I wish Microsoft had more Raymond Chens, and less... whoever it is that makes decisions like "let's preinstall candy crush", and "let's break the start menu AGAIN". There's a real elegant core to windows, it's such a shame that a lot of the higher level stuff piled on top is so crappy.

NT is a nicely designed OS. I wonder how many people still at Microsoft really even grok it anymore. I hear Apple is having trouble finding enough developers who can do kernel work.

When I worked on video systems at Apple I got dinged on a performance review for negatively comparing their kernel to Linux too many times. I’m pretty sure they still have a dogshit IO scheduler but I haven’t used a Mac in ages.

I suspect it’s not that people can’t do the work and more that Apple’s silos mean their already employed engineers are not allowed to try or even talk about it.

That's interesting, are there some benchmarks that prove the inferiority of the Mac scheduler? (Without getting you into an NDA trouble, of course.)

I don't think it matters as much any more now that we don't have spinning disks with slow seek times.

For things like Final Cut/iMovie with lots of video/audio/misc tracks, it was trivial to saturate the disk with dumb seeks when reading otherwise linear data streams due to a lack of nobs.

> dinged on a performance review for negatively comparing their kernel... engineers are not allowed to try or even talk about it

I wonder if it was possibly not that you compared the kernels but rather how you chose to express the comparison. For example this bit makes me think you possibly expressed your opinion combatively:

> a dogshit IO scheduler

Perhaps you were more polite in your day-to-day, I don't know. But your language here makes me wonder.

Just World Fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

More like, One Side of the Story :)

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/some...

To be fair, all anecdotes are one side of a story :-)

You seem to be extrapolating a lot from a single turn of phrase but the fact remains that while Apple's kernel is satisfactory, it's not really considered best of bread in anything other than maybe dtrace support.

So I'm sorry I offended you with my salty language but the evidence suggests I'm far from the only one that went ignored at Apple.

> I'm sorry I offended you

You didn't.

Some people seem unaware that others take issue with how they communicate and not what they communicate

the way you are responding to some one who asked you a pretty mild question (assuming they were personally offended rather than asking about a potential communication issue) suggests there is some validity here.

I don't think it was mild, they more or less implied I was an asshole at work because they didn't like an adjective I used years after the fact.

Sure the phrasing was gentle, but the actual statement was quite offensive, presumptuous, and prudish.

There's lots of them but long long gone are the days when the guy who's working on Network blah blah for Azure is allowed to do anything with Windows. Silos are good except when they become Ivory Towers which is what they have become. Sadly it seems some sort of modern managerial style since it infects almost every corporation these days.

AFAIK Dave Cutler is still there but he's been moved off the Windows team -- first to Xbox of all places and then to cloud, maybe?

Most well known names that are still around have moved either into Azure or DevDiv (which I think now is under Azure as well).

Which is probably the root cause of the GUI civil war happening between all desktop frameworks.

"Been moved" strongly implies that it wasn't his choice. Cutler worked on some really cool Virtualization problems in Xbox and is bringing that expertise to Azure as well.

I had this book when it first came out and it was fantastic, coming from a pretty hard core Unix background.

Inside Windows NT from Microsoft Press

https://a.co/d/1lxwnQt

Without that pile so many people would have nothing to do, no impact to list in their reasons for a bonus.

I don't think you understand the position Microsoft is in.

First, Candy Crush was never preinstalled. A link to purchase it in the Microsoft store was preinstalled, and it took all of two clicks to get rid of it if you wanted to.

Second, preinstalling that link reduced malware infections of windows systems by a visible percentage worldwide.

Microsoft has a duty to protect users who need it. Finding a compromise where the worst case for other users is that they need to click twice is pretty good.

How did a candy crush link reduce malware infections?

Also as an aside, that link _kept coming back_ on my laptop (but not my desktop oddly).

> Second, preinstalling that link reduced malware infections of windows systems by a visible percentage worldwide.

Why? Because people would pirate it? Or Just download virus laden games in general?

If I wanted to set up a botnet, bundling malware in a dumb game and then putting the exe on the internet for free seems like a decent start

Source? Why don't they also bundle Fortnite and LoL?

In the 90s he would answer Windows programming questions on usenet.

Raymond Chen is the OG of Windows development.

To me that is Charles Petzold:

http://www.charlespetzold.com/pw5/

He also strikes that great balance between fun to read, low level and precise. Thankful for this articles, always a reflex click :)

Him and Russinovich --before he joined MS.

"before" :)

Also whenever I have a question, it feels like he has the answer. No matter how specific the question is

Well, I'd imagine the day job is why the blog is so good.

And every year or so Microsoft wrecks all links to his blog, so linking to old articles never works properly. It’s highly ironic that the blog talking about backwards compatibility moves urls constantly

There was also Michael Kaplan, who had a similarly informative and in-depth blog "Sorting it all out" about localization, text encodings, keyboard layouts etc in Windows. In fact, Raymond Chen specifically recommended him on these topics:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20041217-00/?p=36...

Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't exactly treat him kindly [1] in the end. And to add insult to injury, his blog was completely wiped. There are some archives around, but I haven't seen one that retained the images, which often makes the posts incomprehensible, unfortunately.

[1] https://vsubhash.wordpress.com/2017/04/17/rip-michael-j-kapl...