Re: Ah the memories...
"Hey MS... look customer feedback!"
MS: You think we care?
32768 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Let's not forget the guerrilla marketing of upgrades. Each new version could read what an older version had written but not vice versa so that needing to read a document you might receive from someone on a later version forced you to buy an upgrade and in turn force upgrades onto anyone on an older version to whom you might then send a document.
That game stopped when a requirement for standardisation was forced on Microsoft.
What do do next?
Subscriptions, of course.
You'll find the usage embedded in those online bastions of US language, the University of Cambridge dictionary, the Collins English dictionary, and no doubt, if I could bother walking across the room for my 1950ish Pocket Oxford, in there too.
And then in the Oxford edition of Fowler, the introduction quotes a 1911 letter from Fowler to his publishers:
"Not but what we may be of some use to the foreigner who knows English pretty well"
"You've missed out the bit about where Spain did no cost-benefit analysis (FWIW) on the programme before starting, and after the programme finished were unable to supply EU authorities with any information about how much the programme had cost."
Give or take the EU bit that sounds much like any UK govt I can recall.
AFAICS this is an agreement for a flight to be sponsored by commercial partners who are not only as yet unannounced but might not even have volunteered and with no announced objectives to be achieved in orbit. What is the point apart from PR the cost of which might very likely fall on UK taxpayers?
"It passed over several times a day for a while one summer, early 70's I suppose."
We had a few sonic booms in Belfast when they were flying along the Irish Sea. Later sitting in the queue for a runway at Heathrow and there was one several places in front of us taking off. Our own pilot over the PA was quite enthusiastic about it. My flight, of course was just a hop back to Belfast.
"but it's very difficult to find a Linux desktop GUI that Just Works"
Oddly enough, IME the difficulty of a desktop that Just Works lies with Windows.
You need to realise that there are several Linux distros that are good for production - they get name-checked here often enough.
There are a lot of others which, I think, exist for various reason (such as Neon which exists to showcase the current KDE desktop) of because someone has there own idea of what an OS should be with Linux providing a good base on which to do that and the GPL providing encouragement. Unless one of these latter chimes with your own idea of what an OS should be like you can ignore them.
"But, they're already living in a hell of their own making where they need the validation of others to reassure them that their choice is the correct one."
Validation?
Let me tell you a little story. Some years ago I bought an ex-display W10 laptop, created a Windows reinstall image on a USB* stick and blew it away to install Linux. After a few years I decided I really needed a bigger screen so bought a new laptop. As the old Linux installation was now redundant I decided to reinstall W10 & then add Linux as dual boot.
A number of attempts at reinstalling failed. Eventually I discovered it would work if I switched off secure boot. Not very impressive given that it's MS who is so in favour of this. Ho hum.
The reinstalled image would complain about a mis-matched dll for OneDrive or words to that effect. No amount of updating cleared it. Not that I wanted OneDirve, it was just an annoying pop-up. In the meantime I marvelled at Windows Updates: how could it be so slow? Why did it trip over its own feet so often? Why did it need so many reboots? And why did it seem to want to keep installing what appeared to be the same update for an Intel display driver? Eventually, BTW, the OneDrive message went away. Nevertheless it gave the impression of being a lumbering system written by a corporation that doesn't understand the difference between Just Works** and Only Just Works***. I am amazed that anyone thinks that this crud is a viable operating system to do real work.
I have to admit that a few updates did go smoothly. But I made a post on the thread referring to this month's Patch Tuesday saying I'd checked the speed for a fairly large batch of Devuan updates against that of W10. I failed to do that. The Devuan went smoothly, of course, although unusually it said "update at your inconvenience", not just because of a new kernel but also because of a new daemon. This is unusual because most services are simply stopped and restarted if there's a new version of the daemon but the DBus daemon obviously needs starting before a lot of other. No problem. But the reason I failed is because the W10 update has completely crapped itself. I've had it run long disk-checks and all manner of other stuff but it's still firmly wedged with an error code that's not the one that's widely cited. I've tried the RestoreHealth trick to no avail so it looks like a complete reset is going to be needed.
So validation? I need no validation to tell me why I run Linux. I have a direct comparison between that, a completely reliable OS, and a hell of Microsoft's making.
* If the H/W proves faulty it would be preferable to take it back to the shop running an OS the shop understands - providing it's not so faulty the OS is invisible.
** Debian or, these days, Devuan
*** Windows 10 - some of the time.
By way of contrast a client of mine had all the disks (a lot because back then disk sizes were small) mirrored at the controller and then mirrored the mirrored pairs in S/W. 4 physical drives for each logical drive.
We didn't have disk failures but the tape drive for the overnight backups need changing at least a couple of times while I was on that gig.