Be Excellent To Each Other

Yep, mine is like JCs. Are we getting to the bottom of this then? I can't wait to calculate all those dates I've got piled up.

I seem to recall at least a couple of times where Windows went all laggy, then tried installing updates and failed, finally reverting back to where it was before.

Maybe that's why.

How long ago was that?

Most recently? about three days ago. I seem to recall it doing it just before Christmas too, because each time it's happened I've thought "Oh god another SSD has died".

Last Saturday was the worst though. Well, Friday. It did the whole lag thing and I shut it down and went to bed. Got up Saturday to watch the football and it was just sat at the Windows logo with nothing spinning. I left it, and left it, and after about an hour decided the SSD must be dead so I went over to my lady's PC to look at some. I rebooted it twice after that, same thing. Finally it came up with the repair screen and then when it finally booted it mentioned something about Windows Update failing.

I checked last night and my PC wasn't doing it's automatic update for some reason. I downloaded an update tool from Microsoft and spent an hour looking at progress bars as it checked, checked and checked again before finally updating.

The first thing I did was check the 'about' screen and it was all there, all updated. Next, I loaded the calculator and....

Still no date calculation.

I give up.

Man, that post was an emotional roller-coaster. And I'm impressed that you didn't give in to the pressure to have a happy ending.

He's going to start exploring the creepier corners of the Dark Web in his quest to work out his age in days.

You'll never guess what I've just discovered? Yes.. That's right... It's what everyone has been thinking about. It's my calculator! It's finally up to speed!

Does anyone need any dates calculating because if you do, I'm your man.

Huzzah!

So how did you fix it?

It was actually quite simple. I was on the earlier version of Windows and the automatic updates weren't working so I downloaded this:-

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/softwar ... /windows10

and ran the option to upgrade now and it installed the latest version of Windows 10. Hopefully this will fix the problem of my updates not working. A quick Google suggests that it might.

Yeah can you calculate how long it's taken you to be able to finally calculate dates kthx

29 days.

Next please!

Ah OK I see. So it's an entire refresh install sort of thing?

TBH I don't really care about the calculator but being stuck on an older version that clearly won't update does bother me a little.

Teenagers reacting to Windows 95 does not make me feel like a living fossil. It makes me want to drown teenagers.

How would you have got on with 1974 tech in 1995, though?

Absolutely fine because things didn't really change as fast back then. So in 1995 I could have used a phone with a dial or stood up to change the channel or whatever. I was talking to a colleague in her twenties about those sorts of things though and she had an "oh you poor people" sort of look on her face and all of a sudden I felt like someone from my parents generation talking about ration books and the blitz.

What is the issue?

Well yeah, but how was your CP/M?

I'd have probably fumbled around a little, but I wouldn't have done it with sass turned up to 11.

The pissing adverts.

Let's not pretend they're not getting direction to act like that.

You raise a fair a point. But life's not fair. And they need to learn that.

Not into watersports then?

I can't work out how worried to be about this because I can't find out what UWP actually offers. If accessing it's features are somehow intrinsic to developing games that run on Windows 10 then obviously this is pretty fucking disastrous stuff. If everything it does is completely optional then I'm not sure what the problem is? The very fact that I've read that Guardian article and don't know the answer to that hardly recommends it as a good source. It also comes across as a bit hysterical with this:



I did a fresh install of Windows 10 and changing the default web browser and media player was as low effort as it's always been (i.e. install non-default media player, open video file, get pop-up asking which app I want to use and whether I want it to be the default one or not, make selection, never worry about it again). With the Windows search bar I'm sure there was a really obvious and easy option to tell it just to search My Stuff rather than online as well; and I understand why they added the online search stuff anyway so I don't begrudge it initially being there anyway. And the rest of the stuff he mentions there I've never even noticed so I'm not convinced it's a massive problem.

Yeah, I'm not sure what the problem is there as, like you said, doing all those things was easy and I've never seen a lock screen ad let alone an invasive one.

The trick is to give the kids old shitty tech before they see the new shiny, then they're not spoiled

Sorry, I thought you said shitty old tech then. All I can see is the brilliant Xbox controller.

Are they his real glasses? They're awesome.

Agreed, my daughter will be rocking my old Nokia 8210 at secondary school. I may give her my old Gameboy Advance Micro too.

Yep. He's had them for a while now.


Coolest kid ever.

Don't have a shot of him playing on the Atari

I shall say it again... Sorry, I thought you said "shitty"?

I read somewhere a little while ago about a dad who's starting his son on Pong and they're working their way up to current-gen via the stand-out titles of the generations.

I wish I'd done that

Ah, here is is: http://kotaku.com/father-makes-son-play ... 1669616589

What's stopping you?

I'm assuming because he's already seen all the newer stuff so he'd be like "what the hell is this crap?"

Quite. Pong is probably less impressive after Arkham Knight.

That's always going to be a problem isn't it, unless you're Josef Fritzl or something?

In case he sees something at a friend's house, you mean? I don't think so - you could do the whole thing in a month or so, and I'd have done it when he was about five.

Maybe it's something to save for when he asks you about growing up in the 1980s? To him that would be as alien as hearing about my parents' lives in the 1950s (albeit not thinking they were in black and white...)

There's also the danger he'd turn into a Chinny clone as well.

The regular beatings he'd get at school for endlessly banging on about Amstrad and 80s radio DJs would build character. And scar tissue.

My kids often come out with stuff, and Pauline and I are left to wonder how old they think we actually are?

Like thinking there was only 1 black and white TV channel when we were young. And that computers were as big as a sofa or something.

I don't know if that's just my kids being extra ignorant, or indicative of a wider general ignorance.

A few years ago my Mum asked me if I thought she was 'old'. I paused for a moment, then briefly noted that when she was born Major Attlee was Prime Minister and King George was on the throne.

I think the big concern would not be that they will ever remove Win32 compatibility from Windows for PCs in order to force UWP adoption. That would kill Windows.

The concern in my mind is them making a move like making a future version of DirectX only available for UWP, so developers either have to abandon sales outside of Microsoft's ecosystem and go UWP exclusive, stick to older versions of DirectX, or maintain multiple versions.

Or, you know, use opengl.

Why would the removal of win 32 kill windows?

Could you imagine a Windows where you can't download and install ANY program from the internet?

Aye meant to mention DirectX alternatives, but it'd most likely be Vulkan now.

Considering the most important customers for MS (ie where they make their money) is enterprise clients, and considering how MS have bent over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility for exactly these clients, breaking that compatibility would seriously harm their business in this area.

How does the removal of Win32 stop that?

'Win32 is built into Windows 95 and Windows NT so applications that rely on the API (Win32 applications) should run equally well in both environments. It is also possible to run some Win32 applications under older 16-bit versions of windows by installing the Win32s runtime system.'

Should it not be retired after 20 years?