UI blunderz

Windows has been around for quite a bit, and been thru several revisions. The Vista edition, like the Concord, looked impressive, but at times had difficulty flying. Here Vista is trying to show some volume controls (with a pretty basic hardware setup), and running into some difficulties: What causes this bug - who knows, and I suppose, who cares. Some kind of erroneous while condition, which can cause any imperative program to enter an inefficient, repetitive  state. Given the complexity of a piece of software such as Windows Vista (50 million lines of source code!). To put this in perspective, and at risk of comparing the art of C++ programming to that of 16th century literature (though at least in terms of age and fragility, there may be parallels), the entire works of the Great Bard (he of Hamlet) number 0.88 million lines. So we may reason that Windows Vista could have been composed by 56.81 Shakespeares.

Down through the years, it is unfortunate but true that any diehard Windows user will have experienced a serious disk failure. While it is true that like any mechanical device, disks are prone to occasional error, and like everything in this universe, eventual decline unless work is done, there are fundamental reasons why the Windows Operating System is more prone to disk issues that Linux based systems. Given the same hardware, and allowing for different flavours of Linux and file systems, generally Linux disk systems tend to be better performant and more reliable: - Linux filesystem avoids fragmentation, where the free space of a disk becomes broken up over time into smaller parts, and then newer large files must be broken apart in order to fit into the free space. Fragmented drives tend to perform more slowly, and defragmenting is a slow process. - Linux seems to make better use of caching, where file contents is read and written in memory (the very fast, volatile storage of a compu...

  Notepad++ is a great and free text editor with many practical features, such as line-sorting, multi-file and directory find-and-replace, and excellent encoding support. However, programming is hard, and even the noble Notepad++ has been caught off guard in the war on bugs:  To NULL or not to NULL... A display full of NULLs is not that desirable, but on the other hand is better than random, uninitialized data, or worse, reading beyond assigned buffers into memory regions containing data this user is not supposed to see.  The history of NULL is a controversial one: it was, somewhat like JavaScript, cheap to implement at the time and seemed a good idea. However, notoriously, even the inventor of NULL considers the invention to be a mistake . At first glance, and when used in a very limited scope, NULL seems a sensible construct: a global kind of default 'this is not set' value, that is reliably detectable, as opposed to some random memory garbage. Issues arise when the NU...

Windows aficionados will recall the blue screen of death - and it's not fun like the one they use in the movies. To the credit of the inventiveness of Microsoft engineers - the screens of death are not limited in their colors to the blue section of the visible electromagnetic spectrum. Should you be unlucky enough, and perhaps there is some Irish-American connection here, but you may also share the joy of experiencing not only the blue screen of death - but also the green:   Software innovation at its finest Oh to be a fly on the wall, when the UX, software devs and PMs were discussing this fine feature! The exact count of shades of green that Windows sports is a topic for more in-depth analysis, and may even be considered a trade secret... EU officials are investigating...