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Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

devblogs.microsoft.com

41–50 of 311 posts

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#41
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just MS. I think they might have fixed it now, but my personal favorite was when Google photos would send me a notification with a preview of an AI generated album of my photos they made for me even though the app did not now, nor ever have permissions (on Android) to look at said photos. And it too would then "catch up" and ask permission to see my files and I'd say "no" and then the preview would go away.

The team that wrote the preview portion of the app is a different team to the one that wrote the permission requesting part. They communicate asynchronously (as a team/org, but this probably is reflected in the app's architecture!), which means the outcome is eventually consistent! But you managed to observe one of those inconsistent cases!

Yah. But I would think the permissions would be a OS level thing that can’t be bypassed simply because Google also wrote the app.

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#42
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just MS. I think they might have fixed it now, but my personal favorite was when Google photos would send me a notification with a preview of an AI generated album of my photos they made for me even though the app did not now, nor ever have permissions (on Android) to look at said photos. And it too would then "catch up" and ask permission to see my files and I'd say "no" and then the preview would go away.

The team that wrote the preview portion of the app is a different team to the one that wrote the permission requesting part. They communicate asynchronously (as a team/org, but this probably is reflected in the app's architecture!), which means the outcome is eventually consistent! But you managed to observe one of those inconsistent cases!

The team that wrote the preview portion just accessed the photos with elevated permissions if permission wasn’t granted yet? That doesn’t make any sense

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#43

This relates to something that might have started around that time: The practice of displaying the splash screen for a finite time period, then showing the user environment before the software was fully started . It was suspected that both OS's and apps were doing this, because people notice when "the app takes too long to load." Now you have to guess whether the software has really loaded or not before you start usi…

It's clear to me that the intent with this 30-second timeout was that it's better for you to have a possibly half-broken but at least somehow usable desktop than be stuck with the loading screen forever, having to boot into a different OS to try to fix your main one.

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#44
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just MS. I think they might have fixed it now, but my personal favorite was when Google photos would send me a notification with a preview of an AI generated album of my photos they made for me even though the app did not now, nor ever have permissions (on Android) to look at said photos. And it too would then "catch up" and ask permission to see my files and I'd say "no" and then the preview would go away.

The team that wrote the preview portion of the app is a different team to the one that wrote the permission requesting part. They communicate asynchronously (as a team/org, but this probably is reflected in the app's architecture!), which means the outcome is eventually consistent! But you managed to observe one of those inconsistent cases!

Yes! So many times observed that there is a name for it (Conway's law), teams having limited touchpoints obviously leads to such impedance mismatches.

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#45
post #8

“Comfort food”. That’s so funny. I still use motif window manager with steelblue4 desktop and wheat xterm background since aix into Linux. That was my first default in 1989 college and nothing has improved since. (Gnome, kde and the like make me want to upchuck).

What will you do when you want to use a 4K monitor? This is not to be dismissive. I am genuinely curious if HiDPI works on motif.

You would set an appropriate size in .Xresources or somesuch.

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#46

“Comfort food”. That’s so funny. I still use motif window manager with steelblue4 desktop and wheat xterm background since aix into Linux. That was my first default in 1989 college and nothing has improved since. (Gnome, kde and the like make me want to upchuck).

"Nothing has improved since". That's so funny.

What's the biggest thing that's improved? We have 4x the pixels, so we spend 4x the rendering time to draw everything with 4x as many pixels, when it works, and complain when it doesn't.

Would have been easier to stick with the pixel density we had.

Oh, and we have to wait a frame to see everything because of compositing that I still don't quite understand what it's supposed to do? Something something backing store?

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#47
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The team that wrote the preview portion of the app is a different team to the one that wrote the permission requesting part. They communicate asynchronously (as a team/org, but this probably is reflected in the app's architecture!), which means the outcome is eventually consistent! But you managed to observe one of those inconsistent cases!

The team that wrote the preview portion just accessed the photos with elevated permissions if permission wasn’t granted yet? That doesn’t make any sense

Oh, god, no, it makes complete sense. Somebody has to code the permissions in, after all...

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#48
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The team that wrote the preview portion of the app is a different team to the one that wrote the permission requesting part. They communicate asynchronously (as a team/org, but this probably is reflected in the app's architecture!), which means the outcome is eventually consistent! But you managed to observe one of those inconsistent cases!

Yah. But I would think the permissions would be a OS level thing that can’t be bypassed simply because Google also wrote the app.

What OS? The one Google wrote, underlying these services?

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#49
post #40

This relates to something that might have started around that time: The practice of displaying the splash screen for a finite time period, then showing the user environment before the software was fully started . It was suspected that both OS's and apps were doing this, because people notice when "the app takes too long to load." Now you have to guess whether the software has really loaded or not before you start usi…

> showing the user environment before the software was fully started. and it has migrated to web apps today - where doing something causes the UI to show a loading/progress wheel, but it takes forever in actuality (or on start up of the webpage, you get a blank screen with placeholder bars/blurred color images etc). And this is the so-called responsive design...

What would you suggest? Is it better to wait until the whole app is loaded to show anything? Or is the only solution to fix loading times in the first place?

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#50
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The team that wrote the preview portion of the app is a different team to the one that wrote the permission requesting part. They communicate asynchronously (as a team/org, but this probably is reflected in the app's architecture!), which means the outcome is eventually consistent! But you managed to observe one of those inconsistent cases!

Yah. But I would think the permissions would be a OS level thing that can’t be bypassed simply because Google also wrote the app.

it's very easy to imagine the scenario where this happens.

Those photos may have already been uploaded to google's web servers (from my understanding, this happens with google photos by default?), from which a preview has been generated. The permission is at the android app level, and is requested at some point to ensure that the permission model is respected from the POV of the user. I can imagine the permission request being out of sync!

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