💻 Customer-friendly design

Meet Fujitsu Lifebook U904 (2013). This bad boy completely defies the corporate rule of «if it doesn't fit, it isn't included». They managed to achieve this by making the Ethernet port... foldable.

While the construction is certainly not network admin friendly, and isn't going to last an exceedingly long time, it's far better than no port at all!

Remember this post when a corporation like Apple uses thinness as an excuse to strip your product of features or make you buy overpriced dongles! 😉

😢 The downgrade in software quality

It's not a secret that in recent years the software quality significantly degraded. Many bugs, previously unthinkable, started surfacing, but even more importantly, the developer communication skills have been lost. We've all experienced it with Microsoft's classic «Something happened».

Well, today I stumbled upon a new Blue Screen of Death concept on Twitter (figure 3). That looks awesome, doesn't it! It almost sends chills down my spine how great it actually looks. Seriously. Great job on that design. However, there's an inherent problem with such a design — it's a blue screen, it's designed to be lean and mean, and whatever it takes — let the user know why the computer crashed, as well as give helpful information about the crash to help prevent it in the future.

I've provided you with a chronological arrangement of Windows blue screens. The first one is the Windows XP blue screen, and as you can see, it gives you plenty of information:
▪️ The stop code;
▪️ The parameters;
▪️ The module that caused the crash;
▪️ Debug information for the module;

The Windows 10 blue screen looks nicer and cleaner, but lacks the module debug information, and hides the parameters behind a registry hack. They're not present in a BSOD by default.

The concept is looking so much better, but doesn't provide any information except the stop code! Now imagine your computer bootloops into a blue screen. Not a helpful wingman, I should say! You have better luck firing up WinDbg and analyzing the crash dump just to get the culprit module image name...

Regardless of that concept, it seems like we're headed that way anyhow, unfortunately. That's not the only problem. Let me explain why making the blue screen look nice is a bad idea.

Each element needs to be drawn out, and fancy graphics come at a cost. The computational cost doesn't matter in this case, any modern computer is capable of drawing basic geometry. The cost here is linking additional libraries to import necessary functions or implementing them within the lean bootvid library (I think they still use that).

The number one rule of software engineering — the more dependencies you have, the less reliable the system becomes. That's not what we want with the blue screen of death! We need it to fire each and every time, 100% of the time. The blue screen is actually a program in a sense that it's a routine that's being executed, when certain conditions are met, so it can also crash. The code may fail to execute, and all the user will see is a black screen.

That's certainly not favorable and shouldn't happen. That's why developers should always favor functionality over design.

— Enderman

😢 Software quality rot

Did you know the Copilot key is simply a macro for Win + Shift + F23? I wonder why they didn't implement a separate keycode for their AI button. I guess the software quality in general just keeps degrading.