Also reddit:

My gf didn’t close the tooth paste in the bathroom.

Reddit: Red flag, LEAVE HER

Ah reminds me. My dad did smoke. And as tobacco was taxed differently he had once used one of these small sliding machines to put tobacco into “empty” cigarettes, sold separately.

He had stopped using these and was back to store bought cigarettes when I found his cigarettes and the machine.

I carefully pulled out all the tobacco from one of his Camel filters, and put it back in with the sliding machine - adding the tiniest firecracker I had.

Few days later he was sooooo angry. And the angrier he was the more I had to laugh.

It did explode in his ashtray when he was concentrating at his desk.

Oh fuck, thats was over 40 years ago and I still have to laugh like a madman.

Remembering him fondly, even when he was mad as hell at me the worst that would happen was him shouting.

Much too frequently, if you need to manage systems for a company.

THAT is my point.

I have spent too many nights unrolling and blocking Windows updates just to keep the fucking MS Exchange server happy. Or the damned 8 year old CRM software which writes to places that Windows now blocks access to.

Yeah it was paid time, but I’m much more happy if the systems I care about just run without hiccups.

So ultimately I just jailed all the Windows stuff in VMs which I can snapshot and reliably backup, which I can roll back (mostly, as long as it does not involve Active Directory) etc. Windows is inherently unstable, that’s my point.

The ultimate solution was to get out of that job. Yeah, I stilm do use Windows as a daily driver, but single use only, no centralized management and thats kind of OK.

Haha, are you aware of how many layers of Windows are just backward compatibility hacks? Architecturally Windows has changed a lot since Win98.

The fact that your 30year old business software is still running is just the fact that Windows has built in patches for some common programming patterns used at the time and someone having insight enough can enable/disable them (mostly).

Btw, the same for games. Windows detects specific games and re-enables former direct x bugs.

There are numerous layers of abstraction between your Win32 application and the Kernel, there’s no reason they won’t work on another kernel.

Oh. And of course it’s badly debuggable and frequently goes wrong.

I stopped maintaining Windows systems and focused on developing software - it’s so effing annoying that things always break out of the blue with a new windows patch versions because MS has bad quality control on their overcomplicated house of cards that is named Windows.

Are you wishing back for Ballmer? IMO things were even worse, then. When they built a new version of Windows that was so bad they threw it away after a few years and botched together Vista as a quick save.

Or for Gates? Who just missed and overlooked this newfangled internet thing in the 90s until they slammed the brakes and used loads of money to turn things around?

Or the Microsoft that successfully hollowed out monopoly regulations paving the way for the tech bro style off business we now have?

Your best bet to run it probably is on Linux with Wine. Or if it is MS themselves , they already have their own Win32 to Linux translation layers, for example DB2 for Linux runs that way.

I do think software piracy also was a large success factor. When I was 13 there was one major spot in my city where consoles and computers were sold (within a department store!), and people where “swapping” games even before they bought the hardware. I remember at least one of the store clerks having a small side business providing access to disks and tapes you could copy - right on the machines that were shown in store.

And I learned how to copy the C64’s basic rom to ram and mod small things even before I had the machine myself.

All the kids were gathering round the computers, the consoles were less attractive.

When I got my own C64 in 1983, my first game was Fort Apocalypse. It was not an original. You needed a boom box with dual tape decks to copy these.