I’ve had a gutful of Microsoft this week, so far.
I got the new corporate laptop. Seems like a decent machine, a Dell Latitude. It doesn’t have the retina screen like my Thinkpad. On the other hand, I have trouble seeing that high a resolution. It matches the curved flatscreen monitor I use. It has Windows 11, which I’ve come to hate with the heat of a thousand suns. They are trying to emulate how a Mac displays apps. So gone is the ability to hit the start icon and tap the first few keys of the app you want. It’ll do that, but it also blends it into a worldwide search.
Yes, I have to get used to a new interface.
Yes, I can probably tailor it to my liking, which will take hours of farting around on the web. Interesting that I don’t have to do this on a Mac, or even either Linux laptop I use. I have to figure out what the hell some GenZ UI developer thought was neet-o.
Worse yet, since it’s new, it has the corporate image on it – the base level of software. For other packages we have a company portal. So, my login does not have admin rights, a corporate policy. The problem here is I have a bunch of software that I need to do my job that isn’t available to the masses in the company. I also have to install the software that I support. So to do this, I needed to initiate an IT workflow to get admin rights. I’m now on day two of waiting for this blessing. I’m at a dead stop with this machine until I get it. That, and I need to enter another ticket to find out why I can’t access the backup from my current machine to move my crap over.
So I spent some wait time entertaining myself with a recorded webinar I missed. Get a load of this:
A full half of that screen is taken on advertising their dopey AI that I can access with a ‘premium’ account. This is high pressure stupid. This is a corporate O365 plan. I can’t try premium. They should know this.
I also cannot use an AI platform not blessed and approved by corporate. Matter of fact, we have rules for how and when we can use AI. What’s the point of non-disclosure if you feed proprietary data into a competitor’s AI interface?
Microsoft is pushing their dopey Copilot AI hard. Like I want their grubby fingers in my stuff. It’s all over Windows 11 and I’m sure the roots run deep as a weed.
I hate this stuff so much that I found myself on Apple’s site pricing a MacBook Air. I’m not thrilled with my old ThinkPad running on Linux. It’ll do what I need, but it’s clunky and won’t run some of the apps I need without using Wine (a windows emulator).
So a Mac? I have an iPhone, iPad, and Watch. I’m already deep in it. Besides I trust them more than Microsoft, who I trust only a little more than Google (which is not at all)
But I’m dealing with sticker shock at the moment.
So I decided not to decide for now. I’ll use the tower and Linux laptop for now.
Inspected By Pat 
I’ve two corporate laptops with Lose11 on them. Same wonderful experience.
Personal machines are all Linux, except the paranoid side of me insisted that I also needed OpenBSD since corporate enshittification is gradually destroying Linux.
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You are way ahead of me on this technology. I’m long-time retired but still very active. Very much disklike the way this IT game continues to be going with hardware <>software round robin and everybody can mess with YOUR P. Why do they even call it that any more? “Personal” my ass.
Forced obsolesnce & requirwed participation. They have policies; I have policies as well. A new fine upscale restaurant did not have menus they require I sue the the ‘code’ and smart phone to download it and God knows what else I did not have one with me (Imagine THAT) and told them bring me a menu or I’m leaving They searched h round and loaned me a lap top. Net time in that city I just go directely to a favored back-side of town local place I like… with better food; more friendly people; and lower cost anyway
What’s interesting and missing is people HAVE the damn technology but don’t really know how to communicate well.
I’m at the time of life when simplifications is a goal and can see the time they can all go pound sand; I done with it. Will just go back to enjoying my old toys and only doing what I want to do.
It’s very interesting what all we were able to do in the most productive years 1960 to 2015 WITHOUT most of this bullshit anyway. Real things. Proud of my career University was still keypunch card days and the first HP 35 bascic hand calculator came out,; at $ 400 I think it was.
I passed on that too until function vastly increased and price came way down; in doing so skipped several generations of the stupid game. Back then we would have killed for such tools as we have now but so very few people know how to do shit.
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I read a great book some time ago called “High Tech Heretic” by Clifford Stoll. The point of it was that instead of teaching kids how to use the computer, teach them the background subjects so that the computer becomes just a tool. A spreadsheet is useless if you don’t know the math behind it. Same with something like word. Learn the language and it’s grammar. Word becomes only a tool.
What’s happening is we’re wrapped up in the platform. And as we do so, we become more stupid, which in turn makes the platform dumber, or at least for those that know what they want to do. That’s what AI is about. Can’t do the thinking for yourself, let us do it. Lockheed’s skunkworks built some of the most amazing planes with fuggin sliderules. Back then, these engineers could do most of the math in their heads.
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I remember back in the daze of yore. The very FIRST “CAD” system they bestowed upon me at HP NJD was “HP Draft”. It was written in BASIC of all things. I was TOLD that you could not use it to create isometric views of anything and it would take a full SIX MONTHS before any of us “On The Board Drafters” would be able to produce ANY drawings with it.
Three weeks later I had produced the first “Manufacturing Control Drawing” using it. Complete with full ISOMETRIC illustrations on how to manufacture a Power Transformer simply by applying basic drafting techniques to the operation of the software itself.
HP Draft was a TOOL after all and I just used it accordingly. I got the impression that the fellows in GMBH that written it may not have ever used triangles, circle templates, a compass etc. to actually CREATE an isometric view otherwise their pontifications as to it’s use and their assumptions as to the complexity of what they created (learning curve) would not have been so overblown.
That a lowly “Drafter I” in New Jersey totally blew their assumptions out of the water? Yeah, caused a few rather larger ripples in the Corporate Septic Tank to be sure.
Post Scriptum: That hours and hours of scrupulously practicing PRECISE HAND LETTERING went out the window for what was a far more valuable 1 year in 8th grade studying “Typing” was a totally unpredictable event to be sure!
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