>These junior developers also have a tendency to make improvements to the system by implementing brand-new features instead of improving old ones. Look at recent Microsoft releases: we don't fix old features, but accrete new ones. New features help much more at review time than improvements to old ones.
This is true. Windows 7 had an easy way to create adhoc wifi but win 8 removed it. So now I must either use command prompt or install connectify.
WP has too many examples:
Music app has been rewritten multiple times and rebranded almost as many times.
Email has also been rewritten and renamed - new version is slightly better.
The excellent lumia camera has been replaced by a meh windows camera app.
Internet explorer's been replaced by the featureless edge IMO.
Instead of fixing the Skype app (missed notifications, memory consumption issues, performance issues, calls ringing even if the target is OFFLINE, inaccurate notification count...) a bland messaging and Skype video apps were introduced. So we've got three apps for Skype on Windows 10 and windows mobile.
This statement is broadly true across bigCo industry from what I've found, but I'd assign an "obvious explanation" to why: New features are recognized for promos far more than existing improvements. I wouldn't say it's a new vs old dev thing other than that old devs need "broader impact" to justify promos and thus can't really take low hanging fruit, (although I've certainly seen senior devs ramp up significant projects just so they get "novel visibility" even if it's reinventing the wheel these tend to be slower by their very nature and often not as visible as the more top level feature bloat) it seems more to do with the culture of how career progress is measured throughout industry. (A culture that I personally think is extremely broken, but see very little to fixing outside of starting my own company)
"New features are recognized for promos far more than existing improvements."
Seems like the solution is neither in engineering nor product, but marketing- companies need to get better at explaining when a low-new-features iteration is intended for stability and streamlining of existing features.
Didn't they remove folder encryption from Windows 8 too ? I wasn't able to do it when in W7 it was a simple right click -> menu folder properties -> encrypt. They sure had that annoying Modern UI menu which is totally useless.
What happened to window essentials ? I don't want to use outlook, that email client was enough and supporter RSS feed reading.
I don't believe Windows ever had a feature to right click> Properties> encrypt. Perhaps you had an application installed that had an extension enabling that?
I don't know about performance but the windows ecosystem sure is buggy inside, or at least stdout says so. One time I needed to work on a driver and I enabled kernel debugging. My console immediately started spitting out a steady stream of warnings and errors which continued forever. This is before I touched anything.
It is strange to work in a field where everything produced is lower quality than desired. My wife is continually amazed that I continue to beat my head against the metaphorical keyboard. I have said that I have always hated computers even though I have done nothing but work on them my whole life.
That was really interesting. Subjectively, two of my friends graduating (Bachelor's) this year were rejected from Google SWE and have since received (and accepted) offers from Microsoft for SDE.
Sounds like any large company - no longer a fast-moving innovation engine. Instead a customer-preserving value-calculating incremental development shop. Just what you'd expect.
Having web apps that break my workflow every 2 months, and back end servers that change their API every 3 months, I'm very happy with a company where I can run software (that I still enjoy) 10-20 years later.
Very essence commercializing of web apps is working against them. Interoperability, open interfaces, open data structures and last but not least reliability seem to be forgotten these days where the lock-in-effect is the only thing keeping people.
I don't want to be held hostage, so web apps and the cloud can kiss my shiny metal behind. I'll keep my data and apps on my own machine until ideas like sandstorm find a middle way in which I can stay in control of my data.
Don't you think that the fact that webapps don't have interoperability, open interfaces, or datastructures, nor even a way to execute them under a debugger or own infrastructure or even read the files they create ...
Don't you think that for companies like Google, Microsoft, etc. this is a feature, not a bug ? Microsoft would lose too many customers if they went full-on webapps, but everyone else won't.
And customers like it ! Wtf ? But it makes sense : no install troubles, no running out of diskspace, no losing files (of course on occasion someone else loses your files. Like Amazon did a few months ago), ... But there's many false advantages, too. Webapps are most definitely not virus-proof (just ask any online banking security guy. Poor suckers), as a client side virus can change what's on the screen or just take over the browser window when you close it, or proxy the webapp, or ...
But if you sell someone a program that works and they install and use it, ... well that's it. You got paid but that's the end of it. You get someone to run their business on a webapp, in the next negotiation you have the power to kill the other company's access to their own financial data. Or designs, or ... You got them by the throat.
You are describing why it is the way it is. Yes, pretty much so. There is a lot of convenience involved. The downside is that it creates mostly invisible dependencies which will break at the worst of times.
> (You'd guess that 40 year old Unix applications could work too without recompilation, though I've never tried it)
40 years takes you to 1976, at which point there's no longer any ISA-level compatibility between the hardware we have now and the hardware Unix ran on then. Basically, nothing we have looks like a PDP-11 to software, and Unix didn't run on much else in the mid-1970s.
(Tidbit: 1976 is when the Lions book came out. Full source code, with apposite and useful comments, for Sixth Edition Unix, passed around as samizdat long afterwords due to Bell Labs enforcing copyright on the Unix source code not long after.)
Just the other day I got Bourne's original Bourne shell running on a modern system (as part of Fuzix development). I don't know which version, but it's badged as coming from V7.
I kept finding places which needed adjustment for a modern architecture... and then I looked more closer and saw that they were actually fine. About the only thing I needed to do in the end was fix some headers, rename a symbol which was clashing with a modern utility function, and change the directory reading stuff to use opendir() instead of read().
Everything else just worked on a modern 64-bit system. (It had already been converted from K&R to ANSI C in an earlier pass by someone else.) Good grief, that code is clean. Incomprehensible, but clean.
So you are saying I can install a modern Linux distribution, let's say Ubuntu, and run KDE 2 and Gnome 1.0 applications right away, say by copying over the binary? I don't think so. These won't even run with a recompile, unless you can find the appropriate kdelibs or whatever and even then, I'm guessing it will fail hard.
If you're just referring to eg the gnu tools or whatever, then you'll still need to recompile.
If the binary depends on userland libraries, then duh of course it'll fail, you're not copying over the entire application. But if it only makes syscalls then it should still work.
Linux binaries will still run. There's a question of whether or not X has changed their API, but I doubt it given how old a lot of X applications are. So I guess that it should be possible with minimal tinkering.
As is noted, this was from 2013. I've worked at MS on and off over the years. I only have my perspective, but it is a little different than the posting. While there are certainly things I wish were better, I'm actively doing my part to try and improve things. Microsoft seems no worse than other places I've worked, and in many ways it is significantly better. I came back to Microsoft after several successful startups because it is a company of doers.
> I'm a developer in Windows and contribute to the NT kernel. (Proof: the SHA1 hash of revision #102 of [Edit: filename redacted] is [Edit: hash redacted].) I'm posting through Tor for obvious reasons.
My Google-fu isn't turning up any non-redacted versions of this line; all I see are the countless copies of this redacted version made over the last 3 years.
It would be nice to be able to note the file and hash references in question in the case the opportunity ever arises to verify this. That would be pretty cool :)
IMO releasing one filename is not really a security issue, and a hash is categorically useless garbage.
This is true. Windows 7 had an easy way to create adhoc wifi but win 8 removed it. So now I must either use command prompt or install connectify.
WP has too many examples:
Music app has been rewritten multiple times and rebranded almost as many times.
Email has also been rewritten and renamed - new version is slightly better.
The excellent lumia camera has been replaced by a meh windows camera app.
Internet explorer's been replaced by the featureless edge IMO.
Instead of fixing the Skype app (missed notifications, memory consumption issues, performance issues, calls ringing even if the target is OFFLINE, inaccurate notification count...) a bland messaging and Skype video apps were introduced. So we've got three apps for Skype on Windows 10 and windows mobile.
...and many more