Comment Even for Slashdot this is old news... (Score 1) 68
Dave Plummer may have Tweeted about it recently...but his Youtube video on the topic is over three years old. His Youtube channel is particularly interesting, since it includes information regarding Task Manager and a number of other late-90's era things he coded that are still in use, so it's well worth the watch.
In terms of the disk format tool, there are a few things I'd add if it were up to me. First, I'd add a "low level format" option that nukes the partition table entirely and doesn't create a new one. I'm a happy purchaser of a license for LLF, but this really should be a built-in function, especially since it's technically possible to do with diskpart in the CLI. Second, I'd add a 'custom size' option that allows the user to specify the partition size. This is possible to do in the MMC snap-in (diskmgmt.msc), and of course diskpart allows it as well, but I think that the ability to make simple sized partitions would be a viable improvement.
That being said, I hope Microsoft doesn't mess with it, because Notepad is a harbinger of what is coming. Notepad was pretty darn close to the "do one thing and do it well" UNIX philosophy. It did text editing at a very predictable level, used next to no system resources to do so, and had basically four options: find/replace, word wrap, a font format dialog that changed how Notepad displayed whatever it opened but didn't format the text at all, and the F5 option that automatically entered the date/time...and that's it. Now, the devs decided it needed to be 'modern', so it got tabs and 'search bing for' and autocorrect and spell check...who thought it was a good idea to have autocorrect in a text editor?!?
If this is what Microsoft is doing to legacy code that has stood the test of time, my hope is that they don't mess with it, because there is no possible way that the current folks at Microsoft will be able to improve upon Dave's code. Knowing them, they'll have Clippy Cortana Copilot integrated and suggest partition layouts based on what's trending on the Bing Start Page.
But really...R.I.P. PartitionMagic.