If you changed the colour scheme on Windows 98, none of the cloud images were transparent in Explorer (they assumed the background was white) so you'd end up with these weird clouds/sky fading into a white background and then a hard line into whatever colour you'd set your background to.

The desktop was very sluggish if you added an active desktop to it, as IE4 had to run; at least it was on my underpowered machine. Additionally it came with a screensaver that you could interact with, which was odd because normally moving the mouse dismissed the screensaver.

I never knew this existed!!!!

Thank you!

I have been using macos for decades and use it daily at work so I understand it is different. I am just saying that the out-of-the-box functionality for keyboard usability is very poor compared to Windows (and Linux DEs which imitate Windows).

I end up using Rectangle on macos for moving windows and maximising them using keyboard shortcuts because else it's infuriating for window management to have to move from the keyboard to the mouse all the time. The usability under Tahoe for window edges etc. is even worse with a mouse than previous versions and a complete joke, so I am stuck on Sequoia.

A = 0; B = 0; A = move(B); ++B; ++A;

What should happen at ++B, and what should A be at the end? How would the compiler enforce this? I can see this being complicated.

The compiler can forget about it, but the code doesn't, so you mismatch between what is on screen and what the compiler does, which seems even more confusing.

I know C# does some magical things (I know not what) to avoid this since there are no headers so you can refer to something in the same assembly/namespace thingy, but it's very different to how C++ compiles and links?

I wasn't saying that progress should be stinted, but that complaining about something with the expectation that it magically be solved is a strange view of the world. Do you also just assert that poverty and war shouldn't exist?

They also decided about 10? years ago to make it behave as a "fullscreen" button which was really useless to me on a Mac Pro with 2 screens, where it would only ever "zoom" to one screen and then make the other screen display the desktop wallpaper - not the actual desktop - the wallpaper.

Useless.

How do I get to the dock so that I can open the Applications menu? Ctrl-F3. left left left left left up. Then the popup menu doesn't respond to any letters.

All of this contrasted with Windows which had Alt + key for the menu. I learned it from Windows 3.11 for incredible speed:

- Alt space - show the window menu

- Alt space x - maximize

- Alt space n - minimize

- Alt space r - restore

- Windows key - start menu

- Windows key > P > right cursor > N - notepad (the right cursor = accessories)

This was broken in later start menus. The modern start menu is absolutely useless and takes forever. Up until XP this worked fine.

- (with Quicklaunch): Windows + N (number) - launch that item. Eg. Windows + 3 will launch the third item across. No idea if they broke this in Windows 11.

Under Windows 98 all of these were lightning fast. Explorer behaved as you'd expect too.

None of this was possible on the Mac and using it was very very very slow with a mouse to wave around the screen.

But headers are perfectly fine to deal with and have been for decades and decades! Next you'll be arguing that contents pages in all books should be removed.

eg. B = std::move(A); // You are worried about touching A when it's in this indeterminate state?

I worked on a massive codebase where we used Microsoft SAL to annotate all parameters to specify intent. The compiler could throw errors based on these annotations to indicate misuse.

This seems like an extension of that.

I for one can write C++ but I cannot write a single program in C. If the overlap was so vast, I would be able to write good C but I cannot.

I've done things with templates to express my ideas in C++ that I cannot do in other languages, and the behaviour of deterministic destructors is what sets it apart from C. It is comprehensible and readable to me.

I would argue that C++ is modern, since it is in use today. Perhaps your definition of "modern" is too narrow?

I do have 2 identical Warwick FNA Jazzman 5s, and bizarrely they do not sound the same at all, so there's some effect from the material? But the most affect is from the strings themselves (steels vs nickels). The most important thing is how they feel to play (in addition to not sounding like mud).

It always seems to be used disparagingly or as a slur and perhaps some of it is deserved: I used to work with a guy who had a Naim CD player and would talk about how it had some balancing system for no jitter during data transfer from the laser read process, but was obviously clueless on the error-correction inherent in CDs anyway, making this mechanism redundant for the most part. He seemed to think it made the CDs sound better when in reality the original recording engineer, the mixing engineer, the mastering engineer and the pressing plant played more of a part that any of the CD player nonsense; I think he also used gold-plated cables, as if electrons somehow degraded when passed along copper wires...

Utter nonsense. As for me, I just learned to listen critically and identify mixing artefacts and compression oddities etc. which are more apparent on non-lowend audio equipment. Bluetooth speakers are the worst because they use acoustic coupling for harmonic reproduction and just generally sound unbalanced and bad.