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If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#91

Post by maerF0x0 »

I've learned this as "swallowing errors" and IMO it's a poor practice. Not only does it not solve the issue at hand (you cannot print on an xbox), but it actively hides how broken the software is, which makes bug discovery and testing much harder.

This is one thing I like about Go's panic. You're mostly not supposed to use it or recover from it at run time. It serves as a great vehicle to blare loud sirens at testing time that you (the programmer) screwed up (and that's ok, we all do), and it's time to figure out where and how to fix it :)

PS this analogy works in a lot of domains - If you have actors in a system actively trying to hide their flaws/errors it will be exponentially harder to root them out and solve the issues.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#92

Post by mnw21cam »

gruez wrote: post #67
bombcar wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you compile them to DVI you'll get the same DVI file. Compiled to PDF you might get very slight differences.

>the same DVI file. Which is used by approximately no one. Good luck uploading your resume in DVI.

Good luck uploading your CV in PDF. I tried that a few times and got moaned at a load that my CV must be in Word format. In the end I converted the PDF into images, and created a Word document in OpenOffice (this was a while ago) with one page image per page. Got moaned at for that too.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#93

Post by benjaminpv »

gruez wrote: post #66
alpaca128 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A file from 1997? Maybe if you get lucky, but there's also a good chance that it will simply look wrong in any office application you try. With Word you can't even guarantee that reopening the file on the same computer & version won't change its formatting. That was the reason I learned TeX. And games? Microsoft broke numerous games by shutting down GFWL. I had to pirate Dark Souls as my original copy wasn't playable…

>With Word you can't even guarantee that reopening the file on the same computer & version won't change its formatting. Source? This seems utterly bizarre.

I don't know if anything's changed but for a long time a lot of Word's formatting was impacted by the printer you had installed and/or selected. So it was pretty easy to run into scenarios on a network where printers being taken offline/their capabilities changed resulted in documents getting reformatted.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#94

Post by kentonv »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #81
kentonv wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is the other way around -- it's written from the perspective of a platform developer trying to deal with apps that didn't anticipate the situation.

Thanks for the clarification, you're correct. The nuance/complexity is that the platform developer must conform to a platform spec (in this case, the Windows API) that usually makes some underlying assumptions about the capabilities of the system that runs it, which may not always be correct.

Yes, I'd add to that by pointing out that the "spec" is a de facto spec subject to Hyrum's Law, that is, people have built their apps against other implementations of the platform and inevitably don't handle any behavior not seen on those other implementations.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#95

Post by maerF0x0 »

daveoc64 wrote: post #32
hailmac wrote: post #15

Why /wouldn't/ I want to print something from my Xbox?

Due to the input device most people will use (controller), apps that work best on Xbox are those used to consume content like photos or videos. You might be viewing something and want to print it, but that's clearly not desirable enough for Microsoft to build print functionality into the Xbox UI.

I mean, it has USB ports. If I can plug it in, I'd like to be able to use it _somehow_ , even if that means installing another app that does direct port/device access or w/e . ie, it should be possible (but not necessarily super easy)

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#96

Post by mnw21cam »

bombcar wrote: post #63
gruez wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My LaTeX files from 35 years ago, on the other hand - they just do fine. Yeah, because they're plain text. A fairer comparison would be whether they render pixel perfectly as 35 years ago, which I doubt.

If you compile them to DVI you'll get the same DVI file. Compiled to PDF you might get very slight differences.

If you're rendering to DVI, it's explicitly defined as a bug if it doesn't compile to exactly the same pixel-perfect output as a previous version.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#97

Post by blibble »

paxys wrote: post #10

People are reacting negatively as expected, but stuff like this is exactly why you can click on a file that was written in Word '97 or a game that was compiled for MS-DOS three decades ago and it opens on your computer exactly as expected. Backwards compatibility is always messy. You either do it imperfectly or don't do it at all.

MS-DOS software doesn't work on modern 64-bit windows

you get a dialog saying "unsupported"

now you can download dosbox but that isn't really "exactly as expected"

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#98

Post by mnw21cam »

alpaca128 wrote: post #60
paxys wrote: post #10

People are reacting negatively as expected, but stuff like this is exactly why you can click on a file that was written in Word '97 or a game that was compiled for MS-DOS three decades ago and it opens on your computer exactly as expected. Backwards compatibility is always messy. You either do it imperfectly or don't do it at all.

A file from 1997? Maybe if you get lucky, but there's also a good chance that it will simply look wrong in any office application you try. With Word you can't even guarantee that reopening the file on the same computer & version won't change its formatting. That was the reason I learned TeX. And games? Microsoft broke numerous games by shutting down GFWL. I had to pirate Dark Souls as my original copy wasn't playable…

I had the same with OpenOffice (before LibreOffice was a thing). I created a nice document while logged in remotely to a Linux computer over Xvnc. When I opened it on the native terminal, the layout was different. Same computer, same version of OpenOffice, different X server.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#99

Post by xp84 »

iamtedd wrote: post #87

> the function for installing a printer can return immediately with a result code that means “The user cancelled the operation.” I hope this is never shown to the user, because one of the most infuriating things that can happen is when the computer tells me that I did something I actually didn't.

It would be unlikely that it would be, since to any properly implemented app, the fact that the user cancelled is not an error since it thinks you did it yourself on purpose.

On the other hand, I recall a few years ago (in the days of one of Apple’s least stable Mac OS [X] releases) seeing the message frequently after a random kernel panic “You restarted your computer because of a problem.” And I would be pretty ticked, saying “Nope! YOU restarted yourself. 0% of this was me. I was sitting here and you just died and rebooted.”

They changed it to use passive voice instead, a year or two after that!

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#100

Post by benjaminpv »

wewtyflakes wrote: post #43
paxys wrote: post #10

People are reacting negatively as expected, but stuff like this is exactly why you can click on a file that was written in Word '97 or a game that was compiled for MS-DOS three decades ago and it opens on your computer exactly as expected. Backwards compatibility is always messy. You either do it imperfectly or don't do it at all.

I hear that refrain often regarding Microsoft, but with games, I have not had good luck. I resort to using GOG, which itself ends up virtualizing the environment anyway. For example, I do not think anyone would have success installing the original Sim City on Windows 11.

Yeah, people frequently trot out the Sim City classic example, but the fact is that games in particular have borne the brunt of Windows API changes. If it didn't happen we'd have no need for wrappers like dgVoodoo: software once only meant to wrap Glide calls, but now used to get around deprecation to DirectX as well. Not to mention the breaking changes to the audio stack that happened between 9x and Vista.
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