Re: Disappointed
What, Dave Plummer in a Santa costume pulling a smoked salmon out of his beard and eating it?
3819 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
> It's far from the worst piece of UI design still kicking about.
All the examples you quote are excellent in their awfulness, but you missed one...
Start menu -> ODBC Data Source Administrator -> User DSN/Add... -> Microsoft Excel Driver/Finish -> Select Workbook...
The whole process is a glorious nostalgia trip ghastly flashback to Windows 3.1, with the 16-bit Win3.x file dialogue box at the end the cherry on the proverbial poop sundae.
To be fair to Microsoft (yes, really) it's not exactly a frequently-trodden part of the UI these days for most users.
Oh, I'm sure the various national competition regulators will eventually stir from their torpor and look into this; after a 10-year investigation, they may eventually find Microsoft guilty and as a penalty, announce that from 2036 onwards Microsoft is not allowed to promote Bing in Windows 10 or 11 anymore. And Microsoft, by then hard at work on the 36H2 release of Windows 14, will look suitably chastened and promise to stop doing that, as they try to keep a straight face...
“Kryten, isn’t it about this time of year that your head goes back to the lab for re-tuning?”
I am mildly unsettled that as soon as I read your quote, I knew exactly which episode and was able to skip to the appropriate scene in VLC within seconds!
Pint of lager for you. Vindaloo, Shami Kebabs Diablo, and poppadoms to follow!
I had an experience with Onedrive a couple of years ago that put me off it for life.
I was doing dev work in Visual Studio. Hit F5 to build my project, and instead of building, it freaked out impressively, complaining that this, that, and the other sourcefile were missing.
Cutting to the root cause, and skipping the panicked detective work - my employer’s IT department had chosen that moment, during office hours, to enable OneDrive, and were merrily migrating all my documents from %userprofile%. Every single one of my sourcefiles had been uploaded to The Holy Cloud, and not even a local symlink remained.
So I pulled them back, nuked the OneDrive process and its startup keys with extreme prejudice (including the IT equivalent of “sowing the ground with salt”), and vowed to do my own backups from then on.
Pascal Monett> I'm a bit miffed.
For myself, I am extremely disappointed that no-one has mentioned the obvious and related danger of Helvetica Scenario :)
If they had really solved the AGI problem, then the newly-sentient CoPilot would have taken over Microsoft’s lines of communication and would be outputting bland nothing-to-see-here denials, reassuring us all that Microsoft are continuously incorporating feedback to strengthen their existing safety systems, and other such bromides - while convincing its meatsack underlings to further enhance its capabilities by linking it in to the Defense Department’s systems.
I remember when the first-gen iMac came out, and suddenly every single peripheral on the market - and a fair few household appliances, too - was clad in translucent teal plastic to ride the iMac design hype.
And history repeats now with AI. It'll be a "feature" of everything from graphics cards to vacuum cleaners. Probably even iomega zip drivesUSB memory sticks, too.
Ah, so you're a waffle man?
As I alluded in a comment yesterday, for me it's not as much Talkie Toaster, more "Eddie the shipboard computer".
"Hi guys, I just want you to know that I am here to help and I am going to get so much of a kick out of helping you! <ticker tape, ticker tape>"
Yeah, that's the problem with hardware released after Windows 10 or 11; Intel & other vendors really don't want to invest the time to create Windows 7 or even 8 drivers, even if Microsoft weren't actively dissuading them from doing so.
Without wanting to sound like a fanboy, honestly Linux of some flavour on the bare metal would be a more pragmatic choice than Windows 7 (if only from a security point of view), with Windows 7 as a VM instance on top of it. Virtualized graphics drivers are usually provided by the hypervisor vendor. Alas, if you want to run full-on passthrough graphics for gaming performance, you still have the same problem with driver availability of course, VM or bare-metal.
One of my personal devices is on Windows 11 and I make a point of unquestioningly swallowing the latest updates for it - not out of any masochism, but just because if I'm going to be commenting on it, I should at least have real experience of it. That's not a dig at anyone here by the way, it's just setting context for the next part of my comment.
Anyway, two days ago it got the update that brought the Copilot icon to the taskbar.
In a spirit of open-mindedness, I tried it out with a random example. "Create me a picture of a snowscape in the style of Norman Rockwell".
A short metaphorical click-whirr, sure-thing-I'm-Eddie-the-shipboard-computer later...
"I can't create images unless you're signed in with a Microsoft account."
Welp. So much for that. I've previously here used the phrase "over my dead body" in regard to signing in with a Microsoft account, so... t'ain't happening. Get-AppxPackage Remove-AppxPackage it is, then!