Posts by David 132 5506 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
Honestly, I'm just surprised no-one has brought up the subject of Danube steamboat captains and their administrative arrangements yet.
Allow me:
"Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft"
Beer, because Friday, Germany, and sunshine.
I installed v2004 on my main PC yesterday. Breaking a lifetime habit - wait for other people to encounter the bugs, David, no sense rushing in, you won't gain anything...
Well, so far, not too bad. Most things still work.
On the downside, see my rant elsewhere on this page about the *&^@! Web Search feature, which just won't take a hint and die already.
Oh, and I had the Winaero "Windows 7 Games for Windows 10" pack installed, in order to get my Freecell fix. Well, Microsoft silently uninstalled that (presumably, in order to protect me?) without so much as a notification, which was so very nice of them. I was able to reinstall it and it works just fine, so I can only assume that what they were protecting me from was card games that don't have adverts in them. At least they didn't try to reset my default browser choice for once.
Be warned - if, like many other people, you have disabled the utterly pointless Web Search in the Start Menu - it's back in v2004. This latest release completely ignores all those CortanaConsent and BingWebSearchEnabled registry keys and system policies that you carefully implemented, and with a loud "fuck you, we know best" re-enables web search. Good job Microsoft, because when I hit the Start menu and type "show icons" I'm obviously wanting to search the web for icons inspired by my favorite Broadway shows - there's no possible way I'd be looking for the specific Windows setting on my local PC to show/hide specific desktop icons... *rolls eyes*
Anyway, rant aside, the latest way to disable the benighted web search is to set HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\[DWORD]DisableSearchBoxSuggestions=1. Which also kills command history on the Win+R Run box, but I guess that's acceptable collateral damage. And so the game of whack-a-mole continues.
Microsoft, get this into your heads - many of us do not want to search the web from the Start Menu, and certainly not using your pathetic Bong search engine. That's what browsers are for. Give it up already.
Upvoted purely for mentioning the baby-eating Bishop of Bath and Wells. The great Ronald Lacey, who - trivia fans - was also the nasty Nazi in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark who gets the medallion burned into his palm.
And while we're on the subject of that episode of Blackadder, the portrait painter Mr Leonardo Acropolis was played by Philip Pope, who was Grasientus in Chelmsford 123. A factoid of zero interest to any of you, I'm sure, but it gave me a "I knew he looked familiar!!" moment a couple of years ago...
I call BS on your answer... Microsoft don't normally bother being so clear and concise, an actual response would be something like:
"Hello my name is _____, I am a Microsoft support specialist, I understand that you are having a problem doing <repeat customer's exact words here with no indication of actual comprehension>.
First, please run SFC /scannow and re-install all Windows files.... (long list of utterly irrelevant and pointless suggestions skipped for brevity)
Finally, f___ you."
Well, not entirely. Hardware-based remote control like Intel's vPro AMT system will give you full remote control/viewing of the target system via Ethernet or WiFi, regardless of OS & power state, provided it's been configured first. Super handy for remote Helldesk duties.
-fake lcd crack
Back in the days of CRT screens, the thing to do was to create a 5px x 4px .BMP using Paint, and set every pixel to the standard Windows teal desktop color apart from the top-right one, which was set to magenta.
Set the bitmap as the desktop wallpaper, stretched to the screen size, and Windows would obligingly dither the single magenta pixel into a very convincing simulacrum of a badly discolored and expensively distorted CRT phosphor...
I have an AutoIt script, inspired by an old Verity Stob article ("Cruft Scale") that idles for N seconds (where 20<N<240), then jumps the mouse pointer an inch to the left, before going back to lurking again until the next time. I put it on PCs I build for people. It only activates if a particular filename is found in User's downloads folder.
I'm left wondering what do patent trolls tell their kids / grand kids that they do for the their day job and what do their kids think about that
I believe that, per the old joke, they tell their kids they play piano in a brothel... because there’s some shameful adult things you just can’t tell kids.
When this "$ENTITY_I_HATE doesn't pay enough tax" argument is advanced by someone who voluntarily pays more tax each month/year to their government than they're required to (as in, "I owe £X tax, but please Mr Government, take £2X from me!") and doesn't avail themselves of, for example, the personal tax-free allowance, deductions, ISAs etc, then I might listen to it. Until then, it's just the bitter, resentful whining of the green-eyed monster.
its own bylaws including an entire section on transparency that states it “shall operate to the maximum extent feasible in an open and transparent manner.”
Yeah. Always beware of any organization that feels it has to boast about making special efforts to do what should come naturally and automatically and without "look at me, I'm being super honest and trustworthy!!" fanfare.
To quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons"...
I cheat and run my old Workbench desktop environment under WinUAE. The Sysinfo benchmark reacts hilariously when it's running on top of a modern CPU (the "your performance" comment reads "Phone me NOW!!!!!", when it finds that you somehow have a system that runs at 94x the speed of an A4000/40). I have many of the games you mention and a few of my old apps (I made the cover disk of Amiga Format - by golly, that made me feel smug for a long time). Although I am embarassed to admit that a clock I wrote in '94 isn't Y2K compliant and reports this year as "120". Darn it.
Funny you should mention Flanders and Swann. Here at mi casa, Mrs. David132 has decreed that this is the perfect time to have major structural work undertaken on part of the house. And for the last couple of days we've had the plasterers in. Except that in this part of the world they refer to it as "mud".
Prompted by this new fact, I burst into a spontaneous rendition of "The Hippopotamus" (as in, "Mud, Mud, glorious mud...").
I got two very puzzled looks. Bunch of bloody uncultured barbarians.
