PhobosAnomaly

Telling you now. A woman - and probably a guy - will appreciate a tongue far better than a dong.

And above all that: respect and communication.

“great start, now go for the lead!” 🏁

You should start a website or something, it’d be popular!

Maybe something like CatsThatLookLikeChaplin.com I’m not sure

I’ll be honest, I used Windows XP fairly extensively then switched to Lubuntu while learning about Windows 7. My workplace moved from NT4 to Windows 7, and then to Windows 10 which is the only versions I’ve had serious exposure to.

My only real experience of Vista and 8 has been installing it on folk’s devices, patching them to a current state, and Ninite-ing them full of handy applications.

Nah I agree, but if every incremental release was included then you’d need a 55" monitor in portrait orientation to see them all!

I’ve not really thought about the Star Trek films. I enjoyed them all (even Nemesis!) with the exception of ST4: The Voyage Home.

I’m afraid I can’t speak authoritatively on the subject, however taking a step back - MS do have a record for driving hardware uptake with their system releases.

In theory it’s not a bad thing - Unreal and Quake II (among many) requiring 3D accelerator hardware largely drove PC gaming into the lead for cutting edge graphics - but the type of hardware MS have been requiring has always been a bit of a clusterfuck - a prime recent example being the supposed requirement of a TPM board in a Win11 computer.

My anecdotal experience is that Vista - while pretty - is a bit of a bloatfest regardless of what hardware you run it on.

Would it? If I’m already a user on a local device, surely my parental code would suffice and turn a ludicrous process into a one (and a half) step process?

Ah I remember upgrading from 98SE to Millennium Edition and it was just ass. That said, I reformatted and installed Me and used the 98 CD to pass the upgrade check, and I had very few issues with it. Shit like System Restore was gash - in fact, any of the new tools installed with Me were awful - but I just effectively used it as 98 Third Edition and it did the job nicely for me.

I agree that 95 was a big - if not monumental - step up in graphics interface driven OSes… but the first few releases were unstable as fuck. Whether it was horrendous shutdown issues because ACPI support was super flaky at the time, to trying to run com/com as a command to insta-bluescreen the system. The latter is so much of an edge case though that I almost cut myself typing it.

Jesus, my son wanted to add a classmate as a friend on Xbox Live last night. It should have been a two step process from a parent perspective: Authenticate, then authorise (though the lad was delegated the task of the latter technically).

When he tried to add the friend, I had to:

1. Enter my parental code (fair enough);
2. Enter my Microsoft Account password because it was apparently a transaction involving personal data;
3. Scan the QR code to do this on another device (admittedly optional);
4. Enter the email address of my MS account;
5. Enter the 2FA code emailed to me;
6. Stop the passkey creation process;
7. Confirm that I didn’t want a passkey;
8. Skip the age verification;
9. Turn off the personalised ads

Just so he could get to the point where he could select “add as a friend”, what the actual fuck

Yes… and no.

Microsoft’s operating systems have been very hit or miss - certainly their consumer operating systems - with the classic rule being “every other one is decent”:

• Windows ✅
• Windows 2.0 ❌
• Windows 3.11 ✅
• Windows 95 ❌ (but in fairness it was a good crack, OSR2 was decent)
• Windows 98 ✅
• Windows Me ❌ (unless it was a clean install, the upgrade was horrific)
• Windows XP ✅
• Windows Vista ❌
• Windows 7 ✅
• Windows 8 ❌
• Windows 10 ✅
• Windows 11❌

The more business focussed OS’s like Windows for Workgroups, NT4, and 2000 were rock solid in fairness.

Their business practices have always been shady as fuck too. Embrace, extend, extinguish is firmly burned into computer hobbyists minds.

The Passport was actually a really decent phone but the jokes did get old.

“When are you going to wall-mount your phone?”

“fucking hell that will kill someone if you drop it”

“you don’t need to send that text, that person can fucking read it from here!”

etc etc etc

I’m glad you mentioned the bugs. I was slowly leaning towards it but I’ve done my fair bit of… “unpaid beta testing” for one lifetime.

I miss my BlackBerry phones. The Titan range was cool but buggy as well. If they could just do a Nothing phone with a QWERTY keyboard, I would literally buy one overnight.

I mean, my understanding of the trials of TEMPEST were that it was designed to reproduce the image that was displayed on a screen at any given time rather than detect the use of TV receiver sets.

I understand that for the most part, the TV detector vans used a similar technique used to find cold war spies transmitting covertly - that is to say, broadcasting a specific frequency known to resonate with particular components of a receiver, and listen for the telltale high frequency squawk that was produced as a result of the receiver’s operation.

Advance in technology from the 80s onwards and the move to digital decoding all but fucked this technique.

There was a very small window in time when they could, but they’re all but useless now, simply being touted as a scare tactic.

I can’t find the source for the life of me; but detector van operators haven’t been called to give evidence to support a prosecution in decades; and whereas TV Licensing historically haven’t disclosed their fleet size or operations, their budget drops would suggest that the automotive arm that would support their detector van procurement has been dormant for years.

edit: in fact I think most of the enforcement actions have been outsourced to Capita, which is the equivalent of putting Myra Hindley in charge of a fucking nursery.

Counterintuitively, I’ve become a bit of a Nothing fanboy. The phones are decent; the earbuds are decent; and the watches would be decent if it wasn’t for the watch face that has the same surface area of a small eastern European country.

Genuinely though, love the idea of Buy Nothing day.

Buy what you need, when you need it, for who you need in your life. Including you.

Or not, I’m not the boss of you 😊

It’s a bit of a wank article to be honest - it doesn’t even go on to say if the SIM was delivered. Why not wait the extra day and publish the article after it was due to be delivered?

If it didn’t get delivered then it’s easy meat for Trump-kicking, and if it did get delivered then you’d get some sort of review from some other poor fucker daft enough to sign up to it.

Bit of a waste of time really.

Fair play to M Lechat, that is some pragmatism and understanding in the world that I would sorely be lacking. I feel sorry for the guy. I hope he comes up with a banger soon and the planets align for him.

I’m not sure if the Steam Machines announcement helped or hindered him. Yes, it sunk the chances of mass visibility on the storefront… but then I’m assuming there’d be a vastly increased number of folk logging in to Steam to see the Steam Machines news, and exposed Planet Centauri to more views by the law of averages.

doesn’t matter bro, they’re your thoughts and that’s what makes them awesome 😊

Figma balls wheeeyyyy

yes