Posts by bombastic bob

Keen to go _ExtInt? LLVM Clang compiler adds support for custom width integers

Re: What am I missing?

"What's wrong with that?"

you used K&R bracing style. (use Allman style instead - more readable!)

Re: Sounds like a good idea

C already has bit-size designators within a structure, like

struct thingy

{

unsigned int nine_bit:9;

};

etc. - it'll get padded out to a power of 2 [probably native word size] but you can modify that with packing and so on.

Thing is, as I understand this can cause a bit of trouble with endian-ness so it's almost a YMMV kind of thing. As a result I end up hard-implementing the non-standard integer types with macros so that it's consistent regardless of integer size or endian-ness. [portable structure definitions that compile on x86, amd64, ARM, _and_ an Arduino, using those binary structures to transfer data back/forth between all of those]

having the designated _ExtInt support would probably help a LOT.

Google says no more shady anonymous web ads – if you want your billboard up, you've got to show us some valid ID

Re: Excellent - Hopefully will also exptend to Android App developers too (Like Apple do)

Unless I totally misinterpreted what you wrote...

Please do NOT encourage Android to LOCK DOWN like Apple, unlesse it's just for the use of google ad services. One of the BIGGEST advantages of Android development is the ability to load YOUR APK on ANY Android device, if the end-user jumps through a couple of minor hoops, WITHOUT their "store" in between - that and FREE DEV TOOLS.

But yeah - locking down the AD NETWORK, which goes through google's ad services as I understand it, THIS would probably be a GOOD thing.

Re: Tweets Included

yeah, ain't it the truth?

On occasion, for issues that I could vote either way on, I base my decision on who has the more irritating ads... (or worst behavior in public). THAT side gets the "no" vote.

Re: A Good Step

"I doubt that I could prove it with a DNA test as Warren did."

Uhh... you think Warren *PROVED* Native American heritage? Her DNA test was STATISTICALLY ZERO, less than 0.1% as I recall. That would be at LEAST 10 generations of separation, if I do my math correctly (if it's actually _THAT_ _HIGH_). That as opposed to *me* who DOES have Native American ancestry [Taos tribe from New Mexico, as well as others], and my late uncle once did a geneology study and traced the family tree back to the REAL Pocahontas. yeah no kidding!

Warren is NOT a Native American. It was a LIE, and she did it to get into Harvard. You cannot trust ANYTHING she says. You know she's LYING when her mouth opens.

Re: A Good Step

A quick search led to this:

https://corp.delaware.gov/agents/

So a Delaware corporation needs to have a "registered agent" for service of subpoenas, etc. If this is NOT being properly enforced, then a U.S. Federal lawsuit needs to be filed to change this...

In any case if this pertains to the "payer of the ads", and Delaware corporations _ARE_ that shady by definition, you could simply reject doing business with ANY entity incorporated there. [and if that becomes a widespread response, Delaware will have to modify their policies]

However, because I know that many people have opinions about corporations being inherently evil, etc. and aren't familiar with setting one up and what the legal requirements are [in the USA anyway], I'd just like to say that it's probably NOT as bad as you might think.

(IANAL but I've had to deal with them from time to time)

Re: A Good Step

yeah ICANN seems to (at least in the past) accept just about ANY unverified contact information, at least in my opinion...

Not quite the same as what Google appears to want to do.

Re: A Good Step

"won't tell you which oil company owns them"

It might take some digging, but as a general rule, every corporation should have registered a human to which you can send a subpoena, with the state that gives them corporate status.

I would expect UK law to be similar.

You might have to do some digging, but it SHOULD be possible to get to the bottom of ANY shadow corporation that's inside the USA. For foreign corporations, not so much... (but that's when the red light should come on and warn you it's possibly manipulative or an outright hoax).

Re: A Good Step

right, and for political ads, regardless of the content, they could require that the funder identify himself and/or the organization. then let them say "whatever".

But somehow I doubt it's the way Senator (*cough*) Warren, the senator from Massachusetts that once claimed to be Native American to get affirmative action favoritism, claims it is. She HAS been known to, uh, STRETCH facts to her own favor (read: LIE) after all... [but we can determine this ourselves, without the need of NANNY ISP to do it FOR us, thank you]

In any case, let's just stop the censorship in ALL directions, and JUST let us know who's paying for it.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Light-powered nanocardboard robots dancing in the Martian sky searching for alien life

Re: Pollution

the first step towards terra-forming?

Re: Biochemical Analyser

it could be called the Gene Hunt.

And if we listen for sounds we could name it after his made-up brother "Mike"

(fridge moment... wait for it... wait for it... wait for it... GOTCHA! - Coat please!)

Re: How do you talk to them?

martian base station(s) from which they fly and through which they communicate. like a cell tower, sorta.

Re: "third of a milligram"

weighs 35mg today. You don't need anything _THAT_ complex, by the way. And for thermal considerations, you could mount it to the 'cold side' and only burst it. average power in nanowatts, let's say, with 10's of watt bursts and a very very very tiny duty cycle, powered by a supercap and a solar charger. Also need power for sensors, too, so you factor all that in.

_NOT_ impossible. Just difficult.

Re: "third of a milligram"

using a super-capacitor, some kind of solar charger, etc. you could set up a "burst broadcaster" to transmit data [as long as it isn't too complicated]. Repeat it a whole lot and allow for unreliable reception and you can collect data.

To receive commands, you could cycle your receiver to turn on at periodic intervals with randomization, and listen for a broadcasted signal during the 'on' time. Listen long enough, and repeat the signal often enough (or make it continuous) and you can command the things, although somewhat unreliably.

Just a thought. Make it a 'swarm' and just keep using them until you run out of bots [design lifetime of the system].

Actually... this tech kinda reminds me of BALLOONS...

GCC 10 gets security bug trap. And look what just fell into it: OpenSSL and a prod-of-death flaw in servers and apps

Re: El Reg (or the readership) really has changed

"We don't think you're dumb. But I don't want to assume everyone knows what GCC is."

see icon

Re: El Reg (or the readership) really has changed

"I have no problem with acronyms being explained, even if I already know them."

ack, but there are always those who *FEEL* as if an explanation is "beneath them" or insulting. Sometimes, to preclude that with hyper-snowflake types, you can include a funny joke like "Captain Obvious knows ..."

Or whatever. Yeah, I hate that TOO. Happens a lot. People who get bent out o' shape seeing an explanation are snobby snowflakes. 'Nuff on that, yeah.

(making readership into an "exclusive club" where ONLY THE INSIDERS UNDERSTAND THINGS is NEVER a good thing, and I bet n00bs are CONSTANTLY being added to the readership)

llvm already had it - thought so

I remember seeing something uncovered in a kernel module by a new feature in llvm nearly a year ago. I forget exactly what it was, [it was an nvidia driver module compiled for FreeBSD] but it spat out some warnings I hadn't seen before. The updated version didn't have those warnings, though. But the older compiler didn't show those warnings, so I guess it was added last year some time.

Yeah, It's all good. I should add this flag to my own stuff, check for it in the configure script

If you want to take social distancing to the next level, and go to the Moon, take this: A complete lunar geology map

Re: The mad paintball warrior strikes again.

if rare earth elements are present in large enough concentration, it might make sense to mine them there.

(I checked the high res map for rabbits, didn't find any)

Yes, there's lots of COVID-19-themed scuminess around – but otherwise the level of cybercrime is the same

Re: This is bullshit.

well, I'm seeing a LOT more spam in my e-mail. I have Fail2Ban running also, and some pretty strong user/password combinations on ssh to protect against dictionary-based attacks [cryptic user names do help a bit]. So it might be entertaining to see if Fail2Ban is catching anything worth my time to make a "special friend" out of...

Seriously, though, spam HAS increased, and the usual scams, many of which _are_ corona-virus-related.

AWS rolls out 'Linux 2 Ready' scheme to lure penguins into using its homegrown distro

Re: Already ready

2.4 was a really stable kernel during the mid to late noughties, used on many wifi routers. may still be...

and it was *cough* OPEN SOURCE as it should be. [ok linksys had some BLOBs but necessarily for some, like the wifi driver - but their config app was also pre-compiled as a BLOB, which was a little irritating in some ways]

Not sure what's going on with the whole "Linux 2" distro NOT publishing source directly... don't all of the OTHER derived Linux distros have their own repos?

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

Re: Better

YES!

Re: This is exactly what the internet was designed for

maybe just bite the bullet with a) a browser that destroys all history/cookies/cache on exit, and b) 10 minute e-mail address

(assuming the video is worth watching...)

/me wonders if youtube-dl will download it ANYWAY

["restricted content" usually means pr0n and THAT would make sense, as a joke]

Re: Death to Flat Style !

from the article:

But if there is a particular bit of Windows 98 UI design that needs to come back in 2020

How about 3D SKEUOMORPHIC!

(I would like VERY much to say "IT IS HAPPENING" but not *quite* enough activity for THAT claim... yet)

I should look at this and see what could be ported over to FIREFOX'S CSS somehow...

Python 2 bows out after epic transition. And there was much applause because you've all moved to version 3, right? Uh, right?

Re: Repeat Offenders?

"As if C++ could be trusted to always compile with the newer version of the compiler"

at least with the C++ compilers I work with you can specify whether or not the new language features should be implemented, i.e. "-std=c++14" for C++14 features

making it similar for python - that'd be nice!

Re: Repeat Offenders?

"can the Pythonistas be trusted to not do this ever again? It’s been fairly off putting."

No. Good point.

Re: lol

Django? I had to deal with that, at one time. *shudder* - it re-defines new levels for BLOATware.

My solution to MANY of the problems it CAUSED by Django (and bad python code) was to write C language utilities to do REAL work with reasonable performance, and then call the programs from the Django Python code [instead of trying to gerrymander Python code] and not only made it work properly [from the user perspective], but made it way more than 10 times faster in the process. That code should NEVER have been done in Python to begin with...

It was also the first time I'd seen upstream feature creep break an installation. I figured out how to force Pip to ONLY load specific versions of things to prevent breakage, just so I could work on it. It was sad.

Re: lol

I have a suggestion: why NOT add backwards compatibility BACK INTO THE LANGUAGE?

You know, like a COMPATIBILITY MODE ???

can't be THAT hard...

(or, is it MORE important to WIELD CONTROL and FORCE DEVELOPERS to "do things the new way" ???)

WHY make the older code IN-compatible like this?

I saw THIS which explains SOME of it... but it does NOT explain why there isn't a "backward compatible" setting of some kind.

This seems to be one of those things that came about in the mid to late naughties, after which a bunch of VERY ARROGANT DEVELOPERS over the next few years just "DECIDED" - culminating in gnome 3, Australis, 2D FLATTY Windows 8, systemD, Pulse Audio, and of course the changes in Python 3 - they "JUST DECIDED" that ALL OF US MUST CHANGE and do things THEIR WAY!!!

And of course, it *WAS* *RESISTED*, to the point of forking gnome 2 into Mate, creating Linux distros withOUT SystemD, and "forcing" the extension of the life of Python 2.7 ...

maybe a FORK is in order? [are there enough people to support such a thing?]

I don't do a lot of Python coding and so I may just deal with it and do things "the 3.x" way, but it might be nice to be able to write old-style code, which I had gotten used to, using a "compatibility" flag.

Academics: We hate to ask, but could governments kindly refrain from building giant data-slurping, contact-tracing coronavirus monsters?

Re: And the non-centralised approach

"And yet, countries that have implemented a variant of this (e.g. Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea) have had far less problem with COVID-19 than others."

Sorry, this is a FALSE conclusion. Singapore and Taiwan are also VERY close to China and have had a LOT of back/forth travel.

As has CALIFORNIA, which (surprise, surprise) does NOT have a very high infection or hospitalization rate, especially when compared to New York City.

And California has had a TON of travel back/forth with China. Case in point: a company I do contract work for [up until the shutdown affected their customers so much THEY had to shut down, too] had sent engineers to China to correct some quality problems, and when they got back I was in the office. One guy got sick and had to go home [fever, coughing]. I joked with him about "infecting everybody" and guess what - a week later [working from home] I had a fever, and then my (adult) kid got a fever, and then I had another fever (the reported 'relapse'?). And each time it was mild, and went away fast. Was that the Wuhan virus? Probably. At that time California was reporting an unusually bad flu season, but of course nothing its hospitals could not handle [which has been demonstrated over the last MONTH or so, "social distancing" notwithstanding, and California's governor started giving away ventilators a while ago].

But of course, politicians and advocates of CONTROLLING THE POPULATION like this will CLAIM it was "the social distancing" but if this virus HAD BEEN AROUND FOR 3 MONTHS BEFORE ANY SOCIAL DISTANCING then HOW could it be "the factor" ??? I say it was NOT. Most likely it was either a gross overestimation of the Wuhan virus' behavior, OR some level of herd immunity [being exposed to similar kinds of viruses a LOT due to travel to/from China], or perhaps both. And, MUCH lower death rates because U.S. health systems are better than China's overall...

Same for Taiwan, Singapore, and other nations in the pacific rim. I expect their health systems to be up to par with USA, UK, etc., as another factor in this.

As for Italy and NYC, there may be a commonality THERE that causes them to be affected MORE than other places. Italy certainly had the frequent travel to/from China, but not so much NYC. However, NYC has a LOT of public transportation usage, and a high density population.

I mentioned the Stanford study before. As they continue their research, we'll get to the truth on this.

In any case, check out the REAL commonalities here. With at least ONE good counter example, "draconian anti-privacy phone app tracking" isn't the factor.

Re: And the non-centralised approach

that's two hundred people before you show symptoms - if you ever show any.

The numbers from a compelling Stanford University survey [as reported by the S.F. Chronicle recently] says that the infection rate of the Wuhan virus could be 50 to 85 TIMES HIGHER than expected, mostly people with mild or NO symptoms at all. So take that 200 people, times 85 [for the people who do not show symptoms] and extrapolate the new infection rate...

Seriously contagious, isn't it? Yet, not so fatal when the denominator is multiplied by 50 [this puts it VERY close to influenza, for which we DO NOT SHUT DOWN, EVAR]. And with those kinds of numbers, tracking "known cases" (one in 50? one in 85? or WORSE?) doesn't sounds so useful any more... [and neither does HUNKER IN YOUR BUNKER or even wearing masks to prevent spreading it]. Though I'd expect if you're coughing or sneezing you should PROBABLY wear a mask... (I would).

A few weeks from now people are going to realize I was right about this all along. If your infection rates do NOT look like New York City did, or Italy did, chances are they won't. And the USA will have plenty of masks, ventilators, and gloves to share in case they do. [already happening]. So living paranoid about "was I near an infected person" - and a PHONE APP to track you - pointless indeed.

Re: And the non-centralised approach

YES! (why would ANYONE downvote that?)

the first person who's furloughed or fired for having been NEAR someone that "tested positive" for the Wuhan virus, and "just has to accept it", will prove the point.

Re: And the non-centralised approach

"Or I will uninstall the app"

that's where you got it right.

NO privacy violations! [whatever happened to GDPR ???]

I guess when Henny Penny and Chicken Little decide the SKY IS FALLING, then all privacy-protection bets are OFF.

I like what the academics warned about this at the beginning of the article, but the "ruling class" elite learned LONG ago that manipulating a population through Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt leaves a LOT of citizens willing to give up freedom for a FALSE sense of security.

Scaleway disarms its ARM64 cloud, cites unreliable hardware as the reason

stuff that is "too cutting edge" sometimes fails earlier than expected. I've had to replace a couple o' motherboards for similar reasons... and the 1 year later motherboard is rock solid, performs the same, and lasts for over a decade [and costs less]. Could just be THAT.

Re: Yet another example

well cloudy servers have their place BUT yeah, "all eggs in one basket" shouldn't be done either. Somewhere a balance of that would make the most sense. Maybe the cloud system includes a server local to the company on its private connection, and then a good portion of the real work is done "in the cloud" on other servers... so if THEY go down [or YOU], the service is not significantly interrupted - ok performance degraded, but not interrupted. That's the point. Just needs to be properly designed for failure tolerance and failover.

If 'power sipping' ARM64 costs less... won't people want it?

I think it may be that they did not properly investigate the marketing opportunity, to use ARM64 to provide CUT RATE services.

Or maybe they did, and rejected the idea and didn't tell anyone?

in my opinion it could justify the procurement of lower cost ARM64-based cloud servers, which should run cooler, use less 'trons, and maybe even COST LESS for the hardware itself, as compared to its amd64 architecture cousins. Just a thought, anyway. Maybe some other cloudy provider can step in and do this, and take all of the business.

So - what's the highest expense for a cloudy provider:

a) electricity

b) intarwebs bandwidth

c) hardware

d) administrative (building, people, legal, gummint, ...)

I think a and c can be mitigated with arm64. 'b' can't though. So knowing if 'b' is the limiting factor might explain things. [of course 'd' is probably a fixed cost, and I'd expect IT support to be part of that].

Coronavirus lockdown forces UK retailers to shut 382 million square feet of floor space

Re: Cunning plan!

crude prices are low, yeah. Storage costs may exceed profits, though. It's hard to say. not a bad plan, in theory. I don't know enough about the oil industry to comment further, except to say "why isn't anyone doing this already?"

My guess is that these people know something... something that we do not.

[smart money doesn't announce its plans nor its reasons for them]

you forgot the troll icon...

well, more people doing deliveries and mail order... retailers were _already_ adapting to that. "More of Same" in THIS case would be a good thing, then!

Then instead of being a checkout clerk or shelf stocker you're a delivery driver... earning tips!

"Let's hope this puts an end on the spread"

it won't. It'll slow it down a *LITTLE* at a *HUGE* *COST* to *EVERYBODY* [except those elitists at the top who manage to make a killing during every disaster, through various forms of manipulation].

(I know everyone WANTS it to work. Reality...)

It's a VIRUS. Chances are EVERYONE will catch it at some point. SLowing things down for a BRIEF period of time ONLY makes sense if your hospitals would be overwhelmed if you did NOT do this [then you take time to prepare, and let it rip]. At some point this highly contagious disease will hit EVERYONE regardless of who you are. If you can prepare for THAT, and mitigate "triage deaths", it's worth doing a shutown. If "triage deaths" are NO LONGER A FACTOR [case in point, *NOW*], it is POINTLESS to try and stop a virus by SHUTTING DOWN EVERYTHING "deemed non-essential" like this. It's certainly EXTREMLY HARD on 1/3 of society who work in service industries, and chances are they're middle or lower class wage earners. [why aren't socialists SCREAMING about THIS right now? Hmmm???]

It just so happens that service industry businesses are my customer's customers, and they're doing poorly, and that's affecting ME, too. EVERYBODY HURTS FROM THIS, in other words. Misery "trickles down", and for WHAT, a FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY?

RECOGNIZE it's a virus, it's HIGHLY infectious, and it CANNOT be stopped without some form of "Herd Immunity". But you CAN mitigate things at the hospitals, protect specific individuals, AND ACHIEVE HERD IMMUNITY, if you STOP THE SHUTDOWNS NOW!

"We have to embrace a sea-change in how everything is done"

NO!!! N !! O !! NO NO NO NO NO!!!

Instead, WHY NOT RESIST STUPID POLICIES LIKE THIS??? Or, how about this: wait until YOUR job becomes "unessential" and YOU are suddenly stuck with no income, the potential of being evicted onto the street without being able to do ANYTHING about it [except wait for big nanny gummint to "help" you], and so on.

SERIOUSLY - this whole approach is MADNESS and needs to STOP...

"New normal" my NAKED HAIRY ASS!

(time will prove that I am right, but I doubt anyone will acknowledge it)

Yes. It's called FREEDOM. And, just to make a point, it's worth DYING for. The FALSE "security" of these RIDICULOUS SHUTDOWNS [which hurts EVERYONE, but "unequally"] is *NOT* something to *EMBRACE*. It's something to *RESIST*!!!

In Rust we trust? Yes, but we want better tools and wider usage, say devs

despite the enthusiasm of developers [snip] adoption remains limited

I'd like to see more on this...

Otherwise it's starting to remind me of ADA [and why ADA was not widely accepted as a 'language of choice' for new development]

So I'm sticking with C, C++, PHP, and occasional Java and Python [and Javascript ONLY when other choices make very little sense] until there's some really compelling reason to pick a language like Rust.

(nice article though - provokes thought)

20 years deep into a '2-year' mission: How ESA keeps Cluster flying

Re: This was the second attempt

right, it's why the payloads must always be insured - it just happens sometimes. Rockets occasionally blow up. In fact, for safety reasons, they typically have explosives on board to make sure of that in case the thing goes wildly off course... better to blow it up far way from the potential collateral damage.

oh, and "nice hack" for all those times the mission controllers kept the thing running *anyway*.

(if anyone wonders what *REAL* hackers do for a living, that is...)

Europe publishes draft rules for coronavirus contact-tracing app development, on a relaxed schedule

Re: another nanny state idiocy

yeah, unfortunately true in the USA as well, with bureaucrats "going rogue" on occasion. The elected folks are SUPPOSED to keep an eye on them (and recent history shows just how bad it can get at times). ThOSE wheels do grind slowly, but at least the DOJ is doing something now over some past abuses. This as opposed to (at least my perception of) EU, which appears to give the unelected "overseers" considerably more independent power over the citizens...

Re: We know what you did ...

"slightly worse than influenza" = 50% higher death rate, which in many areas of the world is the difference of 0.05% . The "Model" numbers are saying this - 60,000 deaths projected (rather than 2.5 MILLION) in the USA vs 40,000 for a typical flu season. SLIGHTLY worse, in the idea that it's 0.1% death rate for flu, 0.15% death rate for COVID-19. Or, SLIGHTLY worse is that, instead of 40,000 people dying, it's 60,000.

Then there is the recent Stanford study using ACTUAL DATA checking for virus immunity. They surveyed several thousand volunteers in the Silicon Valley area and it suggests that the number of UNREPORTED CASES are as much as 50 TIMES the previously expected numbers. This suggests that the death rate projections MAY BE OFF BY A FACTOR OF 50, due to the vast number of MILD and UNREPORTED cases, which means THAT THIS SHUTDOWN BULLSHIT IS EXACTLY THAT - BULLSHIT!!!

You can all act like small fearful rodents who won't dare leave their bunkers for fear of something that *MIGHT* be harmful to you, shut down your lives, your livelihood, and NOT complain about it if you want. As for ME, I shall *NOT* remain silent on this!!!

Oh and for that one member of my "fan club" - "LISTEN" does not equal "BELIEVE". "UNDERSTAND" does not equal "ACCEPT". And one plus one *IS* two [except for binary, when it's 10].

and from a recent S.F. Chronicle article (yeah not Fox News) (link snipped because of captcha and I'm NOT turning script on)

“I think based on our study that it is less lethal” than has been previously reported, said Bhattacharya, who calculated that it is about equal or slightly more lethal that the flu

The study appears to fall in line with another recent study that estimated that as many as 270,000 Californians are infected with the coronavirus, or 0.69% of the population. That’s more than 10 times the number reported. It calculated that 4.8% of the U.S. population was carrying the disease by early April, 39 times higher than reported, and that nearly half of New Yorkers were probably infected.

that particular article has many different perspectives on the argument but the one thing you can determine clearly from all of this is that THE DEATH PROJECTIONS ARE JUST PLAIN WRONG, and the WORLD is PANICKING UNNECESSARILY over a virus that is only *SLIGHTLY* worse than influenza!!! And 'herd immunity' is PROBABLY the BEST way to combat it!

(and NOT a TRACK YOUR PRIVACY AWAY "phone app")

Mayday! Mayday! The next Windows 10 update is finally on approach to a PC near you

Re: Not all conspiracies are bad.

a) image your hard drive into a '.vhd' file or similar (using a linux box, let's say), and shrink it down so it will fit properly.

b) put LINUX on the laptop

c) load virtualbox, create a Win-10-nic VM using the imaged hard drive [this may be possible separately if you use a 2nd hard drive to boot Linux from, and create a virtual hard drive that maps to a real one with win-10-nic on it]

Then, run Linux on the desktop, with Win-10-nic in a VM. It should do everything you want, it would be FIREWALLED by the VM'ing, you could SHUT OFF NETWORKING whenever you don't want it running, you could BACK IT UP and RESTORE IT more easily, and you could DISABLE THE CAMERA and DISABLE THE MICROPHONE for the VM [thus eliminating THAT problem].

You can use a SAMBA share located on your Linux laptop to transfer things around, too.

This kind of thing works pretty well for me. SOME things might not work well, but in general you should be able to do just about EVERYTHING you need to do this way!!

NOTE: you could ALSO upgrade it to 7 and do the same thing with virtualbox and Win-10-nic

Re: 20H1 - a longer wait for WSL2

Here's what *I* think MS should do instead: write a Wine-like layer that does NOT take over the desktop, but rather allows us to run Windows applications (even "The Store" stuff) on a LINUX MACHINE!!!

I'd pay MONEY for THAT. It wold solve EVERYTHING for me. Wine is unreliable. An MS-blessed version that is SUPPORTED would be AWESOME! [they did this once for Macs, back in the noughties]

But it makes TOO MUCH SENSE, yeah...

one more thing - there was a subsystem called 'XMing' that let you run X11 applications on a windows desktop. I think it still exists.

Re: Surp is run by idiots

no disagreements, though I think the problem is in their choice of project managers.

Even though Sinofsky and Larson-Greene are *GONE*, their "legacy" lingers on... [to our ultimate dissatisfaction].

Don't forget, Larson-Greene is ALSO responsible for "The Ribbon", and Sinofsky was actually FIRED over the tile-based interface of 8.0 . And from what I've seen, 8.1 isn't/wasn't much better.

So I guess the *REAL* problem: Why is Micro-shaft DOUBLING DOWN on STUPID???

Re: daubing the veteran OS with the Fluent Design brush.

at least you COULD stick with the Win2k look. I did that, too, initially. At least 'small icons' fixed most of the problems with the XP UI, no longer so bulbous and oversized with 'small icons'. Same with 7, I think.

I don't like the "message center" at ALL and want it to go away and die a horrible tortuous death in HELL. I always shut OFF "Defender" because I don't need my compiled work-in-progress SCANNED [and delayed] by some stupid *THING* trying to "HELP" me... and all of the OTHER "notifications" are merely "irritations" and need to JUST GO AWAY.

but anyway... I'll tolerate THAT in lieu of the OTHER things that 8 and later do.

Re: Just wait

I'm (begrudgingly) allowing a win-10-nic "test VM" to go update itself. I made a backup first. I figure the downloads should last through the night and into tomorrow afternoon...

sad face because I know I need to do this for the testing VM, but I hate actually doing it. Just recently DL'd Win 8.1 "updated" version which in my opinion actually has WORSE "user experience" than Win-10-nic, which is a frightening reality [it even tried to strong-arm me to do a 'Microsoft Logon' - go fig].

But it doesn't have tracking, as far as I can tell, but it's the "updated" release so who knows...

daubing the veteran OS with the Fluent Design brush.

anything would be an improvement over the 8.x-ish 2D FLATSO FLATTY McFLATFACE FLUGLY

But Micro-shaft STILL DOES NOT GET IT when it comes to overall appearance and WHY people STICK WITH 7 *DESPITE* the "lack of support"

If they REALLY want to make CUSTOMERS happy, they need to:

a) RE-ENABLE PERSONALIZATION PREFERENCES (including 3D SKEUOMORPHIC features for people who WANT them!)

b) DIVORCE FROM "The SETTINGS" and GO BACK TO CONTROL PANEL

c) STOP the TRACKING, Cloudy "Microsoft Logon", the SPYING, the ADS, and "The Store" (in general)

d) eternal support for 'start' replacements

e) SOME EASY WAY to stop "hitting the web" for LOCAL searches (or JUST DISABLE IT ALWAYS)

f) 'NoScript' and similar plugins for whatever-replaces-Edge

g) FULLY USER-CONTROLLED UPDATES for HOME AND PRO!!! [yes, I want to SHUT IT OFF and ONLY update MANUALLY]

If MS *FINALLY* gets a @#$%'ing CLUE [my clue-bat is ready to help] and does THESE things, the complaints about Win-10-nic should dwindle into nothing

But NOOooo... they have to "daub the OS with the Fluent Design brush".

talk about 'majoring in the minors', 'walking over dollars to pick up pennies' yotta yotta...

Cloudflare goes retro with COBOL delivery service. Older coders: Who's laughing now? Turns out we're still vital

C++ and Python are ok; C-pound, however... ABOMINATION!