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.
Posts by fedoraman
188 posts • joined 6 Apr 2011
Windows 11 in detail: Incremental upgrade spoilt by onerous system requirements and usability mis-steps
Microsoft's problem child, Windows 11, is here. Will you run it? Can you run it? Do you even WANT to run it?
Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone
With apologies to HG-
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.
Windows 11: Meet the new OS, same as the old OS (or close enough)
Was going to be Windows 10 forever?
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.....
Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language
Can a 21.5-inch iMac beat the latest-and-greatest M1 model in performance? Kinda
Home Office slams PNC tech team: 'Inadequate testing' of new code contributed to loss of 413,000 records
We’ve found them! Govt reinstates records previously missing from the Police National Computer
43 years and 14 billion miles later, Voyager 1 still crunching data to reveal secrets of the interstellar medium
Chrome release cycle accelerated to four-weekly frenzy
KDE maintainers speak on why it is worth looking beyond GNOME
Re: The "Problem" with Linux
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!
After IBM axed its face-recog tech, the rest of the dominoes fell like a house of cards: Amazon and now Microsoft. Checkmate
Gone in 9 seconds: Virgin Orbit's maiden rocket flight went perfectly until it didn't
Rust marks five years since its 1.0 release: The long and winding road actually works
It's official: In May, Microsoft will close the door, lock the vault, brick over the entrance of dreaded Windows 10 1809
Linux in 2020: 27.8 million lines of code in the kernel, 1.3 million in systemd
Long-term Linux Mint: 19.3 release unchains the Gimp, adds HiDPI, is kind to your older, less-beefy kit
Re: Gimp
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.
Are you writing code for ambient computing? No? Don't even know? Ch-uh. Google's 'write once, run anywhere' Flutter is all over it
Engineer grumbles and user gripes do little to slow down Nadella's trillion-dollar Microsoft

Why.....
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>
Firm fat-fingered G Suite and deleted its data, so it escalated its support ticket to a lawsuit
Frustrated Brits can dump mobile providers by text as of today
Must watch: GE's smart light bulb reset process is a masterpiece... of modern techno-insanity
Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike
Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Boffins discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater
Need a Ferranti Pegasus board in your life? Brit computing history could be yours for four figures
Go, go, Gadgets Boy! 'Influencer' testing 5G for Vodafone finds it to be slower than 4G
Secret mic in Nest gear wasn't supposed to be a secret, says Google, we just forgot to tell anyone
London's Gatwick airport suspends all flights after 'multiple' reports of drones
Doom: The FPS that wowed players, gummed up servers, and enraged admins
Expired cert... Really? #O2down meltdown shows we should fear bungles and bugs more than hackers
Naked women cleaning biz smashes patriarchy by introducing naked bloke gardening service
OM5G... Qualcomm teases next Snapdragon chip for phones: The 855 with a fingerprint Sonic Screwdriver, er, Sensor
CubeSat buddies, like those sent to track Mars InSight landing, can be used in future missions
NASA has Mars InSight as latest lander due to arrive today
What the #!/%* is that rogue Raspberry Pi doing plugged into my company's server room, sysadmin despairs
Sorry, but NASA says Mars signal wasn't Opportunity knocking
If Shadow Home Sec Diane Abbott can be reeled in by phishers, truly no one is safe
Windows XP? Pfff! Parts of the Royal Navy are running Win ME

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.