We don't digest food exclusively with bacteria. They play a role, of course, but our digestion is done through things with hydrochloric acid and various enzymes produced by the stomach. The bacteria in our stomach is pretty much strains that can both survive the acidic environment and can consume things we cannot digest at all. Various fibers, for example. They help as they consume it and shit out stuff we can digest. Often the things they consume that are indigestible to us are the result of our own breakdown of other compounds; making the process symbiotic.
Also, the environment on a kitchen counter is wildly different than the environment inside out stomach, so airborne bacteria- even if we were to presume these were the exact same kinds of bacteria present in our stomach - being uninterested in foods in the open air doesn't really translate to the idea that the food is indigestible. Many gut bacteria rely on us to break down foods into the things that they can digest, so a colony couldn't start on the surface of the same food(s) in the open air.
Well if it's self-hosted you have to do it yourself. You can either backup your databases from the old version and restore it to the new version once installed, or you can use pg_upgrade to upgrade/copy a old version data directory to the new version.
I don't think this is done automatically when you simply install a new postgres version, but I'm not certain of that.
It's related because that past suggests a history of being untrustworthy. I mean we're talking about running a company that literally stole money from people and intentionally infected peoples computers to try to trick them into giving you more money, not just something he did by accident one weekend but something he dedicated years of his life to. Him leaning heavily on how he worked at a company two decades ago doesn't help. Other than the scam company shut down by washington state, what has he done since?
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.
You seem to be of the opinion that people cannot learn from mistakes and cannot change and should not be given second (third? fourth?) chances to rehabilitate themselves and recover from bad decisions or habits?
This issue seems like partly an artifact of the invented binary operator ^. In math exponents are superscripts and there's no binary operator- it's part of the term. But for text on computers, binary operators ended up being fabricated for the things you couldn't represent directly. The caret is common and was the first one to appear, but doubled multiplication signs is another one. Traditionally, binary operators have lower precedence than unary operators since the unary minus is considered part of the term, so the exponent turning into an operator mucks things up if it's still implemented to adhere to that logic.
You sort of see the same issue with division. The forward slash is a completely invented binary operator since the actual division symbol was often not present- and let's be real nobody uses the binary division operator when writing formulae. It's supposed to represent the dividing line in a fraction, similar to how division is usually represented in a formula as a fraction of two other expressions. It's got lower precedence than anything in either term- but, if you just replace the dividing line with a forward slash to input the formula into a computer, you'll get incorrect results, because it's replacing what is part of a complete term (the division line) with a new binary operator inserted between sets of terms, which is now subject to precedence rules.
I suspect it's more likely an artifact of how the number is lexed. `-3^2` probably gets lexed into Number(-3), Operator(^), Number(2), which results in the aforementioned precedence issues. The reason for parsing the operator with the number is that it makes it easier to handle the case where you just write a negative number as a literal value into a cell.
Source: I've written an Excel clone before. I don't believe it has the same bug, but if it does, that will be how it's crept in.
EDIT: looking at some of the descriptions of the bug, it seems like it happens when handling variables (i.e. cell references) as well, which makes it seem like a pure precedence issue and not a parsing issue. So I've got no idea, presumably someone simply messed up the precedence order.
It's almost certainly a precedence issue. It's much easier to consider that unary operators have precedence over binary operators, and just learn the precedence rules for each class, rather than a global precedence rule. Plus, there's no conflict with math notation, as there is no exponentiation operator in math.
In my country we teach the same rules in math class. Blaming it on “unary vs binary” was a stretch. Next you’re going to blame it on the lexer for producing the -3 as a single term instead of two. (Which WOULD explain something, but… fix it?!)
In my country we use a horizontal line with a dot above and below to indicate in-line division in lower grades. Exactly like the computer /.
I also learned the line with a dot above and below in my country, the USA. But that was a very long time ago, math teaching has changed immeasurably since my time.
This is because a particular support page has "The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.". Crazy how that somehow has spawned endless articles from tech "news" sites. But it's hardly news, and saying they've 'officially deprecated' is misleading. Fact is The Control Panel has been in the 'process of being deprecated' since Windows 8.
For me, I bought "Clean Code" because it was, at the time at least, quite highly recommended. After being rather confused for a while, I finally stopped reading right around page 141 when I realized that the reason his examples looked awful were because they were.
In that section of the book, he takes a Java port of Donald Knuth's PrintPrimes program, and refactors it. But in doing so, he actually breaks it. He moves state out of local variables and parameters and makes them all static fields, and then refactors the code into long-winded methods that specifically perform side effects or operate on those fields (names like isNotMultipleOfAnyPreviousFactor(), isLeastRelevantMultipleOfNextLargerPrimeFactor()). But the simple act of moving state that would otherwise be part of the stack frame into static fields means he has changed the behaviour of the code - it is no longer thread safe! calling it from different threads will have undefined results because all threads will be operating on the static fields. He demonstrably made the code worse!.
It invalidated the entire book for me at that point. Here's "Uncle Bob" trying to pretend to be some aged, skilled, craftsman hand guiding us young, ignorant whippersnappers into being proper craftsman and not only can't he properly refactor a simple prime number sieve as a demonstration, but he's so blind to awful code that he doesn't even see it in his awful example enough that it gets published in the same book that complained about programmers who don't have "code-sense". Mistakes and "errata" are one thing, but when he makes such a big noise about "do it right the first time" and then has an example where he refactors and literally breaks something, that's another.
I started reading the code Martin wrote with his son for the “FitNesse” acceptance tracking framework.
The code was simply God awful. Nearly every method was tagged ad “throws Exception”, no comments, and the famous endless sea of classes with only a few lines of code per method.
The code itself ran with constant exceptions filling up the logs. This was going back over a decade or more when I looked at it.
You can see his lineage of trying to sell consulting services and books all the way back to the comp.object Usenet groups back in the 90s.
Sadly he still commands big fees to speak at various conferences and companies, I was very disappointed when he spoke at Bloomberg many years ago when I worked there.
Interestingly enough, John Ousterhout was a recently on Book Overflow podcast and he says he uses this very refactoring but on reverse to teach good software design. So it’s good for something!
I even hate that the title got popularized. Code isn’t “clean” or “dirty”. It works or it doesn’t work. That’s the most important aspect. Another very important aspect is that It’s readable or unreadable. Readable code may be very long winded, but I would much rather have that than somebody’s idea of a “clean” concise very abstract piece of logic.
I hate when I get comments on a PR talking about some subjective piece of code suggesting an alternative that they think is “cleaner”. How clean a piece of code is shouldn’t be a part of consideration while reviewing any code. Instead, like I said before, the only thing that really matters is if it works and if it’s readable. I wonder how many junior engineers have been bogged down with pointless PR comments over the years because of this idea that code can somehow be “neat” or “clean”.
I mean. It’s not like people pushing “side effects” (read: literally any change at all) aren’t also being overtly dogmatic, and writing utterly terrible code.
Uncle bobs book didn’t age well, but neither will the dogmatic stances on immutability and side effects.
In this case, By "side effects" I mean non-obvious changes to the static state, Where a seemingly simple function will both rely on static fields to evaluate it's result as well as make changes to various other fields that will subsequently change the result of that function going forward. I don't think one needs a dogmatic adherence to immutability and avoiding side effects to find that to be undesirable.
I agree. Just letting you know that, most likely, the people you are learning about “side effects” from don’t actually mean “side effect” in the colloquial sense of “state changes beyond the expectation”.
They mean literally any change at all. If your function is named addOne(&x), then they consider the result of x being one greater to be a “side effect”, whereas I suspect actually sane people such as yourself would not see that as a side effect.
This type of definition fuckery is one reason (among many), that I’ve come to fully disrespect functional programming communities.
One thing that also needs to be understood is that side effects (to your definition) are not explicitly bad things. Side effects ignoring boundaries, ignoring APIs, holding references, etc are probably mostly bad though.
In fact, in gaming, providing hooks to empower side effects is often explicitly good for granting designers mechanic freedom.
My belief is the people you are talking about think of programs as batch operations where you take data transform it and then pass it to someone else's API calls. In that case state is sort of evil.
In embedded and gaming state changes in response to input is the point of everything.
I was trying to use a function. You had to create an instance of it to use it, but I was using one method that by appearances should have been static. You feed it an input, it gives you an output, there's nothing to remember. I was calling it from multiple threads--occasional corruption. There must have been something being stored into the object but I have no idea what or why.
Avoiding side effects as much as possible is not a new idea, though; it's been around since at least the 80s. You can just ask people who have worked on Haskell code written in the past 25 years to determine for yourself if the idea aged well or poorly. Opinions will probably be mixed, though, not clearly one way or the other.
I don't understand how this relates to my comment. I'm saying that avoiding side effects isn't a new idea, so it already has aged, either well or poorly.
I don’t really care about the opinions of Haskell coders, as they are probably the only programmers on earth that have more terrible dogmatic ideals than uncle Bob does.
If you're open to challenging your preconceptions (dare I say dogma?) about Haskell programmers then I'm willing to share my opinions on good software development and how Haskell helps, based on over a decade of professional experience with Haskell. Free tidbit: I find effect tracking to be extremely beneficial to software engineering in the large.
Not quite what you are describing, but you can prevent any specific executable from ever running by configuring a "debugger" for it in Image File Execution options (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options). You add a key with the executable name and then add a "debugger" value, then point that debugger at C:\Windows\system32\systray.exe. Every time the named executable tries to launch, Windows will try to "debug" it with systray, which immediately exits so the program never actually runs. After uninstalling OneDrive this can be set to prevent OneDriveSetup.exe from ever running for example.
I was able to confirm in the Windows NT4 source code that he originally wrote some of the code for the format dialog on 2-13-95. That much is true. (late 1994, early 1995, close enough)
>"I also had to decide how much 'cluster slack' would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB."
NT4 didn't support FAT32, and NT4 actually was actually able to be 4GB rather than 2GB for a FAT volume because NT4 allowed 64K clusters, so actually exceeded what most systems were able to do at the time. Formatting as FAT in NT4 had no cluster check or option. The cluster size used was decided based on the size of the volume.
Furthermore, the The 32GB limitation for FAT32 volumes was originally in the internal format functions, not the dialog itself. On Windows 2000 (Which does support FAT32) you can try to format a drive bigger than 32GB as FAT32, but the formatting will fail, as it is hard-coded at the end of the format to fail trying to format FAT32 volumes larger than 32GB. The dialog itself isn't what presents this limitation and it is shared by the command line format.com which uses the same functions.
Not sure why he seems to always exaggerate his own involvement. He's got people believing that he wrote the Zip folder code that Microsoft literally licensed from Info-Zip because he had to touch it to get it integrated. I guess exaggeration is what "influencers" do, and that's what he is at least trying to be now.
Memory is a fickle thing, but the format dialog enforcing a FAT32 limit is probably Dave's biggest failing when it comes to telling old stories.
I don't know if FAT32 was in development in late 1994, it's possible, but it sure didn't ship in Windows NT 4, nor the original Windows 95. Even when it did land in Windows 95 OSR2, the format command happily accepted partitions up to 128GiB; but okay, Windows 95 isn't NT.
Windows 2000's internal formatting functions appear to be the real reason FAT32 is limited to 32GiB on new formats. The GUI, format command, and diskpart are all equally incapable of creating a >32GiB file system. Why? Who knows, it's not like drives of that size or larger didn't already exist at the time. If you use, say, mkdosfs on Linux, the VFAT driver in Windows 2000+ will take volumes up to 2TiB, you can even install Windows 2000 on such large volumes.
> are all equally incapable of creating a >32GiB file system. Why? Who knows,
Win95osr2 could format FAT32 volumes up to at least 128GiB IIRC, the 32GiB came when the filesystem was officially added to the NT line in Windows 2000⁰.
Part of the reason, I always assumed, was to push people to use NTFS where they otherwise wouldn't, which gave MS a bit of lock-in because NTFS wasn't particularly stable on Linux at the time. ExFat as a compromise didn't exist until a fair while later either.
> If you use, say, mkdosfs on Linux, the VFAT driver in Windows 2000+ will take volumes up to 2TiB
2TiB is only the limit if you stick to 512 byte blocks, the filesystem supports up to 4096 byte blocks giving 16TiB. Some filesystem tools didn't like this, and the larger cluster sizes could be very wasteful of space for small files³, so it was often avoided. I don't know if the Linux tools supported this from the start, but they certainly did eventually.
--
[0] there was at least one common 3rd a party driver, from sysinternals to support it on NT4
[1] for safety the most common methods for using NTFS under Linux defaulted to read-only, then and for some time after
[2] sometimes to the extent of causing corruption rather than just refusing to work
[3] the main reason to use FAT32 over FAT16 at the time⁴ being that above 32MiB the cluster size needed to increase about the minimum 512B, up to 32KiB for 2GiB filesystems⁵ meaning an average of 16KiB wasted per file.
[4] later the 2GiB limit⁵ was more significant as drive sizes grew
[5] 4GiB was possible with 64KiB blocks though while officially supported by the format this was not supported by all tools
> 2TiB is only the limit if you stick to 512 byte blocks, the filesystem supports up to 4096 byte blocks giving 16TiB.
Aye, I'm aware, but a 16TiB FAT32 file system in that configuration is only usable on Linux, at which point... why? Use exFAT in that range!
Windows NT 5.x's storage drivers don't support hard disks larger than 2TiB, and there's nothing to do about that. It puts the upper limit of FAT32 on those systems at 2TiB.
IIRC FAT32 supported larger sectors in part for future proofing. It was made because of storage length limits on its predecessor so it makes sense that the devs were very conscious of the need.
Also some storage systems are more efficient speed-wise with larger sectors (though if that was a concern for you, you probably weren't using FAT<anything>). It also made switching between 16 & 32 in-place easier, though I can think of a reason off the top of my head why you would want/need to, and none of the standard tooling could do that.
As an aside, and connected to the failing memory thing, Raymond Chen has repeated multiple times that Space Cadet Pinball couldn't get working on a 64-bit build and never shipped with any version of Windows, and that's why it was gone in Vista. Windows XP Professional x64 Edition has a working 64-bit native build of Pinball.
Well, it was a game from 1995 and wouldn't fit in with Vista's style revamp. Even the old Minesweeper and Solitaire games became Direct3D accelerated in Vista. Maybe the effort to do the same overhaul to Pinball was discarded, but the idea that a 64-bit native build couldn't get working is absurd when the previous Windows version included the very thing.
There were issues with Pinball on "Windows XP 64-bit Edition", or the Itanium version. A great video explaining this is https://youtube.com/watch?v=3EPTfOTC4Jw
I owned zip folders for a while during the windows Vista days. I could have sworn the code was originally purchased, not written by someone at Microsoft. Honestly, it looked like it had been run through an obfuscator. I assumed that the original author had done that to ensure it was difficult for Microsoft to make changes/improvements.
I may be misremembering, but Dave has spoken on his Dave's Garage Youtube channel about running a separate software business selling small utilities and later selling some of them to Microsoft. This might have been one of them. A quick search confirms that he also claims that here:
He talks about it in one of his videos. The zip directory was a product of a side hustle of his, which Microsoft then bought out. In the video he comments how much easier it was to integrate when he had access to more internal apis.
Source: Extracted VZIP150's InstallShield `data.z`, saw `DZIP32.DLL`, and `DUNZIP32.DLL`, and confirmed with `strings` on `Vzip.dll`.
http://dynazip.com/ confirms “DynaZip technology is used by Microsoft Corp. and for many years it has been directly incorporated into the Desktop and Server versions of the Windows Operating Systems. DynaZip technology implements the compression engine behind the Windows Zip Folder user interface which allows users to view, extract-from and create ZIP files that are managed as compressed folders.”
I know that Microsoft employees have accused them of such things, but is there any real evidence of such, or even anyone unaffiliated with Microsoft who can corroborate?
As for the ZIP support, I can't find the source code for ZIP folders specifically. There's this excerpt from another company (Schlumberger Technology Corp.): https://github.com/tongzx/nt5src/blob/daad8a087a4e75422ec96b... which was added in 1996 if the comments are to be believed.
> I was able to confirm in the Windows NT4 source code that he originally wrote some of the code for the format dialog on 2-13-95.
That was a dry Monday, not a rainy Thursday. It's possible he wrote the code Thursday, but didn't get to check it in until Sunday (though Thursday was dry too), but I know I couldn't tell you the what the weather was for code I wrote last month.
I thought that sounded dubious. The 32GB limit is also enforced in diskpart.exe (for the Windows-uninitiated, a console tool for disk manipulation) which would mean it's decoupled from any UI code. In other words, the UI is not what is enforcing the limit OS-wide.
It would be nice if you can cite credentials, if possible; not everyone has/had access to Windows NT source code and Dave for his part provided his credentials.
Not that I am discounting your claim, but from a cursory glance through your comment history you're practically a nobody with a seeming vendetta against someone who credibly had a part in much of Windows NT's innards.
Fair enough. As others have noted the source code was leaked; I've got NT4, NT5, XP, XPSP1 and Server 2003 codebases to review from that, which I downloaded a good while ago. I've been a software developer primarily targeting Windows for 20 years, 10 of those professionally. I was a Microsoft MVP for half of those (2012-2016 inclusive). The reference to the date is found in the header of nt4\private\windows\shell\shelldll\unicode\format.c
The 32GB limit for FAT32 doesn't appear to be handled by the shell code or the dialog, so when I said it was handled internally to the formatting code, I couldn't actually find that. It's just somewhere loweer than the UI. What I did do howeever was boot up Windows 2000, the first version that did have FAT32, and there's no limitation in the format dialog itself. It goes through the entire process and then gives a "Volume too big" error after it has gone through the process, an error shared by not just the format dialog, but diskpart, disk management, and format, which certainly suggests that that is happening at some lower level. The dialog in question does just call into other functions to perform the actual format, but I wasn't able to find the actual source files for it.
>Dave for his part provided his credentials.
Now he understandably does leave out a bit of info about his history which you could arguably say is part of my "vendetta" that you observed. The reason for the proportion of comments is less a vendetta and more that I get kind of worked up every time stuff of his is posted and people applaud how great he is. He's no Dave Cutler but he certainly talks like he was.
Now, as to the tidbit. Dave Plummer ran a scam company that was sued by Washington State in 2006, "SoftwareOnline.com, Inc. ". He actually left Microsoft specifically to run this company. Court documents can be seen here:
You can find David W. Plummer listed in the court complaint.
The short of it is that it was an online software scam company that tricked people into downloading fake Anti-virus and security software using online ads, and then the software delivered additional adware and nagware onto users machines.
That is why it may appear I have a vendetta. I don't trust a word he says and especially when what he says directly contradicts other sources. Mistakes in memory are one thing, but some of them are rather beyond the sort of thing I think is reasonable. Paired with his history, I'm convinced he's actually lying intentionally because he's trying to build a "following" and "Dave's Garage" is just his latest scam. That's why he keeps "coming forward" in posts and his youtube as writing this or doing that. What bothers me is that it's working, because most people don't seem to even question it, even where there are rather severe contradictions.
Spent the afternoon formatting a 128GB USB stick (only thing on hand >32GB) to FAT32 via the format command on one of my Windows machines to see what it'll do, and indeed it failed at the end saying the volume is "too large". So wherever the logic is, I agree it's deeper than the interface Dave wrote.
To give benefit of the doubt, though, Dave didn't say he wrote that logic into the interface. Just that he had to "decide on the cluster slack", which clearly was written by someone (which could be him, this wasn't specified) at a deeper level of the operating system. It's also worth noting that Dave's interface doesn't even give the option to format with FAT32 in the first place, at least with my 128GB USB stick.
So I find nothing wrong with his statement. He wrote the interface, a temporary one which ended up being permanent. He also played the role (or at least a role) in deciding the arbitrary 32GB FAT32 volume size limit.
As for SoftwareOnline.com, that's also mentioned on Dave's Wikipedia article so it's not something hidden away. Anyone so inclined to research his character will see it.
With regards to your vendetta against him regarding his past conduct, it is unwarranted: He settled with Washington state and paid penalties, he returned refunds as requested; the case is closed. If you're going to keep bothering him over that, it's you who is wrong.
I'm not who you're replying to, but I'm a bit torn on your response. I started by understanding your self-described vendetta, but then I read the link you posted.
The link describes the judgement against the company he was CTO of at the time.
So, he's been through the justice system for this, and has been reprimanded satisfactorily. He's paid the fines and made the promises and does not appear to have reoffended.
I don't think there's anything else for him to do in order to atone for this.
So, why are you still mad? What would it take for you to let go of this vendetta that you say you have?
I don't care either way, I'm not involved. I'm just curious why people will forgive some for just about anything but hold negative attitudes toward others for their entire lives, no matter what they do.
He was CTO but also owned the company. That is why he was named directly on the complaint.
I feel he violated what I feel are very basic, elementary ethical principles with regards to software development, by specifically setting out to create software products that were not designed to give the user value but to scam and trick them out of their money.
(There's an argument to be made that he was merely ahead of his time at Microsoft but that's perhaps another discussion.)
He's retired and supposedly wealthy. Not sure what sort of stock options he might have for 7 years at Microsoft, but how much of that wealth (if it even exists) is or was from the scam company? He didn't have to pay most of the fine and the number of customers that requested refunds is hardly documented. For all we know dude is still living off money he scammed from people.
Either way when you stoop that low I don't think you can ever stand up straight again- all you can do is try to hide your slouch.
>What would it take for you to let go of this vendetta that you say you have?
Well, to take an extreme but analogous (IMO) example - what would it take to trust Bernie Madoff for financial advice? That's kind of what I feel this is like. Doesn't matter if they "went through the justice system". You never regain the trust in the field when you so readily violated it to make money.
So what would someone who has done this need to do to win you over?
Record shows he’s paid his debts, to both society and everyone directly affected, at least everyone who requested refunds. Just as importantly, as far as we know, he hasn’t re-offended.
Bernie Madoff isn’t out of the justice system yet, and Dave Plummer hasn’t started any new scam companies, at least as far as I know. So per your analogy, it’s as if Bernie Madoff got out of jail 20 years ago and has been a cashier at a grocery store ever since. I would not go to him to invest my money, and he would not ask me to.
I don’t like it when people who do something wrong are held to that activity for the rest of their life, no matter what else they do. One can’t un-commit the crime, but they can demonstrate that they are reformed over and over and over and it will never be enough for a lot of people.
I don’t understand that. I want to understand that.
I do remember there was a leak of Windows 2000 source code years ago.
I downloaded it only to search for swear words. The most offensive thing I've ever found was things like "workaround because some idiots call <API name> <description of a wrong way to do it>"
> I guess exaggeration is what "influencers" do, and that's what he is at least trying to be now.
Regardless of the rest of your story, this made me chuckle a bit - since Dave went from signing off his YouTube video’s from “I’m only here for likes and subs” to “I’m mostly here for the likes and subs” and started accepting sponsored products.
I didn't read heroics in the above tweet and I'm more than a little confused about the sour grapes here. Is it too much to forgive inaccuracies in a 29 year old memory for such a low stakes issue, especially when there is a huge benefit to giving a personality to some ancient OS history?
It wouldn't matter if he claimed his 5.25" drive shot lightning bolts the first time he tried to compile that dialog, the stories are still great and it's personally enough for me having grown up with these systems to hear them told (not much different from listening to a pseudo-senile grandparent exaggerate war stories for entertainment's sake)
> I'm more than a little confused about the sour grapes here
The bitterness of these comments seems to be inversely proportional to the subject matter's importance. In fairness to these posters... I mean, it's the internet.
He got Dave Cutler to sit for a three hour interview.
As far as the value of his social media stuff goes, the danger posed by his inflating the importance of the Windows format dialog and his contribution to it (seriously?) is outweighed by the serious stuff he's doing.
The old, ugly task manager performed well, which is not something that I can say for the "new and improved" one. It also never crashed for me, not once, which is also something that I can't say for the contemporary version.
Dude this guy is desperately trying to avoid fading into oblivion and is clinging to a little ancient format window to remain relevant in public eye. Have some mercy and let him have his 32gb moment.
Memory is an interesting thing. I once claimed to somebody I was seeing that I had done/said something humorous, fully believing that it was my own experience. It was only when he mentioned hearing that joke from a famous standup comedian that it really hit me - I think what really happened was that I watched a clip a long time ago, and thought hey that's the kind of thing I'd have done - and then proceeded to record the memory as mine, even going as far as attaching it to a specific shop from the same chain in the story.
Once famous incident of this effect is reported by Oliver Sacks, where he confidently narrated a story that presumably happened to him during the war until his brother corrected him:
i remember reading a study that showed conclusively that verbalizing your memories changes them permanently, every time. at some point, if you talk about a memory enough, you wind up remembering the words you've used to describe the memory far more than you remember the memory itself.
depending on the words you choose to describe the memory, and how much you talk about it, you can dramatically change what you think you saw or heard or experienced, to the point where you're telling something that is based on memory, but is now effectively 100% fiction.
This guy has always rubbed me the wrong way. Like he's grifting. Which isn't helped by the fact I've learned recently that apparently he literally did run a scam company and spread malware and got shut down by a state government, as other commenters have noted here.
According to Raymond Chen here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180515-00/?p=98...
"Furthermore, since the compression and decompression code weren’t written by anybody from Microsoft, there is no expertise in the code base, which means that debugging and making changes is a very difficult undertaking."
Which kind of conflicts with Dave's story, where he was, in fact, working at Microsoft.
Additionally, Raymond Chen says: "On of the terms of the license is that the compression and decompression code for Zip folders should be tied to UI actions and not be programmatically drivable. The main product for the company that provided the compression and decompression code is the compression and decompression code itself. If Windows allowed programs to compress and decompression files by driving the shell namespace directly, then that company would have given away their entire business!"
It doesn't really make sense that he would have had this sort of restriction on the licensing since there was no "company" involved and he had no main product to protect there.
According to the leaked source code for XP/2K3, The zipped-folders support in Windows was from Info-zip. Dave did copy something from "VZip" on his own:
History: Sep-26-96 Davepl Created (from old VZip code)
This was a set of utility CIDL functions and not related to the zip functionality in Windows.
That is interesting. There is also his story about 64bit Space Cadet Pinball which got disproven by NCommander. No one said he was lying, but maybe misremembering things, because evidently there is a working 64bit Space Cadet Pinball version. But he blocked every attempt to engage.
My understanding is that The "Nintendo hired the iNES Developer" story is actually it's own myth!
The person referenced who Nintendo hired is Kawase Tomohiro.
The basis for calling him "The iNES Developer" is that, in a changelog for 0.7 of iNES, Marat Fayzullin - the developer of iNES - wrote: "Sound support completely rewritten, thanks to Kawase Tomohiro"
That is the entirety of the association. That single line in a changelog. Based on similar "thanks" lines it was probably because they reported some emulation issues and not because they personally rewrote the sound support for the emulator, but resulted in Marat doing so. It's actually interesting how these stories seem to change over time. The last time I heard this, the story was that Nintendo had hired somebody who contributed to iNES, which was at least technically true if a bit misleading, but it seems that now the story is that they hired *the* iNES Developer. Which seems particularly silly when we consider the basis is that 8 word changelog line.
Also, the environment on a kitchen counter is wildly different than the environment inside out stomach, so airborne bacteria- even if we were to presume these were the exact same kinds of bacteria present in our stomach - being uninterested in foods in the open air doesn't really translate to the idea that the food is indigestible. Many gut bacteria rely on us to break down foods into the things that they can digest, so a colony couldn't start on the surface of the same food(s) in the open air.