dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Say the line, Cave!

The original Unreal Tournament (or UT’99, or whatever) is also one of the very few modern-ish full screen games that had a drop down menu bar like you’d expect on a typical Windows application. The other one I can think of off the top of my head is ZSNES, although in that case they rolled their own solution. Not least of which because the original ZSNES was a DOS program (with huge chunks of it written in x86 assembly!) so they kind of didn’t have a choice.

If I remember right UT’99 actually did use Windows style accelerator keys in its menus, i.e. hold down Alt and press a letter to perform an action, which might just make all this malarkey peripherally relevant.

It’s deliberately to fuck with AI scrapers, per their bio. At the very least, I can respect the dedication to keeping up the shtick.

I still have two of them in a desk drawer. Both still boot, although the batteries are definitely toast. I have no idea if you can find a new-old-stock battery for one of these that is not likewise also knackered. But fun fact, an S5 will power on and run indefinitely with no battery in it at all if it’s connected to a sufficiently powerful USB power source.

Why pine for the past when you can have one again right now!

What? No takers for a phone that’s stuck on Android Marshmallow?

For the purposes of disposing of a janky battery before it goes off bang and replacing it with a fresh one, that is probably quite sufficient.

I don’t think even power users these days are going to be strutting around hot swapping batteries from the little holster of them they’ve got on their belts like us turbo-nerds were doing in the PDA era. It would be rad to be able to do so, sure, but I think that will wind up just being a side effect models of the next wave of user-replaceable battery phones on some models.

Mountains and mountains of janky spaghetti code VBA macros. That’s the only answer left.

This is musical chairs, and everyone involved is desperately hoping that they won’t be one of the ones left without a seat when the music stops. Anybody with a plural number of brain cells must know deep down inside that infinite growth is literally impossible, but they all think they’ll be smart enough to cash out before it all collapses.

There’s a problem with that, though: Money has a notoriously poor nutritional value.

I have a Dell Axim X50v in a box somewhere. I imagine the battery is toast and I’ll probably have to keep it in its cradle to remain powered. It was a hell of a machine for it’s day.

I went through a succession Windows CE/PocketPC machines back in the day, starting with a Casio Cassiopeia E-115, then an Audiovox Maestro which was a rebadged Toshiba, then an HP iPAQ 2215, and finally the Axim.

The displays on the Maestro and the Axim were really something, and I wish someone would bring these back for a modern smartphone. They were rotten at color accuracy, but both had transflective displays that were fully readable even in direct sunlight. The Axim X50v also had a full 480x640 screen resolution which blew the first few iPhones out of the water on pixel density and even gave the iPhone 4 a run for its money. “Retina” display, my ass.

I had a Microdrive bunged into the CompactFlash slot on my Axim which was… several gigabytes, I don’t remember how many. I kept it packed with MP3’s, and I had a custom wallpaper with a white-on-chartreuse silhouette of a pacifier on it with the legend, “All 10,000 Songs On Your iPod Suck.”

But then the entire PDA market got swallowed in one gulp by smartphones.

I’ll bet you a shiny penny that’s what it is. The backend recompresses things to some other format, probably a low bitrate JPEG, in order to save space and/or in case some joker uploads a 90 megabyte uncompressed TIFF image to use as a profile pic, or something.

Those are displayed in browser, right? The only reason that would be happening is if Piefeed is recompressing images and their code is not smart enough to identify an animated .gif and act accordingly.

I mean, that’s already how animated .gifs work. If somehow you manage to load one into a viewer that doesn’t support the animation functionality it will at least dutifully display the first frame.

How the hell you would manage to do that in this day and age escapes me, but there were a fair few years in the early '90s where you might run into that sort of thing.

Yes, the iPhone did not and never has supported Flash. At least not officially from Apple. There was support, albeit not quite 100% complete, on Windows CE/PocketPC at the time, though. That was one of the things that let me lord it over early iPhone adopters back in the day — my pocket nerd computer could play Homestar Runner videos, and their stupid expensive bauble couldn’t. So there.

Old people are actively using tablets. Lots and lots of them. A significant cross-section of my Boomer-and-up client base uses an iPad to do absolutely everything. It’s broadly the same experience as what they have on their phone, so I guess it’s familiar, but the screen is giant so they can actually see it. They seem to like that.

Especially since the majority of computer users worldwide now no longer use a PC to do their computing. The average consumer now uses Windows only at work. Their personal device, whatever it is, runs Android or is some manner of iDevice, two platforms which have thoroughly eaten Microsoft’s lunch.

It’s too bad for Microsoft that their mobile platform – Windows Mobile, er, I mean Windows 8 RT, er, actually it was Pocket PC, um, no wait, it was Windows CE, et. cetera – all bombed so spectacularly, and the most recent one mere moments before Google took over the world.

I imagine Microsoft is no longer eyeing private users as a cash cow except purely as advertising targets.

It’s only a matter of time before some brilliant dipshit over there manages to envision Windows as a subscription service aimed solely at businesses, and the days of Windows as a standalone OS will be over.

If it is, their stupid model forgot a “more” in this passage:

Password compromise is no joke; it leads to account compromise and that leads to, well, the compromise of most everything you hold dear in this technological-centric world we live in. It’s why Google is telling billions of users to replace their passwords with much secure passkeys.

(Wow, much secure. Very password.)

“Moooooom! They’re looking at me!!!”

You can even skip step 2 by using one of the IoT editions (either Win10 or Win11) which come minus the prepackaged bloatware.

Microsoft is mostly interested in making everything bullshit for home users. If you convince them you’re an enterprise customer, preferably by running up the old Jolly Roger, suddenly your life is a lot easier.

You would be amazed in the industrial world. There are tons of large and incredibly expensive special purpose machines that are operated by super antiquated PC architecture computers running geriatric operating systems, sometimes still even DOS or Windows 3.x.

Think industrial CNC mills and lathes, presses, pick-and-place machines, specialty lab testing equipment, electron microscopes, etc.

Process control, i.e. production line automation, is usually driven by dedicated PLCs. But the user interfaces connected to them are almost invariantly some old ruggedized panel mounted PC running Windows. An absurd number of them in my experience are still on 2000 or XP. NT4 is pretty easy to find, too.

Granted often these are not networked, and in cases where they are they’re not connected to the internet, or may even talk to other workstations via RS-485 serial (!) or some other gimcrack method that is unlikely to be a vector for modern malware.

What Microsoft probably expects you to do is get your management to buy new computers that support Windows 11 and/or whatever the hell their current server OS is, and in the process give them and their hardware vendor partners a lot of money.

What you can do instead is switch to Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC which is what I did at my workplace recently. It’s supported until 2032 with security updates. Not feature updates, but I suspect that business users probably don’t care about those much. In fact, most people would probably treat that as a benefit. It also comes with basically no bloatware (except goddamned Edge), which is surprising. No Copilot, no Cortana, no Recall. None of that shit.

We have a fleet of machines that “can’t” be upgraded to Win11 because of hardware shortcomings, at least without overriding the requirements with Rufus or similar. Unfortunately we also rely on a small but important spread of proprietary Windows-only applications which have no open source or Linux replacements, and at least two of them absolutely will not run in Wine. Believe me, I tried.

The only wrinkle with this is that you cannot upgrade or license swap in place. You have to do a full reinstall, which for us is not a problem because we have a modest number of computers and I have physical access to all of them. None are bricked up behind a wall or anything.

Re: But it has to be watertight, so it can’t have any ports or buttons or doors or hatches or a replaceable battery!!!

Uh-huh. Sure.

Feel free to trot this one out the next time some glassy-eyed Apple apologist is making that argument at you. That one annoys the shit out of me, too. This has been a solved problem for thirty years. Probably longer.