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

181–190 of 311 posts

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

#181

Post by phkahler »

jameshart wrote: post #164
phkahler wrote: post #162

This is the kind of problem that can be prevented by using "better" coding patterns. Not to say it will be prevented, but that some ways people like to structure code are more prone to these kinds of bugs. I quoted the word "better" because I work with a competent but less experienced guy that tends to write more complex code, or what some claim is just a different style than I would prefer. I make claims that "this…

Let’s be honest this is the kind of thing that can happen to anyone. We all like to think we have picked up habits that immunize us from certain kinds of error but large software systems are complex and bugs happen. The number of people in here taking ‘Raymond Chen tells an anecdote about the time a dumb bug shipped in Windows and was fixed two weeks later’ as an indictment of Microsoft’s engineering culture is frank…

>> Let’s be honest this is the kind of thing that can happen to anyone.

I didn't say I'm immune to doing this myself, nor did I condemn anything about the particular scenario in the blog. My pain is in trying to articulate why some ways are better when any code that works is in some sense just fine.

>> We all like to think we have picked up habits that immunize us from certain kinds of error but large software systems are complex and bugs happen.

We sure do, although "immunize" is too strong. We try to minimize the likelyhood of these kinds of things. Experience is valuable and sometimes it's hard to articulate why.

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

#182

Post by sixothree »

RajT88 wrote: post #157
vlowrian wrote: post #62

As someone who prefers a solid color background, I’m always surprised by how often this simple preference leads me into bizarre rabbit holes. Some additional examples beyond the OP: - In the latest macOS, trying to set a custom solid color background just gives you a blinding white screen (see: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256029958?sortBy=rank ). - GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgr…

I too prefer a solid color. However, I've noticed, there's not much point in changing it. Showing the desktop is a waste of screen real estate because of the generations of abuse of desktop shortcuts. Even if you are careful, it becomes a cluttered wasteland (on Windows anyways). I just learned to never use the desktop for anything and always have windows up on various monitors.

I would love to store documents in the My Documents folder if applications actually had respect for me. Windows should never allow an application to just dump stuff in the Documents or Desktop folder without my permission.

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

#183

Post by jayd16 »

Load curtains can be pretty annoying if you handle them like this.

One pattern I've had success with is using handles they need to be returned. If you never grab a handle you don't have to worry about returning it. Seems to work better than the fire and wait for side effects approach.

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

#184

Post by skyyler »

queenkjuul wrote: post #178
cogman10 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's historic reasons. KDE used to be the "bloated" desktop way back when (I know, pretty silly and laughable now given the current state of things). That cemented Gnome/Mate into a lot of major distros as the primary DME. Ubuntu being the most famous. The QT licensing situation is also a bit of a bizarre quagmire. There are certainly people that don't like KDE for more ideological reasons. Personally, none o…

KDE still seems pretty bloated

One person's "bloat" is another person's "batteries included".

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

#185

Post by jameshart »

phkahler wrote: post #181
jameshart wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s be honest this is the kind of thing that can happen to anyone. We all like to think we have picked up habits that immunize us from certain kinds of error but large software systems are complex and bugs happen. The number of people in here taking ‘Raymond Chen tells an anecdote about the time a dumb bug shipped in Windows and was fixed two weeks later’ as an indictment of Microsoft’s engineering culture is frank…

>> Let’s be honest this is the kind of thing that can happen to anyone. I didn't say I'm immune to doing this myself, nor did I condemn anything about the particular scenario in the blog. My pain is in trying to articulate why some ways are better when any code that works is in some sense just fine. >> We all like to think we have picked up habits that immunize us from certain kinds of error but large software system…

That’s been my experience of what it means to try to do ‘software engineering’ as a discipline; it’s the ongoing process of developing ways to articulate - beyond just ‘this way feels better to me’ - what attributes we are trying to build into the software we construct, what methods we use to imbue the software with those attributes, and why certain ways of doing so are better than others.

It still feels more like craftsmanship than actual engineering. A lot of the time it’s more like how a carpenter learns to use certain tools in certain ways because it’s safer or less prone to error, than how an engineer knows how constructing a particular truss ensures particular loads are distributed in particular ways.

And one of the best tools we have for developing these skills is to learn from the mistakes others have made.

So I agree - I think your instinct here was to look at this error and try to think whether you have engineering heuristics already that would make you unlikely to fall into this error, or do you need to adjust your approach to avoid making the same mistake.

My criticism here was more directed to others in the thread who seem to see this more as an opportunity to say ‘yeah, Windows was always buggy’ rather than to see it as an example of a way things can fail that they need to beware of.

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

#186

Post by jlpom »

queenkjuul wrote: post #178
cogman10 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's historic reasons. KDE used to be the "bloated" desktop way back when (I know, pretty silly and laughable now given the current state of things). That cemented Gnome/Mate into a lot of major distros as the primary DME. Ubuntu being the most famous. The QT licensing situation is also a bit of a bizarre quagmire. There are certainly people that don't like KDE for more ideological reasons. Personally, none o…

KDE still seems pretty bloated

I rather think the right word is clunky: one of the dev is attached to Server-Side Decoration/against CSD for some reason (none of his arguments make sense), so every stock app are difficult to read and taking unneeded screen space. It's just bad UX.

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

#187

Post by RajT88 »

sixothree wrote: post #182
RajT88 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too prefer a solid color. However, I've noticed, there's not much point in changing it. Showing the desktop is a waste of screen real estate because of the generations of abuse of desktop shortcuts. Even if you are careful, it becomes a cluttered wasteland (on Windows anyways). I just learned to never use the desktop for anything and always have windows up on various monitors.

I would love to store documents in the My Documents folder if applications actually had respect for me. Windows should never allow an application to just dump stuff in the Documents or Desktop folder without my permission.

Don't get me started... Office these days adds friction if you want to save documents anywhere but the Documents folder (where they get uploaded to OneDrive if you have it set up).

They've also disabled auto-save if you don't have the documents backed up by OneDrive, which is the most egregious for me.

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

#188

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Many, many years ago, when I still used Windows recreationally, I used to edit the value of a specific Windows registry key, replacing "explorer.exe" with "cmd.exe". This would prevent Windows from runningg explorer.exe and launching the "desktop" with wallpaper, icons, etc. This produced what seemed more like a UNIX window manager, a solid backgground, where each window is a Microsoft cmd.exe shell, a classic Windows black box with a blue bar across the top and thin grey borders. I could then launch applications, such as the ones in the C:\windows\system32 folder from a command prompt, e.g., taskmgr.exe. For me, this made Windows feel much faster and more robust that when using explorer.exe. Certainly it was lighter weight.

More recently, long after I stopped using Windows but still many years ago, I was reading an article about Arthur Whitney. It had a photo which seemd to be at home, maybe in a furnished garage, and in the background was a desktop computer running Windows. The only window open was a cmd.exe. I am not suggesting anything. It is just something I always remember.

Perusing some recent Microsoft documentation I noticed this:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/shel...

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

#189

Post by hbn »

nly wrote: post #97
josephg wrote: post #76

To me, this falls in the category of bugs I think of as "systemic bugs" or "type bugs". If login components were passed a token, then you could make the token's destructor automatically flag that the process is done. Then this bug would be more-or-less impossible to write. Because they made it a runtime thing - "components just have to remember to do this", the code structure itself affords this bug. There was a simi…

Bad notification icons happen on Reddit all the time. I've always assumed it was just bad caching

For as long as I've used the official app on iOS (since they killed third party apps... which also got me using reddit SIGNIFICANTLY less) it's had the issue where it'll send a push notification for a message reply or whatever, you can click it, view the message in the thread, reply to it, whatever. The push notification will be gone from your iPhone, but it never actually clears the notification from within the app. So you'll still see the notification in your in-app inbox so you have to go in there manually and click it again.

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

#190

Post by MisterTea »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #188

Many, many years ago, when I still used Windows recreationally, I used to edit the value of a specific Windows registry key, replacing "explorer.exe" with "cmd.exe". This would prevent Windows from runningg explorer.exe and launching the "desktop" with wallpaper, icons, etc. This produced what seemed more like a UNIX window manager, a solid backgground, where each window is a Microsoft cmd.exe shell, a classic Window…

There is/was a mode for this in Windows server. I also seem to remember a low cost/free windows for server or embedded meant for iot or whatever that featured cmd only without explorer.
Post reply on HN