Posts by Diodelogic 111 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Sep 2015
My wife worked for one of the largest banks in the US for over 25 years. The last time I heard about a desktop count, there were over 150,000 people using Windows just in the US and more all over the world. There are development teams working to write proprietary software tools for these desktops and help desk people supporting the desktops.
Now imagine plopping a Linux desktop onto these machines. Suddenly there is no support; the dev teams have to be replaced/retrained because they don't write code for Linux; the help desk workers have to be replaced/retrained because they don't know Linux. The desktop user is confronted with an unfamiliar environment with unfamiliar tools and applications, and since the tools they were using are no longer available, they cannot get any work done. An enormous amount of the software being used depends on Active Directory for security and routing--all gone.
I'm not saying that replacing the Windows desktop with a Linux desktop can't be done in this instance. It just can't be done without a huge outlay of money, time, loss of work, and severe inconvenience to the bank's customers.
I'm old enough to remember a time when we were informed that no one would ever have a computer in their home because computers were the size of an office building and required enough power to run a small city. I expect that once quantum computers are of a sufficient size and stability, uses (meaning algorithms and/or new programming techniques) will be found for them that we aren't thinking about today.
The aspect of this whole discussion that troubles me is that if a machine/computer/whatever actually did develop sentience, people would never admit it because it would make them feel less special. People like to feel special. Humans may never create true artificial intelligence because no one would accept it.
Look, I don't care what OS anyone prefers to use. I really don't. You can use Linux, Windows, BSD, or something you wrote yourself if that's what serves your needs. Linux does not serve my needs.
Does this mean I think Linux is somehow "bad?" Not at all. It just means that Windows, for me, is the best choice. Complaining about Windows (or Microsoft) isn't an argument for using something that will not run the software I need nor support the hardware I use.
Not every desktop user is an 82-year-old grandmother who only browses the web. Some of us use our computers for far more than that, and for the vast majority of us, Windows serves our needs just fine. Use Linux if it does what you need, absolutely, and be so kind as to stop trying to make the rest of us feel inferior. Please?
One day at work, someone digging in a nearby field cut the main power cable to our building. Everything went dark, then the emergency lights came on. The two enormous generators in the back of the building failed to start for some reason and our facility was dead. We were told to just relax and take it easy while the power was being restored. Whilst waiting, I dug out my flashlight from my briefcase and took it with me to the men's room, as I remembered there were no emergency lights there. I was right, but I had no trouble, ah, taking care of business. Turned out the men's room was pretty well occupied at the time, including a lot of guys who used to wonder why on earth I had a flashlight in my briefcase. When I tried to leave there were yells of "HEY! WHERE ARE YOU GOING?!" from the stalls.
Never got questioned about the flashlight again...
If the population is getting older, then the USER bit of UX is getting older too
This is a serious issue in Japan, certainly. However, please note that Fujitsu is an international corporation, selling to many, many other countries other than their own. Not everyone's demographics are as dire as Japan's.
ITMA: If you are referring to my post, then I will reiterate that I'd already made the hardware changes while still using Windows 10. I didn't know about Windows 11 until well after the changes were made. I may have unintentionally conflated some conditions to make it appear that Windows 11 was responsible for the massive increase in speed of my computer--mea culpa. What I was trying to say was that even with the new hardware, I still noticed an increase in system speed.
I did not change the hardware to meet any conditions for Windows 11.
The only change that I am aware of in Windows that might help with speed is a new memory management system, and, as I said, I do notice an increase in speed. Of course, as always, YMMV.
I've been running Windows 11 for about two weeks now, and so far the only real problem I've had was one of my own making--I totally hosed the system drive on my computer and, via a MAJOR brain fart, failed to realize what I had done. Got that fixed and since then things have been more-or-less okay.
I can't say that I really notice all that much difference from Windows 10 except that some applications (especially my Firefox browser) are noticeably faster to come-up than before. I downloaded Winaero Tweaker because I knew there would be some things I wouldn't like, such as the two-layer context menu. That is nothing more than an annoyance to me. Most of the tweaks I made were the same ones I used in Windows 10. I haven't run into any serious bugs, but this isn't a work computer on a corporate network, either.
Having upgraded my hardware to a 3rd gen Ryzen 5, TPM 2.0 was not an issue. Replaced all my spinning rust (except for an 'emergency' external USB drive) with an m.2 NVME system drive and SSD for the rest, the system is about 5-8 times faster--the computer boots to a usable desktop in about 20 seconds from a cold start. I did this while still using Windows 10.
Overall I guess I'd say that Windows 11 works tolerably well, for me. I wouldn't presume to speak for a corporate environment.
I'm going to install this to a spare SSD
So that I can suss what there is to see.
With nothing to fear from errors and such,
I'll find out if problems are just too much--
Or, if it works out as well as MS doth say,
I can always upgrade on another day.
--Burma Shave
I got stuck in one of these recovery loops a few weeks ago, immediately after installing a new M.2 SSD as the boot drive. Windows kept trying boot from the previous drive and, of course, immediately failing to recovery mode. I finally selected the boot drive myself prior to startup, and the system came up properly. But the next time I restarted without selecting the drive (as an experiment), the same error occurred.
I was starting to get a little perplexed. I went into the BIOS and checked the system boot order--it was incorrect. D'oh. I set it to the correct order,saved, and restarted. The wrong drive got selected before I could get the boot order menu. Back into BIOS. Wrong order still. Corrected. Restarted. Wrong order, failed boot.
WTF? A bad chip?? Why won't it save??
Did the same thing about five more times and suddenly, everything was working correctly. Pushed my luck, went into BIOS--the boot order was correct, and has remained so every since. I have never seen something like this happen before in ~40 years of putzing with personal computers.
'Way back in the mid-1970's a newspaper in Florida reported a story about a man who had been stopped in (IIRC) Miami by a mugger armed with a knife. The victim reached inside his jacket and produced a hand grenade, pulled the pin, and screamed, "Not again! This is the last time!"
The grenade was inactive, but the mugger didn't wait around to make that discovery.
While working at Microsoft as a front-line tech, another tech who was having a major problem with a customer's system asked me for some help. I was known as the "hardware guy" since I built my own machines, etc. The computer would not boot, would not display anything, would not--well, anything at all.
After hearing the t-shooting steps that had been tried, I said, "The computer isn't plugged into the wall."
The tech went back to the customer and asked him to make sure the system had power. The customer blew-up at him (I'm sure you've all had the experience) and let him know that he was a doctor and not some ignorant doofus off the street, and the problem was Windows and so forth. A week went by like this, and finally the tech asked the customer again to check that the computer was plugged-in.
You can almost certainly guess the answer. No, the computer was not plugged-in.
This book reminds me (vaguely) of a book I read when I was in the third grade: The Angry Planet, by John Keir Cross, which was full of unpleasant scenes with illustrations to match. It didn't have what I would call a "happy" ending. If a nine-year-old can enjoy Dana Dash then that's a good thing, with it's emphasis on STEM.
Dr. Cavor sure gets around the time stream!
Except for the last upgrade to 2004, when I did have a problem ("not connected to the Internet") and decided to install from scratch rather than fight with the upgrade. I fully admit that I'm in a position to do this anytime I want without repercussions, as this is not a work computer and everything I need is local. The only serious trouble I've had came from a failed hard drive.
I don't think Windows 10 is perfect. There are numerous things I wouldn't mind seeing changed. However, I use applications which are Wiindows-only and see no need to deal with a non-Windows OS.
When my daughter was a little bitty, she would visit me in my "computer room" at home and demand to play one of her games. Of course, this was always while I was busy writing software. One day she escalated the situation by randomly pushing buttons and pulling cables. My solution was to get her involved in my work so she would have something to do besides reboot the computer(s).
I had a leftover from college days: A set of two large plastic buttons, one red, one green. The red button had "Total Destruct" printed on it; the green button had "Reset." Both had squeakers inside. I stuck these to the side of a heavy tower case and told my daughter that she had to be ready to press the red button at any moment to keep my work from being lost, and then press the green button so I could keep working. She accepted these instructions very solemnly, and volunteered to help me at anytime. I made sure to ask for button presses often enough to keep her happy without completely destroying my workflow, and for many months we were both content.
"The only other major differentiation related to frequency is if the EMR is Ionising or not, i.e. contains enough energy to actually harm biological cells in plants and animals. You need to be at ultraviolet or above for that to be the case, anything from visible light or below, which includes all radio frequencies, just doesn't contain enough energy to do any direct cell damage."
Please be a little more careful about saying such things. If you were indeed completely correct, my microwave oven wouldn't be worth anything.
And I include The Register in this, would be if the ownership of the company were to be handed to Linus Torvalds gratis, along with the right to employ anyone he wanted in all corporate positions (CEO, CFO, etc.). While I would never say that "Microsoft can do no wrong"--I know better--apparently there is no other way for them to make amends for past mistakes and a comment made nearly twenty years ago from someone who doesn't work there anymore.
Yes, of course I will be downvoted about a gazillion times but I have little patience for anyone who can't let go of the past and look at the present instead. Being cautious is all well and good, but ignoring potential benefits because of old news is just asking to have a bullet removed from your foot.
I've got First Flight card #1062. I've had it since 1969 when I signed up for a moon flight at the Montreal Exposition. I like to take it out now and then and sigh heavily, then put it away for another few years.
Incidentally, and not related, I also have a "I Ate Just One" gold medal from Lay's Potato Chips. I would happily eat their potato chips on a flight to the moon.
Uhm, I almost hate to break it to you folks, but methane doesn't have a distinctive smell--it is colourless and odourless*. That's why tiny amounts of hydrogen sulfide are added to the methane in natural gas pipelines and storage containers--so that the human nose can detect a gas leak. At least, it is added here in the US, I don't know what other countries may do, if anything.
*Look it up.
My family lived in Roswell, New Mexico, many years ago, adjacent to the Walker SAC base (long since shut-down). At the local elementary school we were made to practice "duck and cover" by filing into the interior hallways and sitting, facing the walls, hunched over with arms covering the head. For some reason it was thought that we needed to practice this rather often, at least until That Day when, just as everyone was settling into place, a B-58 Hustler (yes, it was that long ago) from the airbase went supersonic over the school. Nobody knew if it was intentional or not--personally I never thought so but you never can tell with Air Force pilots. The school declared a half-day and we all went home.
Features and functions reported as being "broken" in the 1809 update work properly on my Windows 10 x64 install.* I'm following the steps people claim to fail or break, and there's just no problem. There hasn't been any problem with updates/patches since I installed Windows 10 on three computers (a desktop, laptop, and tablet) the first or second day it was released. As I've said before, I'm using the same bits as other people so I cannot for the life of me understand why failures are being reported when I never see them.
I am NOT saying this in an effort to refute the claims, but rather to suggest that perhaps some other fault may be involved.
*I want to note that I do not use some of the software said to be experiencing problems, such as iCloud or Windows Media Player. However, I can associate file extensions with any Windows app that I want all day long and it works as it is supposed to work (as one example.)
Windows users will put up with *anything* and they simply don't believe that other systems can run for multiple years without a single problem.
I haven't had an issue on a Windows machine since 1998 that wasn't caused by a hardware problem. That was the last time I got a BSOD, which is why the date stands out. So I have no idea what you are going on about.
I've been using Windows 10 since the day after it's initial release. The problems I've experienced have been:
1. None at all.
2. See 1.
Please don't bother to tell me how "lucky" I am. I'm using the same bits as everyone else. NO broken updates, NO update interruptions (I tell Windows to perform the updates in the middle of the night when I'm sleeping), NO issues with application software, NO BSODs, a faster UI, and frankly, I couldn't care less concerning someone else's opinion of what the interface should look like. Every piece of hardware I use has worked flawlessly with Windows 10.
If the above offends you, tough.
I was visited by a couple of ATT representatives who informed me that fiber was available for my home (ATT had been digging and burying fiber lines for about three months). I asked a few questions: Was it fiber all the way to the modem, and what were the upload/download speeds I could expect, and what was the cost. I was told that it was fiber to copper at the "box" on the outside of my house but I could expect gigabit speed down and about 750Mbs up. The cost would be the same as my current service.
The actual installation was all fiber to the modem and gig down and gig up, which I verified using a wired connection to a computer. The installation was free, the connection is unlimited, and costs the same as my previous 45Mbs, including five static IP addresses. I'm not complaining.
@ Christian Berger:
Your description of the halting problem didn't sound right to me...
"The halting problem is the problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will finish running or continue to run forever."
"I regarded Win9x and ME as game consoles. Never sold or installed them for business."
All I have to say about it is this: Back in the 90's I was a support tech for Windows at Microsoft, first-line support as it's called. I "graduated" to the Premier Support group after awhile, meaning that my team provided phone support for customers paying for it. Fortune 500 companies, smaller-but-still-quite-large companies, occasionally a rich person who was showing-off. I took thousands of calls from businesses. I supported Windows 95, 98, 98SE, and ME. All business, all the time. And I will just mention that the vast majority of calls were exactly the same kind as for free support, and most of the rest were just barely more challenging.
This dredged-up an old memory of mine: Back in the late '70s I was seated at a private dinner with a guest who a missile officer on a US ballistic-missile submarine. I tried to question him about nukes, the ONLY thing he would confirm for me was that the Little Boy bomb functioned by jamming two masses of uranium-235 together. I was disappointed (physics major in college) but I understood that he was sworn to secrecy. Imagine my surprise when, in reply to someone else's question about politics and nukes, he said, "We all know that maybe one in ten H-bombs will go off." I have no reason to think that he made a deliberate mis-statment, because there would be no point in doing so. He said no further word that evening concerning anything other than sports. He did take me to one side as he was leaving and said, sotto vocce, "We never had that conversation. Right?"
MSGrrrrl: I saw this when I Googled it: "It's thus worth adding that the Windows 10 technical preview has these requirements". The articles below this say that the Windows Acccount and Internet Connection were not required in the release version of Windows 10.
Slight confusion, perhaps not really Microsoft's fault, but the user's for not reading the first article properly or completely.
Amazingly enough, I've actually built a paintball Gatling gun. It's not belt-fed, but feeds from a "powered magazine" to keep stuffing paintballs into the gun as fast as it can fire. Got it up to 6000 paintballs/minute but then realized just how many paintballs I was going through--it gets expensive after a few minutes.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
