It makes sense business wise. Getting new features is sexy/sell-able. Refactoring existing/working code to be smaller/faster/secure/etc isn't.
‘As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.’
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/09/18/strategy-letter-vi...
https://www.cnet.com/products/dell-latitude-e6500/specs/
It came out in October 2008
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Latitude-E6500-Not...
SSDs are roughly 100x faster than HDDs, so they're superior despite offering less TB. Unless you're a gamer constantly downloading new 50GB games, most people are fine with ~300GB of storage.
People want faster storage, as opposed to more storage.
I want 2TB of space and the speed of an SSD, and I don't want to pay much.
Hybrid hard drives seemed like the perfect solution (a few GB of flash, combined with a 2TB drive).
Sadly, nobody managed to get decent performance on hybrid drives. As far as I'm aware, none really had a good grasp of the filesystem, so none could make decisions like 'these small dll files will likley need low latency reads, stick them in the flash, while these massive mp4 files will probably be streamed, leave them on the hd'.
[1] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...
That's the current conventional wisdom. But it's more like an excuse.
Windows got bloated because Microsoft relied(s) on cheap masses of mediocre programmers, backed by equally mediocre managers. A pattern that Windows application developers copied.
Yes, Microsoft has some really talented people. I knew a good number of them from the Bing and Xbox group when I lived in Bellevue. They would talk about amazing things. But then they would always follow those tales with internal Microsoft horror stories.
Microsoft research is a top notch research company. Microsoft is also a large, if not the largest, contributor to Linux & Open source.
Horror stories aren't unique to Microsoft... The industry of the 80s/90s and early 2000s was something i'd never want to go back to - but its also something i suffered through and that suffering didn't matter what OS you ran. If you chose Irix it sucked paying 600 bucks for MEDIA to update your OS, if you ran HPUX it sucked having to buy a support contract to update your OS, if you ran Solaris, you were proud of solaris - but it wasn't until sun embraced open source that it really took off because we didn't have to buy a compiler that cost hundreds of dollars if not thousands to license.
Meanwhile, Windows has TurboC, TurboPascal and tons of stuff - and open source gnu started taking off and linux came around and the world started getting better for everyone- opportunity opened up - we crossed the chasim from 8 bit to 16 bit to 32 bit and 64bit and Windows has maintained a level of compatibility second to none to support all that legacy.
They're working hard to compete - Windows "S" mode is windows without the ability to stall win32 - its "Store mode" - it could go a LONG way into making it "suck less" from legacy cruft but by and large the market and developers are refusing to support it - which is odd considering they NEED to support the store model for official chromebooks, android apps or ios marketplaces.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I always hear things like this. What exactly are they contributing though?
> Windows has maintained a level of compatibility second to none to support all that legacy
As far as I can tell, if you want to run a legacy Windows app, you're more likely to be successful running it in Wine on Linux.
Their employees contribute tons of code to the kernel and they're a premium partner in the Linux foundation paying Linus's salary. They contribute to the kernel, hadoop, mesos, k8s, they contribute to gcc, heck they let you run linux on windows now with Linux subsystem and have official partnerships with redhat, suse, ubuntu. They also open sourced C#, they contribute to jenkins, so much mroe.
>As far as I can tell, if you want to run a legacy Windows app, you're more likely to be successful running it in Wine on Linux.
no sane person would do that. Just run it in compatibility mode on Windows 10.
Linus wasn't starving before MS became a platinum member of the Linux Foundation.
> They contribute to the kernel, hadoop, mesos, k8s, they contribute to gcc, heck they let you run linux on windows now with Linux subsystem...
Right, so as far as I can tell most of their contribution are likely to be things to make their linux subsystem work better. Which has very little effect on me.
> >As far as I can tell, if you want to run a legacy Windows app, you're more likely to be successful running it in Wine on Linux.
> no sane person would do that. Just run it in compatibility mode on Windows 10.
Mentioning sanity and running Windows 10 in the same breath?
Chromebooks are great. Windows 10 is great. My Macbook is great. We have TONS Of great computing devices and choices today. Use an iphone, use an android, use a stick phone, i don't give a crap.
What i do get appalled at is all this hate, misinformation and projection of personal biases and preference as "matter of fact".. its bull crap and ya know it.
Edit: Ah, I realise what the 'hate' remark is about, my comment about Windows 10 and sanity. Here's my Windows 10 story - I was installing it on a 'game box' (since repurposed as a Linux workstation) off of a usb stick. In the middle of the installation, it complained about some sort of missing drivers (in a very opaque fashion). I wrote down the information and went off to the Internet for help, figuring, it's easy to help for Linux issues, so Windows issues like must be even easier, given its wide-use. But nothing I found made any difference. Until I came across a suggestion somewhere to unplug the usb at that point in time and plug it into another usb slot. I thought "that's silly and will never work". Of course, that was the solution. Note: it didn't matter which usb port it was plugged into initially, so it wasn't a 'usb3 drivers missing' issue or anything like that. For whatever reason, at that point in the installation, unplugging the usb and replugging it in made Windows 10 'see' the drivers. I spent way too many hours on such a silly (and still to me opaque) problem. Thus I don't really associate Windows 10 with sanity. (And I won't mention my experience with the official Microsoft Store and malware.)
So because other companies also did sucky things, Microsoft’s sucky things don’t count.
Got it.
You're ignoring a massive amount of history (and current actions) to keep your jaded worldview and that sucks.
Wine better at windows than windows itself.
There is still a 32 bit version of Windows in 2018.
Windows 7 has the same level of compatilibity (or perhaps even more, as I'm sure more software is compatible with it) but it's much lighter.
For the server, I recently had to write a process that takes messages from a queue in AWS and store it to a database. It ran well as a .Net Core based lambda running on a 256MB RAM Linux VM.
I did the same with a .Net Framesork app that inherited and the smallest EC2 instance we could use was one with 4GB RAM. It was barely usable. We had to upgrade to 8GB. Microsoft has been successful because of Moore’s law hid the increasing bloat of Windows. But once smartphones and low resource required operating systems became popular, they can’t compete.