Posts by aerogems

How a single buck bought bragging rights in the battle to port Windows 95 to NT

Re: Nah.

While I do agree the prompts about "do you really want to do this" were annoying, when you take a second to think about it, they were kind of a necessary evil. They were intended to try to force people to stop and think, "do I really want to do this?" This was coming off the golden age of spyware/malware, and people would just install shit with admin privileges without so much as a second thought. Vista was a little bit too much, Win 7 was maybe a little bit too little, but by 8 they had it pretty well dialed in. Sort of like how it took them a few tries with Windows 10 to deal with the new policy of forcing updates that may require reboots. Yes, it's annoying since it seems like it always happens right when you're in the middle of something, but if you stop and consider, a lot of the shit that we used to deal with (email worms, the messenger service reboots/spam) have almost completely stopped. Grand scheme, it seems like a small price to pay.

Re: Nah.

Just because they aren't trolling doesn't mean they aren't here. They seem to have taken to stalking me across every comment section on El Reg and downvoting every single comment I make. A couple of times I've gone to check the comments because that's the fastest way to check if there are any replies, and will see multiple comments across multiple stories all get downvoted at more or less the same time. So, if it's not the vatnick eel, it's someone equally pathetic trying to pull a Reddit-style karma bombing.

Re: Nah.

Come to think of it, isn't NT4 the one that has like a recursive loop with the service packs? You can't install one of them unless you have a certain version of IE installed, but somewhere along the line that version of IE stopped being downloadable and the only version you could download required the service pack you were trying to install. And this was before SPs were cumulative, so you couldn't just grab whatever the latest one was (didn't they get up to SP7 with NT4?) and install that.

Re: Nah.

I see Jellied Eel has clocked in for the day and is going straight to cyberstalking me again. Remember everyone, no matter how bad you think life is, it could be a lot worse. Just look at Jellied Eel and realize how much further you could fall. A like third or fourth string vatnick troll who has to work the graveyard shift. Not even good enough to be assigned to any of the bigger name sites, they're relegated to trolling niche sites like El Reg.

Re: Nah.

I only have but one upvote to give, so you'll have to make due with a thumbs up icon as a bonus for a refreshingly pragmatic comment. Whatever works best for you is, pretty much by definition, the best version of Windows for you. It's not healthy to get emotionally attached to any specific version, or to inanimate objects period. Exceptions might be made for things given to you by a deceased relative or friend, which are one of a limited number of mementos you have from them, but getting your panties in a wad over one version of an operating system vs another is really just the height of stupidity.

Re: Nah.

And 7 is a re-wrapped Vista. That's how it's generally gone with Windows releases. They have major releases like every 3-years (Win95, Win98, XP, Vista, 8, 10) and then minor releases (98SE, Me, 7, 8.1, 11) about a year after the major release, which were always just warmed over versions of the major release. It's been a bit different since they moved to a more SaaS model with Win 10 and 11, but you can still point to things like the Windows 10 "Creators Edition" as being a significant update compared to some of those before it.

Re: Nah.

Vista is a very unfairly maligned OS. It made a lot of really significant and important improvements, but most of them weren't user facing, so are generally ignored/forgotten about.

It had

1) A completely rewritten GUI that made use of 3D hardware acceleration in graphics cards, unlike GDI+ which was all software rendered

2) A process scheduler that understood the difference between multi-core CPUs and multi-CPUs, which is a subtle, but very important, distinction

3) Significant improvements in security, particularly in hardening of the driver model (of course all people remember is that they couldn't use their old 2K/XP drivers, and some hardware vendors were slow to release Vista drivers, and everyone forgets how for like 2-3 years, literally every week XP had some new critical vulnerability found [sometimes more than one] that required immediate patching)

I kind of wish MS had stuck with their original plan to rewrite the bulk of the OS in .NET, and some of the other things they jettisoned along the way, but Vista was still a very significant release and is very unfairly maligned by people. Generally speaking, if not for the major changes made in all the versions of Windows everyone claims to hate, the versions they claim to love never would have been possible, which includes Windows 7, a barely warmed over Vista that just aped Mac OS X's Dock and toned down the glass effect of the Aero UI. Win 7 had a few other changes, but they were just minor improvements on what Vista started.

You are quire correct, however, that the Vista Capable or whatever they called it, was a self-inflicted blunder. No doubt it was because OEMs like Dell wanted to keep shifting low end PCs with shitty IGPs that weren't up to the task of Aero, and Microsoft capitulated. If you had a more mid to high end system, Vista was just fine. Windows 8 was sort of the same deal. If you take away people bitching about the shoehorning of a touch-oriented UI onto a desktop version of the OS, there was precious little else that people complained about with the OS. Shit, Microsoft even did what people always claim they want them to do, and reduced the size of Windows by a couple GB during the Win8 years, not that you'll ever hear people give them credit for it.

There's a whole groupthink psychology to Windows releases. A lot of people claim to hate Windows <Whatever> simply because other people say they hate it. They themselves probably never even used it, or have no particular complaints about it personally, but they want to fit in with the group, so mirror their speech. And if you take the time to actually look at the complaints people raise about Windows <Whatever>, 99.9% of the time, it's because Microsoft changed something visually. They moved this or that setting to a new location, or a button moved 1px to the left. Rarely do you find people complaining about actual technical issues. And the few times you do find someone saying how the OS and/or apps crash a lot, when you press them a little further, they've never done anything like run memtest or check for malware. They just leap straight to blaming the OS. There are plenty of technical deficiencies in Windows, just like Linux, macOS, *BSD, and everything else out there. Microsoft and Apple have both slashed their QA staff and things have gotten progressively worse since, and QA tasks are rarely the sort of thing that interest FOSS devs. But, even on sites like this, which cater to more technically inclined users, rarely do you see anyone who has taken even basic steps towards debugging the issue to show that it really is the OS.

Re: Nah.

Legend has it that NT 3.5 was probably the least buggy version of Windows ever because they were going to release it alongside the 486, but then Intel had to delay release by like 6-months leaving the Windows developers nothing to do but sit around refining the code.

I actually liked Windows 3.1, except for the GPF errors and the like that would come out of nowhere because one app would clobber the memory space of another. If they had just made a more consumer oriented version of NT 3.5, that would have been awesome, but of course they didn't want to break that DOS compatibility and most PCs at the time didn't really have the resources to be able to run copies of DOS in a VM.

FTX crypto-crook Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years in prison

Re: It's a start.

If they're smart, they only give a small amount up front and then say the rest will come after they're out of prison.

Re: Crypto = Ponzi = Crypto

Isn't that a bit redundant? Crypto should be enough, shouldn't it?

Re: What ?

I sit corrected on that point, but stand by the larger one. Any federal prison in CA is going to be closer to Siberia than any prison in almost any other part of the country.

Re: And when you put it all together, there's the model of a charmless man

That's not entirely true.

A true sociopath, as opposed to someone who we just call a sociopath, is indeed born that way, but they essentially do not have empathy. You can quibble over whether that's the same as a conscience, but, sociopaths can and do learn things like responsibility. It just requires a lot more effort on their part, and it's a conscious decision each and every time, whereas for the rest of us, it's largely subconscious. But, a sociopath will, at the very least, fake concern or whatever else is needed to get whatever it is they're after. It's not a universal trait, but a lot of times sociopaths can actually be quite charming people, because they spend a lot of time learning exactly what kind of behaviors get them what they want.

Granted I'm neither qualified to do so, nor have I personally interacted with SBF in order to determine if he really is a sociopath, but it's a very rare condition and I'd be surprised if he was. I think his emotional growth was stunted at some point and he doesn't really have the capacity to understand what he did. Sort of like a dog doesn't really understand why it's bad for them to piddle on the carpet, just that you get upset with them when they do.

Re: And when you put it all together, there's the model of a charmless man

Congrats, you've just outlined the US GOP from (at least) Ronald Reagan to today. Some of the terminology has changed, but the basic message has remained pretty consistent for the past several decades. Main difference is that today they don't feel like they need to couch their racist, nativist, jingoist, authoritarian, and theocratic bullshit in cute little euphemisms. Now they just come right out and say what they're going to do.

Re: What ?

I mean... Technically the Bay Area is pretty close to Siberia relative to a lot of other places, like say Riker's in NY. If there's a federal prison somewhere in Alaska, that would be closer still, but San Quentin is pretty close to Siberia.

Re: It's a start.

If Trump (perish the thought) is POTUS again, no doubt some of that missing money will find its way into his pocket and then he'll issue a pardon letting SBF out early. Sort of like Scooter Libby who took a bullet for GWB's war crimes. If Biden gets a second term, it's likely SBF is fucked until at least 2029.

I mean, on the one hand, at least the people who were caught up in this will have some measure of justice done. I'm sure many would want a longer or harsher sentence, but that's how revenge works, not justice.

On the other hand... what this guy did is fundamentally the same as what banks did leading up to the 2008 banking crisis. After years of US politicians chipping away at the firewalls erected after the 1920s financial meltdown, allowing banks to mix customer funds put into checking and savings accounts, with funds put into investment accounts, shit predictably hit the fan again -- worst part is, after putting back significantly watered down firewalls shortly after, within a couple years there were efforts to knock them down again. People lost huge amounts of money, but the banks were bailed out and no one (that I'm aware of) faced any kind of prison time as a result of their actions. So, it kind of seems like this guy is being treated disparately harsher than all the CEOs of major banks who were pulling the same kind of shit. Not saying this guy doesn't deserve some time in prison, but there should be enough people to have a whole prison wing devoted to people who committed this kind of fraud on people, not just him, Madoff, and maybe a couple other small-timers.

University of Washington's Workday woes leave research grants in limbo

Really starting to think that any company looking to migrate to one of these big name products... SAP, Oracle, Workday, whatever... needs to include a rider in the contract that the vendor guarantees the project will be completed on time and on budget, with all promised functionality working, or they will eat any overages, plus pay compensation for lost business, and/or increased expenses, for the client. Otherwise, you're basically handing the vendor a blank check, and we've all seen how that movie plays out more than once.

Execs in Japan busted for winning dev bids then outsourcing to North Koreans

I remember years ago there was a story about some Facebook(?) employee who outsourced his own job to someone in China(?) and then spent his days watching cat videos on YouTube. On the one hand, you kind of have to hand it to them for the ingenuity of it all, but at the same time, why shouldn't Facebook (or whoever) just cut out the middle man and hire the person actually doing the work? They could give that person a 10% raise, which should make them happy because they're making more money, and Facebook is probably still saving a bundle on salary.

Twitter's lawsuit against anti-hate-speech crusaders gets SLAPPed out of court

Re: ... the lawyers ... should be referred to the CA State Bar for potential disciplinary action

And just as a small addendum, seems it was just today that the judge in Eastman's disciplinary hearing recommended he be disbarred.

Whatever you say, Steve. Whatever a racist POS needs to tell themselves to sleep at night.

Re: ... the lawyers ... should be referred to the CA State Bar for potential disciplinary action

The oath you quoted states that the lawyer will conduct themselves with integrity. If you are knowingly bringing a meritless case, how is that acting with integrity? Also, look at the recent case of John Eastman. He was part of the cabal that was responsible for bringing a bunch of meritless lawsuits claiming election fraud in 2020. I forget if they've already disbarred him or if it's still in limbo, but basically a foregone conclusion. He wasn't even directly involved in the lawsuits IIRC, he just was the one who came up with the scary idea of alternate electors that was intended to throw the formal process of counting electoral college votes into disarray long enough for Trump to file more lawsuits.

And again, you're taking this to an illogical extreme. This isn't a case of, I'm suing you because you are picking fruit off branches of my tree which extend over the property line onto your lot. You might consider that a silly case, and it is, but there's a legitimate issue at the core. Of course, if my lawyer even suspects that I'm actually wanting to file a lawsuit just to harass you, they should refuse to take it. This is a case where the lawyer(s) knew before they filed it that it had no merit, but that it ran afoul of SLAPP legislation.

I suppose it's... something, that you aren't pretending like you aren't playing the dictionary game. A largely meaningless token gesture, but something just the same.

There's nothing wrong or shameful about being corrected. There is, however, much wrong and shame in refusing to acknowledge you were wrong and doubling down on the stupid.

Re: Careful here.

And that has relevance to this specific example of Xitler suing them because they said something he didn't like.... how?

In Related News

Seems Xitler is looking to spend money Xitter doesn't have helping pay the legal fees of other assholes like him, who tried to silence critical speech.

"X is proud to help defend Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill against the government-supported efforts to cancel her speech," X said, going on to say they would pay the remainder of the doctor's $300,000 legal bills. Gill had previously posted that she had raised around half of the amount herself through a crowdfunding campaign, meaning X was going to fund the estimated remainder of $150,000.

However, Musk and company left out an important, glaring detail that seems to run contrary to his stated "free speech" beliefs: The lawsuit that Gill lost was one that she filed in an attempt to silence critics from saying things she did not like.

https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-x-to-support-covid-vaccine-skeptic-kulvinder-kaur-gill-lawsuit

Oh good, we've moved onto the dictionary game phase. Now you will pick some inconsequential word of phrase, latch onto a very specific and narrow definition of that word/phrase, and refuse to acknowledge any other possible meaning besides the one you've decided upon. Then, either people "debate" you on that point until they realize that if they talked to a brick wall, they would at least have an insanity defense for their action, at which point you claim you won. Or, you drag things so far off-topic that the original topic is forgotten and people decide it's no longer worth the effort to continue, at which point you also will claim you won. I expect you'll downvote this post in very short order to prove that I struck a nerve.

You clearly recognize you're on the losing end of the debate, but rather than do something sensible like say, "I was wrong, thank you for correcting me," like a mature adult would, you double down on the stupid like a petulant toddler would. You're really helping prove my suspicions that you're grossly misrepresenting what got you banned on all those other sites, so I'll remind you of the first rule of holes: Stop digging!

I'm pretty well convinced that we're getting a highly sanitized version of what actually transpired that is intended to make them seem like the victim. Sort of like, "they're banning me because I'm a conservative!!11!!!one" when it's really, "No, we're banning you because you've been acting like a fucking asshole who thinks they are above the rules." I don't have any actual proof, but they fit the pattern to a T.

There's only one vaccine I'm aware of that actually aims to prevent infection, and you can't even get it in the US. It works by fortifying your nasal passageways to prevent the virus from ever being able to enter the body in the first place. I want to say it's approved in India, but don't quote me on that; could be somewhere else in or around SE Asia. The mRNA vaccines that you can get in the US and Europe, are intended to prevent severe disease and death, not infection. It might help incidentally prevent spreading the virus to others if your immune system is able to attack it quickly and efficiently, but that's not the intent.

Since I don't consider random youtube videos to be credible sources, I'm not even going to bother looking at them. I'll just assume that, like dozens of other people I've come across, you think you're some kind of expert on a subject when you really don't know WTF it is you're talking about. You "do your own research" but that "research" basically involves just reading a lot of the same circle jerk info from the same paranoid people who don't know WTF they're talking about. This being a tech oriented site, one of my favorite examples goes back to when computers only had a max of 512KB of L2 cache. At the time, people who claimed to be experts would tell you that this means you should never have more than X amount (I forget what X was now, maybe 128MB?) of RAM, because otherwise it would slow your computer down. This was based on an incorrect/incomplete understanding of how L2 cache works. It stores memory addresses for RAM to provide faster access. They made the leap from "uncached RAM is slower, so uncached RAM = slower computer" which is incorrect. Uncached RAM is absolutely slower, but it's still going to be hundreds of times faster than the alternative of paging to a spinning rust drive. Even if you applied it to more modern computers with SSDs, uncached RAM would still be significantly faster than the alternative. It's even better to have fully cached RAM, but if you ever have to choose between uncached RAM and paging, uncached RAM will win every single time.

Also, I must thank you for the chuckle of posting as an anonymous coward and asking me if I was being paranoid.

Things like saying Covid vaccines don't stop you catching it or stop you passing it on

They were never intended to prevent you from getting covid, they were intended to make it so if/when you get covid your immune system is already primed to fight it off, so the disease is less severe and also less likely to kill you. My guess is that you're not being entirely honest about how you're phrasing things on the other platforms, because if you simply said what you put here, that would be factually correct, if maybe a bit misleading.

Criticising the Net Zero policy will currently get you severely limited on Google and Facebook platforms, by shadow banning or other means.

Yes, yes, the "shadow banning" bullshit. I have yet to see anyone do any kind of thorough analysis to show that it really was the company taking action against them and not any of the other almost infinite number of possibilities. Conservatives very often have a nasty habit of jumping to wild conclusions. A byproduct of too much time spent listening to each other instead of getting out into the world and exposing yourself to other people and viewpoints.

He's not Tony Stark, but he's also not anything close to Hitler.

Except that he does things very much like a young Hitler.

He

1) Repeats the Great Replacement Theory, which is that brown people from Mexico and Central America, are coming to the US to take the jobs of honest, hard working, white folk and various other racist tropes

2) He constantly rails against DEI

3) Tesla has repeatedly been sued for racial discrimination, meaning he clearly isn't interested in doing anything about it -- Tesla just settled one such lawsuit they'd already lost at trial 2X

4) He's been peddling Russian disinformation about Ukraine, where Putin is not just trying to destroy a people, but has literally been kidnapping their children and brainwashing them

5) Has made several antisemitic comments

Unlike Hitler, who at least managed to get the German economy back on track among a few other positives, before he went full-on genocidal lunatic, Xitler doesn't have even a few successes like that he can point to. He came from money, fucked things up at PayPal so badly they paid him to go away, and then used that money to effect a hostile takeover of Tesla, which he's been using as his own personal piggy bank ever since after stacking the board with literal family members and other sycophants.

Edit: And I see our vatnick friend Jellied Eel is lurking about with one of his many sock puppet accounts.

Re: Costs

See my comments above. I'm all for judges handing down some stinging sanctions for lawyers who bring these kinds of frivolous lawsuits. I know, as a general rule, they're reticent to do so because they don't want to sanction someone who was intending to bring a legitimate case, but there's a difference between a case that may seem rather stupid and pointless (like two neighbors arguing over who owns the fruit from a tree when the branch extends over the property line) and cases like this one. If, as a judge, you find you need 50+ pages to tell one party or the other just how frivolous the case was, I'd say that puts you on pretty firm footing for issuing a fine and referring the lawyer to the state bar for potential disciplinary action.

Re: Costs

It's not so much that it happened... if it were a one-off, I doubt many companies would have left Xitter the way they did. It was the fact that it kept happening that was the problem. Xitter either couldn't, or wouldn't, do what was necessary to prevent it from happening, so advertisers said, "Fuck it, I'm out!"

Re: Costs

You mean like how conservatives have been loosing their shit Bud Light because they had an advertising deal with a trans person? I forget why it was they were upset with Yeti coolers, but there was that one too. I'm sure if I wanted to, I could find plenty of other examples.

Usually when liberals get upset with a company, it's because they did something like promote antisemitism or their CEO is a racist POS. Conservatives seem to get angry with companies when they do something that upsets their delicate sensibilities like make them get a hardon over a person in a commercial, only to later find out they were trans. I also can't recall the last time I saw a liberal taking a gun and shooting at the product of a company that made them confront their latent homoerotic desires. That's a pretty aggressive action. You're literally play killing something.

Re: ... the lawyers ... should be referred to the CA State Bar for potential disciplinary action

Except that they're not bearing the consequences for their client's guilt, they're bearing the consequences for wasting the court's time with obviously frivolous cases that should never have been brought in the first place. This isn't about Xitler losing the case, it's about how this is a case that has absolutely no foundation in law, and was intended entirely to try to silence CCDH's speech which Xitler didn't like. Not only is it a waste of time for the CCDH's lawyers and the judge/jury who has to sit there read/listen to this garbage, but it takes up one of the limited slots on the court's docket, meaning people with legitimate cases have to wait longer to have their issue resolved. So, issuing a few fines to lawyers who bring these idiotic cases seems like an excellent first step in stopping them entirely. or at least cutting them down in number.

Re: ... the lawyers ... should be referred to the CA State Bar for potential disciplinary action

I've been using "Xcretions" but I suppose "xits" is shorter, so I'll allow it.

Re: a fool and his money

The whole free speech thing was just a crock of shit. He bought it while on a massive drug-fueled bender and wouldn't take yes for an answer. He just wanted to be queen bitch of his own personal mean girls platform. Of course the way he financed the deal was even worse than his repeatedly sweetening the offer to Twitter before they even had time to respond to his previous offer. The entire $45bn has to be paid, in full, within like 5-years. So far he's paid like $1bn, and that was basically by not just cutting Twitter to the bone, but sucking some of the marrow out while he was at it, not paying any bills, and not paying promised severances, etc. The thing about cutting like that, is you can only do it once, and you're basically mortgaging your future revenue, so where he's going to come up with the cash for the next payment is anyone's guess. Xitter revenues definitely aren't going to cover it, even if he were willing to risk not making payroll for the sad bastards who are left, he's already leveraged up to his eyeballs so most of his famed wealth isn't really his. He could maybe try using his Tesla cash salary, but I doubt that would buy him more than maybe one more year. He already uses his Tesla stock to fund things like SpaceX, which is why most of it is already spoken for. He could potentially let one of his various business ventures fail, like Neuralink or Boring, but that will likely result in lawsuits that will tie up a lot of his resources for years.

He's basically fucked, and it was all of his own doing. He's completely overextended, and I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a part of me that will enjoy the schadenfreude of watching his little "empire" come crashing down around him. I'll feel bad for all the people who may lose their jobs as a result, but not for Xitler. I almost hope there really is a hell, and he gets to spend eternity having to relive watching everything come crashing down around him, but I'd settle for him suddenly becoming essentially penniless and untouchable in the business world because of all the racist and antisemitic things he's posted on Xitter. If he became a homeless person wandering the streets of Austin rooting through garbage cans looking for cans and bottles to redeem, being told by a bunch of rednecks to go back to his country because of his accent, I would be quite amused.

Re: Costs

I mean, to be fair... John Oliver very deliberately picks fights with powerful people. If you're an insurance company providing the policy for that show, you kind of have to figure they're going to get sued again... and again, and again. I mean, just recently he tried to provoke Disney into suing them for using the Steamboat Willy version of Mickey Mouse a few days before it went into the public domain. While I'm sure they run the script for every show past the legal department before filming, they deliberately dance right up to the line and proceed to lean over it pretty far. Which is what tends to make that show so damn funny an entertaining.

Now, admittedly, an org like CCDH is also likely the sort that will piss off people who may sue, but probably not with the same frequency as John Oliver. If I'm an insurance adjuster looking to set rates, I'm going to give CCDH a much lower premium than John Oliver.

And for some reason when I saw Bob Murray my first thought was Bill Murray. Took me a second to remember who you were referring to and how, aside from a single vowel difference in their names, they're completely different people.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite dares to game, reaching 30 FPS in Baldur's Gate 3

But they come with PCIe interconnects so you have the option of adding a discrete card if you want. And, as I said, a lot of times with SoCs the RAM is literally part of the chip, so if you skimp and only get 8GB and later find you need 16GB... ruh-roh spaghetti-o.

If someone made an ARM (or even RISC-V) chip that was just the CPU, or even CPU and iGPU, but with the necessary bus interconnects for discrete RAM and video cards, you'd likely find a lot of people very interested in it. Maybe even enough to kick off another great replacement cycle like Dell and HP have been so desperate to try to bring about. However, so far, it's just basically "here's a cell phone chip that we're selling as a desktop chip."

That, to me, is the biggest hurdle to getting away from x86 CPUs. Every ARM offering is a SoC, which includes an iGPU and sometimes even the RAM is integrated onto the chip. You get one of these SoCs where you have the ability to add discrete RAM and video cards and you've got yourself a hot commodity. All those PC gamers, who tend to be the early adopters, will likely beat a path to your door for a CPU that offers similar performance, with a fraction of the power draw and thermal dissipation. That will then prove the legitimacy of platform, because if it can stand up to gamers' expectations, it can certainly handle anything most businesses are going to throw at it.

Microsoft gets new Windows boss as Start Menu man Parakhin 'to explore new roles'

Re: The actual necessity

I love you too Jellied Eel! The fact that your life is so devoid of meaning you have to cyberstalk me and downvote literally every post I make really helps me realize that, no matter how bad I may think things are in my life, they aren't so bad I have to resort to cyberstalking and downvoting for some kind of petty revenge for pointing out what an idiot you are. Keep fighting the good fight lil' buddy!

Re: There could be...

The answer to your question was in the part of the sentence you chose not to quote.

"They can downvote, but they can't actually formulate a counter argument."

Oh, sure, the Program Manager was crap, no question. However, the start button/menu was a huge step backwards from a UI/UX POV. I'm not saying just revert back to Program Manager and call it a day, it's just a proposed starting point. A starting point that frees us from a couple decades of idiotic design.

I'm guessing you've long since lost contact with that coworker, but I'd love it if they ever found their old code, if it made its way onto Github or somewhere similar where people could play around with it. If they have a better Program Manager than Program Manager, that's an even better place to start from.

Re: The actual necessity

I would disagree. I'm not proposing that we use Random Dev #532's idea, I'm saying throw shit out there and see what works. If you've got an idea for how to create a better UI/UX, I'm all for hearing about it. However, FOSS devs have both the time and expertise to implement different ideas. Commercial companies like Apple and Microsoft are always going to play it safe because they have to keep investors happy. That's why we've been stuck with the same shitty, illogical, desktop metaphor for the last 30+ years. No one has ever taken the time to really stop and think about how we actually use computers and then design something around that. Microsoft actually did this, once, when they created Windows Mobile (or was it Phone, I forget) 7. They took a step back and really thought about how to design an interface around a touch screen, whereas Apple and Google just took the lazy approach and shoehorned the same basic desktop bullshit onto a phone and tablet. Unfortunately it was far too late and Apple and Google had already stitched up the market, but Windows Phone 7 and 8 devices were really nice to use from a UI/UX POV.

In an ideal world, with infinite time and resources, you could get a company to do something like you propose, but in this world... we've had 30+ years of stagnation. A suck it and see approach may not be ideal, but it seems to be the best we've got to even have a chance of actually advancing UI/UX design.

Re: There could be...

More precious little snowflakes I see. They can downvote, but they can't actually formulate a counter argument. So far, the best counter examples anyone has ever been able to come up with are unicorn level examples where it might come up once or twice a year, and that's by their own admission. Everything else is just, "Waaaah! I don't wanna change!" Which, I'm perfectly willing to accept if, but at least have the fucking balls to say it. Don't insult other people's intelligence by coming up with these pathetic excuses for reasons, when it's clear even you don't believe them.

Seems like all the so-called Linux users around here are just Linux users in name. There's nothing special about running Linux over Windows if you know about as much about Linux as Windows users do about it. Get over yourself. Get back to me when you've had to manually edit config files, or actually compiled your own custom kernel and configured the bootloader to use it. Until you do things like that, you're just a bunch of wannabe posers who haven't learned as much about Linux as I've likely forgotten and have no right trying to claim any kind of superiority to Windows users.

Re: Start Button........................

The start button came around with Windows95. To Sinofsky's credit he at least tried to do something different. It failed miserably, but at least he tried. Honestly though, after about the 1 week I allowed myself to bitch about things with Win 8, I adapted quickly enough. It wasn't hard, just annoying.

When I see comments in stories like this one, I'm reminded of an old therapist trick. Say you want to learn a new language, programming, spoken, whatever. You tell your therapist you're too old since you're in your 40s. The therapists asks you how old you'll be in 2-years, and you say 42. The therapist then asks you how old you'll be in 2-years if you don't start learning that new language. You have a finite amount of mental energy to spend on things. You can choose to spend some of that energy complaining or you can choose to spend that same energy adapting to the new reality. It's fine to give yourself a brief window to get the complaining out of your system, but at a certain point it becomes counterproductive. Say you are stranded on the side of the road in the dead of winter. You can sit there cursing your lot in life, probably freeze to death in the process, or you can start walking and try to reach a place where you can call for help. The choice is ultimately yours to make.

Re: There could be...

You really should try it. It sucked up until Windows 8, I'll definitely grant you that, and Windows 8 tended to hide it, but it's actually become fairly useful since then. In Windows 11 (probably 10, but I forget now) you can even search for things in the settings app. So instead of going to Settings>>System>>Display to change the resolution, you can hit "Win+S" type in "res" and it's the second search option. Type in "reso" and it's the first option. It takes you right to that part of the settings app. I still sometimes find myself falling back on old habits, but investing the time and effort to try to learn new habits was well worth it. Especially for some of those more esoteric settings I don't change very often.

Besides, I thought El Reg was populated with a bunch of old grizzled Linux hacks. How the fuck can you call yourself that if you don't know how to use a command line!? Plenty of things on Linux are just so much faster and easier using the command line, especially if you set up command aliases. One of the first things I would tend to do with new Linux installs is set up command aliases for dealing with tar.gz and tar.z tarballs. Then it's "alias tarball.tar.gz" to extract everything.

You literally said it happens "maybe twice a year." If that's not an edge case to you, WTF is? And don't go trying to change the subject. When you do something maybe twice a year, how does it make sense to make life harder than it needs to be the remaining 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the time? If I need to update my resume/CV twice a year, I'm not going to get all bent out of shape because I had to stop and think for a couple of seconds about where I store that file. It's twice a bloody fucking year!

Should I presume that, because you attempted to change the subject, you have no response to that?

Nice attempt at changing the subject. You have an answer to the question or not?

I swear, every time this topic comes up, someone like you always posts the same rare edge case type example that just doesn't make sense. "I use some app once every couple dozen blue moons, so I have to make life more difficult for myself the entire rest of the time!" So what it takes you a few extra seconds to find an app you yourself admit you might use only twice a year. By your own admission you use it so rarely it shouldn't really matter; it's more than made up for by making your life easier the remaining 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the time.

The examples you give just means that there needs to be some additional metadata to help find things via search without knowing the specific app name. So, take a DVD burning app, to use your example. There could be some search terms associated with it like "DVD" "burning" and so on. Presumably this could be embedded right into the executable and then the search indexer could pick it up as it scans the file. Windows already has some metadata embedded into executables, so all they'd need to do is expand it, maybe even let users add their own search terms. Then, those two times a year you might need some app, one of those times you just need to make sure to add the metadata search terms if they don't already exist. Seems like a much better solution than making life unnecessarily difficult just for those extreme outliers even among edge cases.

The start menu was a completely asinine idea from the very beginning, so to make it great again would first require it being great once, and the sooner it's done away with the better. I'm sure there are examples of better ideas out there, but honestly I haven't seen anything better than the old Windows 3.x Program Manager. You can group apps and whatnot together for the people who insist on doing things the hard way, without the idiotic cascading menu system of the start menu, then you could combine that with the search function that actually started becoming useful in Windows 8 for people who aren't stuck living in the past, and have something far better than the start menu. Shit, even something as lazy as Apple's "Applications" folder on macOS would be an improvement.

This is why I wish the FOSS community would spend less time copying whatever Microsoft and Apple do, and more time trying out weird ideas devs may have. They could potentially sell their idea to Microsoft as the foundation for a UI overhaul. They make money and get recognition, the rest of us get a better UI, it's a win-win.

Windows Format dialog waited decades for UI revamp that never came

I know you were making a largely tongue-in-cheek comment, and you made a few good points, but... You have to remember that a lot of the people using Windows don't know even half as much about computers as you do. They're the sort who would struggle to find the power button even if there was a giant flashing neon arrow pointing right at it. The sort who fall for those tech support scams where they show people the "errors" and "warnings" from the Event Viewer and convince them that means their computer is in need of hundreds of dollars worth of fixes. People who can barely master the power, channel, and volume buttons on a TV remote.

The sad reality is, when you take almost any situation where you think things are unnecessarily complicated, when you really start digging into it, you find there are actually good reasons why things are the way they are. There are the occasional times when you find someone who just slapped something together in a hurry and it stuck, but a lot of times you find that it was a very considered choice because it fit the broadest set of use cases.