Hacker News: ThrowawayB7

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)"

ThrowawayB7 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 21:55:20 +0000

Ask anyone at a FAANG and they will tell you that large corporations get flak every day for a lot of things, some justified and some unjustified. As an IC, you need to tune it all out and let the people whose full time job is to deal with that sort of thing handle it.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)"

ThrowawayB7 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 16:05:40 +0000

Microsoft needs Bill Gates back, the young, abrasive version of him that didn't tolerate bullshit, to call them out on what they're shipping these days.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Windows 95 released August 24, 1995"

ThrowawayB7 — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 21:51:46 +0000

IBM's PCs were dependable but came at a premium price that was undercut by PC clones. OS/2 might have been superior but it had higher system requirements ($$$) and itself came at a premium price that was undercut by Windows 9x. At the end of the day, it was all about the price.

(Linux, being free as in beer, did the same to Windows Server and the other UNIXes not many years after.)

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Ask HN: Has Microsoft forgotten how to test software?"

ThrowawayB7 — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 05:16:17 +0000

This is a serious answer: Microsoft dissolved its test discipline in 2014, early in Nadella's reign, in favor of developer-led testing and telemetry based bug detection. The results you can judge for yourself.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port"

ThrowawayB7 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 13:33:33 +0000

My first guess (and probably the first guess of many of the old school nerds) was that the MS Word codename is from Opus the penguin from Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County comic strip and that seems to be correct.

High five for anyone who still remembers the brief Bill the Gates arc in the comic or the Banana Computer parody ad of Apple starring Gene Simmons (https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-banana-junior-6000-comp... , about halfway down the page).

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "That time when I failed the Microsoft interview"

ThrowawayB7 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 04:48:06 +0000

Odd that they received a brain teaser at a MS interview in 2015. IIRC that's several years after internal interviewer training was updated to recommend that brain teasers not be used in interviews because they weren't useful.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "I'd not buy a LG monitor"

ThrowawayB7 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:52:09 +0000

Microsoft doesn't police IHVs -> Geeks: "MS is negligent!"

Microsoft does police IHVs -> Geeks: "MS is an evil monopolist!"

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Windows CE Dreamcast Community Edition (wince-dc)"

ThrowawayB7 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 06:15:27 +0000

Well, it's at least interesting in the sense that the user doesn't have to dig up a copy of Windows NT to run the toolchain, which is what was required for the original Windows CE for Dreamcast SDK and Platform Builder. I seem to remember that it wasn't forward compatible with Windows 2000 or any later OS, which was an annoyance.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Windows CE Dreamcast Community Edition (wince-dc)"

ThrowawayB7 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 06:12:01 +0000

Windows CE for Dreamcast ran a custom port of DirectX 5 and subset of Win32 so developers could create a game that supported both desktop Windows and Dreamcast more conveniently.

For games that didn't need to be cross platform, it was still less of a hassle to develop on Windows CE because you got all of the services that having an OS provides you instead of having to write to the bare metal, which is what the Sega SDK required. Many developers chose the Sega SDK anyway because bare metal was what they were used to but IIRC that generation was the last console generation where bare metal was an option for developers.

New comment by ThrowawayB7 in "Windows CE Dreamcast Community Edition (wince-dc)"

ThrowawayB7 — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 18:41:28 +0000

Windows CE isn't in ROM, the binaries are loaded from GD-ROM disc for games that chose to use it. And booting it wouldn't do you much good anyway since there's no graphical or text shell. It's intended to launch straight into the game.

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.