[HN Gopher] A Microsoft team racing to catch bugs before they ha...
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       A Microsoft team racing to catch bugs before they happen
        
       Author : sogen
       Score  : 13 points
       Date   : 2022-08-03 21:25 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
        
       | tremon wrote:
       | > At Microsoft, we have everything from silicon to compilers to
       | the operating system
       | 
       | In what way does Microsoft "have silicon"? They don't own a fab,
       | FAFAIK. Do they design their own processors like Amazon does, or
       | is this simply referring to the amount of datacenters Microsoft
       | is operating for their Azure platform?
        
         | LeonTheremin wrote:
         | Xbox and Pluton, at least.
        
           | gigel82 wrote:
           | Also, technically the SQ* chips (like SQ1 used in Surface X)
           | are also Microsoft chips, though they look more like slightly
           | tweaked / rebranded Qualcomm devices.
        
       | iasay wrote:
       | Great job here.
       | 
       | But what about the rest of the platform? It's knee deep in layers
       | of crap accumulated over 20 years due to schizophrenic product
       | management. Nothing is finished. Everything is broken or limping
       | or painful to use. Every major release just adds another layer of
       | crud.
       | 
       | I want to come back to the platform but it hurts me. Every bloody
       | day I have to use anything Microsoft it is literally a
       | productivity draining nightmare.
        
         | LeonTheremin wrote:
        
           | iasay wrote:
           | What the fuck
        
             | tofuahdude wrote:
             | Whoa. That commenter's history is WILD! Most fun I've had
             | on HN all day.
        
               | iasay wrote:
               | That is at least 40dB over my level of insanity.
        
         | pathartl wrote:
         | I personally feel like Windows in the past 3-4 years has been
         | slowly unifying to at the very least be more consistent. Part
         | of this was the introduction of Windows Terminal, the rebuild
         | of Notepad, tweaks to Explorer, rebuild of Task Manager coming
         | in 22H2, and the huge overhaul to Settings which is slowly
         | rendering Control Panel obsolete.
        
           | blibble wrote:
           | notepad could be built by a smart 12 year old over a weekend
           | 
           | and a terminal is a pretty common single person open source
           | project
           | 
           | meanwhile the shell has something like 7 different styles of
           | context menu, with several new ones added with every major
           | release
        
           | iasay wrote:
           | These things are pretty much just bike shedding though in the
           | scale of the problems with Windows.
           | 
           | They are very easy to market as improvements though and MSFT
           | is entirely driven by marketing now rather than quality and
           | engineering.
        
           | azinman2 wrote:
           | That they have released any version of windows without 100%
           | consistency is itself an abomination. We're not even talking
           | about a nit, there are literally completely different
           | paradigms within Settings itself as you click around, and
           | that's just one example of many. Perhaps it's my Apple-bias,
           | but every time I go to use Windows I just go "wow how could
           | they say yup ship it?!"
        
             | robotnikman wrote:
             | extreme backwards compatability is my guess. There is
             | probably some ancient program a business is running
             | somewhere out there which depends on the control panel, or
             | that random button, being there for whatever reason.
        
       | givemeethekeys wrote:
       | "Isn't that what QA is for?"
        
         | muricula wrote:
         | In a sense, finding security bugs is a very specialized QA sub-
         | discipline, which often requires a far deeper understanding
         | about security than many QA engineers or developers possess.
         | However, there is also a part of that organization which does
         | feature work to systemically address the kinds of security
         | issues they find.
         | 
         | Also, many large organizations like MS don't have many QA
         | teams, preferring to push QA tasks onto developers, but still
         | need specialized security teams. If you dig into the deep
         | history of morse, they barely escaped being sacked when MS laid
         | off the QA org circa 2017.
         | 
         | (I used to work on that team, but now work at another company
         | doing a similar job)
        
       | jrm4 wrote:
       | "The Exxon Team Racing to Stop Oil Spills Before They Happen"
       | 
       | I mean, yes. That's what you were supposed to do all along and
       | failed a lot at. Hopefully it gets better.
        
       | aliqot wrote:
        
         | drewda wrote:
         | Eh, well, Microsoft Teams is so much better than Skype for
         | Business (originally known as Microsoft Lync). Now that was a
         | horrible video conference application!
        
         | smcleod wrote:
         | Yeah Teams is probably one of if not the worst pieces of
         | software I've had to use in the last 5~ years.
        
           | jimbob45 wrote:
           | They have the clout to hire the best engineers in the world
           | who could make fast native versions of Teams for each
           | platform and instead they hired the Healthcare.Gov team from
           | Oregon to write the garbage we currently have.
        
         | wozer wrote:
         | I think this is not about Teams. Probably more about security
         | critical backend code.
        
         | game-of-throws wrote:
         | This article isn't about the app called Microsoft Teams. It's
         | about a lowercase-T team of people.
        
           | [deleted]
        
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       (page generated 2022-08-03 23:01 UTC)