Live data from Hacker News

Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

devblogs.microsoft.com

341–350 of 556 posts

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think package managers are the single most impressive feature Linux distros have over Windows. Everything else I use has some kind of equivalent; for a dev environment you can sort of get by with MinGW and MSYS. But if there's anything on Windows remotely as capable as apt or pacman, I haven't heard of it.

> But if there's anything on Windows remotely as capable as apt or pacman, I haven't heard of it winget: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/wi...

chocolately too

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NTFS was doing B-trees in the 90's far before btrfs was a twinkle in someone's eye; unless some other UNIX was doing it.

Apple's HFS used a B*-tree starting in 1985.

IBM had used B+ trees for implementing the VSAM "catalogs" (IBM lingo for directories a.k.a. folders) already about a decade earlier.

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#343
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have very little respect to people at Microsoft when it comes to technical side of things. Whenever I have to deal with their "creations" it's like they were motivated by malice, or part of their frontal cortex gone missing. > The most obvious reason would be to use the executable itself to back the memory which the comment you replied to already hinted at. Imagine that I've already read that, and I still see no re…

Most users do not want a running program to corrupt / crash on them - even if they deleted the backing exe.

In practice, this isn't really true? Like, when do users delete programs manually anymore? Its almost always some uninstaller doing it from some installed appstore type program (Steam, Adobe Cloud, etc). And usually the user is deleting the whole directory, which almost always has additional files that the program needs to actually work. Those files will be deleted so their install already gets corrupted either way.

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#344
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would favor a /var/user/something directory. The fact that nobody does that is pretty much a consequence of the difficulty of coordinating multiple projects that do not have a common authority, not because it is a bad idea.

Again, what do you prefer about that? Maybe the reason no one does that is simply that no one shares your preference.

Having a clear separation between actual user data files / documents and stuff like cache for different reasons:

- easier to cleanup/wipe without risking deleting works/personnal files

- backup solution doesn't have to have a town of entries in an ignore/exclude file

- same as above for syncing software

- tier storage separation possibility

- disk space allocation separation depending on data vs volatile stuff

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that very anti-linux though, to have a directory owned by root but populated with subfolders owned by other users? /home is the only exception I can think of that does this.

Anti-linux I don't know, but it was not uncommon in unices to have home directories in /usr/home. And there is no written or unwritten rule about that. In fact, /home is a subdirectory of / which is owned by root.

True, but /usr/home is no longer a common place to store home directories. It used to be, particularly in Bell Labs Unix. (Does FreeBSD still do this?)

The Linux Foundation’s File Hierarchy Standard puts user homes in /home, but it’s by no means mandatory.

/home being the *nix home folder directory isn’t written in stone, but plenty of software expects it. Of course you shouldn’t hard code things like that, but that has never stopped anyone from doing it. (Not that we should reward that with de facto standards necessarily.)

I understand the various reasons why a root file system hierarchy isn’t part of the Single UNIX Specification, but it might have been nice.

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#347
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing you to have inconsistently valid data, where a file can both exist and not exist depending on who's asking, is the opposite of smart.

I just imagined the file being part of the mob, and somebody coming to ask if it was there. The body guard just responding with a “who’s asking?”

That's why Dijkstra was against the idea of explaining CS concepts by anthromorphic analogies ig.

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#349
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There are some brilliant people at Microsoft. Maybe not in the product end of things, but there are very few brilliant product people anywhere ;)

Obviously I cannot know everyone working for Microsoft. But I do know few people. Also, since I would never work for Microsoft, at the times I spent many years working for the same employer and either wanted to practice interviewing because I thought I might be headed for the door soon, or just to keep things fresh, I'd apply for jobs with Microsoft.

And invariably I'd hit the most bonedeaded interviewers I'd ever talk to. Arrogance is common to all interviewers in the tech giants, Microsoft is no exception of course. But in the context of glaring lack of any kind of ability, arrogance hits a lot harder...

What also stands out is that programmers working for other companies would typically know something about the platform their company didn't use. Like, if you talk to a person at Google RSE department, they'd still know something about how things are on MacOS or on MS Windows. Microsoft programmers are completely oblivious to anything outside Microsoft. They believe that whatever garbage they came up with is the best thing there is never trying alternatives. But, in rare cases when they do, their knowledge is very distorted and superficial.

Here's a real case of someone who worked for Microsoft for about ten years and branded himself a "visual C++ programmer". This guy started about the same time with me in a company which was transitioning from a bunch of Windows tools to Linux. Part of the transition was to move away Perforce and to Git. It was the time when even small companies would self-host Git, and the typical way to do that was to create Linux users on the server hosting Git repo and give programmers SSH access to it.

The sysadmin there was new to Linux, but we were kind of friends, especially since I had more Linux experience, so he'd come and chat with me about his job. One evening he comes to me and starts asking about how'd I set up Wine. Intrigued by why he'd need that... soon I discover that the "visual C++ programmer" guy requested that the sysadmin install an FTP client on the server, so that he can access Git repo... and that FTP client has to be some Windows-only junk, and so the sysadmin though that maybe it would run on Wine.

It was so many stupid things and of such magnitude all at once... I almost had a spasm laughing. And that's, basically, how my experience with Windows programmers usually went. I never had a moment of "hey, this guy may be OK, not like the others" or anything close. Somehow it was always bizarrely otherworldly comedically stupid.

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#350

Why do we still need to install stuff? Why can I run webpages just fine without installing anything? Installation shouldn't exist, at least not from the user's point of view.

A lot of people in the finance world prefer native apps to web apps. It's bizarre.
Post reply on HN