[HN Gopher] I wrote Task Manager and I just remembered something
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I wrote Task Manager and I just remembered something
Author : notRobot
Score : 278 points
Date : 2020-05-25 20:20 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
| bobbydreamer wrote:
| Nice. I open task manager everyday. I wish this dude has written
| VSCode
| vezycash wrote:
| I wish he'd been in charge of Metro, UWP, Univeral apps and all
| of its reincarnations. They'd have been fast, lean, worked
| better with keyboard (even keyboard only). And wouldn't have so
| much whitespace.
|
| Wonder if he'd have made Explorer better.
| jacinabox wrote:
| Let me guess task manager could have managed the tasks better, i
| would have let it slide but if you call your program "task
| manager" in for a penny in for a pound.
| AareyBaba wrote:
| I curse the MS developer/s who wrote the peep show listboxes:
| those non-resizable scrolling list boxes that display long lists
| in a peep hole that is just a few items long so you have to
| scroll endlessly to find what you need. This UI element has
| remained in the OS since I had hair on my head.
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| Task manager (in my win2K8R2) is bloody great. It does what it's
| supposed to do, does it well in little space, is highly reliable,
| has plenty of good options usefully exposed, is sensitive to the
| user (if you right-click on a process in the process view, the
| updates that rearrange the view freeze so things don't change
| underneath you) and it runs permanently for me. The author should
| get a medal.
| pgrote wrote:
| The author asks for an upvote for more inside trivia. Excellent
| first hand source.
|
| Mod responds, "Though this could be construed as a PSA, and thus
| in violation of Rule 8, it's got a lot of valuable info that even
| I have never seen before. Therefore, I'm going to leave it.
| /u/daveplreddit , please message the mod team or myself before
| making any more such posts, and we can discuss how to best move
| forward."
|
| Solid moderation to offer a way to keep contributing. Kudos.
| mellosouls wrote:
| btw just noticed "...that even I have never seen before..".
|
| The implication of his incredible knowledge makes his allowing
| the post _by the author of Task Manager_ even more gracious!
| What a guy!
| mellosouls wrote:
| My thoughts as well. Awesome gate-keeping effort, give that mod
| a badge.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| I was concerned that they would even consider removing it
| from a tech support subreddit.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| More stuff like this needs to be recorded. It saddens me to think
| how much of this kind of stuff is already lost from earlier times
| in computing. A lot of interesting stuff like this is captured
| from the history of the Mac[1] and from Atari[2], but the
| "folklore" from so many other companies and products is being
| lost.
|
| Who are others who are doing this kind of work?
|
| [1] https://www.folklore.org/ [2]
| https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/
| brundolf wrote:
| This is a great one: https://www.filfre.net
|
| He did an incredibly thorough nine-part series on the history
| of Windows from DOS through 3.1 and the antitrust cases. It was
| fascinating. There's tons of other stuff here too.
| uryga wrote:
| thanks for the link! i really liked the series, but forgot to
| bookmark it and couldn't find it.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| The Old New Thing blog [1] has a fair amount of Microsoft
| folklore.
|
| [1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
| omnibrain wrote:
| And there was even more folklore in the comments but
| Microsoft killed them when migrating the blog content to a
| new platform.
| ritchiea wrote:
| There is a bit of "folklore" here but most of this post is
| program functionality that should be documented. Really only
| the details about the window class name and being fully
| resizeable without flicker are "folkore" details that go beyond
| the scope of good documentation.
| twic wrote:
| > I also wrote Space Cadet pinball
|
| Talk about burying the lede!
| voltagex_ wrote:
| "- There should be nothing that TaskMgr can't kill - it will even
| escalate privilege and (if you have it) enable debug privilege to
| attach to and kill apps that way if needed. If TM can't kill it,
| you've got a kernel problem."
|
| I've seen stuff that taskmgr can't kill - I haven't ever seen it
| use any debugging privileges that I know of.
| aeyes wrote:
| Is it good or bad that I remember most of these features from my
| days on Windows 95? We have come a long way, I hardly ever have
| to open Task Manager nowadays.
| thrower123 wrote:
| I've got it open 24/7. There's enough misbehaving stuff that I
| have to use day-to-day that spikes off the CPU or runaway
| leaking memory on a regular basis...
|
| I miss the Vista/7 desktop widgets that you used to be able to
| use to keep an eye on this stuff without having TaskManager
| open.
| jkingsman wrote:
| I use https://github.com/ArcadeRenegade/SidebarDiagnostics
| and love it.
| thrower123 wrote:
| That is lovely, thanks.
| cheschire wrote:
| You must not have to put up with corporate cyber security
| professionals using tanium and HIPS to hump your hard drive for
| hours like a monkey on a football.
|
| I use TM multiple times a day.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Now I'd like to know why Task Manager got rewritten in Windows 8.
| I liked the old one better; it was lighter and faster than the
| current one.
|
| Disclosure: I work at Microsoft, on the Windows accessibility
| team. But I didn't join until a couple years after Windows 10's
| initial release.
| deadso wrote:
| Why do you think it got rewritten? Obviously the UI has
| changed, but the reddit post indicating that it can run without
| shell32.dll makes me think it was rewritten with a nicely
| decoupled UI and that is what got updated in later iterations.
|
| If you work at MS, it would be cool to find the last person to
| push a change to that code base and ask them. Or maybe we can
| reply to the reddit post.
| asveikau wrote:
| Fits in with the rest of windows 8, and later 10. Lots of
| rewrites and new UIs, many of the replacements are not up to
| par with the original.
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| I'm tempted to reply it's because MS are spiteful tossers but
| actually (despite that being true) there's a bigger problem. MS
| used to be pretty good at interfaces - true, they really did -
| but on & after win8 they just forgot that UIs are not there to
| look 'cool' and 'awesome' but to simply to help users get shit
| done.
| diamondo25 wrote:
| Wasn't Vista where they went all-in with animations and
| blurs, like Windows Aero?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It's weird because Win8 looks like quite the opposite of
| "cool", at least in my view. And their interface is actually
| somewhat helpful on touch-based devices, but other OS's do a
| _way_ better job of having a unified interface for 'touch'
| and 'keyboard+mouse' input.
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