That has nothing to do with single threading that shit, an Arduino could draw that image faster. Most likely something fails to start correctly and windows waits for a 30 second timeout to run out before continuing anyway.
Well yeah, the reply is obviously a joke. Displaying an image is a single threaded task regardless of the contents, and adding threads will just make it slower.
I tried to figure out if this was real, and the closest I found was this article where setting a solid color background in windows 7 would cause up to a 30sec delay during login. The solution was apparently to make a small image in the color you wanted, and tile that image so that it would cover the whole desktop.
Here’s a hackernews discussion on it, includes some other fun stories like how windows 95 progress bars would complete faster if you were wiggling the mouse the whole time.
I bring up the mouse wiggling thing all the time when I’m sharing my screen at work. I get impatient with computers very easily, so I start wiggling and jiggling and doing figure 8s with my mouse cursor and say that “it makes the computer go faster.” Then I get to be distracted by telling someone how that used to be kiiinda true back in the good ol’ days of PS2 and single threaded cooperatively-multitasked operating systems (the fact that PS2 sends hardware interrupts still blows my mind a bit).
Funnily enough, I learned about it from a greybeard who did a stint at Novell. He’d constantly jiggle his mouse around while waiting for shit and I bet he was just waiting for me to ask him why he thought it made the computer “faster.”
Even for Windows, as shit as it is, this seems hard to believe.
Yeah, the only thing I could imagine would be that image loading/processing uses an optimized library, but a single color is (unlikely but possibly) implemented poorly as a loop over every pixel, with some egregious overhead.
Most likely shit post though…See reply, apparently real!
