InterLinked

Started tuning in this morning, less because I was excited about, but just to see if Windows 11 could be any more awful than Windows 10. I didn't think it was possible, but Microsoft has just proven me wrong again. Just when I thought things couldn't get worse. Seriously, Windows 11 looks like the garbage popularly known as "Mac OS". Panos can talk for hours about how "Windows should feel like home, familiar" and I'll say "Heck yeah, so I'll stick with my Windows 7, thank you very much." I'm 120% sure that all these Microsoft execs from 2012 on are ex-Apple employees there just to drive their products into the ground.

Well, at this point, the economy is part of the problem. There is no economic incentive to get stuff locally when possible when we get all this cheap crap from China all the time, shipped halfway across the world, destroying the oceans and marine life. Rasing gasoline would reverse that, and force all sectors of the economy to shift incentives towards local production.

Yeah, politically, it would never work, because no politician has the guts to do that, but that's what we need to do. And tax electricity too in equal proportions, because electric vehicles are no more innocent. Nothing comes for free, nothing. People think it's okay to consume all these resources like water, because they will always be there (and even water won't). I have a bunch of phones here, the two main ones on my desk are from 1957 and sometime in the 60s (the date on the second one says it was refurbished in 1992). I have other phones from the 70s and 80s as well. All of them work perfectly, much better than the plastic junk people have to pay $1000 for every three years to keep "upgrading" to the next "phone" that sounds awful as hell. My stereo, which has tape/CD/aux/AM/FM all in one, is 22 years old, somewhere around there. It's starting to show its age in that the buttons on the unit don't work so well (I always use the remote), and the CD player's starting to skip, but I mostly keep it on radio, and it works great. Wouldn't have it any other way. I have two monitors on my desk, the smaller secondary one is an early LCD monitor that's also around 20 years old. It had flickering problems for a while but after a few years in the basement, with brightness all the way down, it works reasonably well. It works, what am I going to do, trash it? No, works fine, I'll keep using it until the pixels fall out. Got an electronic piano with a floppy disk reader in it, dates to 2003 - again, 19 years old now. But it works perfectly fine, except the E key below middle C has been stuck now for the past half year. But otherwise, works great, what should I do, get another piano we don't need? Got an MP3 player that has 128 MB of storage and who know's how old it is. Like a lot of my electronics, it's hand me down - literally. But I only use it when travelling, and it can play enough hours to make it all the way through one cycle, so it's all I need. Why would I replace it? Sometimes, it seems like GDP is a better measure of environmental destruction than progress.

Finally someone who understands how the environment really works. Moving to electric cars just moves the profits around. We really new *FEWER* cars. Better public transportation in urban areas. More walking and biking, much more. Going from two car to one car families is a good first step, and maybe people in urban areas can do without them altogether. I'm more of a rural person myself so I don't see myself not having one. But it certainly won't be an electric one. Not that I'm a fan of gasoline, but there wasn't much else 60 years ago. "Bright Green Lies" by Derrick Jensen is an eye opener into how environmentalism has been hijacked into a faux environmentalist movement. Electric cars and LED lighting, etc. has no place in an environmentalist movement.

So far, everything has been grandfathered in, and hopefully that would continue to be the case. What are they going to do, pull you over and ask for you MPG? All the electric cars do anyways is relocate the emissions from the tailpipe to the smokestack. The environmental "benefits" are a complete joke. Lithium batteries are extremely toxic, and store energy non-densely.

Yup, not here anymore either: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/may-2021-updates-for-microsoft-office-e89b2f2b-29f0-4692-b7c1-e05d55e18b33 from; https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/office-updates-msi

Thanks, Dave! I think my supersedence chart is all up to date: https://w2k.phreaknet.org/files/o2010.xlsx Anyone have any of these and able to say what the version numbers since 2020/10 have been? It's funny, because Microsoft's O2010 page says "The last updates for O2010 were from October, 2020". Clearly, Microsoft's different departments are not communicating, probably the patch people don't even know support has "ended"! Or maybe this is internal resistance against Office 365. Either way, thanks, Microsoft!

Yup! I have no plans to ever buy a new car. I probably won't even consider buying anything that's not at least 40 or 45 years old when I get one. If there really aren't, maybe you can look into VoIP as an option? At least you can use good quality landline phones instead of POS mobiles that sound and feel like crap.

I want to say that in the past I haven't noticed getting updates like this but I haven't paid too much attention. I have updates disabled now and every couple months I go in and install updates manually by downloading them from the Download Center or catalog, now that there aren't many updates for W7, no point in having the update service running in the background. If you want to be really picky about that, I suggest you look into WSUS if you want to control what updates go through.

Hmm... maybe this only applies to certain Office products. I deployed Office 2019 Professional Plus just last week using the Office Deployment Tool and you can uncheck all the stuff you don't want. In this, I unchecked Skype, Teams, and OneDrive products and just left the "real" Office applications in, as this was in a corporate environment. The click to run version might not prompt for that, but I think using ODT you could change it or go into Change the installation afterwards and uninstall those components. Not as straight forward as the MSI installer I use for Office 2010, but it should still be possible. I'm most familiar with 2010, but based on my experience with 2019/365, it seems that capability is still there as well. Maybe this is the home 365 version or something?

What do you mean "all or nothing"? So far as I'm aware, one has always been able to go Add/Remove Programs -> Change and then uncheck the Office programs you don't want. It's always annoyed me that some organizations disable some of the lesser used programs - hey, SOME people might want to use those! That said, I disable SharePoint, because I have no use for it. I install all the other programs, including Access, InfoPath, Publisher, etc.

Hey, everyone - looks like the clocks are rolling forward next week: Posting this here, since I know all the people in Windows 10 land will be completely ignorant of this. Hey, it's Windows 10 - you don't get what you didn't pay for - or what you did pay for! Seriously, I can only imagine what the Windows 10 product managers were thinking: Bob: We don't want the operating system to be too intrusive - let's take out the Daylight Savings nag so people don't get annoyed. Alice: Great idea! Let's send updates to all the Windows 7 users to tell them how awesome Windows 10 is and how to get their free upgrade!

Maybe true, but when has Microsoft ever offered free "support" for their products anyways? You can't call up Microsoft if you have a problem with a "supported" OS like Windows 10 and ask for help. Unless you have an enterprise support agreement, even if the problem is THEIR fault, you are SOL because you don't matter. I don't care squat about whether Microsoft will supposedly offer "support" - they never have anyways for the consumer market! So, it's a bit irrelevant IMO if they are "supporting" something or not, because the outcome is the same either way. If there are software updates, then that's more than good enough for me.

Why Office 2003? Office 2010 is the most superior version (in my opinion, of course). I used to be a diehard Outlook fan, but I learned the hard way over time that it, quite frankly, sucks as a mail program. Every version of Outlook does, it's a chronic Microsoft problem. They don't know how email works. It's so broken that I eventually just gave up. The workarounds are poor and insufficient. I use the excellent MailNews from Roytam1, a fork of Interlink, which is a Thunderbird based client. Not to say it's perfect, I have many gripes with it, but at least it works. I used Outlook for non-email stuff as Exchange is still awesome - I use it for calendar, contacts, tasks, and journal, etc. but just not for email. Bit of a split reality, but what can I do about it?? Also, it seems G-Suite will stop supporting password sign on this year without OAuth for organizational use that is not grandfathered in. MailNews supports OAuth but some clients don't. It's getting hostile out there, folks...

This is what you get with programs you can't touch the shrinkwrap from, or at least use indepdently of the Internet. I store all my passwords in an encrypted Excel file. No regrets. Only need to refer to it for those I don't use often and forget. All my frequently used ones are memorized.

Also, why use POS updates when you can get the real ones? Windows 7 is NOT unsupported, Microsoft just wants people to think that. They are releasing updates through 2023. Just saying...

More updates for Exchange Server 2010, woot woot! "Microsoft isn’t even waiting until next week’s Patch Tuesday to distribute them, signalling the vulnerabilities’ seriousness. The update fixes Exchange Server 2013, 2016 and 2019. There is also a Defense in Depth update for Exchange Server 2010 with Service Pack 3." Not sure with DID means, but there is an update, despite ES 2010 going EOS in October 2020. https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/microsoft-urges-admins-to-patch-on-prem-exchange-server-installations-immediately/443293

Weird, you didn't get offered KB4493142? Seems like there were 5 total updates.

Wouldn't this download all post-SP2 updates though, including those that have been superseded? My thinking was just to download the relevant ones, to reduce the size of the files on disk. Already this is taking up several GB on my hard drive.

I know people who do that, but can't understand why. Why not just use an OS that doesn't require such tweaks, like W7? W7 still requires tweaks, but at least they can all be done through GPOs or reg edits or built-in OS toggling. No third party software needed to make it not drive you insane! Compatability for 8x can be even worse than 7 so I can't see that being a bonus, either. Security updates for 8x will end before or at the same time as security updates for 7 do, IIRC.

Without patching the operating system in a way that makes sfc /scannow fail? Enlighten us, please... The W10 PowerToys are useless IIRC. The XP ones were more useful. Well, I think I'd go mad if I didn't have OpenShell on W10 when I have to use it You're saying people should just use the default sorry excuse for a start menu? It looks more like what an 8x real start menu would have looked like but the point is functionality not look necessarily. Best solution: upgrade to Windows 7, and forget about Windows 10, if you can!

Exactly, I'd say these are all excellent points. I know retrocomputers comprise a good portion of this forum, and as such they/we are all doing our part insofar as electronics go. Today, nothing is built to last, all kinds of rare earth minerals are endlessly purged and wasted - look at sour companies like Apple. They are the epitome of planned obsolescence. Proprietary hardware, exclusive software, planned obsolescence, hardware and software incompatibility, and mobile first. As an environmentalist, it disgusts me. As a technology enthusiast, it disgusts me even more. I'm also a bit of a telephone collector, sort of. My main phones are all vintage Bell System / Western Electric 500 rotary or 2500 TouchTone sets. Those things were built to last. I've plugged in 80 year old phones and those just work! Personally, I don't use anything older than the 500, which started in 1949. The F-style handsets before '49 are too uncomfortable. The G-style handsets on modern rotary and on 2500-type and Princess phones are the best. They're still widely used today - on pretty much all payphones and 2554 courtesy phones you often see in hotels, hospitals, convention centers, etc. I don't have a mobile (cell "phone") of any kind. Absolutely no interest in dropped calls, crappy call quality, brain cancer, wasting energy, or having a useless "computer" the size of a fingernail. Or something that needs to be charged over and over. It's so nice not having to charge ANYTHING on a regular basis. And MUCH better for the environment. Also, did I mention cell phone audio quality sucks? It really does. This kind of lifestyle is a complete rejection of e-waste, fads, frivolity, etc. I believe in things that work well that work well for a long time that are quality, durable, environmentally friendly, and top notch. So, environmentalist technologist types, here we are: - Using older operating systems and reusing or refurbishing older hardware - Using timeless telephones built to last. No cheap/expendable electronics here. Probably I'll die before any of my phones do. Half of them are already older than my parents. If anything ever breaks (doubt it), easy, just open up the phone and fix it. They were made for that. (SIDE NOTE: remember when you could actually go to a REAL phone story and buy a phone? Now, the only phone store is eBay, maybe flea markets. You try finding one these days, all you find is junk, maybe a couple real modern electronic phones in Office Depot if you're lucky...) - Using wired technologies. Ethernet cables are a superior species to radio waves. Seriously, who wants a high-latency low-quality connection? Ditch the Wi-Fi and cordless phones, and even more, ditch the 3G/4G/5G/etc. - Not subscribing to the whole continuous never-ending "upgrade" culture. As Windows 7 -> Windows 10 has shown (or pick your favorite good OS -> bad OS transition), the wow doesn't always start now, sometimes it already started and it's OK to hop off the train for a while, maybe forever. P.S. Vista is a good OS, I mean that in a different way. Technology today is responsible for about as much CO2 as the entire airline industry today - about 2%. So, technologists have a responsibility to the environment. Anyways, I'll be here, all Ethernet wired up, using Windows 7, Office 2010, Adobe Reader 11, and my classic top-notch telephones, no wireless or cordless products in sight! It's more than most people in developed Western countries are doing, at least 95% or maybe 99% of folks, so a good start I'd say!

Plenty. Especially lesser used, obscure, or academic sites. Keeping an old version on hand would be a smart idea. I've also got that version I believe safely downloaded from the Wayback Archive. The bomb goes off Jan 12, not Jan 1.

Yeah, you might be right... but I feel like you could get close. Windows Mail, when I ported it to W7, just crashes mostly. MailNews is nice but with 11 accounts it's a memory account. Something like QTWeb that makes it easy to toggle on/off different things like JS would at least allow easy reduction of resources. Also has automatic ad blocking which is probably more efficient than ublock origin.

I was afraid that was the case We just need QTWeb updated for the modern web... I was able to get it to not crash on one page by disabling JS, so that's a relief, but o/w, it loads many things slowly, improperly, or not at all. If someone could make a decent browser that was lightweight < 100 MB idle, < 150 MB with a couple tabs open, that would be awesome! $$$$.