Profoundly, hilariously slow.

Amazon sold me a defective planer that had sawdust in it. Ibwas apparently the second to return it under warranty.

Mostly I have this distinct memory of badly communicating with a Verizon employee when I got my first smart phone, an LG Ally.

I remember asking “Is this a Droid?” Meaning “is the make and model of this handset a Motorola Droid?” And the reply was “They’re all droids.” meaning they all run the Android operating system. I miss LG phones, or at least the state of my personal life back when I had LG phones.

was it Verizon or Motorola?

They keep re-implementing things.

Just the Start menu. You can see how 95 evolved into 98 evolved into ME, then they changed it for XP, and they never stopped making big pointless changes. In many cases, those big pointless changes have been lengthening the process of going from the bare desktop to the thing you need by adding pointless screens and dialogs. Or, like the Start menu, they just drastically redesigned it such that a user used to Win XP tries to use 7 and they just…stare at it because it’s not what they were expecting. Windows 7’s Start menu might even be objectively better, Microsoft’s software engineers could very well produce good research documentation about UI design based on observing or polling users about what features they wanted and then they made the thing people seemed to want, but to people who got used to how it already worked the new thing was bad because it’s different.

I could be convinced Windows 8.1 is a mental unwellness simulator. In Sierra’s FMV horror game Phantasmagoria 2, the player character goes insane at work, and this is simulated by the paperwork he’s working on flashing scarier words for a split second. You’re reading this document and then near the bottom of the page an ordinary word like “recommended” turns to “murdered” for a few frames. Win 8.1’s animated tiles reminded me of that. Plus the whole “The desktop and all normal Windows apps therein is itself just an app that can be run in split screen next to special phone-like single tasking apps which pretty much only we will develop for and we won’t include desktop versions of so you have to deal with this.” I hate Windows 8.1.

What’s real fun is you can tell when they abandoned work on a project by which drastically different UI it’s encrusted with. The modem dialer looks like Windows XP, the fax program looks like Vista, some things have the flat purple stank of 8, some things have the dark glass look of early 10.

Funnily enough, the main place I worry about resolution is on a desktop computer doing desktop computer stuff. My 1440p ultrawide is kind of decadent for games, but when I’m doing something I just want a bunch of real estate.

Just watching TV or movies…honestly I think I might like lower resolutions more. I’ve got a copy of Master and Commander on “fullscreen” DVD, 480p 4:3. I’d really like it to be 16:9 but I can’t come up with complaints about the video quality. I get immersed in that movie just fine at DVD quality. I’ve got a few films on Blu-Ray, and at 1080p film grain starts being noticeable. And the graininess of the shot changes from scene to scene as the film crew had to use different film stock and camera settings for different lighting conditions, so I spend the whole movie going “That scene looks pretty good, oh that’s grainy as hell, now it’s better.” Lower resolutions and/or bitrates smooth that out, but I think they actively preserve it on Blu-Ray because the data fits on the disc, there’s no internet pipe to push it down, and film grain is “authentic.”

So at 4k, it’s either going to display a level of detail that I’m sitting too far from the screen to notice, it’s going to look even noisier, or it’ll be smeared by compression rather than resolution because of bitrate limitations. So…?

Something I recently learned: it is outright impossible to legally play 4k blu rays on PC.

I use Syncthing for this; it syncs directories on my phone and computer, so to put something on my computer from my phone I just put it in that directory. I share my camera roll so my pictures are synced with my computer.

If you just want a “send this file” application, warpinator might do that.

If I understand correctly, the 1541 was initially launched for the VIC20, where the datasette and several Commodore printers that would remain compatible with the VIC20, C64 and later were PET-era. This is what I think I’ve learned from Youtube, mine was an IBM household since before I was born.

Windows, like DOS and CP/M before it, was designed for a standalone microcomputer that the user had physical access to, so they lettered the drives A, B, and C, That would allow mounting 26 drives which should be enough for everybody forever.

Linux, like UNIX before it, was designed to run on a minicomputer in a university basement accessed through a dumb terminal where the end user has no physical access to the hardware, so the file system presents as completely abstract.

In the modern paradigm of local PCs attached to network storage, both approaches have their disadvantages.

I wonder how UEFI treats it; diskette drives were kind of sacred in the old BIOS days. How modern Windows handles it is anyone’s guess, I’m sure it’s been rewritten by Copilot by now.

I had reason to use an optical drive lately, and even that was a blast from the past. Hitting eject, watching the light blink and then the drawer opens. USB-based storage just isn’t the same.

There is no goddamn reason to continue to use magneto ignition in aircraft engines. I’ve been a Rotax authorized service technician for 13 years, I have never seen the digital CDI installed on a Rotax 900 series engine fail in any way, and you’ve still got two. Honestly I believe a CDI module is more reliable and less prone to failure than a mechanical magneto. The only reason why we’re still using pre-WWII technology in modern production aircraft engines is societal rot.

So there hasn’t been any RAM manufactured in Europe in nearly 20 years? Is that the point you’re making?

Mainland Europe has never had a culture of computer hardware development or manufacture. They’ve been coasting on the United States and Britain since WWII. Name me a CPU architecture developed in the EU. There’s one, ARM. British.

Furthermore, Europe just doesn’t have the work ethic to run a chip fab. You know those attempts to bring fabs to the United States? They’re running afoul of American labor laws, turns out American citizens won’t work 14 hour days like the Taiwanese. You lazy ass Europeans with your 51 weeks of vacation a year don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making your own CPUs.

Three. Wordpad also existed.

I hope my cat doesn’t learn that trick.

Well tough shit, I learned something anyway.

Yeah, you know, they were trying to get Half Life 2 out as a launch title but the game was delayed?

Let me Wikipedia that for you…It was rolled into Wordpad circa Windows 95, and that write.exe is present in newer versions of Windows but it’s basically just a link to Wordpad.

According to Wikipedia, MS Write uses .wri files, which can be opened by LibreOffice 5.1 and later but not by any Microsoft software from Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later.