First Copilot, now voice commands. When will people understand developers want to develop and not get their code degraded by some AI, and they certainly don't want to TALK to their IDE.

I can see this getting hilarious in the workplace given that most people work in open-plan offices. Just try making VS Code understand that you are only talking to YOUR instance, and at the same time ignore your neighbor... they can't even get Teams working without background noise, how do they think that will work with everybody babbling with their own IDE?

Candycrush and that Xbox thingy will become mandatory.

Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant!

Well, you just might want to read up on the origins of copyright laws. Because in the beginning, they were the governments way of protecting their free speech by denying it to others.

Somehow I don't see things changed that much, apart from the shift from absolutist nobility to multinational corporations. And there is no ethical reason for any artist (or wannabe artist) to put a middleman in the way of their career, not in this day and age, be it an old-fashioned record company or Jay Z.

Being put right through to second level wastes valuable time for that second level person that a first level person could have avoided. Simple collection of who are you, what is your IP, are you at your computer right now, what kind of connection do you have and what is the actual problem. First tier usually also has means of tying that information to the information we have about you, so that phase can be short and sweet like just mentioning a customer number, but more often it's not. Yes, most of the scripts are stupid, so I'd agree most of those can be skipped, not the data collection part though.

You may succeed in bullying first level into contacting second level directly, but with what I do at work (second and third level support) all I'd do was send you right back to first level to get that data collected. I can't help you unless I even have the slightest idea what your problem is, where you are, or if it's something stupid (like you canceled, believe me, it happens) and I don't intend to use part of my work time to provide first level support. So don't waste my time, or the only thing you accomplish is that we can see your "I want to speak to your manager" haircut through the phone.

Let me add that my "told you so" might hurt a bit more than a first level "Ah, so it works now? Great!" :)

PS: as for non-managed routers, there are reasons for us not doing that (being in a security-sensitive environment with non-computer-savvy customers is one), but I can't see why eg. Comcast isn't doing it. My home ISP gives me an ethernet port in the fiber box where I can connect any old box that speaks DHCP, so maybe I'm privileged. On the other hand I still don't get native IPv6 at home, so probably not :P

This is known as the change process in ITIL, and it does have a remedy. The remedy is pre-approved changes (standard changes), which should include patching the OS with patches approved by the vendor. It's meant for exactly this situation, and if your change process doesn't have them it's just a paper wall.
The ITIL change process is all about reducing risk. If there is a risk with patching your OS (there is, especially since you mention Windows, it's not that unheard of that a Windows patch makes your whole network inoperative) you have to weigh it against the risk of not patching it (meaning you leave known security holes in).
So, my advice is to get OS patches for your OSes pre-approved by the CAB, that is, when a vendor releases a set of patches you are allowed to patch your systems in the way and the order of that pre-approved change. Of course it's paper-pushing, but use it to your advantage and push some paper yourself. If a server gets compromised and you have the papers (changelog) to prove that you followed procedure, blame will be placed somewhere else. And things will be done differently from there on, since it has been proven that the procedure didn't work, and everybody wins.
Or you could go find another job (like some other posters recommended) where you are the sole *cowboy*-admin and nothing gets done properly. Your choice really.

OpenOffice derivatives (nobody uses the original from that stupid database company anymore, right? RIGHT?) nowadays have quite evolved compared to the ancient version they were using in Freiburg. No wonder they wanted to replace it, because at the time of 3.2.1 it really wasn't that compatible. Nowadays I can even open Visio files quite fine in LibreOffice Draw.
The real culprit though is the evil file format from hell which got through the standardization process like George W. Bush got through his elections - not by being better but by heavy lobbying and in some cases in court. In some countries (like mine) the standardization committee mostly worked after the "agree with the (MS-cult) committee leader or leave the committee" principle. That never works out right, at least not for the users. Hell, they got a passus in there where they can insert binary blobs of (proprietary) old Word stuff that nobody who only knows the standards document even can *try* to render.
The ones who suffer under decisions like these are the users. They are the ones who have to learn a totally new user interface every other year, they have to battle incompatibilities that Microsoft in their infinite wisdom forced on them with no way back, they have to do the old print-retype-routine just because Word doesn't want to have anything to do with Word from two years ago.
And why does Microsoft change their user interface so often? I guess it's a mixture of "because we can" and "ooh, flashing lights". It certainly doesn't help the user *at all*. Wonder why eg. doorknobs all look and work about the same? Why shouldn't the way you set the font in your document be like that? And still following that analogy, whoever heard of doorknobs that move about the surface of the door just because some program decides it would fit better in another position? Or a door that doesn't open sideways at the hinge but now, in the new version, falls flat on the floor (and good luck to you if you happen to stand in front of it)? Yes, that's how Office is degrading from version to version, and I *mean* degrading.

Besides, I'm still pissed that our government (no, I'm not from the US) had the chance when they decided official documents had to follow an open standard, and Microsoft's isn't. Then they fired the head of that department and put the two words "or OOXML" in all the appropriate places. Way to go wasting our tax money.

Fun fact: while I am typing this, on a Mac, that "Microsoft Updater" popped up totally ignoring all UI guidelines and Excel begins one of its swap eating frenzies. Had to abort both to be able to finish typing this :/ Before you ask, I am forced to use Excel because there are people at my place of work who use every little aspect of Excel and I am glad it even works in the Mac version ('cause often I have to use LibreOffice because Excel can't read Excel files, go figure). And I don't exit it at the end of the working day because it loads half of Windows (or something like that), it's monstrous even if it works.
Of course this use of Excel is stupid, I have pointed it out to others, but the same people see LibreOffice (or any piece of open source software) as the spawn of evil and go pray to their Microsoft gods. Whenever I have to write some documents myself, from scratch, I use LibreOffice because it just works.

I weren't no good at grammer and speling niether.

I'm a linguistically confused guy who grew up with a language with grammar (German) and moved to a country with a language where context is everything (Norwegian). Go ahead, criticize my English grammar (which btw. is borrowed/stolen from each and every one of the European languages... well, except finnish and hungarian).

Fun fact: for quite some versions, the Norwegian spellchecker in Microsoft products was written/maintained in Finland, and the quality was as you'd expect :)

This poll is missing the Cowboy Neal option. May I suggest "Cowboy Neal fakes my surveys for me"?

Ewwwww, another Clipper survivor!

I remember that my executable* (that didn't do that much, mostly a preference system and menu) was so big I had to use overlays to make it run on a particular machine with only 512k (my development machine was slower, but it had 640k, all the memory you'll ever need :D). Parts of it were a separate program written in Turbo Pascal which I exec'd directly from another overlay, and another Clipper program I had included a small text editor written in C and linked directly into the executable.

Yes, I am an old fart, do you really have to ask?

* first versions written with Summer 85, and I jumped off the Clipper train shortly before 5.0 came out. Read the gritty details about Clipper version confusion (Summer 87 released in December 87, whoa!) on wikipedia :)

I bet with that number they're just "friends". As in facebook-friends.

Well, you can say much about the south pole, but saying it's hot isn't one of it.

Of course 69% (at the time) say it won't touch them. I also guess that quite a lot of the other 31% are jokers. Face it, people, slashdot is an international phenomenon, not restricted to the US east cost.

What's next, "I'm preparing for total traffic breakdown in Beijing..." poll?

"Nasty word" lists have, do and will never work. It's to easy to push new memes that look totally innocent - see subject :)

Well, "chair" is a functional name, right?