Posts by TSM

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

It's funny that some people have expressed that Copilot does a decent job of summarising meetings etc., because that's basically the one thing I've seen it used for and the results can be pretty dire.

Here's a recent effort, anonymised. [A] through [J] are specific phrases or sentences (for the curious, [H] is related to [G], so that's not a non-sequitur when we get to it):

Meeting notes:

[Words from [A]]: [People] discussed an issue with [A]. [Name] mentioned that [B], and they are trying to verify [C].

* [Words from [A]]: [Name] raised a concern about [A]. [B], and they are trying to verify [C].

* Verification: [Name] asked [Name] if [C]. [Name] was not aware of the specific issue and needed more information to provide a definitive answer.

* [Words from [D]]: [Name] explained that [D], so [E].

* [Words from [E]]: [Name] mentioned that [E]. [Name] inquired about [F].

[Words from [D]]: [Name] explained that [D], so [E]. [Name] inquired about [F].

* [Words from [D]]: [Name] explained that [D], so [E].

* [Words from [E]]: [Name] mentioned that [slightly reworded E] and [Name] asked if they could [F].

* [Words from [F]]: [Name] inquired about [F], and [Name] explained that [E], and [G].

[Words from [G]]: [Name] asked if [G] once month-end is closed. [Name] confirmed that [H] and offered to [I].

* [Words from [G]]: [Name] asked if [G] once month-end is closed. [Name] confirmed that [H].

* [Words from [I]]: [Name] offered to [I] to help verify the [part of [G]]. [Name] requested the report to [J].

* Verification: [Name] expressed concern about verifying [part of G] to [J]. [Name] agreed to [I].

The meeting then moved on to a related topic, which was summarised with equal concision.

Microsoft signed a dodgy driver and now ransomware scum are exploiting it

Re: Legacy code strikes again!

I think probably your memory is overly idealistic.

Here's a post from Raymond Chen from *21 years ago* detailing some of the shenanigans that manufacturers got up to to get their drivers approved by WHQL, by making them work differently in WHQL than when operating in a normal environment:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040305-00/?p=40373

Untrained techie botched a big hardware sale by breaking client's ERP

Re: Not Kanes mistake

As per the article - it was the sales people's idea to offer "we fix your current problems" in exchange for "you consider buying our servers". As always with the sales department, offered without any understanding of whether it was technically feasible.

The company quite likely didn't have anyone trained on the other vendor's kit. But hey, might as well have a stab at it, right? The worst that can happen is you don't get the contract, which is where you are if you don't send someone, so....

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

Re: Never had to suffer this sort of crap.

My management has pretty much always been like this too. Not coincidentally, I've also been with this employer for over 20 years. It's almost as if treating your employees well gets you some loyalty or something....

In our team (now 8 including our manager) we have a 15-minute daily standup which is just for everyone to give a very quick update on what they're doing today, flag any problems or if they need help on anything, and for the team collectively to make sure any urgent tasks are assigned to someone. It works pretty well for us.

Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did

Re: Passwords

Well, it's a clock. It shouldn't *need* to be rebooted every year,

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

Re: Help me here..

Nobody (at least in the article) ever said the pen and paper method was faster. The complaint was that the screens were not reliable, which was because the repeated impacts were rapidly damaging them.

Microsoft 365 price rises are coming – pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)

Re: If you can't find the opt out button

Same here.

Rather glad I just wasted a couple of hours of my workday reading through El Reg, as I did not know this was an option and I have now saved $A40 on my annual subscription.

BOFH: Forecasting and the fine art of desktop upgrades

Re: I've had to suffer a hardware buy that was the other way around!

I've had the reverse sort of situation - my ISP announced their 5G offering was now available in my area, so I thought I'd give it a try to see how it compared with the service I was on. There was a free trial period (I don't now remember whether it was 7, 14, or 30 days; one of those), to the effect that if you decided the 5G offering was not for you and cancelled it within the trial period, they'd revert you back to your previous plan at no cost.

So I filled in the form on their website and eventually the kit arrived and I tried to set it up - absolutely no signal received. Called support, who got me to try it at different points in the house - still absolutely no signal anywhere. (My memory is fuzzy on the details but you needed a signal strength of so many dB to connect properly, and a lower signal could mean spotty connections - support thought this was what was happening, but I found the advanced page which showed the detected signal strength was about -110dB everywhere, i.e. not receiving even a hint of any signal at all.) Might have been a dud antenna / receiver but support ddn't seem to be interested in the possibility so we agreed this was not the solution for me. However support couldn't do the contract stuff so I had to ring back in business hours for that.

So I duly rang customer service the next day only to be told that they couldn't just revert me to my previous plan as the trial period had expired. "But I only got the gear last night!" I protested. Turns out the trial period starts when you fill in the form on the website, and the fact that the trial period may be shorter than the time it takes them to get the kit to you is apparently not an important point.

To cut to the chase, after a couple of rather irate calls with customer service they agreed that they would indeed revert me to my former plan without charge, and they would send me details for returning the 5G router. They never actually followed up on that last part (despite me calling in again to say "hey nobody sent me the details" and them promising for a second time that they would do so), so I still have a useless 5G router sitting in a box in the garage. But you can bet I scrutinised my accounts pretty closely when the next billing period came around to ensure they weren't charging me for the 5G service as well!

BOFH: Don't threaten us with a good time – ensure it

When we bought our first house, we were required to arrange insurance as a condition of getting the loan (reasonable enough), and not having strong opinions we opted for the convenient option of arranging it through the lender's insurance arm as part of the settlement process. (We changed insurers later.)

About a week after we moved in, storm damage meant that part of the kitchen ceiling needed to be replaced. We were glad that we hadn't delayed on getting the insurance sorted out!

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Finance dept. are at the root of this issue

I don't buy as many physical books as I used to, because there's so much available for free for my Kindle. But of course, a lot of that free content is works that have not been professionally copy-edited, because that cosst money. And by far the biggest grammatical issue I see is confusion of homophones. Some books are nigh unreadable because of the internal wince that is generated each time I see it happen. Most are not so bad, of course. But I will note that if you're going to make a word foundational to your story and repeat it many, many times, it's a good idea to make sure you are using the correct version of that word.

Revenge for being fired is best served profitably

Re: New PCs too fast, need older slower ones

As one of the affected users (early postgrad at the time, code was working at the end of one year and failed at the beginning of the next after the department upgraded the PC), my recollection is that both source* and executable fixes were pretty readily available quite soon. Certainly they were available by the time the problem got to me, and I don't think it had been a super long time since the first appearances.

Of course it's worth noting that a lot of people didn't have home internet back then, nor was searching for answers anywhere near as simple as it is now, this being some years before Google existed. But there was plenty of discussion available on comp.lang.pascal.borland.

* not really source per se, patches to the supplied CRT unit's initialisation code.

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

Re: Mental image

Only a couple of months ago I had to help my wife out with a similar problem. She was trying to make a presentation and had a page with 50-odd photos on it, timed to appear at half-second increments, and (for some strange reason) the animation timings weren't working properly. I had to explain that even though they looked pretty small on the screen each photo was still the original high quality full image, a large amount of data, and the computer simply wasn't able to load them in time.

I wound up pasting all the photos onto a black background, saving that as a single image, and using that as a background on the presentation, with 50-odd black ovals timed to disappear at half-second intervals. Didn't look quite as good (the original background was textured, and some traces of the picture edges were faintly visible), but I had less than an hour to get it sorted and then select and add a music track behind it, so I did what I could in the time available. The presentation size shrank from several hundred MB to under 8 MB, and it all worked quite nicely.

For the record: You just ordered me to cause a very expensive outage

Re: Practice makes Prefect.

Maybe, for some strange reason, firms that are horrible to their employees have trouble retaining good employees? Once all the good employees have left it seems pretty probable—though by no means certain—that corporate death will follow reasonably soon, from one cause or another (customer dissatisfaction, legal troubles, embezzlement, commercial failure due to insane management, etc.)

By contrast, my workplace is notable for the large number of people who've been there for seriously long times. I'm far from the only member of the 20+year club. That says something about the way the company treats its employees. No company is perfect, of course, but knowing they have your back counts for a lot.

There are companies around that actually value their employees. If yours doesn't, I'd really recommend that you try to find one that does.

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

Re: Same prank, but for teenagers

Years ago I edited the hosts files on my kids' computers to block Youtube. But I told them I had done it, and this followed several unsuccessful atempts to get them to moderate their consumption.

They'd been using enough to regularly chew through our monthly quota (sometimes before mid-month), causing us to be shaped down to dial-up speeds, which was not acceptable when I had to remote desktop in to work to fix something that had broken. Back then we had 2GB for peak hours and another 2GB for off-peak, but off-peak didn't start until 2am and our batch failures were often before that.

Obviously things are a little different these days :)

Thanks for coming to help. No, we can't say why we called – it's classified

Clearly the indicated procedure is to replace the hard drive first, then boot it up to diagnose and fix the problem.

If you're feeling exceptionally generous, you can reinstall the original hard drive once the repairs are complete (if the problem wasn't a failed hard drive).

20-odd years ago when I worked at a facility that handled materials up to SECRET classification, we did much the same thing. It makes sense if you look at it with the right level of paranoia. Bear in mind that such places strongly discourage making unnecessary physical copies of classified information.

If you were working on unclassified material, you used the unclassified hard drive in your computer and the unclassified network cable. To work on classified material, you shut down, pulled the hard drive caddy out, got the classified caddy from your safe and put that in, swapped to the secure network cable, and started your machine up again. (Details are a bit sketchy after this time, but it wouldn't access the network if you started it up with the wrong network cable in place.) On the secure network you had no external network access, if I recall correctly, and no email access (even internal). You were effectively working on a different computer when you were on the secure network.

The overriding principle was that classified information was never exposed to any system that could exfiltrate data. Floppy disks, by policy, carried the security level of the highest security machine they had ever been placed in - it didn't matter if you had only stored unclassified material, if you put it into a secure computer it was now classified SECRET and couldn't be left out, removed from site, etc. [Because secret material might have made its way on there, either with or without your knowledge. When there's a risk of serious espionage attempts, things like worms that might attempt to store data in unallocated sections of a random employee's disk become part of the threat model.]

If you'd used the same OS disk for secret and unclassified uses, who knows what secret material might be left floating around on it when you were in the more vulnerable unclassified space?

Those of us who had mobile phones (I didn't at the time) had a lot of fun rules to comply with in that regard as well. I don't remember those clearly since I didn't have to, but I remember they were absolutely not allowed in any classified meetings, due to the risk of surreptitious concealed transmitters.

Now to be fair, there was a project planned (maybe even started) to investigate whether the secure and unsecure computing environments could be integrated in a safe manner. I have no idea whether that eventually worked out for them. I hadn't heard about any progress before I left that job, but I wouldn't have expected to unles it was almost complete, since I wasn't in the IT department.

Seething CEO shoulder surfed techie after mistaken takedown of production server

Re: Labelling production

A teammate and I independently selected the same two contrasting colour schemes to differentiate between production and test terminal sessions.

However, the colour scheme he uses for test is the one I use for prod, and vice versa.

Always makes it fun when we have to look at things on each other's computers :)

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

I know I wrote this down somewhere. But was it on Teams, Confluence, in a Jira ticket, or an email?

Even good search capabilities - and most of these tools don't have good search capabilities - will struggle if you don't know *where* to search.

BOFH: The greatest victory is that which requires no battle

Re: Who knows a future AI Boss could be in play?

> When did that cease to be a given?

As soon as the first computer support was introduced - if not earlier.

"The computer / calculator said this, so it must be true" has been a thing for a long time.

Working as a tutor 30 or so years ago, it was already a struggle to get high school students to understand that they needed to have at least a rough idea of what would be a sensible range of results, rather than just blindliy trusting whatever their calculators wound up with.

I had one person write down -E- as the result of a maths question because that's what their calculator showed.

I can fix this PC, boss, but I’ll need to play games for hours to do it

"Morally and in some cases practically", as per the comment you're responding to.

Most shareware products were licensed on the basis that you would pay for them if you continued to use them after a certain amount of time - though of course most people did not. Hence the proliferation of "part 1 is free, pay to get parts 2-N" model, which provided an incentive to pay.

Re: Flight Simulator and Solitaire

Best scores I ever got at Solitaire of that era were when the computer was printing a lengthy document at the same time. Ending animation was a tad slower than usual though :D

Same, for me it was mostly CD or not and sound card emulation modes - the mouse stuff on my system could be reconfigured live and didn't need config.sys support. I had five or six combinations in all, one of them being for booting into Windows.

Kind of nice not to have to reboot the machine to switch from one game to another, isn't it? (Although rebooting into DOS didn't take very long.)

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

What I've done in the past (when hiring for an ETL developer) is given them a simplified version of a small design problem that we had already solved (and was part of running code when I started using it in interviews, though in later years that functionality was moved to a different system). I gave them a few paragraphs summarising the requirements and data structures, and gave them some time to think about how they would design something to do the job. It was pretty effective; there was enough technical detail involved to sort out the people who could actually understand and do the transformation step from the people who only knew enough to connect a source to a target (which was surprisingly many), and for people who showed a good grasp of the technical aspect I had a couple of extension questions along the lines of "how would you modify this design if we added this requirement?" to better probe their thinking and flexibility.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Re: Lie

> Doesn't anyone actual archive their records or data? BACKUP ≠ ARCHIVE !

We did that once, moved a whole whack of stuff off our fileservers into archival storage.

When, ten or so years later, a need arose to access one of the archived databases, nobody still at the company could remember any details about where all that archived material had been sent.

Re: Delivery Tracking

Or it's reported as Delivered anywhere from a few hours to a day and a half before they actually show up with it.

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

Re: Check your instruments...

> how would you get the pine trees to move?

https://www.youtube.com/watch/v=D8eZ-4h4MF4

CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results

Re: Unannounced security tests

> If the link they're clicking on is to a phishing test provider, the one your company contracts with, you can probably take a pretty good guess that it's a phishing test.

The first one or two phishing tests our company organised were detectable this way. Since then they use a different domain for each test, and the domains have no useful whois information available to tie them back to the security company.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

> Thankfully, my boss was in the audience and heard everything, as did the entire school.

I guess the batteries were fine then!

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

Re: The last time I heard a loud noise and things were restarting...

I'm sure that will work very well on the Debian system that the person you replied to said they're running.

Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools

Re: Just a quick manicure.

> Even better would be to snip just one pin, and put the jumper back in place so it looked like it was still overclocked.

Nah, you have to remember that in this era that clock speed was displayed (along with other config stuff) for several seconds on bootup, so they woud have known it was no longer overcooked.

Funnily enough, that relates to a situation my wife and I had with the first PC we bought after we got married and couldn't just use my dad's any more. Got the new machine, set it up, turned it on... wait, that's not the clock speed we paid for! (IIRC it was 60MHz instead of 90MHz, or 90MHz instead of 150MHz. A fairly substantial amount slower than it should have been, in any case.)

A little reading of the motherboard manual later to check on which jumpers were involved and how they should be set, and breaking the "do not open" sticker to look inside, revealed the problem: there were two pairs of jumpers for the CPU speed and for this configuration both pairs should have been set. And indeed they were, but the wrong way around - like = instead of ||. Took them off, put them on the right way around, problem solved.

Boffins find AI stumbles when quizzed on the tough stuff

Re: Well ChatGPT can certainly get sarky.

Wait, if I did that, do you think I would get less spam from recruiters? Might be worth trying...

It is 2023 and Excel's reign of date terror might finally be at an end

The thing that's most annoying about, particularly, the date conversion in Excel is that it doesn't consider any context: "The other 1000 values in this column are text strings, but *this* one is clearly supposed to be a date!" Or "Only 40% of the cells in this column are valid {EU|US} dates; they are all valid {US|EU} dates. But I'm going to interpret it as {EU|US} dates anyway and the ones that don't work can be text."

The whole idea of spreadsheets is that you have tabular data, i.e. blocks of data where, generally, each column holds the same information for every row. But this concept has never been applied to the parsing logic.

It doesn't look like the update has done anything about this. It's just allowed us to tell it to stop trying - which is something, at least, but a global solution for a very localised problem.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

> A value of true in the range lookup will mean that if nothing matches, then the next closest approximate value will be returned. This can have fairly disastrous consequences if there are typos in fields such as names.

That's not the biggest problem with it. The biggest problem is that if it uses a range lookup, which is the default, it assumes the data is sorted and does a binary search. If your data isn't sorted, you essentially get a random result from the list. So if you forget to add ", false" in your vlookup, you get a random result, which may or may not be easily noticeable. The same thing happens with match() which is the "find the record" half of vlookup(), index() being the "retrieve a value" half.

It's actually rather annoying that "range vs. exact match" and "data is sorted, use binary search" are tied together in this way. For exact match required cases with large numbers of records, I sort the data and use a two-step process along the lines of "do a range match for this value", followed by "check if the value you found is the value we're looking for". Makes for a clunky spreadsheet design, but a comparison that runs in 20 seconds that used to be "start this and then go to lunch" (and still woudn't be done when you were back), because binary search on 100k+ records is just ever so slightly faster than linear...

That script I wrote three years ago is now doing what? How many times?

That's fine, if (a) you can find the relevant documentation when you need it and (b) the systems haven't changed in the meantime to the point that the documentation is somewhere from slightly inaccurate to actively misleading. Obsolete documentation is (in my experience) both a much worse and a much more pervasive problem.

Had this happen recently when we had to invoke a DR process (which fortunately I knew) that we hadn't needed in several years. [I know, TRWTF is not practising our DR processes regularly. TRRWTF is that we used to do this, but don't any more.] We did eventually find some documentation a few days after the fact, but it was largely inaccurate.

It doesn't help if you change your documentation platform every now and then, and in between reorganise the IT teams periodically so that half of the documentation you need is now in some other team's area. Even apart from those issues, when you have something that involves multiple departments it's impossible to find whether the latest thing is the one on Confluence or one of the ones on Sharepoint or the ones in various Teams channels or the one in an email chain, because everyone has their own ideas on where to put stuff...

Re: On the flip side

> I taught myself Z80 assembly language from books as a pre-teen, and my degrees are in the sciences, not in anything IT related.

(Almost) same [I was a teenager by the time I got into Z80 assembler] and same! I did do a computer science unit in first year but that is the extent of my formal CS education. Like you said, it's the desire to understand that is needed to get you that habit of looking at context above and below and around the thing you're doing and making sure you understand it.

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

Re: Heavy doors

Logically, if opening all the doors is enough to tip over all the cabinets, then opening one door would be enough to tip over one isolated cabinet.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: Golden Junque

Looks like there's also a Hemispheres (small).

So they must be fairly useful...

BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him

Re: Oh the pain!

You mean the things that used to be sometimes useful, before they all got converted into buttons that take you to the help portal on the company's website (or worse, the URL that used to be the help portal years ago), but don't do anything to guide you to a relevant help article, even assuming that one exists?

Re: Oh the pain!

We got hit by that one some years back. One of our kids needed to submit a form to get a Universal Student Identifier, required for educational purposes. The way to do this was to submit an online form with a bunch of ID document details, however when we tried to do this it failed because the document details could not be verified automatically.

After much trying over a period of days we eventually figured out that the automated document verification service appeared to only be available during Canberra office hours (which, because of timezones, were over by the time we had been trying to submit the form). Of course this was never mentioned anywhere and the error message on the failed attempts contained no useful information.

BOFH: Ah. Company-branded merch. So much better than a bonus

Re: AHH the good old USB

Our machines are set by group policy to not even recognise USB storage devices. It's a pain any time I want to move files around, especially in bulk.

Pixies keep switching off my morning alarm, says Google Pixel owner

> Unless his list is ~14 songs long, the issue should not reappear every couple of weeks.

Depends how long it takes him to wake up. Some people are heavy sleepers; he might not wake up properly until several songs into the playlist. My wife certainly doesn't wake up when her radio (we're old fashioned) starts playing. It wakes me up though!

Techie called out to customer ASAP, then: Do nothing

(from the article)

"Whether the customer ever realized it was being fooled is lost to history."

Was the customer being fooled, though? I thought it was the customer initiating the callout, because:

"The cost of having Paul travel to the site and do nothing was tiny, when compared to the penalties the customer was owed under the contract if nobody appeared on time."

I assumed the customer was willing to take the risk of paying the tiny fee for a chance at the large penalties - a reasonably rational (especially since it appears there was a good chance Paul might not have made it in time) if less than ethical course of action. I don't understand how the story makes sense any other way. So how is the customer being fooled?

Boeing Starliner's 1st crewed trip to the ISS delayed again over battery overheating risk

Hold on a second

> Software bugs in the flight code also had to be checked

The bugs had to be checked? Shouldn't they have been FIXED?

(Yes, I understand that bugs can be acceptable in this sort of thing if they have been rigorously analysed, the scope for problems is known, and if necessary appropriate mitigations are put in place. I wouldn't describe this as "checking" the bug, though.)

User was told three times 'Do Not Reboot This PC' – then unplugged it anyway

Re: Content

> or even better perform upgrade during the weekend when nobody is in.

I mean, that's what they did in the article.

Re: Content

> It also doesn't have any information why it shouldn't be rebooted, so the user may not know how important it is.

The article did say

> replaced the desktop background with a big sign, white writing on a bright red screen, saying 'Software installation in progress. Do Not Attempt to Re-boot This System'."

So there was some information about the reason it shouldn't be rebooted.

Also doesn't sound like it would have looked like an advert.

The article felt pretty weak to me for other reasons though. Especially when it says "The few machines that hadn't upgraded weren't a worry: someone always turned off their PC by mistake or did something else that needed intervention" but then goes on to explore the details of one case of this happening. Why is it worth doing that, if this was an expected and normal part of the process? Is the leap from "accidentally turning off their machine" to "pulling out the plug to try to get it working again" really so vast that it elevates the story into something worth reading?

Dear Stupid, I write with news I did not check the content of the [Name] field before sending this letter

Re: Live by the shoddy business practices

I know your pain. When my ADSL modem died a few years ago, I was unable to convince my ISP's tech support that a problem with the line would not explain why it wasn't able to route local traffic - or why the power light wasn't coming on any more. It took a technician visit (who confirmed that yes, the line was fine) before they would accept that the modem needed to be replaced.

Artificial pancreas successful in type 2 diabetes tests

Re: Exciting news

I'm a LADA which seems to be not well understood yet, hooray. Diagnosed a couple of years ago. Despite going from 8 to 12 units of insulin since I last saw my endocrinologist my levels are higher than ever... maybe the metformin is not working as well, or maybe my pancreas is starting to give up the fight. My immune system already killed off my thyroid years ago so it has form for this sort of thing (and at the time of that diagnosis my doctor warned me that I'd be at increased risk for other auto-immune diseases, so here we are).

CGMs have just gone onto the subsidy list here in Australia for people with Type 1 so it might be worth looking into. Kinda squeamish about the idea though.

Version 5 of the Endless OS enters testing

Re: Looks like Windows 11

> I do wonder about the possibility (probability?) that I (and others) like the early windows generic interface - menus, taskbar, heirarchical start menu - only because that's what we learned first.

I think there's more to it than that. I started on GUIs with MacOS System 3 (although it was upgraded to 7 after a year or so) at uni and Windows 3.0 at home. Windows 95 was a massive improvement over 3.x by every measure, provided you made sure to configure startup options to suit your DOS games and didn't try to run them under Windows. And most Windows versions continued to improve for quite some time. I certainly wouldn't want to go back to the Windows 95 UI, much less anything earlier.

A key factor in making the most out of the Windows UI has always been a willingness to spend some time organising and customising things. This didn't really start to lose its effectiveness until after Windows 7. Focusing particularly on the start menu and taskbar (since the main job of the OS is to let me start applications and manage the applications that I have running), here are some things both good and bad that stand out to me version by version from 7 onwards (except enough has been said about Windows 8 so I'll ignore it here). Some of the Win 7 things are really Vista things because I never used Vista enough to count:

Windows 7:

* Searching on the Start Menu is OK, but if (like me) you have everything you want in tightly controlled, nested folders, it doesn't help much.

* HomeGroup is terrific. Sharing a printer is much easier than ever before.

* Libraries seem kind of unnecessary.

* Taskbar is still relatively useful as long as you set it to never combine.

* Why would I want windows to be transparent? If I'm working in one window I want to see that window, not what's underneath it.

* Jump lists are pretty cool, if nigh-impossible to discover.

Windows 10:

* I see we still haven't gotten Settings and Control Panel merged after the Windows 8 mess.

* HomeGroup is gone :( Sharing printers is back to being somewhat painful.

* Give up on Start Menu folders. Also, accept that you won't be able to find executables for a bunch of programs.

* Organise the Start Menu by pinning instead. (This was more a work thing than a home thing for me.) Pin every single program you use regularly to the Start Menu with a small tile, organise them into appropriate labelled groups, and set your start menu to show pinned apps by default. Then you have instant access to everything you need. On the rare occasions you need something else, it's easy enough to switch back to the all apps view and search for it.

* Taskbar is still relatively useful as long as you set it to never combine and to show text.

Windows 11:

* OK, let's put the taskbar back on the left (literally the first thing I did).

* I see we STILL haven't gotten Settings and Control Panel merged.

* WHY CAN'T I RIGHT CLICK ON THE TASKBAR TO PULL UP TASK MANAGER? [Note: as of sometime in the last couple of weeks, this is back! Why it ever went away is beyond me - but I was very glad to know the Ctrl+Shift+Esc shortcut in the meantime.]

* Pinning still kind of works to organise your Start Menu, but not as well: you don't have groups any more and you can't control the layout beyond "less pins" and "more pins". You can't turn off recommendations altogether, which is a pity because if I could use those last couple of lines for pinned apps I could fit all the ones I want to use on the same page and not have to scroll.

* There's really no way to ungroup my taskbar icons? Great, let's add time and extra clicks every time I want to swap to an app that has more than one open window. That's only (unsurprisingly) all the ones I use most often. [I think I need to train myself to use the Task List button for app switching rather than the taskbar icons.]

You might notice from the above that there's been useful UI stuff in most of the Windows versions I've used. But I haven't found anything in Windows 11 that works better for me, and several things that are quite a bit worse. It feels like the Windows 8 experience again in some ways (though certainly not as bad).

Stuff that I don't remember well enough to attribute to a particular version, or that has been a tendency over multiple versions:

* Taskbar functionality took a hit for me in whichever version insisted that all the windows for the same application had to be together. But the forced grouping in 11 has really killed it.

* Why don't jump lists work on the pinned apps view? (Not sure if this was the case in 10.)

* Steady removal of detail for customising the layout and appearance of the UI. Fairly minor for the most part and understandable from a vendor perspective. It'd be nice if everything that remained didn't get shifted around continually, I might have been able to find things sooner.

* I actually don't want to search the internet from the Start menu pretty much ever (I will note that it is handy in the case of an app that you thought you had previously installed but actually hadn't yet; but that's a very niche case). If I did want to, I wouldn't want to use Bing.

* Flat UI. Ugh. Borders served a purpose.

Someone else mentioned the rise of skinny, nigh impossible to use scrollbars (especially when you're on the bus and bumping around). I only don't include it above because it only shows up in some apps and I don't know if it's an app thing or an OS thing.

Two signs in the comms cabinet said 'Do not unplug'. Guess what happened

Re: DO NOT REBOOT THIS COMPUTER!!

> I put a big sign on the monitor saying "DO NOT REBOOT THIS COMPUTER!! It is being used for $PURPOSE and needs to run interrupted!".

He was just trying to make sure it ran interrupted, like you asked.

Just follow the instructions … no wait, not that instruction to lock everyone out of everything

Re: Writing instruction manuals is an art....

Don't worry, one day soon it will just be a file that you can only access by pressing a specific sequence of buttons on the infotainment panel.