By your timeline, it means Microsoft only had institutional taste for about 3-4 years. A tiny fraction of the company’s lifetime.
(If it helps, I do agree with you about those years being the most… design-coordinated: when Office felt like part of Windows)
(I like to think that Visual Studio 2026 proves that the company can still do good desktop UI design; but it doesn’t help that every major first-party product is now using their own silo’d UI framework; wither MFC and CommonControls, I guess)
I think there was a period from Windows 3.1 to somewhere during Windows 98 (maybe right up until the release of Office 97?) where both first-party and third-party Windows apps were all expected to be built entirely in terms of the single built-in library of Win32 common controls; and where Windows was expected to supply common controls to suit every need.
This was mostly because we were just starting to see computers supporting large bitmapped screen resolutions at this point; but VRAM was still tiny during this period, and so drawing to off-screen buffers, and then compositing those buffers together, wasn't really a thing computers could afford to do while running at these high resolutions.
Windows GDI + COMCTL32, incl. their control drawing routines, their damage tracking for partial redraw, etc., were collectively optimized by some real x86-assembly wizards to do the absolute minimum amount of computation and blitting possible to overdraw just what had changed each frame, right onto the screen buffer.
On the other hand, what Windows didn't yet support in this era was DirectDraw — i.e. the ability of an app to reserve a part of the screen buffer to draw on itself (or to "run fullscreen" where Windows itself releases its screen-buffer entirely.) Windows apps were windowed apps; and the only way to draw into those windows was to tell Windows GDI to draw for you.
This gave developers of this era three options, if they wanted to create a graphical app or game that did something "fancy":
1. Make it a DOS app. You could do whatever you wanted, but it'd be higher-friction for Windows users (they'd have to essentially exit Windows to run your program), and you'd have to do all that UI-drawing assembly-wizardry yourself.
2. Create your own library of controls, that ultimately draw using GDI, the same way that the Windows common controls do. Or license some other vendor's library of controls. Where that vendor, out of a desire for their controls to be as widely-applicable as possible, probably designed them to blend in with the Windows common controls.
3. Give up and just use the Windows common controls. But be creative about it.
#3 is where games like Minesweeper and Chip's Challenge came from — they're both essentially just Windows built-in grid controls, where each cell contains a Windows built-in button control, where those buttons can be clicked to interact with the game, and where those buttons' image labels are then collectively updated (with icons from the program's own icon resources, I believe?) to display the new game state.
For better or worse, this period was thus when Microsoft was a tastemaker in UI design. Before this period, early Windows just looked like any other early graphical OS; and after this period, computers had become powerful enough to support redrawing arbitrary windowed UI at 60Hz through APIs like DirectDraw. It was only in this short time where compute and memory bottlenecks, plus a hard encapsulation boundary around the ability of apps to draw to the screen, forced basically every Windows app/game to "look like" a Windows app/game.
And so, necessarily, this is the period where all the best examples of what we remember as "Windows-paradigm UI design" come from.
> On the other hand, what Windows didn't yet support in this era was DirectDraw — i.e. the ability of an app to reserve a part of the screen buffer to draw on itself (or to "run fullscreen" where Windows itself releases its screen-buffer entirely.) Windows apps were windowed apps; and the only way to draw into those windows was to tell Windows GDI to draw for you.
> This gave developers of this era three options, if they wanted to create a graphical app or game that did something "fancy":
> 1. Make it a DOS app.
This vaguely reminds me of WinG[0][1] - the precursor to DirectDraw. It existed only briefly ~ 1994-95.
My vague "understanding" of it was to make DOS games easier to port to Windows. They'd do "quick game graphics stuff" on Device Independent Bitmaps, and WinG would take care of the hardware details.
Sometimes the "any clickable area => make it a Windows control/button" works and sometimes it doesn't.
I talked with the programmer for the 16-bit Windows calculator app, calc.exe.
Any naive programmer with a first-reading of Charles Petzold's Programming Windows book would assume each button in the calculator app was an actual Windows button control.
Nope.
All those calculator buttons, back when Windows first shipped, used up too many resources.
Every major first party product has been using their own siloed UI framework since like 2003-ish. Visual Studio has always been one of the worst offenders. Sometimes the new UI components in a VS became the new normal for the rest of the first party stuff, but it was usually right about the time a new VS came out with a new paradigm. That's slowed a bit with the last bunch of VS releases being basically the same UI with different toolchains and default plugins, but it's still quite different from the rest of the OS. It's really pretty silly.
I think you mean US rolling news channels (specifically, Fox, MSNBC/MSNOW, etc)? Because there's plenty of "legacy" news I consume that certainly don't give me that impression (for example, The Economist). I suppose it matters that it's news that I'm paying for, as opposed to being free but ad-supported, and being print vs. TV - so they have different incentives and pressures.
I short the stock of companies whose leadership is wasting time posting to LinkedIn instead of… y’know… leading their org. The more they post the more I short. Similarly, the less-attached-to-reality the post is the more I short.
I wish I could say I’m making bank off this strategy - but pretty-much all the slopposters (and the most insufferable of the AI boosters) are all working for nonpublic firms, oh well.
Maybe not a winning strategy because a lot of public companies have a comms team that manages the CEO’s LinkedIn. Thereby saving the valuable time of the CEO themselves.
I think if an MRI was ever used for airport security screening it would cause more damage and disruption than the terrorist bombs it purports to detect.
Both. 1.5/3 T is standard, >3 T machines (such as 5 T from United Imaging) are becoming more popular (and affordable) and at the same time ultra low field ones keep improving and now they make some things that were impossible before now actually doable such as bed-side MRI (not in clinical practice of course, but there was nice engineering proof of concept with ultra low field MRI machine that could be powered by normal power outlet).
The idea behind the recent boom in low-field stuff is that you'd like to have small/cheap machines that can be everywhere and produce good-enough images through smarts (algorithms, design) rather than brute force.
The attitude on the research side is essentially "por qué no los dos?" Crank up the field strength AND use better algorithms, in the hopes of expanding what you can study.
I know nothing about the "industry" of MRIs, but from the physics side, (everything equal) more Tesla is better - at the end of the day, harder magnetic field gets you a stronger signal
There's no "retroactive" exception. The core point of this rule is to deter police from intentionally violating people's rights, under the expectation that what they find will, "retroactively", vindicate them. Won't work.
How would you know when it did? You can’t “retroactively” justify an arbitrary search under the exclusionary rule, but this doesn’t exclude evidence tangential to a legally-executed warrant during the execution of that warrant. For example, suppose someone is suspected of illegally possessing wildlife. A search warrant is issued on the residence. No wildlife is found, and in fact no wildlife was ever on the premises. If officers find large quantities of cocaine during the search, they aren’t precluded from making an arrest, because the warrant used to gain entry and conduct the search was legal.
> In Arizona v. Hicks, police officers were in an apartment investigating a shooting and suspected that a record player in the apartment was stolen. The officers could not see the serial number, which was on the bottom of the record player, so they lifted the player and confirmed that its serial number matched that of one that had been reported stolen. However, the Supreme Court ruled that lifting the record player constituted an additional search (although a relatively nonintrusive one) because the serial number was not in plain view.
Constitutional law doesn't mean anything when the authorities don't respect it. Constitutional law won't stop you from being arrested or killed if you don't fully submit to an authoritarian government.
There were laws in Germany to prevent what Hitler did. It still happened.
Depends what you mean by "the authorities." It's a demonstrable fact there are many small local PDs that don't give a shit about the first, fourth, or fifth amendments to name a few. That doesn't mean the Constitution "doesn't mean anything" in those places.
> What recourse would an American have against a punitive search?
None. The endless videos, from better-years-gone-by of people refusing to answer questions at the border then having drug dogs run all over their car to scratch it up was my first exposure to federal agents acting maliciously.
You can attempt to sue for damages, but the suit is likely to be dismissed because law enforcement and legal adjudication are tightly coupled and very friendly in ways that subvert the proper functioning of justice. More likely you'd just invite more harassment for daring to attempt recourse at all.
You can sue for anything, whether or not you win is another matter. Civil and criminal court also don't have the same rules or standards for evidence and culpability. Whether or not actions were legal is not really what is being adjudicated there.
Well the first half of the sentence you're replying to is "a legal, valid and justified search." So if your question is "what recourse does an American have against a legal, valid and justified search" the answer is obviously and correctly "none."
You might be able to argue harassment or malicious prosecution if it's just one part of an ongoing campaign but even that is going to be hard to argue if everything is within the bounds of the law.
> Musk has pushed back against guardrails for Grok [...] Musk has “been unhappy about over-censoring” on Grok “for a long time.” [...] At one meeting in recent weeks before the latest controversy erupted, Musk held a meeting with xAI staffers from various teams where he “was really unhappy” over restrictions on Grok’s Imagine image and video generator
...how are the shareholders not in revolt over this?
The stock seems completely disconnected from the antics of Musk. I would think that having a CEO who is clearly a heavy ketamine user and spends more time playing politician than actually running the company would have a negative impact on the stock, but tesla's stock has been divorced from reality for a long time.
(If it helps, I do agree with you about those years being the most… design-coordinated: when Office felt like part of Windows)
(I like to think that Visual Studio 2026 proves that the company can still do good desktop UI design; but it doesn’t help that every major first-party product is now using their own silo’d UI framework; wither MFC and CommonControls, I guess)