So animated mouse pointers are OK, blinking cursor in command prompt is OK, Teams starting with the system is OK, but counting seconds is overkill for Windows?
I would probably not display seconds anyway even if I had a choice, but this explanation seems strange.
That’s because it’s on the blog on which Raymond looks at a common annoyance on the Windows platform and makes up excuses for it. Sometimes they make sense, sometimes they might have made sense decades ago, oftentimes it’s just bullshit and the real reason is just an off-the-cuff decision by some random intern in the 80s.
Windows already has mechanism for streamlining the visuals when the desktop runs through RDP and updating one small rectangle on the real screen once every second costs basically no resources at all, especially considering the typical Windows use case where everything runs through multiple layers of virtualizations while the virusscanner is wasting as many resources as it can get away with.
I would probably not display seconds anyway even if I had a choice, but this explanation seems strange.