you probably missed that years ago it was about 'maybe kinda sorta a trace of water' and is now arrived at 'ocean-sized volume'

The premissa of the discussion was that whatever is posted is /not/ in complicance with the law
Nice straw man, though.

Eh, nvm that, I suck cock.

Yeahh. Especially Venus.

Stop feeding the trolls. It's dumb.

Thanks, but that doesn't answer (or even address) my question at all...

I guess Microsoft wants to shield the user from accidentally running across the oh-so-utterly-complicated and highly technical concept of 'files'.

It's Much Nicer(TM) to think of your stuff in terms of "this is a picture, that is a game, that is a cat video", and being completely oblivious of that all those magic little things generalize to 'a bunch of application-interpreted data with a name'. Encouraging whitespace in file^Wmagic thing names also hints into this direction.

Microsoft is probably well aware of the fact that showing extensions by default would help the luser spotting attempts of tricking them, but this is apparently not as important as providing a "magical" computing experience.

FTFY

it's < and >.
Welcome to the 90s.

I like how you say something dumb, get called out for it, and then follow up with random statements completely unrelated to your original point... But i truly lost it at

(not only because it's complete nonsense)
Please quit posting on /. forever. Thanks.

I never said you said that, but you mentioned it only in the context of programming.
Besides, you ignore the entire rest of the response.. Pot, meet kettle.

Was there a viable standard for this at that time?

That sounds like a chicken-egg problem. If the drive can access the platters without firmware, what's the point of the firmware then? Or if the 'small bootloader' can actually access the platters, then what does it need to read the 'real thing' from the platters for?

Dear Mr. Low-ID, here's your Interwebs 101: Don't feed the trolls. That is, unless you're in for quality counter trolling.

Right, manufacturers typically spend a shitload of $ to engineer their own debug interface and the respective hardware for it when there's an established and well-designed open standard around. </s>