Kosh's Shadow 11/12/2026 6:07:30 PM

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PJM had someone reference a company that makes switches and panels that look like real and fictional spacecraft and aircraft,

So I ordered mine - JEWISH SPACE LASER ACTIVATION PANEL

I will have my wife give it to me on the first day of Chanukah - and light one laser the first day, two the second.....

Kosh's Shadow 11/13/2026 6:40:17 AM

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With the Jewish Space Lasers, this article explains:

Why Hating Jews Feels So Good

vxbush 11/13/2026 7:39:12 AM

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Reply to Kosh's Shadow in 1:

Okay, that is a thing of beauty. 

Who all got hit by Microsoft's outlook snafu yesterday? 

JCM 11/13/2026 7:42:02 AM

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Reply to vxbush in 3:

Me personally no. I don't have any MS software.

The company yes, but I don't use much MS software and it was only the 365 stuff affected.

vxbush 11/13/2026 9:07:59 AM

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In #4 JCM said: Me personally no. I don't have any MS software.

That sounds rather nice. 

I haven't seen any information on what caused the issue, but it seemed like someone pushed out a coding change to most of the servers that broke communications instead of testing it on a very small batch of servers. 

vxbush 11/13/2026 9:12:17 AM

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In #2 Kosh's Shadow said: Why Hating Jews Feels So Good

Good article. That last point is probably something on the order of 60% or more of why a lot of college students are now aligning with these groups, because they are invited in after being thrown to the wolves on campus. 

Kosh's Shadow 11/13/2026 9:27:29 AM

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In #3 vxbush said: Who all got hit by Microsoft's outlook snafu yesterday? 

Not us; we don't use Microsoft cloud services. Office, yes, because wife has to share files and other software isn't 100% compatible.

We each have Verizon email (now run by AOL) and email with our own domain on a company Network Solutions now owns.

And we use Thunderbird for email I can easily view source and headers of suspicious messages without opening them.

JCM 11/13/2026 9:36:57 AM

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Reply to vxbush in 5:

The update to WIN11 at work gave me glimpse under MS skirt. A lot of my CAD software has a bunch of stuff at the very bottom of the window.

I've always kept the task bar over on the right side of the screen because of that. WIN11 that function was gone. The MS forums were full of people complaining about it.

It was so significant it came up at press conferences the guy in charge of WIN11. He basically side enabling that function in WIN11 wasn't worth the effort. Excuse me you have the function in WIN10, it can't be that hard to up do the graphical side.

My take away was MS has gotten lazy.

Kosh's Shadow 11/13/2026 9:46:20 AM

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Reply to JCM in 8:\

And when MS does add back features, they get them wrong. They dropped automatically re-opening file windows (not that it worked well if you had windows on multiple monitors - it would mess up the sizes on one monitor). They finally added back but if you have a window with multiple tabs, the title will be for one tab, but the actual address is from a different one.

vxbush 11/13/2026 10:34:46 AM

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This hits close to home: 

vxbush 11/13/2026 10:57:57 AM

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But this one IS legit: 

vxbush 11/13/2026 11:00:45 AM

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Kosh's Shadow 11/13/2026 11:21:51 AM

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Reply to vxbush in 12:

One of the architects of NT was one of the architects of VMS, Dave Cutler. VMS had a good solution to incompatible libraries - but it used extra memory and disk space. Basically, a program would request the version it was built for and calls would go to routines from that version.

And VMS had many of the problems Windows does - processes are big.

Somehow MS didn't learn from mistakes or from good practices, creating DLL hell and then a quite complicated "solution" to it.

vxbush 11/13/2026 11:43:11 AM

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In #13 Kosh's Shadow said: Somehow MS didn't learn from mistakes or from good practices, creating DLL hell and then a quite complicated "solution" to it.

DLL hell is an excellent phrase to describe it. There's a part of me that understands the value to creating virtual layers to drive the hardware and interface, but egads and little fishes, the bloat from all those interfaces is what makes Windows require so much memory. 

I can't say I ever liked coding in BASIC on a TRS-80, but man, it was zippy compared to Windows in pretty much all of its flavors.

Kosh's Shadow 11/13/2026 12:06:47 PM

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Reply to vxbush in 14:

Part of the software bloat is "reusability" and multiple layers. At one time, different processes would have some way to communicate - shared memory, sockets, whatever. But each program had to be changed if the underlying mechanism changed. Now we have message passing systems that serialize and deserialize data and send it through multiple layers, all so each program des not need to know the details of how communication is done. Same for UI - multiple layers.

And even standard packages end up not quite doing what is needed, so there are layers that glue everything together. I have debugged software with MULTIPLE layers of adapters, just so no one had to rewrite lower level code, or understand how it worked.

It is as if you needed adapters to connect "standard" bolts and beams.

1 MHz VaxStations ran a GUI that was quite responsive. But it was one layer.

buzzsawmonkey 11/13/2026 12:08:39 PM

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The cyberization of everything should be referred to as "Caligula's Dream."

The Roman Emperor Caligula was---is---famous for his numerous executions of enemies and opponents, both real and imagined. One of the most-famous quotes attributed to him is, "Would that the people of Rome had just one neck."

Concentrating all the functions of business, of government, and of personal and private interaction into the hands of a few "online services" entirely dependent upon uninterrupted power supplies and bug-free operation of a handful of highly-complex computer programs whose operation is known to few, ensures that "the people of Rome" have, indeed, just "one neck."

Kosh's Shadow 11/13/2026 12:09:21 PM

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First computer I used had 16K bytes and a 1 MB hard drive. It was quite slow - 7 microseconds to add 2 16-bit integers.

Now, I wouldn't even run Linux on something less than 16GB. I had Qt (lets you deveop GUI software for Windows, Mac, and Linux, in C++ and Python) that complained it only had 12GB.

vxbush 11/13/2026 12:13:50 PM

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In #15 Kosh's Shadow said: 1 MHz VaxStations ran a GUI that was quite responsive. But it was one layer.

When I used VAX, it was without the GUI and was such a stinking pain. I've pretty much recycled those brain cells.

Kosh's Shadow 11/13/2026 12:47:55 PM

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Reply to vxbush in 18:

You didn't like DCL (Digital Command Language)? Back when I first used VAX, there was NO gui for it. I think the only computer with a GUI was out of Xerox PARC. No, Apple Lisa was out, but not the Mac.

vxbush 11/13/2026 12:54:02 PM

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In #19 Kosh's Shadow said: You didn't like DCL (Digital Command Language)? Back when I first used VAX, there was NO gui for it. I think the only computer with a GUI was out of Xerox PARC. No, Apple Lisa was out, but not the Mac.

I saw the NeXT operating system in grad school and said, "Linux with a real GUI? Yes, please." And I used a NeXT machine at work until those were no longer made. I really like a GUI, as I can interpret a lot more visually. 

Kosh's Shadow 11/13/2026 1:10:14 PM

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Reply to vxbush in 20:

I did a lot with X-Windows, back circa 1990. Ported the X-11 R1 server to a VaxStation 2000 as a proof of concept.

The layers of code in that - Motif widgets, etc.