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Comment by jtchang | Hacker News Reader

On the whole this does not affect my perception of Microsoft. In fact it probably tilts it in their favor. They were able to conduct a thorough investigation and figure out the attackers had access to the source. The reality is that while it makes future attacks easier it has already been taken into account for a large majority of risk assessments.

People trash Microsoft a lot but some of the people there are the best in their respective fields.

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So true. There’s this funny line in one of Paul Graham’s essays where he says something like “making the wrong technology decision can doom your business - like choosing Windows in the 90s” I got such a kick out of that because I worked for CyberTrader in the 90s; we built our whole platform around Windows and wiped the floor with our competitors. We ended up the top day trading company in the US and were acquired by Charles Schwab for just shy of $500m. But at the time, you pit Windows NT with IOCP against anything else and it was game over in the low latency trading space.

Reading the old NT debugging blogs and Raymond Chan’s stuff was very eye-opening. Microsoft has incredibly talented engineers ready to help Solve Problems, not just toss you the source code and wish you luck.

Cool, maybe they'll solve the problem of Teams freezing up constantly someday.

Try disabling gpu rendering.

I think that's the generic solution to Electron apps issues :-))

That works OK, even on Linux (anecdotally)

I will kiss you if this works.

This basically makes Teams so slow it’s unusable...

It might depending on platform. On my windows laptop, I can videoconference without GPU accelleration. Windows 10 has an impressive software fallback for gpu rendering (WARP), they could be using that.

That does not happen, even with the beta grade Linux version on Arch (as I run it)

You may have a rubbish internet connection. If you are using a VPN with a slow internet connection, investigate a split tunnel. Teams traffic involves only three IP ranges so it is easy to split out and route direct to shave a fair bit of latency.

Other issues will require more investigation but they are local to you.

Same freezing problem, company issued laptop 100mbit internet connection. Same feedback from hundreds of people. Half a gigabyte RAM or more even when Teams inactive. Other softwares have solved this problem so I will agree with the opinion that Teams team should put their act together. I will postpone prioritizing Teams ips to the routers.

you have a lot to learn about computers if you're still dishing out the "it works on my machine so it's not a problem" excuse

they gave a credible theory to back it up though.

It’s difficult to fix issues on compromised machines, for example. Or buggy VPN. Etc.

Sometimes it really is a specific person’s issue, and sometimes there are a lot of them so it can look like a vendor issue.

Of course, sometimes it is a vendor issue.

There is a percent range where it is difficult to differentiate. Made worse by a large user base.

I'm only 50 and been messing around with them for about 40 years.

My point was that even on a precariously supported platform (my Arch Linux computers), the software works fine - ie as proscribed. MS Teams is used by a vast number of people and has a habit of working OK for them.

"Works on my machine" is not a serious person's response to anything

If the software freezes because of a bad Internet connection, and it can't detect and report the Internet problem, it's still a bug in the software.

e.g. "Slack has lost connection... We'll try to reconnect in 30 seconds"

Agree if your computer resources are being utilized over 70 percent teams becomes a nightmare. They could have written it in c++ in the same amount of time and had that thing running smoothly.

Rewriting it in C++ to magically solve problems. Good job, engineer.

> Rewriting it in C++ to magically solve problems. Good job, engineer.

Well it's a lot easier to make an app perform well in C++ than electron.

They should at least have for the VS Code team to help. That's one of the best performing Electron apps, it's strange MS never adopted those practices company wide.

Or they did, and it has more to do with different things happening on the network layer of individual machines.

Sounds like a lot of shit rolling downhill.

Hmm when I compare the two in terms of CPU / Memory usage and speed, Teams is one of the worst performing electron apps on my system, and VS Code one of the best. I don't think this is just network related (and I have a 600/600 connection anyway).

Either way, even if this was the reason it would prove that Electron is not a good fit for an app like this.

The issue with teams is performance. Teams is a relatively simple application. C++ is extremely common and well known, would have been a better tool for the job. That’s called engineering when you actually care about the quality of the product.

Calling that engineering reminds me of things I said while being in college before I had any real experience.

Why? The teams app is an example of poor engineering. I don’t see how you don’t realize this.

Funny enough in 'founders at work' it sheds light on the early days of paypal. It seems to point towards one of the reasons Elon got fired as CEO of Paypal is because the broader team disagreed with Elon about whether to build around windows or linux and Elon argued that there was more tooling in windows at the time.

That’s consistent with the biography by Ashlee Vance: Elon pushed for Windows and C++ because he believed it was a more mature ecosystem.

I worked on a big distributed system with C# and windows servers. Was rock solid I miss it so much. I'm not drowning in Java/Spring/Linux app its such a horrible mess, security is the worst nightmare but even stuff like NFS is regularly breaks. Windows was great.

Well, things have a tendency to come full-circle again. Maybe with the cloud offerings, we'll realize that open-source isn't so great and go back to more proprietary offerings.

C# is basically the same thing from a VM perspective, an interpreted bytecoded high-level language, but tied to windows. You can write architecture astronaut shit in C# just as much as Java.

The nice thing about Java is the deployment and management tooling. It's cross-platform and mature. C# is not nearly as good in this respect, although with the open-source it is finally free to move with that.

> C# is not nearly as good in this respect.

How so, I had nothing but issues when trying to deploy cross-platform Java because of the Java ecosystem itself being bad compared to C# or Golang where you just compile stuff and run it.

With the right JDK you can do the same with Java as well.

> C# is basically the same thing from a VM perspective, an interpreted bytecoded high-level language, but tied to windows.

C#/.NET hasn't been tied to windows for a number of years now. .NET Core/.NET 5 is cross-platform and great to work with. All of our CI/CD runs on Linux agents too.

The branding has been churned like crazy. As far as I can tell, the first .NET version that officially supported (almost?) the complete API on Linux was released last month, so we’d have to sign up for being an early adopter.

"the complete API" is a bit of a misnomer, since there have been new APIs and runtime capabilities that aren't available to the Windows-only, older runtime (The .NET Framework). This has been the case since at least .NET Core 2.1 but has continued ever since.

There are several APIs in the older runtime that are intentionally not brought forward, and what I believe you're referring to is this announcement: https://github.com/dotnet/announcements/issues/130

The remaining APIs are (mostly) AppDomains, Remoting, Web Forms, WCF server, and Windows Workflow, most of which is either an acknowledged "this was the wrong way to do it so we won't bring it forward" (e.g., Remoting) or tied to Windows anyways (e.g., WCF).

Agreed C# and Java are virtually identical. However the cultuer is completely different. The plethora of libraries to me ends up being a handicap. We have had a bunch of different Java developers on our project and each one does things differently so we end up with a huge mess. I didn't see such problems in C# world where maybe we just had better devs that concentrated on clean models instead of incorporating fashionable libraries and other moving parts.

So your team had a problem, that's what I'm reading here mostly.

> C# is basically the same thing from a VM perspective, an interpreted bytecoded high-level language, but tied to windows

C# is not tied to Windows, some new features in the latest C# 9.0 doesn't even support running on the Windows-only classic .NET Framework.

All new .NET development + C# features is being invested into .NET 5+ (FKA .NET Core), i.e. the high-performance cross-platform runtime.

> The nice thing about Java is the deployment and management tooling. It's cross-platform and mature. C# is not nearly as good in this respect, although with the open-source it is finally free to move with that.

Citation needed, I deploy my .NET 5 Apps with Linux tools, either rsync, Docker as well as AWS ECS. All clean + simple, only requires a single command to publish your App ready for distribution, that you can either rsync across or include it in the runtime image of your Docker build.

Tried to publish a Java package last week and the whole experience was a shit show, by far the worst experience of all languages where the recommendation to publish a package is to push it to bintray first, make it available to jCenter than sync it to Maven, where you need to get manual approval to include it in jCenter then you need to create yet another account/credentials with a 3rd Party which requires a manual request via a damn Jira ticket. Then each package manager has different requirements as to what a package needs, I could publish it to bintray but couldn't get it to jCenter without uploading a POM which new Kotlin projects aren't created with, then MavenCentral requires a stricter POM and Java Docs but there's no standard way to publish to a repository as bintray needs their own non-compatible task, so now I have duplicated generated POM's in my gradle build to satisfy different repositories, for bintray I needed to hook into their bintrayUpload task and generate the POM just just before it uploaded the package which I needed to decompile its sources to find out where exactly the POM file needs to be written to, no examples of which existed for Kotlin build.gradle.kts scripts that new Kotlin projects are created with. Then there's the case that every build.gradle example uses configuration that is already deprecated and Java/gradle seems to be the only one requiring uploading binary .jar's with your source projects.

Every other language has a single repository you can publish to that you don't need to jump hoops to get, published using standard tools, simple, clean, straight-forward & well documented.

> C# is basically the same thing

Abstracted far enough, everything is basically the same thing.

Your opinion on C# is outdated by at least 5 years of massive changes in the entire .NET ecosystem.

> an interpreted bytecoded high-level language

Something C# never was, given that it always JITs before execution and AOT compilation to dynamic libraries has been available since version 1.0 via NGEN.

Plus lots of additional AOT alternatives like Windows 8.x Bartok compiler, .NET Native and CoreRT.

This on top of third party offerings like Mono AOT or IL2CPP, and the research compilers from Singularity and Midori projects.

Whereas for Java, while AOT has been available since around 2000, it has been for the most part only available on commercial JDKs, and free beer AOT only came with the release of GraalVM community, the addition of J/Rockit JIT caches into OpenJDK, and IBM releasing OpenJ9 as FOSS as well.

This still holds for C# and the .NET ecosystem today, especially amongst SV startups. If only they knew how much faster and better they could be building instead of avoiding it for ideological reasons.

Except that those ideological reasons are more important than faster and better... even assuming that is true.

What reasons? Do you have an example? Ideological is usually the opposite of rational.

"I don't trust, based on their past behaviour, that these people will pick a path that is consistent with mine" is a perfectly rational reason based on ideology.

Ok, so what path is interfering with the ability to build faster and better exactly?

Looking at their current behavior from open-source to VSCode to .NET 5 shows that it's a more compelling choice today than ever before. This is actually rational.

Except those same startups are more than happy using FOSS tools paid with Facebook, Amazon and Google money.

The three heroes of ethics, ideal working conditions and examples of behaviour towards the society in general.

What ideological reasons? Are you claiming SV startups use open source alternatives because of "free software" or what?

The only reason most startups use open source ecosystems is economics.

.Net core is free and open source and compatible with linux

But not the whole ecosystem. How about SQL Server or thousands of third parties?

SQL Server isn't part of .NET, and no different than using any other proprietary database. I'm not sure what you mean by 3rd-parties but .NET works with all the major open-source projects so you're not missing anything.

Only since 2016, and it wasn't really usable until a couple of years ago. Most third-party .Net libraries still assume you're in a Windows world. The reality is that .Net is very competitive in terms of development speed if you deploy on Windows; elsewhere you'll likely have to figure out stuff and suffer from being on a second-class platform.

IMHO selling .Net to unix devs is a bit like trying to sell icecream in Siberia.

Maybe more like selling snow cones in Siberia.

Azure runs more Linux than Windows, including its own services. Linux and mobile are first-class platforms. Everything is compatible unless you specifically use Windows-only APIs. Do you have any examples of 3rd-party libraries that aren't supported?

.NET Core (now .NET 5) has changed the entire ecosystem and has been production-ready for years, and is even making cutting-edge advancements like Blazor which offers the first real alternative to Javascript on the frontend. The reality is that .NET is a top choice for both development speed and application performance across all platforms today.

> The reality is that .Net is very competitive in terms of development speed if you deploy on Windows; elsewhere you'll likely have to figure out stuff and suffer from being on a second-class platform.

That's nowhere near reality, .NET 5 (FKA .NET Core) has flawless first-class support for Linux, the whole deployment experience is even better on Linux since you have access to the entire Linux tools + ecosystem. Which I've been deploying to for years, I still develop on Windows but only ever deploy our .NET (Core) Apps to Linux (since the same App runs flawlessly on Windows + Linux).

The Windows-only .NET Framework (excl Mono) is now considered legacy, it's continually supported but all new development + features are being invested in the .NET 5+ cross-platform runtime which is now what ".NET" refers to.

Even though you may be right I’d still fear being a second class citizen on Linux. And I’ve heard nothing but positive things for .NET.

Not that Electron is appealing either but I get the draw fully.

This fear is unfounded, the primary value proposition of .NET (FKA .NET Core) is that it's a high-performance cross-platform runtime that has first-class support for Linux.

It's been designed to be "cloud-ready" from the start where it's adopted a high-performance core with a leaner, modular runtime that supports side-by-side installations since Microsoft wants it to run well in the Cloud of which all cloud providers (inc. Azure) predominantly deploy to Linux VMs, whose trend will continue to dominate.

You can view the supported Linux distributions on their installation page which includes Linux binaries for x64, Arm32 + Arm64 including package managers for its supported Linux distributions (Alpine,CentOS,Debian,Fedora,openSUSE,RHEL,SLES,Ubuntu) [1]. As well as maintaining multiple Docker configurations for popular Distros [2].

With Linux now being a supported platform means if you have run into an issue you can report it where their full-time resources will resolve it. The old days of using .NET to push Windows is gone, the future is the cloud and Azure doesn't care if you run Linux or Windows VMs, it's all the same to them, they're still collecting rent for usage of their servers by the hour.

[1] https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet/5.0

[2] https://hub.docker.com/_/microsoft-dotnet-aspnet

Do people still trash Microsoft? Maybe it's just because I'm in Seattle, but I feel like their reputation has really turned a corner in the past year or two.

There's still a lot of cruft from who they used to be, but I feel like most people I know echo the sentiment that Satya has been a revolution. Things like them embracing Linux, acquiring and not ruining NPM and Github, contributing to open source projects, and all the work they've done with Dotnet Core seem to really have bought them a lot of goodwill, at least with the people I know.

> Things like them embracing Linux

Have you seen the WSL2 DirectX support?[0] They're extending it, too!

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23241040

They'll extinguish desktop Linux any day now!

It's funny because Linux did just that to Unix. Embrace (new OS that does everything Unix does, and free!), extend (Linux has features not found in classic Unixes), extinguish (Linux is now the de facto standard, so anyone who wants to use Unix is laughed at).

Microsoft gets mocked for embrace/extend/extinguish, but really, it means just do a better job than the competition. Embrace: "do what others are doing", extend: "do a better job at it, have more features than the competition", extinguish: "sell customers on those features and improvements". How anyone could be against competition, simply because it's framed in a cheesy phrase, is beyond me.

You can compete without working to convert an ecosystem from standardized to proprietary. If that happens it becomes much harder for anyone else to compete, and the end result is reduced competition.

That's what most companies do, though.

"Differentiate your product."

"Let's build an IP portfolio."

"We don't want to be the dumb pipe."

"Build a moat around the product."

"Don't let yourself be commoditized."

Etc.

All that coded or not so coded business language says the same thing: make it proprietary/uncopyable and make money off of it.

It's much less of an issue if you make your own new thing be proprietary. It causes problems when you co-opt an existing market. It really causes problems when you're devoting external resources to conquering the market and once you do so you stop caring very much about improving any more.

Commercial Unix extinguished themselves without much help from Microsoft. The Halloween documents were about Linux after all (over 20 years ago!).. the commercial Unix players have only themselves to blame. Unless we’re going to blame all the mistakes of DEC, HP and IBM on Microsoft. Like geez.... even if that’s true then frankly Microsoft deserved to win.

Commercial Unix suffered from a lack of vision. They could have made version to run on x86, but they basically conceded to the low end to Linux. They were too busy making money from selling super-expensive RISC-based machines.

Solaris had a good version, which I used for a time, while I was running a data center full of Sparc equipment. All the user space stuff was happening in Linux-land. Solaris x86 had a nice repo for various packages, but there was always something you wanted that wasn't there. It got really close, though.

If one of the bigs would have gotten serious about packaging up, say, Debian's userland stuff, they could have put a serious dent in Red Hat, and maybe things would have played out differently.

They were also thwarted by the GPL, had Linux never came into the scene, the BSDs would never been as big as Linux became.

If at all, they would just cherry pick stuff out of them as they were already doing anyway.

> How anyone could be against competition, simply because it's framed in a cheesy phrase, is beyond me.

Because you've entirely misunderstood what EEE means. It absolutely does NOT mean to "do a better job." That phased was coined SPECIFICALLY because it was how Microsoft either absorbed competitors, or put them out of business. They spent decades doing JUST ENOUGH to persuade people to use their stuff, even when it was NOT as good -- given the advantage of their monopoly position and vertical integration -- in order to starve the competition of oxygen.

And yet it still didn't work.

It didn't work perfectly. Microsoft's one of the biggest organisations in the world, remember.

Yes, people still thrash Microsoft because many of their business practises and products are thrashy, even if it needn't be.

Windows is a great example - forced updates, forced ads, forced data-ming and spying, stupid UI changes etc. all make an otherwise decent OS a real pain to use and a must-avoid for the privacy conscious. These are easy to fix for a company like MS, but they do not.

> forced updates

I don't understand whinning about that when you have bilions of people using your OS, so shitton of people who are newbies at computers then you want to help them to stay as secure as possible.

"at best(worst?)" this thing is "not nicest", but it's totally reasonable.

you have reasonable control over updates on non-home versions, imo.

Especially, as Windows updates, given basically infinite combination of hardware (often broken) and software (broken even more often) are super rock solid.

So true. I just yesterday, on a lark, took a win10 SSD from a new Dell and stuck it in a 10 year old HP, and within about a minute it booted much to my surprise.

It didn't even need to connect to the internet.

Don't try that with Arch Linux. That distro lost me forever because I didn't log into a computer for six months (in 2012) and the OS was recoverably broken.

From experience, I highly doubt it was actually unrecoverable. I did something similar many times & all it takes is to read archlinux.org news section & apply .pacnew config diffs where needed. Arch is a bleeding edge distro constantly marching ahead; that's one of its primary advantages, so it's best to update regularly. That being said it is very much possible to not update for months, just requires a bit of extra care when you finally do due to the large number of accumulated changes.

I even did an online, in place switchover from SysV to systemd in 2011 and despite that being a scary amount of changes at once still got a working system.

For quite a while, Windows was the holdout. MacOS wouldn't even flinch if you moved it to another machine; Linux might have needed a little help finding its root volume or NIC but would otherwise be happy. Windows, however, would fall over with a BSOD.

They've been way more stable than MacOS updates recently too. That has to say something about the processes Microsoft has in place to QA.

Have they? Or do the people they impact simply not blog about issues.

My new Mac mini was doing kernel panics at every shutdown for about a year.

The 4th "security update" somehow made that disappear?!

How does that answer the question? If anything it reinforces the point.

The latter. Usually when my Microsoft Surface Book 2 (the flagship consumer device, for context) BSODs for the third time in a day because MS couldn't be assed to fix compatibility/thermal issues with the graphics card that was one of the highlight features of the device, or the tablet undocking (another highlight feature) fails, or their "Modern Standby" drains the battery from 100% to 0% overnight (Is it the 3AM wake-up to phone home? Weird ancient USB controller issues? Who knows!), I tend to just go to reddit or the Microsoft support forums and see how many other people are complaining without finding any solutions. No time to blog.

It’s not only QA. It’s approach to legacy features.

Apple is removing frameworks like crazy, forcing apps to update or die. Windows takes backward compatibility extremely seriously.

The trade off there is that Apple can then perform a major architectural shift in a single fell swoop because it’s not carrying around silly amounts of legacy cruft. Endless backwards compatibility isn’t always a benefit imo.

That works if your os is used by geeks. Doesn’t fly that well if you need solid, long term stable platform to build your solutions on top of.

Edit: typo

lol - Yup, Mac's are only used by geeks. /s

> Especially, as Windows updates, given basically infinite combination of hardware (often broken) and software (broken even more often) are super rock solid.

Apart from breaking SSDs [0] less than two weeks ago. And deleting your certificates in November [3]. And breaking Kerberos in November [4]. And moving your files to another user in February [1]. And breaking their own reset feature in February [2].

All of those are massively disruptive and breaking changes. And all of them have Windows Update to blame (especially the moving files bug) - not some buggy underlying hardware that Microsoft had to work around.

[0] https://borncity.com/win/2020/12/18/windows-10-20h2-chkdsk-d...

[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/658194/windows-10s-new-update-is-d...

[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-pulls-security-updat...

[3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information...

[4] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information...

I dislike the forced windows update because they shove crap down your throat with the updates, try to force edge on you, and repeatedly try to get you to accept their privacy stuff.

The thing that finally got me to abandon Windows was when a forced update wiped away the system settings that I had spent days figuring out to get a trackpad to work the way I wanted to.

>I don't understand whinning about that when you have bilions of people using your OS, so shitton of people who are newbies at computers then you want to help them to stay as secure as possible.

That doesn't explain forced feature updates.

Sure it does. It means you don’t need to backport fixes to an infinite number of builds.

But they do a great deal of backporting anyway. Enterprise and Education users can run a slow path that gets bug fixes and security updates only, for feature updates as far as 30 months back. This is not offered for any other editions of Windows, meaning feature updates are forced on them earlier than they need to be.

Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/win...

General consumers are now the beta testers for Microsoft Windows. With Windows built-in spyware features, they don't even need any user interaction to collect data from your computer.

People who are newbies at computers wouldn't be able to find the switch to turn off updates anyway, so why not include the opt-out setting for users who care?

Forced updates are unnecessary and a bad idea, even more so in rolling-release models.

It's very jarring for an inanimate object that you are trying to wield as a tool, to suddenly have its own agency and its own priorities that it treats as more important than yours. "No, I'm busy for the next 40 minutes" and "Sorry, I have to go now" are things you hear from your friend, not from your hammer or or your toaster.

I don't mind Chrome's forced auto-updates, because they've never gotten in my way.

Serious question, do you actually use Windows 10? I use it daily and I've never had it force an update on me in the middle of the day. I turn it off every night and it applies the updates then, as it should.

It happened to me a couple of times this year. It was really annoying to go make coffee, and come back to an updating screen. Even better, one of these failed and spent another 30 minutes rolling back the update.

I think you may be in a minority of people that intentionally turn their machine off at the end of the day.

I don't think I've intentionally shut down my desktop or laptop (excluding reboots and when leaving for travel) for years. Especially not laptops.

That makes sense, if you've got a laptop and you never reboot it then you're creating an impossible situation for the updater. I still don't understand the constant whinging in that case, though. Of course it's going to update while you're using it if, from its perspective, you are always using it.

I have. There was a Chrome version (69 IIRC) that kept it from using a proxy server that was at a CNAME and had Kerberos authentication.

Here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=872665

This was a huge, huge, huge pain in the butt in a big enterprise. Nothing like a creeping "users can no longer access the internet" spreading across the environment.

I think he meant frequent and unpredictable forced reboots. But the updates are also a disaster. Microsoft trying to shoves their shitty apps down our throat every time, resetting the default applications regularly.

People complain about forced updates because updates have come down that inexplicably break things. For example there was one update in 2020 that caused appeared to delete any files placed in the users Desktop folder (although the files weren't really deleted) and another which caused running chkdsk to corrupt users filesystem in a fashion that typically required fixing the filesystem offline.

Furthermore such updates which usually require a reboot can easily interrupt important work or a long running task.

Just yesterday my Windows install which exists solely to run steam and steam games updated and then committed suicide in a fashion that can't be automatically repaired and requires a reinstall with zero explanation. For reference the hardware is fine as is the Linux install on another drive. The windows drive is a ssd less than 6 months old. I can even mount the ntfs filesystem which appears to be just fine.

There is absolutely no excuse for not letting users pick when or if they would like to update their OS especially when their QA has completely gone to shit and they cannot realistically promise that their update wont break your install.

To concur:

My laptop running Windows hangs periodically requiring a hard reset... if I watch Hulu on Chrome. At least twice a week and sometimes multiple times a day.

At least Windows in the 90s had the decency to put up a blue screen — now it just hard crashes without any display or debugging information.

Telemetry and forced updates are a slap in the face on top of the quality regressions.

Microsoft fired their Quality Assurance staff, hence the regressions in reliability: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/23/former-microsoft-employee-...

I somehow missed that — thanks for sharing!

That sounds like a hardware or driver thing, specifically related to GPU, rather than a Windows issue. You can try to disable hardware acceleration in Chrome.

Sure, could be.

My testing pointed towards a DRM problem, since it doesn’t happen with other video streaming or with rendering outside the particular Chrome + Hulu combination.

My point is two-fold:

1. Even if the driver crashes, the OS should blue screen (like it used to) rather than just hard freeze the machine.

2. Using an HP laptop with Windows and Chrome to view Hulu is so mainstream it should “just work” — so it’s a sign of industry breakdown it doesn’t.

At least Windows in the 90s had the decency to put up a blue screen

This sounds like back then there were only crashes with a blue screen (and dump), and currently there's only hard crashes without blue screen. Both of them are not true. I.e. there are apparently types crashes for which it hasn't been possible in the past decades to come up with a bluescreen, othiing new there. It is just as likely, maybe even moe so, the difference in your particular case is your hardware/driver. It's of course possible there were effectively changes at the OS level in how hard faults are dealt with, but I wouldn't just assume so.

ltsc is the solution, and even though all the MS sychophants will tell you it's for ATMs/medical equipment only: I've been running it on my 2019 gaming box for a year, and had no issues at all

... I hear keys on ebay are about $2

What's Itsc?

I wonder how many people who complain about forced updates also complain(ed) about having to support users running decade-old versions of the OS/browsers?

It really wasn't that long ago that most commercial software still had to support IE8 (released 2009), for example, because that's where the user base was and they didn't upgrade.

Yet chrome forced updates are the greatest revolution it's modern software solutions.

They're revolutionary not because they're mandatory, but rather because they're transparent and not disruptive.

what forced ads? I only know the start menu candy crush stuff, but I remove those first thing after installation.

Comes back with every update.

Was Pinball an ad? A preinstalled game is not an ad. Annoying? Sure. Ad? No. An ad is what that one time they put an actual ad on the lock screen.

Candy Crush and Minecraft are not installed. Clicking on the items in the start menu opens the Windows Store.

As far as I recall pinball had no micro transactions.

For what it's worth I always enjoyed the "stock" games like pinball, solitaire, freecell and minesweeper. But I liked them tucked away under the clear label of the games sub menu, and without any pressure to use them

Micro transactions do suck, and I wish the trend of them would just die, but that doesn’t make a game an ad. You also have a point of the games being tucked away with the option of bringing them out if you wanted. Microsoft should’ve done that.

Hasn't happened to me. My start menu always remains the same after updates. Maybe use an alternate start menu if that's the problem. There are no ads anywhere else IIRC.

I don't use Windows, just have to maintain my parents machine.

I actually looked at BYOD computers and it only happens when a certain non-Microsoft software cough AV that sounds like coffee cough tried to modify the start tiles/menu for no good reason (corrupting the file in its process and forcing Windows to reset it).

Note: I'm not in the US. It seems that Americans tend to complain about this more. I don't know if it was deliberately done or not in that case.

I can tell you first hand that at least not always true. I removed it once and its gone ever since.

They do on Hacker News! People here seem oblivious to the fact that Microsoft is right behind Apple in valuation.

What does this valuation matter?

There is some correlation between selling good products and valuation. Intel's valuation for example went down 25% in 2020 in contrast to the NASDAQ US Composite index (of which Intel is a part) which went up over 40%.

Who decides it is a good product? Seems to me it is rather "selling a lot". Lots of people do not think Apple make good products and prefer Dell or Huawei etc. That doesn't change the valuation of Apple.

Could be my neck of the woods too but where I am Microsoft has the best reputation among the Major tech companies (not a privacy nightmare, great research division, has started supporting open source, remains fairly apolitical)

Microsoft is like the government... everyone has a relationship with them, and those experiences vary from high trust / strategic down to a sort of taxman.

If your work is such that scaling to bazillions of servers or other artifacts isn’t an issue, Microsoft is a smart choice. If you are building Facebook, it is a dumb choice.

I think using their dev tools is a solid choice. Using their OS or their DB... not so much, primarily due to licensing.

I only wish more of those tools would be cross platform. I know it's not happening, but it'd be nice if I could develop WPF stuff right on my macbook without a VM.

Same. At least now there's a promise of cross-platform UI in the form of https://github.com/dotnet/maui

> Using their OS or their DB... not so much, primarily due to licensing.

The state of SQL Server's MVCC suppot is arguably enough to preclude use even before we talk about licensing.

I never thought I would miss Oracle until I learned about NOLOCK and the cost of enabling MVCC in SQL Server.

Microsoft is a very large company with many different internal orgs, your experience will vary greatly from one to the other (or product to product)

> acquiring and not ruining NPM and Github

a little early to come to this conclusion, one way or another, I think

They are doing this to survive, not because they love open source and Linux. MS is still every ounce of the company they were in the 90s, they just saw the writing on the wall and decided to play for the new generation of developers. I don't trust them any better.

We're fortunate that Microsoft shareholders think catering to developers is good for business. Not every megacorp thinks so. I mean, take a look at Swift's documentation and tell me with a straight face that Apple cares about developers.

While Windows 10 i pretty good and stable system, the bundled programs that are default for photos etc are truly awful. In corporate environments it's often hard or impossible to install 3rd party programs, so when the default bundled software suck, it is frustrating to deal with...

whats so aweful about the default photos app? how can it be better?

Install irfanview and compare.

A lot of people don't update their opinions because it takes work. I know because I've made it habit of checking my assumptions and I still forget. For example, people still trash PHP and post a "A Fractal of Bad Design" when PHP 8 is now on par with any other language and not an amateur minefield. Some things get better, some things get worse. It's best to check in once in awhile. Microsoft is much better than it was 20 years ago.

Good point and maybe true for PHP, but not for Microsoft or its products. They've continued to "update" their bad practices too, and it's not just old criticisms that are rehashed again against them.

And no, to me Microsoft is actually worse than before as they have turned Windows into a spyware. The forced updates (not just security updates) make it even worse.

Developers opinions don't seem to have changed that much

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-mo...

Maybe they are all wrong. Maybe PHP still sucks just less.

That's because there's a ton of legacy PHP code to deal with. I shudder to think about it.

> and all the work they've done with Dotnet Core seem to really have bought them a lot of goodwill, at least with the people I know.

Microsoft has done some good things with .NET Core, but they still don't have a very friendly OSS or partner strategy.

AppGet is a pretty good example; there was an existing Open source solution that filled a need, and Microsoft decided to create their own replacement, not bothering to give any credit (until there was an internet ruckus) to the original despite the very striking similarities and relative level of obviousness that they were at bare minimum 'inspired' by the tool; after all, they interviewed him for a role and even warned him the day before it came out... [0]

Octopus is another example. I -hate- TFS Release pipelines. Octopus Deploy was (until they ruined their pricing model) a far superior product overall. You can really tell the way TFS Release pipelines were done, they tried to 'checkbox-copy' Octopus Deploy's features without making it too much like Octopus to be obvious.

But the checkbox-copy strategy is inferior in many ways. In Octo you can have a stage that runs in all environments (but certain steps on/off per env) and configure server groups that way. In TFS Release, You have to have to 'copy' the steps for every stage. It's like their data model is missing a 1-many relationship or two somewhere.

And the impacts in the case of their behavior has a second-order effect; I am curious whether TFS Release eating into Octopus's market share was a factor in their price hikes a couple years ago; in that regard, I can't blame them if that's the case.

[0] - https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22

Brands can turn money into goodwill, given enough money, time, and skill.

I don't think this is some fundamental shift in Microsoft or its values: simply a shift in their market positioning and brand value/identity.

Their products are still proprietary spyware, designed to get as many people locked into the Windows (or now Azure) licensing ecosystem as possible. Even the best parts of VS Code, often cited as one of their best new releases, are either spyware or proprietary. Windows remains a tire fire.

GitHub and NPM are prime examples of this concept that one can turn money into goodwill. I assume money also changed hands for the first-class support that Docker has for windows.

> Do people still trash Microsoft?

Microsoft is a big company. Some things it does will always be trashy - like fighting tooth and nails to keep Linux desktops and truly-open formats out of European public-service procurement. That's still going on, 20 years and 2 CEOs later, and will probably never stop, because screw public interest when there is so much money on the line!

But sure, in some areas they behave better now. They had no choice, after losing a whole generation of developers and seeing their cash-cows (Windows, Office, and AD/Exchange) under siege from SaaS insurgents. I've still to see something where their efforts are not fundamentally tied to their immediate self-interest, though.

My problems with microsoft really aren't around their security practices (these days).

It's more around the ads in the start menu, the telemetry they send, and their tendency to reset my telemetry settings around updates.

I don't feel like I'm in full control when I'm using a computer running windows. Which, y'know, is probably fine for 95% of computer users, they want more of an appliance than a general computing experience.

> I don't feel like I'm in full control when I'm using a computer running windows.

Yes, they've started imitating macOs / ios and have even gone beyond what Apple does in blatantly turning Windows OS into a spyware.

Running an .exe in Windows on a slow internet connection doesn't slow down Windows,so they are not there yet.

It does if it has to go through the Windows Defender check. Enough that sometimes I end up launching the same thing multiple times because I get gaslit into assuming I haven't launched it.

I mean, true they detected this but you don't know what you don't know...

This does not change my perception of Microsoft either.

Doesn't mean they don't deserve the criticism or thrash directed at them for their products or business practices.

>>> They were able to conduct a thorough investigation

Prove that.

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