arglebargle

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So they asked me if I was BI. Well I took a little Spanish in high school, but not enough to be BI. But I didn’t want to look stupid so I said sure I’m BI.

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You don’t just have your podcast auto resume whenever you start driving?

Well I appreciated all of that believe it or not. I still stand by windows 95 being basically a hybrid with the bootload from DOS, but I understand your distinction. But because while windows 95 was 32 bit preemptive, it still had 16 bit applications running at the same time that were cooperative multitasking such as User.dll. They pushed processes to User.dll It still was this weird hybrid sitting on top of several 16 bit processes.

As an Amiga user by early 1988, and access to DEC Alphas and Sun workstations, windows 95 seemed very late to the party. But you are right that in hindsight, windows 95 solved a lot of problems for working with generic hardware for the masses.

But also remember that DirectX at launch was not easy to work with. Microsoft had licensed OpenGL from silicon graphics, and later bought the graphics engine for DirectX from Rendermorphics. OpenGL would be at windows 95 launch far better performing, and directx still hard to write for and limited graphic functionality. But they continued to improve it and you are right they supports sound, joysticks, graphics, one stop shop eventually.

But it’s a perfectly functional and sensible solution for storing system configurations.

No. It was not. The concept was OK, but the execution was not. Even Microsoft didn’t know what was in there. The design was horrific. They could have used keywords, they could have had a data dictionary, they could have standardized it. They could have made it not get corrupted by glancing at it.

But they didn’t, at least not for a long time. And it still sucks, just a little less.

XP was also pretty good for its time.

Pretty good at collecting every virus under the sun and beginning the anti consumer practices.

95 was an innovator if anything, ahead of pretty much anything else on desktop at the time

Huh? Coming from an Amiga it really didn’t seem innovative. Or OS2 or BeOS (which ran circles around Win 95) or Macs. Windows 95 was still just another dos program on top of a shell.

Yep and that happened right about when windows XP came out.

Yes, yes it has.

20 years and counting its been Linux desktop for me. There really hasn’t been a good alternative yet.

Most people are not making software and trying to create support structures either. So I am not sure what you are getting at here. If someone can create a development project of any decent size, setting up a web page for cheap or free is trivial. So I have no idea what you are getting at.

It has nothing to do with if I like discord or not, it is simply is it appropriate or not. I have explained why it is not an ideal support place. Certainly not a tier one. Nothing I said was pretending anything.

And yes it depends on the server. You do realize that admins use various bots and have different settings per discord instance right? There are many discussions with the discord devs about their various approaches and problems with searches.

How am I being disingenuous? I DO host web pages. We do host pages for support. I am not sure what you are getting at.

Yes, IRC isn’t used that frequently, and it is sad. It just works.

I am not the only one who doesn’t like Discords search, and it really does vary depending on the instance.

And I am realistic. Again, we already do this. No discord needed.

most people aren’t gonna host it themselves

Why not? Barely costs anything. Or even free if you want to rely github, and if that goes away you can move it elsewhere, you own it. I still host multiple web sites and work with several projects that leverage tools to self host. A domain is not that expensive.

No one under 50 knows how to use irc? We still use it for some of the support cases for a few software projects and I can assure you the majority of users are under 30. But I get your point, for the average, barely computer literate person, they probably haven’t even heard of it.

you just put a discord button in the app or the settings page if it’s something bigger than an app:

To find out if someone will bother answering a question, to sign up, to ask the same thing over and over again. Horrible way to run support.

I am not the only one who finds the searches inconsistent. It also depends on how each person sets up their channel. More importantly it doesn’t end up in a search engine. You have to know what discord server to start with.

IRC with history, your own forums, your own chat, your own wiki: they do not disappear.

Horrible place to support software. No history, your question is answered by whoever happens to be there, you cant see the information with out joining… just terrible.

With other methods at least there is asynchronous support, history is kept, and no login is needed.

Not to mention the horrible interface and design choices and the reliance on third party tools that could disappear or change service at anytime.

It is written into their plan, not a surprise at all “ignore the courts”.

Sure… Want to fix the stupid new menus in windows 11? Oh it is just a new guid key in the registry in a location you wouldn’t expect. You know just cut and paste shit into the registry you found on the internet. Windows is just as annoying, if not more so.

In any case: what system GUI’s do you want? GUIS make everything so much harder, careful what you wish for.

Ogg at lower bitrates sounded better than mp3 at the same rate. Consumers dont care, but for a lot of game developers the zero patent risk and higher quality shipping with smaller files made Ogg a great choice at the time.

For me? FLACs are the only way… which reminds me, I wonder I can still convert all the SHN (shorten) lossless files I still have. I should get on that before a converter doesn’t exist.

Yes it was. Windows XP began the phone home for licensing. It also created a tiered system where things are kept from you unless you paid more, but they were not really clear about it. I remember needing a Corporate license to do some things we needed to do. This is also where they realldy fucked up with Active X and tying windows explorer to the system in such a way that made it harder not to use it. Home users could not actually admin local accounts, and security between then was basically non existant.

And then shortly after launch they began the push to get the users to use their home page, msn services, notifications for explorer to be the default browser. The media player started pushing their online services. Live ID became a thing.

If you complained that they had things you didnt want, like explorer, windows media player, windows messenger, etc: they did say you could run a utility to “remove” them. Except it didn’t. It removed the icons. So they started the flat out lying to the consumer with windows XP.

Edit: Now I remember, among other reasons, we needed corporate to stop forced updates.

Edit: I apologize for all the after post edits but the longer I think about it the more I think of!

What about the new “buy music online” feature? You could ONLY use Explorer to complete the transaction, no matter if you had a different default browser or not.

No this isn’t right. Windows XP was the enshitification.