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

Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 424 posts

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#141

Post by blibble »

WorldMaker wrote: post #139
blibble wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a local filesystem that can only be mounted once and of which state is 100% controlled by one entity (the local kernel) is not a distributed system the CAP theorem simply does not apply Windows IO subsystem was simply designed for extensibility over performance

A) It's a useful analogy whether or not you think it technically applies or is a perfect analogy. B) The Windows filesystem (and to an extent the POSIX) isn't just "local", it also includes transparent and semi-transparent network file storage. C) Windows and POSIX are both multi-user and multi-process . They operate over multiple cores and multiple I/O buses. Even if it just one system API centralized in charge of a…

an NTFS volume can only be mounted by one entity at a time, the same as a zfs volume, ext4 volume, btrfs volume with 100% of the state managed by a single entity

it is almost the definition of "not a distributed system"

the fact there might be nfs/smb/ceph/... volumes bolted into the same namespace that happens to include it does not make it one (and neither does requiring transactions)

> Windows and NTFS combined have strong transaction guarantees that other users and processes must see a highly consistent view of the same files. It makes heavy uses of locks by default even for cached data. POSIX favors the "inode" approach that favors high availability and fewer locks at the cost of eventual consistency and the occasional partition (the "same" file can and will sometimes have multiple "inodes" between different processes/users, many common Linux tools rely heavily on that).

this is literally is not true, they are different abstractions

and I suggest you observe the size of a large file being copied if you want to see how "strong" NTFS "highly consistent views" are

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20111226-00/?p=88...

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#142

Post by e40 »

martinald wrote: post #105
adzm wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. I'm not sure what the obstacle is, and I know a lot of smart people have worked on it, but opening a ton of files and traversing a bunch of them in directories is very slow. Once the file is open, IO is just as fast though.

My guess is ACLs, which are enabled by default on NTFS but not (afiak) on most linux distros using ext4.

Extended attributes are definitely turned on in my ext4 filesystems and to my knowledge I didn't do anything to turn them on.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#143

Post by Tijdreiziger »

duskwuff wrote: post #137
Tijdreiziger wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mac is a mixed bag of excellent Rosetta and breaking apps for no reason. They will probably retire Rosetta2 in a few years, like they did with Rosetta. Apple usually seems to care about getting the bulk of applications to transition over, and the rest is just collateral damage/the devs should’ve just updated their software.

> They will probably retire Rosetta2 in a few years, like they did with Rosetta. Counterpoint: The PPC-to-Intel version of Rosetta was licensed technology (QuickTransit); Apple was undoubtedly paying for it, possibly even per user, so there were financial reasons for them to get users off of it ASAP. Rosetta 2 was developed in-house by Apple, so there isn't the same hard timeline to get users to stop using it. I woul…

Yes, just like they had valid technical reasons to kill 32-bit iOS apps. The point is that they don’t go above and beyond like Microsoft (although of course even MS has deprecated e.g. 16-bit apps).

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#144

Post by 6D794163636F756 »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #69
jmkni wrote: post #63

What I find so frustrating is that Windows, under the hood, is so solid. It's just the UI with Bing/Ads/telemetrics/etc integration is so crap, like they've ruined a solid OS with crappy surface level stuff.

It's as if, it's a product made by a giant corporation with over a dozen different teams of skilled people, with different managers and different visons on how their own team's work should impact the final product for their own career advancement purposes.

I would like to refer you to Conway's law for business which states that, "Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#145

Post by FirmwareBurner »

6D794163636F756 wrote: post #144
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's as if, it's a product made by a giant corporation with over a dozen different teams of skilled people, with different managers and different visons on how their own team's work should impact the final product for their own career advancement purposes.

I would like to refer you to Conway's law for business which states that, "Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."

My point.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#146

Post by vladvasiliu »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #131
vladvasiliu wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be so, but all the annoyances I have with windows don't seem hardware-support related. The laggy menus, the clock in the taskbar that slides to the right outside of view, etc. This can't possibly be related to the fact I have a shiny, brand-new Wi-Fi card.

>the clock in the taskbar that slides to the right outside of view, etc. What? I've never seen the taskbar clock ever move.

How this usually happens is that there's a notification indication. I'd click on the clock to show the notification center, dismiss the notification, and the clock would slide "too much" to the right, so that almost half of it is outside the screen.

A quick google search doesn't bring my issue up (I'll try to take a screenshot next time it happens, but I'm usually too annoyed of having to use windows to think about it). But it did bring up a separate issue, where the right-hand side icons area (system tray?) and the clock are moved down so that only the top of the date is showing. I've never had that one.

I think these are lag-related, as in things move when something opens. But if the thing before didn't complete or something, the new thing happening doesn't get to remove the old one as expected.

The other day, on a PC that was doing whatever it is that windows does when the CPU fan goes full tilt while pretending to be asleep (complete with the blinking power light), after waking it up, I managed to have both the notification center and the quick settings displayed. I mistakenly clicked on the notification, then immediately on the settings. The notification panel took forever to show up, and it showed while the settings panel was still showing.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#147

Post by rkagerer »

It's not insane, it's my expectation for a tool. My hammer still works perfectly well with nails I bought 30 years ago.

It's impossible to build on shifting foundations that are constantly breaking backward compatibility. You eventually spend all your time maintaining instead of creating.

Then you have to go reinvent your wheel, and in my experience as a user your shiny new one isn't necessarily better.

Most of the software I use is more than 10 years old. Some is still updated, some is not (or went cloud and left me happily behind).

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#148

Post by msla »

znpy wrote: post #120

Someone’s gonna come and say that linux has that too, and while technically true it’s quite hard in practice. The kernel abi is stable, everything else is pure chaos, and this is mostly due to how applications are usually packaged in linux: your app could load (as long as it’s not in a.out format) but then would fail at loading most libraries. So effectively you need a whole chroot with the reference linux distro (or…

It works in Linux the same way it works on Windows: If you don't have the dynamic libraries and configuration you need, it won't work.

Why this is a mark against Linux and not Windows is beyond me.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#149

Post by lamontcg »

knallfrosch wrote: post #20

See also https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Win…

From where I'm sitting this looks like an excellent argument for breaking backwards compatibility. All those bullshit hacks are a maintenance and debugging burden for someone and a tax on the whole rest of the operating system -- and I'd argue that it really shows.
Post reply on HN