Kinda, but also that Clippy (real name Clippit, as it happens) was included as a feature that was genuinely intended to be helpful. Like, that’s not to say it was successful, or appreciated, but that it came from a time when you could buy a product in the expectation that you’d own it, you could keep it and it’d work for you, not for someone else.
I think about this kind of thing too often. Take “chlamydia” and “genocide”. Two words with horrible meanings, but they’re really nice words. Flowery and regal. They sound like Victorian girls’s names. “Cousin Peter arrived, with his lovely daughters, Chlamydia and Genocide”.
In Enterprise: manageability. It’s hard to overstate how powerful Windows Group Policy is. Being able to configure every single aspect of the OS and virtually all major applications, Microsoft or otherwise, using a single application that can apply rules dynamically based on user, device, user or device groups, time of day, location, battery level, form factor, etc, etc. Nothing on Linux comes close, especially when simplicity is a factor, and until it does most large organisations won’t touch it with a barge pole.
People called Caniformia they go the 'ouse!?
“I peep object is for contents of object of equal or smaller or slightly bigger. Am as such. Thus, I can and will and must be contain in containering object. Ergo. Am.” - Cat, probably
It’s true! I just drew a circle and measured it. Turns out π≈5.
Once you’ve used one you’ll be angry that they’re not standard, at least on desktop/kiosk devices. USB-A also had that as an option.
Imagine someone said “make a machine that can peel an orange”. You have a thousand shoeboxes full of Meccano. You give them a shake and tip out the contents and check which of the resulting scrap piles can best peel an orange. Odds are none of them can, so you repeat again. And again. And again. Eventually, one of boxes produces a contraption that can kinda, maybe, sorta touch the orange. That’s the best you’ve got so you copy bits of it into the other 999 shoeboxes and give them another shake. It’ll probably produce worse outcomes, but maybe one of them will be slightly better still and that becomes the basis of the next generation. You do this a trillion times and eventually you get a machine that can peel an orange. You don’t know if it can peel an egg, or a banana, or even how it peels an orange because it wasn’t designed but born through inefficient, random, brute-force evolution.
Now imagine that it’s not a thousand shoeboxes, but a billion. And instead of shoeboxes, it’s files containing hundred gigabytes of utterly incomprehensible abstract connections between meaningless data points. And instead of one a few generations a day, it’s a thousand a second. And instead of “peel an orange” it’s “sustain a facsimile of sentience capable of instantly understanding arbitrary, highly abstracted knowledge and generating creative works to a standard approaching the point of being indistinguishable from humanity such that it can manipulate those that it interacts with to support the views of a billionaire nazi nepo-baby even against their own interests”. When someone asks for an LLM to generate a picture of a fucking cat astronaut or whatever, the unholy mess of scraps that behaves like a mind spits out a result and no-one knows how it does it aside from broad-stroke generalisation. The iteration that gets the most thumbs up from it’s users gets to be the basis of the next generation, the rest die, millions of times a day.
What I just described is NEAT algorithms, which are pretty primitive by modern standards, but it’s a flavour of what’s going on.
Oh no.
As someone who oversees a shop like that, I’ll just say: if there was an even vaguely competitive option, I’d jump at it.
I know what you’re referring to, and I thought that too until he said “northern lights”. Ya gotta learn to listen.
Yeah, me.
Here’s the rule of thumb: do you think the food benefits from being cooked unevenly? For meatballs as you mentioned, I’d sear them in a frying pan to get a little bit of crispiness before I cook them through in the sauce in the microwave. Hunters chicken, cakes, seafood, all good. The microwave will cook far more evenly than a convection oven, though sometimes the unevenness is desirable.
Man, don’t you be dragging down microwave cookery like that. People who depend on LLMs are not like people who cook with the microwave; they’re more like people who don’t know how to cook, refuse to learn, eat takeout for every single meal, and still demand you address them as “chef”.
And now I’m going to talk about microwave cookery.
I think people who object to microwave cooking and see it as ‘lesser’ are either snobs, or people who have never used anything less than 100% power and get food that’s both scalding hot and still frozen.
If you’re in the second camp, try cooking for twice as long at 50% power. For most foods you’ll get an even heat well beyond anything a convection oven could manage. In some dishes the unevenness (e.g. crisping) is desirable, but in most it’s not.
I used to have an iMac that I loved (screen was excellent) but it quickly became a shitbox (because Apple) so I turned it into a X Server for my far more powerful Linux box. Is there a modern equivalent of that? Basically turn it into a thin client?
Edit: for kiosks, Windows 10 can be quite happy on 1GB RAM, but that 16GB storage is a problem.
That’s the best bit about WSL (at least, version 2) is that it is a VM running a full version of Linux using Microsoft Hypervisor. There’s a bunch of drivers included that allow Windows and Linux to share filesystems and if you run Wayland/X apps in Linux they run on the Windows desktop.
One hundred percent go for USFF. Even the cheapest, most basic processor will smash server roles because it’s not having to power desktop applications, graphics, window managers, etc.
It’s easy. Just read the manual.
The rolling release thing isn’t for me, but I get why that model might appeal. Brave, though? Why?
Well, it was the best invention. Then, someone sliced it.
There’s a cat near me that does exactly this. Big orange and white thing. Her name is Shitbastard and she’s super sweet until you touch The Forbidden Zone which, in her case, is her hips. Scritch her head, neck and back, though, and she purrs like a fucked diesel engine.