Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.
Old people are actively using tablets. Lots and lots of them. A significant cross-section of my Boomer-and-up client base uses an iPad to do absolutely everything. It’s broadly the same experience as what they have on their phone, so I guess it’s familiar, but the screen is giant so they can actually see it. They seem to like that.
Especially since the majority of computer users worldwide now no longer use a PC to do their computing. The average consumer now uses Windows only at work. Their personal device, whatever it is, runs Android or is some manner of iDevice, two platforms which have thoroughly eaten Microsoft’s lunch.
It’s too bad for Microsoft that their mobile platform – Windows Mobile, er, I mean Windows 8 RT, er, actually it was Pocket PC, um, no wait, it was Windows CE, et. cetera – all bombed so spectacularly, and the most recent one mere moments before Google took over the world.
I imagine Microsoft is no longer eyeing private users as a cash cow except purely as advertising targets.
It’s only a matter of time before some brilliant dipshit over there manages to envision Windows as a subscription service aimed solely at businesses, and the days of Windows as a standalone OS will be over.
The original Legend of Zelda. I still have it on cartridge and every once in a while I’ll just steamroll the entire game and whoop Ganon’s ass. I can usually do it in about 4 hours.
I don’t use any glitches or speedrun optimizations, I just know where everything is and what order to do things in.
One of the things I learned as a wee waddler on my path to being a fully-fledged computer nerd (that was two bird puns in one sentence, I don’t know if you noticed) was that keeping a spare power supply or two around is always a good idea.
A blown power supply can bring your day’s Unreal Tournament matches productivity to a halt instantly, and inevitably on a Sunday when all the stores are closed, too. To make matters more interesting, a partially failed power supply can cause all manner of strange and otherwise undiagnosable mystery issues. E.g. you’re telling me two of your hard drives, your RAM, and your video card all started acting flaky at once? More likely is your PSU’s +12v rail is wonky, or something. Swap in a known good one and see. A power supply is also the first in line of all your PC components that can be killed by external forces, e.g. dirty power or nearby lightning strikes, or maybe your dad just deciding to plug his 1970s vintage arc welder into the same circuit in the house, etc.
To this day I have a generic 750w PSU sealed in its shrink wrap on the parts shelf in my basement, because you never know when it’ll get you or someone you know out of a jam. And eventually it probably will.
I keep plenty of stock of this stuff and use it on plastic screen covers and bezels, plus it also does wonders on motorcycle helmet visors, sunglasses lenses (provided they’re not mirrored), and the Slipstreamer fairing on my Honda Shadow.
It does a credible job of defogging plastic headlight housings as well, but it takes a lot of elbow grease and a bitchin’ long time.
If it is, their stupid model forgot a “more” in this passage:
Password compromise is no joke; it leads to account compromise and that leads to, well, the compromise of most everything you hold dear in this technological-centric world we live in. It’s why Google is telling billions of users to replace their passwords with much secure passkeys.
(Wow, much secure. Very password.)
“Moooooom! They’re looking at me!!!”
I personally do not trust ISP provided routers to be secure and up to date, nor free of purposefully built in back doors for either tech support or surveillance purposes (or both). You can expect patches and updates on those somewhere on the timescale between late and never.
Therefore I always put those straight into bridge mode and serve my network with my own router, which I can trust and control. Bad actors (or David from the ISP help desk) may be able to have their way with my ISP router, but all that will let them do is talk to my own router, which will then summarily invite them to fuck off.
Likewise, I would not be keen on using an ISP provided router’s inbuilt VPN capability, which is probably limited to plain old PTPP – it has been on all of the examples I’ve touched so far – and thus should not be treated as secure.
You can configure an OpenWRT based router to act as an L2TP/IPSec gateway to provide VPN access on your network without the need for any additional hardware. It’s kind of a faff at the moment and requires manually installing packages and editing config files, but it can be done.
You can even skip step 2 by using one of the IoT editions (either Win10 or Win11) which come minus the prepackaged bloatware.
Microsoft is mostly interested in making everything bullshit for home users. If you convince them you’re an enterprise customer, preferably by running up the old Jolly Roger, suddenly your life is a lot easier.
You would be amazed in the industrial world. There are tons of large and incredibly expensive special purpose machines that are operated by super antiquated PC architecture computers running geriatric operating systems, sometimes still even DOS or Windows 3.x.
Think industrial CNC mills and lathes, presses, pick-and-place machines, specialty lab testing equipment, electron microscopes, etc.
Process control, i.e. production line automation, is usually driven by dedicated PLCs. But the user interfaces connected to them are almost invariantly some old ruggedized panel mounted PC running Windows. An absurd number of them in my experience are still on 2000 or XP. NT4 is pretty easy to find, too.
Granted often these are not networked, and in cases where they are they’re not connected to the internet, or may even talk to other workstations via RS-485 serial (!) or some other gimcrack method that is unlikely to be a vector for modern malware.
What Microsoft probably expects you to do is get your management to buy new computers that support Windows 11 and/or whatever the hell their current server OS is, and in the process give them and their hardware vendor partners a lot of money.
What you can do instead is switch to Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC which is what I did at my workplace recently. It’s supported until 2032 with security updates. Not feature updates, but I suspect that business users probably don’t care about those much. In fact, most people would probably treat that as a benefit. It also comes with basically no bloatware (except goddamned Edge), which is surprising. No Copilot, no Cortana, no Recall. None of that shit.
We have a fleet of machines that “can’t” be upgraded to Win11 because of hardware shortcomings, at least without overriding the requirements with Rufus or similar. Unfortunately we also rely on a small but important spread of proprietary Windows-only applications which have no open source or Linux replacements, and at least two of them absolutely will not run in Wine. Believe me, I tried.
The only wrinkle with this is that you cannot upgrade or license swap in place. You have to do a full reinstall, which for us is not a problem because we have a modest number of computers and I have physical access to all of them. None are bricked up behind a wall or anything.
Pretty much all of those are characters from franchises that quickly jumped to consoles, or had the intention of multiplatform releases from the very start. I’m not sure any of them are very fitting.
So on that note, the least nonsensical mascot for PC gaming in particular I can think of is that dwarf, whoever he is, from the box art of World of Warcraft. Or possibly the orc from the alternate version. WoW is earth-shatteringly popular and has basically defined the entire private lives of a depressing number of people, not to mention it’s the sole and singular thing even non-gamers think of when you mention MMORPGs. And it has only appeared on home computers. Never consoles. Other Warcraft properties have, but not WoW.
Define “long.” I disagree with the Doomguy proposal explicitly, because Doom appeared on the Sega 32x in November of 1994 which was barely a year after the initial PC release. One of the defining aspects of gaming in the mid '90s was the monumentally cynical gold rush of trying to cram Doom onto any damn fool console as fast as possible, in a vain attempt to capture part of the lightning and make those sales. And until the Playstation and arguably the N64, every attempt failed spectacularly in various ways.
The definitive Doom experience remaining locked to the PC for those few years was absolutely not for a lack of trying. Every greedy video game exec on the planet wanted Doom on their system. id themselves assisted with several of these ports in various ways and they had absolutely no intention of leaving Doom only on PC, either, if they could help it.
It can indeed, but Notepad++ is explicitly Windows only.
There are some clones for Unixlike platforms, and I guess you could run the genuine article in Wine if you really felt like it. But don’t go looking for an official Linux build, because there isn’t one.
Re: But it has to be watertight, so it can’t have any ports or buttons or doors or hatches or a replaceable battery!!!
Uh-huh. Sure.
Feel free to trot this one out the next time some glassy-eyed Apple apologist is making that argument at you. That one annoys the shit out of me, too. This has been a solved problem for thirty years. Probably longer.
For anyone wondering about where, just as an example, polyvinyl is: Polyvinyl acetate (i.e. PVA) is the stuff that wood glue is typically made out of. It’s also the binder used for those bird seed bells.
…It does indeed dissolve in the water. In the rain, certainly, which any owner of a bird seed bell could tell you.
I propose the following amendment, then: If you cause harm to a two wheeled rider due to negligence and/or belligerence, you get busted down to a Vespa for a further 5 years.
In some places in the world you can give it a shot and see, but we don’t have rear fog lights in the US. I’ve never seen one on any car designed for this market, and my Crosstrek just to name an example has a conspicuous filler panel over the hole where the rear fog light goes on the same model sold in other markets.
As to why, I have no idea. But we also mandate that front fog lights can’t be configured so they can be activated without the main headlights on at the same time, which kind of defeats the purpose if you ask me. So maybe asking DOT regulations to make sense is a tall order.
Or on your motorcycle in 15.
Everyone with the usual compliment of legs should be forced to start on a motorcycle or moped. After 2 years of that we let you graduate to being in a box. Riding a motorcycle will force you to learn how to remain attentive and focused 100% on operating your machine, and when you’re finally afforded the luxury of a roof and heat, not having to get rained and snowed on half the year, you’ll really appreciate what you’ve got instead of treating it like the world owes you a car.
Just like in the NES days. Everything old is new again!