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Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#371

Post by jeberle »

- Drop the shiny, translucent Aqua-wanna-be thing. Windows should look serious, a la NT 3.51/Win2K. It's been downhill since then. If you want to copy someone, take some style hints from NeXTStep, or these guys: http://www.ableton.com/live-session-view.

- Hard deprecate the backslash. Forward slashes have been OK in code since forever. The GUI should display & accept slashes.

- Incorporate bundles into Explorer & the Windows loader (again, like NeXT). This would eliminate thousands of brittle file references in the reg db.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#372

Post by abalashov »

JunkDNA wrote: post #121

Some points: - It's annoying in this day and age to be forced into using the entire MS Stack when I need to work with one specific technology. For example: if I want to test a web app on various versions of IE, I have to run Windows. OK fine, even though IE is the only browser that is tied to one OS, I'll let that go. However, if I want to use the Microsoft-provided free MS Virtual Machine images, I have to run them…

Interesting. I have not had any problems using FreeTDS and UnixODBC in large-scale production environments to talk to SQL Server, although I agree that the interfaces of the tools are brittle and pathetically clunky, in a minimalistic sort of way.

I work in VoIP and have several customers who insist on storing all of their production data from open-source Linux telephony app servers in SQL Server because they are otherwise a Microsoft stack shop, and have not had an issue once all the DSNs were correctly set up.

Of course, said organisations are all using relatively old versions of SQL Server and intensely disinterested in upgrading, so who knows what awaits when they finally do and the FreeTDS v8.3 protocol implementation may not work properly anymore.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#374

Post by nl »

sqrt17 wrote: post #180
seltzered wrote: post #92

I recently got a windows 7 machine. Some things that bug me as a programmer using it, and make me wish I just paid up and got a mac: 1) WPF - I am trying to use this in my work life. It scares me when I hear your ex-product manager twittering that it's dead. I now feel like I should've done my app's front-end in qt or swing. 2) Will microsoft create in-built, tested, virtual desktop support already? More people use l…

ad 5): heartily agree. To make people stop thinking "cheap beige box loaded with crapware" when they hear Windows, MS should reinforce the "PCs at Mac pricepoint are just as nice as Macs" image. They did have a "recommend me a nice Windows notebook/desktop" page at some time, but it was kind of half-hearted and hard to find. For example, they could create some "Windows Experience" (i.e. solid usable box) and "Windows…

For example, they could create some "Windows Experience" (i.e. solid usable box) and "Windows Ultimate Experience" (i.e., reassuringly expensive and stylish) badges for notebooks and desktops that

Not MORE badges on a windows machine? I hate all those stickers and badges, and I'm not alone. See http://ipadtest.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/the-cancer-of-micro... for example.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#375

Post by loewenskind »

nailer wrote: post #360
loewenskind wrote: post #172

The company needs to split in two internally. One side can be the "MS Stack" side that continues with the current strategy milking it for every last penny while it dries up, but the other side needs to become a software company again (as opposed to a stack company). Start bringing your software to other platforms. Why was Office canceled on Mac while Mac is gaining market share? Don't you want money from all the peop…

Why bother making new desktop products (other than browsers) for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iPad? Why not just make them for the web?

It's not clear how long it will take for web applications to completely displace desktop apps, if this ever completely happens at all (it can't today, and HTML5 still isn't enough for it to completely happen either). They've already got a big investment in .Net, they should leverage it.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#377

Post by Yaggo »

cgomez wrote: post #303
Yaggo wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how Apple does it, but both my iMac and MacBook wake up in a second. I guess they keep the ram powered up and only save it to disk (hibernate) when running out of battery (or after certain amount of hours?). Anyway, they are totally silent and consume very little energy when sleeping. That's how it should be. I love how the difference between sleep and hibernate is abstracted away in Apple's implementati…

Yep, Apple laptops keep the RAM powered up until the battery level dips down to 20%, then it writes the contents to disk when the machine sleeps. It's called Safesleep and you can tweak this if you'd like by using a utility called Smartsleep.

Actually, according to the following sources, the content is written to disk _before_ entering sleep. This can be done very quickly because most of the data is already in swap file.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1757?viewlocale=en_US http://www.macworld.com/article/53460/2006/10/safesleep.html http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#378

Post by loewenskind »

aphexairlines wrote: post #205
loewenskind wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all you ever look at is raw bottom line numbers, life is going to be one surprise after another for you.

That's an odd way of advocating hype over facts. And it's a bit of a stretch to pronounce Microsoft's decline if they're not #1 in a couple of trendy areas (cloud computing, smartphones).

Revenue and popularity are tails of trends. If you're looking at the bottom line you're looking at what was previously (possibly several years ago).

People pay a lot less attention to what MS does these days and people are even making new OSes these days. It wasn't so long ago that people were predicting that would never happen again.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#380

Post by robbyt »

gaius wrote: post #326
JunkDNA wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Microsoft could deploy a decent unix on top the NT kernel, that might not be a bad strategy. But the fact remains that there are a wealth of unix tools that you can compile and run on an number of unix variants, but are practically impossible to build and run on Windows without heavy customization. I'm arguing that is eventually going to be a problem for MS because they are forced to invent everything internally a…

There's a POSIX subsystem. Way back in the day, Microsoft had their own Unix, Xenix. However they did a deal with AT&T to get out of the Unix market - they probably still can't sell a Unix even if they wanted to.

Does anyone know what UNIX even is anymore? Does UNIX=BSD? So does that mean Microsoft could sell Linux, since Linux!=BSD?
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