Posts by fedoraman 188 posts • joined 6 Apr 2011
Hmm, not sure I wholly agree. But matters of taste aside, one thing I really find hard on Windows 10 is windows that have no border. If you have one window overlaid on another, its really hard to see where one ends and others begin. The Windows calculator is a particular example of this, say when you open it to do a small calculation whilst working on a document.
No one would have believed in the last first years of the nineteenth twenty-first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
Yet across the gulf of space Sea of Japan, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
They skipped Windows 9, to get to Windows 10, and then it was going to be ten - forever? No more upgrade cycles, just a continuous gradual improvement? Didn't last so long, it seems.
And by the way, Windows 10 might not break, as such, but its far, far from nice. How about collecting all the scattered control options back into the Control Panel, mmmm? And maybe a consistent skinning? Its fun to see those old style (but to me, nice) dialog boxes and panels pop up from time to time. Windows 7 is not dead, its still in there, somewhere.....
Yes, I found the shock of moving from KDE 3 to 4 very abrupt too, from a mature-seeming environment that you almost didn't notice (the mark of a good GUI to me) to one where you were constantly brought up short, where things no longer worked, and KDE just got in the way of you doing your work.
However, it has slowly matured, and though I greeted the change from 4 to 5 with similar trepidation, I have to say that its good, again.
I'm now running KDE Neon, and it feels great. Its fairly quick even on a cheap Celeron/SSD laptop, looks good, and doesn't get in the damn way all the time!
Gimp seems to typify an concept of software design that says "All software must be as hard as possible to use", and "we wrote it, now its up to YOU to figure out how to use it". Never got on with it. Only today have I learned that you can't create images in it. Well, that might explain a lot of the trouble I had, then.
Its the random switching between modes that gets me, TIFKAM still lurks not far beneath the surface, and when it reappears its horribly jarring. And why must the "File" menu on Office applications look so fucking shite? Its awful! And why can't windows have borders anymore, you have to hunt really hard to see where your window edge stops and the desktop begins. Yes, I'm an old fart. In my day, windows had visual clues as to where they began and ended, it really saved the cognitive load in trying to work out what the hell you were looking at!
Ahem.
</rant>
I think you'll find that everything up to WinXP didn't use an activation server. The product key was simply checked to see if it was legitimate. I don't know for sure, but expect, that there was some way to transform the key and see if it belonged to the group of allowable keys for that product. I remember that keygens were available for many bits of software, once the valid-key-generating algorithm was reverse-engineered.
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022
