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How did software development become so hard (Windows)???

tomtoo

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Me too. Didn't think anyone else would remmber them. It contained Microsoft Basic complete with their first major bug to annoy me - their broken garbage collection memory routines. Yes, early as it was, it had the ability to crash just like their latest Windows.

Good old times, ;)
 

xaviescacs

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I enjoy to be the Boss of my computer, not the way arround.

That's the key. OS should be free and open. The opposite is just falling for the same trap once again. Humanity must overcome this at some point.
Many people can't use Linux, but many could and they don't do it because they don't want to spend time on it. Selfish! Think about the community! If you use Linux you instantly become a member of a community that's trying to overcome this global issue.
 

Walter

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A tip. Put Windows in a virtual machine (use virtualbox). I spin up a Windows VM when and if I need it. If I am doing work in both Linux and Windows, there's a very neat seamless mode - everything on the one desktop.
I have considered it, as I use multiple Linux VMs on a daily basis. But I've had this SSD since 2012, when I was still using Windows regularly. I spent a lot of time configuring it then, and it is not worth the time and trouble to clone it and set up a VM that I'll only use 4-5 times a year. If I still did desktop application ddevelopment, then I'm sure I'd need multiple Windows VMs.
 
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amirm

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Does AP publish the some kind of API for its device upon which the community could build a Linux based client?
No, they actually added a hardware key which stops anyone from running any other software against it. :(
 

storing

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Imho the most blame should go to shit developers of bloated intrusive software "suites" - Adobe, Autodesk, etc.

This, plus the stuff which comes preinstalled with a lot of manufacturers. Add a virus scanner on top of that (not Defender) and you're completely screwed.

I personally don't seem to have issues with any of the problems mentioned here (e.g. main dayjob work machine is nearnig its 12th birthday and still happily runs Win 7 with about zero problems, previous laptop ran for 10 years then hardware broke down, never had to reinstall Windows, etc), but I also take a bit of care what to install and always buy decent hardware. And I might have been lucky.
 

xaviescacs

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No, they actually added a hardware key which stops anyone from running any other software against it. :(

This is disappointing coming from a instrumentation manufacturer. What are they afraid of? They are not a software company and therefore trying to make money out of something that is not their main expertise looks risky, narrow-minded and a bit desperate. If they publish the specs they will eventually sell more of this devices.

Edit: they publish a good deal of different programs in their website. All for their machines I suppose. Are this programs that bad that they are afraid of not selling one of them if the AP users were free to choose? Narrow-minded...
 
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amirm

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This is disappointing coming from a instrumentation manufacturer. What are they afraid of?
They got this bright idea of starting to charge a subscription fee for the software to the tune of $1000+/year. :( It used to be free forever but now, you only get one year with the hardware. New updates are available for downloads after that but if you don't have the license key stored in the hardware dongle on the instrument itself, you can't use it. Needless to say, I am stuck on my old version.

Thankfully they have added very little of value which makes it doubly strange that they think they can or should charge for such updates.
 

beeface

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This is disappointing coming from a instrumentation manufacturer. What are they afraid of? They are not a software company and therefore trying to make money out of something that is not their main expertise looks risky, narrow-minded and a bit desperate. If they publish the specs they will eventually sell more of this devices.
If the hardware can be reverse engineered and cloned, I can kinda understand them being a bit paranoid about the software, especially when they sell low volumes

They got this bright idea of starting to charge a subscription fee for the software to the tune of $1000+/year. :( It used to be free forever but now, you only get one year with the hardware. New updates are available for downloads after that but if you don't have the license key stored in the hardware dongle on the instrument itself, you can't use it. Needless to say, I am stuck on my old version.

Thankfully they have added very little of value which makes it doubly strange that they think they can or should charge for such updates.

yikes
 

xaviescacs

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If the hardware can be reverse engineered and cloned, I can kinda understand them being a bit paranoid about the software, especially when they sell low volumes

The specs of the electronic interface wouldn't reveal anything about how the unit works internally. It's far more simple by opening the case :)
 

xaviescacs

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They got this bright idea of starting to charge a subscription fee for the software to the tune of $1000+/year. :( It used to be free forever but now, you only get one year with the hardware. New updates are available for downloads after that but if you don't have the license key stored in the hardware dongle on the instrument itself, you can't use it. Needless to say, I am stuck on my old version.

Thankfully they have added very little of value which makes it doubly strange that they think they can or should charge for such updates.

So they want to make money out of everything... They instead have the change of publishing a spec of the interface of this kind of devices, publish a free software, and hope that other manufacturers stick to this free spec and software, and then they can sell forever support and extensions to everyone, not just their hardware customers.
 

valerianf

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I have a Windows computer at work since 1985 and also have my personnel computer running Windows.
Let me be clear: Windows made me lost years of my live because of the stupid way it is behaving.
But for now there is no real alternative.
Only IOS seems better, but is very limited in the applications it can run.
At work, most of the time it is the Boss that has an Apple computer, and all the developers have Windows.
Windows computers are for the ones doing the day to day job.
But what a daily pain!!!
 

Hipocrates

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Windows can be trim down considerably in order to make it quite less intrusive and annoying.
I love Linux on servers not so much as desktop or laptop OS, that might change with the W11 nonsense... Sometimes I miss the windows 2000 era... but I digress.

This article might be of help at least as starting point.
https://christitus.com/debloat-windows-10-2020/

My W10 pcs run smoothly without problems, with adobe, MS office and VM stuff installed
 

Koloth

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Add a virus scanner on top of that (not Defender) and you're completely screwed.

Yes!! Man my systems were so unstable back when I used to bother with shit like Bullguard, Norton, Bitdefender etc. Figured at least MS had to be able to have proper compatibility with their own OS and switched to the much maligned Windows Live Security Essentials package. 29$/year, I think. At some point it got rolled into what is today Windows Defender.
I havent looked back on other antivirus software since. Fucking threat review scores can kiss my ass, at least Windows Defender doesnt give me BSODs.
With Norton or Kaspersky you didnt need a virus to fuck up your system. The antivirus did it all by itself.
 

RayDunzl

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@amirm

"How did software development become so hard (Windows)???"

I had a Macintosh in the 80's and 90's, when it was demonstrably "better".

I bought the "Inside Macintosh" series of how to program the Mac.

I wrote some interesting (to me) code using the GUI and Sound. Wasn't too hard, actually made sense what was going on.

---

I bought a PC with Windows.

Found totally inexplicable spaghetti code with no rhyme or reason (to me) why it would step into various spaghetti coded routines in trace mode and a real lack of "what's going on" documentation (or just couldn't figure out where to look).

Gave up, and haven't tried again.

Did write some procedural (non-object stuff) in C to get done (musically) what I was interested in at the time (compose multi-voice stereo WAV files a pair of samples at a time). Couldn't figure out how to directly tickle the sound hardware in the PC, so, used brute force method.

Haven't written a line of anything in maybe 20 years, other than a little HTML to see what that was all about.
 

ZolaIII

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I think I preferred Win 3.1. ;)
Well 3.11 for workgroups who's best windows and a most polished 16 bit OS of all time's. That whose the end of Windows era, 32 bit king whose Linux 3.xx (3.06~3.14) Kernel which still runs some enterprise servers (and it will stay more than enough for automative probably forever). Win 10 isn't particularly bad, it's still (after all this years and reaching the end of development stage) rough on the edge's.
Background OS noise (syncing background processes and such) is rather annoying thing and all do it appears bandwidth used isn't huge great amount of it is random mixed IO (generally rather hard on storage drives logic). If some of intermediate caller's makes a huge indexing requests (like in Amir's case Adobe) which fails and fails to compile in this case by silent kernel panic (which originally actually is a security measure introduced in mentioned Linux Kernel) because it can not comply full condition to enter hybernation shuts it self completely down to prevent future demage. Of course everything in intermediate buffers (such as disc cache) gets lost.
Of course getting an drive which handles random traffic IO's better and more robust (bigger chank of SLC and DRAM) to make it less visible it doesn't solve the loss data problem so there whose lot of fuss about numerous non vaolate srorage random memory devices which are all still in development stages.
There are of course monstrosities on the software front that are so ludicrous but that is really hard to explain (so I won't even try to do that). MB software from Asus/Gigabyte, Adobe service, Nero burning ROM just to name a few. Central problem of such is central integration hub a like for bunch of things you really don't want nor probably will need ever ending up with huge pile of bloat like 1GB just that you can read a pdf or control a RGB element (thank good CD's are mostly dead so at least you don't need Nero al that much anymore).

Increasing complexity of command's (instructions) and never ending introduction of new one's and more or less specialised accelerators even more contributes to difficulties of software development which lags more and more (time requirements for good written, optimised and checked code) behind actual silicone. With which coders community & end users ain't thrilled with to say at least (OoO execution CVE's, Specialised wide SIMD's and cetera).

Thing's probably won't get better, actually quite opposite so learn to relax and live with it, best regards.
 
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Music1969

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I suspect 99% of the people would have to reinstall windows and go through the hell that is to get all your apps and settings back to where they were.

Yep that's a full weekend job

Been there, done that. Switched to macOS + Ubuntu Desktop and never looked backed

(I have Win10 via Parallels on my mac but very rarely need to open it)
 

ZolaIII

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Good old times, ;)
Good old times where with PC/M and Amstrad Basic on Z80 not M$ copies of it and Intels dirty practices. Actually I take that as turn points which leed us to hire (no desktop OS and generally not a great software support for MIPS/RISC alike architectures).
 

storing

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Forgot to mention, wrt actual software development: it varies, but it's not like the competition is much better.

About 15 years ago I was developing a pretty specific cross-platform audio application. I like IDEs (mainly for the visual debugging, not so much for the text editing) but XCode was a serious mess back then, on linux you'd be stuck with Eclipse which was ok-ish at least if you manged to install and could live with having to fiddle with OS configuration, and Visual Studio was what it always has been: pretty good but quirks here and there.

These days things are definitely better with e.g. cmake for cross-platform projects, CLion, XCode, ... On the audio front: low latency was a piece of cake on Windows because ASIO. Similar on Mac OS. Linux: talk about wasting time. Nowadays I hear mixed things: some claim it's solved, other still complain about endless configuration pain. I assume the truth is somewhere in the middle depending on whether you happen to have the right OS flavor, hardware, and what you want to do exactly.

tldr; I could praise any OS and curse any OS depending on the specific task at hand, but there's no silver bullet and also not exactly one which is much better on all fronts than the other.
 

Berwhale

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And why on earth would you cause a system crash because a device won't go to sleep? And if you did crash, why not tell me so I know what is going on.

Powercfg can generate some very nice reports. Try running
Code:
powercfg /systempowerreport
and taking a look at the HTML report it spits out.

Code:
powercfg /lastwake
is also useful for finding out which device woke up your laptop ("maybe it's always waking up in your bag because you left your wireless mouse on" would be a common retort to some of our users :) )
 

abdo123

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I personally have been using Windows with little to no trouble for some reason. Yeah some times something like that happens. I usually just turn off all the startup service that I don't need from some Chinese windows optimizer(from Tencent). Adobe is indeed one of the worst since the old days(by now).

I tried to use Linux and installed hundreds of releases since 2014. But sadly it just doesn't work. But just last weekend after I watch some linux related video on YouTube I reminded myself about it's sad CentOS dead. Then I have some hope on Oracle linux again. I may try again in the future. But for now windows is so trouble free for me I don't really understand how it can be so drastically different for other people.

I don't like Apple in general but I have an iPad pro for notes it's very easy to use.

Honestly this has been my experience as well, even the Windows 11 Insider build has been pretty stable.

Unless I'm intentionally abusing the machine things are usually smooth.
 
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