ThrowawayB7

7 ms·

1.
by ThrowawayB7 9d ago
Ask anyone at a FAANG and they will tell you that large corporations get flak every day for a lot of things, some justified and some unjustified. As an IC, you need to tune it all out and let the people whose full time job is to deal with
2.
by ThrowawayB7 9d ago
Microsoft needs Bill Gates back, the young, abrasive version of him that didn't tolerate bullshit, to call them out on what they're shipping these days.
3.
by ThrowawayB7 22d ago
IBM's PCs were dependable but came at a premium price that was undercut by PC clones. OS/2 might have been superior but it had higher system requirements ($$$) and itself came at a premium price that was undercut by Windows 9x.
4.
by ThrowawayB7 27d ago
This is a serious answer: Microsoft dissolved its test discipline in 2014, early in Nadella's reign, in favor of developer-led testing and telemetry based bug detection. The results you can judge for yourself.
5.
by ThrowawayB7 1mo ago
My first guess (and probably the first guess of many of the old school nerds) was that the MS Word codename is from Opus the penguin from Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County comic strip and that seems to be correct. High five for anyone w
6.
by ThrowawayB7 1mo ago
Odd that they received a brain teaser at a MS interview in 2015. IIRC that's several years after internal interviewer training was updated to recommend that brain teasers not be used in interviews because they weren't useful.
7.
by ThrowawayB7 2mo ago
Microsoft doesn't police IHVs -> Geeks: " MS is negligent! " Microsoft does police IHVs -> Geeks: " MS is an evil monopolist! "
8.
by ThrowawayB7 2mo ago
Well, it's at least interesting in the sense that the user doesn't have to dig up a copy of Windows NT to run the toolchain, which is what was required for the original Windows CE for Dreamcast SDK and Platform Builder. I seem to
9.
by ThrowawayB7 2mo ago
Windows CE for Dreamcast ran a custom port of DirectX 5 and subset of Win32 so developers could create a game that supported both desktop Windows and Dreamcast more conveniently. For games that didn't need to be cross platform, it was
10.
by ThrowawayB7 2mo ago
Windows CE isn't in ROM, the binaries are loaded from GD-ROM disc for games that chose to use it. And booting it wouldn't do you much good anyway since there's no graphical or text shell. It's intended to launch strai
11.
by ThrowawayB7 3mo ago
Lends some credence to the suspicion that Phil Spencer's retirement might not have been voluntary.
12.
by ThrowawayB7 4mo ago
Not a tool per se but I miss Charles Petzold's Programming Windows book in its earliest editions. People forget how difficult it was to find well written programmer documentation in the pre-Internet and dialup-era Internet days. H
13.
by ThrowawayB7 4mo ago
And what would you do with the Windows 2000 source? It's 32 bit x86 code and the driver model for Windows has changed significantly since those days so it wouldn't run on modern x86-64 hardware anyway. Maybe it would run in a VM
14.
by ThrowawayB7 4mo ago
Parent poster is probably conflating Windows CE, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone. Windows Mobile 5 was tremendously popular with over 100 phones from various manufacturers. But that was also around the time iPhone was released and by th
15.
by ThrowawayB7 4mo ago
On the early alkaline / NiCd AA battery powered WinCE PDAs with as little as 2-4 MB of RAM and a very slow single core processor, having only 32 process slots wasn't really a limitation. You couldn't afford too many processe
16.
by ThrowawayB7 4mo ago
" ¿Por qué no los dos? " A lot of the issues that he has seems to be running on hardware that Linux doesn't currently support well. Used 1 liter PCs that are old enough to have solid support under Linux but still fast enoug
17.
by ThrowawayB7 4mo ago
And the contemporaneous counterexamples are what? The various UNIX windows managers and X11? System 6-8 on the '90s Macs? None of those were great UI/UX IMO.
18.
by ThrowawayB7 5mo ago
To paraphrase the old taco ad, " ¿Por qué no los tres? " I use all three daily and any of them are fine, provided you know what you're doing.
19.
by ThrowawayB7 5mo ago
> " Which is why Microsoft had to use such dirty tricks to prevent them from making inroads into workstations and desktops at the point that they still had competitive hardware. " Huh? Sun Microsystems pretty much owned the wo
20.
by ThrowawayB7 5mo ago
The funny thing is I actually had Windows 11 reliably black-screen on me after creating a local account. On a recent Surface Pro device, no less. I blame Nadella. Gates or Ballmer had their own deficiencies but they would never have tole
21.
by ThrowawayB7 5mo ago
Back when the word hacker still meant something, that was the opinion of most hackers. Microsoft being bad guys did not make early Java versions good. [EDIT] I'd actually say MS losing the J# lawsuit was a net positive since it gave
22.
by ThrowawayB7 5mo ago
> " Their problem was that Microsoft excluded them from the market and starved them for money... " That is not what happened. Sun Microsystems had immense revenue and clout in the server and enterprise space because of the dot
23.
by ThrowawayB7 5mo ago
> " ...embrace-extend-extinguish against Java... " Early Java was horrid for everybody except the architecture astronauts who could cram ten GoF design patterns into a hello world program. It only got traction because a differ
24.
by ThrowawayB7 5mo ago
For big products with many years of history behind them, yeah, that's true. For v. 1.0 or skunkworks projects, it's still mostly true but occasionally, some crazy-ass stuff can happen. (Cue the "what has seen cannot be unse
25.
by ThrowawayB7 5mo ago
The "somehow" is Microsoft, who defines what the hardware architecture of what a x86-64 desktop/laptop/server is and builds the compatibility test suite (Windows HLK) to verify conformance. Open source operating systems
26.
by ThrowawayB7 6mo ago
"When in Rome, do as the Romans do."
27.
by ThrowawayB7 6mo ago
Change "thief" to "free rider" and it's exactly what the shared source / post-open license folks are saying.
28.
by ThrowawayB7 6mo ago
Why would you expect an engineer to be able to comment on legal affairs? Presumably it was cleared with Microsoft's legal department or whatever GitHub's divisional equivalent is.
29.
by ThrowawayB7 6mo ago
The 50th anniversary of Bill Gates' " An Open Letter To Software Hobbyists " was a couple of months ago and the letter was literally about developers deserving to be compensated for the hard work put their code. Now that muc
30.
by ThrowawayB7 6mo ago
Yes, Microsoft does still sell MS Office 2024 as a one time purchase: - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-... - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365&#x2

More ›