UI Bites
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@Tsaukpaetra said in UI Bites:
The crosswalk button doesn't make the light turn sooner, but it does make the one in the direction you walk a minimum.
See, here that wouldn't work. You do need to press the button if you want to cross, because if you don't the lights will just cycle through their road-traffic-only loop. If you want a pedestrian interrupt you have to ask for one, and it will be slotted in at the appropriate phase.
Here, most/all of the downtown lights are on the 'always pedestrian crossing' mode, so don't have buttons, but outside of that are push-to-cross.
Not that the buttons do a lot of good, given that a lot of pedestrians don't care about waiting for the cross light, or even bother to go the 100 feet to a crosswalk.
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@Gurth licensing
For completeness: you mean “Making users pay for a higher Windows licence” rather than “Microsoft having to pay licensing fees to a third party”, right?
Yes.
Changing language is an Enterprise feature IIRC? Also, each language pack takes like 100-200MB of disk space, compressed.
Wow, a few hundred megabytes … let me check how big the hard drive with my OS on it is, again. Oh, yeah, 2 TB.
When have you turned into Jeff "Last Year's Mid-Range Devices Aren't My Target Platform" Atwood?
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Wow, a few hundred megabytes … let me check how big the hard drive with my OS on it is, again. Oh, yeah, 2 TB.
Multiply that by N languages, where N-1 will be uselessly taking up multiple GBs of space. At least there's only one Candy Crush Saga that Windows pre-installs.
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why does Windows still not just ship with all languages Microsoft has available for it
Because changing language isn't just about changing the text in labels. For some languages, it fundamentally changes how input is performed (input methods continue to scare me due to their sheer level of underdocumented-ness). There may also be a text-to-speech engine present (for accessibility reasons) and that takes plenty of data in each supported language, to say nothing of the modern habit of AI speech interpretation (which is usually cloud hosted due to the sheer size of dataset required). There's a lot involved potentially.
It's all much simpler to keep everything in the original English and tell the rest of the world (loudly and slowly!) to change their language to match…
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@Gurth licensing. Changing language is an Enterprise feature IIRC? Also, each language pack takes like 100-200MB of disk space, compressed.
Good grief, That's almost the size of Skype!
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@Zecc EACH language pack. And there's like 80 of them? And it's easily double that size after installation.
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@Gąska I'm actually with you. I just saw an opportunity to take a cheap shot at Skype and I took it.
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Wow, a few hundred megabytes … let me check how big the hard drive with my OS on it is, again. Oh, yeah, 2 TB.
When have you turned into Jeff "Last Year's Mid-Range Devices Aren't My Target Platform" Atwood?
Far from it, but I am saying that amounts of disk space that we used to think of as HUGE now often aren’t all that big anymore.
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Wow, a few hundred megabytes … let me check how big the hard drive with my OS on it is, again. Oh, yeah, 2 TB.
When have you turned into Jeff "Last Year's Mid-Range Devices Aren't My Target Platform" Atwood?
Far from it, but I am saying that amounts of disk space that we used to think of as HUGE now often aren’t all that big anymore.
Speak for yourself!
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@Tsaukpaetra said in UI Bites:
Wow, a few hundred megabytes … let me check how big the hard drive with my OS on it is, again. Oh, yeah, 2 TB.
When have you turned into Jeff "Last Year's Mid-Range Devices Aren't My Target Platform" Atwood?
Far from it, but I am saying that amounts of disk space that we used to think of as HUGE now often aren’t all that big anymore.
Speak for yourself!
Computer masochists excluded, natch.
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Wow, a few hundred megabytes … let me check how big the hard drive with my OS on it is, again. Oh, yeah, 2 TB.
When have you turned into Jeff "Last Year's Mid-Range Devices Aren't My Target Platform" Atwood?
Far from it, but I am saying that amounts of disk space that we used to think of as HUGE now often aren’t all that big anymore.
Not when you have 128GB SSD, which are common for current mid-low-end laptops. And honestly, I wouldn't care about 2GB more - but here we're talking about at least 20GB, maybe 30GB, almost entirely made of stuff that will be never used, not even once in the entire lifetime of the device. On every Windows installation.
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Far from it, but I am saying that amounts of disk space that we used to think of as HUGE now often aren’t all that big anymore.
Amounts of disk space that we used to think of as HUGE are now HUGE again since speed was given priority and all the huge disks were replaced by those tiny SSDs.
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Far from it, but I am saying that amounts of disk space that we used to think of as HUGE now often aren’t all that big anymore.
Amounts of disk space that we used to think of as HUGE are now HUGE again since speed was given priority and all the huge disks were replaced by those tiny SSDs.
Three times 2TB of spinning rust in singly-redundant software raid, over in a closet where I cannot see, and more importantly hear, it, disagree.
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@PleegWat I also still have spinning disks at home. But at work I have this tiny ~½ TB SSD which might be faster, but gets pretty tight when the build environment takes up around 60 MB. Can't keep around that many of those for comparison.
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@PleegWat I also still have spinning disks at home. But at work I have this tiny ~½ TB SSD which might be faster, but gets pretty tight when the build environment takes up around 60 MB. Can't keep around that many of those for comparison.
Ah, yes, there's that. They assign us hosted VMs for dev work which clock in around 200gb. Most of that gets eaten up by database datafiles (which never ever shrink) and runaway logging that's enabled by default and I'm not sure how to turn off. It's not really possible to run multiple instances at the same time anyway on one host, so I've got multiple dev VMs sitting around. If I need more than that, I stash changes - don't need to keep the transaction open when automated tests run in farm and code review is in a web tool.
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And then there is the target, which has 512 MB (yes, MB) flash (it's not a proper SSD and uses special flash filesystem), split to system, data and logs, and in production there are two system partitions of equal size for reasons of updating, but we squeeze out the second for debug builds, because they wouldn't fit in otherwise.
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I'm just thinking back to high school, when the idea of running out of gigabytes was completely
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@Mason_Wheeler
1996: Wow, 1.2 GB? This'll last for years
2001: 80 GB, there's no way I'll ever fill that
yesterday: What were these clientidiots thinking, only provisioning 2 TB per drive letter?
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@hungrier I remember back in like 1990(?) when we got our first hard drive. A whopping 20MB. I thought it would never run out.
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here we're talking about at least 20GB, maybe 30GB, almost entirely made of stuff that will be never used, not even once in the entire lifetime of the device. On every Windows installation.
The real question is: why are the localisation files that big? Approximately every Mac OS X/OS X/macOS (
re: looking this up), iOS and all mainstream modern Linux distro’s I’ve seen, come with a whole bunch of languages, and if I do a quick search, it seems they only take up a few gigs on macOS:I routinely clear a few gigabytes of unused languages when I run Monolingual. For example, running it for this tutorial I freed up almost one and a half gigabytes.
Are the Windows language packs full of localised complete binaries rather than just files with the localised strings?
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The real question is: why are the localisation files that big?
There's probably an Electron.js blockchain with an npm package that recursively refers to every other npm package that's ever existed.
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status: thanks, Android...
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amounts of disk space that we used to think of as HUGE now often aren’t all that big anymore.
When I was in college, I interned at a very large tech company. One time, just before I returned to school, I left a job running overnight. When I came in the next morning, the job had crashed because the log file had exceeded my disk quota. I couldn't do anything with the file; I couldn't look through it in a text editor, because there was no room to create the on-disk buffer/journal file.
How big was this enormous file? 10 MB.
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@HardwareGeek said in UI Bites:
How big was this enormous file? 10 MB.
To be fair, things like Notepad and Google Chrome choke when displaying such a gigantic thing.
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The real question is: why are the localisation files that big?
Googling some rough numbers: a book page has ~2500 characters. So for a 200 pages book we got 500K, meaning the 200MB language pack contains about 400 books worth of text if there's no overhead.
That seems rather too large.But then, while I get that a modern OS does more than it did back in the days, I also don't understand how it does so much more that it takes up 25GB. That can't all be media files.
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The real question is: why are the localisation files that big?
Googling some rough numbers: a book page has ~2500 characters. So for a 200 pages book we got 500K, meaning the 200MB language pack contains about 400 books worth of text if there's no overhead.
That seems rather too large.But then, while I get that a modern OS does more than it did back in the days, I also don't understand how it does so much more that it takes up 25GB. That can't all be media files.
One word: XML. A good way to turn 100 words into 100 000 words. Or am I too cynical?
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Upon the first start of Adobe Animate:
Have you not used Animate before?
( No ) ( Yes )Is it too much to ask to have them ask that question in a normal way, that is WITHOUT the negation? Because doing it this way makes the answers a bit ambiguous.
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@Atazhaia Haven't you never not used Animate before? No, never No, not never
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@Mason_Wheeler said in UI Bites:
I'm just thinking back to high school, when the idea of running out of gigabytes was completely
Youngsters... In high school the idea of a gigabyte was
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@Mason_Wheeler said in UI Bites:
I'm just thinking back to high school, when the idea of running out of gigabytes was completely
Youngsters... In high school the idea of a gigabyte was
I can remember my father coming home from having gone out to buy a new hard drive for the family PC, and him asking me to guess the size. I thought I’d aim high and replied, “A hundred megabytes?” “More,” he said, “a hundred and sixty-nine!” In retrospect, even the 20 MB and 40 MB drives that were in the computer at the time would have seemed HUGE a few years earlier when we were still using an Apple ][ clone with nothing but two 140 KB single-sided disk drives …
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@Benjamin-Hall Our first computer with a hard drive had a 2GB one (to better give an idea of the time, it was a P166 MMX with Windows 95).
Our previous computer was bought 10+ years earlier, and used only floppies with 178k of user data per side.
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had a 2GB one (to better give an idea of the time, it was a P166 MMX with Windows 95).
I had that exact same configuration as my first computer, including the MMX buzzword which nobody knew what is was. And 16MB RAM.
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16MB RAM.
I remember the excitement when our computer at home got its RAM
doubled !That was when my father upgraded our Macintosh 512k to a Macintosh Plus which had an entire megabyte.
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My first home computer was an IBM Aptiva with Pentium 120MHz with 12MB RAM (2MB shared with graphics card), 1.2GB hard drive and a combined IBM Mwave sound card and 28.8k modem, along with a 14" CRT monitor. It later got an upgrade to 40MB RAM when 12MB turned out a bit too little.
Also, I remember saving up to a 20GB harddrive for it that encountered the 8GB BIOS limit for harddrive size, but the driver disc for the harddrive has a BIOS addon that could allowed the drive to be used, but it split it into 10 2GB partitions.
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You know you're old enough on TDWTF when people start reminiscing about their first computers and you recall this happening before.
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@Zecc when you're old enough, you don't.
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My first computer was a Lambda 2000. Yellow plastic case with green buttons.
It was almost exactly this one, but not quite.
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@Carnage
Who takes pictures on a wooden floor? Blasphemy!
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Youngsters... In high school the idea of a gigabyte was
i saw my first Gigabyte of random access storage at 6.
It was LITERALLY the size of a rather large room. memory's a bit fuzzy on how big because i was 6 but if that room was smaller than 12x30 feet I would be shocked.
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@Carnage
Who takes pictures on a wooden floor? Blasphemy!It was either this or a plastic table.
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For a while, I had several 486's with 8 MB RAM and 800 MB hard drives that I rescued from the dumpster at school. We used them for Age of Empires LAN parties. They were so underpowered that a full game would take 3 - 6 hours, but the game summary at the end only showed 45 minutes on the clock.
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486's with 8 MB RAM
reminds me of those Intel Dialogic cards for analogue phone signaling, think of it as an analogue modem that had done something unholy with a soundblaster and the result allowed to handle 4 phone calls per ISA(!) card and that ran on a dedicated on board 486.
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Youngsters... In high school the idea of a gigabyte was
i saw my first Gigabyte of random access storage at 6.
It was LITERALLY the size of a rather large room. memory's a bit fuzzy on how big because i was 6 but if that room was smaller than 12x30 feet I would be shocked.
I remember those huge spinning pillars of disks... (Dad worked at Bell Labs) What did one of those disk packs hold? Something like a couple K? https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/memory-storage/ Ah, a little more... 2M Tho the 1311 isn't exactly what I was thinking of...
But now my mind is stuck on CRAM
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Speaking of shitloads of RAM, Chromium-based Opera started putting these weird chevrons in the top left corners of things:
Near as I can tell, it applies to scrollable containers, but not all of them. E.g. the preview panel in the composer doesn't have one.
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I didn't get my first computer until after I graduated from uni in the mid/late-80s. It was a nameless beige-box 386(?) with 1MB of RAM on a full-sized ISA plug-in card fully packed with DIP chips. I don't remember what kind of drive(s) it had.
The first computer I ever used I've mentioned before. It was a PDP-8/L with 4k words (12-bit) of magnetic core memory and a 110 bps ASR-33 Teletype as its only peripheral. It took a half-hour to load the BASIC interpreter from punched paper tape, although you only needed to do this if you'd used some other language, because the magnetic core memory was nonvolatile and the interpreter would persist through power cycles. In theory, the last run program should have, too, if you knew how to bring the machine up in the right state, but we didn't. The standard power on procedure was to turn the power on using the key-lock switch, and use the front-panel switches to halt the CPU, just in case it had randomly powered-up in the running state, load 0400 into the instruction pointer register, and start the CPU. The front panel address/data switches were normally left at 0400, so power on, "Stop", "Load Address", "Start". These were spring-loaded toggle switches. "Stop" and "Start" were push down to activate, but "Load Address" was, for some reason, normally down, and you pushed it up to activate it.
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I got my first computer when me and Charles Babbage dismantled Beethoven's piano to build one.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in UI Bites:
I got my first computer when me andCharles Babbage and I dismantled Beethoven's piano to build one.
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@HardwareGeek said in UI Bites:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in UI Bites:
I got my first computer when me andCharles Babbage and I dismantled Beethoven's piano to build one.I thought it was Lady Ada that built it. Charles Babbage just did the heavy lifting and stole the credit....
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@HardwareGeek said in UI Bites:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in UI Bites:
I got my first computer when me andCharles Babbage and I dismantled Beethoven's piano to build one.I thought it was Lady Ada that built it. Charles Babbage just did the heavy lifting and stole the credit....
Neither of them built it. It remained purely theoretical long after both of them were dead.
