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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I miss the Directory listings of a search engine. It was great for finding a series of niche sites based on “Quake III news” or “Subaru Impreza owners club” or such like.

    SEO has ruined the web 1.0 efforts to just shotgun news and opinion onto the web (fact checking was purely optional) - everything’s just a bit too clean and corporate now. Shame.












  • I’m going to preface this by stating that it’s my assumption and not fact:

    O’Leary isn’t daft. I don’t like him and I don’t like Ryanair, but he’s done well with the brand from a financial perspective, in an industry that’s all about the fine margins.

    I’m quite sure your view is correct, it’s probably only about the numbers - for better or worse. If Starlink was a cheaper alternative to most in the market, and their projected connectivity sales outweigh the operating and capital costs, there’d be Starlink all over Ryanair planes. As it happens, the numbers probably look a deep red on the spreadsheet so it’s in the “fuck right off” box.

    I’ve no love for either of them but it’s still nice to see Elon getting a poke in the eye.





  • I’m afraid I can’t speak authoritatively on the subject, however taking a step back - MS do have a record for driving hardware uptake with their system releases.

    In theory it’s not a bad thing - Unreal and Quake II (among many) requiring 3D accelerator hardware largely drove PC gaming into the lead for cutting edge graphics - but the type of hardware MS have been requiring has always been a bit of a clusterfuck - a prime recent example being the supposed requirement of a TPM board in a Win11 computer.

    My anecdotal experience is that Vista - while pretty - is a bit of a bloatfest regardless of what hardware you run it on.



  • Ah I remember upgrading from 98SE to Millennium Edition and it was just ass. That said, I reformatted and installed Me and used the 98 CD to pass the upgrade check, and I had very few issues with it. Shit like System Restore was gash - in fact, any of the new tools installed with Me were awful - but I just effectively used it as 98 Third Edition and it did the job nicely for me.

    I agree that 95 was a big - if not monumental - step up in graphics interface driven OSes… but the first few releases were unstable as fuck. Whether it was horrendous shutdown issues because ACPI support was super flaky at the time, to trying to run com/com as a command to insta-bluescreen the system. The latter is so much of an edge case though that I almost cut myself typing it.


  • Jesus, my son wanted to add a classmate as a friend on Xbox Live last night. It should have been a two step process from a parent perspective: Authenticate, then authorise (though the lad was delegated the task of the latter technically).

    When he tried to add the friend, I had to:

    1. Enter my parental code (fair enough);
    2. Enter my Microsoft Account password because it was apparently a transaction involving personal data;
    3. Scan the QR code to do this on another device (admittedly optional);
    4. Enter the email address of my MS account;
    5. Enter the 2FA code emailed to me;
    6. Stop the passkey creation process;
    7. Confirm that I didn’t want a passkey;
    8. Skip the age verification;
    9. Turn off the personalised ads

    Just so he could get to the point where he could select “add as a friend”, what the actual fuck