3 ms·

I'm very impressed with the scale of the project. I can definitely see both the short term and long term ramifications and huge huge huge potential savings. I

by virtue3 12y ago

I'm very impressed with the scale of the project. I can definitely see both the short term and long term ramifications and huge huge huge potential savings. I'm a bit curious to know what the shelf life on the OS choice is and how well it works. I believe redhat ran into this issue and adopted the "extended support" versions in order to address the concerns (the linux space tends to move _very_ quickly in directions and you can definitely be left out in the cold if you don't stay relatively current). All in all I doubt it's worse than the microsoft "you need to upgrade _now_" philosphy and the lack of "we don't break compatability" that used to be enjoyed in the heyday of the "Full M$ Stack".

virtue3 12y ago
Back with windows 95 Microsoft actually took backwards compatability very very seriously: An emphasis has been made by Microsoft on maintaining software backwards compatibility. To achieve this, when developing a new version of Windows, Microsoft sometimes had to implement workarounds to allow compatibility with third-party software that used the previous version's API in an undocumented or even (programmatically) illegal way. Raymond Chen, a Microsoft developer who works on the Windows API, has said: "I could probably write for months solely about bad things apps do and what we had to do to get them to work again (often in spite of themselves). Which is why I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure."[19]