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Bug of the moment 2009-11-02


Not a bug, this, but just an amusing observation. No doubt many people have seen this before, but it was not until a few a days ago when I mistakenly sorted My Computer by size that I encountered Microsoft’s semi–easter egg:

Tiny, Large, Gigantic and Unspecified drives in Explorer

Actually, there does appear to be a bug whereby Explorer is unable to read the sizes of floppy discs and pen drives. Floppy discs I can understand, as Windows doesn’t strictly know whether there is a disc inserted or not (until it gets upset when it’s been ejected), and what its capacity is, but it should be able to display the size of a pen drive.

Also, given that Windows’s size display algorithm goes right up to exabytes (260 bytes), you would have presumed that Microsoft would have long since amended their naming strategy likewise, such that petabytes would be classed as “Gigantic”, terabytes “Nice budget”, and a mere 500 gigabytes as “Got the t-shirt”. “Exabytes” would show as “Your disk drive is probably broken”.

The disc I inserted for the floppy drive test was my Lotus III: The Ultimate Challenge disc, and I had the first game of Lotus III in a few years now:

I shall leave the disc in, to remind me to re-rip all the music. Although the Amiga soundtrack can be obtained from World of Game MODs, I still love the Adlib soundtrack of the PC version.


Posted 2nd November 2009 – Comments and questions?