He kind of fell off. He left Microsoft to found a scam company called "SoftwareOnline.com" that used ads to trick people into downloading fake anti-virus software. The software didn't do anything besides show the user ads and nag messages, and could not be fully uninstalled. See https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...
Meanwhile, the creators and maintainers of linux 'btop' haven't scammed anyone or been sued by any state AGs. Shocking, I know! It's almost as if you can write a system status monitor application without doing anything shady.
Being the Task Manager Guy became his whole brand. Any time he's brought up, the Task Manager topic is sure to follow. No wonder he's doing more Task Managers. It's so pervasive it's kind of funny.
"Plummer left Microsoft in 2003[10] to start his own company, SoftwareOnline LLC, a software vendor. Plummer claimed that the company went on to sell millions of copies of first and third party utilities software for Windows.[16]
In 2006, SoftwareOnline was sued by The Washington State Attorney General's Office for alleged violations of the Consumer Protection Act after complaints were made about two products called "Registry Cleaner" and "InternetShield". SoftwareOnline agreed to pay $150,000 in civil penalties, plus $250,000 that was ultimately suspended following compliance with all terms in the settlement, as well as $40,000 in legal fees.[6] He also founded Xeriton Corporation during this period, whose major product was the Blue Phone technical support service.[17] In December 2009, Xeriton was sold to Support.com for $8.5 million.[18]"
For working with processes and software development on Windows, this replacement looks useless. I use Sysinternals Process Explorer daily at work, and that'll continue being immensely useful.
Ripped off with using a free tool to do basic task management and get better viz than default TM? To each their own, I've used SPE and I much prefer TS for my simple needs.
"Every core, honestly", "Not just used. Accounted for.", "More signal. Less hunting.", "Your machine. Your phosphor."
anyways, after scrolling through all of that stuff, it is not clear to me what the benefit of using this over normal task manager (or sysinternals tools) is, other than themes i guess?
perhaps it is better than whatever the native task management program is on mac?
Nothing wrong with using AI for software development, but your product landing page being chock full of LLM-isms is an honest signal about how much care was put into this project.
Also, it somehow, bafflingly, against all odds, manages to use 60% more memory and 3x as much CPU as the underwhelming XAML task manager that comes with windows. How about we figure out how to use fewer resources, rather than way more resources, than the already unreasonably inefficient thing that Microsoft ships?
Also, I find it funny that this TMOG thing seems to apply a special rule such that its own process does not appear in the dashboards by default.
> In 2006, SoftwareOnline was sued by The Washington State Attorney General's Office for alleged violations of the Consumer Protection Act after complaints were made about two products called "Registry Cleaner" and "InternetShield".
This seems like a good place for me to share TaskPilot, which shows you and lets you manage everything running in the background on Linux. Services, SystemD timers, cron, autostart, ports in use, snaps, containers, mounts, and more
We need a marker on posts which are complete AI generated rubbish.
What happened to the profession of software engineering? The craft and quality has been thrown out of the window in pursuit of slop.
We are disrespecting our own profession by turning the software we build into a fast food junk where nobody wants anything we make and nobody cares about the quality and craft of creating.
We are just building the same things repeatedly over and over again with nothing inventive or new, wasting engineering time in the process.
AI has just shown how unimaginative some engineers are in choosing what problems in software to solve.
It would be okay if it were a bit less AI slop in regards to prose, had more conventional fonts and also removed the obnoxious glow effects. Then again, personal opinion.
36 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 32.1 ms ] threadhttps://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows/dave-plumme...
"Plummer's Task Manager OG is, for now, only available on macOS. But as Plummer states, "Windows support will follow shortly.""
Linux is also available
Because they use a screen reader and don't know any better.
And remember, the state of Washington sued the author for some very good reasons. I wouldn't let his stuff anywhere near my machines.
[0] https://apps.gnome.org/Resources/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Plummer
"Plummer left Microsoft in 2003[10] to start his own company, SoftwareOnline LLC, a software vendor. Plummer claimed that the company went on to sell millions of copies of first and third party utilities software for Windows.[16]
In 2006, SoftwareOnline was sued by The Washington State Attorney General's Office for alleged violations of the Consumer Protection Act after complaints were made about two products called "Registry Cleaner" and "InternetShield". SoftwareOnline agreed to pay $150,000 in civil penalties, plus $250,000 that was ultimately suspended following compliance with all terms in the settlement, as well as $40,000 in legal fees.[6] He also founded Xeriton Corporation during this period, whose major product was the Blue Phone technical support service.[17] In December 2009, Xeriton was sold to Support.com for $8.5 million.[18]"
anyways, after scrolling through all of that stuff, it is not clear to me what the benefit of using this over normal task manager (or sysinternals tools) is, other than themes i guess?
perhaps it is better than whatever the native task management program is on mac?
"lots of words. not much substance".
Activity Monitor works well enough for me. But, damn, I'd rather visually parse top all day before I'd resign myself to gaze upon that hideous mess.
Also, it somehow, bafflingly, against all odds, manages to use 60% more memory and 3x as much CPU as the underwhelming XAML task manager that comes with windows. How about we figure out how to use fewer resources, rather than way more resources, than the already unreasonably inefficient thing that Microsoft ships?
Also, I find it funny that this TMOG thing seems to apply a special rule such that its own process does not appear in the dashboards by default.
> In 2006, SoftwareOnline was sued by The Washington State Attorney General's Office for alleged violations of the Consumer Protection Act after complaints were made about two products called "Registry Cleaner" and "InternetShield".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Plummer#:~:text=16%5D-,In...
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/windows-vetera...
https://github.com/eric-frost/taskpilot
Why do we need to tolerate this vibe coded slop?
We need a marker on posts which are complete AI generated rubbish.
What happened to the profession of software engineering? The craft and quality has been thrown out of the window in pursuit of slop.
We are disrespecting our own profession by turning the software we build into a fast food junk where nobody wants anything we make and nobody cares about the quality and craft of creating.
We are just building the same things repeatedly over and over again with nothing inventive or new, wasting engineering time in the process.
AI has just shown how unimaginative some engineers are in choosing what problems in software to solve.
We need to do way better.