7 ms·

There was a tombstone of Gates during hackers in progress (hip97) iirc. Shows you how much he and windows was loved. Today’s microsoft is forced to play nice.

kragen 4y ago
github just removed git: urls from their web ui so it no longer tells you how to make a clone you can push from using standard git it's been replaced with instructions for using their own gh cli tool (which, however, is also free software) for example on any github project page, https://github.com/username/projectname https://github.com/username/projectname, click on the "code ↓" button in the top right; the "local" tab on the left has a "clone" tab with 'https' and 'github cli' subtabs. the git@github.com: url you can use with standard git has been removed i think this is a change within the last month embrace, extend, and extinguish is alive and well
- Scaevolus 4y ago
  You have to be logged into github for the SSH clone tab to appear-- if they don't know your pubkey you can't connect using the SSH protocol. Git can push over HTTPS, too.
  - kragen 4y ago
    aha, that wasn't previously the case, thanks for the correction whether i'm logged in in my browser has nothing to do with whether my ssh client has access to an authorized private key
    - zdragnar 4y ago
      Given the number of users who are novices to both git and ssh and all the rest, and also given that the UI doesn't really have room for "teaching" (it's already a popup, so adding another popup would be pretty ugly), I think it is a fairly reasonable change. Clearly, more people were confused by the original than outraged about the current implementation... I don't even recall the change being made.
    - zerocrates 4y ago
      The heuristic for Github though is that the vast majority of people visiting a repository page who aren't logged in to Github on that browser don't have an authorized private key. It makes complete sense to present only options for anonymous checkouts to anonymous users. Long ago they used to push SSH as the "right" way to pull repositories (I still almost exclusively use SSH), but their change to recommending HTTPS instead by default is by now quite old: it's been the case for many years. Other related things have changed more recently: Github doesn't allow git:// urls anymore (but HTTPS still allows anonymous checkouts), and when doing authenticated HTTPS, you now need to provide a token instead of your password. The git:// protocol, to my recollection, doesn't support authentication at all. If you've ever been able to push to git:// URLs on Github, it's news to me.
      - kragen 4y ago
        i wasn't talking about git:// urls and i think that removing them was probably a good idea, for the reasons you describe, but also because they didn't have any way to stymie mitm attacks but it seems like my original comment was incorrect in a couple of different important ways, and i appreciate people having pointed that out
    - robinsonb5 4y ago
      This may have something to do with one of my other pet hates - projects with submodules using git:// urls. If you don't use SSH keys for github you can't do a "git submodule update --init" without first changing the submodule urls in .git/config to https:// https:// style.
    - Denvercoder9 4y ago
      FYI if you don't want to manually convert to a SSH URL, you can use a insteadOf setting in your gitconfig to make git do it automatically: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#Documentation/git-config.txt-urlltbasegtinsteadOf https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#Documentation/git-config...
    - legobmw99 4y ago
      It seems that this has been the case for years, at least going from the (obviously logged-out) archive.org saves of the Linux repo: https://web.archive.org/web/20180115003453/https://github.com/torvalds/linux https://web.archive.org/web/20180115003453/https://github.co...
      - kragen 4y ago
        i appreciate the additional correction; perhaps i was looking at github mostly while logged in previously
- Kab1r 4y ago
  I don't think this is true
  - kragen 4y ago
    see correction in other subthread
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > embrace, extend, and extinguish is alive and well ??? you can clone Github projects and move them on every other git repository you want if Github removed the support for git, Github would be dead in a week. Not only because git is literally in their name, but because every programmer tool that deals with code (editors, IDEs, etc.) has embedded support for git, the protocol, not git the Github version of the protocol. Remove interoperability and you killed the golden goose. At MS are not that stupid.
  - kragen 4y ago
    if www browsers had removed support for ftp, browsers would have been dead in a week, in 01998 but because they waited until last year, removing that interoperability did not significantly affect their dominance as a way of accessing the internet
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      > but because they waited until last year FTP died long ago as a protocol, it wasn't killed by some corporations trying to embrace and extend, but by better protocols (SFTP, SCP, HTTP(S) etc.) also FTP created a lot of issues behind NAT
      - kragen 4y ago
        there are still ftp servers and there is still a substantial information that is only accessible through ftp, however lame the protocol design is wrt nat i would say that nat created a lot of issues with ftp
        peoplefromibiza 4y ago
        > wrt nat i would say that nat created a lot of issues with ftp let me rephrase it. FTP behind NAT had a lot of issues. But the protocol was never designed to be accessed by a WEB browser, that were limited to read only access. The best way to access FTP is through an FTP client. I don't necessarily agree with the new wave of browser security at all costs, like HTTPS everywhere, but FTP clients are far from being hard to find. > there is still a substantial information that is only accessible through ftp can you point me to an example? I haven't encountered that problem since the end of the 90s. The only instance I can recall is upgrading the firmware of home routers/modems using TFTP.
ThrowawayR2 4y ago
If Microsoft hadn't existed, everyone would be bitching just the same about whichever tech titan would have formed in their absence and erecting tombstones of their founders. It's not as if any of the other wannabes jockeying for power in that era would have had any hesitation in using their dominance anti-competitively either if they had gotten it. Even a certain scrappy don't-be-evil business that hackers were cheerleading at the time didn't manage to resist the lure of leveraging their market dominance.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  The question is whether an omnidominant platform like Microsoft's would have arisen in the first place. While the current Android/Apple situation isn't ideal, it's certainly better than only one of the two. I don't think it's a forgone conclusion that a "Microsoft-esque" monopoly would have happened.
  - icelancer 4y ago
    For as bad as Microsoft was/is, imagine if Oracle filled that role.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      For whatever it worths, oracle has been spectacularly and surprisingly good at shepherding Java since the takeover, they held onto almost the whole core team from Sun (which is not a common thing with takeovers) and the platform is advancing faster then ever (and not in a haphazard way).
    - hinkley 4y ago
      Mercifully, I don't have to worry about Larry Ellison every day of the week. He's not a 'oh god what has he done now' sort. The good thing about Larry is as shitty as his bag of tricks is, it doesn't change much. What people hated about Microsoft is that they innovated on fucking other companies over and putting them out of business. There would not have been 'a different Microsoft'. It was Gates and Ballmer and friends that did that. Paul Allen got sick and then split with Microsoft to do pretty much completely different things for the rest of his life. Not that people have good things to say in Seattle about his behavior as landlord.
steve1977 4y ago
> Today’s microsoft is forced to play nice. And looking at the success of Visual Studio Code and GitHub, people actually fall for it.
- kaba0 4y ago
  Every big enough company is a paperclip optimizer. So just look at the incentives. It turns out that playing good citizen and profiting off an easy to use cloud is better business today than desktop is.
- 7speter 4y ago
  Plenty of old Microsoft in the Xbox/gaming division, we just aren’t seeing it all yet.
ThrowAgain 4y ago
Funny how all my "nerdy" friends love Gates now. I guess 100B$+ is enough to afford PR team that can convince public you are no longer "more evil than satan himself".
- elevaet 4y ago
  Well, Gates is absolutely terrible at PR and doesn't tick any of the boxes of being chic, unless it's some kind of so uncool that he's cool kind of thing. Despite this and more importantly despite his reputation in business and the often laughable products MS produced, his tremendous philanthropy really changed my perspective on him. In a world where there are mega-billionaires, he's my least unfavourite. He's doing good things with his money like eradicating malaria and funding bleeding edge climate tech. He's pretty outstanding wrt how he spends his money.
  - ThrowAgain 4y ago
    Eh, I would say he puts a lot of effort intro creating image of benevolent nerd philantropist. Point in case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hnZJIRd6Qw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hnZJIRd6Qw There must have been a team of people dedicated to carefully crafting this video, creating props, there's even a dozen or so actors there (each in the background for just a few seconds). It looks like someone put a lot of effort into this and it surely consumed thousands of dollars (my uneducated guess is somewhere in 10-100k$ range). To what end other than working on his personal brand? Speaking of malaria, after googling for 3 minutes it seems he spent around 2B$ on it. Does it really matter? Yes and no. Maybe it had impact on people's lives, but given Gates' net value is 100B$+, giving away a billion or two does not matter. It will not affect his quality of life in any significant way. He could give away a few dozen billions more and still will spend rest of his life living in luxury that I could only dream off. Sure, better to fight malaria than buy another yacht, but still, it's easy decision to make when you have that much money.
    - elevaet 4y ago
      Can't fault him on hiring a crew to craft his videos. He has better things to do with his time. Wouldn't you outsource that if you were in his position? My 2 mins of googling came up with more like 3.6B$ on malaria, but even 2B$ is a shit-ton of money. I certainly haven't donated 2% of my net value to malaria (and it's only on the order of 1/10000 of his!). Malaria rates are down around 30% since 2010, thanks in part to Gates. He's likely saved thousands to hundreds of thousands of lives. Malaria is just one part of his philanthropy. I'd love to see the numbers for Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. It would be great to all billionaires follow suit with this kind of "easy decision".

kragen 4y ago

github just removed git: urls from their web ui so it no longer tells you how to make a clone you can push from using standard git it's been replaced with instructions for using their own gh cli tool (which, however, is also free software) for example on any github project page, https://github.com/username/projectname https://github.com/username/projectname, click on the "code ↓" button in the top right; the "local" tab on the left has a "clone" tab with 'https' and 'github cli' subtabs. the git@github.com: url you can use with standard git has been removed i think this is a change within the last month embrace, extend, and extinguish is alive and well

Scaevolus 4y ago
You have to be logged into github for the SSH clone tab to appear-- if they don't know your pubkey you can't connect using the SSH protocol. Git can push over HTTPS, too.
- kragen 4y ago
  aha, that wasn't previously the case, thanks for the correction whether i'm logged in in my browser has nothing to do with whether my ssh client has access to an authorized private key
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    Given the number of users who are novices to both git and ssh and all the rest, and also given that the UI doesn't really have room for "teaching" (it's already a popup, so adding another popup would be pretty ugly), I think it is a fairly reasonable change. Clearly, more people were confused by the original than outraged about the current implementation... I don't even recall the change being made.
  - zerocrates 4y ago
    The heuristic for Github though is that the vast majority of people visiting a repository page who aren't logged in to Github on that browser don't have an authorized private key. It makes complete sense to present only options for anonymous checkouts to anonymous users. Long ago they used to push SSH as the "right" way to pull repositories (I still almost exclusively use SSH), but their change to recommending HTTPS instead by default is by now quite old: it's been the case for many years. Other related things have changed more recently: Github doesn't allow git:// urls anymore (but HTTPS still allows anonymous checkouts), and when doing authenticated HTTPS, you now need to provide a token instead of your password. The git:// protocol, to my recollection, doesn't support authentication at all. If you've ever been able to push to git:// URLs on Github, it's news to me.
    - kragen 4y ago
      i wasn't talking about git:// urls and i think that removing them was probably a good idea, for the reasons you describe, but also because they didn't have any way to stymie mitm attacks but it seems like my original comment was incorrect in a couple of different important ways, and i appreciate people having pointed that out
  - robinsonb5 4y ago
    This may have something to do with one of my other pet hates - projects with submodules using git:// urls. If you don't use SSH keys for github you can't do a "git submodule update --init" without first changing the submodule urls in .git/config to https:// https:// style.
  - Denvercoder9 4y ago
    FYI if you don't want to manually convert to a SSH URL, you can use a insteadOf setting in your gitconfig to make git do it automatically: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#Documentation/git-config.txt-urlltbasegtinsteadOf https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#Documentation/git-config...
  - legobmw99 4y ago
    It seems that this has been the case for years, at least going from the (obviously logged-out) archive.org saves of the Linux repo: https://web.archive.org/web/20180115003453/https://github.com/torvalds/linux https://web.archive.org/web/20180115003453/https://github.co...
    - kragen 4y ago
      i appreciate the additional correction; perhaps i was looking at github mostly while logged in previously
Kab1r 4y ago
I don't think this is true
- kragen 4y ago
  see correction in other subthread
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> embrace, extend, and extinguish is alive and well ??? you can clone Github projects and move them on every other git repository you want if Github removed the support for git, Github would be dead in a week. Not only because git is literally in their name, but because every programmer tool that deals with code (editors, IDEs, etc.) has embedded support for git, the protocol, not git the Github version of the protocol. Remove interoperability and you killed the golden goose. At MS are not that stupid.
- kragen 4y ago
  if www browsers had removed support for ftp, browsers would have been dead in a week, in 01998 but because they waited until last year, removing that interoperability did not significantly affect their dominance as a way of accessing the internet
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > but because they waited until last year FTP died long ago as a protocol, it wasn't killed by some corporations trying to embrace and extend, but by better protocols (SFTP, SCP, HTTP(S) etc.) also FTP created a lot of issues behind NAT
    - kragen 4y ago
      there are still ftp servers and there is still a substantial information that is only accessible through ftp, however lame the protocol design is wrt nat i would say that nat created a lot of issues with ftp
      - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
        > wrt nat i would say that nat created a lot of issues with ftp let me rephrase it. FTP behind NAT had a lot of issues. But the protocol was never designed to be accessed by a WEB browser, that were limited to read only access. The best way to access FTP is through an FTP client. I don't necessarily agree with the new wave of browser security at all costs, like HTTPS everywhere, but FTP clients are far from being hard to find. > there is still a substantial information that is only accessible through ftp can you point me to an example? I haven't encountered that problem since the end of the 90s. The only instance I can recall is upgrading the firmware of home routers/modems using TFTP.

ThrowawayR2 4y ago

If Microsoft hadn't existed, everyone would be bitching just the same about whichever tech titan would have formed in their absence and erecting tombstones of their founders. It's not as if any of the other wannabes jockeying for power in that era would have had any hesitation in using their dominance anti-competitively either if they had gotten it. Even a certain scrappy don't-be-evil business that hackers were cheerleading at the time didn't manage to resist the lure of leveraging their market dominance.

Beltalowda 4y ago
The question is whether an omnidominant platform like Microsoft's would have arisen in the first place. While the current Android/Apple situation isn't ideal, it's certainly better than only one of the two. I don't think it's a forgone conclusion that a "Microsoft-esque" monopoly would have happened.
- icelancer 4y ago
  For as bad as Microsoft was/is, imagine if Oracle filled that role.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    For whatever it worths, oracle has been spectacularly and surprisingly good at shepherding Java since the takeover, they held onto almost the whole core team from Sun (which is not a common thing with takeovers) and the platform is advancing faster then ever (and not in a haphazard way).
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Mercifully, I don't have to worry about Larry Ellison every day of the week. He's not a 'oh god what has he done now' sort. The good thing about Larry is as shitty as his bag of tricks is, it doesn't change much. What people hated about Microsoft is that they innovated on fucking other companies over and putting them out of business. There would not have been 'a different Microsoft'. It was Gates and Ballmer and friends that did that. Paul Allen got sick and then split with Microsoft to do pretty much completely different things for the rest of his life. Not that people have good things to say in Seattle about his behavior as landlord.

steve1977 4y ago

> Today’s microsoft is forced to play nice. And looking at the success of Visual Studio Code and GitHub, people actually fall for it.

kaba0 4y ago
Every big enough company is a paperclip optimizer. So just look at the incentives. It turns out that playing good citizen and profiting off an easy to use cloud is better business today than desktop is.
7speter 4y ago
Plenty of old Microsoft in the Xbox/gaming division, we just aren’t seeing it all yet.

ThrowAgain 4y ago

Funny how all my "nerdy" friends love Gates now. I guess 100B$+ is enough to afford PR team that can convince public you are no longer "more evil than satan himself".

elevaet 4y ago
Well, Gates is absolutely terrible at PR and doesn't tick any of the boxes of being chic, unless it's some kind of so uncool that he's cool kind of thing. Despite this and more importantly despite his reputation in business and the often laughable products MS produced, his tremendous philanthropy really changed my perspective on him. In a world where there are mega-billionaires, he's my least unfavourite. He's doing good things with his money like eradicating malaria and funding bleeding edge climate tech. He's pretty outstanding wrt how he spends his money.
- ThrowAgain 4y ago
  Eh, I would say he puts a lot of effort intro creating image of benevolent nerd philantropist. Point in case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hnZJIRd6Qw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hnZJIRd6Qw There must have been a team of people dedicated to carefully crafting this video, creating props, there's even a dozen or so actors there (each in the background for just a few seconds). It looks like someone put a lot of effort into this and it surely consumed thousands of dollars (my uneducated guess is somewhere in 10-100k$ range). To what end other than working on his personal brand? Speaking of malaria, after googling for 3 minutes it seems he spent around 2B$ on it. Does it really matter? Yes and no. Maybe it had impact on people's lives, but given Gates' net value is 100B$+, giving away a billion or two does not matter. It will not affect his quality of life in any significant way. He could give away a few dozen billions more and still will spend rest of his life living in luxury that I could only dream off. Sure, better to fight malaria than buy another yacht, but still, it's easy decision to make when you have that much money.
  - elevaet 4y ago
    Can't fault him on hiring a crew to craft his videos. He has better things to do with his time. Wouldn't you outsource that if you were in his position? My 2 mins of googling came up with more like 3.6B$ on malaria, but even 2B$ is a shit-ton of money. I certainly haven't donated 2% of my net value to malaria (and it's only on the order of 1/10000 of his!). Malaria rates are down around 30% since 2010, thanks in part to Gates. He's likely saved thousands to hundreds of thousands of lives. Malaria is just one part of his philanthropy. I'd love to see the numbers for Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. It would be great to all billionaires follow suit with this kind of "easy decision".