Viewing profile — ThrowawayB7

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 str…

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 us…

Microsoft doesn't police IHVs -> Geeks: " MS is negligent! " Microsoft does police IHVs -> Geeks: " MS is an evil monopolist! "

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 …

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. F…

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…

Lends some credence to the suspicion that Phil Spencer's retirement might not have been voluntary.

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 i…

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 x8…

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 t…

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 limit…

" ¿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 sol…

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.

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.

> " 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. " …

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 …

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 lo…

> " 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 …

> " ...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 …

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 hap…

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 con…

"When in Rome, do as the Romans do."

Change "thief" to "free rider" and it's exactly what the shared source / post-open license folks are saying.

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.

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 fo…