Windows 11 still sucks.

[frostknight]

Look who's dreaming. As with the Apple platform, the entire reason the average user is on Windows is so they can treat it like a toaster or a dishwasher and NOT learn things.

I never said that people would join the forums with that intent, just that if they did, it wouldn't be a problem.

It does very much seem like it would be a dream come true that outcome I spoke of though.

At present? Very, unlikely...

Even linux mint with their friendly community and ones like it, wouldn't be enough likely though.

So yes, you are mostly correct, but to answer you simply, I think the likelihood of such an outcome is brutally low also.

[Night Wing]

Off-topic:
When it comes to Linux, I think both of you give me more credit as an advanced user than I deserve. I've never thought of myself in Linux as being an advanced user. Why do I say this?

Because when it comes to doing things in Linux. Somethings I do well, somethings I do not do well and sometimes I do not do anything at all. But since both of you think I am "advanced", then I will take the credit.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

In Italian "avanzato" might mean "advanced" (probably a retro-cast from English), as well as "leftover", from "avanzi", typically food leftovers. We used to make a pun on a a sister institute "Istituto di Tecnologie Biomediche Avanzate" )

[UCyborg]

Night Wing is the polar opposite of my father, who'd be 90 years old later this year if he was still alive. He never wanted to learn how to use a computer, not even how to read and send a SMS on a cellphone.

At some point someone on some discussion board said Linux teaches you how computers work. I wondered if he had anything specific in mind. I could understand it from Linus Torvalds' point of view, but what's in it for most Linux users? Speaking of Linus, I recently watched Building the PERFECT Linux PC with Linus Torvalds.

I have used OllyDbg in the past on Windows. Came up with a number of bugfixes for some of my favorite old games, for some specific fixes, I wouldn't believe it was me who figured it out, if I didn't witness the process. Sort of a once in a lifetime achievement. OllyDbg shows the instructions for the CPU of the program you're analyzing, so I guess that's the closest I got to "how computers work".

Someone once said to think of computers as state machines with huge memory pool. But it's still all very senseless to me.

Despite few things I surprised myself with, I find leaving own comfort zone is still difficult. Extremely difficult. It goes for both trying something new on a computer or something else in life not related to computers. My brain is slow in general and seems to have trouble comprehending things. Occasionally, I'll listen to some random podcast and I get lost quickly. I'm in this strange place where I realize I'm just getting older and thinking I should be getting more out of life. I'm terrified of the future.

Hardware work is off limits for me for disability-related reasons, but throwing away this computer is unthinkable to me, even if it would cost more than to replace it. It has been with me half my life (literally: 492‰) and accompanied me through many changes in my life. One does not (often) grow attached to a toaster, but I have become attached to this in the way I have to my childhood pillow and blankets, in which I am wrapped while writing this. Family and friends have often urged me to upgrade, but I think of that as wasteful. I had never thought to connect that with electronic failures, although planned obsolescence is familiar to me in the abstract. Consumerism is so foreign to me that I forget people really maintain it.

Your post got me curious about my percentage and I calculated it is 52,11% (presumably for yourself, you meant to write 49,2%). That computer was with me during fun times and it also led me to some ugly truths about the world.

It works until it works. I thought lately of consumerism as a sort of cope. Material abundance in itself doesn't bring happiness. At least that's how I see it.

[adoxa]

Off-topic:

492‰

you meant to write 49,2%

No, notice it's per mil, not per cent.

[Mæstro]

OllyDbg shows the instructions for the CPU of the program you're analyzing, so I guess that's the closest I got to "how computers work". Someone once said to think of computers as state machines with huge memory pool. But it's still all very senseless to me.

This is not as much an explanation but a literal definition of Turing machines that I recognise as a mathematician. Boolos (I think) presented a model of the Turing machine as a ‘poor sod’ stuck in a giant box which he rolls along a railway track, drawing marks on the earth beneath his feet. This has been adapted as the manikin model, which assigns actual CPU instructions, each stage in the computer’s operation executed by a homunculus in his office. It helped me realise the purpose of a clock in actual electronics, as somebody who had been introduced to computer operations mostly through logic gates and asynchronous mechanisms constructed from them.

I find leaving own comfort zone is still difficult. Extremely difficult. It goes for both trying something new on a computer or something else in life not related to computers. My brain is slow in general and seems to have trouble comprehending things.

This is not true for me with learning abstract subjects, but it holds very much for anything which has to do with modifying my system. I know that, if I attempt to change anything on my computer, I must maintain the capacity to forsake whatever I am doing and return to my normal conditions if the experiment proves too overwhelming. In a sink-or-swim scenario, I always sink.

Your post got me curious about my percentage and I calculated it is 52,11% (presumably for yourself, you meant to write 49,2%).

As Adoxa said, I was using permillage, not percentage. 492‰ = 49·2%; 52·11% = 521·1‰ = 5211‱. I choose whether to use per cent, mill or myriad by which can reflect the actual precision of the figure without decimals.

[Night Wing]

Night Wing is the polar opposite of my father, who'd be 90 years old later this year if he was still alive. He never wanted to learn how to use a computer, not even how to read and send a SMS on a cellphone.

Off-topic:
I'll soon be 76 years old. Starting when I was around 15 years old, I was the "odd man out" so to speak since I never "ran in the same direction with the pack". I always liked to "blaze my own trail" if you get my drift. This is why I think I took to computers easily. And eventually to Linux.

[UCyborg]

Off-topic:
Oh, should've looked up permillage, I don't remember encountering it before. But it was late and I was writing as it came to me, it takes me forever to put longer posts together.

That was always puzzling; put tons of simple instructions together and somehow interesting things happen then.

I've always felt out of place and didn't fit in anywhere. Probably did too much escapism as well. Not coping with reality well.

[frostknight]

I've always felt out of place and didn't fit in anywhere. Probably did too much escapism as well. Not coping with reality well.

Off-topic:
Story of my life...




I have felt out of place as well. There was this one moment in an anime called bleach where the main character had like this purpose that made me think of someone who was a part of many different places. But he was an oddball in most of them.

That character of course was ichigo.

my point I guess is, this isn't the first time I have felt this way and this likely won't be the last,

[Mæstro]

“Microsoft is taking an impressive step in modernizing its biggest codebases and will eliminate all C/C++ code by the end of the decade, replacing it with Rust.”

“My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,” Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt writes in a post on LinkedIn. “Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’ To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we’ve built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale. Our AI processing infrastructure then enables us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make code modifications at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding.”

https://www.thurrott.com/dev/330980/mic ... st-by-2030

Does this distinguished engineer think that his ‘AI’ is not just algorithms like any other? Oh, no, this is just businessman’s tripe.
Is knowledge of C and C++ really dying out to motivate this, or is this just another case of change for its own sake? I can only imagine the inevitable bugs that this blind porting will bring, update after update, to unwitting Windows 11 users.

[Octopuss]

I don't know shit about programming and I don't want to, but hanging around various IT-related forums on daily basis, I couldn't not notice the repeatedly resurfacing Rust mentions in the past few years, so I'm curious whether this really is such innovative revolutionary new language it's worth rewriting everything in it.

[Moonchild]

Is knowledge of C and C++ really dying out to motivate this, or is this just another case of change for its own sake?

That and there also being an almost cult-like obsession with Rust, which has already shown to be a lot less "safe" than what the followers try to push, especially if one attempts to do low-level things with it that can't just be left to a generic all-purpose rustc (compiler).

[Moonchild]

I don't know shit about programming and I don't want to, but hanging around various IT-related forums on daily basis, I couldn't not notice the repeatedly resurfacing Rust mentions in the past few years, so I'm curious whether this really is such innovative revolutionary new language it's worth rewriting everything in it.

Here are just a few categories of bugs that Rust doesn’t protect you from:

• Type casting mistakes (e.g. overflows). (C++ compilers will emit warnings about this or may even stop if configured as such)
• Logic bugs
• Panics because of using unwrap or expect
• Malicious or incorrect build.rs scripts in third-party crates (supply chain hijacking - since Rust relies heavily on using dependencies instead of standard libraries, this is a real and present secops concern!)
• Incorrect unsafe code in third-party libraries (same as above)
• Race conditions
• memory leaks
• dangling pointers/use-after-free (especially hazardous in rust because it does not guarantee lifetimes the way you can in C++!)

[Mæstro]

Even mainstream journalists admit that Windows 11 is bad and Microsoft is actively making it worse. To see such a source saying outright that one ought to forgo feature updates (every month now!) and install only security ones is refreshing.

[Night Wing]

@ Maestro

When I clicked on that link you provided and read all of the "crap" that Microsoft keeps adding or sneaking into Windows 11, this is the reason why I left Windows. The article reminded me of a commercial where a family rents a BnB rental for a nice few vacation days only to be blind sided by all of the "rules" the Host demands for them to "use" the BnB.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOY7nq79dVI

[moonbat]

since Rust relies heavily on using dependencies instead of standard libraries,

You mean like modern websites loading multiple 3rd party script libraries? Wow, all the programmer friendliness of C/C++^* combined with the security of npm! What could go wrong?

* - By which I mean easy to screw things up if you aren't careful about memory management and pointers, unlike Java and similar that have garbage collection built in and/or no pointer support at all.

[Octopuss]

Even mainstream journalists admit that Windows 11 is bad and Microsoft is actively making it worse. To see such a source saying outright that one ought to forgo feature updates (every month now!) and install only security ones is refreshing.

IMG_1611.jpeg.c019504b1fb9caf3bb9ba95ae9e0cdcd-1247609253.jpeg

[UCyborg]

https://www.techspot.com/news/110817-windows-11-performs-worse-than-older-windows-versions.html

Windows 8.x is quite something under the hood, MS attempts at targeting tablets were notable, though I also encountered odd glitches in places. While not too familiar with whole D3D11On7 thing (for some newer D3D12 games to be able to run on Windows 7 if developer wanted to), that thing also didn't run on Windows 8.x for some reason, though I highly doubt 8.x really lacks anything in that department. I have impression MS got better at locking things to certain OS version since the days of Halo 2, which was notorious for "requiring" Vista officially (but was hacked to run on XP).

[Mæstro]

XP is objectively technically superior to 11, confirming what I already knew in my bones. Technical regress is all too real. Right now, I have got the fantasy that a team of developers somewhere apathetic about copyrights use the leaked XP source code to prepare security patches for XP, leading to its renaissance as a lightweight, familiar, trustworthy Windows OS.

(Edited to add jest tags to the claim of ‘objective’ merit, meant as a tongue-in-cheek way to refer to benchmark testing.)

[Octopuss]

XP is objectively technically superior to 11

What are you, high?
As much as Windows 11 suck, I will take that with all AI shit enabled over Windows XP any time of a day.
But then again this is not even apples to oranges comparison, more like apples to car tires. It just makes no sense to think about it this way, IMO.