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And their plans for Recall[^] which really make you want to "get your ass to Mars". 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Richard Deeming wrote: And their plans for Recall[^] which really make you want to "get your ass to Mars".
What worse... Microsoft (Pest) or Musk (Cholera)?   
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Look, arguing about which colour horses they're riding, or who the other two are, won't avert the apocalypse you know! 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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On my laptops (MSI and Gigabyte) there is a key combination that does that. Something like Fn+F3 or another function key.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Microsoft's choices over the last several years are appalling. Windows 11's UI changes are awful, and the injection of ads everywhere is worse. This latest upcoming "Recall" feature that will chew up your disk space for no discernable benefit and huge privacy drawbacks has put me over the edge. I've been talking for years about switching to MacOs for my daily driver, and this week Microsoft convinced me that was the right choice. I can't completely escape Windows - I support applications for Windows servers, but MY main computer will not be Windows moving forward.
--Avonelle
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One of the things that really ticks me off about Microsoft's UX changes is the way the newer crop of development idiots completely ignore the way things should be done.
Case in point -- there used to be a Microsoft document called "The Windows Design Guide". It laid out all the dos and don'ts for creating Windows applications, especially in terms of the user interface. One of its strongest rules stated something like "When your application first opens, do not expand its main window to take over the entire screen. Do not cover up all the other applications that may be running."
Now, take a look at what happens when you start even small applications, like Settings, or larger stuff like Outlook or Word -- Boom! whole screen covered for no good reason. This new crop of idiots simply assumes that no one can handle more than one window at a time, so why waste screen space? And, I'll bet they have no explanation for why they've blithely ignored decades of good advice.
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So true.
Something that ticked me off in the last couple of years is a UX change they made to the treeview in Outlook. Previously it showed the number of unread items in a folder right next to the folder name, which made it very easy to read. They changed it so that the number of unread items is right justified so that it is far away from the folder name. Now it is much harder to tell at a glance which folder the unread items are in. WHY DO THAT? It makes things objectively worse.
That's when I realized they are just making changes to justify their jobs, with no real thought or care.
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I've been using Windows 10 on an iMac for years with a secondary monitor. This year I've switched to macOS as my main dev system on the iMac, and the other screen is used for my win11, Ubuntu, Debian or mac mini machine. Lots of juggling.
I'm working on the iMac on one file, and on the mac mini on the same file, but a different version. I was wishing I could just copy from one to the other, but they are on different machines. Then, without thinking, I copied some text, dragged the cursor from one screen to the other, and then pasted.
I totally forgot about macOS Universal control. It was so intuitive I wasn't even aware of what I was doing: it just worked the way I expected it to (but had I thought about it, I would have not expected it to work).
I love UI/UX like that. It's like the perfect butler: they are there before you even realise you need them, and then step back once the job is done. But without the whole moral issues thing and all that.
I wish we all had the time and resources and mental space to write software that worked like this.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote: I wish we all had the time and resources and mental space to write software that worked like this.
It's been my experience that companies will spend hundreds of thousands so people can argue over a text box for months and call that innovation. 
Jeremy Falcon
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Or spend millions in court aguing over ownership of the shape of a corner!
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Chris Maunder wrote: I was wishing I could just copy from one to the other, but they are on different machines. Then, without thinking, I copied some text, dragged the cursor from one screen to the other, and then pasted.
It came with the Logitech mouse drivers, maybe four or five years ago. I never worked with "i" stuff, but if I remember the documentation right, it worked across OSes.
I never saw a standard protocol for cut & paste across internet - maybe it exists, maybe it even existed then. Most likely, Logitech devised its proprietary cut & paste protocol between its drivers. They are just talking to themselves, need not relate to other mice or OSes (except that the mouse driver will have to know how to do both copy and paste on the local system - but if you write a driver for an OS, you are likely to know that!), so there really isn't that much need for a world standard protocol.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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Sort of like Synergy? Synergy - Share one mouse & keyboard across computers Although that's sort of the other way around, perhaps being best described as a software KVM switch, that allowed you to cut & paste between systems. Maybe drag-and-drop, too. It's been a long time since I used it, but your description of rang a bell for me. So, if you're looking for something to do this, and you have windows/mac/linux systems, it might be a solution for you.
"A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants"
Chuckles the clown
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I would love to have something like this, Microsoft supports this, but you have to login to the Microsoft ID. I refuse to do so. i have an app in the works...
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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We used to use Synergy in our industrial applications. We had to split the processing load between five different machines and Synergy allowed us to easily control all of them with one keyboard and mouse. Those machines were installed about thirteen years ago.
Late last year we replaced all five machines, which were 4U boxes that each had dual six-core Xeons, with a single 2U box that has a single Ryzen 7950X (16 cores) and the performance is more than twice as fast as it used to be. We couldn't find this package commercially so we build them ourselves. Those five old machines cost about 6K each then (30K total) and the new one costs less than 2K in parts. Incidentally, we tried a machine with a 24-core EPYC CPU and another with dual 16-core EPYCs and this Ryzen is faster than both of them. We also used the EPYCs to host a high-powered GPU (A100 or A40) but our problem is so complex that the Ryzen CPU is faster than the GPUs and the CPUs by themselves. Now we use the EPYCs and GPUs for AI training and they work great for that.
Technology marches on.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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I use Input Director, a very good KVM style tool that has copy/paste among other neat little features. And it is free.
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I used synergy some years ago across a couple of Windows boxes and a Linux box and I'm sure a Sun box was in the mix somewhere, too - it just worked really well.
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This is exactly my type of passive-aggressive.
Sadly this one won't ship to Canada.
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I'd never heard of it, but according to the sparse information I can find it's a sort private e-mail network that predates e-mail.
Apparently it's "popular" for EDI exchange and not much else (although the military and NATO use it, among others, because it's more secure than e-mail).
I just got a question from a client if I can deliver an EDI message via ATLAS400 instead of regular e-mail.
Seriously, as soon as someone mentions EDI I get shivers down my spine.
How can something be so ridiculously obscure and complicated and yet so popular!?
A simple OpenAPI specification would've done the trick! (I know, EDI predates REST, JSON, SOAP and even XML...)
Anyway, it seems I need some subscription to an X.400 service and even then, there are 0 code examples on the entire internet...
So much for "industry standard"
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Oh man now I feel old. I think we used that on AIX machines in the early 90's.
Good luck! You've got this! 
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote: Good luck! You've got this! 
No I don't! 
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And on the IBM AS400 Series.
I remember as a young "tech" , working for a company that made rubber gaskets for the auto industry.
They used to exchange orders with their European partners every night, it used to take 9 hours to exchange all these massive EDI documents, which then took another 3 to 4 hours in a complex COBOL driven process to turn the data into a human readable format.
We'd set the transfer going at 5pm when everyone left the office for the night, and it would be just finishing at about 9am the next morning as everyone started to filter in for the day.
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Another nighttime story ...
In 1983 (*), I started working in a company developing an X.400 system. Testing interaction with other systems was essential, so those of us who kept up old contacts at our alma mater was welcome to keep in X.400 contact with them - the University ran a different X.400 implementation. The underlaying network wasn't perfectly stable, so every now and then, messages didn't make it.
One day we had a huge rush of incoming messages, some of them months old. All the missing ones were there. Where had they hidden in the weeks before?
It took a while before we found an explanation. When the University mail system failed delivery, it was configured to make a new try later - at midnight. At our company, a raw disc offline backup copy was made every day, or rather: every night, starting at midnight. So when the MTA at the U made another attempt at midnight, night after night, our mail machine was just taken down for backup.
One evening, our mail machine had a total crash. As it was already down, the operators decided to make the backup a couple hours early. The machine was back on air before midnight, ready to receive all the failing messages for months from the university. It took yet a couple days before anyone connected the early backup to the rush of emails, but when someone suggested it, the connection was obvious.
(*)
Some people claim that while internet protocols are based on real experience, real testing, OSI standards are just paperwork that never works in practice. That is of course far from truth. This was in 1983, a year before the fist official X.400 standard was passed. There were (at least) two complete, independent implementations available for testing.
But, being ahead of time can be costly. My company obviously based the implementation on working drafts. For a couple years, the drafts for the directory functions (then still part of X.400 - later to be split off as X.500) was quite stable, the implementation was based on that. A few months before the finalizing of the official standard, a major part of the directory drafts was ditched, and another alternative pulled in. My company had to do a huge crash job to implement the other alternative, the one in the final standard. (Obviously, proponents of this other alternative were from companies who had a running implementation of that alternative ready. In order to be competitive, my company had to offer the standard solution as soon as possible, not something of their own, before the competition took over the market.)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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It rings a bell. Maybe bank networks, like ATM machines use it? IDK. I just think it sounds familiar.
NVM, I'm thinking of something else.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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