Lay the blame where it belongs: it was one of Satya Nadella's early decisions to eliminate the SDET role at Microsoft. Everybody praised him at the time as some kind of wunderkind for juicing the stock but now Microsoft and users are facing the consequences. Hopefully history will correctly attach responsibility to Nadella for it.
To be fair, as of today, history still proves him right. Windows crumbles, but it still features enough value via its dominant position. As much as consumers are dissatisfied, investors are getting what they asked for, it is more efficiently extracting money. I hope that eventually that trend would reverse, but just being able to hold 10+ years with that bad of a product is already pretty sad.
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.
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.
Favorite part is Gates' opinion of the entire Windows project:
"Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up."
They also know it's shit, they're just gaslighting you.
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.)
Yes, I recall that not all hardware was supported (or well supported) although it wasn't a huge problem and I was able to find drivers for everything I personally needed. Video drivers that supported the full capabilities of the card were the biggest issue as I recall
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.
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.
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.
I interviewed with Microsoft at the end of 2016 as a new grad and was given the same marble question over the phone. I then made it to the on site interview where I failed horribly haha.
Or they could bundle a basic driver or police the driver they're curating while allowing people to download and install drivers directly from the vendor website with no policing, no signature checks, etc.
Distributing malware is negligent or malicious, yes. Not stopping users from seeking out their own malware is neither. Nothing stops you from running malware on Linux. The curated repos are simply good enough that there's not much reason to go looking elsewhere.
That is really what everyone else does. When you get the auto downloaded Nvidia driver you get only the bare basics and it's not bugging you to install the GeForce experience stuff like they do if you download it from their website.
Well yeah, when you spend a significant segment of your corporate life being both negligent and an evil monopolist, people tend to assume the worst. Don't like it? Behave better.
There are more than the two bad choices for behavior here.
It's not "no matter what they do" it's really that everything they do is wrong and there really are much better alternatives than the choices they continue to make.
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.
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.
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.
It seems that the original plan was to create the first game console with an operating system, something happened at some point and the ROM only contains a BIOS, just like a PC. Maybe it was cost issue or maybe devs demanded bare metal or maybe something else.
Game devs in general did have issues with multithreading and OS scheduling interfering with game logic until mid-late Vista era; games used to be all big single threaded main loops with some interrupts for peripherals that struggled to adapt to multi-core/multi-threaded CPUs. DC was between PS1 and PS2, so games were still quite deep in that phase.
DC not having the OS in the ROM is IMO a big shame considering that Dreamcast could have been basically the Xbox. Makes me wonder if Gates' push on "bringing back games to hands of Americans" was partially driven by that "incident", if it had been one, on top of having the market dominated by Nintendo and Sony.
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