Ask Paul: June 28 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here’s another great round of reader questions to carry us into the weekend, and into the end of June.

19H2 = 1903 + the new Microsoft Edge?

chrishilton1 asks:

Will 1909, 19H2, or whatever it’s called, be specifically aimed at releasing (cr)Edge onto Windows 10, given the mystery around what it is going to be?

That’s an interesting theory. And that’s all we really have right now, since Microsoft is not discussing this release in any official capacity.

I had previously offered up the possibility that 19H2 would basically be an “R2” or Service Pack-type release for 1903, basically that version plus all subsequent cumulative updates and app updates, but packaged together and serviced longer to businesses. Or, perhaps that it will also include some early 20H1 features that are ready and/or don’t have dependencies in that future release. Your idea maps nicely to either, assuming we believe that the new Edge will be “done” or in some good state by September. That seems both reasonable and plausible.

European travel tips

drjohnnyray asks:

My wife and I are going on our first trip to Europe next fall (Rome). As a frequent European traveler, any sage words of advice for the first timer??

Why, yes I do. 🙂 And congrats: We’re eager to get back to Rome ourselves. (We’ve only been once, in 2007.)

First, be sure to get the Rick Steves guidebook for Rome. Depending on when you travel, the current edition might be up-to-date; it was published in September 2018 and the next update arrived in October 2019. I strongly recommend following all of his advice.

I also would like to echo what a few readers responded with, which is that learning basic Italian phrases is key, though in Rome, most of the people you will interact with will speak English too. Expanding on that, be sure to understand local customs (and the Rick Steves book covers this). For example, what the tipping policies are for restaurants, taxis, and so on. Don’t be an ignorant American and tip 20 percent if the expectation is for minimal or no tipping. (They get paid a living wage there, unlike in the U.S.)

Also echoing another bit of reader feedback, be careful about pickpockets and scams in Rome. This is the only place I’ve ever been pickpocketed in all of my trips to Europe. (But not my only experience with theft; I had an iPhone stolen as part of a scam in Lisbon as well.) There are ways to prevent or lessen the risks of pickpocketing, such as using a money belt and not putting all of your cash/cards in one place. If the weather is right, a jacket with internal pockets is ideal.

Don’t be put off by the pickpocket/scam stuff. Rome is amazing, from the food to the sights to the people. You’re going to love it.

Dreaming in code

WP7Mango asks:

When programming or coding, what language do you actually think in? The reason I ask is that your superb programming articles got me thinking about how programming languages are in some ways similar to normal spoken/written languages, and how we can be multi-lingual but do all our thinking in one language (probably the native one).

So, for me, although I am proficient in C# and JavaScript, I still think in Visual Basic (or pseudo-code BASIC). VB is what I always default to if I need to do something quickly, or explain some computer problem to someone. For example, when thinking about a loop structure, I will think in terms of “FOR and NEXT” or “WHILE”, but then I have to “translate” in my head into the JavaScript equivalent. So, I’m genuinely curious what programming language you think in? And does your programming-thinking have any influence on your real-world thinking? I’m wondering if programming influences our personalities in some way…

Interesting.

I’ve never considered this before, and I will be going over what my own experiences are with software development and programming languages as that series progresses. But I think you’re touching on a topic similar to one that’s bothered me for a while. And that is that the proliferation of C-like languages, which some people call “curly-brace languages” (though that’s now out of date) is in some ways more confusing than it is helpful. For example, where a language like C++, which builds on top of C and is (mostly) a true superset of C seems natural, languages like Java, C#, and so are only C-like and it’s the details that will catch you up.

Put another (even more confusing and perhaps less accurate way), English is a lot like C++ in that it is based on a lot of other things (and for your programming geeks is thus even more like C++ because of its multiple inheritance), whereas languages that are similarly old and similar to each other—like Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian (or whatever) are just, well, similar.

Maybe that’s not the smartest way to put it. I don’t know.

Anyway, I started with BASIC, and BASIC played a major role in my life, from my books to my use of VBScript, ASP, and Access (and then SQL Server) to create an early and primitive CMS for WinInfo (and other sites) in the mid-1990s, long before this kind of thing was popularized and common. And so you’d think that’s where my brain would be at. But … it’s not. I think it’s just been a while, and like riding a bike, I could pick it up again easily. (I’ll find out soon, actually.)

So, I guess my brain is really in a C or “C-like” mode because most of my past decade and a half, during which I was not a developer and only dabbled in this stuff, was spent studying things like .NET, C#, Objective-C (for iOS development), Swift (ditto), and Java (for Android development), plus Flutter, which uses Dart, which is yet another C-like language. (There are probably one thousand of them.)

In doing research for a coming set of articles about OOP, C++, and MFC, I was trying to jam a 15-year old MFC application into a modern Visual Studio that does not let you create an “empty” MFC app project, as it does for a Windows Desktop app project. And this required me to dig up long-lost understandings of how these types of apps are linked, how the compiler in Visual Studio works, and so on. And … I had a real breakthrough in that I actually got this thing to work. The result, a basic “Hello, MFC” app, is about five articles away from publication given all the other stuff I know I’m going to publish first. And it won’t be as exciting to read about as it was for me to figure it out.

Let me see what happens when I get to Visual Basic. 🙂 I may be right there with you.

Keto

SeattleMike asks:

Paul, I’m 18 months into the Keto lifestyle and loving it! How is yours coming along? Any future “health hacking” articles to look forward to? Thanks!

I can’t claim to be keto at this point. I’m mostly just low-carb. I go back and forth on the particulars of the diet, but I suspect I’m usually at 20 to 40 net grams of carbs per day, as opposed to under 20 when I’m on full keto. I did one month of keto earlier this year, and then I’ve been alternating since. (Sometime keto during the week, low carb on weekends, etc.). Also trying not to stress over it if I want an occasional piece of pizza or something. You gotta live too.

Health-wise, the big change I’ve made this year is to start exercising, which I’d not done beyond walking since we moved to Pennsylvania. When I’m not traveling, I actually exercise every day, but with all the travel I’ve had recently, I’ve averaged six days a week for the past month or five weeks. I alternate between upper body, lower body, and cardio, on subsequent days but would like to get to a place where I’m working out and doing cardio on the same day at least five times per week. But it will take a while, and this summer’s home swap will interrupt things to some degree.

I’ve been working out since late March, so I passed the three-month point last week. It won’t help me (or anyone else) lose weight, but it was overdue and is good for many other reasons.

Gates and responsibility

hrlngrv asks:

Tangent on the Bill Gates articles this week. When Gates retired as CEO he remained chairman of the board and Chief Software Architect. How much responsibility for Longhorn belongs to Gates vs Ballmer? Did Ballmer really have a free hand when he first became CEO?

Ballmer divulged (last year, I think) that the first few years of his time as CEO were overly-stressful because Gates couldn’t stop interfering and trying to do his old job and that these issues led to a split in their friendship. Now, they rarely even talk to each other anymore.

But regardless of that, Gates was absolutely responsible for Longhorn. As Chief Software Architect, he was the most senior technical person overseeing the project, and he was much more technical, from a software architecture/development standpoint, than either Ballmer (the CEO) or Jim Allchin (who then ran Windows).

More generally, Gates was responsible for the culture that led to Longhorn even happening in the first place. There’s a great deal of hubris required to think that something that ambitious was even possible, let alone viable or necessary. And by the time Allchin figured out the project was too big to work, it was already years late and Gates had no choice but to allow him to start over from scratch. He also had no choice but to ask for Allchin to leave the company as soon as the resulting product, Windows Vista, was completed. Which led to Steven Sinofsky and the insanity of Windows 8. Which was also ultimately Gates’ fault.

By the way, it’s very interesting to compare how Apple steadily evolved Mac OS X during this time period, and how that company, while doing so, starting adding features like instant system search (in Tiger) that Microsoft had been flailing around trying to get working for years. I didn’t like Apple’s marketing at the time. But that division was better led and better run than Microsoft/Windows was at the time. They got it done.

Living with Linux

anderb asks:

Have you ever considered doing a ‘Living With Linux Challenge’ where you install a popular linux distribution, say Linux Mint Cinnamon, and try to get by on it for, say (and let’s not get too ambitious here), two weeks? I think it could be very amusing. Not so much for you but for your readers.

LOL.

So, yes, I think about doing this kind of thing a lot. Also, about doing this kind of thing with Chromebook as well. I probably will do so.

Embrace and ignore

john.boufford asks:

What are your thoughts on Microsoft not allowing its workers to use Grammarly? I find it a useful service, but could I be compromising company information?

I found this to be perplexing when I first heard about it, but not as perplexing as the fact that Grammarly is a much better spelling/grammar checker than what’s available in Word and other Microsoft products. It seemed to just come out of nowhere.

But if the worry is that Grammarly is cloud-hosted and thus the information you’re writing could be intercepted and stolen, that at least makes some sense. As a reader noted, Job One for most employers is ensuring that no critical internal data is compromised.

I love Grammarly and I still very much recommend it. I find it amazing on a daily basis how many things it catches that Word didn’t, when I paste a Word-generated article into a web form.

UNIX vs. NT

MartinusV2 asks:

In your “Programming Windows” series. You never mentioned that Microsoft had at that time bought a Unix license. It was called Microsoft Xenix. We tried the OS briefly on an AT-286 when I was doing my programming diploma. It was very good. If we play the “what if”, do you think that Microsoft should have stayed with a Unix based OS and build a Windows shell on top of it instead of making Windows NT from scratch?

I’m not sure if Microsoft Xenix will ever come up in Programming Windows as there are so few overlaps between it and Windows beyond a bit of Xenix support in a few early Microsoft developer tools. But I do know that it was reviled for being resource hungry and was never popular, and that Microsoft dropped it when Windows took off.

As far as adopting and extending UNIX, I think that would/could have happened if UNIX wasn’t so big and heavy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And it is a matter of history that Dave Cutler became disenchanted with DEC when they refused to let him create the platform that became NT and ended up at Microsoft. At the time, NT was a real hedging of bets: Microsoft saw that 32-bits was the future, and it wanted something more sophisticated than DOS/Windows, something that could be, over time, superior to both UNIX and OS/2, and something that was portable (could be brought to non-Intel chipsets should a superior alternative emerge).

Ultimately, NT was Cutler’s/Microsoft’s answer/retort to UNIX, and as we discussed briefly on Windows Weekly this past week, I think history now shows two things. That Microsoft successfully managed the transition to 32-bits with both DOS/Windows and NT, successfully managed the transition to all NT and then to 64-bits, and … maybe never really defeated UNIX. For example, Linux is something that Microsoft might have acquired/used, much like it did with QDOS/MS-DOS in the early 1980s, had NT never happened. That Microsoft is starting to use Linux today is interesting.

I will touch on NT (and OS/2) more in the Programming Windows series for sure.

Software diversity vs. monoculture

MartinusV2 also asks:

After watching your rant about how bad Microsoft was with competitors in this week episode of Windows Weekly, what if Microsoft at that time, was like the new Microsoft is today, do you think we would have had, even now, the best software ecosystem and more diversity of software today? I had a deep pinch when you mentioned Quattro Pro, Turbo Pascal (my beloved programming environment with Turbo Vision, VROOMM and Paradox Engine).

It’s impossible to know what would have happened. But what I tried to communicate on the show, and what I feel to be the case, is that the diversity we now see in personal computing platforms would have happened earlier if Microsoft had not illegally established and defended a monopoly product in Windows, driving away competitors and their superior products and services in the process. In fact, it was this type of diversity that Microsoft destroyed in the 1990s.

We’ll never know how much Microsoft held back innovation and progress because of this abuse, what could have happened sooner or better. But what we do know is what happened when that power was stripped from Microsoft: The rise of the web and Google, the rise of mobile devices and Apple, the rise of e-commerce and Amazon, and the rise of social networks and Facebook.

That of all these things have been allowed to grow cancer-like into their own abusive monopolies is, of course, problematic, but it’s finally being addressed. More important, I think, is that no one company lords over the entire industry as Microsoft did previously. Diversity is key to both the health of the industry and to the quality of the products and services we’re offered.