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A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#81

Post by Perz1val »

sandworm101 wrote: post #67
Ciantic wrote: post #6

I know it must be frustrating from Microsoft's standpoint, but those are needed because they keep changing things. Start All Back is one very popular explorer.exe patch that makes the Windows 11 taskbar function a lot like Windows 10. For one thing, it allows you to move the taskbar again. I've also made an explorer.exe in-memory patch to disable flashing taskbar buttons in Windows 10, it injected itself to WndProc a…

Wallpapers can be animated? This is like learning my car can count butterflies. I wonder why such a feature exists but also now feel obligated to hook VLC into the wallpaper function so i can play movies underneath all my other work. Can wallpapers have sound?

> speed up wallpaper animations

Sounds like the fade-in between images when you choose a folder with files to set one as wallpaper every 5/10/15 minutes

Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#82

Post by abbeyj »

rob74 wrote: post #16
saurik wrote: post #5

Frankly, it is really annoying when developers working at one of the large closed-source platform oligopolists blame their users for trying to work around the deficiencies (or even outright hostile "business model" optimizations) in their software by whatever scant means are left to them: maybe if Microsoft didn't keep removing good functionality and stopped forcing bad "features" on everyone, fewer people would see…

Well yeah, I mean no one forces you to use Explorer for file management under Windows. I'm an old-time Norton Commander user, and when Windows came around I switched to Total Commander. There are open-source alternatives too, even cross-platform ones, like this one: https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/ . That being said, no one forces you to use Windows either - except maybe your employer or the software you are using,…

This isn't really about using Explorer for file management. It is about using Explorer as the shell. That's the default setup for everybody. Changing the default steel is difficult and some programs may not be compatible with whatever alternative shell you switch to.

Most people don't want to learn a whole new shell. They just want the Explorer shell to have the features that it has had since Windows 7. Features that Microsoft inexplicably chose to remove in Windows 11 and that they are only now belatedly adding back.

Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#83

Post by mrguyorama »

sandworm101 wrote: post #67
Ciantic wrote: post #6

I know it must be frustrating from Microsoft's standpoint, but those are needed because they keep changing things. Start All Back is one very popular explorer.exe patch that makes the Windows 11 taskbar function a lot like Windows 10. For one thing, it allows you to move the taskbar again. I've also made an explorer.exe in-memory patch to disable flashing taskbar buttons in Windows 10, it injected itself to WndProc a…

Wallpapers can be animated? This is like learning my car can count butterflies. I wonder why such a feature exists but also now feel obligated to hook VLC into the wallpaper function so i can play movies underneath all my other work. Can wallpapers have sound?

There was a time when we thought wallpapers should be entire web pages! That didn't go so well

Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#84

Post by TremendousJudge »

daemin wrote: post #73
surajrmal wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching the clip, the improvements he's talking about are great and very welcomed. Is this a case of any change being considered bad because you're used to how things are?

Only supporting grouped taskbar icons is a big inconvenience when actually trying to do work. Instead of clicking directly on the taskbar item which corresponds to the window you want to access it requires that you hover over the icon, then try to pick out the window you want from a very small thumbnail of it. This just adds extra time and unnecessary thought into this process. It's also quite bizarre given that wide…

>This may have been fixed in recent versions where they finally added the ability to change the taskbar grouping in the settings, but I haven't felt the need to test it.

THANK YOU. I never heard about this, I had completely given up on using the taskbar for anything except the system tray.

I agree to the rest of your points -- I only use the start menu to search for stuff now. The pinned icons take up way too much space and even though I spent some time carefully curating them I never seem to want to use them.

You didn't mention the system tray, but I want to add that the redesign also made it worse than in Win10. The volume, battery, wifi, etc icons are joined into one button but actually if you right click they are three different buttons still. This is awful design, the fact that you have different options depending on where you right click is not communicated at all.

Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#85

Post by TremendousJudge »

TravHatesMe wrote: post #4

Maybe large swaths of users wouldn't download enhancement suites if you actually listened to them? It took like 3 years to support the basic feature to "never group tabs" in the Taskbar -- that's been supported by previous versions of windows for decades. That's why I downloaded patches.

Agree. I didn't download patches because I knew from experience (Win8 start menu patching) that it was asking for trouble down the road.

Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#86

Post by giantrobot »

praptak wrote: post #39
bombcar wrote: post #19

Kind of sad. Even from this blog, he admits that the Microsoft of old would test software and see if it worked; the Microsoft of now obviously knows of the existence of these shell enhancements, but clearly doesn’t test patches against them at all.

A relevant quote about the lenghts they went to to assure stuff not getting broken: "Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Mi…

A huge difference between 1995 and today is in 1995 "simcity.exe" might represent fewer than a half dozen artifacts because patches and updates were rare. An exception covering a handful of cases is maintainable and testable.

Today patches are near constant so a "simcity.exe" might represent hundreds of different versions of the code. It's much harder to maintain exceptions since the list of cases is much larger. Even if your test harness is embarrassingly parallel your results are only as accurate as the latest version available to test.

None of that is impossible but there's additional non-zero costs involved in maintaining compatibility exceptions. At some point they tip over to not being worth the investment.

Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#87

Post by mrguyorama »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #55
jdewerd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they are also used by debuggers, security tools, and other flavors of "keep the world humming along despite its best efforts to kill itself."

We might add to the list "tools and utilities desired by power users".

Sure, but if you use/build a tool that modifies how Windows runs by trawling through and manipulating internal process memory that explicitly is not meant to be modified by anything else, that's on you.

It's like asking why Nintendo won't support the NES you desoldered the CPU from and replaced with a higher clock capable CMOS 6502 and new crystal

"Nintendo is such a bad company, I upgraded my NES and now it can't play anything"

No buddy, you broke the machine!

Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#89

Post by Ciantic »

Perz1val wrote: post #81
sandworm101 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wallpapers can be animated? This is like learning my car can count butterflies. I wonder why such a feature exists but also now feel obligated to hook VLC into the wallpaper function so i can play movies underneath all my other work. Can wallpapers have sound?

> speed up wallpaper animations Sounds like the fade-in between images when you choose a folder with files to set one as wallpaper every 5/10/15 minutes

That is the same animation, but it is also triggered if you have chosen a different wallpaper per virtual desktop. It animates the background change when switching desktops, and the animation feels like it lasts around 500ms. I wouldn't mind a quick animation but the default is too slow.

Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#90

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

praptak wrote: post #38
adrian_b wrote: post #15

While in this case the jump into the middle of an instruction was not intentional, several decades ago many Microsoft programs for MS-DOS, like their BASIC interpreter, contained frequent intentional jumps into the middle of instructions. This technique had already been used in many Microsoft programs for CP/M, i.e. for Intel 8080 or Zilog Z80 CPUs. There were two reasons for the use of such jumps in the middle of in…

Biology sometimes "jumps into the middle of instructions" when decoding DNA/RNA. The "instruction" length is always 3 nucleotides and the sequence usually has only one valid "entry point". There are exceptions though. Some sequences do encode biologically useful information with sequences which not only overlap but do so with the starting points differing by a number not divisible by 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

You'd almost hope there was some younger more code-centric version of Douglas Hofstadter, figuring out how to write palindromic or multi-framed assembler that was semantically equivalent to, for example, his "Crab Canon".
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