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If you move your mouse continually the query may not fail. Do not stop moving

support.microsoft.com

121–130 of 168 posts

Re: If you move your mouse continually the query may not fail. Do not stop moving

#122

Whenever I am waiting for something to happen, I tend to move my mouse pointer around in circles on the screen - this always caught peoples attention and I've been asked plenty of times over the years if there was a reason for it. I always joked that it helped make things go faster by making the computer know I was still there and waiting - I guess I wasn't lying.

I do exactly the same thing, because once upon a time I had a hand-crank modem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6576823

Re: If you move your mouse continually the query may not fail. Do not stop moving

#123
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to COM, are (beside OLE, DCOM, ActiveX) Gnome's "Bonobo" (component model) [1], KDE's KParts, Mozilla's XPCOM and CORBA. Apple choose KHTML over Gecko for it's Webkit fork [2] because of the various cons of such component models. [1] Bonobo is officially deprecated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo_(component_model) [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPCOM

I remain convinced that C++ warps peoples minds into things like this :-). I'll go out on a limb and say that pretty much ALL of those things are horrible.

I've done COM in straight C and it's not too bad. It's rather reminiscent of the Linux kernel's "operations" struct-pointers. (i.e. where `struct file` contains a `struct file_operations *` and the operations struct itself is full of function pointers - kind of like the C++ vtable concept)

Re: If you move your mouse continually the query may not fail. Do not stop moving

#124
post #28

It still happens, i have seen here in Mexico in the Gov Agency that collects taxes when they send something to print/export pdf's they keep moving the mouse or their progress bar doesn't move at all. But they made this natural i think it is part of the training they receive, maybe some devs there tough it was the only way to get the rid of that bug, JUST KEEP MOVING THE MOUSE!. Agency url: http://www.sat.gob.mx/sitio…

Sounds like they do their long-running process in the event loop. It's an easy mistake to make for someone writing a Windows app for the first time.

Re: If you move your mouse continually the query may not fail. Do not stop moving

#125
post #21

Can you imagine how crazy you'd think the customer was if you were giving technical support and they insisted they had to do this?

Despite never being a Windows developer, I ended up reading Raymond Chen's "The Old New Thing" blog from start to finish while lying in bed with a nasty flu and wanting to die a couple years ago.

After that, I don't think anything somebody reports as a Windows application bug could make me think they're crazy.

Re: If you move your mouse continually the query may not fail. Do not stop moving

#126
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to COM, are (beside OLE, DCOM, ActiveX) Gnome's "Bonobo" (component model) [1], KDE's KParts, Mozilla's XPCOM and CORBA. Apple choose KHTML over Gecko for it's Webkit fork [2] because of the various cons of such component models. [1] Bonobo is officially deprecated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo_(component_model) [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPCOM

I remain convinced that C++ warps peoples minds into things like this :-). I'll go out on a limb and say that pretty much ALL of those things are horrible.

XPCOM is... yeah, it's pretty bad. Writing a Firefox plugin vs. writing a Chrome plugin is darkness vs. light.

Re: If you move your mouse continually the query may not fail. Do not stop moving

#127
post #21

Can you imagine how crazy you'd think the customer was if you were giving technical support and they insisted they had to do this?

The customer? didn't you mean the developer? The dumbest customer will guess that a "solution" like that from support can only come from a design that sucks. If it were a refrigerator instead of a spreadsheet it would be like support telling you that you have to keep petting the door of your refrigerator to keep it cooling. Who is the crazy there?

I agree - but the simile is a bit exaggerated. It's more like having to tap the lever a bunch for a couple of seconds on a toaster to make it make toast when it should work the first time you interact. Annoying but also short-lived and not really worth replacing the device.

Re: If you move your mouse continually the query may not fail. Do not stop moving

#128
Internet Explorer (v2 or v3 I can't remember) suffered a similar bug, basically pages would load or load faster if you "gave more cpu" to the thread, by moving your mouse over the window. Noone ever believed me but now I feel a bit less crazy for thinking that worked.

Re: If you move your mouse continually the query may not fail. Do not stop moving

#129
post #62

This is a 11 year old knowledge base article for a bug in a product (Excel 97) that saw the light in 1997, that is 17 years ago. Yes, the second workaround is kind of hilarious, but let's not draw too many far-fetching conclusions from it. I believe many of us have seen crazier bugs.

>far-fetching conclusions like bot detection on NT-based systems? Yes, lets not talk about that.

Excel does bot detection? :)

Re: If you move your mouse continually the query may not fail. Do not stop moving

#130
post #66
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but back then there was no "CPU power saving" mode. The CPU was slow and it always run at full speed (power was cheap back then). In the Windows NT series (4, 2000, XP, etc.) the sheduler gives the forground application an higher priority. It runs a longer CPU time than all other applications. This was probably also similar with Win 3 and 9x series but probably with many hacks and glue code on top of DOS. Movin…

Not completely true, there was some kind of power saving starting in those days: If I remember correctly, one of the first moves towards power-saving in the stock-OS was Win 95/98/ME (one of those) to start using the HLT instruction (stop processor up to next interrupt) in the main OS, was a busy loop until then. Notebook manufacturers (I worked with machines from Toshiba and Compaq in the 90s...) provided DOS TSRs a…

that's the reason why win9x in emulators like qemu and vbox will cause those emulators to eat up the entire CPU.
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