lupi

Lupi

@lupi

cow of tailed snake (gay)

avatar by @citriccenobite

you can say "chimoora" instead of "cow of tailed snake" if you want. its a good pun.​

i ramble about aerospace sometimes
I take rocket photos and you can see them @aWildLupi

I have a terminal case of bovine pungiform encephalopathy, the bovine puns are cowmpulsory

they/them/moo where "moo" stands in for "you" or where it's funny, like "how are moo today, Lupi?" or "dancing with mooself"

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lupi
@lupi
cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude
cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

you're sitting in the middle of a beautiful forest. birds are chirping, but it's still quieter than you remembered outside could be, living in a city as you have most of your life, and when the sun goes down, you'll remember what stars look like. you relax, sighing more softly than you need to, then silence envelops you once again. in your left ear, you hear an internet explorer navigation click

cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

my favorite part about this bit is that if you're under 30 you almost certainly won't get the actual cosmic horror of it

cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

okay here's the explanation

Back in 1998, even though modern, stable web browsers didn't exist and the term webapp did not exist (or referred to serverside stuff mostly written in ASP) the concept of the Awful WebView App was already in full swing. the distinctions vs now were

  1. They mostly used activex instead of JavaScript
  2. Instead of simply meaning that an app is going to be crappier that had to be, it almost universally meant that the app in question was one you didn't want to use at all (fucking joystick driver), or in fact was commercial malware (Norton Antivirus)
  3. they didn't. Work

but the other thing is that they all used Internet Explorer's COM embed object, because chromium hadn't been invented yet. And the thing about IE is that every single time you clicked a link or otherwise navigated to a different page, it played an utterly unnecessary clik noise. we all hated it, and app devs who used this technique never turned the sound off, because - even more so than now - the fact that an app was Just A Webpage was a 100% guarantee that the developers were bottom dollar incompetents making software under duress for a company that felt nothing but malice for its users (Symantec, Mcafee)

so you'd invariably end up with some miserable piece of sludge running on your machine that you couldn't get rid of, or couldn't even identify since it was some hidden process installed by a driver, and for God knows what reason, they would occasionally decide to reload the hidden web view. and you'd just hear

clik

and wonder how the fuck a browser could be open, or what on earth it had just done

PS: you have to understand that at the time, even for those of us who had always on internet, it was really not normal or at all comfortable to think about your computer doing stuff that you hadn't explicitly asked it to do. I just thought you should have that context. It wasn't always like this.

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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

yaodema
@yaodema

click...

you rise up with a start, the view of the clearing streaming away as if it were a slide being pushed downward to reveal the view in front of you, as you find

you are standing in front of a white house, with a boarded front door. there is a mailbox here.

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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

gull
@gull

much as i'm in the Very Under 30 age bracket i am also in the Shared Computers With Grandparents Who Paid For Both McAfee And Norton When I Was Younger bracket. the existential fear of that little fucking click returning to haunt me never truly goes away

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emly
@emly

You know what got me on and off for months, trying to track down hardware issues, drivers, interference, malware? On windows XP you might have occasionally just heard a quiet “PSShh…pssh” sound out of nowhere. It was completely random, didn’t change after reinstalls, different cards, updates.. I eventually just gave up on it until a while later I happened to have the culprit program open when it happened. A useful utility baked into windows.

Search. The windows search dog was digging the ground as an idle animation, and someone though this needed to be both a rare animation, and that it needed to have a sound

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noa
@noa

i kinda understand using modern web frameworks to write native apps

but... people used to use activex to write native apps??? what??? isn't activex basically just native code anyway?? why not make a real native app at that point?

idk i've never used activex

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sirocyl
@sirocyl

"ActiveX" was a lot of technology with a confusing name, unlike TWAIN, whose name was only uninteresting.

Flash, Shockwave, Director? Those were ActiveX.
COM, DCOM, OLE? ActiveX. ODBC? Yup, ActiveX.
Visual Basic, JScript, Java and early C#? ActiveX.
Network shares, FTP, and Gopher in IE? ActiveX.
Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents? ActiveX.
ASP, and Internet Information Services? ActiveX.
... What did you think the "A" in ASP was? ActiveX.
Windows Media Player and MIDIs in IE? ActiveX.
Codecs and the video pipeline in Windows? DirectShow.
which was once called ActiveMovie, part of ActiveX.
The Windows file picker window itself? Common Dialogs.
... yeah, you bet that comdlg32.ocx was an ActiveX control.

Realistically speaking, ActiveX was a pattern - "using COM/OLE to embed controls across applications, using content from across networks."

It was no one "thing" - there isn't a single "activex.dll" that shouts "here it is! the ActiveX!" - in fact, "activex.dll" often got used as a malware drop filename, because nobody knew what ActiveX was, except that it was somehow very important, so nobody was going to touch that file and risk breaking the computer.

(also apologies for the many edits. I've been fighting markdown)

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

yeah but in context "activex", if you had reason to notice it, almost universally meant "a DLL coded in C with God knows what inside it". It was a native chunk of code often enough to be miserable. Most webapps nowadays do almost everything in JS running inside a relatively trustworthy and robust VM, and only link out to typically well-known native libraries, the exception being custom code for hardware drivers.

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

It's like, if I say that an app uses "some god forsaken custom COM control" , yeah, I know that Windows is literally made up almost entirely of those, but this one caught my attention because it wasn't standard, which means it's implementation could be arrestingly poor

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sirocyl
@sirocyl

entirely a fair assessment, and I think that's what separates the wheat from the chaff here. lots of parts of Windows are assembled from cursed incantations of CLSIDs and COM pipelines and data routing, but when you start making your website do that, suddenly it's ActiveX and that's a problem.

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darryl
@darryl

Yes. This is what was great about the DOS days. There was all sorts of nonsense around, idk, conventional memory and IRQs and whatever, but the computer was knowable. If it did something there was a direct causal explanation for it, and often that explanation could be found in the most recent input you supplied.

Whereas nowadays I sometimes just notice that my computer is different than it was yesterday and carry on with quiet acceptance; to understand even incompletely is beyond the grasp of mortals.

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sirocyl
@sirocyl

I've got a refrigerator that, I shit you not, time and again makes a tick sound identical to the start.wav navigation click on occasion. The thing terrified me at first, until I actually stood around and waited for it to happen, and saw where it came from.

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