Windows 7 could be installed without a Microsoft account.
Windows 8 required it, but had a “Skip” button.
Windows 10 also had a skip button, though obscured and inaccessible for those who just click through the process (95% of people).
Windows 11 home doesn’t have a skip button. You have to press Alt + F4 when Windows installer asks you for network connection to avoid it asking to create a Microsoft account.

My girlfriend, a linguist who has nothing to do with programming and computers in general, successfully transferred to a Linux distro after I told her about Microsoft supporting ICE. She says Linux is simpler, she had no problem installing additional software and she liked that cooling fans are never spinning now and that battery life is now solid two times better.

Think about it.

Back in grammar school we started programming in TI-Basic on a TI89 Titanium as it was part of math class (calculus and geometry). I didn't really understand much because the teacher thought it was a great idea to start with recursively calculating GCD (and we were in a sort of "linguist profile", nobody had ever touched a line of code in their lives before). I still liked it though and by some coincidence I got an old Win95 compaq notebook to play with from a friend.

I started playing around with the CMD prompt and batch files and could apply some of the things I had learned on the TI, like GOTO or If statements. I still didn't know what I was doing of course, and so it happened that I used the > file pipe when trying to compare two values. Suddenly there was a file with some code fragments and I started to get what I had done. I put the file pipe into an endless GOTO loop and was amused how those few lines filled up the whole desktop with nonsense files. I went on to refine this a little so I could control it with another file that acted as a kill switch when present. Over the next weeks I played some more with it and made it write out and start another batch file that would check whether the original script was still there and recreate it if not.

That notebook was so large and heavy I could not bring it to school, so I wrote all code by hand on paper and typed it in when I got home, that way I could still code in class when I was bored and no one would notice.

So my first ever "program" that I wrote myself was some lousy malware.

Java Vs. C++
Ok, so I know a bit of Java, still lots to learn but isn't there always! My question to all you poly-linguist programmers is; once you know the basics of OOP are there any obvious hurdles in learning new languages? For instance - do you sometimes accidentally use some Java in C++? Would you all advise to stick to one language and learn it to genius level or does it make you a better programmer to understand a multitude of languages?
<Learning Rant>

Egad! An actual rant is revealed!

Lamers who insist that informal or oversimplified stuff be written are damn annoying.

God forbid the appropriate use of a four-syllable word.
In what world is "uncanny" a strange word?

Is "blessed are the authors of good documentation" such a difficult sentence? Call the linguist; this shit can only be interpreted by an expert!

"U WRITE LIEK A ROBOT!!!!!!!!!"
Piss off, trog. Some men like succinctness and just wish to communicate without a great deal of ambiguity. A bit of clunkiness is preferable to a bit of ambiguity.

Pants are apparently shat when proper sentences are encountered.

If writing coherently and correctly implies being pretentious, then the world is beyond repair.

Also annoying are lamers who insist on wasting other men's time by asking questions which are perfectly suited for search engines.

Reaching through the monitor and beating the crap out of people sometimes seems a bit tempting. But doing such a thing is infeasible... and would probably result in felony charges if such a thing were feasible.

nice...