131–140 of 222 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows XP still likely meets that standard as long as it's air-gapped and placed in a facility that has at least the equivalent level of access control, and never removed.
... and never used. That was the punchline?
I worked in the windows kernel team and my favorite story about DC is when he basically made x64 happen because he hated Itanium architecture so much. He worked with AMD and basically made it happen while cranking in his corner office.
Love it
The interviewer, Dave Plummer, is also is also an amazingly interesting person in his own right. I particularly enjoyed his retro-coding videos, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlZe2JwrJqM and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0zxIfJJLAY The videos are really interesting and his background muzak and RGB lighting puts me in a Christmas mood. He generally put Microsoft in a completely different light than I'm us…
About 3 days ago, I watched a single 10 second Short on a Soufflé from my recommendations page and since then half my recommendations are soufflé videos. This is not a joke, and “half” is pretty accurate. I’m pretty sure something is broken or YouTube added an LLM to the recommendations engine.
I have a container for "I would like Youtube's algorithm to learn this". Everything transient by default doesn't go into it. This is, incidentally, the most wonderful demonstration of the worst aspect of the whole idea of targetted advertising: buy a sofa, and get sofa ads forevermore, despite you not wanting another one for several years!
The bit I found interesting was how Xbox's hypervisor is based on that of Azure, rather than anything they did on the desktop, and that Xbox games are/were packaged up with an OS rather than relying on a single OS on the device, so a bit more like containers. Dave also said he's working on making ML workloads run on idle Xbox Cloud Gaming devices. Any architectural tie between Azure and Xbox had never occurred to me…
There is an amazing video about Xbox security. It's extreme. For example the games executables are actually encrypted on the game discs, and it's almost impossible to even dump the actual binary that is running. RAM is also encrypted. Or the reason modern TPMs live inside the CPU is to prevent sniffing the TPM bus which people did on the Xbox.
I'd like to be treated as a customer, and allowed to play on the hardware I just paid a lot of money to buy!
The book describes Cutler coming in and revamping certain assembly routines and you can see exactly what routines are being talked about in the actual source code.
Cutler's code was (and I'm sure still is) absolutely beautiful C code. It really impacted the way I write NT-style C code.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...
The interviewer, Dave Plummer, is also is also an amazingly interesting person in his own right. I particularly enjoyed his retro-coding videos, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlZe2JwrJqM and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0zxIfJJLAY The videos are really interesting and his background muzak and RGB lighting puts me in a Christmas mood. He generally put Microsoft in a completely different light than I'm us…
He went from "I'm only here for the subs and likes" to "I'm mostly here for the subs and likes". I wonder what the next step is. That said, his channel does have much interesting content. I just wish he didn't go into sponsorship-reviews like with (Chinese) Ecoflow like products.
I haven't watched this video yet but I'm looking forward to it, having read Showstopper[1] quite a few years back. One thing that stuck out to me when I was still in my early 20s thinking I needed to work all the time was the mention that Dave would always take holidays on time, every time without any debate. While I may not love Microsoft, it was probably my first real exposure of a highly competent and qualified pe…
8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:
10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2020&ver...
I’ll recommend here the book “Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft”, which someone else recommended a few weeks ago. Link: I’m still reading it, but it’s really enjoyable. And it makes me wish I had been part of that history. Particularly the whole thing about dogfooding a brand new OS. But it caught me a few years too early.
Bill, what are you most proud of out of the following two:
1. Getting Cutler to come over from DEC and spearhead NT.
2. Committing to backwards compatibility early on, that ensured old apps Just Worked on new versions of Windows.
I don’t think Microsoft would look like it currently does without either of those two historical paths taken.