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

devblogs.microsoft.com

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

#211

Post by drewolbrich »

whynotmaybe wrote: post #138
myfonj wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I used an Android (Galaxy) phone, to have a solid pitch-black background (which I thought made sense for modern phone displays energy-wise, besides looking pretty swell), I had to download — yes, D-O-W-N-L-O-A-D — some black image from some "Galaxy Store" thing or whatnot to achieve that. It was free, but it seemed like an exception there. Something that should be a default option, or a single-tap switch in…

I had to take a picture with my finger on the camera to have a black image to use as background.

Another way is to do a Google image search for "black".

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

#212

Post by nullc »

andrepd wrote: post #132
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…

> GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgrounds, but still technically supports it if you manually set a bunch of config keys — which seem to randomly change between versions There's the peak GNOME experience.

My analogous gnome experience was that on my tv-computer I was using 4x scaling, because TV and because my distance vision stinks.

At some point they decided 2x (3x?) scaling was enough for anyone and took away 4x, I didn't notice because I was already set at 4x and it continued working. Somewhat later they took away the backend, and then my system crashed with no error message immediately at login.

After much troubleshooting replaced a movie night, I inquired about the functionality being removed and was berated for using an undocumented/unsupported feature (because I was continuing to use it after the interface to set it had been removed, without my knowledge).

I'll never use gnome again if I can help it.

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

#214

Post by Izkata »

3036e4 wrote: post #56
90s_dev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

The same is true of vim. They're talking about effort changing it and keeping it around across computers. I don't think I've really changed my vimrc for 5-10 years.

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

#215

Post by myfonj »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #205
whynotmaybe wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to take a picture with my finger on the camera to have a black image to use as background.

I don’t know if that would do it or just return your dark current image. The best thing to do is just take a file same as your screen resolution into your favorite image editor and fill it with actual true black. Save as png and send to phone.

Was not sure if sensor in pitch dark would catch some other radiation and output some pixel "grain" seen from high ISO or not, but from what I tried, visually the photo seems pretty black, so the method seems to be surprisingly usable.

As for "same image as your screen resolution": screenshot sounds like the exact fitting thing here. As a challenge, tried making screenshot black using stock Samsung "Gallery" and it seems that repeated Edit - Brightness: -100 - Save as copy, then open the copy and goto back to Edit can do the trick as well, after four or so copies. (Copies, because there is no way to re-apply same effect on the same photo, apparently.)

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

#216

Post by hulitu »

grumpyprole wrote: post #65
alex-mohr wrote: post #19

The code in question reminds me a lot of my favorite Kubernetes bug: if (request.authenticationData) { ok := validate(etc); if (!ok) { return authenticationFailure; } } Turns out the same meme spans decades.

The way software is built hasn't changed in decades.

> The way software is built hasn't changed in decades.

Correct. The only thing that changed is the number of level of abstractions.

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

#217

Post by hennell »

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.

My windows desktop remains pretty organised, occasionally there might be an app appear. My mac however I gave up on, it's just a mess of screenshots and files you have to drag n' drop from somewhere and the desktop is just where that ends up. I used to have a script that moved the screenshots but it's easier to just live in chaos.

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

#218

Post by keyringlight »

hulitu wrote: post #120
fhd2 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to joke that Microsoft stuff is always 80%. Works very well for the obvious use cases, but then you are bound to run into weird issues as soon as you run into some edge case they haven't covered. Makes me think it must have something to do with their corporate culture and how they work, since their developers, to my knowledge, never had a reputation for being weak. Maybe it's just because they have such a giga…

> I like to joke that Microsoft stuff is always 80%. Only when they "release" it. And then they start again from 10%. /s

The ongoing saga with the migration from control panel to the settings app is as good an example as any. They've been working on that since win8 which released in 2012. Given the time it took to make a new release, it's been 15 years and is still ongoing, it very much seems like MS don't care about that area of the OS.

I can understand that there's a lot of old/legacy third party stuff that would rely on the .cpl capabilities so you can't rip it out in one go, but "it's a lot of work" seems like a poor excuse for a company with resources like MS to not at least get all their own moved across with equivalents. They could even leave the old deprecated ones available in the background for anything legacy that needs to interact with them.

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

#219

Post by necovek »

antgiant wrote: post #152
necovek wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this particular issue, MS has an opposite problem: you grab a document link, grant a permission to someone, and they still can't access the document through the original link (you need to fetch a new link just for them).

Kind of. The default behavior is to create a new link. So when you grant someone access you are actually creating a new link. However, you can find the buried manage access settings and change the permissions on the original link. If you do that then they can use the original link. (Teams makes this Byzantine in the extreme to accomplish as you have to go find the folder it drops all shared files in to gain access to…

Yeah, many things are definitely possible but to me it seems like the user experience is driven by the technical implementation and architecture, instead of vice versa.

From the outside looking in, it's the age old organizational problem when there are no good synergies between customer experience and development teams.

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

#220

Post by necovek »

Someone wrote: post #122
jkaptur wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? That’s very surprising. You can see what this says? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uYM0vyZiDJbo-5mXmU_6Xtrz...

Possibly they refer to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172527 “I received a link to a Google doc on slack recently, but the owner had forgotten to share permissions with me. Though I couldn't view the doc when I clicked it, I did notice that I could view the first page of the doc in the link preview. It was very high res and I could view the text clearly.” . If so, pasting that link into Slack may reveal…

It could even be a Google docs Slack app that has the bug of generating a preview if the sharer has permissions on the doc (and they usually do) and the preview generation enabled.
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