As for PCs, the vast majority of people use Word, Outlook, and a browser (usually the memory hog Chrome followed by Edge). Again, explain how a PC which is three years old reduces productivity in this day and age.

Easy - all of the added AI/telemetry crap in Windows 11 slows down all of the programs you're trying to run. And it doesn't help when those programs themselves are also being bloated with AI/telemetry.

For the past 25 years, there have always been between 2 and 5 concurrently-supported versions of Windows Desktop:

• Windows NT 3.1 Workstation was supported from July 1993 to December 2000, nearly a year after Windows 2000's release in early 2000
• Windows NT 3.5 and 3.51 Workstation were supported from late 1994/early 1995 to December 2001, two months after the release of Windows XP
• Windows NT 4.0 Workstation was supported from August 1996 to June 2004, about a year after the ill-fated Windows XP for Itanium (which itself was followed by Windows XP for amd64 two years later)
• Windows 2000 was supported from February 2000 to July 2010, about 9 months after Windows 7 came out
• Windows XP was supported from October 2001 to April 2014, about six months after the release of Windows 8.1
• Windows Vista was supported from January 2007 to April 2017, just under two years into Windows 10
• Windows 7 was supported from October 2009 to January 2020, four and a half years into Windows 10
• Windows 8 was supported from October 2012 to January 2016 (before Vista!), at which point you had to upgrade to 8.1
• Windows 8.1 was supported from October 2013 to January 2023, a year and a half into Windows 11
• Windows 10 was supported from July 2015 until today, October 2025, 4 years into Windows 11
• Windows 11 was released in October 2021

For the first time ever, there is now exactly ONE supported version of Windows Desktop (excluding the various feature updates, and also excluding the Enterprise LTSC versions because, let's face it, nobody's legitimately running those at home). I'm sure Microsoft is thrilled that they don't have to worry about supporting old desktops anymore (aside from the people paying for up to 3 years of extended support).

Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.

In other words, they blue-shifted the image back into the visible spectrum, which I'm sure would do a decent job of counteracting at least some of the extreme red-shift you get from observing such distant objects.

Whether they actually tried to calibrate the blue-shifting (e.g. by looking for emission spectra), I don't know, but I'm sure it wouldn't be out of the question.

I wouldn't say that the MIDI synth in your PC is necessarily a different thing - it's "effectively" the same as a hardware synthesizer in that, if you've got an appropriate adapter hooked up to your computer (whether via USB, RS232, or the old DA15 "gameport" on old soundcards), it can receive MIDI data from other devices and convert into audio to play through your speakers.

I say "effectively" because real MIDI synthesizers probably do way more than the simplistic "Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth" on all Windows installations, but there are other MIDI synths on Windows (such as VirtualMIDISynth) which do a lot more.

As far as I've heard, it's only required if you're running the Home edition - if you install the Professional edition, you can just click "Sign-in Options" during initial setup and select "Offline account". Granted, it'll still try to convince you why that's a bad idea, but it will still take "no" for an answer.

Firefox has always used its own trusted root store rather than using the one provided by the operating system (unless you turned on a specific hidden setting). Does this mean that Chrome is now copying Firefox for a change?

The "Buy Now" section lists 6 different versions: EU, US, DE, FR, IT, and ES. If you want to see what the US version looks like, there's an article on Hackaday with pictures of it.

There are different editions for different regions, but the website strangely only showcases the UK keyboard version. There's an article on Hackaday with a picture of the US keyboard version, and it should hopefully be to your liking.

What about dog's milk?

"Nothing wrong with dog's milk. Full of goodness, full of vitamins, full of marrowbone jelly. Lasts longer than any other type of milk, dog's milk, (since) no bugger'll drink it. Plus, of course, the advantage of dog's milk is that when it goes off it takes exactly the same as when it's fresh."

That's not really a fair comparison, because most pocket calculators will also give you a result of 18 from that set of inputs. If, on the other hand, you switch the mode from "Standard" to "Scientific", you'll get the correct answer of 12. This holds true not only for the UWP app on Windows 10 but also the various versions of "calc.exe" dating all the way back to Windows 3.1.

It probably wouldn't hurt to make backups of all of your data on any Intel-powered devices, since if there turn out to be remotely-exploitable backdoors in this breach, you're probably going to need them very soon...

When I manually installed updates last week, I noticed an entry "2019-04 Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB4493132)" in the "Optional Updates" section, whose "More Info" page clearly states that it's responsible for displaying the warning message about support ending. Thankfully, Windows 7 (and 8.1) still allows you to Hide individual updates that you don't want.

It would've been nice if the article had mentioned that...

You were probably using the "Touch Cover", which is indeed very difficult to use (since there's no tactile feedback). There's also the "Type Cover", which is basically like a super-thin laptop keyboard (backlit mechanical keys), and it's also the only one available for the Surface 3 (it's a different size, and Microsoft seemingly didn't bother making a Surface 3 Touch cover). Unfortunately, the keyboard has to be purchased separately, and it's also rather expensive ($130).