WTF Bites
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I worked on a project where we almost deleted a much loved feature because no one complained about it for a while. Didn't think anyone was using it.
I didn't know you worked on Firefox's FTP support.
Edit: oh wait, you said "almost".
s/Firefox FTP/various Google services
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
Not to mention that showing "NaN" to end users under any circumstances is just a bad idea. Capture it and display "Error" if you must.
A bad enough customer would rather show anything than "Error".
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
@izzion those are unintelligible by any mind not being fed by a .25%BAC bloodstream so they are unlikely to cause long term damage.
Oh, okay, then that's "networking".
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
MileIQ
IQ of a rocking horse is still IQ
And it's the population average!
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Microsoft in 1994: We care about stability so much we'll reverse-engineer every Win 3.1 program we can get our hands on and do everything in our power to make sure their crazy ass broken code still works fine on 95.
Microsoft in 2022: Failed background Edge update freezes the whole taskbar until reboot and even restarting explorer.exe doesn't help LOL.
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We care about
stabilitybug for bug backwards compatibility so muchTheir shit was always unstable until at least XP SP3.
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We care about
stabilitybug for bug backwards compatibility so muchTheir shit was always unstable until at least XP SP3.
Mostly due to 3rd party drivers and other apps too smart for their own good. Other than that, Windows was rock solid at least since 98. Until Windows 10, that is. Or maybe 8? Never used 8.
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@Gustav eh, depends on your definition of rock solid. I guess most blue screens were caused by third party drivers. But a swiss cheese network stack that got you infected with Sasser (or was it Blaster? ) literally within minutes of being online was not a third party thing.
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@topspin okay. Their browser always sucked, and apparently it didn't change to this day. Still, there was definitely a major shift in the company's mentality regarding not being broken out of the box.
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HowTF does do that? Either load new posts dynamically as they appear, or don't, but don't half-ass it. (Look two posts above and see that there's posts missing in the screenshot)
This always makes me miss a bunch of posts in fast-moving threads.
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Their browser always sucked
Wasn't the browser, if I understand correctly, just an open port or something like that. Being online was enough.
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Windows was rock solid at least since 98
Either you never used Win98 or we have a very different definition of rock solid.
Multiple crash per day is not what I would call rock solid
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@TimeBandit alternatively, I didn't have a printer.
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Still, there was definitely a major shift in the company's mentality regarding not being broken out of the box.
Now they first instill a false sense of confidence before surprisingly breaking after an update.
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instill a false sense of confidence
I can't remember the last time a Windows update instilled a sense of confidence, false or not.
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@HardwareGeek I remember very well. It was in 98 days, on a pirated system. It said it doesn't work at all.
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
I can't remember the last time a Windows update instilled a sense of confidence, false or not.
Not even when it told you that your files are right where you left them?
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@TimeBandit said in WTF Bites:
@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
I can't remember the last time a Windows update instilled a sense of confidence, false or not.
Not even when it told you that your files are right where you left them?
Yeah... the fact that they felt the need to include such phrasing instead of touting how Fast and Battery the Intertnerts was now.... poisoned any and all confidence past present and future.
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A physical WTF:
Consider the thermostat (in freedom units). Where should I put the dial to maintain 70F? That's right, pointed at the 65 marker. Why? Because the dots actually represent the next labeled value, not halfway between the labels.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
Where should I put the dial to maintain 70F?
First, you get one of these:
And then you get 69999 more.
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@Benjamin-Hall Where's the 55 dot?
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A bad enough customer would rather show anything than "Error".
See also: ď…ş and ď…ą
Seriously, what's up with "Your computer had to reboot due to an upsie-wupsie, sowwy." that Windows and macOS does? Just show me the goddamn error with all the information so I know where to point the blame without having to hunt through the system logs.
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We care about
stabilitybug for bug backwards compatibility so muchTheir shit was always unstable until at least XP SP3.
Yeah, XP and 7 were fairly good. 10 was alright but I was using object dock and dual commander then so I missed most of the ui bullshit. 11’s ui and anything store related is a fucking tire fire. You could ignore the store for the most part on 10 but they're worse than Samsung now. If there's a 11 ltsb I'll probably switch to that.
I would love to know what they're up to. 11 has been such a tire fire it's actually making Linux viable.
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@Benjamin-Hall You had me at "freedom units"
A physical WTF: [...] freedom units
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@TimeBandit said in WTF Bites:
Windows was rock solid at least since 98
Either you never used Win98 or we have a very different definition of rock solid.
Multiple crash per day is not what I would call rock solid
I had pretty good luck with 95 and 98SE, with few bluescreens or big crashes. However, I built all my machines myself and wiped them at least once a year or when making any non-trivial hardware changes.
Never used Windows 2000 (Workstation or Server) on personal machines, but I did have a Windows 2000 Server multi-purpose server for a long time.
I put together a LAN pit in 1998/9 so we could play things like Diablo and Unreal Tournament; at its peak we had half a dozen computers in the basement plus a spot or two for people to bring stuff. Started using XP around 2002 when doing hardware upgrades. With XP I didn't do maintenance wipes as often, but they did happen occasionally. Not nearly as many crashes.
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I'm getting slightly annoyed at my work laptop. It is connected to the work domain (as it should), but it is also slow as molasses which looks like something caused by the group policies enforced or something similar. Today it even crashed and rebooted, didn't even display a bluescreen. And the system log just showed the "computer did not shut down properly" message. And a million group policy messages. Just because I did something crazy like close the laptop for 5 minutes and then tried waking it up again.
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Windows was rock solid at least since 98.
There were times that rock was a scree slope.
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Wasn't the browser, if I understand correctly, just an open port or something like that. Being online was enough.
It was a flaw (at least in XP) in their handling of one of the network types that's now usually disabled or firewalled very hard. It blew up in the time of XP SP1, and I had the distinction of not being affected by the problems because I'd already poked around in the network settings and turned on the firewall because I'm of the general opinion that computers shouldn't run world-accessible services unless you know that they're doing so. I remember being told that the hard part was keeping things from being hacked for long enough after the initial boot to get the firewall switched on...
The idea of "unplug the network cable while installing from CD" missed a lot of people.
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Today it even crashed and rebooted
Many colleagues recently had similar issue, but caused by fat administrator fingers. There is some software update utility running in the background, and the administrator pushed an update that needed restart, and misconfigured it so it restarted automatically instead of popping up a prompt (with 8 or so hour timeout) it normally does.
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The idea of "unplug the network cable while installing from CD" missed a lot of people.
To be fair, the idea of speedrunning "turn off everything before the system is compromised... oops, too late" on a clean install is also pretty ridiculous.
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I remember being told that the hard part was keeping things from being hacked for long enough after the initial boot to get the firewall switched
… and thus the masquerade graduated from an ugly hack to an essential feature.
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@Bulb Oh, yeah, I've had that too. The mandatory "software center" (that does nothing not already covered by other apps) decided to ignore my set work hours and rebooted in the middle of the workday instead for a "critical update" (served by Windows Update). Herpderp. It's like when Microsoft fixes their shit, our IT needs to find ways to replicate the stupidity of old.
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The idea of "unplug the network cable while installing from CD" missed a lot of people.
Not a problem when you had one of the many network cards that didn't ship with drivers by default. (Fortunately the drivers mostly came on a separate CD ... and the computers with a CD/DVD drive. Substitute CD with 3.5" floppy depending on %.)
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This always makes me miss a bunch of posts in fast-moving threads.
Nothing to do with post index adjustment. I am not taking the fall for this one.
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Never used Windows 2000 (Workstation or Server) on personal machines
I used Win2k Workstation for a long time. Probably the best Windows experience I ever had. I could code all day without a reboot, then game on it at night.
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I did premeditatedly close the laptop for 5 minutes and attempt waking it up again.
Sicko.
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This always makes me miss a bunch of posts in fast-moving threads.
Nothing to do with post index adjustment. I am not taking the fall for this one.
I don't have anyone blocked anyway.
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@TimeBandit said in WTF Bites:
Win2k Workstation for a long time. Probably the best Windows experience I ever had.
Also almost-POSIX. The NT line wasn't quite garbage.
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@TimeBandit said in WTF Bites:
Win2k Workstation for a long time. Probably the best Windows experience I ever had.
Also almost-POSIX. The NT line wasn't quite garbage.
Garbage enough that we're still using it.
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
I really want to find out where they are coming up with the additional "1" and "0" from but this is too insufferable to bother.
Reverse Fibonacci maybe?
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@Rhywden that explanation seems plausible enough. Let's roll with it.
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Mostly due to 3rd party drivers and other apps too smart for their own good. Other than that, Windows was rock solid at least since 98. Until Windows 10, that is. Or maybe 8? Never used 8.
Horseshit. You're forgetting about Vista and ME and 98 before SE and numerous other versions I am probably forgetting. The first versions of all Windows OS are rubbish. Vista especially so. That release should have been stillborn.
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Still, there was definitely a major shift in the company's mentality regarding not being broken out of the box.
98, ME and Vista were all broken out of the box and remained that way to EoL.
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Still, there was definitely a major shift in the company's mentality regarding not being broken out of the box.
Now they first instill a false sense of confidence before surprisingly breaking after an update.
Along with answering questions that no one asked and solving problems that don't exist.
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
Mostly due to 3rd party drivers and other apps too smart for their own good. Other than that, Windows was rock solid at least since 98. Until Windows 10, that is. Or maybe 8? Never used 8.
Horseshit. You're forgetting about Vista and ME and 98 before SE and numerous other versions I am probably forgetting. The first versions of all Windows OS are rubbish. Vista especially so. That release should have been stillborn.
Vista’s main problems were that it was unpolished (it needed to get out of the door after year-long projects were canceled and “Longhorn” long delayed) and that due to OEM pressure the Vista capable label was put on PCs that definitely were under-powered to run it.
Like, the new DWM and Aero were not really different from 7, but low budget PCs at the time came with complete crap graphics that couldn’t handle it.It was still miles ahead of Windows ME.
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
Still, there was definitely a major shift in the company's mentality regarding not being broken out of the box.
Now they first instill a false sense of confidence before surprisingly breaking after an update.
Along with answering questions that no one asked and solving problems that don't exist.
They’re solving the problem of “how can we make people subscribe to MS cloud services they don’t need.”