Hacker News: ThrowawayB7

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in ""This cannot continue": Xbox leaders lay out "hard truths" behind sagging brand"

ThrowawayB7 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:33:14 +0000

Lends some credence to the suspicion that Phil Spencer's retirement might not have been voluntary.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Ask HN: What old developer tool do you still miss?"

ThrowawayB7 — Wed, 27 May 2026 08:52:23 +0000

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.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Microsoft open-sources "the earliest DOS source code discovered to date""

ThrowawayB7 — Sun, 24 May 2026 21:07:07 +0000

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.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64"

ThrowawayB7 — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:52:14 +0000

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.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64"

ThrowawayB7 — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:10:27 +0000

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.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows"

ThrowawayB7 — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:58:15 +0000

"¿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?

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields"

ThrowawayB7 — Wed, 06 May 2026 05:20:23 +0000

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.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Linux, Windows or macOS: Which Operating System to Use in 2026?"

ThrowawayB7 — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:13:10 +0000

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.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)"

ThrowawayB7 — Sun, 03 May 2026 19:14:22 +0000

> "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.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March"

ThrowawayB7 — Sun, 03 May 2026 17:53:53 +0000

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.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)"

ThrowawayB7 — Sun, 03 May 2026 06:21:01 +0000

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#.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)"

ThrowawayB7 — Sun, 03 May 2026 06:08:35 +0000

> "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.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)"

ThrowawayB7 — Sun, 03 May 2026 05:21:42 +0000

> "...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.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs"

ThrowawayB7 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 05:14:02 +0000

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.)

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "The Orange Pi 6 Plus"

ThrowawayB7 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:39:52 +0000

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.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "The Windows equivalents of the most used Linux commands"

ThrowawayB7 — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:12:17 +0000

"When in Rome, do as the Romans do."

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access"

ThrowawayB7 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:25:15 +0000

Change "thief" to "free rider" and it's exactly what the shared source / post-open license folks are saying.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy"

ThrowawayB7 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:24:30 +0000

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.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access"

ThrowawayB7 — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:14:42 +0000

The 50th anniversary of Bill Gates' "An Open Letter To Software Hobbyists" was a couple of months ago and the letter was literally about developers deserving to be compensated for the hard work put their code. Now that much of the FOSS community is starting to say the same, it's time for them to finally admit that Bill Gates turned out to right in the end.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains"

ThrowawayB7 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 21:24:51 +0000

Yes, Microsoft does still sell MS Office 2024 as a one time purchase:

- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...