5 ms·

It's about having choice: Microsoft used to be quite good at making stuff usable but the underlying geekery was still there and could allow control to the max i

It's about having choice: Microsoft used to be quite good at making stuff usable but the underlying geekery was still there and could allow control to the max if you wanted it. It worked for mom & pops and techs alike but corporations new attitude of "We'll decide what's best and remove other options" is a bloody pain in the arse now. A particularly bad one is this insistence on not allowing me to permanently say "no" to something. It's always "maybe later" or "remind me in 24 hrs" or similar... even Firefox does it now when you set it up - I think it was to do with sending FF to my mobile or something - but the message was "do it now" or "do it later"... I don't want it EVER! So, no! I don't want anyone else's opinion for stuff like this - let me decide what's best for me and allow me to tinker if I want!

cromulent 5y ago
If anyone knows where the "I'm happy to control things myself" setting is in Teams, please share. I'm really tired of it deciding when I should be on mute, or when it should warn me that I am muted. Just let me do it.
- squiggleblaz 5y ago
  > If anyone knows where the "I'm happy to control things myself" setting is in Teams, please share. It's the X button in the top right corner. In the olden days we had individual developers who would work out the internal API these applications used to work. I wonder if that's still theoretically possible. Surely it must be? Even if the client app needs a signed certificate, since it runs in an unsigned environment (i.e. Linux) it should be possible to grab the certificate and present that when you need it.
vosper 5y ago
> Microsoft used to be quite good at making stuff usable but the underlying geekery was still there and could allow control to the max if you wanted it. Windows 10 is the best Windows ever for the vast majority of people who use Windows. Same with Office. But you can still install whatever software you want on your Windows machine. Explain to me again how this is worse than what we used to have; where Microsoft have gone wrong in how they build software? Is it perfect? Of course not - no-one could even agree on what that means. But let’s be realistic about how much progress has actually happened: it’s a lot.
- plater 5y ago
  Yes, because it's based on a PC. A quite standard and open specification where you can buy motherboards, CPU, RAM, disk, IO peripherals etc from many different manufacturers and build and install what software you want. However, on a Mac, you cannot install or change the hardware as you like, you cannot install what software you want. If Linus Torvalds was a teen today and there was no open PC standard, only a Mac, then it would not have been possible to create Linux the way it is today. Imagine if also Microsoft starts to make their own processors and then sell their own computers with Windows and all locked down, and don't allow anyone else to make computers with Windows or their processors. Sure Dell, HP and others could still make PC's, based on Intel or AMD CPU's or some ARM processor and then run Linux (or develop their own OS), but it's a hard sell. The PC's sold to the mainstream thanks to Windows/Word/Excel maybe, but then people who wanted could tinker as much as they wanted and where free so make and sell their software (windows based or whatever) or their HW peripherals. Now you are at best stuck within an app store if you create something.
  - squiggleblaz 5y ago
    > If Linus Torvalds was a teen today and there was no open PC standard, only a Mac, then it would not have been possible to create Linux the way it is today. Torvalds didn't create Linux as a teen in his bedroom hacking on what he had. He created it at university studying operating systems. He would have created it on Raspberry Pi or some other platform. Linux is widely deployed on x86 because x86 is available and open enough. It replaced Unix operating systems on dedicated architectures, like Solaris on SPARC. > Sure Dell, HP and others could still make PC's, based on Intel or AMD CPU's or some ARM processor and then run Linux (or develop their own OS), but it's a hard sell GNU/Linux was a hard sell in the beginning too. In the olden days, if you put Linux on a laptop you lost special features and you had very limited software support. Web pages were designed to work with IE only and you could only run Mozilla. Your major option for producing printable documents was special purpose programming languages like TeX or using Mozilla Composer. And good luck getting your winmodem/winprinter to do anything! Today enough exists that you can buy hardware from companies that expect you to put Linux on them and then run them with full features and great intercompatibility. Your phone will be crap but it'll be good enough, and in ten years time it'll have a lot better features. Till then, if you want a great lowlight camera, buy a great lowlight camera. The inversion of trust is a frustrating aspect of modern business, and it creates many social problems. But it isn't a technical barrier to oldschool hacking about.

cromulent 5y ago

If anyone knows where the "I'm happy to control things myself" setting is in Teams, please share. I'm really tired of it deciding when I should be on mute, or when it should warn me that I am muted. Just let me do it.

squiggleblaz 5y ago
> If anyone knows where the "I'm happy to control things myself" setting is in Teams, please share. It's the X button in the top right corner. In the olden days we had individual developers who would work out the internal API these applications used to work. I wonder if that's still theoretically possible. Surely it must be? Even if the client app needs a signed certificate, since it runs in an unsigned environment (i.e. Linux) it should be possible to grab the certificate and present that when you need it.

vosper 5y ago

> Microsoft used to be quite good at making stuff usable but the underlying geekery was still there and could allow control to the max if you wanted it. Windows 10 is the best Windows ever for the vast majority of people who use Windows. Same with Office. But you can still install whatever software you want on your Windows machine. Explain to me again how this is worse than what we used to have; where Microsoft have gone wrong in how they build software? Is it perfect? Of course not - no-one could even agree on what that means. But let’s be realistic about how much progress has actually happened: it’s a lot.

plater 5y ago
Yes, because it's based on a PC. A quite standard and open specification where you can buy motherboards, CPU, RAM, disk, IO peripherals etc from many different manufacturers and build and install what software you want. However, on a Mac, you cannot install or change the hardware as you like, you cannot install what software you want. If Linus Torvalds was a teen today and there was no open PC standard, only a Mac, then it would not have been possible to create Linux the way it is today. Imagine if also Microsoft starts to make their own processors and then sell their own computers with Windows and all locked down, and don't allow anyone else to make computers with Windows or their processors. Sure Dell, HP and others could still make PC's, based on Intel or AMD CPU's or some ARM processor and then run Linux (or develop their own OS), but it's a hard sell. The PC's sold to the mainstream thanks to Windows/Word/Excel maybe, but then people who wanted could tinker as much as they wanted and where free so make and sell their software (windows based or whatever) or their HW peripherals. Now you are at best stuck within an app store if you create something.
- squiggleblaz 5y ago
  > If Linus Torvalds was a teen today and there was no open PC standard, only a Mac, then it would not have been possible to create Linux the way it is today. Torvalds didn't create Linux as a teen in his bedroom hacking on what he had. He created it at university studying operating systems. He would have created it on Raspberry Pi or some other platform. Linux is widely deployed on x86 because x86 is available and open enough. It replaced Unix operating systems on dedicated architectures, like Solaris on SPARC. > Sure Dell, HP and others could still make PC's, based on Intel or AMD CPU's or some ARM processor and then run Linux (or develop their own OS), but it's a hard sell GNU/Linux was a hard sell in the beginning too. In the olden days, if you put Linux on a laptop you lost special features and you had very limited software support. Web pages were designed to work with IE only and you could only run Mozilla. Your major option for producing printable documents was special purpose programming languages like TeX or using Mozilla Composer. And good luck getting your winmodem/winprinter to do anything! Today enough exists that you can buy hardware from companies that expect you to put Linux on them and then run them with full features and great intercompatibility. Your phone will be crap but it'll be good enough, and in ten years time it'll have a lot better features. Till then, if you want a great lowlight camera, buy a great lowlight camera. The inversion of trust is a frustrating aspect of modern business, and it creates many social problems. But it isn't a technical barrier to oldschool hacking about.