I downloaded the media creation tool around noon Mountain time. When I ran the installation from the resulting ISO on a lab PC, it just reinstalled Build 10586.

Then I tried the Windows10Upgrade9252.exe on a second PC. It failed with code 0x8007001f.

So two manual upgrade methods have failed for me today.

Has anyone gotten it to work?

I am using Cisco VPN Client v5.0.07.0440, which needs the same minor registry edit on Windows 10 that it did on Windows 8. On Windows 10, it also requires installation of a Dell SonicWall driver before it will work correctly. Once it's set up, it works great.

When I installed the Fall update for Windows, it automatically uninstalled this Cisco VPN Client citing compatibility issues. After I reinstalled, it worked perfectly again. I am not sure how Microsoft makes the decision to uninstall something automatically. Even though the configuration is not supported by the vendor anymore, there are many people using this legacy Cisco VPN software.

This is an example of Microsoft uninstalled some desktop software that was working perfectly fine. At least they didn't block the reinstall!

First off, if you are doing LabVIEW then avoid the llb files and commit each VI to the repo individually. That way you can track which SubVI changed on an individual basis. Also, llbs will blow up the size of the repo as they are usually huge when compared to the size of the SubVI that you are actually changing. Having the individual VI's in the repo allows the commits to be small.

Secondly, SVN is great when everyone is in the same building, but if you are working remotely, then "git clone" can be critical for your offline work. You can "git clone" while you are on site, then future pulls are not so terrible when you are on a slow VPN. If you have no connection to your corporate network, you can still track your stuff. We're in a distributed world, and you will suffer without the distributed capability that Git offers.

I am finding that 100% of my clients starting new projects are using Git. SVN is only being used by people who set up their repos in the early 2000's.

SourceSafe is an abomination. We discovered that when we added PDFs, they came back out corrupted. We lost a bunch of schematics that way.

There's a learning curve, but skip the SVN and go for Git. Don't think about VSS.

Cheers!

In the control panel for Win8, there is an option under Action Center to disable the customer experience improvement program. Then under Services, it is possible to stop and disable the Diagnostics Tracking Service. Not sure if these actions disable all the telemetry, but thinking this is part of the solution to have the updates present with the reporting function turned off. Cheers!

In a great exercise in willpower to resist my hoarding instinct, I decided I needed to get rid of a decade of tower PC's and laptops that I was keeping around to run different vintages of engineering and build tools.

I decided to create VM's for everything and went with Hyper-V on a Dell server. I have Ubuntu, Win7, Win8, Win10, and XP VM's running in a mix of 32-bit and 64-bit. If an experiment goes awry, I can flush a VM and start over.

I can use a cheap laptop or someone else's machine to access my VMs remotely. Kind of a different take on Bring Your Own Device. I'm using my own device, just not physically in your building.

The discussion is about the machine specs. Without further adieu ...

PowerEdge T420, Intel Xeon E-24XX v2 Processors
PowerEdge T420 Motherboard, TPM
On-Board LOM 1GBE (Dual Port for Racks and Towers, Quad Port for Blades)
PERC Cable for 3.5in 8HD Hot Plug Chassis
LCD display for T420
Chassis with up to 8, 3.5 inch Hard Drives
Security Bezel
Power Saving Dell Active Power Controller
RAID 1 for H710P/H710/H310 (2 HDDs)
PERC H310 Adapter RAID Controller, Full Height
Heat Sink, Dell PowerEdge T320/T420
Intel Xeon E5-2430L v2 2.40GHz, 15M Cache, 7.2GT/s QPI, Turbo, 6C, 60W, Max Mem 1600MHz
4 8GB RDIMM, 1333 MT/s, Low Volt, Dual Rank, x4 Data Width
2 2TB 7.2K RPM SATA 3Gbps 3.5in Hot-plug Hard Drive
DVD+/-RW, SATA, INTERNAL
Single Cabled Power Supply, 550W

I give each Hyper-V VM about 4 GB RAM and 1 TB dynamic disks (overcommitted).

This is old news for a different part of the country. North Texas has been in drought for several years now, and they put this idea into practice:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/toilet-to-tap-wastewater-recycling-begins-in-wichita-falls-texas/

Use a null modem cable to connect the COM ports between the old PC and a new PC. On the new PC, you might need a USB to RS232 adapter.

Get a copy of pkzip and zip each folder on your old PC. Install Procomm PLUS on your old PC. Run Procomm.

On the new PC, open your favorite terminal program (Tera Term, HyperTerm, etc.)

On old PC, send each file using XModem or ZModem in Procomm. On new PC, receive the file using the same protocol.

This was the way we got our files from dial-up BBSes in 80s and early 90s. The transfer through the cable is actually easier since you don't have to dial through a modem.

Cheers!

I saw MATLAB mentioned here quite a bit. I cut my teeth on MATLAB in the 90s to prototype DSP algorithms, but LabVIEW has become my replacement workhorse for that sort of stuff since Y2K. Even through the dot-com bust there was no shortage of LabVIEW work. I'm mostly a C/C++ embedded guy these days, but LabVIEW is still in my grab bag for rapid app development.

The largest program I build each day is the Linux kernel.

When I ask the question "How relevant is the Linux kernel in 2014?", the relevance of C becomes hard to question considering its 15 million lines or so. ;)

If I google "yellow multimeter", there are a ton of non-Fluke meters that show up.

The meter I have in my lab looks just like a Fluke, but I bought it at Fry's in my poor college days.

It's too bad SparkFun's product got snagged, they are a favorite local supplier for the Denver/Boulder electronics industry. I drive to their will-call all the time when I need cables, dev boards, and such.

Anyway, how did all the other yellow meters get through customs??

Wow, so I'm not crazy. I have to keep some old XP machines around for certain build tools. When I turned on my XP PC's recently for a sustaining engineering activity, the Windows update had them bogged down all night and all day. Was assuming a machine-specific problem, but this confirms it's a general problem. Thanks Slashdot for pointing this out, and thanks Microsoft for keeping IT interesting.

On my lab bench for 15 years:

Oscilloscope and Multimeter

Manna is an interesting short story on the topic:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

In U.S. society, as people who can't compete with automation become non-employable, they are forced to live on welfare in government housing that is essentially a prison camp. There is little opportunity for social mobility.

In the same short story, Australia redefines their economy to be more of an entitlement society, where people have equal access to education, vacation, etc. It becomes more of the utopia that was envisioned in the early 20th century with technology truly making life easy.

I enjoyed this short story, because it demonstrates how the U.S. population could gradually become dependent on a massive welfare state with the standards of living becoming very meager, while societies that are willing to reinvent their economy may thrive.

I tend to agree that the desktop experience in Win8 is not so different from Win7. I have been doing pro HW/SW development using VC++, Eclipse, CAD tools, etc. on XP, Win7, and Win8, and I don't really notice such a different experience on Windows 8. I typically have a VirtualBox or XPmode instance, remote desktop connections, VNC, and Cygwin xterms active for testing, so for the rare cases that I switch to Metro, it's like working with another machine instance. I would argue that for IT people who are already accustomed to managing multiple VM's, the switchover to Metro just feels like going to another terminal.

The hybrid concept actually works really well for my work-life balance. I bought a Samsung ATIV Pro, which is similar to the MS Surface Pro, but I felt the Samsung had better specs. When I'm working, I'm docked to the keyboard and working mostly in desktop. When I'm at home, I'm un-docked and enjoy my mindless content consumption using Metro and touch. Rather than having a separate PC, iPad, e-reader, etc., the hybrid covers all my use cases!

For a serious critique of Win8, I would say that people need to use it for a few months. In my case, Metro has become second nature and I can use it equally well with mouse and touch.

Now, the thing that I really dislike about Metro from a developer standpoint is the inability to side-load custom apps. I often support small teams that are not domain joined, and Microsoft's restricted sale of sideloading keys are a huge deterrent to my desire to ever create a Metro app. I also dislike the developer license concept. When I'm prototyping, why should I have to deal with a license for my own app? Who ever thought we'd have to deal with licensing when writing "Hello World?".

Anyhow, Microsoft gave us a mixed bag here.

The software was called Editor Assembler. I remember that it came with a large 3-ring binder of documentation, a cartridge, and some disks.