Posts by David 132 1054 posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
Good point. But I am a compulsive pedant and cannot stop myself from pointing out that the word you want is “whither”.
Unless you were urging MS only outfits to decay and atrophy and shrink. Which I suppose works, too.
No... as the article alluded., I just use the built-in browser to download a better alternative (Firefox, in my opinion/case).
Actually - and I know this is vindictive, petty, and pointless of me - I make a point, on a clean Windows installation, of using IE to download Firefox, and not even using Edge for that. I just got annoyed too much by Microsoft’s sly attempts to force use of Edge (eg nagging when I try to change the default browser, and Edge icons re-appearing on the desktop after seemingly every Windows Update.)
Fear my nerd wrath, Microsoft!
0laf, I regret I have only one upvote to give.
Hey Microsoft, here’s a tip for you: if something’s genuinely good, people will tend to discover it on their own or by word-of-mouth. If you have to cajole people into using your browser, you’ve already lost.
I remember reading here quite recently that MS had tried the tactic, in a Windows test build, of intercepting user attempts to run Firefox_Setup.exe and showing an interstitial “Are you suuuuuure you won’t try Edge?” wheedling dialog. Pathetic, and would have ticked me off even more than does the nag when you try to change default browser.
Basically, Edge is the browser equivalent of Talkie Toaster.
jake I support a PDP. A dozenish, actually. Mostly -10s and -11s ...
So no doubt at this time of year you’re busy moving them all to corridors?
As in, “DEC the halls”?
(Oh, please yourselves.)
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Dwarf "I wonder how many other internally visible services have amber monitoring right now ???"
"More services are down. Go to red alert."
"Are you sure sir? It will mean changing the bulb..."
(with apologies to Red Dwarf)
Well, at least one of my other computers shows an Apple symbol in one corner of the screen... maybe Microsoft are just paying homage. Or perhaps it's their way of saying "orange you glad we have updates"..?
Sorry. I'm plum out of decent fruit puns.
No, it’s on a computer, so it’s e-fluent design. The hyphen is optional.
Hans 1 "Basically, disable Cortana in GPO and web search."
Oh, agreed, although Microsoft have tended to ignore a lot of those GPO policies lately - they're still there when you fire up the Group Policy Editor, but many of them don't actually have any effect unless you're running Education or Enterprise variants of the OS.
But my point - made with my usual clunking attempt at humor, sorry - was that it would be nice to see simple, obvious options for this in the UI. At this point I'd even put up with Microsoft's usual games, whereby they put an option there in 6 point font, dark blue on a slightly-darker-blue background, and when you click on it it pops up with "Are you sure you don't want to not unset this option? [OK | Yes]".
Edit: and re the removal of Candy Crush & the other shovelware... I built a clean installation of 1809 Pro on a Thinkpad earlier this week. I set the GPO to "disable consumer experience", turned off all the "occasionally show suggestions in start/taskbar" options I could find, and still got an unending stream of notifications that "Dolby ProAudio has installed! Check it out!" "Realtek Audio Console has installed! Check it out!" "Legends of Candy Saga Lootbox of Duty Turismo has installed! Check it out!".
So while I acknowledge your own experience and suggestions, I'm not happy with Microsoft.
...simple UI options for: disabling automatic download of crap like Candy Crush; disabling telemetry; and disabling web search when you're just trying to launch VLC but instead get a list of everything the world's 1 remaining Bing user has ever searched for including that term.
Oh, and also in this build, a leprechaun pops out of the USB port every 5 minutes and waves at you.
All of the above statements are equally true.
Good idea, but wouldn't help some people. Ever browsed reddit.com/r/carbage? Some people are just slobs.
I was driving up the A41 towards Whitchurch some years ago, following a Land Cruiser. The knobheads in it were throwing out a piece of trash about every 50 yards. Cups, crisp packets, cigarettes... disgusting. Hanging's definitely too good for morons like that.
Ironically, just as I was reading this article, my screen flickered black for a moment then came back, and I now have no audio. Windows 10 (1803, not even 1809) has just "helpfully" auto-installed new - faulty - drivers for my graphics & HDMI display audio. I've now spent 10 minutes trying to roll it back, without success. Pardon me for venting my frustration in this comment.
Thanks, Microsoft. $##%@&!
AC My sister swallowed a car door* as a toddler.
Was she prescribed a Corsa laxatives?
Pffft, get out of here with your Duplo pabulum. Real men swallow Sticklebricks or Meccano.
And by "Award", I'm thinking the IgNobel. Should be a shoo-in for 2019.
...or if you can't, at least go through the motions?
AC Don't all cyborgs have a "kill switch"?
Killbots have a preset kill limit - just ask Zap Brannigan...
And by "it" you of course mean iCloud, and not 1809.
Daedalus, haven't you ever heard the guidance "do not speak ill of the dead"?
There are no such injunctions regarding the living, however, so allow me to warn that in your utterings here you're tending to come across as just another bitter, shrivelled left-wing miserablist with a chip on his shoulder a mile wide.
My favourite of her quotes was referenced in her obituary in today's Telegraph.
Apparently when she was being appointed a Baroness, the title of Trumpington belonged to someone else, so she was asked whether there was an alternative Cambridgeshire location she'd accept for her title.
"You don't think I'm going to call myself Lady Six Mile Bottom, do you?" she demanded.
...And subsequently got Trumpington.
RIP.
Stoneshop A Raspberry Pi can easily control a servo or solenoid positioned to push that button for you, as well as run the cam. And you only need to power it up the moment you actually need to read the meter.
That's an excellent suggestion, but I can't help feeling that we're heading into Wallace & Gromit territory here. Something like this.
David Beckham’s at a press conference, fielding questions. In response to one request for his opinion, he pauses for a while, then says “Well, they taste nice and make my breath fresher”
There’s a stunned silence, then the journalist wearily says “No, I asked about TAC-TICS”
(But then, as my mum - and someone above, I see - likes to point out, considering he has a net worth of £lots, and those mocking him don’t, which of us is the thickie?)
Spaceballs had the wonderful scene where they were watching the VHS tape of the movie as it was being made, and found themselves watching themselves watching themselves, etc...
"What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the movie?"
"Now. You're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now."
"What happened to then?"
"We passed then."
"When?"
"Just now. We're at now now."
"Go back to then."
"When?"
"Now."
"I can't."
"Why?"
"We missed it."
The icon is for Spaceballs The Flamethrower ("the kids love this one")
Or any of the Troma films!
Or Ishtar - at least the remake couldn't be a bigger waste of celluloid.
I have a suspicion that "Brewster's Millions" will be the next one up for a remake - after all, it's only been made about a dozen times since the 1920s.
@MiguelC, I always preferred to refer to it as "Dances With Smurfs".
You are an evil genius, and I fear that two years from now we'll be re-reading your comment and thinking how prescient it was.
Amen to that. I remember when these poor, hard-done-by comparison sites were given free reign to pollute Google search results. No matter what term you searched for, the first page would be a morass of links offering "Buy $SEARCHTERM here! Best prices on $SEARCHTERM!".
Good riddance.
Usual Brussels approach, though... if it's successful, tax and regulate it. If it's failing, subsidize it.
AC "With the Alexa, Droid and iOS versions cracked - perhaps Microsoft devs will be freed up to produce a functional version of Skype for Windows."
Put down the crack-pipe, that's crazy talk.
But I've upvoted you anyway, because people as delusional as you need to be gently humored :)
AC ”How many movies have you seen where people are communicating with each other by tapping out morse on a heating pipe or adjoining wall? Doesn't work quite the same if the characters are tapping out some sort of binary representation of ASCII values for the letters in their message, does it?”
Even worse if they’re using 2-byte Unicode. Try doing that to tell your cell-neighbour that there’s an escape attempt planned, and you’ll find you’ve finished serving your life sentence before you’ve got to the first “cell bars” emoji!
“Warder, I know I’m due for release, but can’t I stay in just another year or two?”
Not by post, that's why they tested delivery by drone.
Well you can’t get them to walk there... that’s just pussy-footing around.
Dark, Light, and normal-aka-murky? Such choice.
Remember when Windows allowed you to set whatever color scheme you wanted for the window borders, text, taskbar and all other elements?
Probably because the word "advert" is in the URL...?
Better count your fingers, toes and legs.
I feel like that wouldn’t be difficult after stealing a crocodile. You could almost certainly represent your total number of remaining limbs/appendages using 1 binary bit.
msknight - thanks for the Short Circuit reference, though I wonder how many here will get it.
By coincidence, I was in Astoria just the other day, and drove over the Megler bridge (the one Johnny 5 parachuted from). “Stephanie’s” house is for sale at the moment, by the way.
Also there - the school and house used in Kindergarten Cop, and the house from the Goonies, although in the latter case the owner has got so tired of trespassers photographing the house he’s shrouded it in tarpaulins and posted threatening “POLICE WILL BE CALLED” signs.
Well acsherly, it's another one of those linguistic oddities like flammable/inflammable. Irregardless and disirregardless both have the exact same meaning
I know, right? Which is why I always use “unregardless”, to avoid ambiguity & confusion. The ‘T’ in it is silent, by the way.
Excellent tree puns. I bough down in admiration.
However, given that this is nominally an IT site, I'm surprised no-one has mentioned SAP yet. Tree sap, geddit?
Oh, please yourselves.
Bloody brilliant! Brew?
Beautiful. Bartender! Best bitter!
Not an 0x004003 error!? They've been thrown back to 1984. Did no one tell Microsoft about meaningful error messages?
Software Failure. Press left mouse button to continue.
Guru Meditation 0x004003
You forgot a couple...
iv) Always add sanity-checking / canary logic to any transaction-processing system.. e.g if ($item_price) > ($maximum_price_you'd_ever_realistically_expect) then flag_for_review();
Session) Also flag for review any abnormal traffic levels to any given page. If a particular laptop is getting 500% of the views of other, similar products, it's either a pricing mistake, or a content cockup of some sort.
Saturday) Can we just settle on a list numbering scheme, please?
Order) Apparently not.
I bought a new laptop nearly two years ago, with win7. My main one before that was XP from ... 2002! (1.8GHz P4 1600 x1200 screen
...and I'll wager the new one has a lower screen resolution/pixel count than the old one. Seriously, WTF is up with all these 1920x1080 panels?
Moderators, can we get this comment thread expunged or at least censored, please? I’m no prude, but these frequent, blatant and shameless uses of the word B*lg*um are beyond the pale. There might be small children or elderly dowager aunts reading this, for fuck’s sake.
Indeed. It's pronounced "fooking", apparently, and the good burghers of the town got so sick of Anglophone tourists stealing their roadside signs that a few years ago they resorted to painting the town name onto a large boulder instead.
(This is from memory, so if it's wrong, bite me. I could look it up on Wikipedia but that would be cheating.)
Hey, give them credit. They had the ENTIRE Bing user-base doing testing.
And he said it was OK to ship.
Spazturtle They should just get rid of the current 'penalties' for using an unregistered copy on Windows and just make it so that unregistered copies are automatically enrolled into the windows insider update rings.
Ah, you're of the "hanging's too good for 'em, the Taliban were too liberal" persuasion, I see.
”We have decided not to link to the server exposing the information, nor go into detail on the data-leaking vulnerability, in the interests of responsible disclosure.”
In other words, “...because we don’t want to come into work one day and find Novichok smeared on our door handles”
Morel of the story,
That'll be a D H Lawrence story.
I think it makes him sound like a fun guy.
(EDIT: D’oh, after scrolling down the page I see that about 45 other people beat me to similar puns. So don’t bother up voting this. I’m not THAT desperate.
I wish the Reg comments system threaded conversations properly!)
PUT DOWN THE UNAUTHORIZED REFILL CARTRIDGE!
YOU HAVE THIRTY SECONDS TO COMPLY
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