Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10
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@kt_ I have an iPhone, and I would not use the word "stability" to describe it. iTunes, which is absolutely mandatory if you want to connect it to a computer and do anything beyond the bare minimum of copying pictures off, is even worse.
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@anotherusername said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@kt_ I have an iPhone, and I would not use the word "stability" to describe it. iTunes, which is absolutely mandatory if you want to connect it to a computer and do anything beyond the bare minimum of copying pictures off, is even worse.
iTunes for Windows is a piece of shite, I do agree. I don't use it, though. iOS in the other hand is a stable beast, much more stable than any of my android phones were. I've never used nexus, though, so there's that.
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@kt_ said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
much more stable than any of my android phones were
Most of the stability issues are caused by the vendor's additions and/or shitty drivers/hardware. Stock Android on reasonable hardware is comparable to iOS.
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@masonwheeler said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
whereas patches can be pushed out the door for an Android app with very little overhead.
On the other hand, when problems are found in the Android OS, it takes months for the tiny percentage of phones that are still getting updates to get the patches.
I don't think Google has figured out what a hardware abstraction layer is yet.
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@anonymous234 said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
I don't think Google has figured out what a hardware abstraction layer is yet.
I'm pretty sure Android has one. That's not the problem, it's the shitty third-party software.
Edit: Official documentation here: https://source.android.com/devices/
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@kt_ said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
someone actually tests your app
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@kt_ iOS is buggy shite too.
Just perusing the crash logs, and picking two different groups...
Kernel panics (iOS kernel crashed):
Date/Time: 2016-01-09 08:49:32
panic: kernel abort type 4
Panicked task: kernel_taskDate/Time: 2016-03-09 00:54:13
panic: pmap_remove_range()
Panicked task: mstreamdDate/Time: 2016-06-18 17:17:00
panic: kernel abort type 4
Panicked task: SpringBoardDate/Time: 2016-06-21 17:18:07
panic: kernel abort type 4
Panicked task: mstreamdDate/Time: 2016-06-21 17:25:44
panic: kernel abort type 4
Panicked task: mstreamdSpringBoard (that's the iOS home screen manager application):
Date/Time: 2016-02-08 09:08:56
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTIONDate/Time: 2016-04-03 16:32:49
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTIONDate/Time: 2016-06-14 12:53:46
Exception Type: EXC_BREAKPOINTDate/Time: 2016-06-14 13:09:20
Exception Type: EXC_BREAKPOINTDate/Time: 2016-07-15 08:13:00
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS
Exception Subtype: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x00000020It's just that generally, when an application crashes, it just vanishes and you reopen it and then it works ok, and when the system crashes you get the black and white apple logo screen while it restarts automatically and then
it works okyou'd better just reboot the whole damn phone because if just a process restarted then you'll probably have another crash soon if you don't.
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@kt_ said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
This is a funny place, where praising windows phone gets wider acceptance than praising iOS.
It's true. We mostly mock the windows phone user, not the OS.
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@Groaner said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
What if it isn't 1000 hours to fix an issue in the toolchain? What if it's 2 hours? And what if the fix removes an issue that has to be addressed every time a new Widget is built?
- That isn't a rough edge
- If this is a large enough company with a sane enough toolchain, then that's already been done. Everything left is rough edges. But if you can come up with a cost/benefit proposal where you show 2 hours of work == 1000 hours of savings, then by all means write it up and pitch it.
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@boomzilla said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
Just ask Jeff!
I would, but I'm banned.
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@Lorne-Kates said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
I would, but I'm banned.
Has he blocked you on twitter yet?
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@boomzilla said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@Lorne-Kates said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
I would, but I'm banned.
Has he blocked you on twitter yet?
A long, long time ago.
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@anonymous234 said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@Weng The bigger a product is, the most important the foundations are. Windows is a very big product. So I can't imagine how any problems in the toolchain wouldn't be worth solving.
Specially when you consider that the GUI part of the control panel is almost trivial. There's no reason why adding a menu should take more than a couple lines.
Unless the menu's contents are dynamic. And no, not just the text label for localization, and not just checked or greyed out as simple shortcuts to common settings. Menu entries can be added or removed, menu link targets can be changed, and menu items (even separators, which are their own full-blown menu item subclass) can have their own full sub-menus with all of those things! I mean, just imagine all that you can do with that level of customization!
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@Lorne-Kates said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
A long, long time ago.
...in a Twitter account far, far away?
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@Lorne-Kates said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
- That isn't a rough edge
Care to share the definition you're using? I found this one:
- if a piece of work or a performance has rough edges, some parts of it are not of very good quality
That seems vague enough to cover everything between "massive design flaw that requires rewrite to fix," and "annoying bug which trips up the users every time and slows them down, but would only take a couple hours to fix if someone actually took a look into it."
- If this is a large enough company with a sane enough toolchain, then that's already been done. Everything left is rough edges.
Okay, so from context, I'm going to assume you mean "design flaw."
If all the low-hanging fruit has been harvested and there's absolutely no room to refine the process, it sounds like the best option is to fire all the developers and replace them with automatons, since paying someone to think is a waste of money if all you need is someone who can follow a process.
But if you can come up with a cost/benefit proposal where you show 2 hours of work == 1000 hours of savings, then by all means write it up and pitch it.
Why are you working on a cost-benefit analysis? Only management is allowed to do those! Get back to closing those approved P1 issues, or we'll have someone else at your desk tomorrow!
Also, I've yet to encounter a toolchain in need of a 1000-hour change. In that amount of time, you could do a major refactor of a reasonably-sized application.
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@kt_ said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@lordofduct said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@kt_ said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@lordofduct you should try iOS. You'd get WP's stability and android's app ecosystem. Oh, and great UI.
As well as the stdhivy!
As well as the… what?! Wait a sec, are you the same guy who's critisised people for judging an OS without actually using it? Can't be!
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the stdhivy, pronounced "the stid hivvy"
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I have actually used iOS, extensively.
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It was a joke, I personally don't give a fuck about ones use of iOS. My girlfriend seems to like it. It's just not my thing. Primarily dat price tag (note I'm using a 45 dollar windows phone currently...)
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@lordofduct said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
at the time I had also just gotten into linux hardcore
I read this as "linux hardware" and then had to stop and go back and reread it because it didn't make any sense in context.
I don't remember what exactly people hated about Vista.
When it came out, the minimum hardware requirements were set too low, for marketing reasons. So it was pushed on to a lot of machines that weren't really capable of handling it, and a lot of people who bought new systems with it had a bad experience. Also, driver support for older hardware was spotty, so lots of people who upgraded to it had a bad experience. And there was a significant pain period waiting for a lot of software that had relied on the user being an admin to be fixed.
These days, the excessive UAC prompts are the main problem. Sometimes you'll get three prompts for the same action; this was cleaned up considerably in 7.
Oh, also the Start button turned into a circle with no text. I'm sure that upset a bunch of people.
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I suspect it's fake. Redource IDs was an MFC thing, and xaml is used in wpf. He mixed the two and invented this wtf.
MS writes the best dev tools around. They may be using features that Visual Studio doesn't fully support yet, but I don't believe in what this guy described.
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@kt_ said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@lordofduct you should try iOS. You'd get WP's stability and android's app ecosystem. Oh, and great UI.
But you can't install Send Me To Heaven on it any more, so it's basically useless.
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@lordofduct said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
And yet within a year of each android I've owned it crawls to a fucking hault to do anything.
E_NO_REPRO_TRY_A_NON_SAMSUNG_PHONE
I haven't had that kind of slowdown since Gingerbread...
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@FrostCat said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@lordofduct said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
I don't remember what exactly people hated about Vista.
The majority, at least the part where it wasn't people hating because it looked different, which happened--in exactly the same way--every other time MS made major UI changes, was (simplified a bit because I don't remember the exact details) hardware vendors not putting out updated drivers. For example, HP said all their printers that were more than a year old or so, just weren't getting Vista drivers at all, and you were expected to buy a new computer.
And a lot of computer vendors put hardware that didn't have Vista drivers in their computers, so they didn't work well. As Raymond Chen's said a million times, people don't care, they just blame the problem on Microsoft.
Indeed, the biggest issue I saw was the driver support.
That's also probably why Microsoft hasn't updated the major kernel version since Vista..........
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@kt_ said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
Oh, and you can be quite sure every app you download is safe.
Indeed. Nobody has ever gotten malicious apps in the store after all...
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
When it came out, the minimum hardware requirements were set too low, for marketing reasons. So it was pushed on to a lot of machines that weren't really capable of handling it, and a lot of people who bought new systems with it had a bad experience.
Oh, yeah, that too.
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@flabdablet said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
At my school, my process was more like
At a school I went to:
- Mac OS 9 with Internet Explorer 5 can't possibly ever become outdated
- What's this Ubuntu thing? [school now has 10-ish Mac OS 9 computers and 1 Edubuntu 12.04 computer]
- [school goes out of business]
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@anotherusername said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
It's just that generally, when an application crashes, it just vanishes and you reopen it and then it works ok
That's because mobile device makers strongly encourage app authors to use a database as state storage. Which is actually a really good idea.
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@dkf said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@anotherusername said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
It's just that generally, when an application crashes, it just vanishes and you reopen it and then it works ok
That's because mobile device makers strongly encourage app authors to use a database as state storage. Which is actually a really good idea.
But that would mean learning SQL, which makes a majority of developers run in the other direction, screaming in terror as they frantically attempt to build a car with square wheels to try to escape.
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@lordofduct said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@kt_ said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@lordofduct said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@kt_ said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@lordofduct you should try iOS. You'd get WP's stability and android's app ecosystem. Oh, and great UI.
As well as the stdhivy!
As well as the… what?! Wait a sec, are you the same guy who's critisised people for judging an OS without actually using it? Can't be!
- It was a joke
Well, I got that somehow got offended like a whiny little girl. Dunno, I was extremely tired so maybe that can serve as an explanation?
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@boomzilla said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@kt_ said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
This is a funny place, where praising windows phone gets wider acceptance than praising iOS.
It's true. We mostly mock the windows phone user, not the OS.
Y
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@anotherusername you got an awful lot of kernel crashes. Did you jailbreak your phone/tablet?
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@Lorne-Kates said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
A long, long time ago.
In a Galaxy far away?
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@Groaner said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
as they frantically attempt to build a car with square wheels to try to escape
Square wheels? That's more advanced than I thought. Most seem to go for triangular wheels while attaching a few dozen ships' anchors.
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@blakeyrat said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@asdf "Vista is awful" is just like "Windows Phone is awful". You'll never find a single person who actually used the product for more than 15 minutes saying so.
I have used a Windows phone (7, but you didn't specify which version, so there) for five months, because my boss asked me if I wanted to try it and I was like "well it can't be worse than this POS Windows Mobile device I'm using right now".
It was awful. I didn't want to try 8.Currently I'm on BB10 (which also sucks, but I only wanted it for the hardware keyboard) and CM 12.1 (which is tolerable).
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Devil's advocate here, but I think a lot of this is being facetious.
So you have to
- find the control panel code. (wah)
- find the XAML that represents the GUI. (yeah, wpf wah)
- copy and paste a dropdown element. (because it's xml... heaven forbid I have to copy and paste whatever select replacer I'm using because the default browser select control sucks. Or generally any other user control.)
- Go into a resource file for strings. (Because FUCK other languages. We all speak English here).
- Copy the code tying the dropdown. (Because FUCK events calling API code. It should magically know).
- Run through 2 separate specialized compilers (don't know. I know that we have a proprietary compiler for our resources that generates headers that get loaded by our database, so our database is aware of our resource strings so that anything can use them, SQL, C#, etc).
- No gaps in the resource file. (How the hell did you add the resource. Did the resource editor not generate a new number?)
- Special plugin. (Heaven forbid you do any code analysis or tie VS into source control).
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Either the tools Microsoft has is what sucks,
or this guy is a junior programmer that is having culture shock having left the pristine college world where everything is in one project and you don't even care about source control.
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One of the downsides of scaled Agile, is that teams can operate independently and end up needing and using different tools to get their job done. Making these tools interact well is like bringing life to Frankenstein's monster.
Some tools end up even being something someone threw together quickly to make life easier, and as such aren't unit tested or have even a basic QA to them. Much less documentation.
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@xaade said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
Making these tools interact well is like bringing life to Frankenstein's monster.
Ah, but when they work you get a different image macro!
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@Groaner said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@dkf said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@anotherusername said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
It's just that generally, when an application crashes, it just vanishes and you reopen it and then it works ok
That's because mobile device makers strongly encourage app authors to use a database as state storage. Which is actually a really good idea.
But that would mean learning SQL, which makes a majority of developers run in the other direction, screaming in terror as they frantically attempt to build a car with square wheels to try to escape.
Just saw that on another forum. One guy wants to use MongoDB to do a many-to-many relationship and asked how to keep the denormalized data in sync.
Someone finally pointed out that many-to-many and denormalization don't mix very well. He then went off and created a hideous monster which somehow keeps all the data in sync.
In SQL that's one JOIN query and an extra table containing foreign keys pointing towards the data points related to each other. No duplicate data.
Another guy tried to tell me that MongoDB was superior because it "offloads the joining stress from the server to the client", somehow overlooking that unless you have very simple relationships, your queries for a simple many-to-many relationship just jumped from 1 query to n+1 queries.
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@Rhywden said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
"offloads the joining stress from the server to the client"
So it moves the work away from where it belongs and where you can spec the hardware to support it? And there are people who think this is good?!
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@dkf said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@Rhywden said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
"offloads the joining stress from the server to the client"
So it moves the work away from where it belongs and where you can spec the hardware to support it? And there are people who think this is good?!
Well, it's MongoDB.
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@dkf said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@anotherusername said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
It's just that generally, when an application crashes, it just vanishes and you reopen it and then it works ok
That's because mobile device makers strongly encourage app authors to use a database as state storage. Which is actually a really good idea.
No, it's because most of the time it isn't a repeatable crash. Even so, it usually just dumps you back on the app's initial screen.
Saving state is a good idea, but on mobile it's necessary less for crash recovery and more just because they have a small amount of RAM and the mobile OSes tend to aggressively force quit apps that aren't active in order to free up memory for ones that are. And there's a small bit of risk, because if your app does have a crashing bug your saved state might just reproduce the exact conditions that trigger it and then you crash on startup every time unless you recover from it somehow.
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@kt_ said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@anotherusername you got an awful lot of kernel crashes. Did you jailbreak your phone/tablet?
No.
Dunno if the newer iOS or devices are better, but it's an iPhone 4 with the latest and greatest version of iOS that supported it. I've once had it go into recovery mode and force me to connect it to iTunes and completely reinstall iOS. Luckily I had my apps backed up in iTunes, because at least one of the apps that I use constantly isn't available from the app store any longer.
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@Luhmann said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@Lorne-Kates said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
A long, long time ago.
In a Galaxy far away?
Naboo was under an attack...
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@dkf said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
So it moves the work away from where it belongs and where you can spec the hardware to support it? And there are people who think this is good?!
The grass is always greener.
What are you rebelling against, Johnny? Whaddaya got?
Shiny!
Chesterton's gate.
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@blakeyrat said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@asdf "Vista is awful" is just like "Windows Phone is awful". You'll never find a single person who actually used the product for more than 15 minutes saying so.
I never had Windows Vista personally (my brother did, and from what I heard, half of his games were crashing on startup, so he wasn't happy), but I have company-issued WP phone, and I absolutely despise it. Why?
- It crashes about twice a week. By crash I mean sudden reboot.
- IE crashes about once an hour. By crash I mean sudden back-to-
desktopstart-screen, and when I reopen IE, my tabs and my browser history are gone. - When IE doesn't crash, it has this weird behavior when the back button takes me anywhere from 0 to 7 pages back. And there's no forward button. Or it randomly decides to close the whole tab and clear history.
- When answering phone call, there's about 5% chance the phone will crash. It's separate from the first bullet point in that IT'S THE WORST MOMENT EVER TO HAVE PHONE UNAVAILABLE FOR A MINUTE AND A HALF. Also, when it crashes, THE PHONE CALL DOESN'T SAVE IN HISTORY SO I CAN'T EVEN CALL BACK IF I DON'T KNOW OR DON'T REMEMBER WHO CALLED. It's a fucking phone. The least you would expect is that they made its phone function right.
- There are virtually no alternatives to IE. All the browsers available in the store are either rebranded IE with added ads, or don't work with modern internet.
- While we're at it, there are many websites that simply don't work on WP, or make IE crash after about a minute spent reading them.
- Some Wi-Fi hotspots don't work with WP.
- Sometimes pressing unlock button, it gets terribly laggy - to the point I'm unable to input unlock password.
- Kids Corner shares password with the rest of the phone, almost defeating its purpose.
- They allegedly fixed it in 8.1 update and now let you configure no password for Kids Corner - but I was unable to get it to work. Possibly requires you to have never ever configured it before (or do factory reset).
- Some Live Tiles are annoying (like Contacts), some have quite essential functionality (like Messages telling you how many unread messages you have). There's no way to disable one and have the other still enabled - it's all or nothing.
And that's just from the top of my head.
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@Gąska sounds like an htc Windows Phone.
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@Gąska Your phone's busted.
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@sloosecannon said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
That's also probably why Microsoft hasn't updated the major kernel version since Vista..........
...until Windows 10, which is 10.0, not 6.4 or whatever.
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@blakeyrat said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
@Gąska Your phone's busted.
Just like your Linux hardware.
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@Rhywden said in Anonymous ex-Microsoft coder on what it's like to work on Windows 10:
Another guy tried to tell me that MongoDB was superior because it "offloads the joining stress from the server to the client"
Guys! Guise! Even though we bought this ridiculously expensive database server with 32 threads and 128GB of RAM, let's let the users do the database sorting work on the Celerons their bosses buy them! What could possibly go wrong?