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ThrowawayB7

464 karmajoined 8 anni fa
There is^H^Hwas no building 7.

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ThrowawayB7
·6 giorni fa·discuss
Well, it's at least interesting in the sense that the user doesn't have to dig up a copy of Windows NT to run the toolchain, which is what was required for the original Windows CE for Dreamcast SDK and Platform Builder. I seem to remember that it wasn't forward compatible with Windows 2000 or any later OS, which was an annoyance.
ThrowawayB7
·6 giorni fa·discuss
Windows CE for Dreamcast ran a custom port of DirectX 5 and subset of Win32 so developers could create a game that supported both desktop Windows and Dreamcast more conveniently.

For games that didn't need to be cross platform, it was still less of a hassle to develop on Windows CE because you got all of the services that having an OS provides you instead of having to write to the bare metal, which is what the Sega SDK required. Many developers chose the Sega SDK anyway because bare metal was what they were used to but IIRC that generation was the last console generation where bare metal was an option for developers.
ThrowawayB7
·30 giorni fa·discuss
Lends some credence to the suspicion that Phil Spencer's retirement might not have been voluntary.
ThrowawayB7
·2 mesi fa·discuss
Not a tool per se but I miss Charles Petzold's Programming Windows book in its earliest editions. People forget how difficult it was to find well written programmer documentation in the pre-Internet and dialup-era Internet days. His book was a shining example of how good a programming book could be.
ThrowawayB7
·2 mesi fa·discuss
And what would you do with the Windows 2000 source? It's 32 bit x86 code and the driver model for Windows has changed significantly since those days so it wouldn't run on modern x86-64 hardware anyway. Maybe it would run in a VM but I wouldn't care to bet on it.
ThrowawayB7
·2 mesi fa·discuss
Parent poster is probably conflating Windows CE, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone.

Windows Mobile 5 was tremendously popular with over 100 phones from various manufacturers. But that was also around the time iPhone was released and by the time Windows Mobile 6 rolled out, the iPhone 3G/3GS was taking the world by storm. Windows Mobile 6.5 had a partially revamped UI but not enough to be competitive. From there we go to Windows Phone 7, 8, and 10 and that story is well known.
ThrowawayB7
·2 mesi fa·discuss
On the early alkaline / NiCd AA battery powered WinCE PDAs with as little as 2-4 MB of RAM and a very slow single core processor, having only 32 process slots wasn't really a limitation. You couldn't afford too many processes or to be doing much computation anyway.

Don't get me wrong by the way. For their time, the early PDAs were expensive, bleeding edge tech and the limited things that could be done with them was still unprecedented. They crawled so future smartphones could run.
ThrowawayB7
·2 mesi fa·discuss
"¿Por qué no los dos?" A lot of the issues that he has seems to be running on hardware that Linux doesn't currently support well. Used 1 liter PCs that are old enough to have solid support under Linux but still fast enough to do serious work are $200-400 and can be accessed remotely from Windows by VNC or RDP.

To forestall the inevitable, yes, that's extra cost. Well, the person says the want to use Linux more. Do they want it badly enough to put money behind it?
ThrowawayB7
·2 mesi fa·discuss
And the contemporaneous counterexamples are what? The various UNIX windows managers and X11? System 6-8 on the '90s Macs? None of those were great UI/UX IMO.
ThrowawayB7
·2 mesi fa·discuss
To paraphrase the old taco ad, "¿Por qué no los tres?" I use all three daily and any of them are fine, provided you know what you're doing.
ThrowawayB7
·2 mesi fa·discuss
> "Which is why Microsoft had to use such dirty tricks to prevent them from making inroads into workstations and desktops at the point that they still had competitive hardware."

Huh? Sun Microsystems pretty much owned the workstation market by the mid to late 1990s, having beat out HP, DEC, IBM, etc. It was their game to lose, which they did. And I can't think of anything Sun ever offered in the desktop market in their heyday that was credible; their lunchbox SparcStations cost too much and delivered too little.

The main buoyancy behind Microsoft's push into the workstation market around Y2K is that Windows 2000 was much cheaper and ran on also much cheaper Intel processors. Compared to the ridiculous enterprise pricing from Sun and the other UNIX OEMs, the TCO made them very compelling.
ThrowawayB7
·2 mesi fa·discuss
The funny thing is I actually had Windows 11 reliably black-screen on me after creating a local account. On a recent Surface Pro device, no less.

I blame Nadella. Gates or Ballmer had their own deficiencies but they would never have tolerated the absolute bullshit going on at Microsoft today.
ThrowawayB7
·2 mesi fa·discuss
Back when the word hacker still meant something, that was the opinion of most hackers. Microsoft being bad guys did not make early Java versions good.

[EDIT] I'd actually say MS losing the J# lawsuit was a net positive since it gave Hejlsberg the opportunity to create C#.
ThrowawayB7
·2 mesi fa·discuss
> "Their problem was that Microsoft excluded them from the market and starved them for money..."

That is not what happened. Sun Microsystems had immense revenue and clout in the server and enterprise space because of the dotcom boom, so much so that their advertising declared "We're the dot in dotcom." Microsoft was trying to duke it out with them in the server space but Windows Server was just barely starting to become decent at that point so MS didn't get all that much traction.

When the dotcom bust hit, Sun went into a tailspin because of the glut of Sun server hardware from dead dotcoms at bargain basement prices. That eventually passed but by that time Linux + Intel was good enough to undercut both Sun and Microsoft in the server space. With no way to compete with free as in beer software, Sun was doomed.
ThrowawayB7
·2 mesi fa·discuss
> "...embrace-extend-extinguish against Java..."

Early Java was horrid for everybody except the architecture astronauts who could cram ten GoF design patterns into a hello world program. It only got traction because a different wannabe monopolist, Sun Microsystems, spent heavily to get it pushed into CS curriculums. Fortunately, the one-two punch of Linux and Intel killed Sun or we might all be cursing them today instead of Microsoft.
ThrowawayB7
·3 mesi fa·discuss
For big products with many years of history behind them, yeah, that's true. For v. 1.0 or skunkworks projects, it's still mostly true but occasionally, some crazy-ass stuff can happen. (Cue the "what has seen cannot be unseen" meme pic.)
ThrowawayB7
·3 mesi fa·discuss
The "somehow" is Microsoft, who defines what the hardware architecture of what a x86-64 desktop/laptop/server is and builds the compatibility test suite (Windows HLK) to verify conformance. Open source operating systems rely on Microsoft's standardization.
ThrowawayB7
·3 mesi fa·discuss
"When in Rome, do as the Romans do."
ThrowawayB7
·4 mesi fa·discuss
Change "thief" to "free rider" and it's exactly what the shared source / post-open license folks are saying.
ThrowawayB7
·4 mesi fa·discuss
Why would you expect an engineer to be able to comment on legal affairs? Presumably it was cleared with Microsoft's legal department or whatever GitHub's divisional equivalent is.