Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

devblogs.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 356 posts

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#271

Post by Tainnor »

dalai wrote: post #257
Tainnor wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't had that experience for a single job that I ever applied to. Always sent in PDFs without any issues.

Recruiters and large firms tend to ask for a Word file. I sent the plaintext file (minimal markdown) I used to generate the pdf to a recruiter recently. They directly asked for a docx instead.

> Recruiters and large firms tend to ask for a Word file.

Again, not my experience at all.

I think if a company didn't accept my PDF CV and asked for a Word file instead, I'd strongly reconsider whether I'm actually interested in working there.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#272

Post by heyoni »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #163
PaulHoule wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to overstate how hard Microsoft has worked to maintain backwards compatibility. Recently I had to read an old Access file and where I work we still keep Office '97 around for this purpose and it is quite amazing that it installs and works just fine on Win 11, Clippy works just fine, in fact all the other lame-ass things Office '97 does to take over your desktop all still work even if they don't quite visual…

> It's hard to overstate how hard Microsoft has worked to maintain backwards compatibility. Here's a pretty detailed list: - It is possible to target Windows XP SP3 (released 2008, EOL 2014, 10 years ago) from Windows 11 and Visual Studio 2022[1] using C++23. Windows 2000 can be targeted with a little more setup[2]. Windows 2000 is 24 years old this year. - It is possible to run a binary written for and compiled in W…

This is great and all until you completely ignored the fact that wine exists and went on to call user space design questions by Microsoft “trivial”. I could also start listing ways that the Linux kernel maintains backwards compatibility with not just software but hardware that’s decades old but the list would get too long. No one is complaining that Microsoft has too much backward compatibility, it’s their utter disregard for user choices and privacy that drives away the hacker community to either Linux or even macOS.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#273

Post by pjmlp »

heyoni wrote: post #272
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard to overstate how hard Microsoft has worked to maintain backwards compatibility. Here's a pretty detailed list: - It is possible to target Windows XP SP3 (released 2008, EOL 2014, 10 years ago) from Windows 11 and Visual Studio 2022[1] using C++23. Windows 2000 can be targeted with a little more setup[2]. Windows 2000 is 24 years old this year. - It is possible to run a binary written for and compiled in W…

This is great and all until you completely ignored the fact that wine exists and went on to call user space design questions by Microsoft “trivial”. I could also start listing ways that the Linux kernel maintains backwards compatibility with not just software but hardware that’s decades old but the list would get too long. No one is complaining that Microsoft has too much backward compatibility, it’s their utter disr…

Linux kernel on its own doesn't run software.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#274

Post by pjmlp »

wvenable wrote: post #175
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard to overstate how hard Microsoft has worked to maintain backwards compatibility. Here's a pretty detailed list: - It is possible to target Windows XP SP3 (released 2008, EOL 2014, 10 years ago) from Windows 11 and Visual Studio 2022[1] using C++23. Windows 2000 can be targeted with a little more setup[2]. Windows 2000 is 24 years old this year. - It is possible to run a binary written for and compiled in W…

The most stable API/ABI for the Linux desktop is provided by Wine.

Thankfully the year of the desktop is around the corner, by combining WSL with the original Win32.

Day zero feature availability, without compatibility issues.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#275

Post by ahartmetz »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #163
PaulHoule wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to overstate how hard Microsoft has worked to maintain backwards compatibility. Recently I had to read an old Access file and where I work we still keep Office '97 around for this purpose and it is quite amazing that it installs and works just fine on Win 11, Clippy works just fine, in fact all the other lame-ass things Office '97 does to take over your desktop all still work even if they don't quite visual…

> It's hard to overstate how hard Microsoft has worked to maintain backwards compatibility. Here's a pretty detailed list: - It is possible to target Windows XP SP3 (released 2008, EOL 2014, 10 years ago) from Windows 11 and Visual Studio 2022[1] using C++23. Windows 2000 can be targeted with a little more setup[2]. Windows 2000 is 24 years old this year. - It is possible to run a binary written for and compiled in W…

"The car works great technically, people just have trivial complaints about the steering wheel being made of razor blades." That is becoming less and less of an exaggeration as Windows is progressively further enshittified.

NT seems to be a nice OS at the core, but that's more about what it can do and how it is implemented than about how pleasant it is to use. Some of its syscalls are much more convoluted than the UNIX ones. Typical functions take many parameters, some of them complicated on their own, and typical invocations pass a bunch of NULL arguments (you still need to roughly understand what they mean).

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#276

Post by heyoni »

pjmlp wrote: post #273
heyoni wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great and all until you completely ignored the fact that wine exists and went on to call user space design questions by Microsoft “trivial”. I could also start listing ways that the Linux kernel maintains backwards compatibility with not just software but hardware that’s decades old but the list would get too long. No one is complaining that Microsoft has too much backward compatibility, it’s their utter disr…

Linux kernel on its own doesn't run software.

But it comes with drivers supporting very old hardware, hence the inclusion.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#277

Post by fullstackchris »

> The idea here is to have the printing functions all behave in a manner perfectly consistent with printing being fully supported, yet mysteriously there is never a printer to print to.

What? Why would you ever do this? This post screams of "can't see the forest from the trees"

Sure, now you don't have your app crashing, and instead you have this weird state of seeming like you can print but ultimately can't, wasting users time and perhaps frustrating them even more.

Why not literally just show a dialog like "printing is not supported from an Xbox"? Easy to develop, easy to understand... everyone wins.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#278

Post by chrisjj »

Arainach wrote: post #177
chrisjj wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely a crappy iPhone app running on iPad is better than no app at all? Bogus comparison. Non-crappy apps are a thing.

There are many forms of "crappy". Developer hygiene is one bar; user functionality is another. "Crappy" here refers entirely to developer hygiene, which the user does not care about at all. If the platform changed and Angry Birds crashed, the customer would not accept "but look at all of these other Angry Birds clone games still available" as an answer, they want the app they are familiar with.

> If the platform changed and Angry Birds crashed

Angry Birds doesn't print AFAIK.

The scenario is an app being run on a platform that doesn't meet its declared system requirements.

If an app requires Windows, and customer tries to run it instead on Xbox OS, then he should be surprised it even launches. He should not be surprised if it crashes on print.

> customer would not accept "but look at all of these other Angry Birds clone games still available" as an answer, they want the app they are familiar with.

Then he'll have to run that app on the OS it requires. He's free to sent to MS his complaint that Xbox does not run that OS.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#279

Post by chrisjj »

filleduchaos wrote: post #206
chrisjj wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what's your solution then? Break all apps simultaneously that do not have extensive tests No test required. Just try... catch. > for gracefully handling cases that were impossible when they were created? You can never know they are impossible. That is why you have a top-level try...catch.

> No test required. Just try... catch. That doesn't even make any sense. Where on earth would you insert a try...catch? So many people commenting on this article seem to have fundamentally misunderstood what the situation/scenario even is, which is made more jarring by the fact that so many others seem to have gotten it just fine.

> So many people commenting on this article seem to have fundamentally misunderstood what the situation/scenario even is

Agreed 100%. Those people have overlooked that this is about attempting to run apps on an unsupported OS. And when printing, the OS attempting to gaslight the user into thinking the fail is his fault for not connecting a printer.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#280

Post by rerdavies »

jeroenhd wrote: post #213
WalterBright wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has irked me for decades that when the internet connection fails, all you get is a message that it failed. But what failed? 1. the software on your computer 2. the computer's hardware 3. the ethernet cable or wifi 4. the switch 5. the router 6. the cable modem 7. the internet cable to your house 8. the ISP 9. the remote system you're trying to connect to Nothing has improved for decades.

This is something I kind of like about the Microsoft APIs. Their error codes aren't always perfect, but at least they give you some indication where things went wrong. From MSDN: > An HRESULT value consists of the following fields: > A 1-bit code indicating severity, where zero represents success and 1 represents failure. > A 4-bit reserved value. > An 11-bit code indicating responsibility for the error or warning, a…

HRESULTs are well intentioned. They originated in OS/2; but Microsoft always seemed to use them half-heartedly.

Users should not be seeing "08CAE5D012" error messages. They should be seeing "Connection refused. (08CAE5D012)" messages, or "No connection. (83255321)" messages instead.

There's is a non-trivial protocol for translating HRESULTs into error text; but it is often not supported properly by Windows applications, or Windows OS components.

e.g. DirectX which returns generic 0x8004005 E_FAIL errors. Or the WinSock APIs, which return HRESULTs, but don't provide text message translations; or Microsoft Installers that report raw HRESULTs with no attempt to capture the associated error text.

With discipline, the entire system could have worked. But there wasn't, and it didn't.

Post reply on HN