The X byte of 32-bit color is nowadays used as the alpha channel (brightness), and is usually called A. But I'm not sure if Windows 95 supported alpha channels for display.
1,743 karma · joined June 21, 2011
I do agree with you that it should catch on more and it's unfortunate that it hasn't.
It's a healthy project, with multiple development teams within Microsoft both using and contributing to it. If you scroll down the originally linked homepage, you see 4 Microsoft products that have used it, 3 of which are in active development today.
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/About/WhatistheUSDM.aspx
> Who draws the map?
> Several authors from the NDMC, NOAA and USDA create the map. They take turns, usually two weeks at a time.
> How do they figure out where and how bad drought is?
> This is what makes the U.S. Drought Monitor unique. It is not a statistical model, although numeric inputs are many: [...]
https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2022/04/is-large-portion-of-w...
> The essential message is that weather and climate data do not support the claims of extreme or severe drought in eastern Washington this year.
> There is no expectation of water problems over or near the Columbia Basin. The Drought Monitor graphics, which are created subjectively, are sufficiently problematic and deficient that they should not be considered or applied to any serious decision making.
I don't recommend chk builds for routine use by anyone outside the Windows teams because even if the regular Windows release still receives updates, the chk build typically doesn't. CDN disk space isn't cheap, and neither is CPU time on the build or test machines.
At one point when I was on the Windows team at Microsoft, there was an internal push for us to selfhost (dogfood) checked builds of Windows, since they theoretically provided better bug telemetry than "free" builds (release builds, which are free of debug-only code). "Slows your dev box down by just half!" was the basic pitch of that campaign in a nutshell.
[1] I don't know if this was ever done for Windows 95. It was done for Windows XP up to Windows 10 version 1511, but it appears to have stopped since then, at least according to my quick search.
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/windows/win32/api/sysinfoapi/nf-s...
News coverage at the time (2002 or earlier): https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/
(Feels like a bit of a silly Gotcha! to do it live now - did anyone run their personal computer for 49 days, even counting laptops which went to sleep/standby? But hey, do what you want. :)
Which is referred to in the news article and whose creator posted it to HN a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27265447
I wonder how they're so consistently good at evading the Wall Street Journal's paywall, which is usually strict with no metered free limit and limited exceptions even for Twitter and Facebook shares. Probably the WSJ's website team would like to know too.
* 32-bit x86: https://web.archive.org/web/20191104120802/https://download....
* 64-bit x86: https://web.archive.org/web/20190420141924/http://download.m...
(those links via: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/e4qocq/microsoft_... )
Or use the even older Microsoft utility Network Monitor, which is still available on Microsoft's website: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=486...
Supposedly Microsoft is working on adding to the existing Windows Performance Analyzer (great GUI tool for ETW performance tracing) to display ETW packet captures, which will succeed Message Analyzer and Network Monitor: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/networking-blog/intro...
You can increase the visibility of a Feedback Hub item by sharing a link to it on your blog, on Twitter, or wherever.
For instance, I just picked a random house for sale in Tacoma and tried pricing Internet for new customers from Xfinity (Comcast) and Rainier Connect (former Click). Xfinity offered 1 Gigabit (fine print says 940 Mbps) downloads for $84.99/month on a 1-year contract, increasing to $100 after the contract term. Rainier Connect's fastest offering was only 100 Mbps and cost $104.95/month - pay more to get one-tenth the speed.
(These rates aren't exactly comparable, though I think they are still roughly so. In particular, Xfinity has a 1.2 TB monthly data limit, while it's not clear whether former-Click customers at Rainier have one. Click did impose a < 1 TB monthly data cap. [1])
The most silly thing about this exercise is that if you look at Rainier's rates in Puyallup [2], which is not a former Click Network location, you see that they definitely sell gigabit to some customers for only $80 - but apparently not in Tacoma.
[1] Rainier posts its own usage policy and Click's policy as separate webpages: https://www.rainierconnect.com/rainier-connect-internet-acce... ; https://www.rainierconnect.com/click-network-internet-accept...
[2] https://www.rainierconnect.com/residential/internet#puyallup...
[1] https://www.mytpu.org/community-environment/projects/click-n...
[2] https://www.rainierconnect.com/welcome-click-customers
[2]
Since you're also a Seattle-area local, you might remember that Seattle tried to do a public-private partnership with a company called Gigabit Squared to run fiber into Seattleites' homes. That initiative failed in 2014 [2], but the Seattle City Council has always been able to reconsider, with or without this bill.
* Public Utility Districts are special-purpose governments in Washington dedicated to being non-profit electric or water utilities, with limited tax powers (.045% property tax per year). Many counties have county-wide PUDs that are independent of the county government, such as Snohomish County PUD (Seattle's northern suburbs; no broadband offering) and Chelan County PUD (central Cascade mountains like Wenatchee and Leavenworth; does offer wholesale broadband).
[1] https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=54.16.420
[2] https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2014/01/s...
In rural central Washington, several county electric utility government districts already offer gigabit to the home through their resellers (Chelan, Douglas, Grant among them). From my understanding, that infrastructure and the cheap hydro power attracted Microsoft to build multiple cloud data centers in Quincy, Grant County.
[1] https://news.microsoft.com/en-xm/features/furthering-our-inv...
Among those discussions, what's interesting to me is that Stephen Mather [1], the first director of the National Park Service and before that a de facto lobbyist within the Wilson administration for national parks, saw little tension between promoting park tourism and better preserving parks from abuse. In fact, his consistent position was that making parks more fun and accessible for ordinary people would in fact lead to more parks and better-protected parks, because awed park visitors would themselves become lobbyists for parks. He actually broke with his friend and former employee Robert Sterling Yard (the ex-PR man for parks mentioned in this piece) precisely on this point - Yard didn't believe that more park visitors were the unalloyed good that Mather was sure they were.
On balance, I do think that Mather was more right than Yard. But for at least about 50 years there has been a realization that the downsides of park tourism are far bigger than Mather would have envisioned.
Maybe it's the same subscriber and/or same publisher as in this blog post? If not, that would either be a very unhappy coincidence or a strong signal to Substack that they need to fix this issue.
As for Eric Lawrence, if Eric gets quoted a lot that's probably because he wrote the first versions of Fiddler, the debugging localhost proxy that many Windows developers use, so tech journalists that specialize in Microsoft have heard of him through their developer acquaintances. Plus his Microsoft email address is easy to guess: [his Twitter username]@microsoft.com
Eric left Microsoft after over 10 years, went through 2 companies including Google, then came back within about 6 years. I consider him closer to Microsoft in outlook than Google, though one could plausibly disagree given how rude he was about his old team's products IE and Edge while he was away.
As for "Principal Program Manager," that being misleading about scope is news to me, and if it is, that's on the journalists to clarify, because this kind of title is commonplace and implies very little. At any tech company "Program/Product Manager" is not necessarily a people leader. "Principal" doesn't change this. "Principal" at Microsoft and other tech companies is just a rank like "Senior," albeit a hard-to-earn and usually well-deserved one. If I say I am a "Principal Product Manager, HotTechCo BlahBlah," I don't think anyone in the industry will assume I run the entirety of that product.
And Chromium-based Edge has tracking prevention through filter lists, while Chrome does not. [2]
Microsoft is no one's privacy hero these days, I will concede that. But some of these specific claims are just wrong.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajeshsu
[2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/learn-abo...
Scalar also supports Windows and macOS, while VFS only supports Windows: https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit/blob/v1.0.21014.1/doc...
When I left Microsoft about half a year ago, GVFS and Scalar were both in heavy use there.
I don't believe VFS for Git will ever be abandoned by Microsoft, but I'm doubtful it will ever get any more major improvements from them.
Scalar does use the VFS for Git client-server protocol, and both Scalar and VFS for Git rely on the same improvements to the git app itself, so I could imagine that GitHub would adopt the GVFS protocol and support Scalar without formally supporting GVFS itself.
[1] GitHub did announce future GVFS support in 2017 - https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/15/github-adopts-microsofts-... - but if anything came out of that I don't see it in GitHub help today.
I haven't written Fortran in a while, but I was pretty sure that for illustrative examples like this, you could dispense with the entire MODULE declaration, the use of END FUNCTION Fibonacci instead of just END, and the usually-optional :: separator between the variable's type and name.
Something like this? Again, no recent experience:
implicit none
recursive function fibonacci(n) result (fib)
integer n
integer fib
if (n < 2) then
fib = n
else
fib = fibonacci(n - 1) + fibonacci(n - 2)
endif
end
Most languages that prioritize Fortran code interop also adopt column-major order, but most other languages that support multidimensional arrays do row-major order. I'm not sure why Fortran went column-major but because it did, a lot of libraries designed for Fortran callers (such as LAPACK and all BLAS implementations) need to be told that input arrays have been transposed when they come from languages like C++.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row-_and_column-major_order
Did this improve a lot recently? Only 2 years ago, the Wall Street Journal described the inconvenience of Israeli banking this way:
> Banking occupies a special place among the complaints of Israelis. Banks refuse to give out the phone number of a designated representative. Most basic functions can be dealt with only in person at the branch where an account was opened.
> Tech workers - many of them American and European immigrants who came of age with mobile banking - can toil all day on some of the world's most advanced projects, only to find they can't email their bank any documents. Many Israeli banks demand documents in person, sent by mail or by fax.
> when [Aliza Landes, a] 35-year-old American-Israeli [,] recently tried to send money electronically to pay for her wedding dress, the experience was less than high tech. It took two hours on the phone, and then a trip to her bank branch, where employees manually added the send-money function to her app.
from https://archive.is/EongN / https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-the-hot-device-in-startup...
* https://www.consumerreports.org/infotainment-systems/how-to-...
> Despite selling some vehicles with high ratings in other categories, Audi, Honda, Infiniti, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Mini, Subaru, and Toyota all joined Lexus at the bottom of our satisfaction ratings when it came to ease of use for in-car electronics.
* https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/mazda/3/2021/road-test/ (requires subscription):
> The infotainment screen mounted in the center of the dash isn’t a touch screen; users must adjust audio and infotainment features using steering wheel controls or the rotary controller and buttons mounted between the front seats. Unfortunately, some steering wheel controls are hard to see and difficult to use because they have silver text on a silver background. The rotary knob and buttons in the center console are also challenging to use since many of the buttons are difficult to see at a glance, and the lack of an easy-to-decipher menu structure forces drivers to spend too long looking at the controls instead of the road.
As can be seen from your first link, the main control method is a jog-wheel knob at your knee next to the gear shift lever, mounted facing up, so you turn it left and right to select things and push in to "click"/confirm. CR says that with this control system, and the menu hierarchies that Mazda's UI makes you go through, you end up more distracted than with the better touch-screen systems they review.