Posts by David 132 5506 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
strapping an electrical device to my privates
For some reason that recalled to my mind the scene in Tom Sharpe's Indecent Exposure where the (South African) police constables are given aversion therapy to stop them fraternizing with the native girls - by strong electric shocks delivered every time they get aroused, as a carousel of attractive females is shown on the slide projector.
Which goes awry when the person in charge of loading the slide projector accidentally loads it with his holiday snaps from a safari trip - leading to the immortal line from one of the constables, something like "Please god no, I swear I'll never look at another giraffe again!!!"
Really must re-read that book. It's been 30+ years and I'm sure I've misremembered the details.
A reboot to install updates, I kind of tolerate (yeah, you're right, Windows has conditioned us to accept a low bar).
However, what really, really makes me lose my rag, blow my top, and consider committing extroverted suicide (aka "murder"), is the way Windows 10 just reboots without asking, once it detects you've left your PC unattended for a certain time. The number of occasions on which I've come back to my PC, only to find all my applications and documents have been closed/vanished because it decided a reboot to install the latest version of Edge ("pleeeeeeeeeeease use our browser, if we reset your defaults from Firefox to Edge enough times we'll persuade you, right?") was more important than my productivity.
Icon is what I'd like to do to the morons at Microsoft who sanctioned this.
Fair points in theory, but in the real world they collide with human nature, which is this: (many) people instinctively don’t like to be tracked. Which in the IT world tends to mean the most tech-savvy people, who will then go out of their way to disable/block any attempts at telemetry.
End result? You only get telemetry from the users who are too oblivious/naïve/uncaring to disable it.
So your telemetry tells you “huh, our users are generally ok with telemetry, and don’t use the advanced features of our software”… and you ramp up the former, and dial back the latter… and the end result is Windows 11.
Yes, the 3570 is 3rd gen (the "3" in the model number).
For those who don't know, ark.intel.com is a great decoder for the sometimes-cryptic model numbering of Intel's CPUs (and lists all other products too). Just type the model number into the site's search box and get all the specs.
“The web itself was born and grew up on Windows” – Satya Nadella, Windows 11 announcement
Indeed. Didn't Sir TB-L do his early development of the WWW on a NeXT cube? Bit rich of Nadella to be retrospectively rewriting history like that. War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength. We have always been at war with Oceania...
Indeed. Honestly, compared to the standard level of response on the Microsoft support forums, the answer quoted seems positively great. It was relevant to the enquiry, and didn’t attempt to have the complainer run sfc /scannow, reinstall Windows, or any of the dozen other completely useless things that the MS “support” staff inevitably suggest.
What gets me is, why do all Microsoft's attempts to provide "news" (IE / Edge MSN default homepage, the new Windows 10 taskbar News Feeds) inevitably look like a trashy would-be "Hello!" magazine? Always seems to be dumb tittle-tattle about C-list 'slebs and irrelevant Gawker-level "top 10 things you didn't know about sponge" shite.
Grrrr.
Damn, I must be old as well, because I immediately "got" that reference. That was the TP provided when I was in junior school, Oop North of England. Well, Cheshire. (Which was much less civilized and premiership-footballer-ey back then.)
Even 8-year-old-me thought it was appalling, and at the time I struggled to tell the difference between the Izal and my mum's grease-proof baking paper. Eventually decided that the difference was that the latter would be softer and more absorbent on my posterior.
New service idea... Twitter / Facebook / Instagram - by-Post!
Want to post content to any of those services? Worried about viruses? Solved!
Simply mail us a print-out of your posting (up to 3 sheets of 80gsm A4 supported), and we will post it online for you. Responses will in turn be printed out and mailed to you by 1st-class Royal Mail within 3-4 weeks.
You may also be interested in our G-Mail service - no, not what you're thinking of - it's Google-by-Mail. Send us a postcard or fax with your search query, and we'll post you back the results, neatly printed out onto A4, within 28 working days.
We're still working out the kinks in our Youtube service - bulk freight rates for shipping 30 sheets of A4 per second of video are extortionate and we're not certain the market will support them...
Satya Nadella made a very revealing slip, accidental or otherwise, the other day - one which neither this article nor any of these comments seem to have picked up on.
Describing his own experience of the new Windows version, he said something along the lines of "I have been self-hosting it for a while...". What an odd turn of phrase. "I have been using it", "I've had it running on my systems", sure. But "self-hosting"? Makes me fear that this new version will be much more SaaS-y than even Windows 10. Maybe a small stub installed on the PC, and everything else loaded in from The All-Mighty-Cloud as and when you^H^H^HMicrosoft decide it's needed? I fear it's going to make Adobe's rent-as-you-go model look like a paragon of old-fashioned perpetual licence virtue.
Time to be afraid?
I find your ideas intriguing (and would like to subscribe to your newsletter, etc etc.)
Software versioning should be much more poetic, à la Chinese imperial court. Who here would not want to be able to say, "I am running Firefox The-Delicate-Scent-of-Hibiscus-Blossoms-After-Spring-Rain"? (Such a person would be out of date by the end of the sentence, of course, Firefox's release cadence being what it is, but that's a whole 'nother gripe.)
Well as we're on the subject of Aussie humour, may I recommend, for those who haven't yet seen it, the wonderful Clarke and Dawe discussing how the front fell off!
I got temporarily sorta-banned (read: every one of my comments was flagged for manual review before it would post) several months ago, on the grounds that I'd posted a correction in a comment thread rather than use the corrections@ email link.
The annoying thing was that my "offending" post wasn't actually a correction - it was a (weak, admittedly) joke along the lines of "hey El Reg, this article's headline says Office 365, shouldn't it actually say Office 359-and-a-half-and-decreasing?"
I'm not bitter, cos I got reinstated after I politely explained the situation.
But yeah, use the corrections@ email link. To err is human, and no-one likes having their flubs called out in public, Vultures least of all.
Doesn't worry me. My connection to the internet these days is via a pool of over a dozen Pace Linnet 1200/75 modems. Hayes Compatible ones, no less.
I've almost finished downloading Windows ME and plan to upgrade to it this weekend. I do hope Microsoft haven't come out with anything newer in the meantime.
