I also wonder what his thoughts on “modern Windows” are

That made me chuckle too. No utility, but I did find it interesting.

Didn't know that NT5 source is available for the public. Why Microsoft does not ban/delete it on GitHub?

Because it would always return the first match in that case.

You still need to see all of the items once.

Imagine you have 2 items.

First one has 100% chance to be selected. So it does. Then the second has 50% chance to be selected. If it isn’t you effectively chosen the first one and have 50/50 chance to return either.

Now you add a third item. There is 50/50 chance of having either selected. And 1/3 chance of replacing the selection with the new one. Resulting in a 1/3 chance of selecting any of the three. (Because 1/2-1/6 = 1/3) 1/6 because there is 50% chance you will “steal” the selection.

exactly. There is something wrong with the code snippet.

Either that call would have to do the same (i.e., walking the files and counting), or you'd need some additional metadata in the directory entry to store how many files there are, requiring additional storage accesses for adding and removing files. Adding to that that both FAT32 and NTFS are quite old and had to run on older hardware. Cycles and disk accesses are not free.

On top of that, how often is it necessary to efficiently know the number of files in a directory while at the same time not caring about the files enough to list or display them? This algorithm is a special case where you could use the count of using a bit simpler code that ultimately would have the same file system API calls (since you cannot tell the FS to give you file #37 from that directory, so you'd have to use FindNextFile 37 times anyway, just like the sampling algorithm).

I feel like there would either be too many locks or too much contention on something like /var/log or /tmp if that API was ever exposed to userspace.

just have it count how many times del cmd runs successfully /s

Here's a blog post from 2003 with beautiful pictures.

https://jakeludington.com/2003/12/17/create_your_own_windows...

XP is Microsoft's prettiest OS by far.

I thought it looked great :-/

I don't see how that's relevant? Article is about the RNG implementation, it doesn't matter what the profile pictures are.

because you don't know the number of images before running the code so no number to do the mod part

So users Adam, Anne and Archie all have the same profile image?

How is that simpler?

It's well above the number of images that were in the applicable folder by default, so seems pretty appropriate to me.

It doesn't: https://github.com/tongzx/nt5src/blob/daad8a087a4e75422ec96b...

The account named "Administrator" that Windows created for you always had the chess piece.

There's no way my memory of this is reliable anymore, but I also remember my administrator account being chess pieces (and my user account being an orange fish).

It might be that the randomization code was bypassed in some cases - like creating an account in safe boot mode or similar.

It makes sense. The chess piece is the first profile picture in the list.

I remember it like that too. Or is it Mandela effect?