Pointlessly Pissy Password Pontifications


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @mott555 said:

    I live alone so there's no reason to lock it or even password-protect it.

    Actually there's a good reason to have a password in certain circumstances, like using a VM with Hyper-V or the thing that came before that: file sharing between the VM and host, which IMLE requires a password for the share. Oh, and Remote Desktop if you have more than one computer: can't log in to the remote machine without a password[1].

    [1] I think you can disable both of those requirements but I'm not sure, and it's not the default.


  • Banned

    @FrostCat said:

    Actually there's a good reason to have a password in certain circumstances, like using a VM with Hyper-V or the thing that came before that: file sharing between the VM and host, which IMLE requires a password for the share.

    I'd rather say it's a reason to ditch Hyper-V and use something else, like VirtualBox which has no problems whatsoever with file sharing regardless of password settings.

    @FrostCat said:

    Oh, and Remote Desktop if you have more than one computer: can't log in to the remote machine without a password

    Desktop isn't very remote.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @Gaska said:

    I'd rather say it's a reason to ditch Hyper-V and use something else

    That is far from the only reason for that. The main reason would be that Hyper-V is fucking rubbish.


  • Banned

    Iunno, never used it. But I can't believe that it's "fucking rubbish", as you put it - it would make it far superior to the utter piece of shit that is VirtualBox.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Gaska said:

    I'd rather say it's a reason to ditch Hyper-V and use something else

    Thank you for your input, Captain Missed The Point.

    @Gaska said:

    Desktop isn't very remote.

    I have no idea what this word salad means.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Gaska said:

    Iunno, never used it. But I can't believe that it's "fucking rubbish", as you put it - it would make it far superior to the utter piece of shit that is VirtualBox.

    I don't know how to square this with what you wrote two posts up.

    Having said that, @polygeekery's use case for VMs must be bigger than mine. I have one VM at work so that I can do something that requires 16-bit software because my bosses resembled dinosaurs in one respect. (That is to say, they wouldn't let me replace that software with something more modern because stupid raisins.


  • Banned

    @FrostCat said:

    Thank you for your input, Captain Missed The Point.

    It's hard to get a point if you don't even try to make one.

    @FrostCat said:

    I have no idea what this word salad means.

    It means that why would I ever remote into a computer that's literally two meters from my bed?


  • Banned

    @FrostCat said:

    I don't know how to square this with what you wrote two posts up.

    FYI, I'm the kind of person that thinks every single piece of software ever made sucks. All OSes, all IDEs, all CD burners, all games, all video players, all RDBMSes, all web browsers, all everything.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Gaska said:

    It's hard to get a point if you don't even try to make one.

    Sorry, were you unable to understand my English[1]? @mott55 said there was no reason to use a password. I told him that's not true. Now those reasons probably don't apply to him, but that would've been a different argument.

    @Gaska said:

    It means that why would I ever remote into a computer that's literally two meters from my bed?

    You are clear on the concept that not everyone is you, right? "This reason doesn't apply to me" in no way argues against the statement "it's not true there's no reason for x".

    [1] That's OK, your English is still better than my Polish.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @Gaska said:

    It means that why would I ever remote into a computer that's literally two meters from my bed?

    I frequently remote from my laptop to the computer in my office, if I don't feel like going in to my office or if I am on my MacBook and need to use something Windows based (which is...often).


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @FrostCat said:

    Having said that, @polygeekery's use case for VMs must be bigger than mine.

    I run VMWare Workstation so that when I need to I can run other operating systems completely immersively. That is how you do virtualization on the desktop. I have three monitors on my main workstation, and I can have 3 operating systems on 3 monitors and switch between them by just moving my mouse. They go full-screen and unless you mouse up to the top of the screen, you have no idea you are running on virtualization.

    For those times that I need more monitors, I can spread (for instance) a Linux desktop across all three monitors and it feels bare metal. I can even pop out windows from the VMs and have them on my Windows desktop so that I could have only a Linux terminal on my Windows desktop and keep the rest of it minimized.

    Meh, maybe VMWare Workstation has me spoiled? But, coming from that, Hyper-V on Windows 8+ just feels ancient. It feels clunky. It feels like an also-ran.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Polygeekery said:

    I run VMWare Workstation so that when I need to I can run other operating systems completely immersively.

    Like I said, my use case is "a couple times a month I need to be able to run 16-bit software as part of another more complex processes". Unlike some here I recognize that other people have use cases not identical to mine.


  • Banned

    @FrostCat said:

    Sorry, were you unable to understand my English?

    No, I understood it alright. It's just when you doubted in my understanding of your post, I thought I've indeed got it wrong, but after your explanation in the part of your post I'm about to quote, I know it's not the case.

    @FrostCat said:

    @mott55 said there was no reason to use a password. I told him that's not true.

    Yes, you showed that when you go to great lengths to make absolutely sure that your shit won't work with the current setup unless you have a user password set, then yes, there is a reason to have one. Kinda like @ben_lubar's Cool to BIT compiler isn't exactly useless, if you're compiling for an architecture where BIT is the only option and you strongly depend on a Cool library that has no alternative in any other language.

    @FrostCat said:

    You are clear on the concept that not everyone is you, right?

    All people I know who have desktops, have them within 5 meters of their beds.

    @FrostCat said:

    "This reason doesn't apply to me" in no way argues against the statement "it's not true there's no reason for x".

    But "this is a purely hypothetical situation that won't ever happen in real life" is a sufficient counter, don't you think?

    @Polygeekery said:

    I frequently remote from my laptop to the computer in my office

    Our discussion (well, at least my half of it) is in context of @mott555's post about his home PC.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Polygeekery said:

    But, coming from that, Hyper-V on Windows 8+ just feels ancient. It feels clunky. It feels like an also-ran.

    Oh, I'm sure it's all of that. But it gets the job done for me, and since it comes with Windows, it has "I don't need to download and install it" going for it.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Gaska said:

    No, I understood it alright. It's just when you doubted in my understanding of your post, I thought I've indeed got it wrong, but after your explanation in the part of your post I'm about to quote, I know it's not the case.

    :wtf: I feel like you're having me on here. I know a bunch of Indian people who say shit just like that all the time. It almost sounds like it makes sense.

    @Gaska said:

    Yes, you showed that when you go to great lengths to make absolutely sure that your shit won't work with the current setup unless you have a user password set, then yes, there is a reason to have one

    What? You are speaking gibberish. File sharing requires a password out of the box. Not everyone has two computers but has them in the same room. Use case example: my son's computer is in his room, mine's is in the living room. His doesn't have an optical drive and I need to install something off CD. I could take apart both machines, or I could just RD into mine from his, share the CD, and install over the network. Oh, but wait, because I'm you and I don't believe in passwords, so I can neither use RD nor access the shared drive because both of those things require the user account to have a password!

    So you do what I do, and create a password of one space. And then you try to set a password hint of "one space" and Windows says no because you can't use your password in the hint, so the password hint is now "space". And it's probably still faster than having taken apart both computers to move the drive twice, and it's not only faster than running out to the store to buy a USB DVD drive, but it's cheaper.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Gaska said:

    All people I know who have desktops, have them within 5 meters of their beds.

    Even their work computers? Man, I heard the Soviets fucked up your economy, but I didn't know it was so bad that 24 years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, people still slept at work!

    @Gaska said:

    But "this is a purely hypothetical situation that won't ever happen in real life" is a sufficient counter, don't you think?

    I might think that if I didn't already know of a non-hypothetical situation because it already happened to me. Or I didn't know other people who've done the same thing.

    @Gaska said:

    Our discussion (well, at least my half of it) is in context of @mott555's post about his home PC.

    Well, your fourth of it, anyway. But then again, I wasn't talking about solely his home PC, either: I was giving reasons why someone, not necessarily him at home, might want a password.


  • Banned

    @FrostCat said:

    Unlike some here I recognize that other people have use cases not identical to mine.

    I know people are different, are working on different things and thus have different needs. But if you have a free popcorn coupon and can choose between a small box and a big box, and choose the small box, that's plain stupid. Same goes for choosing objectively and measurably inferior software product.

    @FrostCat said:

    :wtf: I feel like you're having me on here. I know a bunch of Indian people who say shit just like that all the time. It almost sounds like it makes sense.

    It seems like you've already decided that my post makes no sense to you long before you read it, possibly before I even posted it - and with such conclusion, didn't bother to even try to read it properly.

    @FrostCat said:

    What? You are speaking gibberish. File sharing requires a password out of the box. Not everyone has two computers but has them in the same room.

    Not as far as I remember. I've set up file sharing many times on Windows XP, Vista, 7, and I think 8 too. Has it changed in 8.1 or 10? Or perhaps by password, you don't mean the user password but the other one - that thing that pops up when first configuring workgroup starting with W7? Anyway - what the fuck does networking have to do with VM file sharing?


  • Banned

    @FrostCat said:

    Even their work computers?

    We weren't talking about work computers. At least I wasn't.

    @FrostCat said:

    I might think that if I didn't already know of a non-hypothetical situation because it already happened to me. Or I didn't know other people who've done the same thing.

    You had to remote into your home PC?

    @FrostCat said:

    But then again, I wasn't talking about solely his home PC, either

    Trying to be more general has the downside of becoming more detached from subject. Sometimes it works, sometimes you purposefully lose some detail that changes everything.

    @FrostCat said:

    I was giving reasons why someone, not necessarily him at home, might want a password.

    And I replied that Stockholm syndrome relationship with VM hypervisor is bullshit reason.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Gaska said:

    But if you have a free popcorn coupon and can choose between a small box and a big box, and choose the small box, that's plain stupid.

    Fine. But what if 1, the small box is already at your house and the bigger one is not, and 2, you're not going to eat all the popcorn anyway?

    @Gaska said:

    It seems like you've already decided that my post makes no sense to you long before you read it

    No, I couldn't quite understand what you were trying to say, wasn't willing to spend the time to analyze it, and since I'd already made one crack about reading skills, I thought you might possibly have been taking the joke further--it's not as if that doesn't happen here.

    @Gaska said:

    Not as far as I remember. I've set up file sharing many times on Windows XP, Vista, 7, and I think 8 too. Has it changed in 8.1 or 10? Or perhaps by password, you don't mean the user password but the other one - that thing that pops up when first configuring workgroup starting with W7? Anyway - what the fuck does networking have to do with VM file sharing?

    There's something involving sharing--maybe, admittedly, not the default simple case--that requires a password, but I can't quite remember what because I haven't done it in a long time.

    As far as VM file sharing, if you've got a VM set up with Hyper-V, you might want to use RDP instead of the Hyper-V client to access the VM. I forget why I wanted to do that now. I think it had something to do with the fact that HV can't do video acceleration but maybe RDP can? Whatever. And you cannot RDP into a machine with a no-password account (unless you change settings.) In both the cases where I needed to do this, adding a password seemed simpler/faster to do than finding and turning off the password requirement.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Gaska said:

    We weren't talking about work computers. At least I wasn't.

    I was speaking generally, so I wasn't excluding them. There are other reasons you might want a password on a home machine, too, like "other people live with you and you don't want them to get on your computer". That doesn't fit @mott55's use case either, but see my first sentence.

    @Gaska said:

    You had to remote into your home PC?

    I remoted from my son's PC into mine so I could share the DVD. I already said that. I already had a password on my own account because I was trying something with a VM.

    @Gaska said:

    And I replied that Stockholm syndrome relationship with VM hypervisor is bullshit reason.

    Hey, good thing I gave two reasons originally, then, eh? And good thing, I suppose you might say, for you that you seem to have ignored my reasons why Stockholm Syndrome doesn't necessarily apply.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @Gaska said:

    Our discussion (well, at least my half of it) is in context of @mott555's post about his home PC.

    I should clarify, my office is in my home. So...I am RDPing from my couch or patio table to my basement.


  • Banned

    @FrostCat said:

    Fine. But what if 1, the small box is already at your house and the bigger one is not

    If I were to think of popcorn as I think of software, I would try to give back the small box and replace it with the big one, because I know it will annoy me every time I'm eating it (which would be about once a week over several months or years, so yes, it matters). Of course, after you set up the password, Hyper-V doesn't annoy you anymore - but then, before you set it up, you haven't exactly brought the popcorn home yet, right?

    Popcorn analogies suck even more than car analogies.

    @FrostCat said:

    As far as VM file sharing, if you've got a VM set up with Hyper-V, you might want to use RDP instead of the Hyper-V client to access the VM. I forget why I wanted to do that now. I think it had something to do with the fact that HV can't do video acceleration but maybe RDP can?

    Okay, stop. At this point, I don't even want to know what you're doing with this VM. My head would surely explode with the amount of WTFs.


    @FrostCat said:

    I was speaking generally, so I wasn't excluding them.

    @Gaska said:
    Trying to be more general has the downside of becoming more detached from subject. Sometimes it works, sometimes you purposefully lose some detail that changes everything.


    @FrostCat said:

    There are other reasons you might want a password on a home machine, too, like "other people live with you and you don't want them to get on your computer".

    Already covered in another topic. The conclusion was I put too much trust in my closest relatives.


    @FrostCat said:

    I remoted from my son's PC into mine so I could share the DVD.

    That sounds so wrong I refuse to believe you haven't fucked up this sentence somehow. Are you sure you know what remoting in means? And how it differs from network shares?

    @FrostCat said:

    Hey, good thing I gave two reasons originally, then, eh?

    Well, the other reason doesn't apply to home PCs, so...

    @FrostCat said:

    And good thing, I suppose you might say, for you that you seem to have ignored my reasons why Stockholm Syndrome doesn't necessarily apply.

    Stupid management is bullshit reason too. In the sense that the decisions are completely irrational and there's not a single drop of merit in them.

    @Polygeekery said:

    I should clarify, my office is in my home. So...I am RDPing from my couch or patio table to my basement.

    I could clarify how I meant something slightly different than I said when talking about home PCs, but I'd rather go to sleep now. It's almost morning...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Polygeekery said:

    I should clarify, my office is in my home. So...I am RDPing from my couch or patio table to my basement.

    Is your couch/patio table more than 5 meters from your basement? Because Gaską[1] would then know one person for whom that's true!

    [1] I could @-mention you, or I could spell your name right, and I chose to not let you think I'd forgotten.


  • Banned

    @FrostCat said:

    Is your couch/patio table more than 5 meters from your basement? Because Gaską[1] would then know one person for whom that's true!

    Not really. I don't consider byte streams sent over Ethernet to be humans.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Gaska said:

    If I were to think of popcorn as I think of software, I would try to give back the small box and replace it with the big one

    But to torture the analogy even more, remember, like I said above, the small box is already in your house. So now to get the bigger one, you have to put on your shoes and a coat, dig through the couch cushions to scrounge up enough cash, walk down the block to the bus stop, and wait half an hour for the bus to the grocery store. If you lived in the Soviet Union, you'd also have to wait like 4 hours in line at the store, but that's neither here nor there. Then you gotta wait for the bus home, and oh look, it just started raining, and when you do finally get home you realize that you're not hungry enough to eat even the small box. Which I think I said before too, but less exaggeratedly.

    @Gaska said:

    Okay, stop. At this point, I don't even want to know what you're doing with this VM. My head would surely explode with the amount of WTFs.

    The only WTF is the reason I used it at all, namely "16-bit software", which is my boss' fault for not letting me get that dependency out of our toolchain. Because apparently 16-year-old software sold by a company that's been out of business for 12 years is better than open source, because who would you go to for support if you had a problem? And yes, the boss completely failed to see the irony there. As for RDP in this case, I was just playing around--I think the VM had bad graphical refresh rates so I was looking for a way to make it run better, and Googling suggested that RDP could use hardware acceleration, although it didn't help, but by that time I'd already put a password on the account and I wasn't going to bother making the effort to turn it back off because RDP will cache your password for you so in that respect it was better than Hyper-V. I think. In the end I gave up on the VM anyway and ran it off an old server with a 32-bit OS.

    @Gaska said:

    Already covered in another topic. The conclusion was I put too much trust in my closest relatives.

    I didn't see any words that look like "oh, Frost, I guess there are reasons to use a password after all, sometime", but I'll assume they were buried in subtext.

    @Gaska said:

    That sounds so wrong I refuse to believe you haven't fucked up this sentence somehow. Are you sure you know what remoting in means? And how it differs from network shares?

    Is this that hard to understand or are you being stubborn? I RDPed back into my PC from his so I could enable file sharing on the DVD in my PC. What's so bizarre about that other than being too lazy to get up and walk to the other room and back?

    @Gaska said:

    Well, the other reason doesn't apply to home PCs, so...

    Oh, I guess maybe I wasn't home when I did that, even though it was my computer and my son's computers, and not two work machines.

    You're really invested in not admitting you were wrong in spite of all evidence to the contrary, aren't you?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Gaska said:

    Not really. I don't consider byte streams sent over Ethernet to be humans.

    Dude. All that bitching in the past about your stupid little ą and you can't even drop a "thanks for using my name right?" Classy.



  • @FrostCat said:

    because who would you go to for support if you had a problem?

    What people fail to realize is that open source vs closed source doesn't affect whether you can get support for something - whether you're paying for support determines that.



  • @Gaska said:

    if you're compiling for an architecture where BIT is the only option and you strongly depend on a Cool library that has no alternative in any other language

    That would be terrifying. Plus, there's no intermediate form between Cool and assembly code, so you could just stick it in a Scala compiler and then find a BIT JVM.

    On second thought, maybe don't do that if you want to have a computer that exists sooner than a few centuries of Moore's law from now.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Polygeekery said:

    Hyper-V on Windows 8+

    Hyper-V doesn't seem like it's really intended to be used in anything other than a server environment.
    VMWare Workstation / Virtualbox are better on a desktop/laptop.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @loopback0 said:

    Hyper-V doesn't seem like it's really intended to be used in anything other than a server environment.

    Ever used it? It doesn't seem like it is intended to be used there either.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Only on a laptop where I concluded it's probably better suited to a server environment, removed it and went back to Virtualbox.



  • I have a separate ESXi system solely for virtual machines (mostly game servers). I've tried Hyper-V and VirtualBox and they suck big ones. ESXi is the only solution that has worked well.

    And you can definitely set up Windows file sharing without password protection. Some of my game servers (the Windows ones) are not password-protected and I have no trouble copying up new Space Engineers dedicated server binaries over the LAN.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @ben_lubar said:

    What people fail to realize is that open source vs closed source doesn't affect whether you can get support for something - whether you're paying for support determines that.

    Last I checked, NSIS, which was the OSS I was looking at, had stopped paid support (IIRC).

    But it was a 🐄 point anyway because, as I said, the closed source product was long dead.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @loopback0 said:

    Only on a laptop where I concluded it's probably better suited to a server environment, removed it and went back to Virtualbox.

    Yeah, try actually using it. Compared to VMWare or Xen, it is rubbish on servers also.


  • Banned

    @FrostCat said:

    But to torture the analogy even more, remember, like I said above, the small box is already in your house.

    >quote single sentence from my post
    >ignore the rest of the paragraph
    >write a long, sarcastic reply that is completely irrelevant if you were to include my whole post
    >while writing it, forget that we're actually talking about software, not popcorn, and to replace software, you don't have to go anywhere and (in this particular case) don't have to spend even a single penny on it
    >???
    >profit

    @FrostCat said:

    The only WTF is the reason I used it at all, namely "16-bit software", which is my boss' fault for not letting me get that dependency out of our toolchain. Because apparently 16-year-old software sold by a company that's been out of business for 12 years is better than open source, because who would you go to for support if you had a problem?

    That's already two WTFs: using ancient software, and insisting on unsupported software.

    @FrostCat said:

    And yes, the boss completely failed to see the irony there.

    WTF #3: your boss doesn't seem to realize that companies can go out of business. I wonder how that affects your company?

    @FrostCat said:

    As for RDP in this case, I was just playing around--I think the VM had bad graphical refresh rates so I was looking for a way to make it run better and Googling suggested that RDP could use hardware acceleration

    WTF #4: Hyper-V has bad refresh rate. WTF #5: instead of finding software that works, you used some hacks to try make the broken software at least pretend to work well enough.

    @FrostCat said:

    although it didn't help

    WTF #6: your hack didn't work.

    @FrostCat said:

    In the end I gave up on the VM anyway and ran it off an old server with a 32-bit OS.

    WTF #7: it looks like you're saying that switching to another VM software would be pointless, but what you've done is switching from VM to a physical box with real hardware, which is about the same amount of work.

    @FrostCat said:

    Is this that hard to understand or are you being stubborn? I RDPed back into my PC from his so I could enable file sharing on the DVD in my PC. What's so bizarre about that other than being too lazy to get up and walk to the other room and back?

    Well, for once, AFAIK you need to enable RDP on a computer to be able to use it, don't you? Which means you'd already have to have it enabled, or go to your computer, enable it, go back to your son, and then remote in. That, or you had it already enabled, which makes me wonder what other crazy things you've done.

    Also, despite you trying to turn me away from it, I feel obliged to comment on the extreme laziness to be required to use remote desktop rather than walk to the other room. If you aren't living in a palace and aren't disabled/too fat to walk, there's no explanation for what you did.

    Oh, and I completely forgot that you cannot remotely put the disk in the drive. There's no workaround here - you need to physically access the computer. <inb4 Mindstorms Remote Disk Inserter you built the other day>

    @FrostCat said:

    Oh, I guess maybe I wasn't home when I did that, even though it was my computer and my son's computers, and not two work machines.

    Which adds another layer of WTF to that scenario. "My son called me that he wants to install something from CD, but he doesn't have a drive in his PC. Hmm, I could share my PC's drive with him, he would insert the CD there, and it all would work. No, not letting him touch my computer. No, it can't wait until I get home. I have to do it right here, right now, using SSH I mean RDP!"

    Bonus points if you remoted into your son's computer, and only from there you remoted into yours.


  • Banned

    @ben_lubar said:

    That would be terrifying. Plus, there's no intermediate form between Cool and assembly code, so you could just stick it in a Scala compiler and then find a BIT JVM.

    On second thought, maybe don't do that if you want to have a computer that exists sooner than a few centuries of Moore's law from now.


    Sorry, I just can't read this post with a straight face, knowing it comes from the one and only Ben "ben_lubar" Lubar 😆



  • @Gaska said:

    you cannot remotely put the disk in the drive.

    Unless it's already there.

    All the disks, all the time.



  • That would neatly bypass the need for RDP to get to the CD/DVD drive on his computer, too.



  • Ugh, I can't even keep track of all the problems VirtualBox has given me. Right now, the sound in the Windows 10 VM doesn't work. I've never managed to get drag and drop working, and until recently it actually crashed the program.

    And I spent a year using an outdated version because the built-in update checker always told me it was still the latest one :facepalm:. How do you even screw this up?


  • Banned

    @anonymous234 said:

    Ugh, I can't even keep track of all the problems VirtualBox has given me.

    I can imagine. I'm not completely content with it either. For example, I cannot make Arch guest use more than one display.



  • @anonymous234 said:

    And I spent a year using an outdated version because the built-in update checker always told me it was still the latest one :facepalm:. How do you even screw this up?

    This is unfortunately too common. Unity always tells me "There's an update! Download and install it?" And if I click Yes, then it says "No updates available."


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