I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

Maybe some of you know this post-apocalyptic sci-fi short story by Harlan Ellison and the PC game, released 1995 for DOS computers. I played this game for countless hours. It wasn't a shoot-'em-up game, but a game that required a braincell or two. ;-)

Story Line: The war of all wars was fought by THREE Super-Computers capable of running the war more efficiently than humans. One of these machines became self aware, absorbing the other two computers, and killed off all humans except four men and one woman.

In its immeasurable hatred of humans, AM, as the super-computer calls itself, spends every available moment torturing them.

To make the short story even shorter:

Ted, the sole survivor, realizes that AM transformed him to a worthless blob of flesh without any bodily functions, but a working brain. He resigns himself to the fact that...

...AM has won, simply … he has taken his revenge

I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream!

Why am I telling you this?

Because I feel like TED - and MICROSOFT IS AM!

A few weeks back I wrote the blog Windows 10 - Beware! Big Brother Is Watching You, telling you that this here dumb ass upgraded to Win 10 and all the problems I was having, from day one on.

Well, this happened today.

In the middle of working on a website, I lost Internet connection, so I thought. I have a Comcast/Infinity wireless router and went through the motions. You know, rebooting the router came first. That didn't help.

Next, I tried my daughter's laptop, and lo and behold, IT WORKED JUST FINE. On my machine, I couldn't log on to Yahoo (this website is not available), I couldn't log on the gmail, nothing worked.,

Then it hit me. Just a short while ago I was reading a blog on Forbes about the future with MS, and how they uninstall 3rd party apps, etc.

Sure enough, Edge, the built in MS browser DID WORK. I am not going to bore you to death with what I had to do to get Chrome working again. Took me the better part of this sunny Saturday.

All good, I thought. NOT SO!

Now the Windows 10 Menu IS NOT WORKING and neither are the power, sound, notification, time/date icons in the taskbar.

A quick google search reveals that this is a known and ongoing problem, which occurs during or after automatic updates, with a bunch of search results and tips how to fix this. Of course, Big Brother seems not interested to provide a fix.

There goes my Sunday, because none of the fixes are simple or quick. You can check it out yourself, if you are interested. Search: Windows 10 start menu not working.

Also check out the Forbes article (I didn't bookmark the page, unfortunately) for more info what's coming at Win 10 users.

Now for the funny part. Here is a link to the PDF of Harlan Ellison's short story

http://styrofoam.voidaudio.net/ihavenomouthandimus...

The game only worked on DOS machines and was never updated. However, I found out that gog.com did a re-release, but didn't have time yet to look into it further.

Here is a screenshot from the game...I remember it well.

As far as Microsoft and Windows 10 is concerned:

I am done with it and MS. Goodbye Microsoft, Hello Mac, here I come soon.

Have a nice Sunday

John Worthy