Secret Windows settings Microsoft doesn't want you to know about...





  • If the image above isn't showing up here's a mirror:

    http://www.cloudcraft.com/ebay/windows.jpg



  • This is not a WTF. This is a ten-year-old joke.



  • I'm not often one to say :old, but this image is rather dated even in real-life terms, and I think I'm helping the world become a better place if action is taken to nip re-emergence of these things in the bud.

    So.

    :old 



  • That picture wasn't even funny when I first saw it.

    Probably because I seem to have a lot fewer Windows crashes than everyone else, and I find it sad rather than funny when I lose my work.
     



  • That's Office.



  • @Thief^ said:

    Probably because I seem to have a lot fewer Windows crashes than everyone else, and I find it sad rather than funny when I lose my work.

    I usually find it funny when Windows users lose their work, because I don't use it for any real work, and they did choose to use it. 



  • for REAL work??? so... you only use it for fake work then; are you a counterfeiter by trade?



  • @yumology said:

    If the image above isn't showing up here's a mirror:

    http://www.cloudcraft.com/ebay/windows.jpg

    Your sense of your audience sucks. 



  • @asuffield said:

    I usually find it funny when Windows users lose their work, because I don't use it for any real work, and they did choose to use it. 

    So that means that you never do any real work, then? Because the only work done on Linux is by server apps, and you don't sound like a server to me.

    Seriously, run on back to /. where you belong. Quickly now, before anyone notices you're missing.
     



  • @KenW said:

    Seriously, run on back to /. where you belong. Quickly now, before anyone notices you're missing.
    Slashdot is 421789516919471398741 tech guys with no social skills; what makes you think they'll notice someone missing?



  • The joke is ancient; please let it die.

    And for the guy which said that "the only work done on Linux is by server apps": BZZZZZT! WRONG!



  • Sadly, old jokes never die.  Slightly off topic, but it reminds me of the one about mars being the size of the full moon this year.  That email thread has been floating around for over 5 years.  And I still get asked by family/friends if I knew about it.



  • @zip said:

    Your sense of your audience sucks. 



    I knew it was going to be that way when I saw the Tripod hotlink image that has been in effect for many years now.

    I see those 8+ year old images, along with equally aged hoaxes, popping up all the time and can't resist firing back at the sender. sigh



  • @asuffield said:

    @Thief^ said:

    Probably because I seem to have a lot fewer Windows crashes than everyone else, and I find it sad rather than funny when I lose my work.

    I usually find it funny when Windows users lose their work, because I don't use it for any real work, and they did choose to use it. 

    Not many people actually choose to use Windows, it either "came with their pc" (and don't know you can change, let alone want to), or is what is on their work pc and they have no say in changing it.

    Though I do choose to use XP, simply because it IS reliable (despite what the idiots say), and the software / games for it are so much better and more common (though the shit ones are also more common).

    I have linux dual-booting with XP on my pc at home, and I regularly use both. It's just a pity that wine isn't yet finished enough to run most Windows-only games. Though for software (and console) development, it's hard to beat Visual Studio.



  • @Thief^ said:

    I have linux dual-booting with XP on my pc at home, and I regularly use both. It's just a pity that wine isn't yet finished enough to run most Windows-only games. Though for software (and console) development, it's hard to beat Visual Studio.

    Oh dear... Im sure that " it's hard to beat Visual Studio" will do noting but turn this thread into a giant flame war (like the great cold fusion debate of 06).
    In case this happens (And possibly to help it along) I agree completly with Thief^ VS is great and everything else sucks ass... (I'm paraphrasing)



  • I still find this at least a little bit funny. But I have to add this obligatory statement, because it's actually how I feel:

    The Real WTF™ is saving a screenshot, even a falsified one, as a JPEG. (See all those noisy artifacts around the text? They're distracting.)



  • from the looks of it this was taken on an old Windows ME box, and it certainly explains a lot ;)

     

    Agreed with above though, this is def. old... I mean this was before I was a Mac user old. (may the .NET flamers spare me ridicule)

     



  • You could tell Linux was becoming too mainstream when the real geeks started buying Macs.



  • @wonkoTheSane said:

    @Thief^ said:

    I have linux dual-booting with XP on my pc at home, and I regularly use both. It's just a pity that wine isn't yet finished enough to run most Windows-only games. Though for software (and console) development, it's hard to beat Visual Studio.

    Oh dear... Im sure that " it's hard to beat Visual Studio" will do noting but turn this thread into a giant flame war (like the great cold fusion debate of 06).
    In case this happens (And possibly to help it along) I agree completly with Thief^ VS is great and everything else sucks ass... (I'm paraphrasing)

    I would be rude to prove you wrong, so here goes :P

     I'm regularly using both Netbeans (for Java) and Visual Studio (Pro) (for C#), both the most recent versions, and nb easily beats vs, especially when it comes to refactoring (go try renaming a class in both, and you'll see what I mean).
     



  • @CDarklock said:

    You could tell Linux was becoming too mainstream when the real geeks started buying Macs.

    TRWTF (patent pending) is that I know a guy which migrated to FreeBSD because "Linux was becoming too mainstream, getting lots of Ubunt... er... dumb users which don't like to use the command line" (his words, not mine).



  • Good god, I got eaten alive for this one!



  • @VGR said:

    I still find this at least a little bit funny ... The Real WTF™ is saving a screenshot, even a falsified one, as a JPEG. (See all those noisy artifacts around the text? They're distracting.)

    Well, firstly, I actually have a copy of that image somewhere in pristine condition, probably GIF. Which actually suggests that someone re-saved a perfectly good image into a broken format. Argh. Thing is, I remember a friend creating herself an avatar -- a very well-designed one -- in AppleWorks or some such and then saving it as JPEG. Not only was it heavily aliased (presumably from primitive image editing tools) but then it was saved at low quality and thus compounded with hideous artefacts. I actually traced the whole thing as Photoshop paths and re-rendered it -- I think she could tell the difference, but people's standards and perception are pitifully low. Someone posted an image to another forum that was not just heavily artefacted, but digitally enlarged so the little 8×8 grid squares were blown up to painfully obvious size.

    Educating people in image quality is a job for the most hardcode of masochists only. The image itself is still amusing, not just because they use British swear words (yay!) but because it was so true. Painful memories of using Word 6 a lot. But as you all know, still not a patch on Excel. I kinda fancy making one of these for Excel instead. I may just do that, that would be funny. I only have one parody pic on my site so far ... (laughing at Access)

    @yumology said:

    Good god, I got eaten alive for this one!

    Hehe. You will soon learn that Internet culture is hostile and barbaric. Every one of us has a different degree of exposure to various memes and images. I still turn up all sorts of things that I discover that the rest of the world knew or saw years ago. For some reason, people seem to lack the (un)common courtesy to recognise that not everyone has seen everything before. Clearly this was new to you. Though I have to knock you down a few points for having no idea what the screenshot was about :-P "Windows"?? When does Windows do autorecovery save? Or have a Paperclip? "Track Changes" should be a clue that it's Word, since AFAIK the only Office (aka avec paperclip) tool to have revision history is Word. But I might be wrong there. I tend to avoid Office and I don't have it on any PCs here. I have Office 98 on my old Mac, whose copy of Excel crashes if I try to copy anything and paste it into another app. I even had Word crash while performing drag and drop and the icon strayed across one of Word's windows...



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    I only have one parody pic on my site so far ... (laughing at Access)

    Oh, please share. Access has slowly made me a very cynical, bitter, hostile little bastard over the years. At least, I'm fairly sure it was Access that did it...



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    I even had Word crash while performing drag and drop and the icon strayed across one of Word's windows...

    I had it crash once when typing an apostrophe in a specific word.



  • @ahnfelt said:

    I'm regularly using both Netbeans (for Java) and Visual Studio (Pro) (for C#), both the most recent versions, and nb easily beats vs, especially when it comes to refactoring (go try renaming a class in both, and you'll see what I mean).


    Are you sure it's the "most recent version" of VS Pro? I have no problem renaming a class or anything else. Many times it wants to verify what it's about to change, but everytime I check the dialog, it has highlighted the appropriate change points. I've had no problems telling it to go ahead with the refactoring.



  • @AbbydonKrafts said:

    @ahnfelt said:
    I'm regularly using both Netbeans (for Java) and Visual Studio (Pro) (for C#), both the most recent versions, and nb easily beats vs, especially when it comes to refactoring (go try renaming a class in both, and you'll see what I mean).


    Are you sure it's the "most recent version" of VS Pro? I have no problem renaming a class or anything else. Many times it wants to verify what it's about to change, but everytime I check the dialog, it has highlighted the appropriate change points. I've had no problems telling it to go ahead with the refactoring.

    And you are somehow surprised by the idea that Microsoft products may behave differently on different systems? 



  • @asuffield said:

    And you are somehow surprised by the idea that Microsoft products may behave differently on different systems?


    No. I was simply stating that "easily beats ... especially when it comes to refactoring" is not entirely true. It works on both my home and work computers and does it in a flash. I didn't want some people to get the idea that refactoring doesn't work at all in VS.



  • I was actually talking about for C++ development, I sometimes forget that VS is for all the languages. I personally love C#, and use it occasionally at home, but it would be very difficult to use it to do my job.

    I've tried some of the C++ IDEs for linux, and none of them hold a torch to VS. That's not saying that there isn't one, just that it wasn't one that I'd tried.
     



  • @Thief^ said:

    I was actually talking about for C++ development, I sometimes forget that VS is for all the languages. I personally love C#, and use it occasionally at home, but it would be very difficult to use it to do my job.

    I've tried some of the C++ IDEs for linux, and none of them hold a torch to VS. That's not saying that there isn't one, just that it wasn't one that I'd tried.

    Windows users never do get it. The very concept of what you're looking for runs counter to the basic design of unix platforms. It's like you're a boy scout, used to working with one of those pocket knives with fifty different implements stuffed into them; when confronted with a real wrench from a mechanic's toolbox, you find it inadequate because it does so little, and wonder why anybody would ever use it.



  • @sootzoo said:

    Oh, please share. Access has slowly made me a very cynical, bitter, hostile little bastard over the years. At least, I'm fairly sure it was Access that did it...

    This is an error I got from an Access MDE application:

    From this page.



  • @asuffield said:

    @Thief^ said:

    I was actually talking about for C++ development, I sometimes forget that VS is for all the languages. I personally love C#, and use it occasionally at home, but it would be very difficult to use it to do my job.

    I've tried some of the C++ IDEs for linux, and none of them hold a torch to VS. That's not saying that there isn't one, just that it wasn't one that I'd tried.

    Windows users never do get it. The very concept of what you're looking for runs counter to the basic design of unix platforms. It's like you're a boy scout, used to working with one of those pocket knives with fifty different implements stuffed into them; when confronted with a real wrench from a mechanic's toolbox, you find it inadequate because it does so little, and wonder why anybody would ever use it.

    Troll

     



  • @asuffield said:

    @Thief^ said:

    I was actually talking about for C++ development, I sometimes forget that VS is for all the languages. I personally love C#, and use it occasionally at home, but it would be very difficult to use it to do my job.

    I've tried some of the C++ IDEs for linux, and none of them hold a torch to VS. That's not saying that there isn't one, just that it wasn't one that I'd tried.

    Windows users never do get it. The very concept of what you're looking for runs counter to the basic design of unix platforms. It's like you're a boy scout, used to working with one of those pocket knives with fifty different implements stuffed into them; when confronted with a real wrench from a mechanic's toolbox, you find it inadequate because it does so little, and wonder why anybody would ever use it.

    I notice you still didn't recommend an IDE (or any other way of doing it for that matter).

    I don't just want source code highlighting, in fact I could easily live without that. What I want is an integrated editor / compiler / debugger (or at least one program which calls the others), preferably with the ability to apply changes to a running program while debugging it (edit & continue in VS).

    The last IDE I tried for linux auto-generated a makefile to do the compiling, which didn't even work because all my source files weren't in the folder  it expected them to be (though they were loaded into the project).

    Oh, and I did use to be a boy scout :)
    (Many years ago)



  • @Thief^ said:

    (or at least one program which calls the others)

    It's called a shell.



  • @iwpg said:

    @Thief^ said:

    (or at least one program which calls the others)

    It's called a shell.

    That's really the best C++ IDE linux has? </sarcasm>

    How come people always seem to be so against making linux easy to use?
     



  • @Thief^ said:

    That's really the best C++ IDE linux has? </sarcasm>

    Did you read asuffield's comment?

    @Thief^ said:


    How come people always seem to be so against making linux easy to use?

    I find the shell perfectly easy to use, but maybe I'm just more intelligent than most Windows users.



  • @Thief^ said:

    source code highlighting I could easily live without.

    You hardcore.

    Syntax colouring is a blessing of immeasurable proportions.

     

    I'm wondering what Asuffields programming-equivalent of the mechanic's real wrench is. Decent text editors? Command line tools?



  • @iwpg said:

    I find the shell perfectly easy to use, but maybe I'm just more intelligent than most Windows users.

    Now that's a classic "works on MY machine" comment. If you were so intelligent you would maybe see that neither linux nor windows is built for you alone.

    The command line is very powerful and pretty easy if you know what you're doing. But it's not the golden tool that solves everything.

     
     



  • @dhromed said:

    I'm wondering what Asuffields programming-equivalent of the mechanic's real wrench is. Decent text editors? Command line tools?

    You're overextending the analogy, but that is at least closer to the right way to approach the question. Starting from "I want an IDE" would be the wrong way. IDEs make poor programming tools for the same reasons that pocket knives are ineffective at maintaining a jet aircraft.

    (And no, I'm not going to give a detailed description of what's involved in the unix approach, because nobody can really understand how and why it's the right way until they've learned how to do it for themselves. All I can really do is tell people who look for IDEs that they're up the wrong tree)



  • @asuffield said:

    and no, I'm not going to give a detailed description of what's involved in the unix approach[..]

    Of course not. That would be far less elitist. The horror! 



  • KDevelop and the CDT for Eclipse are both pretty good.  the CDT needs some work and I hope it gets better in the next couple years.  They are currently working on a internal compiler for it which might allow them to do edit and continue style running.



  • @tster said:

    KDevelop and the CDT for Eclipse are both pretty good.

    Now that's a first.  I've never seen someone praise KDevelop before.



  • @asuffield said:

    @dhromed said:

    I'm wondering what Asuffields programming-equivalent of the mechanic's real wrench is. Decent text editors? Command line tools?

    You're overextending the analogy, but that is at least closer to the right way to approach the question. Starting from "I want an IDE" would be the wrong way. IDEs make poor programming tools for the same reasons that pocket knives are ineffective at maintaining a jet aircraft.

    Well, the wrench was sort of a crucial element in your analogy, so I figured you'd have a replacement for it in the the coding world. We're all toolmen anyway, so the analogy appeared pretty straightforward. Your second analogy isn't so mappable, though. Pocket knives are bad for real machinery because the fragile, tiny, powerless objects don't stand a chance of tightening a bolt. IDEs are anything but tiny and fragile. At the very least, VS is a bloated slow bastard that attaches the bolt by sitting on it thus squashing it into the metal surface.

     

    I used my pocket knife's pliers once to open a new bottle of water with the sports cap. That shit was tight.



  • @dhromed said:

    Well, the wrench was sort of a crucial element in your analogy, so I figured you'd have a replacement for it in the the coding world. We're all toolmen anyway, so the analogy appeared pretty straightforward.

    I didn't really plan it out any further than illustrating the sort of conceptual disconnect that I was observing. Not everything I write has more than one meaning.

    Your second analogy isn't so mappable, though. Pocket knives are bad for real machinery because the fragile, tiny, powerless objects don't stand a chance of tightening a bolt. IDEs are anything but tiny and fragile. At the very least, VS is a bloated slow bastard that attaches the bolt by sitting on it thus squashing it into the metal surface.

    The essence of the second analogy is this: why exactly is a pocket knife designed to be so fragile and powerless? Why isn't it designed to replace a set of real tools?

    IDEs face similar issues, and they end up not really doing anything optimally, while doing most things in a mediocre fashion. People who have never used anything else generally don't realise that it's possible to do so much better at most of those tasks.



  • @asuffield said:

    The essence of the second analogy is this: why exactly is a pocket knife designed to be so fragile and powerless? Why isn't it designed to replace a set of real tools?
     

    I'd equate pocket knives with purse dogs, or those little floor scrubber creatures, as opposed to a german or husky.

    How can a toolset designed to fit in your pocket also be designed to to real work? It's a little bit like the weird growth of secondary features on cellphones, like camera, music player, organizer software.



  • @asuffield said:

    The essence of the second analogy is this: why exactly is a pocket knife designed to be so fragile and powerless? Why isn't it designed to replace a set of real tools?

    IDEs face similar issues, and they end up not really doing anything optimally, while doing most things in a mediocre fashion. People who have never used anything else generally don't realise that it's possible to do so much better at most of those tasks.

    If you rely solely on built in code generation tools maybe. But apart from that I've never had the feeling IDEs were supposed to "do" anything at all.
    I'd see syntax checking, code completion (as in "complete the name of this property", not "create a Hello World program for me"), object/class navigation, resource management and debugging as the core features of a good IDE.
    All of those features make it easier to obey the constraints of the given language. And those are there if you use an IDE or not. Just in the second case, you have to keep all of them in your mind by yourself, while in the first one you can concentrate on the actual programming.
    Of course you can "program for the IDE", like in the example where someone slapped a "this" in front of everything to trigger code completion. But that's YOUR fault then and not the one of the IDE. In all cases it's you who writes the code and who sets the rules how to write it. The IDE just makes it more comfortable.



  • There's no way I'd stay sane working on this project without a dropdown (and self filtering) list when I type . :: or -> after a class variable, class or class pointer, or without a nice easy way to go to the definition of the class (not all of them are in headers named after themselves).

    Our source folder contains some 10,000 text files (not all c++, though the majority is) for a total of 200MB. This isn't including the .libs or source of the numerous external libraries we use, whose folder totals >5GB.

    We've occasionally come up against an "out of memory" issue when linking, either because of the debug symbols or "link time code generation"


    Also, I love how this forum editor randomly switches between adding <br> tags and <p></p> tags. I can't remember a post I've made here and not gone to edit the html for.



  • @Thief^ said:

    There's no way I'd stay sane working on this project without a dropdown (and self filtering) list when I type . :: or -> after a class variable, class or class pointer, or without a nice easy way to go to the definition of the class (not all of them are in headers named after themselves).

    Your project has insane, inconsistent class definitions. Therein lies the real problem. Which brings us to the big issue with that particular feature: they encourage people to be lazy in their design of interfaces. Ultimately they are a crutch for sloppy work.

    For a skilled typist on a real keyboard, it's actually slower to use an interactive match than to type the thing out in full (the round-trip time between the part of your brain used for reading and the part used for typing is quite poor), until you get up to around 30-40 characters in length - and you should never have many things with a name that long. If you do, find the person responsible and hit them repeatedly with a thesaurus.

    Our source folder contains some 10,000 text files (not all c++, though the majority is) for a total of 200MB.

    That puts it on the smaller side of medium-scale. Most commercial endeavours are somewhere in that vicinity.

     

    We've occasionally come up against an "out of memory" issue when linking, either because of the debug symbols or "link time code generation"

    Your linker sucks. There is no good reason for that to happen. The C and C++ object formats and ABIs were very carefully designed so that linkers can be implemented in a way that won't ever do this - they can run disk to disk, never holding more than a few kilobytes in memory (although typically they carry the entire symbol table in memory for better performance; that should be no more than a few hundred kb). Sadly, most linkers suck, far worse than the compilers, which are pretty buggy to start with. You are probably looking at a really stupid bug.



  • @asuffield said:

    Your linker sucks. There is no good reason for that to happen. The C and C++ object formats and ABIs were very carefully designed so that linkers can be implemented in a way that won't ever do this - they can run disk to disk, never holding more than a few kilobytes in memory (although typically they carry the entire symbol table in memory for better performance; that should be no more than a few hundred kb). Sadly, most linkers suck, far worse than the compilers, which are pretty buggy to start with. You are probably looking at a really stupid bug.

    What C (and especially C++) "object format and ABI" isn't tied to a specific platform? For C I guess there's the System V ABI, but... C++? I can imagine an implementation of templates that requires something that could be termed "link time code generation".



  • @asuffield said:

    @Thief^ said:

    There's no way I'd stay sane working on this project without a dropdown (and self filtering) list when I type . :: or -> after a class variable, class or class pointer, or without a nice easy way to go to the definition of the class (not all of them are in headers named after themselves).

    Your project has insane, inconsistent class definitions. Therein lies the real problem. Which brings us to the big issue with that particular feature: they encourage people to be lazy in their design of interfaces. Ultimately they are a crutch for sloppy work.

    For a skilled typist on a real keyboard, it's actually slower to use an interactive match than to type the thing out in full (the round-trip time between the part of your brain used for reading and the part used for typing is quite poor), until you get up to around 30-40 characters in length - and you should never have many things with a name that long. If you do, find the person responsible and hit them repeatedly with a thesaurus.

    Unfortunately the person(s) responsible work at another company and we're licensing from them.

    For your comment about the typist, you're assuming that they know what "thing" they want. If you're looking for a function that does "X" but you don't know the name, an interactive list is a hell of a lot faster than trying to look up the class definition of the type of the variable you're using, only to not be able to find it and have to search 3 or 4 parent classes. Instead I could just type A.Widget and I get a drop list of all the member variables and functions of A containing "Widget" (not that we have any class variables named A).

    @asuffield said:

    @Thief^ said:

    Our source folder contains some 10,000 text files (not all c++, though the majority is) for a total of 200MB.

    That puts it on the smaller side of medium-scale. Most commercial endeavours are somewhere in that vicinity.

    I said this mainly as a point that it's not a one-person (or even small group) project. I know it's not the largest project ever. I was also surprised at how small the folder was, truth be told.

    It's still too large to work on with just a plain text editor and a command line compiler though. We're not going to be building it for linux, despite it already being cross platform (including one platform that uses gcc for the compiler, but in VC++) because of low demand and no easy support for either developing entirely on linux or compiling and remote debugging a linux version from VC++.

    @asuffield said:

    @Thief^ said:

    We've occasionally come up against an "out of memory" issue when linking, either because of the debug symbols or "link time code generation"

    Your linker sucks. There is no good reason for that to happen. The C and C++ object formats and ABIs were very carefully designed so that linkers can be implemented in a way that won't ever do this - they can run disk to disk, never holding more than a few kilobytes in memory (although typically they carry the entire symbol table in memory for better performance; that should be no more than a few hundred kb). Sadly, most linkers suck, far worse than the compilers, which are pretty buggy to start with. You are probably looking at a really stupid bug.

    The linker in question is VC++'s.

    EDIT: Perhaps if I just ignore this thread from now on the flame war will end :)


Log in to reply