PhobosAnomaly

All fourteen seconds of it, anyway.

Ten of those seconds are apologising, too.

That damned abominable snowman is going to get a nasty surprise at two thousand metres…

Pennis Station a bit too obvious?

whatcha gonna do

when lemmymania runs wild

on you?

I’d love to visit - that area in particular for a cheeky photo under the Revolution sign.

Isn’t Safeway a US firm at it’s root?

I may be wrong. Safeway largely evaporated as a brand in the UK. Shame, I used to quite enjoy working there, good craic.

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.

gobble up deez micronuts

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.

Sorry friend.

If your data was occupationally-sensitive or renders you vulnerable to financial ruination, it’s time to move to a recovery phase and see if modern data recovery specialists can work their voodoo.

Remember: never run experimental commands (you or a GenAI) in a live environment. See how it breaks things in a test environment first - if it shits itself, you may even get to learn how to fix it before running the instruction on live data.

Anecdote time! A good friend of mine drove his car to a mutual colleague’s place once because the wipers were about as much use as two chicken breasts on metal poles. He says to our colleague “Hey Foxy, I hear you’re good with cars, can you fix these wipers for me? The rubber seems to be in good nick but it’s not clearing anything”.

“Sure thing,” Foxy proudly announces, “I’ll get to work”.

Foxy strips the wipers down, one component at a time, before dusting his hands off and walking away.

“What’s going on, Foxy? The thing’s still in bits!” my pal says.

“No idea,” says Foxy, “not a fucking Scooby mate” and goes back inside, leaving his wipers and actuating motor in about fourteen pieces on the roadside.

So much for being good with cars.

It was mostly black, to be fair!

…I’ll get my coat

fit like iday

nah min ahm a bit further up the road the now eh

far enough awa fae Aiberdeen to nae be there every day, but near enough to see abidy fan needs be.

Actually I’m a fake loon, but I have been up here nearly twenty years now so I’m going native slowly!

aye aye min, that’s an affa fine snow loon ken