If our government wants to be able to monitor messaging services like WhatsApp or telegram, then it's going to have to make a significant investment in our Internet network infrastructure in order to even have the capacity to do so, still wouldn't surprise me given that we live in a nanny state!

It's a bad platform, but so are the majority of social media sites.

I actually don't know what reels are. And I have never used them, I'm only posting this because of my most recent experience sharing a video on that platform to show a vibration resonance on a machine, something I don't think is reels worthy, I think you can post videos as comments, but the paradigm as to how it organises and displays them has always been a little bit weird, I guess you could also post them as animated gifs with no sound, but the idea of that just sounds stupid. - perhaps an unlisted video on YouTube, but I think a 30 second clip would be considered a short, so your kinda screwed anyway.

Perhaps we need to regress to niche hobby forums, and host everything on Photobucket, lol.

For me Facebook is basically on life support, I remember when the news feed would show posts from friend and family and now you've gotta dig for that under feeds, or be engulfed in a torrent of AI slop...

Spotify could use this because their random shuffling algorithm absolutely sucks and is appalling, and not random at all.

F-you Spotify!

I'm already running a version of Office that was pre-copilot, (I ripped that copy from a computer running 365 before it was updated) I am waiting until my licence lapses and I'm reverted back to the classic tier in June, before attempting to update it again, otherwise I would just run Office 365 on my MacBook post Windows 10 EOL, problem solved.

Yes, they did add the ability to turn off copilot on the desktop apps, but I'm waiting until it's fully removed from my account.

Killing access to 365 on Windows 10 is like having a partner threatening to leave, and telling them directly, without emotion to just hurry up and go already.

There you go! it's good to see people are still interested in Windows 7 even after almost 16 years since it made its debut.

It would be nice if we could return to Windows 7 because it was a better operating system than Windows 10 and windows 11, windows 11 sucks.

I've bought from limited run games in the past as I am an avid big box game collector, the consensus within that community is that they are too reliant on FOMO, another issue I have with them is their boxes are just getting too big for the shelf, and now days, it's less about the physical game, and more about the tat that comes with it.

I am also not a big fan of some of their business practises, as they will try and dark pattern you into buying box or shipping insurance.

I've regressed back to the philosophy that games are meant to be played, what good is a plastic figurine if it doesn't even contain the game files?

I did buy a big box edition of Doom a few years ago (because the originals are very expensive), and it has a button on the side that plays the music when you turn it on and the box lights up which is kinda neat and a bit of a conversation starter, but other than that, it has mostly sat on my shelf.

I do like the kinda, Etsy style, artisan craft, farmers market that some indie developers go down, for example the 8-bit guys Planet X3 that came on real physical floppy discs for an IBM PC, that made the release feel contemporary, to the era of gaming that it was trying to portray.

I don't mind the idea of feelies but not to an excessive extent.

Streaming services were fun, but I've gone back to physical media.

I use\used a third-party service called just watch to distinguish where the content that I want to watch is located, because it moves around a bit and is actually quite annoying.

I have found it easier to go to an Op-stop\Thrift store and just pick up the DVD\Blu-ray version of said show for cheap, sometimes it's at a quarter of the cost of a monthly subscription to any streaming service.

And the show is just always there either on your shelf or uploaded to your media server, the annoying part is less companies are producing physical media now days.

Although I had an interesting experience recently when my partner wanted to sign up for Apple TV to watch severance, and I saw that the Blu-ray was available at the store (JB Hi-Fi) for almost the same price, and I went and got that instead, and the quality of Blu-rays is actually superior to that of what can be offered on streaming services.

Another experience was I bought the Breaking Bad box set because I wanted to watch that, and not sign up for another streaming service, but at the same time my partner signed up for the streaming service that offered that show, so out of laziness I watched Breaking Bad on one of the streaming services I can't actually tell you, might have been stan or it might have been binge (HBO Max in au), and I got through all of the seasons up until the final episode when my Internet shit the bed (because I live in Australia), so I stuck the Blu-ray in, and the quality was amazing and I regret not watching it from the Blu-ray from the start!

We've just been doing television content consumption wrong the whole time.

I loved word pad because of its simplicity, I actually just checked, and it is still installed on my Windows 11 workstation. - and you can save .docx files wow!

If I had intended to get any work done I would have just used LibreOffice, but I actually do keep an XP era machine running office 2003 in the cupboard as my doomsday device.

Windows would have definitely benefited from a small tables like application for very small home budgets and things, but I think most of excels power users have migrated across to using Python (among other tools), in my job, it is usually used as a line item list, but I avoid using it because it runs like absolute dog shit on the cloud, plenty of passionate power users though...

Aye.

We got the sensitivity labels introduced at work, and I get an email every time a document is found without one, for security of course! Not so Microsoft can train their AI on sensitive data.

If you wanna watch a windows network eat shit, rename a 500 gig VHD file to .Docx...

Having worked in tech support previously, my heart goes out to the layman who's copy of office that they paid for will randomly deactivate on them, but still continues to work under this new paradigm and they will just accept this as the new norm, not too long ago I remember apps that polluted the operating system with an excessive amount of ads to be considered malware, now it's the free tier..

And here I am like a sucker using the paid version when I could just be using it for free with an ad blocker...

Haha! Oh well, Slashdot doesn't have an edit button, so my typo stays. ;-)

What would be the name of the patch notes file found in the cars brake analyst module firmware? - "brakeing news..."

This is both absurd and hilarious, imagine being pulled over by law enforcement, and ask to comply with instructions, only to be interrupted by an ad and forced to endure the consequences of failing to comply with those instructions, or breaking in an emergency, after almost dying, or to unload some emotional dialogue on your spouse. - or stopping in a drive through only to be offered a better deal from a competitor.

I love how it's written as

, they're not even confident enough to call them ads anymore, just *interruptions*...

First, kudos to the engineer for taking the time to implement the patch!


Now onto my nonsensical rant:

I haven't looked at new computers in a while, at work I usually use whatever OEM or Microsoft keyboard I'm given, I was today years old when I looked at my keyboard and realised it had a Windows 10 logo on the start button, before that it was Windows XP, before that it was Windows 9x, it was usually a quick way to tell how old a keyboard was (if you ignore the beige and the PS2 connector).

I think keyboards should be abstract and not have any kind of distinct branding related to any operating system on them, at home I use a custom keyboard, or the text on the keycaps has faded, so it's not really something I ever thought about, I guess the copilot key replaces the menu key that I would only ever use if my mouse stopped working,

having worked in tech support in the past, I know how hard it is to even explain to a user over the phone how to press the Windows key, so I guess, good luck to the next generation of frontline tech workers who have to try to explain the Copilot symbol to someone who hasn't seen it before. - I wouldn't have even known it was there!

p.s the new keyboard symbol reminds me of being in a computer store circa 2006 and being told by friends that the computers with the Windows Vista key symbol on them are the ones to avoid lol.

There have been a few threads around various forums on the Internet, that I may or may not have participated in, that make me believe that the sample size I gathered was sufficient.

The copilot annoying cursor thing in Microsoft Word, could have been avoided if they simply thought about user agency and put in a ticky box in the settings that a user could uncheck if they didn't want that feature, but they didn't, and I had to work with a bunch of people to find a solution, that was both in meatspace and over the Internet, so perhaps a better way to rephrase it was, me and about 10 other people got annoyed at the copilot in Microsoft Word.

There is a feedback hub in Windows that you could fill out, and whenever I point someone towards it the answer is usually "why bother, they don't read it anyway?", thus my consensus.