WServerNews: Some thoughts on Windows 11

In this issue

Ask Our Readers: Managing Teams without Intune? Windows 11 and hobbits. Windows 10 ain’t dead yet. Xboxed in by June updates? A comment on modern comments. How to permanently turn off the Xbox game bar on Windows 10. Railgun fail. Plus lots more — read it all, read it here on WServerNews!

Microsoft things Windows needs a refresh, especially its GUI. Maybe they should hire this guy to do it? Photo by Ari He on Unsplash

Ask Our Readers: Managing Teams without Intune? (new question)

Michael Friedman who works in IT in Massachusetts sent us the following email asking for input from our readers:

Can you discuss the Management of Microsoft Teams on Mobile Device Management Platforms? Microsoft is not letting vendors like Blackberry have access to the API/SDK, and seem to want to become a Mobile Device Management Platform too. You can only control Teams with Microsoft Intune. They previously did allow access to Skype for Business for MDM Vendors, like Blackberry with their Blackberry Dynamics Platform (Blackberry Connect). It seems They want their Microsoft Endpoint Management Platform to be the primary Mobile Device Management Platform, potentially edging out Vendors with more experience and security in this area.

I thought this was the Nice Microsoft that got along with everyone, and allows Linux OS distros in its Azure Platform. Is the Big Bad Wolf Back, and is he picking another fight, Using its Massive M365 platform to kill off more competition Now? Is this the 800 pound Gorilla nobody wants to Address? Can we get a comment from Novell and Word Perfect? Does that Mean Windows Phone and Zune will make a comeback Now?

Can you discuss with the other readers how they are handling this? Thank You.

Can any readers offer us their thoughts on this matter? Email us thanks!

Got questions? Ask our readers!

WServerNews goes out bimonthly to almost 200,000 IT pro subscribers worldwide! That’s a lot of expertise to tap into. Do you need help with some technical problem or are looking for expert advice on something IT-related? You can Ask Our Readers for help by emailing us your problem or question. Do it today!

Mailbag

In our previous issue in the section “Extreme surveillance of tech workers” I began by mentioning an article in Nikkei Asia titled “China’s tech workers pushed to limits by surveillance software” and asked readers if they had any thoughts or experiences with workplace surveillance that they wanted to share with other readers. This drew the following sharp comment from reader Ben Shoemaker:

Mitch, Please don’t compare Communist China to the US IT sector. China has re-education camps if you don’t think correctly. They have the Great Firewall to make sure that their people only see government approved sites. Their citizens are slave labor at the mercy of the state. Their factories have nets to prevent suicides from people jumping off buildings. Google Uygur Muslim concentration camps. The Chinese government is EVIL.

That being said, as an IT Admin, I always warn my users that when they are on a company network or device, that their activity is monitored and logged. If they don’t like it, don’t browse FB/YT/etc on a company device.

Surveillance to protect people and property is one thing but used to micro-manage is wrong. Same goes for vehicle tracking for service industry workers. I had a friend where they’d monitor how long you had doors open on your van, how long it was idling, etc. They wanted people to drive their vans home then go directly to the job site in the morning but they didn’t want you stopping for groceries before/after work. He quit that job because of the insanity. Either you trust someone to do their job or expect robots.

Also, 15 years ago, when I wasn’t in the IT sector, one employer used WebSense to monitor web usage. If something wasn’t deemed work specific, the firewall would pop up a message asking you if you wanted to use a 15 minute block to view that site. You only had a couple of those so you had to use them carefully. That was oppressive. So much so that I got a Wifi dongle + pringles can antenna setup to connect to a nearby wifi network.

If you are too oppressive, shadow IT will pop up and you will lose any control that you intended to have.

Those were excellent observations on the subject and I replied to Ben that I wasn’t trying to imply that Communist China operated similar to the US IT sector. My actual intention by including the Nikkei Asia link was simply to illustrate how shocking worker surveillance has become in China and then use this as an opener to start discussing workplace surveillance with our readership. But what I should have done first is expressed my personal opinion about the shocking Nikkei Asia article before opining further on the subject of workplace surveillance. It was poor writing on my part to fail to do this, and I thanked Ben for bringing the matter to my attention and he graciously responded by saying:

No worries. Thanks for the clarification. Some tech people seem to gloss over or neglect to mention China’s oppressive government and it’s a sore spot with me. I apologize if I seemed harsh. I’ve been reading your newsletter for years and appreciate all that you do.

And thank you for reading WServerNews—please tell all your colleagues about it!

Editor’s Corner

Cows ruminate. So why shouldn’t editors?

Windows 11 and hobbits

Near the beginning of The Lord of The Rings, hobbit Bilbo Baggins invites a bunch of guests to his eleventy-first birthday party and says:

“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

I don’t know what that means either, but I just hope that Microsoft never releases a version of Windows they call Windows 111.

(As an interesting aside for readers who are mathematically minded, numbers like 11 and 111 are called repunits. And while the number of repunits that are also prime numbers are conjectured to be infinite, only 11 repunits are presently known to be prime. The smallest repunit prime is obviously 11, and the next largest one is 1111111111111111111. I wonder if these two mathematical curiosities — 11 being the smallest repunit prime and that there are presently only known to be 11 repunit prints — factored into Microsoft’s decision to call the next release Windows 11?)

The above nonsense aside, I’ve been wondering what our newsletter readers think about Windows 11 based on what we currently know about it. I recently expressed my own first thoughts about it in this TechGenix article which you should read if you haven’t yet. If my writing seems a bit strange in that article, you probably never heard of Yogi Berra.

As you can read from my article, I’m not very impressed yet with Windows 11. Some of the features of the platform, such as being able to run Android apps leave me rather unexcited. And clearly adding a Teams Chat button to the taskbar in Windows 11 isn’t as nefarious as the way Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer into Windows 95 in order to kill off Netscape Navigator. Satya Nadella did come out strongly against Apple however in his closing remarks in Microsoft’s Windows 11 online presentation, but I doubt if any dent will appear in Apple’s grip on the minds and hearts of the “creator” community as a result of his remarks.

Meanwhile confusion has abounded during the week after Microsoft’s presentation concerning what the minimum hardware requirements will be for installing Windows 11 on a computer. Microsoft has tried to clarify this in a blog post and we’ll see how the IT community responds to this. And for those of us worried that you won’t be able to install Windows 11 without a live Internet connection and a Microsoft online account, it seems from my own looking into it that this only applies to Windows 11 Home edition not Pro edition. Can’t confirm this for sure yet, but it’s pretty clear that Satya will continue pushing Windows users into the cloud as much as possible.

Anyways, stay tuned to our TechGenix website as in a couple of weeks I should have a more in depth article in my articles section on the topic of what Windows 11 looks like as far as us IT professionals are concerned. In the meantime I’d love to hear what you our readers think about Window 11 so far — email me your comments and/or questions.

Windows 10 ain’t dead yet

Those of us who are worried that by Microsoft changing their mind and releasing a new version of Windows (i.e. Windows 11) they are reneging on their promise to support what they previously called “the last version of Windows” (i.e. Windows 10) need not be (too) worried, especially if you’re running the Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) version of Window 10. See this article on Microsoft Docs for more.

Xboxed in by June updates?

So my workstation applied the Windows 10 June updates and rebooted, and I logged in and saw…whaaat? I couldn’t take a screenshot but it looked something like this.

Somehow the Xbox game bar got installed and activated on my computer. I’m not a gamer so I’d never see it before. Fortunately a quick search on another machine led me to Winkey+G as a way of turning it off. Read more about this on AskWoody. I wish Microsoft would stop messing around with Windows on my systems, especially when they’re running Windows 10 Pro edition. And don’t get me started on the News and Weather icon suddenly appearing on my taskbar!

Anyways, see the Tip of the Week section later in this issue for more on how to permanently turn off the Xbox game bar on Windows 10.

A comment on modern comments

Microsoft has been rolling out a new commenting system for Microsoft Word to make Word comments more “modern” whatever that means. Read more about it in this article on the Microsoft 365 Blog. Apparently however this change has been causing frustration for some users.

As both an author and an editor I can sympathize with such frustrations. Writing/editing is straightforward process-oriented work, and any changes that radically affect establish workflows are generally reacted to with negativity bordering on hostility because of the loss of productivity that results.

It almost makes me want to ditch Word and turn to LibreOffice sometimes…

Oh well.

Got comments about anything in this issue?

Email us! We love hearing from our readers!

Please tell others about WServerNews!

Enjoy this issue of WServerNews and feel free to send us feedback on any of the topics we’ve covered — we love hearing from our readers! And please tell others about WServerNews! It’s free and always will be free — and they can subscribe to it here. Thanks!!!

Tip of the Week

How to permanently turn off the Xbox game bar on Windows 10

The June 2021 updates installed and probably enabled the Xbox game bar on your Windows 10 systems. If you don’t need it and don’t want to see it again, you can turn it off like this:

Click Start, then click the Gear icon to open Windows Settings.
Click Gaming, select Xbox Game Bar, and change On to Off.

You can also remove this functionality from Windows with the following PowerShell:

Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.XboxGamingOverlay | Remove-AppxPackage

For more detailed PowerShell instructions concerning removing the Xbox game bar, see this Github page.

Admin Toolbox

>> Got any admin tools or software you’d like to recommend to our readers? Email us your recommendations!

dtSearch®-Instantly Search Terabytes. Doc. filters for popular file types, emails, databases & web data; 25+ search options; Win/Lin/Mac C++/Java/.NET Core APIs; Azure/AWS FAQs. Enterprise/dev evals.

https://www.dtsearch.com/

Rimraf helps you delete files and folders with very long paths:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/rimraf

Conquer the best of both worlds with RavenDB 5.2, a NoSQL Document Database. Enjoy OLTP ACID Transactions, OLAP ETL for Analytics, and Grafana integration for visualization. Set up a live demo today.

https://ravendb.net/live-demo

Rufus lets you create bootable USB drives the easy way:

https://rufus.ie/

SDelete is a command line utility that can securely delete a file, or clean the slack space:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete

Factoid – Railgun fail

Our previous factoid and question was this:

Fact: Google plans to disrupt the college degree-granting mill.

Source: https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/inside-googles-plan-to-disrupt-college-degree-exclusive.html

Question: How many readers who hold university degrees if you could go back in time and become 18 again would NOT go to university? Is there any real value today in getting a university degree?

Jeffrey Harris responded to this one with the following comment:

Regarding your question of value of university degrees, the answer is YES. While lack of a degree is not necessarily a bar to success (witness Bill Gates), it is a better indicator than not and people like Bill Gates are the exception. University graduates still command, on average, significantly higher salaries than most non-graduates, and lifetime earnings are generally much higher as well. On a side note, there has been, in my view, a significant gap opened in the last 50 years as the result of the loss of union manufacturing jobs in the US, and possibly Canada. Factory workers were generally well paid, and those without university degrees helped to bridge the gap between other fields of employment for which university degrees were not required, and those fields that required them.

To the latter point, a number of career fields still require degrees: military officers have to have them, architects, attorneys, engineers, doctors. Even in business, most company looks for degrees for their professional staffs and managers, whether the company is a manufacturing company, a high tech company, a healthcare company, or a utility.

I also think that degrees require a certain amount of self-discipline and focus on a goal, which are both traits companies look for. Finally, college experience (but not necessarily the degree itself) is often a time of personal growth and involves collaboration and development of various skills (interpersonal skills, time management, public speaking, clarity of thought) that are also elements of a successful employee.

While degrees are less relevant as people gain more experience in their careers, and companies allow experience to substitute for education, they are still essential for people beginning professional careers who have limited experience. Employers still need something to base a hiring decision on and college performance and a degree provide some information for applicants who may lack significant relevant experience.

Wayne Hanks from Western Australia expressed a somewhat different take on this topic:

I speak from the other end of the spectrum, having tried and failed a few times to complete uni degrees 🙁

First was engineering after being fresh out of high school. This was a big learning curve for a country boy who had never had a social life. Unfortunately the nature of university study and availability to party put paid to that. I will say that the important part of university is the intangibles, exposure to arts and culture, and making lifelong friends in various fields.

Then I tried the part time study thing a few years later but it just got overwhelming and the added financial burden did not help. As a part timer, you also missed out on the social interaction part of study.

So at the end of the day, particularly in the IT field, I would say that you are probably better off doing short courses at technical colleges, so that you can focus on your career, even if you have to start on the helpdesk. Many colleges provide 6 month to 1 year Certificate and Diploma courses that meet the need of employers for formal qualifications, but do not drag on like 4 year courses. In today’s IT industry, anything you study in the first year of your course is going to be hopelessly outdated by the time you finish. Also these TAFE (Technical and Further Education) courses can get you a reasonable discount on your 4 year degree in terms of RPL (Recognition of Prior Learning).

Of course this is from the perspective of an IT person who has found that dealing with humans is 80% of my job.

Any readers who want to discuss this further can email me your comments.

Now let’s move on to our next factoid:

Fact: The U.S. navy’s railgun is finally dead

Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a36633707/us-navy-railgun-is-finally-dead/

Question: What a disappointment! I’ve been waiting to try riding on one of these since I started reading science fiction as a kid. What other long-expected technological advancement that has never been brought to reality has disappointed you, dear reader? Email us your answer and we’ll include it in our next issue!

Subscribe to WServerNews!

Subscribe today to our WServerNews newsletter and join 200,000 other IT professionals around the world who receive our newsletter! Just go to this page and select WServerNews to receive our monthly newsletter in your inbox!