The Format Dialog in Windows NT | Hacker News Reader

The Format Dialog in Windows NT

twitter.com

239 pointsdevelatio116 comments

I was able to confirm in the Windows NT4 source code that he originally wrote some of the code for the format dialog on 2-13-95. That much is true. (late 1994, early 1995, close enough)

>"I also had to decide how much 'cluster slack' would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB."

NT4 didn't support FAT32, and NT4 actually was actually able to be 4GB rather than 2GB for a FAT volume because NT4 allowed 64K clusters, so actually exceeded what most systems were able to do at the time. Formatting as FAT in NT4 had no cluster check or option. The cluster size used was decided based on the size of the volume.

Furthermore, the The 32GB limitation for FAT32 volumes was originally in the internal format functions, not the dialog itself. On Windows 2000 (Which does support FAT32) you can try to format a drive bigger than 32GB as FAT32, but the formatting will fail, as it is hard-coded at the end of the format to fail trying to format FAT32 volumes larger than 32GB. The dialog itself isn't what presents this limitation and it is shared by the command line format.com which uses the same functions.

Not sure why he seems to always exaggerate his own involvement. He's got people believing that he wrote the Zip folder code that Microsoft literally licensed from Info-Zip because he had to touch it to get it integrated. I guess exaggeration is what "influencers" do, and that's what he is at least trying to be now.

I thought that sounded dubious. The 32GB limit is also enforced in diskpart.exe (for the Windows-uninitiated, a console tool for disk manipulation) which would mean it's decoupled from any UI code. In other words, the UI is not what is enforcing the limit OS-wide.

"vzip150.zip" credited to plummer@visualzip.com doesn't mention anything about info-zip https://www.sac.sk/files.php?d=7&l=V

Where did the covette come from then? https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/dev-shows-off-...

It used InnerMedia DynaZIP.

Source: Extracted VZIP150's InstallShield `data.z`, saw `DZIP32.DLL`, and `DUNZIP32.DLL`, and confirmed with `strings` on `Vzip.dll`.

http://dynazip.com/ confirms “DynaZip technology is used by Microsoft Corp. and for many years it has been directly incorporated into the Desktop and Server versions of the Windows Operating Systems. DynaZip technology implements the compression engine behind the Windows Zip Folder user interface which allows users to view, extract-from and create ZIP files that are managed as compressed folders.”

https://web.archive.org/web/19961130210204/http://www.innerm... Version 3

https://web.archive.org/web/20000226025901/http://www.dynazi... Version 4

I owned zip folders for a while during the windows Vista days. I could have sworn the code was originally purchased, not written by someone at Microsoft. Honestly, it looked like it had been run through an obfuscator. I assumed that the original author had done that to ensure it was difficult for Microsoft to make changes/improvements.

I still have nightmares about that code. :)

It was purchased.

I may be misremembering, but Dave has spoken on his Dave's Garage Youtube channel about running a separate software business selling small utilities and later selling some of them to Microsoft. This might have been one of them. A quick search confirms that he also claims that here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kfpjhg/i_am_dave_plum...

He talks about it in one of his videos. The zip directory was a product of a side hustle of his, which Microsoft then bought out. In the video he comments how much easier it was to integrate when he had access to more internal apis.

Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39587379

21 days ago | 121 comments

Dude this guy is desperately trying to avoid fading into oblivion and is clinging to a little ancient format window to remain relevant in public eye. Have some mercy and let him have his 32gb moment.

Memory is an interesting thing. I once claimed to somebody I was seeing that I had done/said something humorous, fully believing that it was my own experience. It was only when he mentioned hearing that joke from a famous standup comedian that it really hit me - I think what really happened was that I watched a clip a long time ago, and thought hey that's the kind of thing I'd have done - and then proceeded to record the memory as mine, even going as far as attaching it to a specific shop from the same chain in the story.

Once famous incident of this effect is reported by Oliver Sacks, where he confidently narrated a story that presumably happened to him during the war until his brother corrected him:

https://www.wired.com/2015/08/fully-immersive-mind-oliver-sa...

i remember reading a study that showed conclusively that verbalizing your memories changes them permanently, every time. at some point, if you talk about a memory enough, you wind up remembering the words you've used to describe the memory far more than you remember the memory itself.

depending on the words you choose to describe the memory, and how much you talk about it, you can dramatically change what you think you saw or heard or experienced, to the point where you're telling something that is based on memory, but is now effectively 100% fiction.

human memory is very, very flawed.

Ian Banks wrote something about how if you live long enough and reminisce enough, your worst memory becomes indistinguishable from your best memory.

It would be nice if you can cite credentials, if possible; not everyone has/had access to Windows NT source code and Dave for his part provided his credentials.

Not that I am discounting your claim, but from a cursory glance through your comment history you're practically a nobody with a seeming vendetta against someone who credibly had a part in much of Windows NT's innards.

I do remember there was a leak of Windows 2000 source code years ago.

I downloaded it only to search for swear words. The most offensive thing I've ever found was things like "workaround because some idiots call <API name> <description of a wrong way to do it>"

NT 4 and Windows 2000 source code were leaked on Feb 12 2004.

The second google result is a copy that Microsoft are hosting on their own website: https://github.com/lianthony/NT4.0

In that case, parent commenter or someone sufficiently motivated should cite file and line number to corroborate the claim.

(I'm not going to do it because I'm drunk and I probably have better things to do than illicitly look through Microsoft source code.)

Someone else already posted a comment with the exact file.

Fair enough. As others have noted the source code was leaked; I've got NT4, NT5, XP, XPSP1 and Server 2003 codebases to review from that, which I downloaded a good while ago. I've been a software developer primarily targeting Windows for 20 years, 10 of those professionally. I was a Microsoft MVP for half of those (2012-2016 inclusive). The reference to the date is found in the header of nt4\private\windows\shell\shelldll\unicode\format.c

The 32GB limit for FAT32 doesn't appear to be handled by the shell code or the dialog, so when I said it was handled internally to the formatting code, I couldn't actually find that. It's just somewhere loweer than the UI. What I did do howeever was boot up Windows 2000, the first version that did have FAT32, and there's no limitation in the format dialog itself. It goes through the entire process and then gives a "Volume too big" error after it has gone through the process, an error shared by not just the format dialog, but diskpart, disk management, and format, which certainly suggests that that is happening at some lower level. The dialog in question does just call into other functions to perform the actual format, but I wasn't able to find the actual source files for it.

>Dave for his part provided his credentials.

Now he understandably does leave out a bit of info about his history which you could arguably say is part of my "vendetta" that you observed. The reason for the proportion of comments is less a vendetta and more that I get kind of worked up every time stuff of his is posted and people applaud how great he is. He's no Dave Cutler but he certainly talks like he was.

Now, as to the tidbit. Dave Plummer ran a scam company that was sued by Washington State in 2006, "SoftwareOnline.com, Inc. ". He actually left Microsoft specifically to run this company. Court documents can be seen here:

https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...

You can find David W. Plummer listed in the court complaint.

The short of it is that it was an online software scam company that tricked people into downloading fake Anti-virus and security software using online ads, and then the software delivered additional adware and nagware onto users machines.

That is why it may appear I have a vendetta. I don't trust a word he says and especially when what he says directly contradicts other sources. Mistakes in memory are one thing, but some of them are rather beyond the sort of thing I think is reasonable. Paired with his history, I'm convinced he's actually lying intentionally because he's trying to build a "following" and "Dave's Garage" is just his latest scam. That's why he keeps "coming forward" in posts and his youtube as writing this or doing that. What bothers me is that it's working, because most people don't seem to even question it, even where there are rather severe contradictions.

I'm not who you're replying to, but I'm a bit torn on your response. I started by understanding your self-described vendetta, but then I read the link you posted.

The link describes the judgement against the company he was CTO of at the time. So, he's been through the justice system for this, and has been reprimanded satisfactorily. He's paid the fines and made the promises and does not appear to have reoffended.

I don't think there's anything else for him to do in order to atone for this.

So, why are you still mad? What would it take for you to let go of this vendetta that you say you have?

I don't care either way, I'm not involved. I'm just curious why people will forgive some for just about anything but hold negative attitudes toward others for their entire lives, no matter what they do.

He was CTO but also owned the company. That is why he was named directly on the complaint.

I feel he violated what I feel are very basic, elementary ethical principles with regards to software development, by specifically setting out to create software products that were not designed to give the user value but to scam and trick them out of their money.

(There's an argument to be made that he was merely ahead of his time at Microsoft but that's perhaps another discussion.)

He's retired and supposedly wealthy. Not sure what sort of stock options he might have for 7 years at Microsoft, but how much of that wealth (if it even exists) is or was from the scam company? He didn't have to pay most of the fine and the number of customers that requested refunds is hardly documented. For all we know dude is still living off money he scammed from people.

Either way when you stoop that low I don't think you can ever stand up straight again- all you can do is try to hide your slouch.

>What would it take for you to let go of this vendetta that you say you have?

Well, to take an extreme but analogous (IMO) example - what would it take to trust Bernie Madoff for financial advice? That's kind of what I feel this is like. Doesn't matter if they "went through the justice system". You never regain the trust in the field when you so readily violated it to make money.

So what would someone who has done this need to do to win you over?

Record shows he’s paid his debts, to both society and everyone directly affected, at least everyone who requested refunds. Just as importantly, as far as we know, he hasn’t re-offended.

Bernie Madoff isn’t out of the justice system yet, and Dave Plummer hasn’t started any new scam companies, at least as far as I know. So per your analogy, it’s as if Bernie Madoff got out of jail 20 years ago and has been a cashier at a grocery store ever since. I would not go to him to invest my money, and he would not ask me to.

I don’t like it when people who do something wrong are held to that activity for the rest of their life, no matter what else they do. One can’t un-commit the crime, but they can demonstrate that they are reformed over and over and over and it will never be enough for a lot of people.

I don’t understand that. I want to understand that.

Spent the afternoon formatting a 128GB USB stick (only thing on hand >32GB) to FAT32 via the format command on one of my Windows machines to see what it'll do, and indeed it failed at the end saying the volume is "too large". So wherever the logic is, I agree it's deeper than the interface Dave wrote.

To give benefit of the doubt, though, Dave didn't say he wrote that logic into the interface. Just that he had to "decide on the cluster slack", which clearly was written by someone (which could be him, this wasn't specified) at a deeper level of the operating system. It's also worth noting that Dave's interface doesn't even give the option to format with FAT32 in the first place, at least with my 128GB USB stick.

So I find nothing wrong with his statement. He wrote the interface, a temporary one which ended up being permanent. He also played the role (or at least a role) in deciding the arbitrary 32GB FAT32 volume size limit.

As for SoftwareOnline.com, that's also mentioned on Dave's Wikipedia article so it's not something hidden away. Anyone so inclined to research his character will see it.

With regards to your vendetta against him regarding his past conduct, it is unwarranted: He settled with Washington state and paid penalties, he returned refunds as requested; the case is closed. If you're going to keep bothering him over that, it's you who is wrong.

For reference: https://github.com/lianthony/NT4.0/blob/b4a8d373d8a082db6758...

Warning: don't look if you ever want to contribute to Wine or ReactOS

That's just a myth. ReactOS routinely uses IDA to inspect actual Windows binary logic.

I know that Microsoft employees have accused them of such things, but is there any real evidence of such, or even anyone unaffiliated with Microsoft who can corroborate?

Disassembling a binary is "clean room" reverse engineering but looking at leaked source is not.

Or, at least, that was what it was in the 80s.

Memory is a fickle thing, but the format dialog enforcing a FAT32 limit is probably Dave's biggest failing when it comes to telling old stories.

I don't know if FAT32 was in development in late 1994, it's possible, but it sure didn't ship in Windows NT 4, nor the original Windows 95. Even when it did land in Windows 95 OSR2, the format command happily accepted partitions up to 128GiB; but okay, Windows 95 isn't NT.

Windows 2000's internal formatting functions appear to be the real reason FAT32 is limited to 32GiB on new formats. The GUI, format command, and diskpart are all equally incapable of creating a >32GiB file system. Why? Who knows, it's not like drives of that size or larger didn't already exist at the time. If you use, say, mkdosfs on Linux, the VFAT driver in Windows 2000+ will take volumes up to 2TiB, you can even install Windows 2000 on such large volumes.

As an aside, and connected to the failing memory thing, Raymond Chen has repeated multiple times that Space Cadet Pinball couldn't get working on a 64-bit build and never shipped with any version of Windows, and that's why it was gone in Vista. Windows XP Professional x64 Edition has a working 64-bit native build of Pinball.

Well, it was a game from 1995 and wouldn't fit in with Vista's style revamp. Even the old Minesweeper and Solitaire games became Direct3D accelerated in Vista. Maybe the effort to do the same overhaul to Pinball was discarded, but the idea that a 64-bit native build couldn't get working is absurd when the previous Windows version included the very thing.

There were issues with Pinball on "Windows XP 64-bit Edition", or the Itanium version. A great video explaining this is https://youtube.com/watch?v=3EPTfOTC4Jw

In his defence he has clarified this was for the Alpha AXP 64bit build that had the problem https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220106-00/?p=10....

> are all equally incapable of creating a >32GiB file system. Why? Who knows,

Win95osr2 could format FAT32 volumes up to at least 128GiB IIRC, the 32GiB came when the filesystem was officially added to the NT line in Windows 2000⁰.

Part of the reason, I always assumed, was to push people to use NTFS where they otherwise wouldn't, which gave MS a bit of lock-in because NTFS wasn't particularly stable on Linux at the time. ExFat as a compromise didn't exist until a fair while later either.

> If you use, say, mkdosfs on Linux, the VFAT driver in Windows 2000+ will take volumes up to 2TiB

2TiB is only the limit if you stick to 512 byte blocks, the filesystem supports up to 4096 byte blocks giving 16TiB. Some filesystem tools didn't like this, and the larger cluster sizes could be very wasteful of space for small files³, so it was often avoided. I don't know if the Linux tools supported this from the start, but they certainly did eventually.

[0] there was at least one common 3rd a party driver, from sysinternals to support it on NT4

[1] for safety the most common methods for using NTFS under Linux defaulted to read-only, then and for some time after

[2] sometimes to the extent of causing corruption rather than just refusing to work

[3] the main reason to use FAT32 over FAT16 at the time⁴ being that above 32MiB the cluster size needed to increase about the minimum 512B, up to 32KiB for 2GiB filesystems⁵ meaning an average of 16KiB wasted per file.

[4] later the 2GiB limit⁵ was more significant as drive sizes grew

[5] 4GiB was possible with 64KiB blocks though while officially supported by the format this was not supported by all tools

> 2TiB is only the limit if you stick to 512 byte blocks, the filesystem supports up to 4096 byte blocks giving 16TiB.

Aye, I'm aware, but a 16TiB FAT32 file system in that configuration is only usable on Linux, at which point... why? Use exFAT in that range!

Windows NT 5.x's storage drivers don't support hard disks larger than 2TiB, and there's nothing to do about that. It puts the upper limit of FAT32 on those systems at 2TiB.

IIRC FAT32 supported larger sectors in part for future proofing. It was made because of storage length limits on its predecessor so it makes sense that the devs were very conscious of the need.

Also some storage systems are more efficient speed-wise with larger sectors (though if that was a concern for you, you probably weren't using FAT<anything>). It also made switching between 16 & 32 in-place easier, though I can think of a reason off the top of my head why you would want/need to, and none of the standard tooling could do that.

I think he's misremembering about the format part because the UI does have some arbitrary cluster sizes for NTFS: https://github.com/lianthony/NT4.0/blob/b4a8d373d8a082db6758...

That code still seemed to be around in (some versions of) XP: https://github.com/tongzx/nt5src/blob/daad8a087a4e75422ec96b...

As for the ZIP support, I can't find the source code for ZIP folders specifically. There's this excerpt from another company (Schlumberger Technology Corp.): https://github.com/tongzx/nt5src/blob/daad8a087a4e75422ec96b... which was added in 1996 if the comments are to be believed.

> I was able to confirm in the Windows NT4 source code that he originally wrote some of the code for the format dialog on 2-13-95.

That was a dry Monday, not a rainy Thursday. It's possible he wrote the code Thursday, but didn't get to check it in until Sunday (though Thursday was dry too), but I know I couldn't tell you the what the weather was for code I wrote last month.

> I guess exaggeration is what "influencers" do, and that's what he is at least trying to be now.

Regardless of the rest of your story, this made me chuckle a bit - since Dave went from signing off his YouTube video’s from “I’m only here for likes and subs” to “I’m mostly here for the likes and subs” and started accepting sponsored products.

Dave Plummer is such a cool guy. I love how casually he writes about building one of the most ubiquitous kernels of all time.

> He created the Task Manager for Windows, the Space Cadet Pinball ports to Windows NT, Zip file support for Windows, HyperCache[4] for the Amiga and many other software products. He has been issued six patents in the software engineering space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Plummer

His YouTube channel is great too! https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage

Yes! It always makes me smile when the algorithm tells me to watch something from there.

Might want to read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39813625

If the softwareonline.com part doesn't convince you I don't know what does.

What are you hoping to convince me of? I did some further research but didn't find anything that would make me not want to watch his YouTube channel. e.g. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2821079/internetshield...

This guy claims Plummer is full of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39812561

And downthread from there, that guy's claim of "literally licensed from Info-Zip" is debunked. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39812860

The OP did get the original authors wrong, but it's still a third-party implementation, and Dave's only contribution is the integration with Windows Explorer.

yeah, davepl is the third party, isn't he? he wrote that software and sold it on the side, and Microsoft reached out to him to purchase it without knowing that he was a Microsoft employee at the time.

The “debunking” link claims it’s InnerMedia DynaZip. Dave wrote the integration between Explorer and DynaZip in his spare time.

> The OP did get the original authors wrong, but it's still a third-party implementation, and Dave's only contribution is the integration with Windows Explorer.

Jesus Christ, why are people around here always so obtuse?

Dave never claimed to have written the decompression routines. Nor does anyone care about that part. He wrote the explorer integration, that was the product: Browsing zip as if they were folders.

That's it. That's his claim. And that's the reality. Which zip library he used in the back is an implementation detail and doesn't matter in the least.

He also ran a Registry Cleaner scam that he was sued for https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...

This highlights a common pitfall: If you “solve” a problem with a “temporary” solution, you lower the priority of the better solution below every unsolved problem. And there are always enough of those to ensure no one ever revisits the temporary solutions.

I've noticed this in my career. The lesson is to not "ship" something until you're proud of it. Sometimes that's easier said than done though.

Then perfectionism sets in, you wind up tweaking and adjusting every detail ad infinitum, and never ship anything.

Bird in the hand, worse is better, etc.

Right! That's why I suggest "proud of" not "sure there are no flaws". If your level of "I'm proud of this thing" is "I can't think of any way to improve it" then you should probably recalibrate.

"There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution that works"

I have no idea where I heard that, but I use it often at work to ensure we don't ship temporary solutions but do it right the first time.

> "There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution that works"

> I use it often at work to ensure we ... do it right the first time.

If it works, you did it right!

I disagree, I consider that an absolute win of efficient engineering. Develop the feature enough that it lasts 30 years without needing to be fixed.

It has to be good enough. Was it? You could argue it was, because it survived that long. But it wasn't a standalone product, rather part of Windows, which was a (commercially) successful product because it was good or great enough. Some parts were better, some were worse. While not completely and utterly broken, I think the suggestion here is that the Format dialog fell in the "worse" camp. So, I'm not saying that it was okay because there were more important things to fix (that was true too, probably), but I'm saying that it was okay because there were enough equally important things that were done better/well enough.

I don't condemn it. I condemn the implementation that doesn't render it with the latest widgets and, instead, implements the same widgets that have been abandoned ages ago.

At any given time, there should be one code path to render an abstract UI definition to a screen. It might depend on screen capabilities or running environment or size, but it should be one, so you don't need to maintain and ship ancient unmaintained software.

> I condemn the implementation that doesn't render it with the latest widgets and, instead, implements the same widgets that have been abandoned ages ago.

Interestingly I think this generalises to the whole Windows Explorer.

The Explorer introduced in Win95 and later in NT 4 is a lovely bit of UI design. It introduced the Taskbar (never seen before, and no, the NeXT Dock is not a taskbar, and Acorn's Paul Fellows said NeXT's implementation was apparently derived from the Icon Bar in Acorn RISC OS -- NeXT hired an Acorn developer and he took his Archimedes with him to California). It introduced the Start Menu, with an elegant system of folders and shortcuts as its storage model, later imitated with the newly-customisable Apple Menu of MacOS 8 and later.

But in Win98, Microsoft bodged the Explorer with Active Desktop, which renders via Internet Explorer 4, so that MS could justify bundling IE4 with Windows to the US DOJ in court. That version is multithreaded, which is good, but it's also much bigger and much slower... because it renders via IE. That means new slowdowns and new ugliness, like windows of generic icons, which then get replaced with the correct icons as the renderer tries to catch up. So, they hid that, with an empty window and a flashlight scanning, while the HTML renderer tries to create a view of the Control Panel. It also added wallpapers in folder views, a horribly ugly idea.

And _that_ ugly version is what KDE ended up copying, rather than the cleaner quicker one that was first launched.

And KDE didn't notice and copy the nice neat and Unix-like "just display a Start Menu built from the contents of a directory" idea. It implemented a database instead, and so every successive start menu implementation copies that instead.

The ugly hack done for some other, non-technical reason ends up being the one that influences the successor designs, and the classic clean original implementation is forgotten.

In this case, the results are GNOME 2, MATE, KDE, Cinnamon, LXDE/LXQt, even much of Xfce...

I think the folder views is one of the most amazing ideas that I saw first in Windows with IE3. You don't build an e-mail client: you build a view that sees a folder full of e-mail messages (each one a file) and displays it as an e-mail reader. Add a service to send messages in your outbox and poll services to populate your inbox, a viewer and an editor for messages and you are set.

As for the renderer trying to catch up, it could be implemented as something that reads and caches all required graphic resources before attempting to render to the display, so that everything appears correct the first time.

As for the UI, it's fine if the current rendered uses HTML - you just build something that reads the abstract UI representation and outputs HTML for the window renderer.

> Windows with IE3

Which version of Windows?

I used IE3. It wasn't great. It came with MS Internet Mail and News.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110816052247/http://www.nwnetw...

I quite liked MSIMN, it was actually a pretty good client -- it just needed spam filtering, which it never got until it was a bloated mess.

> you build a view that sees a folder full of e-mail messages

BeOS mail did that, probably first.

But I don't remember MSIMN doing that.

It does sound just like a Maildir folder, though.

https://web.archive.org/web/19971012032244/http://www.qmail....

Maildir dates back to around the same time that Win95 was first released, and Win95 as shipped didn't have MSIMN. It had the Inbox client, designed to talk to MSN and Microsoft Mail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Mail

> I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on.

> ...

> It wasn't elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived.

This doesn't follow IMO. It presents all the options you need in a simple interface; what would go into a more "elegant" interface?

Are you... a programmer by any chance?

To improve things, we need to talk about common user scenarios. Problem is, normal users will approximately never have to format a disk, and it's a perfectly adequate interface for nerds.

If this were the 90s and everyone was still using floppy disks, yeah it would be worth making it slightly more user-friendly.

This thing literally is from the 90s when everyone was still using floppy disks.

This interface was perfectly acceptable in the 90s, and it's perfectly acceptable today. Dropping a big graphic with a large circle button labelled format would have been worse. I say this as someone who writes my fair share of aesthetic user interfaces.

My takeaway is different. If your "temporary code" is sufficient to solve the problem, then it may last 30 years. If it was an actual problem, it would have been fixed by now.

I'm a programmer and I can't even stand the formatting on Linux distros. Windows was usable even as a kid.

What's wrong with mkfs.<tab-tab>[select-middle-click] /dev/sdc1?

The fact that you need to invoke lsblk/blkid/mount first to be sure what you're about to erase forever, then possibly sync and unmount, and only then format. Keeping the same target device at every step is completely on user and the price of a typo is huge.

I love (and usually prefer) the Unix way, but it's as dangerous as it's powerful and the amount of the required prior knowledge is incomparable.

In that case you could use gnome-drive or whatever it's called, it's all point and click!

Of course there's GUI solutions for GNU+Linux, but I was specifically answering to your "what's wrong with mkfs" comment.

Moreover, the GP mentions "as a kid" which is probably at least 10 years ago, when the choice of GUI tools and their availability in various distros and their repos was much more limited.

Those are the low level tools. there are things like parted that bundle them together if you want something more guided. GUI versions are available too, and since many installers ship with GUIs these days you don't even have to touch the terminal anymore. Unless you install arch, but then learning the plumbing is part of the experience.

Discoverability. The Windows approach is kid friendly because you can discover it by right clicking on a drive in Explorer, ignoring every option you don't understand, and pressing start.

Knowing that "mkfs" is a thing or that "/dev/sdc1" is a thing pushes the minimum knowledge requirements orders of magnitude higher.

Yes, there's gnome for that!

> the dialog is still my temporary one from that Thursday morning, so be careful about checking in "temporary" solutions!

Not only still there but inspired others, like the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool that I always used to bypass the 32GB FAT32 limit: https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/hp_usb_disk_storage...

It's a useful tool! I used it to create a 128GB FAT32 flash drive for sharing my games collection between retro PCs.

It’s perfect, I hope they don’t replace it with an “elegant UI”

Format needs an update. We are getting the update ready for you . . .

Don't forget to leave a review and send feedback (network-attached /dev/null).

It's "replaced" already under Settings -> Storage -> Disks & volumes. When doing it through File Explorer the old one gets called because File Explorer is still (largely) a legacy style app.

I actually quite like the new UI as far as the replacement of the format dialog but the portions that replace the Disk Manager functionality are a bit lacking because it doesn't have the graphical representation of the disk layouts.

Default view: https://i.imgur.com/56yZ8gZ.png

Advanced view section: https://i.imgur.com/fKb3R8c.png

Formatting an existing partition: https://i.imgur.com/DmbX3FQ.png

It's not perfect but it does largely retain the same layout while matching with the OS theme and adds a few options that used to be multi paged wizards in the disk manager. Minor things like "format" is a bit more direct than "start" and "cancel" a bit more apt than "close" sneak in as well. I'm sure it being 33% wider will be the end of the world to someone though.

One thing I think I'm a bit split on is it still expects you to enter new partition sizes in MB. It does at least add localized number separators but it seems a bit silly to worry about how many millions of megabytes given the numbers will only grow with time for here.

I think it's really sad they replaced the disk defragmenter UI. It was nice to look at the blocks being moved around. Worth keeping a spinning metal hard disk just for that.

I'd say that there are no temporary and permanent solutions, but there are bad and good solutions. A good solution, even if implemented quickly, will stick, because it's good (enough).

A bad solution can also stick, if it's the only one available / viable for some time, and then everything else has to be backwards-compatible to it.

I worked at one of the biggest and oldest banks in Europe, and our production was often filled with these 'temporary solutions.' They were typically created as quick fixes for major issues resulting from previous temporary fixes.

Beware of "good enough" temporary solutions: we have a core logging component at work that was written by an intern and has the word POC (proof of concept) in it. Its data format is what an intern would create but by the time anyone really noticed that it had written so much data that the budget and effort of fixing it outweighed its problems.

Maybe if nobody has been noticing for a long time, then it really is a "good enough" solution which was not really worth bike shedding.

I usually try to calm myself that we can't do everything perfectly all the time, and we should prioritize the most important things, and let some less-important things slide.

As the old saying goes: There is nothing as permanent as a temporary solution.

I think that was about taxes!

I remember seeing a patch floating around that removed the 32GB limit; can't find it now but this was back when XP was the most popular OS.

The mkfs or newfs tools on any Linux or *BSD don't have the limit. The Windows kernel also does fine on larger volumes formatted on a free OS.

I do this all the time for SD cards. (Because who wants exfat?)

does fat32 support larger files than 4GB, common for video files shared with USB or SD cards?

No. A lot of software will split files for this use case.

Who doesn't want exFAT? It's all around better.

It's not as universally supported and it's patent encumbered.

If you have some random set-top box or camera that doesn't support exFAT, fair enough, but the situations are becoming few and far between. Windows, Mac, Linux all have native support for it.

No (practical) volume size or file size limits is a huge win for exFAT over FAT32.

Be careful with exfat and macos, the macos driver is known to be able to damage the fs.

I gave you a succinct explanation of why exfat won't work everywhere, and you are basically denying that it's relevant. This attitude is reminding me what being a Microsoft employee was like.

I am denying that it is as serious as you say. exFAT has been around for nearly two decades, and nearly everything from the past 15 years supports it.

If you choose to format an SD card as FAT32 because your 20 year old device doesn't support exFAT, that is entirely reasonable. Maybe a 20 year old device doesn't have much use for >4GiB files either. On the other hand, if your device does support exFAT, there isn't any reason to avoid it. The lack of file size limit should be a particular advantage (with 1080p and especially 2160p video, >4GiB files are common).

There are devices made more recently than 20 years ago that only do fat32. It's not sufficient to point out some standard or that the Linux kernel has a driver and that somehow covers every embedded device.

the support got much better since exFAT became part of the SDXC specifications (anything that supports SD cards bigger than 32GB has to support exFAT). At minimum it has read/write support built into Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS, so an exFAT formatted external drive is supported by 99% devices I need to plug one into.

The only device I can think of that doesn't support exFAT drives and I used it at least once with an external drive is my Asus router (and it runs kernel 5.4 so it could support it, but I guess it was omitted to keep the kernel small).

Anyone transferring files to modded game consoles is probably better off using FAT32

Which console supports removeable media with FAT32 (rather than FAT16) but not exFAT?

Unless you mean internal hard drives, maybe then the Xbox?

Flash carts for 30-year-old and older retro consoles often require FAT32. Think everdrive.

About 14years ago in my first week at a new job I cobbled some code together to query our ticketing system (BMC Remedy) as a sort of quasi queue monitor. It's had a few cosmetic iterations but its still running the same backend code.

This name has been popping into my head a lot recently. I hated it a decade ago at Walmart and it was a right PITA, but I would absolutely KILL to be using BMC Remedy at this point.

I hate Salesforce for tech work and support tickets. It is the worst experience possible. Remedy was Remedy and it was obscure and weird and hard to use at times.

But I swear to god Salesforce is going to cost me my job becuase it makes it impossible to do my job well. Why can't I just open one ticket in one browser tab without 15 other tickets popping into a second tab bar? Why does it NEEEEEED to hide whatever other tab I was working on in a drop down, why can't I sort, filter, rearrange, or resize anything? IT'S BRAIN BREAKING.

Anyway thanks for reading this rant. The idea of running any sort of query or script in Remedy sounds like water in the desert to me now. I'd settle for using service-now to track things. Anything but Salesforce dammit.

Windows has some dark corners where the Windows NT heritage is clearly visible. One would imagine the abstract UI definitions would remain consistent with the latest look and feel provided by different presentation layers added later - a button is still a button, since the late 1970's, and the definitions of a modal dialog box are easily translatable into whatever passes for abstract UI definitions for the latest release.

It's a bit frustrating to see that large parts of a very popular OS (used in life-critical applications) are abandoned like that.

I like this guy, and his stories from Microsoft are good. But man, he has gotten a lot of mileage out of this story.

There is nothing more permanent than the temporary.

There is nothing more temporary than the permanent.

At least that's what the Russians say.

I was watching one of his vids recently about C++ tricks and he talked about one time he submitted about 1m changed lines of Windows source code in a single commit, to a repo that didn't even support branching. It's crazy how devs used to work back in the day.

Here's his YT channel for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage

Reply on news.ycombinator.com