What is Dave's frame class?

Raymond Chen

Back in 2004, we lost Dave’s frame class. Dave’s frame class, or more accurately, DavesFrameClass, was the window class that drew the CPU meter on the Performance page of Task Manager. As you might have guessed, Dave was the name of the original author of Task Manager. (If the checked version of Task Manager from NT 4 encountered an internal error, it printed a message to the debugger which includes details of the error and Dave’s telephone number so you can tell him about it! Mind you, that phone number is several years old, so don’t call it, or you’ll probably annoy the family who lives in Dave’s old house.) One of the quirks of Dave’s frame class that we had to fix in Windows XP was the digital read-out. The original version of Dave’s frame class printed statistics using a display that mimicked an 8-segment LED. It may have been cute and retro, but it was also a bug, because it prevented the translation teams from changing the way the digits were displayed to suit the target language. Not all countries use Arabic numerals. (Somewhat paradoxically, many Arabic-speaking countries don’t use Arabic numerals! They use Indic numerals. Then again, Roman numerals aren’t used in Rome either.)

Nitpicker’s corner

• s/aren’t used/aren’t used for everyday arithmetic by most people/

Raymond Chen

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