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How Microsoft Built, and Is Still Building, Windows 10
An anonymous reader writes with this Venturebeat story about how Windows 10 is different from previous versions because of the way it was designed, including 15 public preview builds, and how much work is still being done. Windows 10 for PCs arrived two weeks ago. Thankfully, we don't need to wait years to say this will be a Microsoft operating system release like no other. The most obvious clue is not the fact that Windows 10 was installed on more than 14 million devices in 24 hours, that you can get it for cheap or upgrade to it for free, nor even that it ships with a digital assistant and a proper browser. No, the big deal here is that Microsoft is turning its OS into a service, and that means as you read these words, it's still being built. For the next few years, we'll be getting not just Windows 10 updates and patches, but new improvments and features. This is possible because Microsoft built this version very differently from all its previous releases.
Well no, it's called slashdot (/.) but you do know where that comes from right?
Well I do, but you might not - it was intended as a joke to make the site name hard to read out, i.e. h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slashdot-dot-org.
Really? Linux can do this?
Yes, any asshole can do it at home.
So here we have Mr. Linux and he can setup groups and all of a sudden the "freetard" ring gets one build and the "It's GNU/Linux damn it" ring gets a different build, and the "I still want to run the 2.3 kernel" ring gets an older build? No, Linux CAN'T do that.
Who told you that? Of course it can. I can do it right here at home without even needing a distribution to do it for me. I make my own packages, using the same tools the distribution maintainers use. I put them in a directory, or in a web-accessible directory on another host, and add one line to sources.list or one one-line file (maybe two lines, comments are good) to /etc/sources.list.d/ and bango, I get debian twiddled with my own packages.
It is ridiculous to claim that Linux can do this.
Unless, of course, you have any experience with Linux. Then you've probably done it yourself, and you know how easy it is to do.
You can do the same thing trivially with gentoo with overlays. You create your own tree, overlay it onto the official tree, and bango. You get whatever you put into your tree. I presume you can do the same with rpm-based distributions, but I hates them my precious, so I use something else.
If only you knew anything about Linux or Unix, you might have something useful to add here.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"