The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed(theregister.com) |
The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed(theregister.com) |
> UPDATE: This only shipped in the NTSUR release, as far as I can now tell. I've confirmed with team members that I'm not crazy, I did write and we did ship the code I describe in this episode, but it was ultimately replaced circa NT4 with bitmaps!
I don't know what's true, but it seems odd to not mention that.
Dave Plummer cannot know about any changes after he left the company.
You seem to be not aware of that.
Also I don't know about you, but I don't know shit about the code I wrote two weeks ago. How do you expect someone to remember all details about code he wrote more than 25 years ago?
Dave retired from Microsoft and started a business that sold scareware: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8
As for the particular claim regarding the start menu, What he actually claimed is that his implementation was removed in production builds. However, at the same time, there's no evidence of it in any of the various Beta and release candidate versions of NT4. Not only that, but prior to the NT4 betas, it was effectively the NT 3.51 "Desktop Shell Update" and none of the releases of that have his claimed implementation. So when and where is it?
He states "I wrote the programmatic version in '94 and we ran it internally". The issue is that there really was no "NT4 beta" at that point in time, nor any start menu in NT to add his rotated text code to. It was only around the start of 1994 that what would be known as the Taskbar and Start Menu really appeared in Chicago milestones- we know he isn't referring to those, since 9x didn't support the needed LOGFONT structures. What would become the start menu on Windows NT only appeared with the "Newshell" project which was preview software that you installed on NT 3.51 to add the Windows 95 enhanced shell. originally a desktop update for Windows NT 3.51 which started around the time of 95's release in, well, 1995. There's no evidence of his special code there- in fact the NT 3.51 Desktop Shell Update previews all used a bitmap.
And you might think, ahh, hew must mean before that, but the rotation feature in question, I believe, was new to NT4 altogether- so it would presumably have appeared somewhere during the betas.
The problem with his claims seems to be that evidence never seems particular forthcoming. When new information comes out he retracts claims and re-titles videos in order to move his claim into "gaps" where his claims are less falsifiable.
People at this site are notoriously anti-Windows. We love to talk about dark patterns. Those products were total bullshit built to scare people, leveraging knowledge of Windows internals garnered as a junior programmer who ported code that drew fonts and lines on the screen. And now he's overstating even that.
But lately it feels like I see him all the time and there is something off with the guy. Can’t name what it is. Feels like he’s trying to milk whatever fame he got around the nerd circles as much as possible.
For the first year or so of his rise Dave finished each videos by "I'm only in this for the subs and likes" and had monetization turned off.
Now he ends with "I'm mostly in it for the subs and likes" and has monetization turned on.
He's also removed his claim that all profits from his book and channel go to autism research.
Nothing wrong with making money from your work but it does show a change of focus.
The first page is shows you with the "reject all" is only for the page of options you're on to start with - the "legitimate uses" page has a ton of stuff opted-in by default, and to turn those off, you have to click on every company, one by one.
Also, once you've hit "reject all", I can find no way to get that permissions dialog back again.
It's a deliberate UI approach to trick you into accepting a ton of cookies without knowing you've done so.
In Win9x calling the task manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL) instantly stopped all tasks except the Task Manager itself, and the Task Manager was always in memory. Most mis-behaving apps could be closed that way. Only a system that was frozen on I/O would not respond to CTRL-ALT-DEL with the Task Manager, and open a blue screen instead (the "system is busy: press any key to wait or CTRL-ALT-DEL again to reboot" BSOD).
In WinNT, pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL didn't do sh|t. All apps kept running. The Task Manager was loaded from disk (when the system found the time) and run in parallel with the other apps. On a busy system, especially if it was out of memory and doing disk thrashing, or some video/media was stuck with 100% CPU on high priority, there was no chance of recovering it with the Task Manager.
I belive it is first a conflict of policy: the USER needs to have more privileges than SYSTEM in order to suspend execution of all (including system's) processes. WinNT is a multi-user OS. Nobody would allow the user to DDoS the system, even when that user has direct access to the reset button.
A second problem is that WinNT probably can't even open the Task Manager if some system processes are suspended (csrss?, lsass?).
It probably works in Linux console. Sysvinit has two keyboard signals (CTRL-ALT-DEL and CTRL-UP, I think), that can run any command, exec'd directly by init with root privileges, and both are configurable in inittab. It also has the SysRq.
In an email to The Register, Plummer told us: "Long story short, in the production builds, I've learned they went with bitmaps rather than the programmatic version.
"My guess is that's the way the art team had always delivered them ... and so it was just easier, but I don't have any real idea. I stay away from source code leaks so don't want to investigate the technicals!"
I wonder if there are any leaked Win95 betas that can show the different approaches. I can imagine that a static bitmap would've been much faster and less memory intensive, something quite important when you're targeting computers with 8MB of RAM.
Given the lag the current wx11 start menu animations illicit in slower machines, I'm not surprised they used to value speed over complexity.
I write this from memory so its possible that i misremember :)
Otherwise depending on your processes you'll either get what davepl got, or you'll be playing whack-a-mole in code reviews trying to protect your design; neither of those situations is a good use of your time.
I belive that's the way thing were done in those days. In Win95 the Start Menu was also in memory, with the entire menu tree, progam names, icons, and everything. It would open instantly. In Win98 they changed that. It would read the .lnk files form disk (or cache) every time it openend. But it added drag&drop editing! And IE integration. And Active Desktop. And web content in Explorer folders.
You probably remember the BSODs due to buggy drivers.
One could argue that an OS for PC (Win9x) doesn't need any isolation. There's only one user (personal in "PC").
That's not how a wise person should act online.
(that you seem to imply to be by using your published books as an argument, as if that would validate any accusatory statements)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8
He is a scammer and was convicted for it.
A settlement is not a conviction.
The security perspective of the SysRq commands is: a human is on a hard-wired console. If they want they can pull the power or press buttons on the outside of the PC that aren't on the keyboard. It's probably OK to obey some small list of actions that are useful when the rest of the system might be unresponsive.
The funky part would be the user space integration, the kernel would probably have to selectively resume a couple key processes or take over the display with its own/embedded one. Sounds like too brittle and/or extra bloat.
I never thought I'd consider Windows 95 technically superior in some area, but holy hell that system ran in 4mb of memory and did one (even if only one) thing right.
Stealing my iPhone and replacing it with another is not the same as having access to my data on it.
I sometimes wonder, what would be the "smallest" machine you could feasibly DIY/build today, that would still allow you to be somewhat productive (e.g. write code, very basic web browsing, SSH, etc). I recently spent a week with a PowerBook G4 (2002) and it's very usable (save for the fan noise). There's probably a lot to explore with modern MCUs.