I mean, Raymond Chen has been writing The Old New Thing consistently for over 20 years. Nearly every single entry is interesting, informative, and illuminating, aimed at every facet of software engineering, old and new, over the decades. He may be part of the final bastion of quality and care for detail at MS, dwindling and faint as it is.
Windows doesn't need or deserve defending. It's atrocious. But this is a silly comment.
> Sound familiar? It should, because it's also an apt description of... well, you know. A butthole.
Good news! Cornholio.ai isn't registered by anyone as a domain name, so someone with sufficient motivation and a love for Beavis and Butthead could totally instruct an LLM to make a satirical AI-butthole-logo themed website.
Bonus points if it has affiliate links to Amazon or other online stores selling TP (for the bunghole, of course).
> There are also examples of US people being offended by scenes considered harmless in other cultures
I’m not going to be able to find this, but I remember some piece of news having to do with a woman and a photograph of her with naked breasts.
Someone found examples of how it had been reported in the US and a European country. Both used the same picture and only censored one area: the face in the European country, the breasts in the US.
Though now it's long buried in internet folklore graveyard, there once was a popular shock image (and an associated website) called "goatse". (If you never heard of it, you better NOT google it).
For awhile, people had been spotting goatse in several logos.
TBH I don't have many problems on that and even changing clothes on public beaches in Spain neither.
I've gotten far more aroused with a nerdy/metalhead woman talking about geeky stuff (and her outfit) than just average naked bodies where in the end most of the "mistery" runs away and, well, it shows up the whole mediocre shapes everyone has, myself included.
Tons of anorexya/bulimia issues would dissappear once people discovered that, well... almost no one it's a supermodel at all, and even that-supposedly-all-hot-girl for sure has some sort of issue with some spot or whatever in her body.
Kinda like libre operating systems with the code wide open in your hands. Tons of technology wonders with shiny UI's are full of crude patches. Humans are similar.
> Tons of anorexya/bulimia issues would dissappear once people discovered that, well... almost no one it's a supermodel at all, and even that-supposedly-all-hot-girl for sure has some sort of issue with some spot or whatever in her body.
I'm not so sure: people in Germany still have these issues. (But I haven't done a quantitative analysis.)
> Until we got a complaint from a government (who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons) that was upset with Windows 95 because it depicted naked children.
How dare you violate the government's exclusive right to naked children!
years ago my father got a decomissioned, wiped clean notebook from work and asked me to set it up for him. i didn't want to shell out a hundred bucks for windows, so i suggested trying linux (ubuntu) and he agreed. "intrepid ibex" was installed without issues. a few weeks later i asked him if everything was ok and how he liked it, and he had no complaints, except one: he didn't like the edgy skull on the desktop wallpaper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history#/media/...
The most shocking thing for me on this was that Ivex was such a shit version of Linux and gave me such trouble I put Linux off for 10 more years after that crap. It was not at all ready for normal people. Night and day different to Linux today.
It's impossible for me to determine whether it looks like a skull now because my mind was contaminated with the notion that it's a skull before I had a chance to look.
I'll see your CD cover with three people in their underwear, plus a hologram of the top half of a possibly naked baby on the Microsoft Windows box, and raise you the top half of several naked SGI "Skinny Hackers" in a projected texture map illustration of an ACM publication:
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
>A truly excellent review of the history of Silicon Graphics. I worked in the Australian Sales office as their 1st engineer in the Asia Pacific region. Was trained in MtView the 1st week the MtView campus opened. The 1st system I worked on was the IRIS 1000 and subsequently all the products from then on till I left in mid-2009 when the Australian Engineering division was shut. A great company with great people who just wanted to engineer the best Graphics experience on the planet until we lost focus and vision of what we did well. Brings to Mind the Skinny Hackers, the Rocktain event, PCP monitoring, CXFS (Clustered File Systems), Failsafe, Diskless boot, Voxel vision, and so many other engineering wins. A great company, great people, & the drive to make a better computing world. Thank you for the memories and documenting the history of a company that did make some huge breakthroughs in Computer Graphics & Computing architecture. Just go ask NVIDIA, Cray and now HP!! Also a shout out to Jim Clark & his team for the vision and determination to bring the Graphics Engine to world, the heart of the IRIS workstation and subsequent graphics systems.
|> In <112...@bu.edu> j...@bu-pub.bu.edu (Jason Heirtzler) writes:
|> | Okay, I gotta know. Whom does the phrase "The Skinny Hackers" refer to?
|> A small group of (fairly skinny ;) ) folks who are also great hackers/developers and mostly long time SGI employees. Among other fruits of their group hackerdom was the original showcase.
>Being skinny didn't have anything to do with it. Although Showcase was the best known product of the skinnyhackers, the first product was an image of them made from a photo of all three sitting naked at computer terminals, busily hacking. On top of the photo was the international "no" symbol (red circle with a line across it), and underneath, the words "No Skinnyhacking".
>Note: Skinnyhacking is a dangerous activity, and should only be performed by professionals. Do NOT attempt it at home.
>If you're interested, you can see the image in the most recent (1992) SIGGRAPH proceedings, in distored form on the back cover, and in non-distored form on page 252.
>I can't imagine that anyone would want a copy of this image, but I have one in SGI format. (Actually, the secret goal is to have this image overtake the mandrill in popularity.)
|> I won't speak further to protect their secret identities ;)
This is completely off topic but I'm shocked that zdnet autoplayed a video with audio on after I opened the page and scrolled down a little. Incredible that we still have websites whose primary purpose isn't playing audio automatically play audio. There's no way this doesn't annoy a vast majority of users.
This phenomenon terrifies me greatly - how large organisations can be ignorant of the basics of their purpose. I believe it is one and the same mechanism of collective incompetence, which can affect both a media company, a school, or a government. It's as if the humanity, under any system, were bound to create inhospitable conditions for one another.
Companies are not “ignorant of the basics of their purpose”. The basics of their purpose is to make money and increase value for shareholders. There is nothing in their core purpose that benefits you as a user or that says they shouldn't annoy you.
I am aware that the purpose of an overwhelming majority of companies is to earn money. Does auto-playing their own video with audio increase revenue? It's not an ad someone is paying for.
>I just got a call from the owner of a hotel for which we provide hotspot service. She says that a guest spotted the “Powered by FreeBSD” logo at the bottom of the login page, and was offended; the guest was convinced that either we or the hotel management “worshipped the Devil” and refused to stay at the hotel unless the logo was removed. The owner could make no headway by explaining that the besneakered mascot was a cartoon character and was a daemon, not the Devil. And she feared upsetting the guest even more if she said that large portions of the same software are inside every Mac and iPad. The hotel stands to lose more than $1000 if the guest, who had originally planned to stay for a long period, moves out.
>One of our tech support people also got a call directly from the hotel guest, who claimed that having the logo on the page constituted “abuse.” The guest also claimed to be “losing money” because she wouldn’t use the hotspot if there was a “devil” on the splash page. He didn’t even realize what she was talking about at first…. He couldn’t imagine why on Earth this person was calling him and going on about devils.
>Attempts at misguided religious censorship notwithstanding, I don’t want to see one of my ISP’s customers lose business. And I’d like to keep a FreeBSD logo on our hotspot page. Is there artwork that doesn’t include horned creatures that might offend the ignorant or superstitious?
> ``Pardon us, ma'am. Mind if we ask you a question?''
> Well, people keep telling me that Texans are real friendly, so I nodded.
> ``Are you a Satanist?''
> Well, at least they didn't ask me if I liked to party.
> ``Uh, no, I can't say that I am.''
> ``Gee, ma'am. Are you sure about that?'' they asked.
> I put on my biggest, brightest Dallas Cowboys cheerleader smile and said, ``No, I'm positive. The closest I've ever come to Satanism is watching Geraldo.''
> ``Hmmm. Interesting. See, we was just wondering why it is you have the lord of darkness on your chest there.''
My buddy was driven out of Lubbock on threat of violence because he was wearing his burning man gear of black trousers, black coat, and black top hat. No satanic imagery.
He is both an atheist and British, so they were accidentally correct.
It's funny that this keeps happening to them. More recently one of their wallpapers had some sort of hippo with hair all over that looked like hairy balls[1]. I wonder how many people look at the wallpapers before they get the okay.
I was watching YouTube the other day and it was talking about Nirvana's Nevermind album, showed the album cover but with a square censoring part of it. In these cases it really is the censor themselves who is debauched. Reminds me of the classic story where Samuel Johnson left out some rude words from his dictionary. He was congratulated for having left them out, to which he is said to have quipped "I congratulate you on being able to look them up!"
It might sound silly to censor an album cover, but on the other hand why risk Google locking your whole account due to some automated check from which you have no recourse?
That sounds fundamentally contradictory. As soon as you got control back, by definition, you CANNOT be a so-called YouTuber anymore. Unless you own YouTube of course. ;)
Raymond Chen's articles are the true wealth of contemporary tech-lore. My favorite is the one where a user reported error on Flight Simulator map [0] and it escalated all the way up to Bill Gates & the then chief of FS division.
Raymond's work often uses analogies to everyday, real life situations to make the technical stuff more relatable. Sometimes, these end up being bizarre and even nightmarish. It's like a glimpse into some alternate world where the denizens are adversarial, hyper pedantic, scheming, criminally insane, or just plain stupid.
"Sometimes I’m in a hurry, and I want to make sure I am the next person to get served at the deli counter. To do this, I find whoever has the lowest number, knock them unconscious, and steal their ticket. But sometimes somebody else comes in who’s also in a hurry. That person knocks me unconscious and steals my ticket. My plan is to set my watch alarm to wake me up periodically, and each time it wakes me up, I find the person with the lowest number, knock them unconscious, and steal their ticket. Is there a better way?"
"This is like asking for a cheeseburger and then trying to peel every last bit of cheese off the patty to turn it into a plain hamburger."
"This is like driving up to a bridge, seeing a 'Bridge out of order' sign, then getting out of your car, moving the sign, driving onto the bridge, falling into the river, and then complaining to the car manufacturer that their car doesn’t work."
"This is like calling the natural gas utility company’s emergency number to report a major gas leak in your house. The gas company sends a technician over, and they can’t find any leak. They ask how you came to suspect that there’s a gas leak, and you tell them, 'Oh, I didn’t smell anything. I called you because I’m hoping to learn more about how to recognize the smell of gas. Do you have any tips?'"
"This is like 'I have this cupboard full of rubbish, so I will solve that by nailing the doors shut'"
"It’s like asking, 'What happens to the phrase 1 cup sugar when I eat my cookies?' The phrase 1 cup sugar was part of the instructions for making the cookies"
I find it worrying because being super sensitive to stuff like that is usually red flag that the person is kinda into it - Senators in Bathroom stalls and all that (bonus if you get the reference).
But I think the person who directly contacted Microsoft about this was probably not the person who noticed it and brought it up on the Government side just the Person who was tasked with communicating about it so its good they remain nameless.
I think they mean it was someone in the government who complained and that complaint went to their IT department, and it was the poor IT department who had to complain to Microsoft.
Or something like that. Basically, the person from the government who contacted them was the sad messenger and not the original complainer.
A few people may have complained, but nobody hated Windows because of the baby hologram or the red moon desert background.
Everyone who hated Windows hated it because win 9x and early xp were terrible. When they weren't crashing, they were often good enough to get the job done and play games, but nobody would accuse anything in the range of win 3.0 to pre-sp2 xp of being remotely well-designed, not even with xp's yoinking of the NT kernel. Yet despite its poor design, Windows managed to become the principle fast food in the OS world, and Microsoft illegally leveraged that OS near-monopoly.
This does not seem to be related to the article. OP is about red moon and naked baby and clouds. It does not claim that anyone hated windows because of that.
Usually I wouldn't comment just to point out offtopic, but I think "instant bad thoughts every time windows is mentioned, no matter the context" is another psychological effect caused by Microsoft.
136 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 30.9 ms ] threadWindows doesn't need or deserve defending. It's atrocious. But this is a silly comment.
People just forgot.
I am sure that in 2050, there will be blog posts about Windows 11 that won't make people enrage.
Have to say this never would have occurred to me.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/oct/02/nirvana-neverm...
Good news! Cornholio.ai isn't registered by anyone as a domain name, so someone with sufficient motivation and a love for Beavis and Butthead could totally instruct an LLM to make a satirical AI-butthole-logo themed website.
Bonus points if it has affiliate links to Amazon or other online stores selling TP (for the bunghole, of course).
I’m not going to be able to find this, but I remember some piece of news having to do with a woman and a photograph of her with naked breasts.
Someone found examples of how it had been reported in the US and a European country. Both used the same picture and only censored one area: the face in the European country, the breasts in the US.
For awhile, people had been spotting goatse in several logos.
https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/038-design...
I also think it would be very impolite to make fun of your clients on the internet for a stupid request while naming them explicitly while doing so.
Looking at it from a distance indeed may raise some brows.
Tons of anorexya/bulimia issues would dissappear once people discovered that, well... almost no one it's a supermodel at all, and even that-supposedly-all-hot-girl for sure has some sort of issue with some spot or whatever in her body.
Kinda like libre operating systems with the code wide open in your hands. Tons of technology wonders with shiny UI's are full of crude patches. Humans are similar.
I'm not so sure: people in Germany still have these issues. (But I haven't done a quantitative analysis.)
By the same logic:
If God didn't mean for people to cannibalize each other, they wouldn't be made of meat.
Flanders and Swan: The Reluctant Cannibal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEvh8qY-QRo
How dare you violate the government's exclusive right to naked children!
cought me off guard while drinking coffee
Ah, that would be 8.10 with the coffee stain wallpaper :-P
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ubuntu_screenshot.png
Windows has been free since at least VXKC4. Microsoft wouldn’t exist as anything but an Excel vendor today if it were any other way; it’s intentional.
(Ubuntu was the right choice.)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/canonical-turns-20-shaping-the...
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34129571
"Yes, we have a dress code. You have to dress." – Scott McNealy
On the other hand, down the road at SGI there was a practice called "Skinnyhacking"!
https://rdtk.net/internet/how-do-you-check-a-computer-s-comp...
>Snowsinger. November 21, 2020 at 07:48.
>A truly excellent review of the history of Silicon Graphics. I worked in the Australian Sales office as their 1st engineer in the Asia Pacific region. Was trained in MtView the 1st week the MtView campus opened. The 1st system I worked on was the IRIS 1000 and subsequently all the products from then on till I left in mid-2009 when the Australian Engineering division was shut. A great company with great people who just wanted to engineer the best Graphics experience on the planet until we lost focus and vision of what we did well. Brings to Mind the Skinny Hackers, the Rocktain event, PCP monitoring, CXFS (Clustered File Systems), Failsafe, Diskless boot, Voxel vision, and so many other engineering wins. A great company, great people, & the drive to make a better computing world. Thank you for the memories and documenting the history of a company that did make some huge breakthroughs in Computer Graphics & Computing architecture. Just go ask NVIDIA, Cray and now HP!! Also a shout out to Jim Clark & his team for the vision and determination to bring the Graphics Engine to world, the heart of the IRIS workstation and subsequent graphics systems.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.sgi.misc/c/X50cCoYrU20/...
>Tom Davis, Mar 22, 1993, 6:06:21 PM, comp.sys.sgi.misc
>In article <gom...@zola.esd.sgi.com>, ol...@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson) writes:
|> In <112...@bu.edu> j...@bu-pub.bu.edu (Jason Heirtzler) writes:
|> | Okay, I gotta know. Whom does the phrase "The Skinny Hackers" refer to?
|> A small group of (fairly skinny ;) ) folks who are also great hackers/developers and mostly long time SGI employees. Among other fruits of their group hackerdom was the original showcase.
>Being skinny didn't have anything to do with it. Although Showcase was the best known product of the skinnyhackers, the first product was an image of them made from a photo of all three sitting naked at computer terminals, busily hacking. On top of the photo was the international "no" symbol (red circle with a line across it), and underneath, the words "No Skinnyhacking".
>Note: Skinnyhacking is a dangerous activity, and should only be performed by professionals. Do NOT attempt it at home.
>If you're interested, you can see the image in the most recent (1992) SIGGRAPH proceedings, in distored form on the back cover, and in non-distored form on page 252.
>I can't imagine that anyone would want a copy of this image, but I have one in SGI format. (Actually, the secret goal is to have this image overtake the mandrill in popularity.)
|> I won't speak further to protect their secret identities ;)
>I will! It was me! Tom Davis! The...
This phenomenon terrifies me greatly - how large organisations can be ignorant of the basics of their purpose. I believe it is one and the same mechanism of collective incompetence, which can affect both a media company, a school, or a government. It's as if the humanity, under any system, were bound to create inhospitable conditions for one another.
https://halfblog.net/2011/12/04/daemon-worship/
>I just got a call from the owner of a hotel for which we provide hotspot service. She says that a guest spotted the “Powered by FreeBSD” logo at the bottom of the login page, and was offended; the guest was convinced that either we or the hotel management “worshipped the Devil” and refused to stay at the hotel unless the logo was removed. The owner could make no headway by explaining that the besneakered mascot was a cartoon character and was a daemon, not the Devil. And she feared upsetting the guest even more if she said that large portions of the same software are inside every Mac and iPad. The hotel stands to lose more than $1000 if the guest, who had originally planned to stay for a long period, moves out.
>One of our tech support people also got a call directly from the hotel guest, who claimed that having the logo on the page constituted “abuse.” The guest also claimed to be “losing money” because she wouldn’t use the hotspot if there was a “devil” on the splash page. He didn’t even realize what she was talking about at first…. He couldn’t imagine why on Earth this person was calling him and going on about devils.
>Attempts at misguided religious censorship notwithstanding, I don’t want to see one of my ISP’s customers lose business. And I’d like to keep a FreeBSD logo on our hotspot page. Is there artwork that doesn’t include horned creatures that might offend the ignorant or superstitious?
>–Brett Glass
> ``Pardon us, ma'am. Mind if we ask you a question?''
> Well, people keep telling me that Texans are real friendly, so I nodded.
> ``Are you a Satanist?''
> Well, at least they didn't ask me if I liked to party.
> ``Uh, no, I can't say that I am.''
> ``Gee, ma'am. Are you sure about that?'' they asked.
> I put on my biggest, brightest Dallas Cowboys cheerleader smile and said, ``No, I'm positive. The closest I've ever come to Satanism is watching Geraldo.''
> ``Hmmm. Interesting. See, we was just wondering why it is you have the lord of darkness on your chest there.''
And it continues…
Three dates ending in 6... 666... What is this Satanic inception?
The cashierist couldn't comprehend the word "medieval", and decided I was going to an "evil event".
Not making this up.
He is both an atheist and British, so they were accidentally correct.
[1] https://linux-cdn.softpedia.com/screenshots/Ubuntu-Hirsute-H...
Did this comment already put me on a list?
If this body part is obscene, shouldn’t the author do the moral thing and remove his own?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170418-00/?p=95...
Raymond's work often uses analogies to everyday, real life situations to make the technical stuff more relatable. Sometimes, these end up being bizarre and even nightmarish. It's like a glimpse into some alternate world where the denizens are adversarial, hyper pedantic, scheming, criminally insane, or just plain stupid.
"Sometimes I’m in a hurry, and I want to make sure I am the next person to get served at the deli counter. To do this, I find whoever has the lowest number, knock them unconscious, and steal their ticket. But sometimes somebody else comes in who’s also in a hurry. That person knocks me unconscious and steals my ticket. My plan is to set my watch alarm to wake me up periodically, and each time it wakes me up, I find the person with the lowest number, knock them unconscious, and steal their ticket. Is there a better way?"
"This is like asking for a cheeseburger and then trying to peel every last bit of cheese off the patty to turn it into a plain hamburger."
"This is like driving up to a bridge, seeing a 'Bridge out of order' sign, then getting out of your car, moving the sign, driving onto the bridge, falling into the river, and then complaining to the car manufacturer that their car doesn’t work."
"This is like calling the natural gas utility company’s emergency number to report a major gas leak in your house. The gas company sends a technician over, and they can’t find any leak. They ask how you came to suspect that there’s a gas leak, and you tell them, 'Oh, I didn’t smell anything. I called you because I’m hoping to learn more about how to recognize the smell of gas. Do you have any tips?'"
"This is like 'I have this cupboard full of rubbish, so I will solve that by nailing the doors shut'"
"It’s like asking, 'What happens to the phrase 1 cup sugar when I eat my cookies?' The phrase 1 cup sugar was part of the instructions for making the cookies"
But I think the person who directly contacted Microsoft about this was probably not the person who noticed it and brought it up on the Government side just the Person who was tasked with communicating about it so its good they remain nameless.
Given that this request was not related to national security, they really should publish the name.
Or something like that. Basically, the person from the government who contacted them was the sad messenger and not the original complainer.
Everyone who hated Windows hated it because win 9x and early xp were terrible. When they weren't crashing, they were often good enough to get the job done and play games, but nobody would accuse anything in the range of win 3.0 to pre-sp2 xp of being remotely well-designed, not even with xp's yoinking of the NT kernel. Yet despite its poor design, Windows managed to become the principle fast food in the OS world, and Microsoft illegally leveraged that OS near-monopoly.
Who remembers OS/2?
Usually I wouldn't comment just to point out offtopic, but I think "instant bad thoughts every time windows is mentioned, no matter the context" is another psychological effect caused by Microsoft.