In case anyone cares, those are called radio buttons.
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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Aptly named because they are circles and therefore have a radius!
Honestly I don't remember why they are called that, I just remember from when I had to add them in HTML back in middle school. The damnedest things stick with you.
because they behave like the buttons on a radio.
Although technically correct, that's not much of an explanation with modern radios.
i mean, the most common radios still worked like that when modern uis were being developed, and they did user studies to figure out what people would understand.
try tracing back the lineage of the "hamburger menu"
Oh, I completely understand. It's just one of the things that's a relic today and will be weird for the generation that grows up today. Just like the floppy disk symbol for saving or the folder icon for loading.
the worst part about all of it is looking at the absolutely insane amounts of user studies that were done for the first GUIs. there are mountains of data. and now we just let the intern do whatever css trick is cool that month.
... Microsoft "let's fucking change everything for no good reason" team enters the chat
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john's probably rolling around in his grave right now, but it isn't because he's upset. he's just fucking the dead hookers down there
The drugs are still working their way outta his system.
fukushima, hold my pipe
I highly recommend looking up the video where John McAfee explains how to uninstall McAfee Antivirus!
dude, you gotta put the link in when you say stuff like that!
The third option seems appropriate. After installing McAfee, my PC got infected by McAfee :P
Not McAfee, but in the early 2000s I came home and found that Norton had decided that everything in C:\Windows was a virus.
Well, it wasn't wrong.
My favorite part of this is that the single-choice circular option control is (or used to be) called a "radio button". I wonder what fraction of people today have any idea why it's called that. I guess we're lucky it's not called a "light switch button" since it's been 80+ years since light switches were like that.
Ask me about the "high beam switch" lol.
High beam switch on the floor is superior to all other high beam arrangements. Got a '98 truck and have seriously considered putting it there, shouldn't be that hard to do.
tell me about the high beam swirch please
They used to refer to women with erect nipples appearing through their blouses as having their high beams on, because the old-style floor switch for the high beams was a little cylinder that resembled an erect nipple.
You went all out and I love you for it.
yea not sure I vibe with that lol
Thank you. I’ve been told “your headlights are on” and it’s a pointless and embarrassing thing to say to someone. Nipples get hard in the cold, they get hard from friction against fabric (note to those who need to hear it: NO, HARD NIPPLES DO NOT MEAN AROUSAL I’ve met men in their 30s that need to be told that, so let’s nip that rumor in the bud right now… pun partially-intended.)
The point is, it’s automatic and involuntary, so calling attention to it (even as a quiet aside) is beyond useless. I hope more people are like you, because personally I can’t wait for such “headlights” comments to end.
That's awful - I'm sorry you had to experience that.
Yea absolutely, it's just a normal bodily reaction. I'd be lying if I said I don't notice it when women/female-presenting people don't wear a bra, but there really is nothing to it. I moreso welcome it because I feel like it's a way for them to reclaim the stigmatisation that comes with "revealing" their bodies. Of course without blatantly pointing to it - who am I to comment such a thing?
Thank you, I'm trying my best :). I guess such comments and analogies are a product of their time and should be left there. I feel like we've made so much progress collectively as a society, with exceptions proving the rule, that such comments, derogatory or demeaning language in general, don't usually show up that much in daily conversation and shouldn't overall. Then again, my view is likely skewed because I'm barely around men and most people I am around are also very much left-leaning just like I am, so the language we use is very considerate and thought out, if that makes sense.
Now that I talk of it, a thing that's been grinding my gears recently is that so many people on here seem to be ok with using the r-word in regular conversation. "R-word" this and "that's so r-word of you" that - like, why? It's just so unnecessary. Same goes for the f-word (gay slur). I thought we've been past this already?
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Why call radio button
What about high beamers
Radio buttons are named after the physical buttons that were used on old radios to select preset stations.[3][2] When one of the buttons is pressed, the other buttons pop out while leaving the pressed one pushed in.
From wiki
TIL! I'm a dev so I know what they're called but I never bothered to check why that is
I will always despise McAfee. When I would get home from middle school and want to play Oblivion or the Sims 2, at some point, 15 minutes into every gaming session it would always pop up a Window and crash whichever game I was playing.
McAfee was just as much a danger to Kvatch as Mehrunes Dagon was.
I remember when McAfee first came out. They posted a free version to all the pirate sites everywhere and anywhere they could. Once everybody got hooked on it, cause it was actually somewhat good back then, they went to a pay model. Sleezy but effective.
1988 is long before 'pirate sites everywhere*'. They might have done that at some point, but the product would have been around a decade old or more.
*Yeah software piracy has been a thing for a long time, but I don't think McAfee was going around dialing every BBS it could find just to spread the program, the users were happy to do that themselves.
I remember all those years ago reading my first EULA for some software I bought. It mostly explained how the software company provided no reparation or responsibility for the software that they created and sold. It was then I decided I was gonna pirate if they were gonna be so sleazy.
Don't admit that you read one too much. A court case was recently decided where EULAs are basically no longer enforceable, because the judge ruled that "no one actually reads those things because you made them too long."
Have not read one in over 20yrs and retired now.
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I don't think that anyone that works there to actually have a soul left, and to care about the radio buttons.
Eh, I assume shit like this is made by some unpaid intern, not the main software developers. But yeah it still says something about their adherence to quality.
This comment would have failed qa too, tbf
lol, totally fair. And fixed. Typed too fast while walking out the door.
This is one of the many reasons why I dumped Windows and moved onto to Linux about ten years ago. I don't have that much money and back then I constantly budgeted what I had to pay for .... I wasn't going to spend hundreds on Windows, then hundreds more on subscriptions for things I could get for free in the Open Source Software realm where viruses and security were almost nonexistant. As soon as I dumped Windows, I no longer had to pay for the OS, the office suite, the image editor or the security software. I've saved so much money over the years.
You never had to pay. It's not like they're gonna actually support you as a lowest level consumer, fuck em
This was over ten years ago ... 15/20 years ago it was a real pain to try to get a copy of Windows and a key ... it was relatively easy to do if you lived in a big city (I used to deal with a computer guy in Hamilton, Ontario and he had memorized three Windows keys that he just kept reusing) ... the problem was in maintaining systems, updating them and in the changes, it kept messing with your setup and eventually triggering the system that it was an illegal key. Then you had to either disconnect from the internet, find a way around it or find a new key. I don't live near a big city and we didn't have easy access to the internet or forums or groups back then so it was frustrating to keep finding the latest ways to get a cracked copy, institution copy, company copy or hack to keep your system running. I don't work for a big company, don't have access to a school or institution so it was always difficult.
I used to get so frustrated with it all that eventually it was just easier to buy a copy rather than do anything else. Saying all that, I think I only ever bought four Windows OS over the years anyway. And before I learned about Linux and Open Source software, I was the same as most unaware people and just bought the software titles I thought I needed .... plus the security software! ... I remember I maintained a copy of Norton Antivirus for years before I realized it was literally turning my system into molasses.
What a load of shit. Pirating windows was super easy and very common back then. And if you didn't had internet access there was no way for windows to revoke your key which actually never happened with the usual pirated copies. You are a liar.
I would be a liar if I had known what I was doing
I am not a liar because I didn't know what I was doing back then
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Ah, that explains it. Convenience (and good service) is a strong piracy preventer.
By the time I was old enough to install operating systems activating them became trivial, nowadays MAS makes it even easier. Also it's probably cultural, piracy used to be so much bigger here. Still fairly big tbh, hell, my ISP's homepage has a couple of articles explaining how torrents work lol
I wasn’t going to spend hundreds on Windows
I never had to pay for Windows. I have been using it since Windows for workgroups 3.11 came out in 1993.
Even nowadays if you don't play any games (most people actually), I get the same set of features with a $100 computer and Linux than a $1000 gaming beast on Windows 11 sold in specialized stores. People are fucked with that and they don't know it.
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