My company (130,000 employees) sticks to 24H2. IT wouldn’t approve the 25H2. Don’t know whether the refusal to upgrade hurts Microsoft in any way, but if it does, I think we’re big enough to be on their radar, and perhaps they talk to our IT about concerns and complaints we may have.

6 and 7. For now, I’ll be monitoring their activity, and we’ll see whether they’ll need any locks. Probably internet filtering on the router.

My kids are getting mini PC’s for Christmas, preinstalled with Mint. They use tablets now, but I want to introduce them to the joys of keyboards and mice (and The Secret of Monkey Island). I hope they’ll like it, so that in the future they’ll stick to PC’s and laptops, which offer far more robust control by the end user.

That was actually Windows. I think I first encountered it in Win 3.1, but I started really using it in 95. It’s not actually Windows that controlled it, but software. Application windows used yo have a top bar, and on the very left they had a small version of their shortcut icon. Clicking on it would roll out a short menu for minimizing, closing, etc, and double-clicking would exit out of the program. I think Chrome was the first popular software to remove it.

Using this method for closing programs is just a matter of preference and muscle memory. I guess it made sense when the last thing you did was File -> Save, so your cursor was already near the top left. Nowadays it’s not as obvious, but some of us are too rigid to easily change.

Brimg back double-clicking on the top left corner of a program to close it. Actually, bring back the top bar and the file menu while you’re at it. And for software that opens tabs, allow the user to position the tabs bar on the bottom or side of the screen.

I don’t watch others playing games, either, but someone who likes those streams told me he didn’t see a difference between watching good gamers play games and good football players play football.

You are absolutely correct about the ambiguity and problematic emojis. The trigger issue was the usage of hearts as “kudos” reactions. That’s where we use the thumbs-up emojis now.

The idea of a reference webpage is a good one, but with Slack allowing you to upload your own emojis (and us using some -- such as the Piccard facepalm and “modern solutions” meme), we’d have to be very careful to show only the default ones.

Those would be emojis not emoticons.

Thanks. I never knew the distinction between the two. These emojis are usually used as reactions in our company to indicate you read a post, are investigating, giving kudos, etc. We actually have an entire document in Confluence specifying which ones to use, for which reactions.

That’s where I learned to type, and the double-space is so ingrained in my muscle memory I can’t get rid of it. I also used to use lower case “L” for the number one, and upper case “O” for zero. I don’t do the former, but occasionally I catch myself doing the latter.

Same here. I personally can’t stand Bill Burr, regardless of how many of my friends tell me he’s funny. With an f-word in nearly every sentence, I can’t listen to him for more than a minute.

I guess I’m a bit old-fashioned. I still put two spaces after a full stop.

But I digress. The question was about other unwritten rules of texting. Over the past year, it’s become frowned upon at my company (a multinational with around 130k employees) to use the default yellow emoticons. People are gently reminded to use the colour that most closely resembles their skin. This is for conversations over Teams and Slack.

Professionally: Waterfall release cycle kills innovation, and whoever advocates it should be fired on the spot. MVP releases and small, incremental changes and improvements are the way to go.

Personally: Don’t use CSS if tables do what you need. Don’t use Javascript for static Web pages. Don’t overcomplicate things when building Web sites.

The question implies war in Europe. The reality is that once the enemy breaks though Poland and Czechia (and even there I wouldn’t put much credence into the latter), the rest of continental Europe will fold without a war. People will not flee, but gradually adjust to the new overlords. There may be small migration of the intelligentsia, which is in danger from any oppressive regime, but that will be likely in form of orderly emigration, rather than flight.

My grandfather’s chess set he used to teach me chess. My grandmother’s piece of coloured glass she kept on her fireplace mantle. The key to my first car, which I drove for 16 years before a tree fell on it during an overnight ice storm. My access badge to the old World Trade Center from 2000. My kids’ first baby teeth.

Artificial. Cost me an arm and a leg when I got it, but I’ve had it for so long it averages less than half the price of a real tree pre year. Plus, I don’t have to bother with finding a good tree, transporting it home, and then driving to dump it at the recycling centre.

Flip the switch, and the virtual simulation we’re in shuts down.

Endorphins. Just yesterday I did 1 km @ VO2 Max running repeats, and about 800m in I started feeling real good. Even my heart rate was slowing. I ended up overshooting the distance a little, and doing an extra interval; it felt so good.

Older ones, but Might & Magic 6 through 8 had amazing soundtracks. Especially the sixth one. I sometimes listen to them as a background music when working.

Cthulhu. There is only one way to properly cleanse this world.

In 2013, I posted on Facebook, urging my Czech friends not to vote for the eventual winner of their Presidential election, Milos Zeman. I called him and inept drunkard, and compared to him to the then Slovak President, Ivan Gasparovic. The next day, the Slovak police paid a visit to my parents (I’ve been living abroad by then), and offered not to create problems for them if I deleted the post, because Mr. Gasparovic was offended by being compared to Mr. Zeman. As soon as my parents called me, I dropped everything and deleted the post.

This was in a presumably democratic member of the European Union, and I didn’t even think twice. I’d probably self-censor if I lived in a dictatorship. Sorry; I’m no hero type. I do have my opinions and express them when able, and don’t when it would cause problems for me or my family. I think I’m just an average person.