8 ms·
Windows brings out the Rorschach test in everyone (2003)
- pelagicAustral 2mo agoThey should have told them to gtfo and use Slackware then.
- docdeek 2mo ago[2003]
- pizzaiolo 2mo agoThat's how far back Windows needs to go to try to elicit some non-negative attention
- Tallain 2mo agoI 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.
- navigate8310 2mo agoI don't think OP meant any non-negative reaction towards Raymond but MSFT.
- abigdog 2mo agoWin 95, 98, Me were buggy and crashed alot.
- GuB-42 2mo agoHating on Windows and Micro$oft dates back from way before 2003. People just forgot. I am sure that in 2050, there will be blog posts about Windows 11 that won't make people enrage.
- anthk 2mo agoBSOD's on Win95 and Win98 tell me otherwise. And with DOS... heh.
- OuterVale 2mo agoUsers scare me.
- mrosenbjerg 2mo agoRaymond Chen is my favorite MS blog writer
- pino83 2mo agoRaymond Chen, the MS keyboard, and Calibri. These are the only three things I consume from MS.
- teekert 2mo agoAnother example: [0] Have to say this never would have occurred to me. There are also examples of US people being offended by scenes considered harmless in other cultures, ie the Totoro bathtub scene [1], search for "family bathing scene". I guess if this hologram offended people, there must be some nice stories about Nirvana's Nevermind (1991). [0] https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-buttholes https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-butt... [1] https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/my-neighbour-totoro-10-things-didnt-know-202612247.html https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/my-neighbour-totoro-10-things-di...
- skeaker 2mo agoHmm. I gotta say I do see these though. Especially Claude...
- rsynnott 2mo agoI refuse to believe that at this point the AI companies are not doing that deliberately.
- croes 2mo agoThe baby sued https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/oct/02/nirvana-nevermind-cover-alleged-child-sexual-abuse-image-spencer-elden-lawsuit-defeated-again https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/oct/02/nirvana-neverm...
- walrus01 2mo ago> 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).
- jb1991 2mo agoSo what was the government that complained?
- wartywhoa23 2mo agoA certain remote tropic island's!
- jb1991 2mo agoPakistan does not seem like remote or tropical to me.
- earth-tattoo 2mo agoPakistan.
- Taikhoom10 2mo ago[dead]
- yreg 2mo agoThis article includes the photo of the (clothed) hologram (it's the third image). https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/038-designed-for-windows-95 https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/038-design...
- kjimlau 2mo ago[flagged]
- lukasbm 2mo agoWhy should the govt remain nameless?
- ketzu 2mo agoFor the same reason they acted on the complaint and changed the hologram. It would be bad for business. 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.
- jck86 2mo agoRed Moon Desert is now my wallpaper for the rest of the week. Looking at it from a distance indeed may raise some brows.
- fluoridation 2mo agoSomeone has to accept that they're looking at the flattest pair of cheeks ever to interpret that as an ass.
- CursedSilicon 2mo agoSir Mix-a-Lot tried to warn us, but we didn't listen!
- teekert 2mo agohttps://knowyourmeme.com/memes/everything-reminds-me-of-her-him https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/everything-reminds-me-of-her-...
- Conasg 2mo agoAppropriately photographed by Charles O'Rear
- kleiba2 2mo agoThe same government should sue all new mothers: how dare they deliver babies into this world completely naked!!!
- reddalo 2mo agoThey better not visit Germany, where nudity -- even in some public spaces -- is considered normal! How dare they!!!
- eru 2mo ago'Some public spaces' is underselling the prevalence of FKK a bit.
- dgellow 2mo agoI remember taking a nap in Tiergarten in Berlin, then woke up to find myself surrounded by a group doing naked yoga
- anthk 2mo agoTBH 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.
- eru 2mo ago> 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.)
- wartywhoa23 2mo ago> 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!
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- ttyyzz 2mo agoI must say that "But it makes me wonder about the mental state of our beta testers [...]" cought me off guard while drinking coffee
- stefs 2mo agoyears 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/File:Ubuntu_screenshot.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history#/media/...
- teekert 2mo agoHmm, I also only see a skull
- boomlinde 2mo agoIt'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.
- SV_BubbleTime 2mo agoThe 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.
- stefs 2mo agothe ibex install worked flawlessly on the first try while installing windows (on the same machine) failed due to driver issues.
- st_goliath 2mo ago> "intrepid ibex" ... edgy skull on the desktop wallpaper Ah, that would be 8.10 with the coffee stain wallpaper :-P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ubuntu_screenshot.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ubuntu_screenshot.png
- artisinal 2mo agoHow do I view the collectors edition Windows XP without Googling “naked baby” ? Did this comment already put me on a list?
- sneak 2mo agoWhat is an “obscene body part”? If this body part is obscene, shouldn’t the author do the moral thing and remove his own?
- trencedamp 2mo agoAppendix
- khazhoux 2mo agoThis is why large companies should employ a few pedophiles to run things like this by them first. Long term, much savings.
- walrus01 2mo agoOr they could outsource it via some kind of API: EaaS (Epstein As A Service)
- SG- 2mo agoThe US government did just that.
- CursedSilicon 2mo agoGiven the state of the US, I'm not so sure that pedophiles are truly fit to run anything
- sachahjkl 2mo agosatanic
- globular-toast 2mo agoI 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!"
- latexr 2mo agoIt 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? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-csam-account-blocked https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
- globular-toast 2mo agoYouTubers need to unionise. People need to maintain control of their own computing.
- pino83 2mo agoThat 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. ;)
- srvmshr 2mo agoRaymond Chen's articles are 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. [0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170418-00/?p=95985 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170418-00/?p=95...
- ntstatusquo 2mo agoMy personal favorite is the classic "Walls and Ladders" post about topmost windows: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110310-00/?p=11253 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110310-00/?p=11... 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"
- luciana1u 2mo ago[flagged]
- pino83 2mo agoIt's ONE window, I guess...
- blkhawk 2mo agoI 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.
- kmoser 2mo agoThe article states that it was the government who remained nameless, not the person who brought it to Microsoft. Given that this request was not related to national security, they really should publish the name.
- MBCook 2mo agoI 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.
- aiandaguy 2mo agoniceee
- harshreality 2mo ago[edited to more align with the essay's thesis, thanks to the reply for pointing out misalignment] I don't think anyone complained about the hologram or red moon desert background because they disliked windows; they complained because they were hypersensitive to possible inappropriate/sexual connotations in imagery. (Conversely, I very much doubt that the baby hologram or the red moon desert background swayed anyone to dislike Windows.) People who hated Windows for being Windows would complain about it on technical grounds. It was terrible, and it crashed all the time. People who hated Windows because it was by Microsoft, would complain about Microsoft's bundling and monopoly tactics.
- ksbd-pls-finish 2mo agoThis 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.
- professor_v 2mo agoI'm kind of offended they changed them all. At some point you just have to say 'okay this is just complete bullshit' and stand for the things you create. Otherwise everything ends up in this corporate bland soup of nothingness. Of course we know where Microsoft ended up, but I doesn't have to be that way. By all means be pragmatic if it's a government complaining, but you don't have to take all crazy feedback at face value.
- anal_reactor 2mo agoUnfortunately the wider cultural movement "we must avoid offending anyone at all costs" got us here. It's not only corporations, many people also behave like this in private. It's sad, but it is what it is, the only thing you can do is searching for small pockets of people who aren't insane.
- MBCook 2mo agoIt doesn’t matter if Microsoft cares about offending people. If some executive is not going to buy 2 million licenses of Windows because they are personally offended by the font used somewhere, then Microsoft is gonna change it. In this case, it’s pure business.
- bigstrat2003 2mo agoYeah, I feel the same way. Most cases where someone complains that they are offended should be handled by not responding to them at all. Instead, organizations will bend over backwards to avoid even the most esoteric claims of taking offense.
- bpavuk 2mo ago> Windows XP had its own share of complaints. The original wallpaper for Windows XP was Red Moon Desert, until people claimed that Red Moon Desert looked like a pair of buttocks. oh thanks, now I cannot unsee it. :)
- eska 2mo agoThe wallpaper in question: https://windowswallpaper.miraheze.org/wiki/Red_moon_desert https://windowswallpaper.miraheze.org/wiki/Red_moon_desert I suppose it looks like buttocks?
- breakingcups 2mo agoInterestingly, that page notes: According to Microsoft programmer Raymond Chen on his blog The Old New Thing, Red moon desert was originally intended to be Windows XP's default wallpaper, but was allegedly changed due to some testers feeling it resembled a pair of buttocks, leading to O'Rear's other photo Bliss becoming the default wallpaper. While this wallpaper was temporarily set as the default wallpaper during Whistler, this story does not appear to be true; Bliss had already been selected based on extensive research by design manager Rob Girling and his team, and the Luna visual style shares the same color scheme as the wallpaper. It is more likely the wallpaper was set to default as a decoy; the unleaked Lab06 build 2415 predates build 2423, and shows Bliss set as the wallpaper.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- lazide 2mo agoThe only people who might plausibly think that were probably also jerking it to late night scrambled skin-e-max in the 90’s when it was basically just hard R. I’ve seen that background hundreds of times, and it never even occurred to me.
- DonHopkins 2mo agoThe original 1989 SimCity box was a Rorschach test that cost Maxis $50k. The cover was a Bakelite toy city simulator appliance with a red MONSTER disaster button, and a stompy T-Rex-looking creature waving over San Francisco on its TV screen. Maxis never called it Godzilla on the box or in the game. Reviewers looked at the inkblot and saw Godzilla anyway. Original monster cover: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/main/documentation/box-art/simcity-box-front-monster-c64.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/m... Revised cover after the lawsuit, monster swapped for a tornado (the MONSTER button survived): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/main/documentation/box-art/simcity-box-front-tornado-macintosh.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/m... In Feb 2024 I emailed Jeff Braun (Maxis co-founder/CEO) and asked what actually happened and how much Maxis had to pay. He wrote back the same day: > Maxis was sued by Toho. We never referred to the name Godzilla, our monster on the box cover was a T-Rex looking character, but... a few magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took. Toho called it "confusion in the marketplace". We paid $50k for Godzilla to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the minimum they take for Godzilla infringement. All the box scans are in the Micropolis repo -- high res front, back with the "floods, earthquakes, fires, tornados, meltdowns and monsters" disaster list, side panels, and the platform variants, each with descriptions: https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/documentation/box-art/README.md https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/docume... Full email thread: https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/documentation/designs/jeff-braun-toho-godzilla-email-2024-02-17.md https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/docume... The back of the box kept advertising monsters as a feature the same year the monster got lawyered off the front. The function names in the code all refered to it like "MakeMonster()", but admittedly there was a "GOD" symbol in the code used to index the Monster sprite likw "GetSprite(GOD)", but Toho could not have know that, since it was a C preprocessor macro that was compiled away in the binary: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropolis-activity/src/sim/w_sprite.c#L1557 https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...
- ndiddy 2mo agoI mean the image on the box was of a knockoff Godzilla figure (https://www.ebay.com/itm/277052192573 https://www.ebay.com/itm/277052192573) and the "monster" scenario in the game involved him attacking Tokyo, so I think it's pretty clearly meant to reference Godzilla.
- nehal3m 2mo ago"The original wallpaper for Windows XP was Red Moon Desert, until people claimed that Red Moon Desert looked like a pair of buttocks." That's not what 'this looks like ass' means.
- Grombobulous 2mo agoI’ve never heard these criticisms about Windows before. My challenge to the author would be to address the much more serious criticisms of Windows that have been frustrating real users and have been left unresolved. Address the forced Microsoft login in Windows 11. Even walled garden Apple doesn’t force that in their desktop OS. Address the pre-installed junkware games that plagued Windows 10. Address the Bing and Edge nags and hostility toward the will of the user. Address sending my start menu search query to bing by default, and how Windows search is horrendous compared to every other OS. How is a free program made by a single person able to perform faster and with more accurate results? (Everything) Address the fact that Microsoft still tolerates OEMs dumping spyware/junkware/scareware like McAfee on their computers when you buy them new. Address the nags to put my data on OneDrive. Address the dual hidden right click context menus in File Explorer that annoy power users to this day. Address the fact that File Explorer will hang for multiple seconds with completely unresponsive UI upon bootup if you pin a network share that is no longer accessible. Address the reason why the taskbar lost its decades-old customization options with Windows 11. Address the disaster that was the Windows 8 UI, which was even more of a disaster in the context of Windows Server where tablet UI made even less sense. Address the reason why telemetry fingerprints your connected devices and installed programs and sends that private information to Microsoft by default. Address the reason why a $200 OS charges an extra dollar for HEVC video extensions support to gain compatibility with the most popular phone in the world like it’s a sleazy used car dealership. Address the fact that a $200 retail price operating system made by one of the largest and most resourced companies in the world is somehow slower, less user-friendly, has less stable drivers, and is an overall worse experience than a grocery store ice cream aisle stocked full of free operating systems cobbled together by volunteers. This has gotten so bad that mainstream technology influencers and very non-technicial surface-level mainstream audience phone and car reviewers like Marques Brownlee start recommending Linux. In what universe does it make any logical sense that I abandoned the operating system made by the creator of DirectX, Xbox, and the owner of potentially the largest collection of game studios in the world because a game developed and published by that very same company (Indiana Jones and the Great Circle) continually crashed with my mainstream commercial graphics card on that company’s OS? By switching to a different OS that’s not even supposed to be compatible with this game, my graphics driver instability stopped entirely. (AMD RX 9070XT, a top-of-the-line most recent generation GPU). It seems like the purpose of this article is to humanize this OS that comes from a monopolistic and generally horrible, unethical company; to say “everyone will criticize Windows over anything minor, when it’s actually a great artisan OS made by real people. Look, we put a picture of a baby on the sticker! How cute.” While I agree that Microsoft employees are real people who aren’t necessarily responsible for the draconian choices of their C-suite lords, and that making any functioning modern OS is no small feat, let’s not pretend that Windows wouldn’t be a better much OS if it was produced by someone else — almost anyone else.
- raincole 2mo agoLet me introduce you the splash screen of Krita (pretty much the only capable digital painting app in open source realm): https://krita.org/images/pages/electrichearts_20250824A_kiki_full.png https://krita.org/images/pages/electrichearts_20250824A_kiki...
- dark-star 2mo agomaybe this is the real reason why governments don't switch to Linux: the nerdy images. Because we can't have that in an official government building, no sir, it's all numbers and abstract icons in here please :-)
- _trampeltier 2mo agoThe faces, when I open PlotJuggler in front if other peopleat work and every time a meme pops up :-) https://github.com/plotjuggler/plotjuggler https://github.com/plotjuggler/plotjuggler
- stackghost 2mo agoI bet it's a contributing factor. Politics is almost entirely about image over substance. If you're a government bureaucrat, do you really want to risk your/your party's electoral chances by proposing switching from Big Tech to something with anime furries all over it?
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoSounds like a personal issue/non-issue for the rest of us who have open minds. I also don't foresee governments regularly using Krita.
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoI don't understand how this is relevant.
- ntstatusquo 2mo ago"tell me you're a rust programmer without telling me you're a rust programmer"
- baxuz 2mo agoWON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- marklar423 2mo agoTo me, the funniest part of this is: > We had to change them all
- DanielHB 2mo agosomewhat related: I have had to do a last-minute fix on a build because a developer added emojis to success messages a fire emoji on software for handling industrial machinery that can explode our QA department was not happy about that let me say that...
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- jodrellblank 2mo agoI dunno why this gets instantly under my skin, but it's like a cross between those Youtube clickbaits "She walked into the meeting and they all laughed at her, then she revealed she was the new CEO" and "forwards from grandma: you'll never believe, Mavis had white flowers instead of yellow, and the home owner's association wsan't happy about that, I'll only say that much..." What do your two things have to do with each other at all? Are they not bothered by fire emoji because they are employees who could be fired? because they work in an office building which could burn down? Do they dislike cooking with gas, rocket emoji, or smoke testing because industrial machinery can explode? Do they hate hearing about software crashes because they drive cars which could crash? Do they hate tests of software resource use because of Climate Change? Do they hate Continuous Deployment because they know people in the military who could be deployed? Do they hate Test Suites because they're diabetic? Do they dislike Black Box Testing because it should be African-American Box Testing? Can they really not tell the difference in context between a picture of a fire in a status update on a computer screen, and an actual industrial fire??
- compiler-guy 2mo agoPareidolia is part of the human condition. It's unfortunate that people take the results of that very natural tendency with a grain of salt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia Pareidolia (/ˌpærəˈdoʊliə/)[1] is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one detects an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none.
- ehnto 2mo agoWhen we were young in a small rural town outside the US, we would borrow copies of Windows 95 or 98 from the school. In order to get them activated, rather than a keygen or other kind of crack we figured out that we could call the Microsoft help hotline from a payphone and tell them our key simply wasn't working. We would give them a plausible sounding fake key then they would give us a new real key. Nothing seemed to get verified or cross checked but it worked at least 4 or 5 times for our little gang of proto-nerds.