DuatDweller on 20/7/2024 at 20:43
Well funny thing is back when I worked with servers there were HP UX (Hewlett Packard Unix), BSD, Solaris (Unix based OS), Novell Netware, and back when Microsoft was something secure even servers with Windows NT 3.51 and NT 4.0.
Back in 1996 I don't recall having any dramas as big as this thing now happening.
HP UX is still used on servers as is Solaris, but Microsoft is now a joke on security, from which security loop hole will they enter now...
Qooper on 20/7/2024 at 22:04
Quote Posted by heywood
Software engineering isn't what it once was.
I've been saying this a lot while writing a low-level system API to bypass a ton of unnecessary garbage. And the more I say it the older I feel. But the thing is, it's true! I could get into a lengthy rant about how everything is slower today than when we had the first Pentiums or even 486s, but it's not that kind of a forum.
My first thought is I miss the times, but really it's the culture and the people I miss, and the conversations that were possible then that aren't possible today.
DuatDweller on 21/7/2024 at 17:10
You can also blame Microsoft for introducing their nasty code into Linux.
Quote:
Microsoft open sourced some of its code, including the .NET Framework, and made investments in Linux development, server technology, and organizations, including the Linux Foundation and Open Source Initiative. Linux-based operating systems power the company's Azure cloud services. Microsoft acquired GitHub, the largest host for open source project infrastructure, in 2018. Microsoft is among the site's most active contributors. While this acquisition led a few projects to migrate away from GitHub,[2] this proved a short-lived phenomenon as by 2019 there were over 10 million new users of GitHub.[citation needed]
Since 2017, Microsoft is one of the biggest open source contributors in the world,[3] measured by the number of employees actively contributing to open source projects on GitHub, the largest host of source code in the world.
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_and_open_source)
Qooper on 21/7/2024 at 18:21
Quote Posted by DuatDweller
You can also blame Microsoft for introducing their nasty code into Linux.
Fortunately most of the parts of the Linux kernel that Microsoft has touched are related to cloud computing. When it comes to the Windows API, not all of it is terrible. It's a hodge podge of all kinds of things, some of it overlapping and redundant, but there are ok parts, like for example WASAPI.
But even the ok parts have terrible aspects, which makes honest engineering work difficult. For example WASAPI, even though it's an ok API, is built using COM. Who in Microsoft thought it was a good idea to come up with something like COM? (Well I know the names.)
Then, let's not even go into error codes! I mean, GetLastError() is where Windows is at now. This is what we've come to. Although some functions do return at least a partially documented error code result, but that's a rarity in the Windows API.
DuatDweller on 21/7/2024 at 20:48
Well and the worse of it, the bloatware called Windows, is fat because "programmers must have it easy".
Qooper on 22/7/2024 at 12:07
Quote Posted by DuatDweller
Well and the worse of it, the bloatware called Windows, is fat because "programmers must have it easy".
Yep, that's one big cause of it. Also, as much as the idea of "programmers must have it easy" sounds good on paper, in practise it complicates things for programmers. Instead of having a complex but transparent API, programmers now have an easy but opaque API that conceals its behaviour. Programmers are forced to run elaborate experiments to interrogate what the system is doing underneath. Visibility into a system is one of the most important tools to an engineer, and when that is taken away, the job becomes much more complicated and frustrating.
But another reason for the bloat is just bad organizational decisions. The kernel team are actually doing an excellent job, but it's everything else that just keeps growing. How many audio APIs have there been in Windows, and how many of those are still being supported (although one would suffice)? Then there are all the useless applications that come with Windows and you can't get rid of. And of course the marketing department wants to have their stuff in there and they don't care how much space it takes. Add on top of that all the bloated drivers for cheap printers and you've got the best operating system on the planet.
heywood on 23/7/2024 at 12:13
Quote Posted by Qooper
I've been saying this a lot while writing a low-level system API to bypass a ton of unnecessary garbage. And the more I say it the older I feel. But the thing is, it's true! I could get into a lengthy rant about how everything is slower today than when we had the first Pentiums or even 486s, but it's not that kind of a forum.
My first thought is I miss the times, but really it's the culture and the people I miss, and the conversations that were possible then that aren't possible today.
I'm nodding my head with you. If we were in a pub or coffee shop we'd probably have a good rant about it together.
There are moments almost every day where my corporate-issue laptop, i5-1245U that clocks up to 4.4 GHz, can't keep up with my typing in an active text input field. That never happened with the 6502-based home computers I first learned to program on in the 1980s. On the projects I've worked on, we always adopt a threading model that avoids blocking in the middle of user input. Why can't Microsoft?
I feel like software engineering had a great building phase in the 1990s and 2000s, which was awesome to be a part of, even though I was a bit late getting in. But now it feels more like civil engineering. We relish our rare opportunities to build something new, while spending most of the time as custodians of old infrastructure, maintaining our earlier works and always wishing we could refactor and improve on them. Agile has made software development more disciplined and manageable, but it puts such a focus on capability delivery that the other -ilities suffer. Where I work, we have systems that have been operation for 15 years that are already becoming borderline unmaintainable.
DuatDweller on 23/7/2024 at 17:17
Well this laptop used to be fast in 2022 (just installed the OS and everything), with all those patches issued by Microsoft now it crawls on games.
Screw it, after Windows 10 is dead I'm going for some Linux of some kind.
Subjective Effect on 23/7/2024 at 19:29
Yeah I hear that's great for games.
heywood on 23/7/2024 at 19:34
Unless you're trying to play the latest games, give Linux a try. I'm getting back into it now. I just retired a home server I built. It was running Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials, which went end of support. I was running a Windows domain at home with four Win 10 and one Win 7 clients. I did not want to upgrade to the latest Windows Server because I'd be forced to adopt their cloud-based services model. So I went in the other direction and bought a Synology NAS instead. Now that I have no particular motivation to avoid Linux clients, I'm building one. The build is a project I'm doing with my son. He'll get his first computer, but it will run Linux. I still haven't settled on which distro though. It will be the first Linux install I've done in about 12 years. I do use Red Hat at work enough to stay familiar, but I don't what's the latest and greatest in desktop stuff.
