enhancement capable of preventing the creation of a "support ticket" having it denied/not approved. You see, usually nooone actually cares about what the IT/support people do , but if a "support ticket" is created, it means that there is an alteration in the workflow of the people that actually work to produce something (or that are supposed to do that), i.e. it means "saved money" or "less downtime" for the company. In any case, you asked about your problem, not one but three possible solutions were proposed for you to test, sorry if none can be - for whatever reason - be tested/used in your environment. jaclaz

It must then be a coincidence that that same program worked for everyone (we are talking of tens if not hundreds of thousands users) since several years, exclusively to "tweak" a 2K or XP source and noone experienced that same bug. jaclaz

I would say that quotas are intrinsically part of the filesystem and low-level enough, but I may well be wrong on this. Still no suggestions for alternate MFT based filesystems. jaclaz

I am not sure to understand WHICH Virtual Machine you are talking about? If the XP install misses a Mass Storage driver, at one or the other stage it will BSOD with STOP ERROR 0x0000007b. Can you try describing what exactly you did? (the more detial you provide the more likely that someone will be able to solve the issue or at least give you some hint to the right direction to do further tests) jaclaz

IMHO, besides that, what sounds to me alarming is not that Abbey Shuto and McGee have access to that data but this line: 1,300 agencies! Having 1,300 "agencies" (including local police) capable of accessing that kind of data is IMHO very little short of publishing it. jaclaz

Personally I use mostly NTFS filesystems on my machines/devices, when/where I see a good use for them, but do avoid spitting on older FAT filesystems and actually use them when there are reasons that justify their use. I mean BOTH filesystems are not (and cannot be) a one-size-fits-all solution for *any* problem. If you could provide some suggestion for other MFT based filesystems, as I already asked you, I am willing to experiment with them. From a purely theoretical standpoint, I would like to have an alternative "simpler" filesystem (for storage only) with only some of the "good" (imho) features of NTFS, such as having the $MFT (and hence the possibility of really fast file searching) and larger than 4 Gb filesize without the (still IMHO) unneeded overhead, like permissions, quotas, "ownership". jaclaz

Sure , the wheel also is very old, simple technology, just as an example traveling on an air cushion is definitely superior, yet the number of hovercrafts around is surprisingly low. "Old" not necessarily means "outdated", and as a matter of fact the most recent (new, updated) technologies, which are EFI/UEFI and GPT, strangely enough make use of a FAT filesystem in order to actually boot a PC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFI_System_partition No, I am unaware of these other filesystems. Which other options do we have? jaclaz

Sure , but if you go to *any* PC servicing shop, if you ask nicely you can have a "good enough spare for tests" for a few bucks or even for free, and of course you can ask friends for any PC they are going to throw away, a "bare" motherboard should be able to power on (and beep) with *any* sized PSU, considering that the smallest one you can find in a desktop which is not really ancient is 250 W or more. jaclaz

So, something that has worked for at least 15 years (within it's limitations) is to be replaced by NTFS even when there is no need whatsoever of the NTFS features? Isn't it surprising that exFAT is still FAT (and not MFT) based? jaclaz

NO. Meaning that a number of so-called ISO editing tools may botch a "delicate" .iso such as the Windows install one. The idea is to create the .iso "properly" and only once and then leave it alone. Mind you, this does not mean that the whatever ISO editor you used necessarily did that, only that editing a bootable Windows .iso is re-known to cause issues. Using a .iso editor with bootable Windows discs is a sort of shortcut that usually resolves as being longer than the "main road". Additionally the actual CD burner software that you used to burn the .iso 8if you have burned it to actual physical disc) may have created a coaster. The usual recommendation is to use IMGBURN (and nothing else) as it has proved to be very reliable, example: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=24562 What you should do is to start from fresh, add/integrate through nlite just one or two things, and test the resulting .iso (without doing ANY manual modification to anything). This way we are sure that the source and that the building procedure is valid. Then, once it hopefully works, re-do still from the original source adding (or removing) more things. jaclaz

Sure , the point was exactly that. What I would expect from an OS is that it does the whatever it is supposed to do. A "better" OS is something that allows me to do more things but do the same things above in less time (faster). We have now (almost 13 years later) replacement OS's that take advantage of the very substantially increased power of modern hardware to do (limited) more things but that takes the same or more time to do the same things that the previous (actually two previous) generation of OS can do in the same time or even take more time. If I put on the hat of the "technical savvy user" I can understand fine how a number of features (not all of them IMHO) that were added are either "more elegant" or "more efficient" or "more handy", but when I take that hat off and put on my "plain layman" one, I cannot but notice how the global result (in it's entirety) provides no or very little advantage. jaclaz

The downside is that (statistically) you end up with 1/3 of the free space in each partition and that can potentially be an annoyance when your drive fills up and you need to shift big amounts of data.Nahh, that cousin of mine is a yute : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104952/quotes?item=qt0404568 that uses the stick just to avoid loosing his keys, all partitions on it are empty. If it was not clear , that cousin is a fictional character that I invented only to reply to the purely anecdotal contribution by NixFix. jaclaz

http://www.jucs.org/jucs_18_2/performance_evaluation_of_recent http://www.jucs.org/jucs_18_2/performance_evaluation_of_recent/jucs_18_02_0218_0263_martinovic.pdf BUT (still in the Conclusion): Whether 64 bits OS's are actually "better" than 32 bit ones (and which among the 64 bit versions of windows OS's is actually "better" among them) is still an open question.... jaclaz

...and you can select different voices: http://www.thewindowsclub.com/narrator-in-windows-8-7 besides changing spped, volume and pitch... jaclaz

Why in my day I managed to put together a floppy interface for the Spectrum (which got rid of the cassette tape player) and I actually liked it. http://tinyapps.org/blog/misc/200702250700_why_in_my_day.html ...kids today. Yep, but, accordingly to what I have read the difference is that in Maryland they will use waste water, whilst in Utah they will be using "good" water, of which 1/3 only will seemingly be re-used by the municipality: http://www.ksl.com/?sid=25978926&nid=148 Are you really 100% sure that anything gathered through the massive surveillance program cannot and will not "leak" to a few selected US based multi-nationals? Information is a product, and usually a very valuable one. jaclaz

Have you also checked the "other" point in the mentioned thread? http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/144776-unable-to-open-an-elevated-windows-explorer-window/?p=1013641 http://technet.microsoft.com/it-it/library/ee844140(v=ws.10).aspx http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/a31e2c3d-4e35-4c33-8208-0a0e3b6964c1/mapnetworkdrive-and-enablelinkedconnections jaclaz

As a side note, if a "team" in charge of support/maintenance of 14,000 PC's cannot manage to: find about (documented) cmdkeyfind about (documented) Group Policiesdo any of the above (or be authorized to do that)I have difficulties in calling it a "support team" (particularly for such a large userbase). Reality check. When you "telnet" manually into a remote computer, and run the Control Panel/Users thingy (which BTW you can access more directly through "rundll32.exe keymgr.dll, KRShowKeyMgr") what you are actually doing is to use a GUI tool to write (or modify) a binary file "Credentials" residing in \Documents and Settings\<User Name>\Application Data\Microsoft\Credentials\<User SID>, see: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/network_password_recovery.html so it is not in any way different from changing a binary file (one of the Registry hives) BEFORE, to avoid the need to connect to the PC at all. As a matter of fact every time anyone accesses a remote computer via "telnet" or other remote administration tool, this represents a serious security (and/or privacy) matter. jaclaz

And you see , that was exactly the point . Yet another item that someone else created, that will (in this case very marginally) occupy your hard disk space. BTW, the author of that post is someone that still has *somewhere* the following hardware (and it's related software). Sinclair ZX81 <- 1981 Sinclair Spectrum <- 1983 Sinclair QL <- 1985 Toshiba T3100e <-1987 Macintosh Powerbook 140 <- 1992 Acer Extensa 355 <- 1996 and *any* amount of partially or fully broken (and even some working) PC's dating back up to 1994 or so, to which you add an incredible amount of "burned" CD's containing software, and a correspondent if not bigger amount of data stored in old hard disk drives. In other words, ponder on his words, but DO NOT take him as an example of "efficiency by throwing away things you don't need anymore" . jaclaz

I would like to have a current definition of "advanced". The far more definitely does not apply, IMHO. I see essentially the exact same codebase with a bunch of minor adjustment/changes, 2 or 3 of which either make no sense or are of no use. jaclaz

Strangely enough, Utah residents are seemingly among the most thirsty people around, with a per-capita use of water above anyone else (except possibly Nevada and Idaho - data is strangely contrasting in different sources): http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_13750549 http://le.utah.gov/interim/2012/pdf/00002706.pdf around 200-250 or maybe even 308 gallons (that is up to over 1,000 liters ). http://humanistsofutah.org/wordpress/sample-page/2012-2/april-2012/water-waste-in-utah/ As a reference, currently used international norms when designing a water supply are usually between 150 and 250 liters/person/day, whilst US are AFAIK more oriented towards the 100 gallons or 400 liters (these are norms used to dimension pipes/pumps/etc. not the actual consumption). Point at hand being that water price in Utah is strongly subsidized by property taxes (depending on exact location), so knowing how much water the NSA uses and how much it pays it may be of public interest, at least for the local residents. On another installment the NSA will use WASTE water (which makes matter quite a bit different): http://cleantechnica.com/2014/01/07/wastewater-will-cool-new-nsa-computing-center/ jaclaz

Good Then most probably it was just a "false alarm". JFYI, the "showmypc" in itself is a "legitimate" software, nothing but one among the n "remote administration" tools for Windows, but since you were tricked into the scam, it is well possible that it was used as "vector" for some malware. jaclaz

Question of the day being: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/03/nsa-water/ jaclaz