9 ms·
I struggle with changing my perception of Microsoft. I still characterize them by their Halloween documents and efforts to destroy Netscape. I would recommend
by delish 11y ago
I struggle with changing my perception of Microsoft. I still characterize them by their Halloween documents and efforts to destroy Netscape.
I would recommend the Surface to friends or family, which is a recent change. But I would never use Microsoft products. And not just because I'd be giving up years of Linux folk-knowledge. Childishly, when I watch a youtube video of someone far more skilled than me programming in Windows, I recoil a little.
I strive to avoid bias; I don't want the change in perception to happen merely after people like me die. My bias is fallacious, but it holds like any other deeply-felt bias.
Hell, I only recently stopped calling them M$.
- throwawaykf05 11y ago> I still characterize them by their Halloween documents... Anytime somebody mentions this, all I hear is, "They said mean things about my ideology of choice".
- hga 11y agoThen you should actually skim them; while of course their presentation as "the Halloween documents" is propaganda, they're sufficiently damning in their own right. They financed a bogus lawfare campaign against Linux, although I doubt they knew it was utterly bogus (The SCO Group never actually owned any rights to UNIX(TM), and knew it before commencing the lawsuits.)
- throwawaykf05 11y agoYep, I've skimmed them (or at least, ESR's articles about them). Propaganda is a well-know weapon in business, only it is better known as "PR".
- NotOscarWilde 11y agoTo cool down some of the optimism in this comment section: Microsoft is still accepting cash for practically every Android phone made because of their patent threats, or did they change their ways in this regard as well? (I am genuinely curious whether this continues; I tried to google "microsoft android patent threats" but found only news articles from 2013/2014 about the practice.)
- sz4kerto 11y agohttp://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/google-and-microsoft-end-all-patent-litigation/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/google-and-micros... "Microsoft and Google are pleased to announce an agreement on patent issues. As part of the agreement, the companies will dismiss all pending patent infringement litigation between them, including cases related to Motorola Mobility. "
- simula67 11y agoThat article very specifically says that we still do not know whether Microsoft stopped the practice.
- avar 11y agoThose are just lawsuits between the two, wasn't the nature of the royalties for Android devices that they contacted OEMs and said "we have these patents, you better pay us or we'll sue you", and the OEMs paid up? That's different than cancelling outstanding lawsuits.
- pmelendez 11y agoFrom the announcement: "Separately, Google and Microsoft have agreed to collaborate on certain patent matters and anticipate working together in other areas in the future to benefit our customers." Last time I heard that was with Apple and was more like "I won't sue you for this and you won't sue me for that"
- LLWM 11y agoThat's how patent licensing works (albeit a comically overaggressive caricature). Do you fundamentally oppose the concept of patents or do you think Microsoft is doing something else wrong by asking to be paid license fees by competitors using their patents?
- avar 11y agoI don't hold either of those views. I was just pointing out that the parent comment by sz4kerto seems to not be relevant to the question asked by NotOscarWilde.
- codeulike 11y agoBut what they did to destroy netscape (bundling a competing app with some other thing) is now a tactic so common that it is taken for granted. I guess what made it scary is that they really did have a strong monopoly and it looked like they might dominate forever. So its not so much the tactics that offend people, but how much power they had when wielding those tactics. Seems to me like every big tech firm now makes the same sorts of moves Microsoft did in the 80s/90s, but because none of them dominate it all kindof just becomes accepted as the way to compete. But if one of them _did_ become as dominant as MS were, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't hold back.
- troels 11y agoI think that's very true. It was also a different environment back then - people affected were a much more homogenous group, so it's not surprising that we as a group identified strongly against what MS did. That fosters strong feelings. That said, is this all just another EMBRACE from Nadella? ;)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 11y agoOh, the tactics did offend people. And still do. But it was always a small number of people that cared about software freedom. The Microsoft consent decree was about restricting browser choice by shipping their own browser as default and claiming it was unremovable. By contrast, today Apple idevices not only ship with a browser but ban all competing browsers (via the ban on run-time compilation effectively banning JIT compilers). Apple have total control over every application that is allowed to ship on the platform and take a 30% cut. Google are responsible for Android, which is Free software to the absolute minimum they could get away with by law. It relies on millions of lines of GPL'd code, yet for most phones it's quite hard to get a rebuildable source tree that even includes all the kernel drivers, and if you do it may be prohibited from loading by a locked bootloader.
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- vegabook 11y agoI've taken a liking to a lot of what Microsoft is doing. I like the open source efforts, I like the RX libraries, the hardware looks great, to my mind the Metro interface is actually better than IOS/Android. I even like Windows 10. Problem is I could never go back to the DOS command prompt. I only moved to the *nix prompt about 6-7 years ago, and I could never go back. I know I can do cygwin etc but that still feels like a layer on top of something else that is awful.
- gecko 11y agoI think people with this attitude would be really pleasantly surprised by PowerShell and Cmder. Windows makes a very bad UNIX, but it has a great command-line story these days if you'll play with it on its own turf.
- harkyns_castle 11y agoPleasantly surprised by powershell? I don't know what to say. I have to essentially copy and paste fragments of things that work, it's so arcane. Its like writing 90's Java on a command line. Its revolting. Still to this day I can't even fscking grep.
- gecko 11y agoI suspect you haven't read the documentation or tried using PowerShell for any length of time. PowerShell may be bash-like, but it's not bash, does not try to be bash, and won't reward you if you treat it like bash. But it's very orthogonal, clean, and well documented. For your particular example: > help grep Name Category Module Synopsis ---- -------- ------ -------- Out-File Cmdlet Microsoft.PowerShell.U... Sends output to a file. Select-String Cmdlet Microsoft.PowerShell.U... Finds text in strings and files. Okay, so Select-String sounds really promising. Let's take a look. > help select-string NAME Select-String SYNOPSIS Finds text in strings and files. SYNTAX Select-String [-Pattern] <String[]> [-Path] <String[]> [-AllMatches] [-CaseSensitive] [-Context [<Int32[]>]] [-Encoding {unicode | utf7 | utf8 | utf32 | ascii | bigendianunicode | default | oem}] [-Exclude [<String[]>]] [-Include [<String[]>]] [-InformationAction {SilentlyContinue | Stop | Continue | Inquire | Ignore | Suspend}] [-InformationVariable [<System.String>]] [-List] [-NotMatch] [-Quiet] [-SimpleMatch] [<CommonParameters>] Most of those command flags seem really straightfoward to me. Can you be more specific about what was unclear to you? I'd be happy to help. EDIT: BTW, it's a bit annoying to type Select-String, so it'd be nice if it had an alias. Does it have one? Well, you can get aliases in PowerShell by typing alias. But that'll give you a wall of text; what you want to do is to quickly search for things that are aliased to Select-String. There are two ways to do this. First, you can pipe to a GUI that allows directly filtering the results: > alias | out-gridview Or, alternatively, we can figure out what objects alias gives us: > alias | select -first 1 | get-member Note that we've got a Definition field, and query on that: > alias | Where-Object { $_.definition -contains 'Select' } which is a long version of > alias | ? { $_.definition -contains 'Select' } And notice that Select-String is aliased to sls by default. Note that I can just reference the column by name, rather than going through some awk/cut fun. You might be annoyed that Select-String is not aliased to grep. While many commands actually do have multiple aliases to both DOS and Unix equivalents (e.g., Get-ChildItem is aliased to gci, dir, and ls, and Remove-Item has ri, rm, and del as aliases), Select-String works differently enough from grep that it's not a default alias so you're not confused.
- togusa 11y agoI'm an MSDN subscriber, write C# all day and am sitting in front of Win8.1, writing this in IE11 with a Lumia 640 next to me. They are still utter bastards and I sleep with one eye open. Currently the tally of bad stuff is pretty high: Patent wars against competitors, forced bundling agreements, lock in despite the open specification stuff which is mostly just wrong, being fucked over on audits and licensing agreement shuffling repeatedly, collaboration with NSA/PRISM, disregard for privacy, plain arrogance since Windows 8 the repeated termination of developer stacks (silverlight, WF3, AppFabric etc) that people built their entire products on. The marketing tactic of talking constantly about everything shiny drowns out these things going on behind the scenes. The press doesn't help this. If there's any advice I can part on people is not to get all mushy and happy about it and always keep that eye open.
- nileshtrivedi 11y agoDon't forget corruption of ISO over OOXML standards.
- harkyns_castle 11y agoPersonally, I'll never forgive them for their practices. They deliberately stifled competition, shafted developers, abused their position, and rubbed it in our faces. There's no coming back from that, and I'll gladly educate newcomers to IT on their ways. Let them die. The new CEO could be the second coming, you can't fix that cancerous attitude that is entrenched. They deserve to become obsolete, at the very least.
- loudmax 11y agoI just transitioned to a new job that uses Exchange for email, and it feels like the old Microsoft. The only way I've found to get Thunderbird to connect to Exchange's IMAP is by using a proprietary add-on. A lot of .doc and .xls files get passed around that I can't modify in LibreOffice without screwing up the formatting. The hardest part of getting work done on a Linux desktop isn't the drivers, it's interoperability with MS Office. So it is good that MS is been moving in the right direction, but there's still a lot of legacy crap holding back innovation.
- mariusmg 11y agoAaaa....why not use IMAP/POP3 ? If the server administrator only allows that dumb proprietary protocol, you can't really blame Microsoft there.
- tdkl 11y agoExchange isn't popular in Enterprise just because of email and to say "just use IMAP/POP" is showing that you're out of touch.
- tluyben2 11y agoAlthough I do not know why it is successful but you are right; mail is definitely not the reason why it is popular. But I don't think it is for the reasons you think it is popular either. Of all my 25-early 40 year old friends working in enterprises, exactly 0 people like it and they avoid it like the plague when they can. They like it slightly more than Sharepoint, but that's not saying much. To why it is popular still I would wager that's because enterprises just 'have it' and you have no other choice; you are forced to use it. But you were probably going to say 'collaboration' ?
- anon4 11y agoWhy not just run Windows in a VM (or Linux in a VM) and be happy?
- kailuowang 11y agoYou dont necessarily need to. I still use MS Windows from time to time and my perception is that fundamentally they still dont know how to write software properly: in windows 10, opening a folder full of large video files takes a painful long time, while all it needs to do is to list some file names. I understand that it must be trying to extract some extra "useful" information from those large files, but the keys is that it shouldnt block your UI from showing the basic stuff. In their outlook, if the network is having connection problem, the UI will become unresponsive. These might be silly easy bugs to fix but it exposed that fundamentally they still couldnt figure out how to separate things properly in software.
- pmelendez 11y ago> I understand that it must be trying to extract some extra "useful" information from those large files, but the keys is that it shouldnt block your UI from showing the basic stuff. That's weird, all the file-io operations in windows store apps are async for the very reason of not blocking the UI thread. How big was that folder? I'm geniuly curious.
- sfilipov 11y agoI think he refers to File Explorer (explorer.exe) which has nothing to do with Windows Store Apps.
- pmelendez 11y agoI know but it wasn't clear to me that he was using file explorer (I haven't seen the issue on none of my machines)
- ygra 11y agoExplorer is not a Windows Store app.
- pmelendez 11y agoI know but he didn't say he was using explorer to open the folder and inspect the files. I was guessing he must be using an app to show them since is the only dialog that's different (I have multi-gb video folders in my pc and haven't seen the issue). He did say he was using Win10 and the file dialog is back to be the same so my guess would be incorrect anyway.
- greggman 11y agoI guess you must think less of most game devs as pretty much all of them are on Windows? I suppose it's possible they feel the same way when they see someone on a platform with 2nd or 3rd class gpu support.
- anon4 11y agoThat's a lot of supposing for a class of developers who write for platforms without an OS, where you must set up your VM tables yourself and program the GPU manually.
- DrShephard 11y agoDo you hold Google to the same standards? Because some of their actions are exactly what people accuse Microsoft of: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-skyhook-emails-2011-5?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/google-skyhook-emails-2011-5?... http://www.androidauthority.com/google-speaks-up-on-the-aceralibaba-affair-115229/ http://www.androidauthority.com/google-speaks-up-on-the-acer...
- serge2k 11y ago> I strive to avoid bias do you? Doesn't really sound like it.
- aagha 11y agoI hated Windows 9x-anything. Win 7 was OK. Win 10 is great.
- shermanyo 11y agoLink for those who are unfamiliar / CBF googling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
- anon4 11y agoYou forgot the Direct3D vs OpenGL shenanigans that they were still trying as early as Vista. The fact that no open technology is ever good enough for Microsoft, the fact that whenever they took anything that could be remotely interoperable with anybody else, they applied embrace-extend-extinguish. The name "Office Open XML" which is just so close to sounding like "Open Office XML" and fool people into thinking it will have some interoperability with Open Office. The way they start new APIs and technologies and then abandon them when they stop being the latest and greatest (MFC, Silverlight). The way they push their own proprietary solution to everything.