541–550 of 697 posts
> Furthermore, I contributed to brainstorming the early Overlake cards in 2020-2021, drafting a proposal for a Host OS Accelerator Card communication protocol and network stack, when all we had was a debugger’s serial connection. I also served as a Core OS specialist, helping Azure Core engineers diagnose deep OS issues. What exactly are these "Overlake accelerator cards"? What are they accelerating?
A business man at a prior employer sympathetic with my younger, naive "Microsoft sucks" attitude told me something I remember to this day: Microsoft is not a software company, they have never been experts at software. They are experts at contracts. They lead because their business machine exceeds at understanding how to tick the boxes necessary to win contract bids. The people who make purchasing decisions at compani…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn’t say it went well. Actually I said it didn’t go well :(
Yes, but you are writing as if you expected it to go well.
Some of this reads like parody, for example: "Cutler’s intent was to produce a system with the same level of quality, unshakable reliability, and attention to detail he was famous for in his work on VMS and NT." I'm not really here to take shots at Dave Cutler, but Windows NT was not known for it's unshakeable reliability. If it's known for anything, it is known for lacking any basic security measures. I remember dem…
NT itself (the kernel and native mode APIs) is pretty well designed and implemented, in my opinion. I know there were findings from fuzzing kernel and native mode APIs in early versions of NT, but by about the Windows 2000-era it was pretty solid.
Win32 and the grown-up mess of APIs around it I'm less enthused with. NT itself is very impressive to me.
My fever-dream OS is an NT kernel with a modern and updated Interix subsystem as the main subsystem, with Win32 as a compatibility layer.
The personal account makes a lot of sense, although I could easily see why the OP was not successful. Even if you are an excellent engineer, making people do things, accept ideas, and in general hear you requires a completely different skill altogether - basically being a good communicator. The second thing is that this series of blog posts (whether true or not, but still believable) provides a good introduction to v…
I disagree. I've worked on honing my communication skills for 20 years in this industry. Every time I have failed to get the desired result, I have gone back to the drawing board to understand how I can change how I'm communicating to better convey meaning, urgency, and all that. After all that I've finally had an epiphany. They simply don't care. They don't care about quality, about efficiency, about security. They…
> I've worked on honing my communication skills for 20 years in this industry.
That's because the skills weren't good enough.
I just do not understand how Azure has the scale it does. You only need to login and click around for a bit to see this is not a coherent system designed by competent people. Let alone try and actually build something on it. Who are the customers? Who is buying this shit?
Ironically, the book "Hit Refresh" hit a nerve that every azure web-page has a refresh button. Isnt that dating back to web 1.0 ?
A business man at a prior employer sympathetic with my younger, naive "Microsoft sucks" attitude told me something I remember to this day: Microsoft is not a software company, they have never been experts at software. They are experts at contracts. They lead because their business machine exceeds at understanding how to tick the boxes necessary to win contract bids. The people who make purchasing decisions at compani…
I mean, if you ignore all the heaps of impressive software Microsoft does ship, sure.
A business man at a prior employer sympathetic with my younger, naive "Microsoft sucks" attitude told me something I remember to this day: Microsoft is not a software company, they have never been experts at software. They are experts at contracts. They lead because their business machine exceeds at understanding how to tick the boxes necessary to win contract bids. The people who make purchasing decisions at compani…
A overly reductionist argument. They described any commercial software company because in the end, you sell or you die. Microsoft has incredible software people and incredible software that coexists with the shitty software people and shitty software.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is a low-demand area?
I thought of this not as geographic but in terms of what’s sexy vs not. Low Demand = not