Yes, Win95 received plenty of heat. But it still sold tremendously well and people actually wanted it. People were lined up outside stores to buy it at launch. Despite its problems, it was still a significant -- and obvious -- improvement over 3.1.
Me over 98, Vista over XP, 8 over 7... not so much.
Never rule out good old ego. I can't tell you how many times I've asked someone to open-source their abandoned a freeware application, and they flat out refused. That's especially true when they know there's a community that depends on a very narrow range of applications, and people need to use a specific application even if it's no longer maintained. Everybody likes to feel important.
Also, hey... if movies, music, and 8-bit game ROMs can still be worth millions when the latest craze comes along, why not deprecated browser code? "If you're good at something, never give it away for free."
people don't rush to upgrade to a new OS if they're happy with what they have.
Sure they do. Everybody upgraded from 3.1 to 95. Most people upgraded from 95 to 98. The benefits from 98 to XP were enormous. The upgrade doesn't have to be spectacular, but it does have to be obviously better.
Everybody knew Vista wasn't better than XP and Win8 wasn't better than 7. If you want people to update -- don't fuck up!
I find that unlikely. MS constantly releases new versions of the update client, and if you're not using the latest one, WindowsUpdate can sit there literally for 30+ hours totally maxing out one of your CPU cores. If you get the latest version of the update client, the update scan will take less than a minute and won't even max out a core!
I think most people would call that a deadlock situation or some other massive fuckup where the machine is doing "something" while waiting for a response it will never get. It's not actual computation.
Since I don't check for updates very often, I always have to go to one of the Microsoft forums and search for posts where people run into 100% CPU usage for hours at a time. Somebody will eventually post a link to whatever latest client update you need (by its KB number) to magically fix it. Microsoft doesn't have a consistent web page where you can download the latest version of the updater. You have to manually hunt for it, and it's a moving target. Guess why!
PS - Windows10 has the same problem maxing out a CPU core and sitting around for a couple days when you haven't updated in a while. Why is this, when Windows10 had nowhere near as many updates as Windows7?
People are often quite predictable. Technology changes, but people don't.
Based on hundreds if not thousands of years of history, I already have a damn good idea of how future AI will be used by our corporate overlords and legislated by their pet politicians. That's what scares me.
All of these were market leaders who in many cases once owned 80% or more of their respective markets, til they were out-competed and were replaced as king of the hill.
Looking at that list, I recall most of them became so confident and arrogant about their market position that they felt they were invincible. I'd say laziness is the dominant reason, not misstepping. Every day was just internal politics, useless meetings, stupid ideas customers clearly hated but went ahead anyway, and endlessly pushing paper. My favorite modern example is Mozilla, which interestingly is following the same path as Netscape.
Monopolies fall eventually because they kill themselves through poor management, not because their large size is a liability and they are overwhelmed by more agile competitors. Some companies take a looooong time to enter that downward spiral, and can cause massive amounts of industry damage in the meantime. Then they get replaced by another market leader and the cycle starts again.
In the screenshot from TFA, the setting for diagnostic data collection says "Full". I assume that means the alternate setting is "Basic", the same as they used to be in the old privacy control panel.
So, this is just a web-based re-skin of the old interface, not an update to their policy which gives you more control. That's not my idea of enhancement.
I do find it interesting that there are four distros of Mint, each touting different desktop environments. The last time I checked, there's no info on their web site highlighting the differences between them other than, "if in doubt, use Cinnamon."
I used to work in a small photo store using their DLS Minilab workstation software (which drove a Noritsu printer). It was awful. Aside from constant crashes and the inexplicable problem of losing connection to the storage database (which required a restart and flushed the printing queue), it also had horrible color accuracy. The biggest problem we had when doing any kind of digital printing was that all highlights had this horrible yellow halo. It was obvious the minilab wasn't converting color spaces correctly and all the colors were way out of gamut. Printing anything digitized by the built-in 35mm film scanner was okay, but anything imported from a flatbed scanner or digital media was ugly as sin. Don't even get me started on the accessory modules, like the greeting card templates, which frequently brought down or locked-up the whole system.
There were huge quality control issues with both their hardware and software. It's obvious to me why they weren't competitive, despite their early "investments" into digital technology.
It's hard to say, but (at least prior to Win10) I never realized how spoiled I've gotten with Microsoft's support cycles. I still use software that's 15 years old on my Win7 machine, including an 18-year-old copy of Photoshop. Even most of my old games still work. My experience with Macs has been dreadful by comparison, let alone mobile devices.
Of course, I'm still sticking with Win7, because I have little confidence that Win10 will continue the tradition. I remember how many applications were outright deleted from my test machine, with no prior warning, when I ran the Win10 installer.
Gee, maybe they should let people make backups and have real save slots... just like in the old days. It's not like saved game corruption is a problem old as dirt, right?
I'll skip griping about always-online games. These days there's plenty of indie titles available so I don't have to subject myself to the crippled AAA garbage.
Haha... there's always some asshole that can't resist blaming the user. If the task manager can't tell you which process is using all that CPU time, I'm pretty sure that's a deficiency in the design of the OS. What do you do when the Windows Modules Installer (ie, TrustedInstaller) is using all that CPU time? Blame Realtek, apparently.
Next you'll insist that if WindowsUpdate uses up 100% time on one of your cores for 30+ hours, that's user error as well! That, despite this being a VERY well known problem for many years and the only solution is to manually hunt for and install the "right" KB update to update the Windows catalog file. Which KB update? Who knows? It changes every few weeks or so, so go to the MS forums and ask everyone else what magic patch to install.
One of my biggest problems with Windows10 is that its behavior, particularly with regards to background maintenance, is wildly inconsistent. Sometimes it'll idle for a day without using any CPU time at all, and then it thrashes the CPU and storage drive like crazy for the next 10 hours. Despite Microsoft's claim that Win10 only performs background maintenance when your machine is at idle, my experience has proven that's total bullshit. The OS does what it wants, and being a black box by design, go ahead and tell me what the machine is doing with that 10 hours of CPU time.
Then there's the lovely fact that configuration settings can just change for arbitrary reasons. If you defer updates too many times, the OS will lock out the config setting that lets you defer updates. Yes, it will literally just grey the UI out so you can't change it anymore. With so many hidden gotchas going on in the background trying to protect you from yourself (or prevent you from having any control over your PC), I'd image this makes Win10 practically untestable. How do you diagnose a system that just changes its own configuration willy-nilly? No wonder it's buggy as fuck and settings just reset to the defaults after certain updates (but only for some people and not others). The only way to diagnose a problem is to reinstall and cross your fingers.
MS built an OS where you don't know what's going on. Clearly, that's why you know it's always user error, and not bad design, that's the problem.
Yeah, the trouble is that when the browser gets to 800MB the pauses become really noticeable, and at full tilt (on my system that's 1.6GB), the browsing is really annoying. I'm on the latest version, BTW. I have FF and Pale Moon installed side-by-side, along with other browsers.
Vulgar as it may be, I'm sad to see your comment has been modded as flamebait. It's a genuine problem that FF fans have been downplaying for way too many years.
Based on my tests with both Pale Moon and Firefox, the problem isn't memory leaks, but the fact the caching policy doesn't want to release the memory at all. Firefox caches WAY too much damn stuff for no good reason. Eventually the memory can be released, but you have to do all kinds of stupid tricks, like use the back and forth buttons a few dozen times and load lots of blank pages to clear out the crap.
I'm desperately trying to find out why Pale Moon 26.5 worked terrific usually hovering around 300MB for hours, and now version 27.0 has the same awful memory behavior as Firefox, sucking down 1.6GB of memory within 5 minutes and staying there forever. I'm pretty sure it's a configuration/policy issue, and not an engine bug. I'm also pretty sure it's not a user-configurable setting, though, so it's going to be real fun to track down.
In Firefox, every time there's a freeze, the developer tools clearly show garbage collection and cycle collection taking up all of the benchmark time. The more memory it uses, including for caches, the worse the performance. This has only been a problem for, oh... over ten years. The same problem they keep blaming on bad plugins and extensions, of course (the ones I disable every time I do these tests).
Another possibility: web browsers are now as complex as operating systems, but nowhere near as competent.
Seriously, if a web page is slow, that's understandable, but responsiveness issues in the browser itself are entirely the application's own fault. That's especially true if you're not a moron and are testing browser behavior with all plugins and extensions disabled (which, of course, is when nobody ever believes you're telling the truth).
As far as Firefox is concerned, it's the long-standing, decade-old problem of the cache being a massive suck. The browser still has regular freezes every few seconds when the garbage collector kicks in (I can confirm it's not the session manager, at least). Mozilla keeps tweaking the browser just enough each release to make memory management tolerable, but then new web sites come out that need more memory, so the GC runs into the same brick wall over and over again.
Why the browser needs to fully cache a handful (read: arbitrary depending on memory available) of old web sites is beyond me. Forget the history button, even windows/tabs that have been closed are still "intelligently" cached for a while. Hundreds of megs just sitting around for no reason, and the GC engine won't flush it out until those caches expire. I'm pretty sure it's terrible policy that's the problem, and not really the browser engine itself. I base this on the fact that for years, Pale Moon didn't suffer from these memory management issues.
The new version of Pale Moon, 27.0, was "retrograded" to a newer version of Firefox, and now behaves just like FF. Same godawful GC behavior and frequent pauses. I've spent the last couple of days trying to figure out why, but I'm not an application programmer and tweaking all the usual user-changeable config settings does nothing, and there's about 40,000 new files in the 27.0 update compared to 26.5. Tracking down the magic change that broke the caching engine (again) isn't going to be fun.
Call me dumb for asking, but I don't own a smart phone...
If the phone was made by Samsung, why do they need to have Verizon update the firmware? Doesn't the manufacturer have the ability to do this to a phone they made themselves? Are they contractually bound so that the ISP has to approve each system update?
2mm is generous if you use proper, high-strength materials instead of cheap plastic. Just check it out on a ruler. For that kinds of thickness, you could get a replaceable battery and more capacity to boot.
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Yes, Win95 received plenty of heat. But it still sold tremendously well and people actually wanted it. People were lined up outside stores to buy it at launch. Despite its problems, it was still a significant -- and obvious -- improvement over 3.1.
Me over 98, Vista over XP, 8 over 7... not so much.
Never rule out good old ego. I can't tell you how many times I've asked someone to open-source their abandoned a freeware application, and they flat out refused. That's especially true when they know there's a community that depends on a very narrow range of applications, and people need to use a specific application even if it's no longer maintained. Everybody likes to feel important.
Also, hey... if movies, music, and 8-bit game ROMs can still be worth millions when the latest craze comes along, why not deprecated browser code? "If you're good at something, never give it away for free."
people don't rush to upgrade to a new OS if they're happy with what they have.
Sure they do. Everybody upgraded from 3.1 to 95. Most people upgraded from 95 to 98. The benefits from 98 to XP were enormous. The upgrade doesn't have to be spectacular, but it does have to be obviously better.
Everybody knew Vista wasn't better than XP and Win8 wasn't better than 7. If you want people to update -- don't fuck up!
I find that unlikely. MS constantly releases new versions of the update client, and if you're not using the latest one, WindowsUpdate can sit there literally for 30+ hours totally maxing out one of your CPU cores. If you get the latest version of the update client, the update scan will take less than a minute and won't even max out a core!
I think most people would call that a deadlock situation or some other massive fuckup where the machine is doing "something" while waiting for a response it will never get. It's not actual computation.
Since I don't check for updates very often, I always have to go to one of the Microsoft forums and search for posts where people run into 100% CPU usage for hours at a time. Somebody will eventually post a link to whatever latest client update you need (by its KB number) to magically fix it. Microsoft doesn't have a consistent web page where you can download the latest version of the updater. You have to manually hunt for it, and it's a moving target. Guess why!
PS - Windows10 has the same problem maxing out a CPU core and sitting around for a couple days when you haven't updated in a while. Why is this, when Windows10 had nowhere near as many updates as Windows7?
People are often quite predictable. Technology changes, but people don't.
Based on hundreds if not thousands of years of history, I already have a damn good idea of how future AI will be used by our corporate overlords and legislated by their pet politicians. That's what scares me.
As long as they don't have billions of dollars and lobbyists galore forcing the public to use it, who cares?
All of these were market leaders who in many cases once owned 80% or more of their respective markets, til they were out-competed and were replaced as king of the hill.
Looking at that list, I recall most of them became so confident and arrogant about their market position that they felt they were invincible. I'd say laziness is the dominant reason, not misstepping. Every day was just internal politics, useless meetings, stupid ideas customers clearly hated but went ahead anyway, and endlessly pushing paper. My favorite modern example is Mozilla, which interestingly is following the same path as Netscape.
Monopolies fall eventually because they kill themselves through poor management, not because their large size is a liability and they are overwhelmed by more agile competitors. Some companies take a looooong time to enter that downward spiral, and can cause massive amounts of industry damage in the meantime. Then they get replaced by another market leader and the cycle starts again.
In the screenshot from TFA, the setting for diagnostic data collection says "Full". I assume that means the alternate setting is "Basic", the same as they used to be in the old privacy control panel.
So, this is just a web-based re-skin of the old interface, not an update to their policy which gives you more control. That's not my idea of enhancement.
would not understand them if they did
Given that 99% of them roughly translate to "Fuck you", they're pretty easy to understand.
If you're not growing, you're dying!
I do find it interesting that there are four distros of Mint, each touting different desktop environments. The last time I checked, there's no info on their web site highlighting the differences between them other than, "if in doubt, use Cinnamon."
And on mobile, it's non-existent.
No, Android doesn't count.
I used to work in a small photo store using their DLS Minilab workstation software (which drove a Noritsu printer). It was awful. Aside from constant crashes and the inexplicable problem of losing connection to the storage database (which required a restart and flushed the printing queue), it also had horrible color accuracy. The biggest problem we had when doing any kind of digital printing was that all highlights had this horrible yellow halo. It was obvious the minilab wasn't converting color spaces correctly and all the colors were way out of gamut. Printing anything digitized by the built-in 35mm film scanner was okay, but anything imported from a flatbed scanner or digital media was ugly as sin. Don't even get me started on the accessory modules, like the greeting card templates, which frequently brought down or locked-up the whole system.
There were huge quality control issues with both their hardware and software. It's obvious to me why they weren't competitive, despite their early "investments" into digital technology.
Has the title bar expanded an inch or two?
It's already annoying how every web site on the Internet does it (and everybody complains about it), so now the desktop has to, as well.
Wake me in 10 years when all this trendy bullshit finally dies and we go full circle to reasonable design, again. Hopefully.
It's hard to say, but (at least prior to Win10) I never realized how spoiled I've gotten with Microsoft's support cycles. I still use software that's 15 years old on my Win7 machine, including an 18-year-old copy of Photoshop. Even most of my old games still work. My experience with Macs has been dreadful by comparison, let alone mobile devices.
Of course, I'm still sticking with Win7, because I have little confidence that Win10 will continue the tradition. I remember how many applications were outright deleted from my test machine, with no prior warning, when I ran the Win10 installer.
Gee, maybe they should let people make backups and have real save slots... just like in the old days. It's not like saved game corruption is a problem old as dirt, right?
I'll skip griping about always-online games. These days there's plenty of indie titles available so I don't have to subject myself to the crippled AAA garbage.
Haha... there's always some asshole that can't resist blaming the user. If the task manager can't tell you which process is using all that CPU time, I'm pretty sure that's a deficiency in the design of the OS. What do you do when the Windows Modules Installer (ie, TrustedInstaller) is using all that CPU time? Blame Realtek, apparently.
Next you'll insist that if WindowsUpdate uses up 100% time on one of your cores for 30+ hours, that's user error as well! That, despite this being a VERY well known problem for many years and the only solution is to manually hunt for and install the "right" KB update to update the Windows catalog file. Which KB update? Who knows? It changes every few weeks or so, so go to the MS forums and ask everyone else what magic patch to install.
One of my biggest problems with Windows10 is that its behavior, particularly with regards to background maintenance, is wildly inconsistent. Sometimes it'll idle for a day without using any CPU time at all, and then it thrashes the CPU and storage drive like crazy for the next 10 hours. Despite Microsoft's claim that Win10 only performs background maintenance when your machine is at idle, my experience has proven that's total bullshit. The OS does what it wants, and being a black box by design, go ahead and tell me what the machine is doing with that 10 hours of CPU time.
Then there's the lovely fact that configuration settings can just change for arbitrary reasons. If you defer updates too many times, the OS will lock out the config setting that lets you defer updates. Yes, it will literally just grey the UI out so you can't change it anymore. With so many hidden gotchas going on in the background trying to protect you from yourself (or prevent you from having any control over your PC), I'd image this makes Win10 practically untestable. How do you diagnose a system that just changes its own configuration willy-nilly? No wonder it's buggy as fuck and settings just reset to the defaults after certain updates (but only for some people and not others). The only way to diagnose a problem is to reinstall and cross your fingers.
MS built an OS where you don't know what's going on. Clearly, that's why you know it's always user error, and not bad design, that's the problem.
Yeah, the trouble is that when the browser gets to 800MB the pauses become really noticeable, and at full tilt (on my system that's 1.6GB), the browsing is really annoying. I'm on the latest version, BTW. I have FF and Pale Moon installed side-by-side, along with other browsers.
Vulgar as it may be, I'm sad to see your comment has been modded as flamebait. It's a genuine problem that FF fans have been downplaying for way too many years.
Based on my tests with both Pale Moon and Firefox, the problem isn't memory leaks, but the fact the caching policy doesn't want to release the memory at all. Firefox caches WAY too much damn stuff for no good reason. Eventually the memory can be released, but you have to do all kinds of stupid tricks, like use the back and forth buttons a few dozen times and load lots of blank pages to clear out the crap.
I'm desperately trying to find out why Pale Moon 26.5 worked terrific usually hovering around 300MB for hours, and now version 27.0 has the same awful memory behavior as Firefox, sucking down 1.6GB of memory within 5 minutes and staying there forever. I'm pretty sure it's a configuration/policy issue, and not an engine bug. I'm also pretty sure it's not a user-configurable setting, though, so it's going to be real fun to track down.
In Firefox, every time there's a freeze, the developer tools clearly show garbage collection and cycle collection taking up all of the benchmark time. The more memory it uses, including for caches, the worse the performance. This has only been a problem for, oh... over ten years. The same problem they keep blaming on bad plugins and extensions, of course (the ones I disable every time I do these tests).
Firefox can't manage memory worth shit.
Another possibility: web browsers are now as complex as operating systems, but nowhere near as competent.
Seriously, if a web page is slow, that's understandable, but responsiveness issues in the browser itself are entirely the application's own fault. That's especially true if you're not a moron and are testing browser behavior with all plugins and extensions disabled (which, of course, is when nobody ever believes you're telling the truth).
As far as Firefox is concerned, it's the long-standing, decade-old problem of the cache being a massive suck. The browser still has regular freezes every few seconds when the garbage collector kicks in (I can confirm it's not the session manager, at least). Mozilla keeps tweaking the browser just enough each release to make memory management tolerable, but then new web sites come out that need more memory, so the GC runs into the same brick wall over and over again.
Why the browser needs to fully cache a handful (read: arbitrary depending on memory available) of old web sites is beyond me. Forget the history button, even windows/tabs that have been closed are still "intelligently" cached for a while. Hundreds of megs just sitting around for no reason, and the GC engine won't flush it out until those caches expire. I'm pretty sure it's terrible policy that's the problem, and not really the browser engine itself. I base this on the fact that for years, Pale Moon didn't suffer from these memory management issues.
The new version of Pale Moon, 27.0, was "retrograded" to a newer version of Firefox, and now behaves just like FF. Same godawful GC behavior and frequent pauses. I've spent the last couple of days trying to figure out why, but I'm not an application programmer and tweaking all the usual user-changeable config settings does nothing, and there's about 40,000 new files in the 27.0 update compared to 26.5. Tracking down the magic change that broke the caching engine (again) isn't going to be fun.
I'm not sure how you concluded that 77% = nobody.
Sounds like just about every telemetry report companies use to "prove" that useful features need to be removed by force.
Call me dumb for asking, but I don't own a smart phone...
If the phone was made by Samsung, why do they need to have Verizon update the firmware? Doesn't the manufacturer have the ability to do this to a phone they made themselves? Are they contractually bound so that the ISP has to approve each system update?
2mm is generous if you use proper, high-strength materials instead of cheap plastic. Just check it out on a ruler. For that kinds of thickness, you could get a replaceable battery and more capacity to boot.