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Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

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Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#111

Post by delazeur »

leonroy wrote: post #54

There is one damn thing I would love from Microsoft. And that's to get rid of adverts from their software. I use Windows 7 and Windows 10 Enterprise. We paid for those licenses. It boggles my mind that anyone at MS would think sticking ads in the Windows Weather App or Skype would be a good idea for paid for software.

This is my least favorite thing. I realize that often when you pay for software you don't truly own it in the legal sense, but I still want to feel like it's mine and ads don't let me do that. For this reason, even though I think it's an interesting idea, I am deeply repulsed by Amazon's discounted "with special offers" Kindles. Somehow, just the fact that those exist erodes my sense of ownership of my "without special offers" Kindle.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#112

Post by justinclift »

> He drove smart acquisitions ...

And the author has "LinkedIn" listed?!?!?!?!

Does anyone - aside from some MS staff and the article author - think LinkedIn was a smart buy for MS?

Everyone I know is welcoming the likely fade out of LinkedIn in not-many-years.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#113

Post by cptskippy »

dbgllm wrote: post #110
cptskippy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing about the NT kernel that needs to be rewritten to implement a POSIX or SUS compliant user-mode subsystem. They once had a Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) subsystem that was POSIX compliant. The new "Bash on Windows", officially called "Windows Subsystem for Linux", appears to be targeting the Linux Standard Base (LSB) and not striving for POSIX or SUS compliance. LSB is mostly a superset of POSIX. POS…

You mention a target as compliance or certification, but I don't think this is a direct concern for the WSL. They want to support specific use-cases, at least at first. --- "Moving forward we will be investigating new areas of interest while continuing to support the following scenarios: + GNU command line tools such as grep, sed, and awk + File system and symlink support within the WSL environment + Ability to run a…

I don't think it's a direct concern either. Though if I had to guess they'd target LSB over any of the others.

I think it's telling that they called it the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" where are their prior Subsystems (SUA/SFU) were for "Unix".

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#115

Post by WayneBro »

overgryphon wrote: post #107
pdkl95 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'bash on windows' in reverse That would be "wine", which has worked surprisingly well several years.

Wine is fine for getting around an expected limitation, but would you run your workloads on wine in a production datacenter? It would be a disaster.

I'd run my entire development stack on Bash on Windows though. That's what it's there for. It's glorious!

Similarly, my laptop probably wouldn't be able to handle a production workload for any length of time...but it doesn't have to either.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#116

Post by RaleyField »

scholia wrote: post #21

Bit too much Ballmer bashing. He made plenty of mistakes so he's an easy target for the ignoranti, but the adoption of open source, the move to the cloud, the writing of Android and iOS apps etc all started under Ballmer. Ballmer also cleaned up the anti-trust mess and -- while his hands were somewhat tied by a dozen years of constant DoJ supervision -- tripled Microsoft's sales and doubled its profits. This was desp…

Microsoft's biggest problem is undue intrusion on liberties that customers have come to expect on x86 computers.

Under Ballmer and Gates this didn't happen, so consequently I liked their time much more than that of Satya. All the goodwill and other benefits that comes from open sourcing various components doesn't outweigh the privacy intrusions and lost trust that came with Windows 10, at least for me. Ballmer was loud and had his antics, Gates had his ruthless market drive that some despise, but I trusted closed source under them much more because of the claim not to abuse their customers was was hedged by the reputation the company, now that this trust is lost I can't trust Microsoft and that's Satya's legacy.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#118

Post by kwanbis »

pavs wrote: post #94
puranjay wrote: post #34

Try this: Google "Office 365" The first result just says "Email". The second result says "Office 365 login" I'm not an internet dunce, but this is just bad user-experience. Why not have a modern landing page that tells me a bit about the product, it's price and what I can expect from it? Why is the first result a login page? I've been using Google Docs almost exclusively for work now. I've ditched Word completely. I…

In our office, one of the best decisions we made is to move to google docs. I had to push it through because most employees were used to working with MS office and emailing docs and excel files to keep everyone in the loop. I know One Drive is a thing and you can do the same thing with MS Office product as you can with google docs. But it wasn't always the case and Google Docs had better usability and easier to under…

Care to elaborate more? I'm also interesting on moving to google apps for work. Thanks.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#119

Post by PeCaN »

drinchev wrote: post #6

I was a Windows user for a long time. 5 years ago I switched to OS X, because I think it's closer to the deployment environment I use as a dev. However what OS X did ( when they killed the old one - MacOS 9 and rewrote the whole thing on UNIX based kernel ) was the single greatest move, which I think pays off even these days. This is what I hope should happen with Windows. They should decide on POSIX kernel and compl…

Yikes! NT kernel is far far far better designed than any * nix¹. POSIX is an API (and not a very good one), not a kernel type anyway. Windows has had a POSIX layer for a while. The NT kernel actually has its own API that both the Win32 and POSIX APIs are implemented on top of.

Why is NT better than * nix (particularly Linux)? Two areas mainly:

- Virtual memory

This one's pretty obvious if you've ever written a malloc. Compare VirtualAlloc² with the mess of mmap/madvise/mprotect. I'm not even sure you can get the nice explicit reserve/commit of Windows with pure POSIX APIs.

Linux in particular used to have a very questionable virtual memory implementation³, but I suspect it's been much improved.

NT can demand-page kernel memory; Linux kills processes if the kernel needs memory.

- Async I/O

Here's how platforms do async I/O:

POSIX: You don't.⁴

Linux: Sleep. Wait for the kernel to wake you up when something happens so you can yell “IS ANYONE READY YET? HOW ABOUT NOW?!” at your file descriptors.

FreeBSD: Like Linux, but the API is less stupid.

Windows: Tell the kernel to run a callback when an I/O operation completes.

Personally I'm really excited for ReactOS. Linux is a 1970s kernel design.

---

¹ Well, Solaris and DragonFlyBSD have a lot of good ideas and good implementation.

² https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...

³ https://lwn.net/1999/0121/a/vmreview.html

⁴ Okay okay, you have select(2) and poll(2), but then you're using select and poll.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#120

Post by Gravityloss »

overgryphon wrote: post #107
pdkl95 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'bash on windows' in reverse That would be "wine", which has worked surprisingly well several years.

Wine is fine for getting around an expected limitation, but would you run your workloads on wine in a production datacenter? It would be a disaster.

I wonder what companies really have designed new backends for windows for years anymore? Technically you could run many generic things there (databases or JVM), but what would you actually gain? Likely if you have to use windows, you're left in some legacy niche, looking backwards and not into the future.
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