gerwin wrote:

So somehow Start menu functionality is tied up with cortana?

That was initially the case and I am not entirely sure when Microsoft changed it.

But they must have. I am on the latest 1903 build and there are no Cortana processes running anymore. I completely disabled Windows search and Cortana in AeroTweaker and it is gone.

Big Pink wrote:

386SX wrote:

The whole evolution from technology as was an eventually useful closed box you payed for to become nowdays something almost "free" but that you -must- have and use it and in the only way designed to, basically a lifetime service.

It's all about information control. The open IBM PC platform was a fluke of history. In the film Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs (for it is he) rants about making a stand against IBM - he's talking about the Big Blue of mainframes and terminals. It's what we're going back to, just without an IBM logo.

Sometimes we could say those sci-fi old great movies like Blade Runner (the original), imagining awful worlds but in their extremely high tech progress didn't really miss their point at all.

386SX wrote:

Big Pink wrote:

386SX wrote:

The whole evolution from technology as was an eventually useful closed box you payed for to become nowdays something almost "free" but that you -must- have and use it and in the only way designed to, basically a lifetime service.

It's all about information control. The open IBM PC platform was a fluke of history. In the film Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs (for it is he) rants about making a stand against IBM - he's talking about the Big Blue of mainframes and terminals. It's what we're going back to, just without an IBM logo.

Sometimes we could say those sci-fi old great movies like Blade Runner (the original), imagining awful worlds but in their extremely high tech progress didn't really miss their point at all.

Yeah, about that...

I am still waiting for the BTTF dehydrated pizza to be invented...

386SX wrote:

Big Pink wrote:

386SX wrote:

The whole evolution from technology as was an eventually useful closed box you payed for to become nowdays something almost "free" but that you -must- have and use it and in the only way designed to, basically a lifetime service.

It's all about information control. The open IBM PC platform was a fluke of history. In the film Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs (for it is he) rants about making a stand against IBM - he's talking about the Big Blue of mainframes and terminals. It's what we're going back to, just without an IBM logo.

Sometimes we could say those sci-fi old great movies like Blade Runner (the original), imagining awful worlds but in their extremely high tech progress didn't really miss their point at all.

High-tech/Low-life ... the escence of Cyberpunk is becoming reality!

bfcastello wrote:

I am still waiting for the BTTF dehydrated pizza to be invented...

Not hoverboards or flying cars? Dehydrated pizza!? 😉

Big Pink wrote:

bfcastello wrote:

I am still waiting for the BTTF dehydrated pizza to be invented...

Not hoverboards or flying cars? Dehydrated pizza!? 😉

Wellllll... what can I say, I am a hungry man! 😁

spiroyster wrote:

386SX wrote:

Big Pink wrote:

High-tech/Low-life ... the escence of Cyberpunk is becoming reality!

The sad thing is to consider how really few years did it take to mentally change the human being in the history capable at every social levels of learning and trasmitting their own/some/any kind of knowledges, to the modern type mostly just "users" already convinced to know everything because they just use tools they would never be able to recreate themself not to mention explaining how really those things works at low level.
And in the meanwhile forgetting the most "basic" knowledges, what the water is made of, why the sky seems blue, how to prepare your own food. Who cares. There're tutorials/apps to know about these boring stuff that will be forgotten a minute after.

386SX wrote:

There're tutorials/apps to know about these boring stuff that will be forgotten a minute after.

People as terminals. No local storage.

On topic, though. I only installed Win 7 in January. The OEM PC I bought back in 2010 came with an upgrade coupon for 7. Which had already expired. It was one of those 'Vista Ready' ones and there was no scope for upgrade - everything was alread maxed. In the end, the pleasure of loading modern websites forced me to build a new PC. My strategy for sticking with Win7 is to not open britneyspearsscreensaver.exe.

Big Pink wrote:

386SX wrote:

There're tutorials/apps to know about these boring stuff that will be forgotten a minute after.

People as terminals. No local storage.

On topic, though. I only installed Win 7 in January. The OEM PC I bought back in 2010 came with an upgrade coupon for 7. Which had already expired. It was one of those 'Vista Ready' ones and there was no scope for upgrade - everything was alread maxed. In the end, the pleasure of loading modern websites forced me to build a new PC. My strategy for sticking with Win7 is to not open britneyspearsscreensaver.exe.

"oh baby, one more time... oops, I did it again...." 🤣 🤣 🤣

Running Windows 7 on a Ryzen 7 2700X build with NVME and USB 3.0 hotfixes. Windows 7 has never been so on top of its game IMO. Have no plans to ever go 10. Going to be Linux and 7 pretty much from here on out until I get my cybernetic implants.

dr_st wrote:

That's the other thing about people. They are very comfortable with their primary environment, but typically don't have the will to become as proficient with their secondary environment, so they end up with the feeling that it simply does not have what they need and so they like it less. Kinda like your repeated claims about Win10 auto-updates, which you say are the thing that bothers you most about the OS. How much time did you really invest into finding a way to turn them off?

Why should someone have to invest time into "finding a way"? It ought to be this:

1Automatically install updates:  [***   ] Off

It's not your computer. It's mine, and so what I say, goes. It's the height of hubris to assume that your (that is,"some company's") code has more right to dictate what happens on my hardware than I do. That #$%^ needs to change. Like, now.

I've gotten to where I don't update anything of my own anymore, because 50% of the time it either breaks something, or removes some feature I want to keep. Something is really wrong with this trend. Updates should fix things, not break them. Due to short development cycles, apps on my phone have a lifespan of about one week before there's an "update". What was so critical you needed to release an update 52 times in a year? Take your time, get it right, then leave it the heck alone. I used to keep on top of a lot of those, until e.g., the YouTube app just kept getting released with a series of new and exciting bugs every week. First it wouldn't rotate video, then they fixed that and it would suddenly skip the video back about 15 seconds while the audio kept playing forward, until it ended up being totally out of sync. That took forever to actually get fixed. Then an update got released that just throttled the CPU, heating up the phone and killing battery life at an alarming rate. Finally I got to an update that had relatively few major bugs, and I haven't let it update since. That was about 2 years ago.

dr_st wrote:

Understand that the primary way of growth for these companies is make money by selling products to new users, not to make things easier for the old ones. So the UI designers try to make it more welcoming to someone who is just now starting to use the program for the first time, not someone who has used it for 20 years and gotten very proficient at the previous way of doing things.

This is also a terrible, short-sighted philosophy. We're near, if not at, the point of saturation. If you're "new to computers" now, you're either age four, or have sat out on the evolution of modern life for a few decades now. At this point, anyone older than age 20 has been getting proficient with computers for 20 years.

Nonetheless, easy to use is fine. Dumbing-down because "we know better than you, so just take what we give you" is not. Careless development is not. Changing things on a whim, or to appease some ridiculous need to control everything and everyone is not. Consuming personal information is not. It's important to me not to be cavalier about these things, as we're willingly giving up control and privacy. We won't get it back.

SirNickity wrote:

Why should someone have to invest time into "finding a way"? It ought to be this: […]
Show full quote

Why should someone have to invest time into "finding a way"? It ought to be this:

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1Automatically install updates:  [***   ] Off

It is.

SirNickity wrote:

Why should someone have to invest time into "finding a way"? It ought to be this: […]
Show full quote

dr_st wrote:

That's the other thing about people. They are very comfortable with their primary environment, but typically don't have the will to become as proficient with their secondary environment, so they end up with the feeling that it simply does not have what they need and so they like it less. Kinda like your repeated claims about Win10 auto-updates, which you say are the thing that bothers you most about the OS. How much time did you really invest into finding a way to turn them off?

Why should someone have to invest time into "finding a way"? It ought to be this:

Copy code to clipboard

1Automatically install updates:  [***   ] Off

It's not your computer. It's mine, and so what I say, goes. It's the height of hubris to assume that your (that is,"some company's") code has more right to dictate what happens on my hardware than I do. That #$%^ needs to change. Like, now.

I've gotten to where I don't update anything of my own anymore, because 50% of the time it either breaks something, or removes some feature I want to keep. Something is really wrong with this trend. Updates should fix things, not break them. Due to short development cycles, apps on my phone have a lifespan of about one week before there's an "update". What was so critical you needed to release an update 52 times in a year? Take your time, get it right, then leave it the heck alone. I used to keep on top of a lot of those, until e.g., the YouTube app just kept getting released with a series of new and exciting bugs every week. First it wouldn't rotate video, then they fixed that and it would suddenly skip the video back about 15 seconds while the audio kept playing forward, until it ended up being totally out of sync. That took forever to actually get fixed. Then an update got released that just throttled the CPU, heating up the phone and killing battery life at an alarming rate. Finally I got to an update that had relatively few major bugs, and I haven't let it update since. That was about 2 years ago.

dr_st wrote:

Understand that the primary way of growth for these companies is make money by selling products to new users, not to make things easier for the old ones. So the UI designers try to make it more welcoming to someone who is just now starting to use the program for the first time, not someone who has used it for 20 years and gotten very proficient at the previous way of doing things.

This is also a terrible, short-sighted philosophy. We're near, if not at, the point of saturation. If you're "new to computers" now, you're either age four, or have sat out on the evolution of modern life for a few decades now. At this point, anyone older than age 20 has been getting proficient with computers for 20 years.

Nonetheless, easy to use is fine. Dumbing-down because "we know better than you, so just take what we give you" is not. Careless development is not. Changing things on a whim, or to appease some ridiculous need to control everything and everyone is not. Consuming personal information is not. It's important to me not to be cavalier about these things, as we're willingly giving up control and privacy. We won't get it back.

Back in the Win9x it wasn't that hard to find people preferring to not update cause scared it may break something or slowdown other. I actually probably never did an update on Win98 first edition, not even in ME later. For the bios I had a different feeling cause I always thought maybe they could have solved some low level bugs found later, stability, ram compatibility, newer cpu support...
But nowdays with modern bios, the concept itself it's not difficult to see which road has taken; at some point it was for some reasons needed to have like an o.s. itself that launch another o.s and live of its own lifetime, problems, bugs and 'features'.
So I'd agree that somehow, at least philosophically the older the technology, the more friendly it was to the human being.

386SX wrote:

nowdays with modern bios, the concept itself it's not difficult to see which road has taken; at some point it was for some reasons needed to have like an o.s. itself

But now you can use a mouse in the BIOS! It truly is the 21st century. 😒

I miss the old BIOS design where I could actually tell if I selected 'save settings and restart' instead of 'cancel'. My motherboard's BIOS has the highlighted option in white and the unhighlited option in bright yellow. It took me a while to figure out which was which - cause ambiguity is a thing you want to engineer into your software.

Big Pink wrote:

But now you can use a mouse in the BIOS! It truly is the 21st century. 😒

meanwhile they complicated the ability to use the windows UI with just a mouse to the level that you constantly need a hand on the keyboard to do anything really.
I always thought the point of windows was an UI that you could use with your mouse in the first place.

don't get me wrong, I like using my keyboard, but I also like the ability to browse and open programs and settings through an UI without having to enter something into a search bar constantly.

Hmm... I feel things have gone a little out of hand in this thread. Or not.

Anyway, I could care less about Windows 7's end of life (EOL) coming up shortly, as I've transformed myself into a full Windows 10 user a few years back. However, some of the computers at my school still run 7, so I sometimes get concerned about their use of OS, but I probably won't pester the system administrators at school about it, as it's their decision if they want to upgrade their OS or not. Of course, many of the other computers at my school also run Windows 10, so it's not that big of a deal.

Big Pink wrote:

But now you can use a mouse in the BIOS! It truly is the 21st century.

There was this thing called "WinBIOS" several eons ago that did the same exact thing though. Before EFI and UEFI even.

Also on topic: The best thing to do when Windows 7 support ends, is to just simply not keep any services active that don't need to be active, especially ones that listen for incoming connections. You can't get magically hacked out of nowhere if nothing will listen and respond to requests coming in from hackers.

You can also set the default security settings for IE (yes even if you don't use IE, there's still stuff in Windows that still relies on the "Internet Options" settings) to the absolute maximum and fill out the "Trusted sites" list like you would with NoScript in Firefox.

SirNickity wrote:

Why should someone have to invest time into "finding a way"? It ought to be this: […]
Show full quote

Why should someone have to invest time into "finding a way"? It ought to be this:

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1Automatically install updates:  [***   ] Off

Yes, this is how it used to be before Windows 10. I wasn't making a point specifically about the automatic updates, but about UI in general. Any time you have two different UIs, there will be things that UI (A) makes easy and UI (B) makes complicated, and (usually) vice-versa. At bare minimum, there will be things done differently. People used to UI (A) sometimes think that everything that UI (B) does differently is bad or "unintuitive", simply because it's not what they are used to.

SirNickity wrote:

This is also a terrible, short-sighted philosophy. We're near, if not at, the point of saturation. If you're "new to computers" now, you're either age four, or have sat out on the evolution of modern life for a few decades now. At this point, anyone older than age 20 has been getting proficient with computers for 20 years.

No one said that this philosophy will stay forever.

Big Pink wrote:

386SX wrote:

nowdays with modern bios, the concept itself it's not difficult to see which road has taken; at some point it was for some reasons needed to have like an o.s. itself

But now you can use a mouse in the BIOS! It truly is the 21st century. 😒
.

The first time I've used one of those modern slower than ever mouse uefi bios with stars animations in the background, I would have taken the mainboard right back in its box or out of the (real) window.
And all this together with those useless who-cares features about remote update, remote control from smartphone or whatever. I've read people talking about "it's more secure" than the old one.. 😵 .. seriously with all the fragmentation of the old eeprom models, versions, flashers, even updating them manually / officially has always been a "difficult" process, making the bios imho really secure, but no there're still people thinking these are better.

386SX wrote:

But nowdays with modern bios, the concept itself it's not difficult to see which road has taken; at some point it was for some reasons needed to have like an o.s. itself that launch another o.s and live of its own lifetime, problems, bugs and 'features'.

Yeah, BIOS, IPv6.. these are fundamental things that, while due for an update, just went way way overboard. IMO, more than legacy compatibility, this is the reason why nobody uses IPv6 -- it tried to fix all the problems and shortcomings, with overkill, all at once. Because 128-bit hexadecimal digit strings aren't hard to remember or anything... and sure, let's go back to when every host was directly connected to the Internet, without NAT. 😖 So many misguided ideas.

EFI is a lot like that. We went from having just enough intelligence to find and boot the next tier code, to the movie Her.

386SX wrote:

And all this together with those useless who-cares features about remote update, remote control from smartphone or whatever. I've read people talking about "it's more secure" than the old one.. 😵

Haha... no kidding. There is absolutely no way that's going to be true. With all the gee-whiz features, there's just so much code now, that you've guaranteed bugs. And with a full IP stack? Good grief....

The only "security" it provides, is the ability for OS vendors to team up with hardware vendors to define a list of operating systems we're "allowed" to run, and under what conditions. (And this is one place where I look directly at Apple as truly being one of the worst offenders.)