Endless Complaining

[Dr. Leonard HmofCoy]

One week seemed like a sadly short operating life.

That is actually the MTBF for Windows 10. There is one copy of which has been running without a crash for years, but Windows Georg is an outlier and should not have been counted.

[stormneedle]

One week seemed like a sadly short operating life.

That is actually the MTBF for Windows 10. There is one copy of which has been running without a crash for years, but Windows Georg is an outlier and should not have been counted.

That meme has improved statistical literacy so much.

[random axe]

All I can say is, I continue to say "Fuck Microsoft!" and not mean it as some weird fetish.

Actually, I just realized that this year I've been using Windows for like 30 years.  And it's always been crap.

[Sidious]

I have to say, I've used every version of Windows in some capacity since Windows 3.

Windows 10 is the worst one, hands down.

[random axe]

Seriously, it's not original for me to say it, but 3.11 was the best overall, even without strong multitasking.  It was fast and light, it was simple, it was easy to customize at considerable depth -- it was easy to alter menus and hotkeys, FFS, or to get swappable third-party desktop shells for.  When something went wrong, it was easy to restart. 

edit:  Also, I think 3.11 was the last version that had a fully functional version of Paint.  This is minor, but also symptomatic.  MS could never bother to fix, say, the color eraser on later versions of Paint, even though they still included the color eraser with later versions of Paint. 

Of the post-95 versions, XP is still the only one I found truly tolerable.


My ancient ThinkPad is finally starting to really die.    Not sure how I'll replace it.  It was under $200, it's worked flawlessly for I think six years (except the DVD drive, which became untrustworthy after about two years), it has a terrific keyboard, and it runs my Linux install perfectly.  I've never asked anything more difficult of it than streaming video, and it was my Netflix machine for years.  I mostly use it for writing.

I dunno.  Part of it is just that I'm so sick of farking around with uncooperative PCs, trying to get them to usable.  I start reading articles on how to Linux a used Chromebook or some damned thing, and my brain starts to throw up. 

[random axe]

SO now Chrome . . . F6 doesn't just move the cursor to the address bar but also sometimes selects a tab, uh, tab, instead.

First of all, there are already keyboard shortcuts for every piece of tab management that you seem to be able to do from said tab tab selection.  It's hard to believe Google hasn't removed those keyboard shortcuts, but not yet.  So this seems to be a sloppy unnecessary duplication of function.

Second of all . . . the F6 key now does two unrelated things.  What The Fuck.  Neither F7 nor F8 nor F9 nor F10 seems to do a damned thing, so it's not like they'd run out of keys.  This is the purest kind of stupid and bad.


Weirdly . . . Google's own support page claims that F10 selects "the last item in the Chrome toolbar".  That either doesn't mean what I think it does, or it doesn't work. 

It also claims that pressing F10 + Enter opens the Chrome Menu.  Not on my install of Chrome, it doesn't.  Also, WTF kind of key combination is that?  Control, Shift, Alt -- those are continuous function keys.  The Function Keys, per se, are supposed to be instant, not continuous.

Do the people at Google not normally use computers?

[random axe]

It's good -- it is; I'm not arguing -- that people at Microsoft are mad about MS tech being used for military systems, and that they're drawing attention to it.  But it's kind of like when Facebook IT people get upset about some new scandal.

You people know the corporation you work for is evil and has done incalculable damage to Western civilization, etc.  Come on.

[flipper]

My corporation enables many of those to do evil.  So we're kind of like evil once removed.

[random axe]

Have we complained about Windows much?  Because I really, really fscking hate Windows 10 so very, very much.  It's everything I've ever disliked and thought was wrong about Windows exaggerated into a caricature.  I'm amazed it isn't full of Clippies.

I don't want rotating nature scenes with glib fortune cookie / clickbait slogans at start up.  I don't want the Start menu to pop up on the assumption that everyone wants that.  I don't want a variety of icon sizes, or piss-poor ugly amateurish icon design (why are icons more impoverished now than they were in Windows effing 3?), or icons that goddamned MOVE and flip around.  Or video in the Start menu, FFS.  Or 'push' information coming into the Start menu.

It's like the people at MS designed a Start menu based half on the principles of Homer's car design and half on the bitter-clown design philosophy of Facebook.  What goes in a Start menu?  Any damned thing.  Who cares?

Every fscking time I plug in a thumbdrive, Windows 10 tells me "there's a problem" with it.  Click here to fix it!  If you click, it takes awhile and then says there's no problem.  Every.  Damned.  Time.  And then it pops up AGAIN to ask what you want to do with this USB drive.  I want you to shut up and put a link in the Drives section of File Explorer.  Maybe put an icon on the desktop while the drive's plugged in.  You're making this WAY too complicated.

The whole damned OS is like that.  Specially designed by idiots to be fancy but not useful.  It's like a broom with the handle studded with rhinestones that cut your hands.  It's embarrassing for anyone to find out you own it.

[random axe]

My corporation enables many of those to do evil.  So we're kind of like evil once removed.

If you work for a big corporation, odds are it's doing terrible things, because that's the darwinian reality of corporations, especially when they aren't regulated responsibly by society.  And, yeah, you're a bad person if you push for something unethical, whereas the rest of us just have to have a job somewhere. 

But you don't get to be suddenly offended.  You gotta draw a line somewhere, but you gotta be up front about it if you want it to mean anything.  It's like, Yeah, we step on people's necks, and we shouldn't, but I'm not OK with stepping on BABIES.  Keep it in context.

[mo]

The USB people need to be rounded up and ...something. Maybe placed in a maze with no exit?

USB 3.2, which doubles the maximum speed of a USB connection to 20Gb/s, is likely to materialize in systems later this year. In preparation for this, the USB-IF—the industry group that together develops the various USB specifications—has announced the branding and naming that the new revision is going to use, and... it's awful.

USB 3.0 was straightforward enough. A USB 3.0 connection ran at 5Gb/s, and slower connections were USB 2 or even USB 1.1. The new 5Gb/s data rate was branded "SuperSpeed USB," following USB 2's 480Mb/s "High Speed" and USB 1.1's 12Mb/s "Full Speed."

But then USB 3.1 came along and muddied the waters. Its big new feature was doubling the data rate to 10Gb/s. The logical thing would have been to identify existing 5Gb/s devices as "USB 3.0" and new 10Gb/s devices as "USB 3.1." But that's not what the USB-IF did. For reasons that remain hard to understand, the decision was made to retroactively rebrand USB 3.0: 5Gb/s 3.0 connections became "USB 3.1 Gen 1," with the 10Gb/s connections being "USB 3.1 Gen 2." The consumer branding is "SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps."

What this branding meant is that many manufacturers say that a device supports "USB 3.1" even if it's only a "USB 3.1 Gen 1" device running at 5Gb/s. Meanwhile, other manufacturers do the sensible thing: they use "USB 3.0" to denote 5Gb/s devices and reserve "USB 3.1" for 10Gb/s parts.

USB 3.2 doubles down on this confusion. 5Gb/s devices are now "USB 3.2 Gen 1." 10Gb/s devices become "USB 3.2 Gen 2." And 20Gb/s devices will be... "USB 3.2 Gen 2×2." Because they work by running two 10Gb/s connections along different pairs of wires simultaneously, and it's just obvious from arithmetic that you'd number the generations "1, 2, 2×2." Perhaps they're named for powers of two, starting with zero? The consumer branding is a more reasonable "SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps."

The good part of all this is that USB 3.2 could mean 5, 10, or 20Gbps. You can bet that there will be manufacturers who are going to exploit that confusion wherever and whenever they can.

- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/usb-3-2-is-going-to-make-the-current-usb-branding-even-worse/

[random axe]

USB is hot trash, always has been.  Granted, things could have been worse than USB, but it's a horrible piece of hardware and an embarrassment for human civilization.  The connectors are bad; the needless multiplication of connector types is moronic; the transfer tech often doesn't work properly.  Not super-often, but too often.  Kind-of sort-of hot-swappable is not good.

For reasons that remain hard to understand

It's not hard to understand.  It's because stupid.  It's just hard to accept.

Every really good USB anything that I've ever had has used the USB socket as a power outlet.  That said, I have a lot of cool gadgets that use a USB socket for a power outlet.  So, you know.  There's that, at least.  But a new data transfer rate won't make the slightest difference to me.

[random axe]

Here's an utterly typical example of MS's design skills:

If you're using Outlook / Hotmail, and you go to the Spam folder, the buttons at the top include, you know, a Delete button.

But if you select everything in the folder, the Delete button turns into a Not Junk button.

They move the Delete button and turn the regular one into a Not Junk button.

This is stupid like if you had the brake pedal in a car you were designing turn into an accelerator pedal when you shift into Reverse.


There's a lot of this kind of 'Context Sensitive Interface' trainwreck crap out there, but MS is still the master of it, as far as I can tell.

[random axe]

Had to add up a ton of inventory numbers this morning, and our actual physical calculator has vanished.  The one on my phone is fine for the occasional calculation, but I sat down at one of our Windows 10 machines to do the endless addition.

OK, so.  The calculator app that comes with Windows 10:

- Windows-standard interface?  No.

- Good interface design?  LOL, no.  God damned ugly, with buttons that merge without spacing or visual distinction, yadda yadda.  It's like they intentionally had it designed by a person who didn't want to do it and who had never seen a calculator.  Fortunately, you can use the keyboard's number pad and only look at the screen when you need to see the total.

- The History sometimes displays your work history and sometimes doesn't.  I couldn't figure out the rhyme or reason.  Luckily, I don't care.

- It's . . . unbelievably . . . incomprehensibly . . . S L O W.

Srsly, how the fsck did they make such a slow calculator?  All I'm doing is adding numbers.  And it pauses for over a second every time it has to perform an operation.  I am teh mystified.  If you're typing in numbers and hitting the plus button fairly quickly, you'll get well ahead of it and be able to look up, stare at it in confusion, and then finally have it display the total.

I want to emphasize that LITERALLY the first commercially available transistor calculators, like this one, things the size of a typewriter and price of a family car, were faster than the Windows 10 calculator.

I'm just going to assume that it did the addition correctly, because it's not that important, but I'm genuinely going to find a copy of an older Windows calculator and see if I can install that, instead. 

Microsoft, you are hopelessly bullshit. 

[flipper]

I always use a spreadsheet.  Mostly because I always have several open.  And mostly because that's 80% of my work.  Haven't used a computer or phone calculator app in probably a decade or more.