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from the its-my-way-or-the-highway-said-the-Borg dept.
An Anonymous Coward belatedly writes:
"Sandisk changed the configuration, beginning in 2012, for all USB drives they make so that in future external USB devices will be seen as physical hard drives. This has been done to meet requirements set by Microsoft for Windows 8 which states that all USB devices must be configured to be recognised as fixed drives (nb. this is possibly related to Windows-to-Go). This has caused havoc for many users as Sandisk drives can no longer be used with Windows Recovery or any program that will only write to USB External devices. Sandisk deleted the support page that described why Sandisk USB drives are now configured as fixed drives, although the blog author includes it in his blog.
Beware any USB pen drive which states it is "Windows 8 certified". The device will not be detectable as an external drive in Windows 8. The HP Recovery Disks page says to avoid any Windows-8-certified USB devices."
One comment on the blog suggests that Sandisk might have reverted to more conventional practices for subsequent USB devices.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 03 2014, @06:22AM
which also would not use a non-"external USB" drive (like network mounted filesystems) out of the box for Time Machine, but there is a file you can touch to make it use it anyway.
M$ OTOH probably didn't think as far as to give the customer a way to override this.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by iNaya on Monday March 03 2014, @07:32AM
God! I got sick of people writing "M$" about 10 years ago.
Every company exists because, why? Because they make money.
There was no -1 childish mod, so I wrote this comment instead.
(Score: 5, Funny) by daver!west!fmc on Monday March 03 2014, @07:39AM
Besides, MICROS~1 gave us a better way to spell their name with Windows 95. (Thanks to Fred Cisin for pointing this out.)
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 03 2014, @08:42AM
Those who want to indicate a dislike to Microsofts business tactics are the ones writing MSFT.
The $ sign is from the good old days, when Microsofts main product was BASIC - real BASIC with line numbers, not the modern Visual stuff.
Back then, variables were one or two letters, plus a character indicating the type of variable. A was a floating point variable, A% was integer (but all calculations were done in floating point, so using an integer variable was actually slower) and A$ was a string variable. And yes, you could have all three A variables at the same time.
So, if you needed 13 string variables, and started with A$, B$, C$ - variable number 13 would be called M$, which looks almost like MS.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 03 2014, @05:52PM
I tend to think that's a wonderful piece of creative history. Nicely done.
But "Informative" ?
Really, guys? That's not why anyone EVER used "M$".
Mod it funny if you want, but not "Informative".
(Score: 1) by EvilJim on Tuesday March 04 2014, @04:54AM
So don't read those comments, you mad bro? wanna rage quit now? [apply all the other memes you hate here]
you'll probably find people are using M$ these days as M$ tends to make decisions based on how much money they think they can rip us off for over functionality every time. they just keep proving it over and over, xbone always on connection? whatever they're doing with USB drives now to piss people off when they've been working fine for years. those are just two examples off the top of my head without even reaching into the soiled abyss that is my mind. dropping support for xp, there's another, I'll stop now. I don't want to think those dirty thoughts any more.
(Score: 1) by iNaya on Tuesday March 04 2014, @08:01AM
Yes, that is exactly correct. At the same time, Microsoft isn't special in that regard. I dislike Microsoft as much as the next man, but I would rather express it by calling them out on what they have done wrong, rather than resorting to writing their name incorrectly.
Apple, Google, and others are just as guilty of abusing us as Microsoft is. At the end of the day, all companies that grow large enough will do anything to make another dollar.
I see no reason to single Microsoft out on this, as that is avoiding the real problem, which is why do we [insert your group here] allow large companies to abuse us?
(Score: 1) by EvilJim on Tuesday March 04 2014, @08:50PM
my personal experience is that only M$ is doing this, at least apple provide the fanbois what they desire, ease of use, and I've never bought a brand new apple product so they've never received any money directly from me, I've had a couple of broken ipods which I've repaired but I usually end up selling 'em, dont have one currently.
Google provides me email and search results for free, they're welcome to scan my emails to my Mum and target ads at me as that is the only price they ask of me, never paid them a cent other than that. M$ - nearly every pc I've ever bought (maybe 4 over my lifetime, all others are made from parts)has been bundled with an M$ OS which I haven't wanted for at least the last 5 years but am still forced to pay for. as for your final question, this I think sums it up: "vendor lock-in" as soon as I can go all linux at work I'm chucking out our volume licences. full disclosure: I did have a personal run-in with M$ jerks at a previous job, they gave us too many oem copies of win98 and instead of leaving it to us to pack up the extras and send them back they sent the goons around who walked around our support office with the CEO picking up unopened packs off everyone's desks, the one on my desk happened to have already been sold to a customer and was sitting on top of their pc ready to go back, so just to make it legal again I had to perform a full re-install against the customers wishes. so there is possibly some personal bias against M$ here but I've never had to pay money to apple, google or had either of their employees violate my workspace and cause me additional work. Interested to hear your thoughts on these points.
(Score: 1) by iNaya on Thursday March 06 2014, @05:46AM
I get your reasoning about Google, because they do provide products for free. However, with Apple, you have never done any business with them, so using that as a comparison versus Microsoft is unfair.
And let me reiterate that I am well aware of all the anti-competitive and anti-consumer activities that Microsoft has undertaken since its inception.
Apple does actually sell products for money. The fact that you have never given them your money doesn't change this. I personally haven't given any money to Microsoft in the last 6 years, but I have given money to Apple. Apple has never had the chance to abuse me, apart from the overly high cost of their products, which do have a much more polished feel about them, which makes me feel better when using them.
As for your PCs coming with Windows, why not change vendors? There are quite a few vendors around that supply bare PCs. With laptops, it's harder to avoid. The laptops I personally like the best tend to come with either the Windows tax or the Apple tax (I put linux on most stuff). One could argue there is no Apple tax, but, if not, why is Apple stuff at the same spec as a Samsung, so much more expensive? IMO I'm paying extra.
But Apple has certainly done many evil things. I will leave that as a Googling exercise for you. For instance, in the EU they tried to charge customers for a warranty, which by law they had to offer anyway, so they were basically trying to literally steal money of people through deception. This is not the only greedy, self-absorbed thing they have done.
Neither Apple, Google, nor Microsoft as organisations would have any qualms taking every cent you have. If they could, they would. Microsoft has done it in a very direct way, whereas Google supports their things through advertising. The cost of this is harder to calculate, as it comes in the form of lost privacy (which is neither a concern to you, apparently, nor is it to me), and in the form of products being slightly more expensive to cover advertising budgets (but this is not Google's fault, as they would use another agency if not Google).
I have worked in and with many organisations, including the a large Australian bank, a large British Financial organisation, a security organisation, the US military, a few New Zealand Government SOEs, and the Korean police, among many others. The only two organisations I worked for where my boss' eyes didn't light up at the idea of being able to scrape a few extra cents out of existing and potential customers - whether it benefited them or not - were the US military and the Korean police. Which also happened to be the only two organisations I've worked for who don't rely on revenues to survive.
The British financial organisation I worked for, for two years. And they were greedy bastards. They built multi-million software product for a particular customer, who also paid (much more than just the salaries) for a certain number of developers to always be working on fixing ongoing issues. The organisation for which I worked put less than half that number on it, and completely lied to the customer.
Then once the product was nearly door, they simultaneously fired about 30 developers while telling the customer that they were increasing efforts to get the product released on time. They were also making the largest profits they had ever made. The product was still going to get released on time to miss penalty payments, and I got some measure of justice by collaborating with several others to leave the org at roughly the same time as me (it wasn't hard, many were just as disgusted as I was), so they lost two project managers, the entire testing team, and most of the graphics team.
What it comes down to, I guess, is that I have had too many bitter experiences to put any faith in the kindness any business other than a small business where the managing director personally knows the customers. Once the hive mentality takes over, caring about people, the environment, etc. all go out the window; except when doing so has an obvious (positive) effect on revenues, or a negative effect on costs.
Anyhow, the reason I dislike the use of "M$" or "fanbois", is because they are words which detract from any meaningful content in a conversation, and are instead an appeal to emotion. Which is all very well when discussing an emotional topic. However, organisational ethics are not an emotional topic, though it is certainly something that provokes extreme emotions in many people, including myself.
Using angry words however (and my original reply here is a prime example of that), never gets people onside with one's line of thinking. In fact, it serves to alienate people, even if they were people who would have tended to agree with you. So I did that and I got modded as flamebait, which is a correct mod considering how I wrote what I was thinking.
I guess, what I'm trying to say, is that using monikers which mock an individual or organisation makes one look childish when there are better ways to express those opinions without resorting to name-calling.
(Score: 1) by iNaya on Thursday March 06 2014, @06:01AM
Oh and that thing with Microsoft goons coming around to your workplace - that's terrible. What country/state are you in? Surely that can't be within the confines of the law.
(Score: 2) by EvilJim on Thursday March 06 2014, @06:17AM
New Zealand, they would have talked the ceo into it who was the accountant at the time, he was with them, I was out at lunch.