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MS has found themselves in the game long enough for different marketing managers to come and go, leaving the company as a whole with a slightly embarrassing inconsistency of brand naming for Windows.

3, 3.1, 3.11, 3.2, 95, 98, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, and now if the codename sticks, Blue.
Windows Blue/8.1/9/whatever is due out mid next year, which is real fast. Some early articles were trumpeting it being "yay free" ... up until you tie that in with this article, if it's 8.1 of course no one would pay for it.

Edit: Wraith was thinking along slightly similar lines to me : )

Heh I used to like this stuff as a young'un 30 years ago! (     )
Notice you stopped just before the pattern broke! Last I knew of these kinds of patterns as a kid, it matters whether the front whole number is odd or even, which determines if the decimal "can divide by 2 all by itself" or else a flow-over 0.5 amount is given/taken back and forth from it.

The whole Casting-Out-Nines series of tricks might be involved here too, but I'm not sure.

If they are all based on time, maybe let the user optionally specify a time formatting string to use instead of the percentage as text on the bar? I mean, so you could make it say "21 days" instead of "94%" on the Christmas bar, or "41 min" instead of "69%" on the Left in Current Hour bar.

Do you really want it counting down the days left in your life?! 

It depends. Not sure yet what they did about a foundation, but a couple of clues are "The building is said to have been constructed with pre-fabricated materials, including 200 tons of steel." and "200 workers". Most projects I knew at my last job only had teams of some 5 at a time, so the many hands bit makes it interesting.

And the Pre-Fab part, if it's for example huge blocks of pre-built modules, you'd save a month each because you just slot them together like lego-type blocks.

Heh P.S. How do you remove entries from the File Menu recent lists? Some of the pictures I edit are ... uh... NSFW, so I'd really rather not have titles such as "Buxom Blond with Big Boobies" in my file list! 

That's pretty close!

For a bit of silly fun testing it out, it seemed that your avatar is a bit serious in expression. That of course leads into the Joker from Batman: "Why So Serious?"

So here is Vlastimil, as the Joker from Batman, now with an uncanny valley smile!
[attach]

From elsewhere:

And I also see as an architect very much that the newer programmers that I mentor don't *get* some stuff, because they don't know what goes on under the covers.  And so they can't make good decisions devoid of this knowledge.
...
You have to know how something is done before you use it, so that you can make good decisions about when to use it.

Would a bottle of wine and a call girl service help them code better?   

Heh this is the same one I posted as the "Guest NANY entry" down in spoof land. I'd gotten it from the same news story that this thread comes from, and being a somewhat silly little line of code, is one of the types of things that I created the Spoof-NANY section for in the first place!

[http://skwire.dcmembers.com/apps/snacks/WallpaperReset.zip]

Here you go: http://skwire.dcmembers.com/apps/snacks/WallpaperReset.zip

I think that works. Skwire Wins!

I am aware that explaining to users how something could be done, if they did not figure it out themselves, is pointless and a sign of a failure of the software. I hope to get better at designing things in the future. Thanks once again for the information about the first impression of the software, it is very important to me.

No no no!    Being the incredible developer you are, my job now is to cheer you up!

I ran into the same thing with Mouser on Screenshot Captor. It's a thing where some powerful program does a lot of stuff, only to happen to miss what at least in my case was THE only use case of some smaller program. And where I am happy to have donated here, is to sometimes get a misc little feature grafted on top of that program so that all that horsepower is there for one day when I need it, but I can do my low-level hack editing on the daily basis. For me the trick to low level tools is like grabbing a blue ball point pen and a pencil and a notebook. I have done some of my best creative work with those - so then questions arise like "why can't you do precisely that on a computer?" Theoretically one day if I had my very own pet developer, you could - I'd devise a program that would *almost* mimic the kinds of tricks I use in notebooks. But until then, and grudgingly admitting that developers are people and not awesome toys, that shall wait for another day! 

So let's see... if you're on a dead heat with Paint.net, except you're here and that guy is "just a random dev", then I'd like it if it is possible to graft on the few low level things I do in MS Paint, so then like S.C., your program can be my all-in-one tool. It's Not an image viewer. So far, fair enough, so that's that. Let's see what else.

1. You already have both adjust saturation and hue, so that part is down.
2. Make a customizable "favorite actions" toolbar. (I got the idea from Office 2010, see my rants on ribbons elsewhere.) If a user really only does like 4 things over and over, it becomes amazingly fast if they're all there on a little toolbar in order. For me, all I really use are the Rectangle Select, Lasso Select, Flip Horozontal, and Stretch/Shrink. So if you had a feature like right-click an option and "add to custom toolbar" that makes life a win. : )

Now, for technical points.

1. Resample doesn't seem to have an effect I understand. My goal is to stretch or shrink the picture, but doing a resample looks like it leaves it there. Also, I'd like the choice of independent horozontal and vertical relative resizing like MS Paint does.
2. Flip Horozontal would be nice - just saves a step having to rotate twice, because the 90 degree cases don't do anything for me.
3. A "Clear All Tools" bit  / button would be useful. I find it rather distracting to be locked into a "select" or other tool, and I'd really rather just go back to as if I'd opened the picture the first time and do something else.
4. A "pointer" tool that doesn't do anything might be nice. The idea is that with the selects, if your hand jiggles then you've yanked a piece of your picture apart and there's a small risk of damaging the picture if you somehow can't undo it such as blundering a close-save changes. A pointer is then like a "safety" so as you're just imagining things, sorta clicking around, you can't actually hurt anything. You could combine this with the "Clear All Tools" bit.

Whew! It's a lot of words, but should be a piece of cake to do after all that other stuff is in there!

Regards,

Tao

Why not just right-click on a picture and set it as the background? 2 clicks. You could use a "blank" image or anything to "make it go away".

Hiya Ren!

1. Right clicking on Jpegs (as an example) doesn't give me an option to set it as a background.
2. I don't know what a blank image is. My standard background is just system black.
3. Sometimes I have gotten fancy and used videos as backgrounds, so I'm interested when I get time if this kind of idea works on clearing those.

(Corporate line)
Too bad. We know better than you. Pay for the new version or be miserable. We like it like that.

[Autohotkey]

Here's a two-line AHK script that should do it:

Formatted for Autohotkey with the GeSHI Syntax Highlighter [copy or print]
RegWrite, REG_SZ, HKEY_CURRENT_USER, Control Panel\Desktop, Wallpaper, % ""
DllCall( "SystemParametersInfo", UInt, 0x14, UInt, 0, Str, sFile, UInt, 1 )

How do you make that into an exe?

TaoPhoenix, if you remember what was the problem, I'd love to know

I worked on this today. Here's most of the rundown of the problem:

- Microsoft Paint
Transparent Select Freeform
Transparent Select Square
Copy & Paste
Copy & Open New File & Paste &Save-As a new file
Flip Horozontal & Vertical
Stretch X % Horozontal and Vertical

- Windows Picture Viewer
Quickly Flip through pic libraries "next - next"
Set as Desktop Background

- Paint.net
Effects/Artistic/Pencil Sketch
Adjustments/Hue & Saturation
Adjustments/Brightness & Contrast
Couple of occasional other things

I'll just quickly affirm TreeDB Notes was my winner of a survey of these types of programs I did a while back.

This is another of those snacks to save steps.

I sometimes like to put a picture on my desktop background. Then when I am satisfied, I want it to go away. However, the main method I know of to make it go away is:

RightClick/Properties/DesktopTab/ScrollUp/None/Apply/OK

Whew! Way too much work to blister through a bunch of pics as desktops!

Anyone wanna go after this one?

Cheers,

Tao

Extra Credit: P.S. my use case is Win XP, but last I recall from Win Vista and 7 and who knows about 8, they deleted that function entirely, so it might be useful for people on those OS's to have this widget work for them as well.

The files aren't blocked.  The service is blocking it.

I saw some similarities in the end effects. So then I guess you're saying that DRM is something that travels with the file.

For an easy example, some videos on Youtube are blocked to mobile browsers. I'm sure my betters have ideas around that. (Browser header changing and all that jazz?)

Not sure what you mean there in that context.

Well, last I understood DRM it meant restrictions & rights on digital media, right? So would coding videos on YouTube count as DRM? Or is there some implicit extra factor that the DRM has to be attached and embedded as some kind of software encoding?

In other words, I see similarities between things like WMA music files and non-mobile or region-blocked YouTube files.

Shameless Bump. Speaking of threads like managing datasets, I recently did a big soft backup of years worth of data as part of my moving prep. I'd lost my other copy of this micro-app until I finally realized I'd posted a note about it here! Yay for the Cloud!

Getting sorta back on topic, would stuff like Apple's restrictions through the App Store count as a new form of DRM? For an easy example, some videos on Youtube are blocked to mobile browsers. I'm sure my betters have ideas around that. (Browser header changing and all that jazz?)

This is my listing of most of the tomes that I decided to discard when I moved. (It's not wholly correct - I did keep some of them, and I abandoned it after I had the general gist of what I was discarding. It was mainly as a reminder that I'd picked them up at various times for a reason as part of various projects and weekly interests.)

http://www.freevoteusa.com/BookDiscards.xls

Awesome graphic, where was that from?

But Cody is not a Penguin!

Can we discuss Spam Organizers? 

And, in some instances, Ctrl+Z can return/undo a deleted file or directory  .

Yeah, I think I succeeded in doing that a few times.