"Paul" <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote

| A simple Google isn't going to train you on how to use
| the Federated Search feature. That's what makes it awful
| in the year 2022. The participants here know not to use it.

I'd never heard of that. But I saw an interview yesterday
with a woman who's written a novel about a future where
algorythms determine, based on social media history and so on,
your creditworthiness, trustworthiness, and so on. Typical
geek logic: "Fucking would be so much easier if I could make my
computer do it for me. And there'd be a lot less slime to clean up.
It's a win/win, worthy of a big IPO."

I think I agree with none.given here. This all makes my head
hurt. If it doesn't go into my microwave for 3 minutes and come
out looking like food, I don't want to know about it. Why complicate
life? I have enough trouble with people who don't replace the
toilet paper roll, without having to worry about irritating
things like variety, efficiency, color, curiosity... Why is there more
than one kind of bee, for God's sake? Fuck that. Shut up. :)

"Ken Blake" <Ken@invalid.news.com> wrote

>In addition, I remember trying (in vain, mostly) to explain to people
>(extended family members) the difference between Internet Explorer and
>Windows Explorer.

| Yes, another example. Two similar names for two very different things.
| A terrible mistake, almost designed to confuse people.

Specifically designed to confuse people. As you may recall,
that was all part of Active Desktop. It was Bill Gates's famous
genious, "turning the Microsoft corporate ship on a dime" to
relate to the Internet. It was mostly just window dressing.
Folder windows were made to look like IE instances. The client
area actually was an IE browser instance, with folder.htt
specifiying the HTML layout and script functionality. It was
a webpage with a listview control on it. The Channel Bar was the
first sleazy adware. A billboard stuck to the Desktop.

Billy was a genius, alright. A genius at finding
ways to middleman anything he came across. He was going to
equate Windows with the Internet and cash in. Except that no
one really wanted to subscribe to ads. No one understood it. And
actually, Windows has nothing to do with the Internet. (It should
be noted that the IE tie-in was also meant to compete with
Netscape and to provide evidence for the scam claim that IE
was integral to Windows. With Active Desktop, it actually was.)

That tie-in between Explorer and IE was real. To this day,
the Shell COM object in shell32.dll has a Windows collection that
returns instances of "InternetExplorer", which includes all open
IE and folder windows. I once wrote an Explorer Bar shell extension
to provide
functionality like there used to be in Win98: links to other folders,
info about the selected file that's format specific, and so on. I
actually had to do some work in order to not share all data with
IE. There's no clear distinction made, programmatically, between
IE and Explorer in the shell.

These days most of that is gone, and Edge was cooked up to
complete the repair of the unfortunate vulnerabilities created
with Active Desktop and ActiveX controls in the browser. Though
Microsoft is arguably to blame for online security problems
overall. The Netscape people weren't stupid enough to put
executable code into webpages. Their javascript was not a
problem until MS decided to link COM computing to it. MS were
not actually stupid. Just very greedy. They "cut off Netscape's
air supply", turning Netscape into an inferior Windows function
rather than a superior browser.

Now we have Google, owning the Internet, your browser, your
email, search, your file storage, your cellphone, your security camera...
Billy G never foresaw the Internet. Google did. Billy G just saw an
opportunity to vacuum up more bucks than he was already getting.

Remember the Windows\Web folder? I think it's still there. But in
the original Active Desktop it had a folder full of icons for the likes
of Citibank and Forbes. Presumably they all paid to be "in on the
ground floor" of Billy G's Internet. By something like 2004, Steve Ballmer
was still screaming about it. In a BusinessWeek interview, if I remember
correctly: "We will get there. We will win the Web!"

So, yes, they very much intended that you should confuse
Explorer and IE.