Interesting Links for 10-04-2014

[andrewducker]

• Font War: Inside the Design World's $20 Million Divorce
  (tags: design typography font )
• Everything you need to know about the Heartbleed SSL bug
  (tags: security computers )
• Ants Build Complex Structures With a Few Simple Rules (which we can now simulate!)
  (tags: ants computers rules brains )
• Why does C# use UTF-16 for strings?
  (tags: text c#

Comments

[drdoug]

There was a bit of copypasta around at the time of the launch that went something like this:

If operating systems were smileys:
MacOS :D
Unix ./
Windows XP

[andrewducker]

Hah!

Yes - what gets me about the wailing that XP will be sadly missed is that I remember that Win2k was the "one that got it right" - it combined Windows 95's interface with NT 4's rock-solid design, giving the best of both worlds.

Whereas XP was bemoaned as "XP with a clown face on".

How time's change :->

[simont]

Whereas XP was bemoaned as "XP with a clown face on".

The thing I remember most about initial reactions to XP was its visual redesign inspiring the nickname 'Windows for Teletubbies' :-)

[drdoug]

I remember that too - you set the desktop to one of these:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=windows+xp+teletubbies&tbm=isch
and set the startup sound to the Teletubbies theme tune.

What larks!

[drdoug]

Yeah, I think the main appeal of XP was "it's not (the appalling) Vista", which was a feature people didn't know they wanted until Vista came out.

I've tried more than once to fit Windows versions in to a 'evens bad, odds good' rule, as a parallel of the first run of Star Wars films, but it works even less well than for films. (Not least because its hard to know what counts and what doesn't. And you end up having to remember Windows ME, which nobody wants.)

[brixtonbrood]

Star Trek rather than Star Wars surely?

[drdoug]

Oh ghod. Yes. I can't believe I did that. High-level mortifying typo.

[woodpijn]

I was reluctant to upgrade from 2k at the time, and my (very soon to be upgraded just as soon as I get around to it) XP is set up to mimic the old grey and blue rather than its native Teletubby colours.

[bashou]

I loved the the heck out of XP when it came out, but the first thing I did was get rid of all the pretty crap and turned off various services. The software activation crap did bother me but not as much as it did later on.