Matron?
Cottage hospital?
Saw you immediately?
Dare I infer that this was not within the last 20 years or so?
4685 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
The desktop reloads a lot faster from blank.
ISTR that there was a bug in Windows 2000, that caused the boot process to take a lot longer if your desktop used a solid colour rather than an image. The reason was that the boot process waited for the image decoder routine to signal that it had finished, before the rest of boot continued. No image -> no decoder -> no “finished” signal, so the boot process hung waiting for a signal that never came, until the (30s?) watchdog timer triggered and booting was forced to continue.
Replying to my own post... as is my wont, once I started hacking away in VS I got way, way too far into it.
My little Notepad.exe replacement for Windows 10/11, which started life as yes, a simple wrapper around the Win32 TextBox control, now has:
If anyone wants the source, and promises not to laugh, reply here and I'll try to throw up (that terminology is apt!) a Github page for it.
Inspired by this article and motivated in part by your comment, I fired up Visual Studio this morning. 45 minutes later, starting from scratch I had a bare-bones text editor with load/save functionality; a couple of hours after that it had a toolbar, supported user-specified fonts, dark mode (or optional custom ink/paper colours), full-screen mode for distraction-free typing, showing of non-printable characters, word-wrap, bookmarking, search, merging of files, character/line counts, automatic bulleted-list mode, and loading/saving of preferences.
No, I haven’t implemented CoPilot, tabs, or anything else :)
What I’ve written is no Notepad++ by any means, but it demonstrated to me that the basic core of what Notepad is/should-be is very, very simple.
"We are in discussions with Google to address a potential miscommunication regarding the application of their policies," a Meta spokesperson told The Register. "Upon becoming aware of the concerns, we decided to pause the feature while we work with Google to resolve the issue."
In other words, "whoops, we got caught out trying to violate the spirit if not the letter of Google's policies".
Can there have been any thought-process behind this mechanism other than "how can we continue to ID users within Google's constraints"?
Hands up anyone who will believe Meta next time they claim to take users' privacy seriously.
"Your new bundle with CoPilot is an extra $30/seat/year. Of course, we're flexible and don't want you to feel pressured - if you don't want CoPilot, your alternative is this bundle, which omits it, as well as use of the letters on the left-hand-side of the keyboard except on Wednesdays, and is very reasonably priced at an extra $100/seat/year. Entirely up to you."
Obviously I can't speak for anyone else, but the Pocket integration was always the first thing I turned off on a new Firefox installation - along with CloseWindowWithLastTab, DoH, Sponsored Shortcuts, Recommended Stories ("Exceptional content curated by the Firefox family", blegh), Suggest Search Engines, and one or two other tweaks. Which might seem like a lot to have to change, but a) it's really not, compared to the bear-wrestling that I have to do every time I am mandated to use a new Windows box, and b) at least in Firefox, I can change these settings. Forced to use Edge recently, I was shocked-not-shocked to see just how much of its blatant user-monetisation behaviour was hard-coded and out of bounds.
To (mis)quote an old Fry & Laurie sketch,
"I thought I saw something dark, vivid, and unpleasant"
"It was probably just your imagination."
(wandering off-topic, I know, but their best line was: "It was a warm summer's morning and I stopped to pick a buttercup. ...why people leave buttocks lying around, I'll never know."
That's an old trick used by vendors on Amazon marketplace. Start off selling some cheap tchotchkes, accrue lots of positive reviews ("it does everything I'd expect a $1.99 'Hello Katty' knock-off pen to do, arrived promptly"), then swap products to something that has a lot more margin. As long as the listing ID doesn't change, the existing reviews and ⭐ratings will remain with it - bang, instant reputation for your $59.99 "20TB external SSD".
I thought Amazon had closed that particular loophole, but as Upton Sinclair so memorably put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
For any readers in the Portland Oregon region - Surplus Gizmos is always awash with cheap fiber, switches, and SFP modules, not to mention surplus electronic equipment of the most esoteric sort (the fact that it's a mile down the road from several Intel manufacturing plants, an ASML site, and a half-dozen other semiconductor companies, is a clue). It's a veritable Aladdin's cave for the tech geek. I mention it because a good friend of mine works there.
Yeah, I've seen - and used - that stuff on interior corners when plastering them, but having every square inch of the wall covered in it was a new one for me. The previous owner of the house was, um, eccentric - very paranoid about security, to the extent of fitting a keypad-equipped deadbolt lock on an interior door leading to the bedrooms. Let's overlook that the door in question is a flimsy 1.5"-thick interior panel one that could be punched through by a toddler.
I am currently helping a friend with some home remodeling. His 1960s house has, in place of modern paper-backed drywall/plasterboard [delete as applicable depending on which side of the Pond you are on], something analogous but using a fine metal mesh (think chicken-wire with a ~2mm aperture) as structural backing. How he gets any wifi signal whatsoever, I don't know. The previous owner of the house had run CAT5 throughout; I am beginning to see why.
When the engine is cold it hardly blows. When the engine gets some warmth it blows hard.
On the third hand, could you please explain that principle to my wife, who, upon getting into our ICE-powered car on a cold morning, will always crank the AC temperature up to MAX, despite my patient explanation that until there is heat in the system, it doesn't matter what temperature she asks for above ambient, she's not getting it?
(And before I am accused of propagating Les Dawson-like "take my wife" humour, I'll point out that she's a former electronic design engineer who really, really should know better.)
> Also, it'll take you a minimum of two hours to write anything because the AI assistant will constantly argue about your grammar, spelling, and content.
For some reason this comes to mind…
“Hi there! This is Eddie, your shipboard computer, and I’m feeling just great, guys, and I know I’m just going to get a bundle of kicks out of any program you care to run through me. I can even work out your personality problems to ten decimal places if it will help.”
>If you have ever been to Russia you would not consider messing with the border officers.
Then things have clearly become much, much worse as Putler's grip has tightened in recent years.
I was in Moscow about 20 years ago on business. Passing through immigration - which I don't remember being much worse than in any civilized country, with the possible exception of Heathrow - we were all given an official chit of paper that had to be presented at our hotel when checking in.
We arrived at our hotel and two members of our party realized that they had somehow bypassed the necessary line, and didn't have this paper. One, a fellow Brit, was shitting the proverbial bricks, with mental images of being deported to the Gulag or even forced to eat Borscht.
The other colleague, a Pole who'd grown up under the cruelty and idiocy of the Iron Curtain (and had many, many anecdotes to tell), was far more sanguine. He had them both go back to the airport, pay the necessary bribes^H^H^Hpenalties (in hindsight, I bet that made for an interesting Expenses claim) and within the hour, both colleagues were checked in and free to pursue a life of religious fulfilment, or rather, customer technology training.
>no one (well, VMware to the reseller) won't give a quote until 30 days prior to the renewal date
Which is such a blatant "get the customer over a barrel" move that I'm amazed trade associations, national competition regulators & similar bodies haven't been screaming blue murder about it.
"We won't tell you how much the ransom is until it's waaaaaay too late for you to do anything about it".
Yes, a prudent customer could pre-empt this by prepping for & rehearsing a move to an alternative, as a fallback solution... but Broadcom clearly count on all too many C-suites vetoing such "speculative" and "unnecessary" expenditure :(