simiones

I think you're perfectly right on the details of the implementation. But then we may have a disagreement of semantics here.

The way I view this, there are three separate things: processes, applications, and windows. In all versions of Windows, a single process/application, that the user launched exactly once, was able to have one main window and multiple other windows that could be independently manipulated, closed etc. Since Alt+F4 was added as a keyboard shortcut, it closed the currently active window, which might happen to be a confirmation dialog or anything else. If it was used to close the main window, the application/process might choose to shut down, automatically closing other windows it owned, but this was never a requirement.

Now, for the process / application distinction. By my understanding, in traditional Windows, the concept of an application is essentially an executable whose main function is WinMain. A user can spawn one or more processes from the same application executable, and these are handled differently in 16-bit vs 32-bit Windows - but they have always existed as separate copies, within the technical limitations of the time. Even in Windows 1.0, the second execution of WinMain did indeed receive a hPrevInstance and could use it to access resources of the already running instance - but it was still a separate thing, with its own window and its own event loop. Ultimately it wasn't all that different from a new process spawned from the same executable - except that memory and compute constraints at the time made it important to have a way to share certain parts of the parent (and the lack of memory isolation made it trivial to access the memory of any other thing running on the system anyway).

The concept that an application can only have 0 or 1 instances running is a very weird concept that MacOS shares only with mobile OSs and Windows Metro/Universal/UWP/whatever MS calls their mobile-style store apps today.

Edit to add a note: it's actually quite common on Windows today for programs to not actually launch, or at least not use, a second process when running the executable again. What they do instead is that during startup they check if the process is already running by checking some named mutex or other similar mechanism, and if it is, they ask that process to open a new top-level window, maybe with the new document loaded into it if you were actually opening a doc, and then the new process just exits, while the old process start a new window that for all intents and purposes looks just like a new copy of the process to the user.

Something is "carnivorous" if it directly consumes the flesh (or other parts) of an animal - usually a living one that it kills (as we have a different name for those that consume only already dead animals - necrophages).

Feeding on nutrients from an animal that died and was then broken down by other beings into base elements in the same area as your roots doesn't qualify these trees in any way as either "carnivorous" nor even "necrophage". Carnivorous plants are those that trap and kill animals that they then directly digest, such as a venus fly trap. Those don't just benefit from animals dying around them and being consumed by bacteria - they have mechanisms that cause the death of the animal and then secrete substances that directly convert the animal into plant nutrients.

An "app" in Windows has always meant a process that starts with a WinMain() function. And as I said in other comments, a single app could always create multiple windows using the CreateWindow() function, that could each be independently closed (though not by Alt+F4). Nothing stops Windows in principle from having a way to close the entire application/process on pressing some keyboard shortcut regardless of which of its windows is currently in focus - they just didn't ever implement one. They could have defined a special message that the application's main message loop can handle to gracefully clean up everything, and then made a keyboard shortcut that would post this message, they just never did it.

Alt+F4 in Windows has always been "close window", not close app. It is even shown on the traditional "application icon" menu on each window, that many new apps are unfortunately doing away with.

Hyperbolic, perhaps, but how does that make them "unserious"?

If OpenAI researchers are publishing shoddy papers, why in the world would anyone else be responsible for editing and cleaning up their shoddy papers?

Oops, should have said CCP, not CCCP.

Though I should note that this would be the "SSSR" since I was clearly using the latin alphabet, even if I had chosen to use the Russian name of the USSR.

It's important to separate what can happen from what will happen.

The majority of people walking in the worse neighborhoods of LA or Chicago never have a single crime happen to them. But that doesn't mean that it's safe to go in a bad neighborhood - and it really doesn't mean it's safe to go there wearing designer clothing, gold watches, diamond rings and wearing your Apple VR device.

The same is true for travel. It's perfectly safe for the vast majority - but it's very important to be aware what may make you a target and what can happen to you if you are. Tens of millions of people visit the UK or China every year with no incident. But if you're a public active supporter of Palestine Action, or an active demonstrator against the CCCP respectively, be aware that you personally face a real risk from this travel, and your devices are actually very likely to be searched at those borders. Vice versa though (anti-CCCP activist traveling to UK, PA activist traveling to China) is perfectly safe, though.

That's completely different. Pleading the 5th and not testifying is completely different from giving false testimony - which is never protected. Even in a trial, if you are asked under oath if you handled the body, you are allowed to say that you invoke your 5th amendment rights not to respond; but you are not allowed to say "no, I didn't" if in fact you did (you can later be accused of perjury in addition to your conviction).

Which tells you of the poor moral character (if not outright participation and complicity) of many people who seemed respectable.

> Did they ever really abuse the power Google could have wielded?

Plenty of times. Perhaps the worse is pushing Manifest v3 with no support for real ad blockers in Chrome. Not to mention no support for ad blockers in Chrome mobile.

Also, their stealing of newspaper content.

Their new push for AI summaries instead of actual search in their search product, stealing even more clicks from sites that actually produce information.

YouTube pushing Shorts to everyone, and now the weird text posts that you can't hide.

In general their gigantic push for ads everywhere all of the time.

That's not an operating cost, it's capital cost.

The problem is that personal vehicles inevitably leads to unsustainable traffic. Now, for low traffic areas, driverless cars might be an acceptable solution. But for busy areas, the geometry of transporting 1M people in cars vs buses is simply inescapable.

"Frustrated with how critical details are missing from the GUI, requiring you to learn console commands? Don't be so ambitious, stop using a GUI for these things at all and write your own CLI for them!"