sweasel.com

“Why do they do this?”

Because they can.

I can’t see anything new about except, as usual, they’ve moved all the buttons around to different locations.

Why they do this?

It used to be described as “moving the deckchairs around on the Titanic.” In MSft’s case, I have never seen any comprehensive description of “improvements” so I have to assume they are trying to keep ahead of the third-party vendors and hackers that keep making Weakly Upduds necessary. The entire MSft operation can be tied to BillyBoi Gates and his paranoid, pseudo-intellectual personality disorder.

When this computer is obsoleted by a new WinDoze Virgin I am going to linux so fast that even Melinda will be cranky about it. In fact, I may just go earlier than “obsolete” just to get away from Mr. WeeWillie “Put mRNA Vax in your food supply” Gates.

I’ve been eyeing Linux, too. Her Stoatliness sucks her teeth, shakes her head and says, ‘You won’t like it’ and I’m sure she’s right but I don’t have the need I once had for my machine to be compatible with everyone else’s and my loathing and contempt for Gates of Hell grows with every day.

If you can access the BIOS on a Windows 11 machine and can change them, disabling TPM:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enable-tpm-2-0-on-your-pc-1fd5a332-360d-4f46-a1e7-ae6b0c90645c#bkmk_enable_tpm
will make the machine unable to run Windows 11 until it is re-enabled. Do understand that Microsoft intends to stop supporting Windows 10 in October 2025.

Uncle B,

Why would Her Stoatliness declare that you wouldn’t like it?

The OS has at least one GUI now and the source can be modified to behave according to The Laws of Badger.

I’m also considering the move to Linux, I’ve been running various distributions in Virtualbox virtual machines for years, I’m down to Debian and EndeavourOS. Been finding open source versions of programs that I can use to do everything I need. Will miss Adobe Illustrator and After Effects but I haven’t really used them in years now. Inkscape is getting to be a pretty good vector program and Krita is a good Photoshop substitute. I use Blender for 3D now so don’t need 3DS Max.

I only stayed on Windows this long because I had corporate clients and needed to be compatible but business is pretty dead these days…can always use online Word and Excel in my Office 365 subscription. Or, run Windows in virtual machine under Linux 😉 I used to run MacOS on a virtual machine under Windows, that came in handy.

I would reset the bios defaults, SWeasy. Might need to change your onboard battery that saves the settings like battery backup for your alarm clock.

@Uncle B. If you have plenty of disk space, ram and a decent multi core CPU, you can try Linux distributions in Virtualbox to get a taste…it runs other operating systems on your computer under Windows or other OS’s…there’s lots of tutorials out there on how to do it, here’s one for an example:

https://itsfoss.com/install-linux-in-virtualbox/

…make sure to enable ‘virtualization’ in your bios settings first.

Edit: I also have MSDos 6.22 running in a virtual machine for old time’s sake 🙂

A further comment on “because they can”…

Because a lot of programmers are prima donna arseholes…with the least capable prima donna arseholes becoming programmer managers.

Who just HAVE to do things different while they put their own greasy little signature thumbprint on something that has worked fiveever..

And

“make it intuitive and new”

AND

Because the “last guys didn’t do it right!” plus “we gave them access to this cool app that allows them to track their oven’s position with a satellite system! and now they can adjust the temperature of their kitchen hot water faucet from their iphone! (Again, because we can)”

If that means YOU have to relearn half of what you knew that’s okay because you are no doubt old and uncool and probably really stupid so shut up (whatever previous generation moniker applies).

40 years living with this tribe has provided insight into why they should be regularly beaten to remind them these systems and devices DO NOT BELONG TO THEM PERSONALLY.
Such beatings have not occurred regularly, if at all, since before the Millennium.

If they didn’t do it, why would their services be needed any longer?

Just think of computers as pop culture and utterly fashion-driven and it all makes sense.

Why not just go macOS? Buy one of the new macMinis,use your old monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Starts at $600.

I had to use windows at work, but no more.

The answer, QuasiModo, is probably because The Weasel has tried Linux and even she, who is geeker than I, got tired of having to fuss with it. She probably fears a stream of ‘Um. Weasel, any idea how you…?’ followed by a tsunami of increasingly vile language as the whole thing collapses around me in a heap of ones and zeros.

FWIW, I agree with Durnedyankee about the nature of programmers in particular and computer people in general (present company excepted, of course). I have personally paid for a small corner of hell to be reserved for the self-entitled children who dare to call themselves ‘engineers’ and who enforce the use of yet another badly designed, connector or device every year or so, which not only doesn’t work properly but outdates every other connecter or device we have bought and struggled with and which now resides in the giant ‘box of leads’ which every computer user owns.

‘Engineers’ use spanners, hammers and grease to make aeroplanes fly and bridges safe to cross. They do not mangle code and neither Apple nor Microsoft has any idea what one is.

Apologies for the badly placed comma in the above. It is early.

My experience is this:

Linux- when configured properly, an absolutely bulletproof PC can be built. The trick is, of course, configuring it properly. Recommended for folk that want to spend lots of time on the internet searching for the ‘proper’ packages to install, and having the install fail half the time.

Apple- classy, beautiful machines that cost four times what anything else does. Plus you must accept the walled garden.

Windows- terrible operating system that actually mostly works, is cheap, has a ton of accumulated knowledge out on the ‘net, and it runs the most popular software reliably.

Me? I run a Windows PC and an iPhone+iPad. Consistency? Who needs it?

UNIX was once described to me by a “grumpy old female programmer” who was awesome and took a young savage under her wing as
“A virus with a user interface”.

Therefore to me LINUX is merely to UNIX what Arcturus is to COVID 19.

As an unfortunate UNIX admin for a few years (twice, actually) I discovered UNIX is the quintessential example of “Programmers” allowed to be savages. This is what happens when you give an OS to college students to play with.
It irks me that it now runs all these user devices, brilliantly, I concede.

Uncle B, yeah “Software Engineers”, thanks NATO/IBM/EDS.
I was one, but no, not Engineers.

/EDS.

Electronic Data Systems?

Thank you Ross Perot!

Windows:

When I used to work, I loved Excel, I tolerated Word, and I despised Powerpoint. They were the defaults; I hated having to transition from WordPerfect to Word, but what can you do? Excel, though, I thought excellent until they started jamming features nobody wanted into it. Every new version meant a week of hunting down shortcuts and changes and turning the damn things off.

Most of our company specific software was developed in-house back when Turing was a child. I (not in IT) led an active campaign to try to get the company to transition to COTS software before all the original programmers died off. I started this attempt at revolution after we had to call a programmer out of retirement to decode a piece of his code. I failed because “we were in too deep” to get out. We can never hire experienced programmers because our system makes no sense to them. We have to hire kids and train in the electric and obscure language built upon thousands of decisions of convenience over decades of lazy programming.

I feel that this same accusation can be made of Windows today.

I do keep an old Windows laptop around to play one old game but everything else has gone to OS.

Of course for some people futzing constantly with the operating system IS the computer game. Well, if that’s your kink, okay, I guess.

Rant over.

appropriate (or not) observations (i.e. prejudices):

— There is such a thing as a software engineer, but they write only in microcode or directly onto silicon.

— At least 90% of the “user interface” and “feature set” of commercial software has the sole purpose of one group of programmers showing off to another group of programmers how fscking clever and cool they are.

— The UNIX kernel is only half of the operating system. The other half resides in the squishy glob of gray cells filling the cranium of whoever has root credentials.

— To create good software, you need to have actually earned paychecks doing, in no particular order, (1) customer support, (2) writing code to spec, (3) writing spec for code, (4) commenting somebody else’s code, (5) market analysis, (6) sales support, (7) writing test plans for somebody else’s code, (8) executing somebody else’s test plan for your own code, (9) writing and editing technical documentation, and (10) regularly standing in front an audience of paying customers to tell them, “I’m responsible for the code. I designed it, and I wrote it. If it’s wrong, I’m responsible for fixing it. Any comments or questions or suggestions?”

I’m expecting that in the not too distant future, after the economies have tanked and dust from all the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments has settled, that the Lizard Overlord League (LOL) will present themselves and offer to solve all our problems for us.

For a price.

Oh, don’t get me wrong – I love Linux. I have two machines loaded with it (one of which is probably bricked by now). And it’s gotten much easier to deal with (I remember a day when you noticed your fonts were fuzzy and by the time you solved it, you had earned a BS in GUI architecture).

But Uncle B really hates it when he gets a Windows update…can you imagine how he’d feel about the constant update of, like, twelve separate packages?

Though to be fair, if I booted that machine more often, I wouldn’t get so many at once.

I will read all your helpful comments after my bath.

@Uncle Al – observations (prejudices) shared and cheered on!

Best coders I ever knew could breath assembler. Nothing like working in a higher level compiled language (which was machine propriety) and finding an invocation to “code” in a proc where one of the assembler guys had disassembled the compiler generated code, found it verbose, and invoked the assembler language inline to speed the program up because micro seconds used to count.

If modern programmers programmed the way we had to during the bronze age these machines would scream even faster speedwise, but now they overcome inefficient code by making faster cpus and faster storage access.

Is there any reason to believe that ChatGP or whatever it calls itself this week, couldn’t do most coding?

https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/04/us-supreme-court-declines-to-take-up-lawsuit-over-patents-for-ai-generated-inventions/