Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

devblogs.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 311 posts

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

#51

Post by TeMPOraL »

garbagewoman wrote: post #42
chii wrote: 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

I imagine the preview was generated server-side, where permissions granted to apps don't matter.

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

#52

Post by 3036e4 »

progmetaldev wrote: post #33
squigz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is. I used to customize everything. On Windows 95/98/2000/XP - custom cursors, themes, icon packs, custom Windows loading screen, the works. > I have the same history customizing everything! ... then giving up because life gets busy. I think this might be why some people have such different experiences. I don't try to customize "everything" - just what needs to be. Like, yeah, I would expect it to be difficult t…

I am with you, customizing your daily tools and saving those configurations is far different from customizing every visual element of your operating system. Being able to reproduce your environment is definitely a worthy goal, but at the same time, I think you'd be limiting yourself by not configuring your production software to your own liking/most-efficient way you work.

One of the few things I do bother to configure is my window manager, but only because it happens to be well designed and make it easy to store all configuration in my config git repo.

Too much software put host-specific stuff in settings files (like absolute paths) or just are not stable enough in general that it is worth trying to maintain a portable configuration.

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

#54

Post by eviks »

90s_dev wrote: post #5

> Also, I tend to stick with default configurations because it makes bug filing easier. I've learned to use default configurations pretty much everywhere. It's far too much of a hassle to maintain customizations, so it's easiest to just not care. The exception is my ~50 lines of VS Code settings I have sync'd in a mysterious file somewhere that I've never seen, presumably on github's servers, but not anywhere I can s…

Using bad defaults is also a hassle, and you do it way more often than maintaining customizations

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

#55

Post by xigoi »

chii wrote: post #39
Enginerrrd wrote: post #34

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!

“Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.” —Melvin Conway

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

#56

Post by 3036e4 »

90s_dev wrote: post #27
squigz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's far too much of a hassle to maintain customizations Is it? The vast majority of the time, I change settings/set things up the way I want, and then... leave them for literally years. Hell, I can directly restore a backup I have of Sublime Text from years ago and my customizations will work.

Most of the time, yes. I maintained my vimrc for maybe 10-15 years before I gave up on it. The hard part of maintaining a config is that there's no such thing as cost-free usage, it always takes a mental toll to change a config, to learn a new config, to remember which configs are in use and what they do, to backup configs, or at least to setup and maintain a config-auto-backup flow. By far, the easiest mental model…

I don't know vim well. Why is it not easy to just keep using the same settings?

The oldest parts of my emacs config go back at least 30 years and I have had it in a git repo for ~15. I keep my entire .emacs.d versioned, including all third-party packages I depend on (so no fetching of anything from the cloud).

Have had to do at most minimal changes when upgrading to newer versions and with some tiny amount of work the same config still works for emacs from around version 21 to 31 (but features are of course missing in older versions).

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

#57

Post by tonyedgecombe »

chii wrote: post #40
analog31 wrote: post #13

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...

I'd be happy to get a progress wheel, half the time it is a blank page.

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

#58

Post by bandrami »

xigoi wrote: post #55
chii wrote: 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!

“Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.” —Melvin Conway

I've heard this was the secret to AWS's taking off twenty years ago: Bezos told the various teams they can only interact with each other as if they were vendors and customers to each other.

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

#59

Post by kn0where »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #34
necovek wrote: post #32

It's funny to see this: after avoiding the Windows world for the last 25 years, back in the corporate world in the last few, I see this pattern with Microsoft tools all the time. Teams not loading due to security issues, but notifications coming through with full content of messages. Ability to type a handful of words in cloud version of Word (or paste full documents) before security check catches up and requires me…

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.

Similar with google docs, if you share a link to a doc, even if the doc is restricted access, anyone can see the thumbnail icon with the contents of page 1.

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

#60

Post by mzi »

bandrami wrote: post #58
xigoi wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.” —Melvin Conway

I've heard this was the secret to AWS's taking off twenty years ago: Bezos told the various teams they can only interact with each other as if they were vendors and customers to each other.

It was formulated a little different. But this was the 2002 mandate:

1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

3. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

4. It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter.

5. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

6. Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.

7. Thank you; have a nice day!

Post reply on HN