NT 3.5 was the last good version. Fight me.

You’re absolutely right about this. 7 is basically a Vista service pack that got rebranded.

All of the “good stuff” people credit 7 with came in Vista.

8 wasn’t nearly as bad as people think, and there were big improvements to the kernel that make it a definite improvement over 7.

The problem for most people was the Start screen, which if you could get past, left you with what was a really good OS.

Less ads and telemetry than 10, too.

Middle-aged white men have a lot of privilege. It’s time we used it for good.

Is this white-saviour and/or patriarchial? Yup. Does it work? Also yup.

I don’t know if we all realize this, but some shitlord being told “What the fuck is wrong you?!” cuts deeper when it comes from someone who looks like their dad, granddad, or their boss.

I’m a 47-year old white guy in a leadership position in a large company. I’ve done exactly this to both young-millenial edgelord types who think I’m in on the joke, and boomer or elder-Xers who are yelling at clouds. I will tell you that, not only does it smack down the dipshit who thought that “lol rape” or “brown people bad” was funny, it also sets the tone for everyone else in the room, and it gets word around that bigotry isn’t acceptable.

Anyone can say this, but it hits harder when it’s someone privileged. Women, LGBTQ folk and other vulnerable groups don’t have this privilege, and get shut down, and if we don’t want that to be the case, we need to speak up for them.

Cellebrite isn’t American.

Aren’t these things trackable? Don’t phones have an IMEI and can’t they be remote-bricked if stolen?

I mean, police don’t care, but Apple could render these useless if they wanted to.

If you thought Viagra and Ozempic had a market, just wait…

This will be huge amongst the wealthy.

Can you quantify why you don’t like Mozilla?

I understand why someone might find Firefox itself subpar in some cases, but I’d like to hear what your issues with the organization are.

Ah, the Oracle clause.

Yeah, XP was pretty good.

I was a young sysadmin during this era, I don’t know if I agree with this sentiment. It got tolerable by the time of the last service pack, but it was a security nightmare otherwise and didn’t offer much over Win2k.

That said, I’m not a Windows fan in general, but I’d class the following as the “good” ones:

• NT 3.5 (user-mode GDI FTW!)
• Phone 7.0 (this was probably what I’d call the Practically Perfect version of Windows. WP7 is just so good)
• NT 3.1 gets an honourable mention
• 8 (after WP7, this is the first version of Windows that was pretty much stable on day one. Say what you will about the UI, the core was the best Microsoft has ever one; ditto fir Server 2012)
• 10 (8 but with refinement; I’m cautious putting it here because you can see the genesis of the decisions that gave us 11)
• Vista (a lot of what people like about 7 really came from Vista, like the WDDM driver model and the improved security infrastructure; Vista, like NT, came out before hardware was commonly available that could run it)

Anchoring the bottom

• 98 & ME (IE integrated everywhere and the security nightmare it begat deserves a special place in hell)
• 1.0 (you had to be there, but this thing made Atari TOS look sophisticated)
• 95 pre-OSR2 (VxDs, DLLs and a login screen you could bypass with an escape key!)
• NT4 (it wasn’t bad, per se, but I still resent how unstable it was versus 3.5)
• CE and pre-5.0 Mobile (hey, guess what, replacing your battery wipes your device because we didn’t implement persistent storage!)
• 11 (10 without most of the redeeming features, plus an Android launcher for a Start menu. Now with extra spyware!)

A lot of people really like 7 and 2000, but I tend to think of those as polish releases of Vista and NT4. They’re Microsoft eventually fixing their mistakes, after having everyone drag on them for years.

ARM doesn’t specify a standard firmware interface like x86 PCs do.

I mean, they could, but ARM comes from a different era, where interoperability isn’t a requirement and devices are disposable instead of upgradeable.

There no incentive, no IBM PC to be compatible with, not even an Apple, Macintosh, Conmodore Amiga or Atari ST to make peripherals for. ARM devices, even the rPi, are one-and-done.

macOS seems to handle this pretty well, honestly. About the only issue I have is XQuartz and even it’s pretty good.

What’s the issue you’re seeing?

“There but for the grace of god go thee.”

Or, to be less poetic, “don’t get cocky”.

Hacks can happen to anyone. Better lessons to learn is “don’t enable or install what you don’t need” and “keep machines you don’t trust off your local network”

Because Google was so focused and strategic before the pandemic rollseyes.

The issue is Google’s broken governance and incentive system, which gives product owners and executives incentives for new products and actively disincentivizes maintaining and improving existing products…and that was a thing from well before the pandemic hit.

It’s why Google launched three pay systems and had five messaging systems at the same time.

And, finally, this is all because of the strategy set by senior leaders.

You have have my LaserJet 5 when you can pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Ugh…

How did PCs beat out the Amiga, Mac and ST with nonsense like that?

It’s hysterical to hear right-wing commentary about how New York Democrats are socialist Marxist communist hippies when the reality has much more goose-stepping to it.

More like seventy five cents, given Google’s profit margins.

Halo is almost a quarter century.

Wolfenstein is 30ish

Now, imagine how us Gen-Xers who grew up with Karateka or Epic Games feel.

I mean, Windows 98’s “Active Desktop” was pretty much this.

Someone at Microsoft has been trying to make MSN a thing for almost thirty years, and they’re sure that if they ram it down out throats just one more time we’ll finally accept it.