71–80 of 124 posts
Makes me wonder if there exists an OS that is truly written from scratch designed for only modern hardware and devoid of all backward compatibility and bloat (like the JS frameworks ditching support for msie). It would be certainty a very interested side project I guess.
Err....it's been NT all along.
Does anyone happen to know how the Windows shell (CShell?) is built? Winforms? WPF? UWP?
I'm actually surprised they use GIT internally. I would have thought they have their own custom VCS. It says a lot about the success of GIT.
Let's rewind to 2001, courtesy of The Register:
Microsoft CEO and incontinent over-stater of facts Steve Ballmer said that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches," during a commercial spot masquerading as a interview with the Chicago Sun-Times on June 1, 2001.
I am personally pleased they have thrown in the towel with Internet Explorer/Edge to just use the same browser as everyone else. Okay, bad for diversity, good for getting your web page to render.
Next they will be emulating Windows in Linux.
Not a bad idea.
A few years ago I was curious as to why programs worked quicklier in Virtualbox running Windows on Ubuntu than when I booted the machine into Windows 7 mode and tried to run them natively. Plus why bother with installing driver disks and having a subsystem when the Virtualbox provided defaults were doing a better job?
Then there is the file system. The Windows one might do special Windows things like animating folders flying through the air but it is always slower given the same hardware and same task. And normally you just want to copy files or rsync them.
Plus there is that matter of anti-virus. That is never a problem on Linux but you need that on Windows, another little watchdog program to double check every byte for you. Can't see how that helps. The unix/linux/ChromeOS idea of considering everything to be hostile with file permissions has always worked.
So I look forward to a future where Windows is just a set of UX guidelines and any 'Windows program' is secretly run in some proprietary blob that is running in some white-labelled Virtualbox clone. Maybe they end up doing that thing Apple did to move off the legacy code base where it recompiles itself.
Makes me wonder if there exists an OS that is truly written from scratch designed for only modern hardware and devoid of all backward compatibility and bloat (like the JS frameworks ditching support for msie). It would be certainty a very interested side project I guess.
Back in the late '80s, my company had a program that included getting the Windows 3.0 source code. Looking through the code I had found the line "goto wearefucked;" and accompanying label further down. When we got the source for Windows 3.1 the first thing I did was check that file, but to my disappointment the label had been changed.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031015-00/?p=42...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about Ubuntu specifically but some distro's do ship sources with their installation media and it usually fits on 1 DVD. When I say "sources" I am talking about kernel, user land and desktop applications too. However that would be compressed tarballs and doesn't include git history - the latter being where I suspect most of the disk space is being used in that screen shot.
A better example would be one of the BSDs, where the kernel and userland are all developed together in a single source tree.
> You can spend a year (seriously) just drilling down the source tree, more than a half million folders I would be more inclined to switch to Windows if its source tree were smaller . My guess is that a big reason I prefer MacOS over Windows is that Apple has been much more willing to drop support for legacy hardware and old applications to keep the source code more manageable.
Oh come on. Be honest. I can tell just from the tone of this post that you'd _never_ switch to Windows.
It is difficult for humans to estimate how they spend their time, but my guess is that I've spent at least 35 hours recently exploring Windows 10: Changing various settings, installing software, asking Windows-specific questions of Google Search.
And I'm writing this on Windows. (Except for the Windows-specific questions, I'm not counting web use in the estimated 35 hours because of course the web mostly works the same way across the desktop OSes.)
I think computer users vary drastically in how much they value predictability in the software-based systems (or "environments") they use, and that I value predictability much more than the average user does.
I realize that it is unreasonable to hope never to be surprised at the response the system makes to an action of mine. But my response to being surprised is to try to understand how I could correctly predict similar responses in the future. For example, I might try to understand the reasoning of the designer of the part of the system in question. Or I might search for ways that I might have misinterpreted the situation. And I don't like it when I never reach an understanding of the surprising response.
Its source code's having half a million folders is a sign that Windows will never stop surprising me, which, all other things being equal, makes me less hopeful that spending time getting to know Windows will pay off for me.
Life of course will never stop surprising me. But to have any hope of getting anywhere in life or achieving any goal whatsoever, my brain must be sufficiently reliable and predictable. I see my computer as an extension of my brain that helps my brain be more reliable in the ways that will help me to succeed.
If you see your computer or the web site you are interacting with as a potential friend with agency of its own, then I can see where you might be offended by my original comment. I see computers and web sites as tools. Levers, if you will.