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

221–230 of 424 posts

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

#221

Post by sedatk »

jiggawatts wrote: post #209
e40 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Filesystem performance on Windows is absolutely horrible compared to Linux. It blows me away how, even using SSDs, the performance of git over large repos is at least 10x slower than a Linux box with the same CPU. It is the bane of my existence. It's not just git. rsync of a large directory takes >10x as long. This is with Server 2016 (and 2012 r2). My 2012 r2 machine had spinning disks and when I tested on 2…

This is mostly caused by the anti-malware scanning. Exclude your sources folder from real-time scanning.

Windows 11 is soon getting a new feature called Dev Drive, which uses an entirely different FS (ReFS) and reduced malware scanning, specifically designed for source code.

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

#222

Post by jacooper »

BirAdam wrote: post #179
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.

This. I use Tiny11 for this reason. The UI is still super inconsistent, but otherwise it’s fine. Mac bothered me by likewise becoming inconsistent, but also soldering everything so the machine is bricked when an SSD or battery dies. In the Linux world the UI has never been consistent, but what really bothers me is that everything is constantly changing unless one uses enterprise Linux, but then I don’t get hardware s…

In my experience linux, specifically Gtk Apps, have the best consistency. It's the closest you can get to a fully styled system.

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

#223

Post by the_only_law »

rahen wrote: post #220
shortlived wrote: post #45

Even more “insanity”: z/OS (aka OS360 aka MVS) supports programs going back to the 60s and I just talked with a DE at IBM who is still using a program compiled circa Apollo 11 mission.

That's common in the mainframe world. Unisys (ex Univac) still has its Dorado mainframes binary compatible with the Univac 1100 released in 1962.

I think I remember reading a while back that System/360 binaries can still run on modern Z/architecture mainframes.

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

#224

Post by hobobaggins »

BirAdam wrote: post #179
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.

This. I use Tiny11 for this reason. The UI is still super inconsistent, but otherwise it’s fine. Mac bothered me by likewise becoming inconsistent, but also soldering everything so the machine is bricked when an SSD or battery dies. In the Linux world the UI has never been consistent, but what really bothers me is that everything is constantly changing unless one uses enterprise Linux, but then I don’t get hardware s…

You don't get hardware support? I have had all kinds of hardware support (Dell, mostly Latitude and XPS) over the years and Linux was never an issue. We even run Gentoo and Void on some boxes (for the reason you state -- to keep things consistent over time) and they've never said anything about it.

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

#225

Post by jacooper »

terminous wrote: post #169
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot the mandatory MSFT accounts to sign in with no way around last I checked (a few months ago).

Use the email no@thankyou.com with any password. It will let you install on Win 11 with a local account.

The developer who put that in needs a raise.

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

#226

Post by hobobaggins »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #201
moonchrome wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't used Windows in quite a while have you ? Past Windows 7 it's been sliding downhill into bullshit UX, crapware, backend migration to Linux almost exclusively, etc. Random things on top of my head : MacOS doesn't come with candy crush, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify etc. prepopulating your start menu. Phone home telemetry and ads in OS ? Yummy Dealing with Windows dev environment is always a PITA eventually - u…

>Phone home telemetry and ads in OS ? MacOS also has telemetry. >For backend stuff it's almost implicit that you're running on Linux in prod and macos is well supported because it's fairly similar. Then Windows would be better than MacOS in this regard because WSL2 is exactly Linux, not just "fairly similar" to Linux. >stuff randomly breaking between updates What stuff broke for you between updates? Our entire DS tea…

> Maybe they know how to use a computer.

Seems uncalled for.

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

#227

Post by hobobaggins »

moonchrome wrote: post #170
necovek wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only used MacOS for a year and only recently (maybe that matters), and I get all the same crappy inconsistent behaviour I do on Linux and did on Windows ~20 years ago when I last used it. Apple has the benefit of controlling both hw and sw and still manage to mess it up. Random crashes, slowdowns for long running sessions, crappy UI (eg those labels not checking their checkboxes in Settings), network weirdness (…

You haven't used Windows in quite a while have you ? Past Windows 7 it's been sliding downhill into bullshit UX, crapware, backend migration to Linux almost exclusively, etc. Random things on top of my head : MacOS doesn't come with candy crush, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify etc. prepopulating your start menu. Phone home telemetry and ads in OS ? Yummy Dealing with Windows dev environment is always a PITA eventually - u…

Windows Pro (and K/N versions), as well as Enterprise, should minimize the consumer-oriented software.

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

#228

Post by FirmwareBurner »

saagarjha wrote: post #218
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Phone home telemetry and ads in OS ? MacOS also has telemetry. >For backend stuff it's almost implicit that you're running on Linux in prod and macos is well supported because it's fairly similar. Then Windows would be better than MacOS in this regard because WSL2 is exactly Linux, not just "fairly similar" to Linux. >stuff randomly breaking between updates What stuff broke for you between updates? Our entire DS tea…

> Right click -> Remove. Done. 2 seconds. Surely you aren't making the argument that Microsoft is generous enough to let you remove their bloatware?

That's a nice strawman you got there, give him a spin so we can admire it in all its glory.

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

#229

Post by Dalewyn »

charonn0 wrote: post #205
snickerbockers wrote: post #116

That's cute and all, but it's fucking gzip. It doesn't have complex dependencies. Pretty sure Linux could run a 30 year old gzip binary too. I've never needed to do that with gzip but I have definitely run binaries of a similar vintage without issue. Windows backwards-compatibility fails miserably on non-trivial programs, you're generally pretty lucky if you can get something from the XP-era or older to work out of t…

> you're generally pretty lucky if you can get something from the XP-era or older to work out of the box. That's actually pretty good. XP was released over 20 years ago.

Off the top of my head I'm running Winamp (gotta whip that llama ass!), Paint Shop Pro 5 (predates XP), RPG Maker 2000, and many more stuff from almost or over 20 years ago with no problems.

So yeah, I'll take my chances with that luck.

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

#230

Post by DiabloD3 »

darklycan51 wrote: post #188
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All those bullshit hacks are a maintenance and debugging burden for someone That’s why that someone is getting paid -it’s their job. If you want software to power important things in society, like transport and energy, you need to have a certain level of responsibility for reliability. As this post demonstrates, Right now we have immature children who are used to breaking things for the sake of a new fad, in charge…

This really bothers me and I'm young, I am TIRED of applications FORCING restarts, and other garbage as a software culture. You are doing something? Oh sorry our developer team thought it would be smart to crash your whatever task you are doing by force to give you a 2 line changelog. Typing a dm on discord or talking to people? boom random restart to force update, using firefox nightly? sorry you cannot use it as yo…

Re: Firefox, Firefox only demands restarting if you changed the copy of Firefox out from under it. This only happens if you're managing Firefox with an external package manager, or you're building from the repo and installed a new copy.

If you run Firefox from its default mechanism, it will update itself and ask to restart before applying the update, and will continue working forever, never updating until you restart it.

Post reply on HN