* Posts by Nick Ryan

3870 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

Windows 95 testing almost stalled due to cash register overflow

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: POS Systems

Or a limit outside the immediate capacity of data storage and as another vulture noted, quite likely a limit of 9,999.99 due to display issues. It could even be that BCD was being used because that's really easy for output and maths and if only 6 BCD digits were available for some arcane reason (possibly to prevent an integer overflow when worrying about binary) then that would also limit it to 9,999.99.

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Re: "Microsoft was keen that the rollout of the new product went off without a hitch"

Yeah, it's an oddity alright and now a good one. Being able to patch things is really useful, unfortunately humans having a tendency to being lazy and bean-counters being what they are, we moved away from trying our best to make sure that something worked when delivered, to just chucking stuff out and assuming that it may or may not work, it can be patched later anyway.

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Tesla that burned so hot, it melted part of the road

It depends on the type of phosphorous...

Phosphorous in P4 form does not immediately react with water and is therefore usually kept stored in water to isolate it from oxygen in the air. It's not that unstable that it will start a reaction with water, however once exposed to free oxygen and then re-introduced back into water the exothermic reaction gives it the energy to break apart water molecules and it's at this point that nasty stuff happens: phosphoric acid (nasty enough) and phosphene gas (just out-and-out deadly). This combination of effects is why it was used in bombs and once a suitable mass of phosphorous gets going, it's not going to stop until all the phosphorous is consumed. The acid will damage a lot of things, in particular flesh, the fire cannot be put out with water and anyone even trying to will be poisoned by phosphene gas unless they have suitable breathing equipment. It is almost a "good" thing that phosphene gas is highly flammable and explosive as this gets rid of it.

Other allotropes of phosphorous tend to be much more stable under normal conditions. For example the phosphorous component in matches/match box is stable until heated.

Techies thought outside the box. Then the boss decided to take the box away

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Re: When I was in college

For a small or enclosed area such a floor is relatively easy and inexpensive. The supports are usually just columns anchored a bit below and the structure is all very stable. Just needs suitably thick and toughened glass, which is more expensive than the structure and not so much because it's about 5cm thick, but because it needs to resist scratching and gouging.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: When I was in college

In a previous life we often got to go the opening nights (plural) of bars and clubs. These were usually just refurbished and rebranded from their previous stint but required a few days of training and practice for the staff to get up to speed and to find the niggles in the work, after which it was the public opening night (weirdly called the "VIP" night despite all the actual VIPs attending the previous 1-3 nights. The DJ console was high and access was up a lovely glass staircase and then across a glass bridge and finally to where the DJ console was. There was a lovely comfortable sofa underneath this bridge and it provided the most interesting views...

Naturally, as diligent testing attendees we did, eventually, inform the venue of a potential issue and the sofa was roped off and by the following night the glass bridge had fabric strung underneath it. The first fix suggested was to prevent attendees from going up to the DJ console to flirt (aka, requesting tracks), but the DJ roundly rejected that idea.

Some English hospitals doubt Palantir's utility: We'd 'lose functionality rather than gain it'

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: No!

True, but my experience of Italian trains is similar. Admittedly these were intercity routes and not commuting or local routes and these could be very, very different.

IT pros are caught between an AI rock and an economic hard place

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Re: It is too early for Trump's chaos to start showing up in the unemployment numbers

What many people fail to realise is that the Chinese locals are not stupid: they do not buy or use the piss poor quality junk that is made as cheaply and nastily as possible for the export market and is often dangerous, just doesn't work or is just a scam. While they are very happy to make and sell this junk and for it to be sold for whatever ridiculous mark-up in Western storefronts, they tend to buy the better made, but still quite cheap, items instead that are designed for the local market.

Where high quality goods are manufactured in China, these are also bought and used in China. For example, many smart phone manufacturers have their devices manufactured in China - these are also sold locally and are not "exported from China to the US and then re-exported from the US to China". Where Chinese companies are just outperforming Western companies, for example BYD, who started as as battery manufacturer after spotting an opportunity in the market and moved on from there, and not having notable component supply contracts with Apple as well as their own range of electric vehicles and collaboration brands, and the value is wholly in the Chinese side of Trump's trade war with the world.

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

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Re: Sheer genius!!

Microwaves don't cook from the inside therefore I doubt that they managed to char the insides of wooden unless there was only water on the inside and none in the outside portions of the wood. In which case the wood would almost certainly have split due to superheating of the trapped water.

What to do once your Surface Hub v1 becomes an 84-inch, $22K paperweight

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Re: its not at the end of life.

That won't help with Microsoft Teams though...

Uncle Sam kills funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

Nick Ryan Silver badge

It's a common strategy for people like Trump. For example, his casino pillaging:

1) Lie about personal assets and worth in order to secure a large short term loan. No need to worry about the repayment schedule.

2) Use this cash to buy controlling interesting in an unfortunate business. For example, a casino.

3) Transfer the debt into the casino, instantly crippling the casino with debt repayments they can never afford

4) Pay self a huge salary and expenses because you are the most amazingest and bestest casino ever in world ever

5) When casino runs out of cash reserves, stop paying suppliers and staff but keep paying self.

6) Casino is declared backrupt due to not paying suppliers and staff.

7) Someone buys the assets of the casino (just not the debt of course).

Win, win, win all around. Except for the suppliers who are small people who don't matter. The staff who are meaningless slaves and don't matter either. Where the debt goes, it doesn't matter but it will be passed onto somebody somewhere.

Repeat this with another casino or other business. Trump did this about six times? Always lying about "market conditions" being why "his" casinos failed all the while others survived just fine.

The initial lie about his assets and wealth was the key part of the criminal case against him - pull the rug out and everything else collapses.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Oh dear, do you have the MAGA cultist handbook shoved somewhere that the sun doesn't shine? You are just tediously repeating the same lies that Tump, his cronies and the trash at Fox news are blaring out all the time. Without firing a single neuron.

Please seek professional help. Urgently. This kind of mentality is not healthy - for anyone: you, your friends, your family, your co-workers. It is not a weakness to seek help.

CVE program gets last-minute funding from CISA – and maybe a new home

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: It's only an 11-month contract extension

I wonder how it will be until President Musk instructs Vice-President Trump to leave the United Nations.

Most likely because the United Nations are "woke" and don't like Hitler wannabes trying to rename the world because of idiotic vanity reasons.

Trump doubles down, vows to make Chinese imports even more expensive for Americans

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Re: I bet

Please, seek psychiatric help. Urgently.

1) Your saviour Trump was instrumental in making the mess in the Middle East even worse than it's ever been and he did this during his previous stint and attempt at autocracy (hint: Trump is not a christian, he's not a follower of Islam, his entire family claims to follow the other Abrahamic faith).

2) The pathetic lies about Nazis in Ukraine are a fiction invented by Russia any only repeated by: (a) Russian sympathisers, (b) MAGA cultists who are accidentally Russian propagandists or (c) the tragically stupid or gullible [e.g. Fox news viewers] - or any combination of these. If you want to find Nazis, look to the guy who bankrolled your King Trump into power and admire his Nazi salute, note his refusal to deny it was a Nazi salute, and then add in all of the extreme right wing individuals and groups that he personally supports.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: I bet

Sometimes I really wonder at the lack of intelligence among MAGA cultists... somehow, absolutely wrong is Biden's fault. Every single time. Yet they ignore the pathological lies from the pathological lying sociopath that was elected and the unelected nazi sociopath that bankrolled him into autocracy. Every single lie, they somehow gloss over with twists of reality and abject lies that contradict each other from one sentence to the next.

If you want to blame the genocide in Palestine on someone other than the nation state of Israel, I'd start looking at King Trump who deliberately provoked the entire region the first time he was stupidly elected. But then King Trump is absolutely not a Christian... despite his "Trump America Bible" (printed in China, almost being forced on schools)... guess what faith the majority of his family claim to adhere to (I'll give you another clue: it's not Christianity, it's not Islam it's a different Abrahamic one...)

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: "My mouse is going the wrong way"

Unfortunately it was all too real.

The company I worked for didn't get the gig to supply the workstations and do the networking for the client that we also supplied critical server applications for. Fair enough, it happens.

Getting to the site though we were presented with lots of complaints that were ascribed to our systems:

* Hard to reach keyboard - the cheap'n'nasty workstations were underneath the tables and had keyboards with the shortest possible PS/2 keyboard cables (about 50cm). We gave them a quote for PS/2 keyboard extension cables and also just pointed them at a supplier to buy them from directly.

* Hard to use mice - coincintally the cheap'n'nasty workstations that were underneath the tables also had really short mice cables. Beginning to see a pattern here.

* Mice didn't work properly - other than having to lean across the table to use the mouse, they didn't work very well. Lovely shiny tables with computer mice only usable when leaning across the tables didn't work well and the provided branded mouse mats, with the cheap'n'nasty suppliers branding, didn't work because they were also shiny and very slippery but also the mouse pads moved across the tables freely. We showed them how to use the cardboard backing from A4 pads of paper which are even now are the best mouse pads cheaply available.

* One user just couldn't get the hang of the mouse and wanted just a keyboard interface. They were holding the mouse sideways which if you try it, is near damn impossible to use.

VMware distributor Arrow says minimum software subs set to jump from 16 to 72 cores

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Very accurate. We are heading elsewhere.

The "focus on the huge customers" fallacy has ruined so many previously successful systems and applications. Yes, smaller customers produce more support, but also many smaller customers often become larger customers and staff often move from smaller customers to larger customers. If these staff are used to using a different environment then they won't consider the "huge customer solution" and instead go with what they know instead. End result, "huge customer solution" becomes very niche and dies.

Meanwhile, in Japan, train stations are being 3D-printed in an afternoon

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Erm, but why?

I was rather non-whelmed by the image too. A crane/lift and it would be in place before too long. I do wonder how much of the value was around experimentation with new techniques (has to happen somewhere and sometime) and potentially due to how the shelter was to be secured to the platform/ground - for example if it's heavy enough then this isn't much of an issue, if it's light then it has to be secured into the existing ground structures somehow. I suspect this latter scenario is where the issue may have been - it can take a lot more than 180 minutes on-site to clear, prepare and level such ground attachments.

Otherwise it's just a shed, and we've been building that kind of thing for many, many years.

Now Windows Longhorn is long gone, witness reflects on Microsoft's OS belly-flop

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Re: WinFS = Document Management System not invented here…

Your missing my point on how WinFS didn't need to attempt replace the filing system, it could enhance it.

The "objects" in WinFS needn't be anything other than references to the files in NTFS. There would be two parallel interfaces into the filesystem; the normal one and the WinFS one. This way applications that can take advantage of WinFS could do so, and other applications for which WinFS would be nothing more than an utter waste of performance, which would include almost all of the components of the Operating System, but also applications that were not rewritten to support it, could work with the normal interface to the file system.

WinFS would exist on top of NTFS and extend it; when a file is created then an entry in the WinFS database would also be made, and so on. While there would be a lot of effort required to ensure that "file" journaling happened properly and consistently, which for a database is a PITA, it would be possible to do this. Rescans or partial rescans of the underlying NTFS structure could deal with the inevitable consistency issues if the WinFS component was not properly journaled (not that NTFS is perfect on this front, but it's almost always reliable now). With the object storage managed by NTFS, WinFS could implement the additional metadata that would distinguish it from a regular file system and the searching of it. Which leads to the next point... WinFS would essentially be the windows file and search indexer, just done properly for a change. An application rewritten to support WinFS would be similar to an application that is "SharePoint aware" - something that most applications just don't need to be, but where it can be useful for some applications.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Another massive reason for Vista's failure, other than being a horrible user interface experience, was the marketing lies about the minimum specification for Windows Vista. Yes, they were sort of accurate, but only if by "minimum specification" you mean something that really means: "Eventually loads the desktop and shows most of the icons. Whatever you do, do not enable any 'Active' content. Also, not suitable for the launching of any applications." Therefore computer manufacturers provided the minimum specification devices possible and then crippled them further with buckets of shovelware.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Just wait until you forget to turn off CoPilot in Microsoft word and any pretence at efficiency gets flung into the distance. Predictive text in Word now seems to require CoPilot to stuff it up.

Clippy: It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like me to fuck it up for you?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

What was worse was the appalling way that the Microsoft Shell developers kludged the damn Windows XP theming in place. It was the absolute peak of inefficiency because it first drew the normal windows chrome and then immediately overdrew this with the Windows XP theme.

A real theming system would have been a single draw process but instead someone at incompetent Microsoft decided to kludge theme overdrawing on top of normal window drawing. While carefully ignoring the system palette, of course. That's the same system palette that when used near seamlessly almost implemented "dark mode" 20 years before it became a must-have buzz word. All Microsoft needed to add was application notifications/API regarding "dark mode", "high contrast mode" etc and they'd have been 20 years ahead of everyone else. Instead, we got a lurid and inefficient tonka-toy interface.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Deliver something worthwhile?

It also didn't take long for the activation to be worked around and subverted, therefore it was often not a problem.

That said, on the odd occasion when I had to make a call to do an activation, the support person at the other end was very pleasant and helpful and was happy to take as long as it took to get the activation going.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: WinFS = Document Management System not invented here…

Well that's the thing... WinFS could have been easily implemented as a layer on top of a real file system. After all, at some point in time and despite what apologists/sales rats might want to try and claim, when it comes down to it all storage needs a filing system of some form, and is a database of some form.

The abject stupidity was trying to replace NTFS with WinFS in its entirety rather than deploy an add-on and parallel using the tools that were already in place. This way existing filing system tools can be used but any process that needs to write a tag and associate it with a file can do so. NTFS has extensible metadata and additional file-streams built-in so it's not as if storage would require anything else, but what would be required is a sensible, sane and usable database and interface into the metadata - naturally something that Microsoft was probably unable to do because they wanted to do it in a stupid way.

I suspect one of the biggest issues was that Microsoft was not able to pollute the Internet with their proprietary standards (aka ever changing non-standards) and somehow force this additional burden onto the Internet while maintaining a closed-source proprietary binary approach to the whole thing to lock out every potential competitor.

Political poker? Tariff hunger games? Trump creates havoc for PC industry

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Bring

The Musk/Trump dictatorship is very keep on levelling wages, and rights, and everything related to making things more expensive to manufacture in the US.

This means the removal of what little workers rights that US workers had, the complete removal of any health and safety and in particular corporate responsibility. Finishing off education helps too.

The intended results are a large pool of desperate and very poorly paid, disposable US workers who get the same or less than Chinese (other countries are available for comparison) workers.

A win, win, win for the owners of the companies that run this kind of outfit, the few that can afford whatever's made and the poor of America get treated as disposable and worthless human assets.

$16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn’t gone well

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: If it aint broke

There were many more problems with Horizon than just that.

Starting with the utterly inappropriate development environment, Visual Basic which is suitable for hobbyist nightmares and not a lot else. Then add in utterly insane data practices which did convoluted things to the data for no remotely sane reason such as unnecessary application side data mangling, column stuffing storing numeric and date fields in string fields and so on - every elementary basic failure was exhibited. Throw in a bundle of lies that everything is perfect when there was ample evidence everywhere that it was not and a criminal culture mindset that "5% of transactions failing" was somehow acceptable - anything over 0% of transactions failing for anything other than expected and handled reasons is unacceptable.

The lack of atomicity in database operations naturally didn't help matters but it was far from the key failing

Nick Ryan Silver badge

I will admit that I have done that in the past. Admittedly it was so the content could be printed out and as Excel's concept of printing is pretty much "open printer device, spew content at printer driver while inserting as many spurious blank pages and near impossible to track down layout issues", there is a reason for that.

I performed the calculations in Excel and copy and pasted the content (not data link, just the data) into Word so it could be presented in a vaguely presentable manner.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Oracle/SAP plus Excel

Excel definitely has its uses... however extracting data from anything Oracle ("services", not Oracle SQL server in general but that's usually nasty enough) and in particular SAP will strain the sanity of anyone attempting it due to the batshit insane data structures in SAP and the junk that Oracle spews out to somehow prop up its "services".

The IT world moves fast, so why are admins slow to upgrade?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: so why are admins slow to upgrade?

The rot set in wholesale a few years ago when Microsoft fired most of the QA staff. Such actions take a while to really take impact but it's been visible as less and less stable servers, systems and the declining quality of everything that Microsoft have released, even internally.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Danger Will Robinson.

Exactly. I have "business consultant" morons to content with here who are pushing "move to the cloud" yet are unable to provide any tangible benefits to counter the "put our organisation critical data on somebody else's computer, have less control over this data and worse backups, less performance and pay much more for this"* stance. But then these are in the same category as the morons who when told that double checking SQL reports takes time and instead just repeat the idiot chant of "just use AI" as if the magical "AI" is capable of understanding anything but the most basic of data structures, let alone actually produce anything out of it that adds up and validates.

* Over five times the cost to host and for this we no longer have four hourly database backups, we would have a connection speed that is limited to Internet up/down bandwidth as compared to gigabit ethernet, less than half the compute and memory allocation and really not knowing who else has access to our organisational data.

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Mars?

It's far enough that when Adolf Musk arrives on Mars to start his new world order, the fact that some half-decent person on Earth may have neglected to send food, water or anything else along with Adolf Musk is a mere technicality.

Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: FTFY re 'blonde with blue eyes'

Portrayals such as this are interesting because they can reflect the culture around at the time.

This is also the only useful thing out of the bible stories; they reflect the culture and morals of the time and the originating stories (which as most of the old testament stories are lifted from other gods in the Canaanite pantheon and other cultures, makes working out the originating culture harder)

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: FTFY

There are no genuine records whatsoever that corroborate these stories.

A claim of "universally agreed to have existed" is only proof of a widespread belief, not the original fact. Every football season tens of thousands of people think that their team is the best and will win the league but this is just a belief and very often doesn't stand up to facts - such as other football teams.

The initiation ceremony of (briefly) dunking someone under water is not something that would ever be recorded anywhere other than the records of the cult that does such things. Why would it unless it led to the drowning of someone important?

There are no Roman records of such a crucifixion. The Romans tended to be very good at documentation, even for unimportant backwaters like that. The apologist excuse is "well, lots of records were lost, but they definitely existed" is nothing more than expressing a desperate hope and is, in effect, nothing more than another lie.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Jesus is depicted as looking like ...

There weren't really any Jews around at that time; more the Levantine and Canaanite peoples. The redefinition of some of these as Hebrew happened later.

The Abrahamic god is Yahweh, the Canaanite god of war (which explains the petty toddler like tantrums and petty viciousness), the followers of which upped and murdered the priests and followers of the other gods in the Canaanite pantheon and then later fought amongst themselves so power could be consolidated in one temple. In the Levantine/Canaanite region there tended to be areas more devoted to one of the gods over the other, as well as the influence of neighbouring pantheons and cultures.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Jesus is depicted as looking like ...

The old testament is just a collection of stories borged from elsewhere. Many had origins outside the Canaanite pantheon, of which the deity Yahweh was just the god of war/metallurgy, but this matches the portrayal of this magical supernatural entity as a vicious, spiteful deity with a toddler level of self control. Later came an uprising when the followers of Yahweh murdered, pillaged and looted the temples of the other gods and rewrote the stories to make it appear as if their particular magical supernatural being was the one in the stories; this is partly why they are so inconsistent, of course. There was a follow-on revolt and power grab where the wealth and power of the priests of Yahweh was centralised and this brought in the new order of the temples where there just the one central temple.

The new testament is very much not just the life and teachings of jesus, 22 of the regularly accepter 27 books of stories are largely opinion pieces and the other 5 books just can't really agree with each other anyway, all were written a couple of generations after the supposed events at best, they contradict each other and one is just a rewriting of one of the others.

As for the bible being the source of facts; that is decidedly untrue and to claim so is manipulative at best. While some stories in the bible to correlate with real world events, this is no different to the Harry Potter books referencing locations in London. That these locations in London exist does not make all the stories in the Harry Potter books real in any way more than Egypt existing and being mentioned in the bible stories makes the bible stories true. The bible stories mentioning of real life places, and very occasionally real events, does lend weight to the existence of these places and events but the same correlation is not true in reverse. To claim otherwise means that I could claim that everything in the Harry Potter books is true because London exists.

"Moses, for instance, was an Egyptian, who converted to the Jewish faith and threatened the Pharaoh. That's a real historical account." It is not even written in the bible stories that Moses was Egyptian or not therefore it is quite dishonest to claim that this is a real historical account. The Egyptian kingdom did hold slaves but the bible stories do not match the records of Egypt, and there are many of these records corroborating each other as well as separate archaeological evidence. There is more evidence that the Levantine/Canaanite people mingled and traded in Egypt than were slaves because part of the reason for the power of Egypt was that it was the gateway between the Mediterranean empires and the central African empires. Not that Egypt had it easy and wasn't split, joined, was occupied and conquered others but throughput it all, that area was a key trading centre and gateway up the Nile.

Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: ". If an application did not pump the Windows message queue"

The single point of failure was the GUI shell. This would lock due to a non-responsive application, i.e. one that was not pumping the message queue or not responding to certain messages sent by the GUI shell, and the GUI shell would then promptly lock up,

In consumer OS Windows 2000 and later the GUI shell system would report that an application was "not responding" but not hang the entire Operating System. CPU load would still likely be 100% of course...

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Marketing

I thought it was:

"A set of 32-bit extensions to a 16-bit shell for an 8-bit OS originally written for a 4-bit microprocessor by a 2-bit company that doesn't like 1 bit of competition."

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Marketing

No, but it was a GUI that required DOS to start. Once started Windows 95 took over but it was unable to launch on its own. It was only when the next version of Windows NT was renamed Windows 2000 and pushed as the successor to Windows 95/95/ME was there a wholly Windows boot process for consumer systems.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Marketing

...and we still had to sit there and listen to the nonsense that Windows 95 had pre-emptive multi-tasking - which for most practical purposes it absolutely did not. If an application did not pump the Windows message queue the Operating System, as in the graphical shell and everything dependent on it, hung. That's pretty much the definition of cooperative multi-tasking.

Some drivers and similar level processes could operative in a pre-emptive manner but the graphical shell was purely cooperative and it was only until the Windows NT kernel was renamed Windows 2000 and pretended to be the next version of consumer Windows after Windows ME/98/95 was real multi-tasking in place in the Operating System.

Kelsey Hightower on dodging AI and the need for a glossary of IT terms

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: "AI tools had the potential to allow engineers to describe their needs rather than using code"

Notice the weasel words though: "potential". Not a fact, not a reality, just a potential that sometime in the future AI might work in some other and better way than it does now.

Why do younger coders struggle to break through the FOSS graybeard barrier?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

> These toy controllers are too basic to make something remotely interesting with them

A very similar idiotic mentality to someone on here who tried to argue that a Commodore 64 wasn't a computer because it didn't have an excess of resources, 3D graphics and acceleration, bulk storage such as IDE or M3 controller.

The Commodore 64 was immensely capable compared to any other similar system at the time and definitely compared to what was prior to it. That a single icon for an application in Microsoft Windows might not fit into the entire memory space of the Commodore 64 just shows the gulf in resources and how they no longer need to be conserved and used incredibly carefully in the same way, What was implemented on a Commodore 64 at the time was due to hard work and clever implementation and not the concept of "optimising a computer programme by adding more RAM and a faster processor".

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Style

This too. There are far too many so called professional developers that have no clue about writing robust code that when it fails does so in a controlled and useful way. "Range checking and error handling? Pah! That can just be left to the exception handler and some other part of the application" seems to be a far too common failing. As a result, we get incompetently useless exception messages for expected issues. For example, attempt to save a file and the file is locked by some other process and rather than getting a message telling us this we instead get an utterly useless exception raised that very unhelpfully states something like "invalid byte count" rather than "unable to save file as it is locked by another process".

But then these are the same mentality of people who always specified "on error continue" within Visual Basic and disabled every compiler warning and notice on any later environment they polluted through use.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: What are the actual demographics?

Unfortunately this also part of the problem. It's human nature to want to improve something and for this improvement to be visible, and unfortunately this can transform into making changes because these are visible and therefore interesting.

Take printing in Microsoft Windows - it's been the unpopular area in Windows for a few decades with no real improvements or fixes during this time. Why? Because it's not only less visible and whizzy than other changes but also it's slightly more difficult than some of the purely visual GUI changes. For this reason printer driver manufacturers, who I am sure employ developers based on the number of lines of code they write for the cheapest price, wound up implementing so much at the driver level that should have been in the Operating System. Which led to both of Microsoft's failures in the Print Nightmare vulnerabilities and the subsequent even worse printing environment that was rushed out and inflicted on the world.

Similar stories are to be found everywhere... would a developer prefer to work on the asynchronous storage of configuration settings and to track down an initialisation issue that is probably timing related due to the configuration changes, or would instead prefer to change the order and naming menu items in the main interface? Guess which gets the most changes...

Microsoft 365 price rises are coming – pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Probably because so many users have no clue and just create headings and so on by selecting text, changing the size, weight, style, colour, etc. and then doing this again for the next one.

Whereas using styles one just selects the line and tells Word the heading level and leave it at that. As long as no idiot has removed the paragraph spacing the first paragraph will always be attached to the heading.

The other massive bonus of using styles is being to re-order content using the navigation side bar. It really is as easy as drag and drop.

Now if they could just fix the sadist way that images are laid out in content it would be usable...

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: If you can't find the opt out button

I just did the switch now and it was remarkably easy, if not exactly intuitive

I signed in, found the account management section, selected "Cancel" and it gave me options. One of which was the "basic" package for the old price and after I selected that I was informed that the change would happen when the bill is due and that's it.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: MS like VM

The information for those speed increases was so contradictory... the promo message for the speed was how fast one could download an entire movie from the Internet. Then there was some other communication regarding piracy...

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Help! Hahahahahaha. Microsoft deprecated help years ago. All that comes up now is a web page (as noted, always in Microsoft Edge regardless of user preferences) which is a security violation on a server when pressing the "explain this error message" link in various places such as Event Viewer. This web page will not in any way be useful and, if you are lucky, you might be able to find instructions for a slightly different version of the application that are almost related to, but not enough to be wholly useful, what you are trying to find help about.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

That's because to Microsoft, there is no English language, there is only American. There are no locales other than USAian. Dates are only formatted in the backwards USAian format. Units of measure are backwards imperial measurements and not the same units that the civilised world use (although USAian scientists in general use standard units because they are not insane)

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Microsoft could have, but they didn't. Instead we got handed a shell interface which was designed to have the menus at the top of the screen and not at the bottom as they were set as default when launched.

Menu items are ordered in an approximation of their importance - Programs, Documents, and then other crap :) such as Settings, Find, Help, Run and then, finally with a separator, the shutdown option. In reverse the most important becomes shutdown and one has to go further past this to get to anything useful, past the spacer separating it from the other options.

If you can find a safe version to have a play with, move the task bar to the top and suddenly the menu makes sense and works a lot better too.

For example, the "Programs >" entry is now at the top and when using it is a lot more usable. When it is at the bottom of the screen as soon as one has more than (approximately) 10 items the sub-menu has to open part of the way through and therefore the mouse has to start in the middle, which is also inconsistent with the keyboard navigation of the menu which starts at the top. The more items in the Programs menu the worse this became. This same happens for Documents and even Settings.

There are technical excuses as to why the task bar was moved to the bottom of the screen and these relate to some applications written for Windows 3.x assuming that 0,0 was the top left corner of the screen. This should never have been an issue because the Windows API could just perform a vertical translation of coordinates and in any case such a poorly written application would have just been obscured at the bottom of the screen instead. The follow-on workaround for this lack of fixing things properly was the auto-hiding task bar (a horror for many reasons).

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Interesting the original design for the Windows 95 start menu was for it to be at the top of the screen. Doing so makes a lot of sense because suddenly the shutdown computer option is the last item in the menu and not the first.

However, at some point in time, likely very close to release, the crayon eating department at Microsoft decided that the taskbar should be at the bottom of the screen. From that point on we had a backwards menu list.

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Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Just a reminder ...

C64 kernel was a few bytes under 8K. It was a fine exercise in cramming as much stuff into as little space as possible. Unfortunately it also meant that more useful slightly higher level operations weren't a part of the kernel requiring them to be rewritten. But then one of the first initiation tasks that a developer who wrote much for the C64, which was inevitably games, was to swap out the kernel and basic ROMs, freeing up 16K of RAM for use.