Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator • Hacker News Board

Re: Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

#171

Post by creato » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:54 AM UTC

kgwxd wrote: post #163

creato wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers use software in weird ways. I've written scripts to hit buttons thousands of times for hours on end. It makes sense that they don't want developers' janky experiments polluting data used to drive design decisions.

Then why the hell do .NET Core dev utilities have opt-out, and sometimes mandatory, telemetry?

The label "developer" is relative. Any given product wants to exclude telemetry from developers developing the product itself. There's no need to exclude telemetry from developers using the product like a user. The point is to exclude developers running the software in weird ways to debug it. Not just to exclude anyone that calls themselves a developer.

Re: Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

#172

Post by earenndil » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 6:26 AM UTC

elken wrote: post #159

DHowett wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as the engineering lead owning conhost.exe: I can't find anything in our code that would trace user input, or data effectively derived from user input, to even a local event stream. There are a couple instances where we trace API call timings, but only that of API calls initiated by an attached console application.

Open the code up then..

I highly doubt he is the one who has the power to make that happen.

Re: Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

#173

Post by ggambetta » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 7:54 AM UTC

gruez wrote: post #143

ggambetta wrote: post #14

While I applaud this, and I'm generally positive about Microsoft's new stance regarding open source, I wonder whether they ever have, or ever will, apologise for having made remarks like "Linux is communism". They caused a lot of damage. It feels a bit disingenuous to just pretend now that nothing happened.

>having made remarks like "Linux is communism". what?

Communism: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/31/ms_ballmer_linux_is...

Cancer: https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/ballmer-i-may-have-...

Re: Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

#174

Post by mihaitodor » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 9:47 AM UTC

I can’t believe the core of it is still some C code from ’95 called “Ratpack”: https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/tree/master/src/Calc... over which they added a whole bunch of enterprise fluff.

Re: Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

#175

Post by justinclift » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 9:57 AM UTC

badfrog wrote: post #38

turrini wrote: post #7

https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator#data--telemetry "This project collects usage data and sends it to Microsoft to help improve our products and services. Read our privacy statement to learn more. Telemetry is disabled in development builds by default, and can be enabled with the SEND_TELEMETRY build flag." Even on a simple calculator.

> Even on a simple calculator. Why not? If they're paying people to build this software, they presumably want to make it good. With this data, they can learn all kinds of things to help improve future versions: when/why is it crashing, what features are people using most/least, are there patterns of clicks that suggest people are mis-understanding or mis-clicking certain features, etc, etc. edit: Another one that's o…

> Why not? If they're paying people to build this software, ...

Even from people who Do Not Want their data collected for this purpose?

Re: Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

#176

Post by justinclift » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 10:02 AM UTC

dvtrn wrote: post #20

mgkimsal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or target people who use large numbers with financial planning ads, for example?

Not like I'm going anywhere with this, just morbidly curious but...this is spoken (typed) in parody/jest, right?

Don't give them ideas. ;)

Re: Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

#177

Post by neop1x » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 10:15 AM UTC

nevster wrote: post #134

Can someone explain why it launches so slowly? It's 2019, I have a multi-gigahertz processor, it's a calculator app, and it takes a few seconds to launch!

All the layers of more and more abstractions. What used to be a simple app with a few dependencies is now multi-team project requiring almost a virtual machine to run.

Re: Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

#178

Post by neop1x » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 10:16 AM UTC

cbsks wrote: post #68

The "help wanted" label on some of the GitHub issues[0] is interesting to me. Presumably there are Microsoft employees who are being paid to work on Calculator, are they trying to crowd-source their jobs? I should convince my company to open source the project I am working on so I can offload some of my work too ;) [0]: https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/issues?q=is%3Aissue+...

maybe it become so complex that it's hard to maintain so they seek the community to maintain it for them for free so they can focus on selling the OS it runs on. ;)