If they want to make automatic upgrades the *default* setting, I'm all for it.
If they want to make automatic upgrades the *only* setting, I'm not okay with that.

For my part, I'd prefer to not have the automatic upgrades because I have a few sources that need to be updated manually after doing a dist-upgrade. I can also see issues where an end user installs a program that adds its own source that will get disabled during the upgrade and they won't notice. (Google Chrome, for instance.)

Right. I keep forgetting to use square braces for placeholders instead of HTML-style on Slashdot.

Person: "But I like [other player]."

Oh, man. I remember codec packs. That is one thing I'm thrilled to have left behind.

Me: "Just install VLC, it's kind of clunky, but it'll probably play that file just fine."
Person: "But I like ."
Me: "Okay, have fun with your K-Lite Mega Codec Pack."

Not that they're perfect, of course. How many years did they refuse to release the Android version in the US because "we don't know if it works on CDMA phones or not?"

I have similar memories of late 80s/early 90s hardware.

Though I've found the experience of messing with them in a low-stakes environment to be a lot more enjoyable. If I broke the one computer I had access to in 1991, oh boy was I going to be in trouble. If I break that same computer in 2021, oh well. It's not the computer I do my work on and it'll be an interesting project to fix it one of these weekends.

It's also interesting because there are a lot of tools and technology available today for cheap that would have cost an order of magnitude or two more dollars back then. (Off hand, EPROMs and associated programmers and the ability to print circuit boards rapidly for prototyping. Also the sheer amount of software development tools that would have cost hundreds of dollars back then that are readily available for download today.) So it's interesting to push the old stuff to see what it's capable of.

The big difference is that nobody is coming to me at 6PM on a Friday saying "Hey, this broke. Can you stay late and fix it?" And that makes it infinitely less stressful than anything I do on a modern computer.

This month:

Equipment Rental - $10

Next month:

Customer Service for Third Party Equipment - $10

Yes, please.

Especially when you type the name of it verbatim and not only get unrelated results, but the utility you want isn't the first thing in the results and you end up opening up some random Windows Store app listing or webpage that kind of matches.

The last version of Windows with a usable search function was Windows 7. (And by usable, I mean usable. Not good.) In Windows 10, I generally find it more effective to fire up WSL and use find and grep.

Yeah. That makes sense. The atmosphere would get you long before tidal forces would, I should think. Still, I'd imagine you'd have a minute or two of freefall to ponder your life choices before things got unsurvivable. (Either from rapidly changing pressure and temperature or just getting smacked with some flying debris.)

Oh, this is much better than I was able to do. From my (admittedly rusty) post-it note math, it would take about 800 seconds to fall from the former surface of the Earth to the new black hole, but I forgot about the rotation.

We wouldn't have time the inevitable recounts, either.

Eh? Unless I'm misremembering my physics, for the purposes of calculating gravity the distance is calculated from the center of mass. Not the surface. Instead of being 3958 miles from the center of the earth, we'd be 3958 from the center of a black hole of equal mass.

True, but I would take solace in the fact that that would no longer be a concern of mine in a few minutes.

Funnily enough, NT has been multi-platform. Grab a NT 3.x or NT 4 disc and you'll see the install files for all kinds of architectures. (alpha, mips, powerpc) By Windows 2000, they were down to just i386 though they have since added other architectures. (ia64, amd64, arm)

Indeed. Microsoft made a foray into ARM-based consumer Windows back in 2012 with Windows RT. It was a complete failure, but they seem to be learning from their mistakes. (Mostly that laptops that run Windows should probably actually be able to run Windows programs.)

After Canada, obviously. /s

From what I remember, there's a magical PowerShell incantation that makes it go away until the next biannual upgrade hits. (Same with the "Get Office 365" app and a few other bundled advertising apps.)

Maybe that's changed in the last couple versions, though.