Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

I feel like none of you would believe me if I didn't show you.

The Windows 11 OOBE hocks Microsoft 365 trialware to a captive audience. It's "free," but you have to cough up a credit card and $100+tax/year if you fall for it.

After the usual privacy violation features toggles, Windows 11 is now asking how the PC will be used. Choices: entertainment, gaming, school, creativity, business, and family.

Nice thought, but why? What happens if I answer wrong? How angry will the boss get if I choose "gaming" on a new office PC? How boring and useless will it be if I choose "business" on a home PC?

Skipping worked. So PIN setup is absolutely required, no way out of it at all, nope nope nope, except if there's an error, then well never mind, forget we said anything about it.

"Something went wrong

"We weren't able to set up your PIN. You can try again, or skip this step and set up a PIN later."

[Skip for now] [[Retry]]

It gets better. There's a cancel button on the PIN setup page. But if you click it, you just go to a page where Microsoft says as firmly as I just did that you must create a PIN (and has the audacity to call it secure and fun), before forcing you back to the PIN setup page.

In addition to a Microsoft Account, Windows 11 requires an insecurity feature. If you skip Windows Hello face recognition, you MUST create a Windows Hello PIN. No skip.

Oh, joy! Yet another PC where pressing the power button doesn't actually cut the power or shut down the system cleanly. No, it just puts it in still-powered sleep mode instead.

Well, sorry about the start-up clean-up you had to do on a battery-free desktop, Windows. Maybe ACTUALLY TURN OFF when you blank the screen after a power button press instead, so I don't crash you when I unplug afterward.

I helped my customer create a Microsoft Account.

In an insultingly ageist move, Microsoft called the year we were typing an invalid date, from the first digit to the last.

I left out TAS due to space, but it's basically underappreciated and "Discount TOS" at the same time.

Enterprise: Why don't we make a federation?

TOS: The Federation is cowboys and aliens.

TNG: The Federation as it sees itself.

DS9: The Federation as others see it.

Voyager: We're hitchhiking back to the Federation.

Movies: The Federation made some oopsies.

LD: The Federation's brochures exaggerated.

Picard: Well, things can't get any worse for the Federation...

Discovery: And then things got worse for the Federation.

Trivia about current #Unix time: While 32-bit time will roll over in January of 2038, just 16 years from now, 64-bit time will not roll over for another 292 billion years. By then, the CMB will have cooled to undetectable, & the cosmic event horizon will be inside our galaxy.

Also by the time of First Edition, #Unix was running on a PDP-11, not the PDP-7 it had been originally designed and built on. The team would use the pain of porting an entire OS using only Assembly language to invent the slightly more portable C language the following year.

(Today, of course, paperwork production in *nix is done using factions of the endless Editor Wars and typesetting systems like groff(1), TeX/LaTeX, or conversion to It Looks Like You're Writing A Letter.)

But #Unix First Edition was complete enough that it began to be used for paperwork production, using ed(1) and roff(1). I can only assume that this is how the manual was written.

At the time, #Unix time was not the Unix time we know today. It was 60ths of a second since 1971-01-01, just 307 days prior, and which would roll over 521 days later, about 1973-04-08.

The epoch had been reset at least once before, given its origin in 1969, and it would be reset and still use 60ths at least once more before it was finally reset to 1970 and standardized to the whole-seconds we know today.

Fifty years ago today, #Unix was complete and useful enough that it got its first ever manpages. Unix First Edition was born: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/1stEdman.html

And now, the showstopper for the day:

No Microsoft account == No Windows 11 for you!

And no, you can't hit [Shift]+[F10] and get in through the control panel. User account creations are managed by the Settings app, and it isn't installed in the OOBE's defaultuser0 account.

(Also, if you try going through OOBE with disabled network devices, it just shows a list of no interfaces and instructions to go to aka.ms/networksetup on another PC.)

Microsoft doesn't even pretend to negotiate anymore. There are no checkboxes, and no buttons to express anything other than meek, unquestioning agreement, no matter how unreasonably Faustian the terms.

These are terms I would never, ever agree to if this were my computer, but my customer doesn't even try to understand or question them, so onward.