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Comment by skykooler | Hacker News Reader

"Resolution:

To resolve the issue, do not create a user account contains the string "user" on the computer."

That's not really a resolution so much as a workaround.

If the issue is happening, you cannot resolve it by not creating an account which contains the string "user". You must probably delete the account which contains "user".

That could be substantially inconvenient compared to going back in time and telling your former self not to create it.

Renaming an user account on Windows systems isn't that complicated.

In theory. In practice, probably not. Windows has a habit of leaving little droplets of history all over that come back to bite.

Best to just wipe and reinstall.

Windows itself? Not really. Third party applications that hard code the path? More likely.

Windows itself leaves the c:\users\<username> path as it was first set, even if you rename the username.

I can confirm this. Recently renamed a user as I handed off an old PC to my wife. The old directory is still there but now all the files within it are inaccessible. Caused a lot of issues!

This shouldn't happen. The directory is still there, but it also should still be your profile directory. Changing a user name shouldn't change the SID and make your files inaccessible.

Lots of things with Windows should not happen, but they do. It shouldn't forget that I have bluetooth hardware installed, but it does. Windows just (in)conveniently forgets things. Or, conversely, remembers things that should be forgotten.

A lot of weird things happen when you violate Windows' core assumptions about the file system.

Not really. Renaming the username-part of the user's home folder has all kinds of data loss potential (apps not being able to find documents, documents linked to each other etc.). Therefore Windows takes the perfectly appropriate approach of leaving the user's files named as they were. Permissions etc. all remain unchanged and allow the same renamed user access. Just the folder on disk shows the old name.

I just renamed my user, too, but I kept the same directory. No issues for the past month or so.

It's a rare operation that most people don't ever do, and so receives little testing. Certainly little testing in a real, deployed, messy system, and not just a pristine, vanilla QA image in some Microsoft Windows test bed.

Yeah, seriously. I love how their workaround is "don't do that," too.

It's actually, "do not ... have done that".

Go back in time and subtly influence your past behaviour to avoid having created an account where the username contains the word 'user'. Alternatively, upgrade to Windows 12.

Seriously. How should I have known not to name my Windows account trousersnake?

Very idiot proof indeed

aka the doctor's cure.

"Don't hold it like that"

Now Microsoft must demonstrate how other operating systems have the same problem "in a certain way"... :-)

Wouldn't be the first time:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/168702

Keep moving that mouse...

Method 2: Move Your Mouse Pointer

If you move your mouse pointer continuously while the data is being returned to Microsoft Excel, the query may not fail. Do not stop moving the mouse until all the data has been returned to Microsoft Excel.

You forgot the best part:

NOTE: Depending on your query, it may take several minutes to return the results of your query to the worksheet.

At least, this KB article correctly puts the workarounds under the "Workaround" heading. However in the KB article linked to by this post, a workaround is put under the "Resolution" heading.

And that's Microsoft saying this, officially. It's not some comment on Stack Overflow.

So does DFPCommon.dl do, anyway? Does it have something to do with "telemetry", the built-in spyware in Windows 10?

It appears to be a support library for dfp.exe, which is the "Disk Footprint Tool". I never knew it existed until now, but it seems to be a potentially quite handy utility with a purpose similar to tools like WinDirStat (but CLI only?).

So to answer your question, no, it's not part of the telemetry infrastructure. And I'll add that calling that infrastructure "spyware" is a simplistic analysis of what's a complex issue. I say that as someone who goes to great pains to turn off as much telemetry as I can across almost all applications I use.

I have a personal line that works for me to determine wether something is spyware or not:

Do I have a universal toggle to shut off all "telemetry" data? If not, then it's spyware.

If it spies on me making it difficult or impossible for me to disable the spying, then what really makes it any different from traditional malicious spyware other than the intention? (if there's any difference to begin with)

> do not create a user account contains the string "user" on the computer.

Is this sentence correct? Maybe a "that" is missing after "account", or shouldn't it be "containing" instead of "contains"?

I'm asking because English is not my native tongue.

Yes - both your suggestions are grammatically correct; the original is not.

You are correct, it seems to be missing a word. I am a native English speaker and I missed that the first time I read it!

You are correct. I suspect most native speakers miss this mistake if they're reading quickly. I did. Our brains fill in the missing word and pretend it was present.

Correct. I didn't catch it until it was pointed out.

English speakers often omit the word "that" when speaking. When I was learning Spanish, the subjunctive tense always felt strange to use. "I wish you'd do the dishes" vs "I wish that you'd do the dishes" sort of thing. This is clearly a different case but the same result of skipping the word "that" when it should really be there.

I'm not the one who downvoted you, btw, but these are different cases.

"I wish you'd do the dishes" sounds fine to most native English speakers, except those who are extremely fussy about language. Leaving out "that" in this sentence will sound wrong to most native speakers (though we can easily gloss over it when reading).

As a native speaker fussy about language, leaving out unnecessary "that"s is something I wish far more native speakers would do. I disagree the sentence sounds wrong, of course, and think including a "that" sounds far more wrong, and should only be done to disambiguate, and only if you cannot reword the sentence to resolve the ambiguity without a "that".

"I wish you'd do the dishes" is fine. Far better than "I wish that you'd do the dishes". The "that" is useless. It's contextually clear what you're wishing, with no misunderstanding.

Many "that"s hide poor sentence structure and are a sign of lazy writing/thinking. Take the following:

- I realize now I need a car.

There is some ambiguity about what exactly I mean. I could use "that" to clear things up:

- I realize that now I need a car.

- I realize now that I need a car.

But that helps me spot the problem isn't the lack of "that", it's the "now", and I subtly alter the sentence's meaning based on where I place it:

- I realize I now need a car.

- I realize I need a car now.

- I now realize I need a car.

I should pick the sentence that most clearly communicates my meaning.

I'm quite sure leaving out "that" in the given sentence is totally fine. I've been taught that you can leave out that, who, and which if the world after "that" is not a verb. If it is a verb, you can also use participle as suggested by parent (but if you use participle too often with long sentences, the sentence will become hard to understand). When using the participle, you should never use that, who, or which.

It should also be noted that leaving out "that" (if grammatical correct) can sometime sound wrong to native speakers, but that varies from accent and region since there is no standard (at least as far as I know).

Thank you for downvoting, but could you also tell me why and what I learned incorrectly?

The "that" most certainly should not be in the sentence about dishes—and by most certainly, I most certainly mean subjectively most certainly because it's just a damn awful sentence. You've given a great example of why skipping an unnecessary "that" is as important as not omitting "that" where necessary.

While the article's mistake is a result of omitting a necessary "that", this example about dishes is a case of inserting one that is ugly, unnecessary, and actually ruins the sentence flow.

My other comment to a sibling explains more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11714645

A "that" is missing, yes. Or "containing" would fix the sentence without a "that". Someone was probably either typing too quickly or edited the surrounding words and neglected to fix the result here.

That sucks for people with names like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krauser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauser_%28disambiguation%29

Also sucks for people who have legitimate reasons to use such names on shared computers. An MRI might have 3 login accounts: MRIdeveloper, MRItechnician, MRIuser.

Does Windows accept non-ASCII characters in account names? If so, you could use MRIüser.

8-)}

Only if you are trying to give the users of your MRI an aneurysm. Which is a bit of irony, I think.

I don't think you're allowed to have metal near an MRI. ;)

That sounds perfectly safe and there's nothing to worry about. (Not)

Especially annoying in a corporate user environment where user names are automatically generated following a standard format. "We upgraded to Windows 8 so now we have to rename some of our employee accounts."

Actually, the problem exists in Windows 8.1, not Windows 8.

Cause of bug: user error.

Solution: GFYS

Cause of bug: "We don't say that word" error.

Solution: Don't say that word.

What word?

The word that the Knights of Ni cannot stand to hear!

As most technet "solutions" have something todo with reinstalling the whole system, this seems a pretty good "solution" to me.

The "solution" is deleting the user and migrating all their stuff to another account. That's not really better than a re-install.

No, you can just rename the user account.

thats like a whole hour less work. praise the operating system gods because this is as efficient as it gets.

Oddly, I've used the username "user" on multiple windows 8 installations and I've never had this happen.

Next up: it's a feature, not a bug.

Windows 10 already says this, but with a different definition of bug.

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