
Welcome to the new decade - tswicegood
http://twitter.com/phil_nash/status/21159419598
======
raganwald
Amusing, but only until you really think about it.

Java was always a restricted platform. Sun's lawsuit with Microsoft
established that.

Google is hypocritical, but they haven't even come close to the "evil" of
Microsoft in the glory days of "The Evil Empire." Microsoft used to have
secret monopoly agreements with people. Google are openly disclosing their
agreements and taking the flak.

Apple isn't a monopoly unless your definition of monopoly is "Controlling
their own platform." Do they monopolize the Internet? No. Do they monopolize
the market for phones? No. For phones that can access the Internet? No. Apple
doesn't hold a monopoly and definitely hasn't done anything to abuse their so-
called monopoly.

For example, MSFT shipped IE for free and killed Netscape. Apple shipped
iTunes for free on the Mac and killed... Who exactly? Not even the celebrated
Panic was killed as a company, just one product for a niche computer. Now
Apple won't allow Flash on the iPad. Let me know when Adobe closes its doors.

Finally, the word "underdog" is not synonymous with the phrase "also-ran."
Does anyone really think the bully that has gotten fat and can no longer beat
up the new kid in the neighbourhood is now an underdog?

~~~
gaius
Yes but Microsoft's motto was always "a computer on every desktop". Nothing in
there about "don't be evil".

 _For example, MSFT shipped IE for free and killed Netscape_

I was working in the industry at the time, and I know exactly what killed
Netscape. My then employer spent substantial amount of money, on behalf of
itself and its clients, on Netscape server products. It sounds unthinkable
now, but there really was a time when people would spend 6 or 7 figures on
web, or mail, or directory server software. Version 2 of Enterprise Server to
this day I still say was one of the best webservers ever written. Version 3
was a dog, and we, along with everyone else, went elsewhere.

Remember that Netscape Navigator was always free for most users...

~~~
raganwald
Like I said, Google is hypocritical. But still not even close to Microsoft's
behaviour during its glory days. I dislike a number of choices the company has
made, but there's only one thing it has done that I consider really evil. And
no, the Net Neutrality proposal isn't it.

~~~
andreyf
_there's only one thing it has done that I consider really evil. And no, the
Net Neutrality proposal isn't it._

Curious: what is it? Android? ;)

~~~
praptak
Kowtowing to China?

~~~
parallax7d
The information sharing agreement with the NSA?

~~~
ay
IPO ?

------
bearwithclaws
It reminds me of a quote by Chris Rock few years back: “You know the world is
going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black
guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup,
France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war,
and the three most powerful men in America are named 'Bush', 'Dick', and
'Colon.' Need I say more?”

------
jlgosse
I mostly agree with Phil, but I still wouldn't call Microsoft an underdog. I
mean, I recently fell in love with OSX, but my opinion still stands that
Windows 7 is f'ing amazing, and still outsells (or is at least on more
machines than) OSX by an IMMENSELY large proportion.

~~~
sjs
There are more than a few of us who don't consider a machine suitable for real
work unless it ships with a derivative of the bourne shell and makes it easy
to run the same software we use on our servers.

My process to get up and running on a new machine is to change the keyboard
layout to dvorak and run `wget -qO - bit.ly/newbox | sh`. On Windows I have to
do everything in a Linux VM anyway, because I hate messing around with cygwin,
coLinux, etc.

I know a lot of people will disagree with this, but to me a Windows box is a
glorified Xbox with a web browser. Sure people work with them but unless
you're using VS I don't really see the point of using Windows for development.

edit: I know I'm not representative of the larger population but I think there
are more people switching away from Windows than to it these days.

~~~
mambodog
Thing is, for a lot of people, a computer for 'work' purely means one on which
they have first class Office (docx, xlsx, pptx) compatibility at the lowest
possible price. Even Office:Mac is pricey, and not 100% identical (and no MS
Access).

~~~
Ben65
I know this probably isn't for most people, but I've gone to emacs' org mode
for creating documents and spreadsheets. The cost is nothing, it's highly
functional, and can be exported to TEX or html if you want to make it pretty.

~~~
listic
Many people need to also read Office documents, not just write them. If you
cannot sign or edit a crucial contract for your company because you are using
some Open Source word processor (and all of your partners use MS Word) your
decision to move from MS suddenly starts to look very, very stupid.

Also, I heard from a writer that Microsoft Office is superior to any word
processor (a.k.a computer program you use to write a novel) to the point that
he writes novels in Microsoft Word under Wine.

~~~
archangel_one
I seem to recall hearing that George R.R. Martin writes in Wordstar on DOS.
That doesn't make it the best word processor though - you can probably find
one fan of nearly any piece of software.

~~~
lsc
'joe' on *NIX is the tool you want if you like the wordstar keybindings. It
was my $EDITOR for a long time because I was used to the wordstar key bindings
as used in turbo pascal 3.0. I talk a lot of shit about how useless school
was... but I learned a lot in that pascal class in high school.

------
grovulent
This tweet almost reads like a Haiku. Goes to show how 'short' doesn't have to
mean 'stupid'.

But there is still room for shortening. I suggest:

'There are no heroes. Welcome to eternity.'

~~~
tswicegood
To wax religious/philosophical, albeit a little darker, you could shorten this
even more:

"All is suffering"

Now I'm waiting for the Lisper to point out the macro for it that has it down
to a few characters. ;-)

~~~
pjscott
I think you're getting Lispers confused with Perl hackers. The Lisp macro for
that would be long and aggressively hyphenated.

In Cobol, of course, "All is suffering" is just implied, and doesn't require
any extra characters to state.

~~~
nkassis
how would you state it in this
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_%28programming_language%29>

I presume it would be an awesome painting/shirt ;p

~~~
ihodes
It'd be one black pixel.

In Lisp, it'd be an empty cons cell.

In C, it'd be the null pointer.

In Java, it'd be a XxxFactoryFactoryFactory.

------
tswicegood
I don't post tweets here, but this one was just too good to not share with HN.

~~~
prgmatic
It was definitely worthy.

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rickmb
Getting very tired of the "Apple is a monopoly" meme. Just because people keep
repeating it doesn't make it even remotely true. Being a control freak in your
own home doesn't make you a dictator for the rest of the world.

~~~
vegai
It's a natural monopoly. Nothing wrong with that.

------
mattmcknight
Oracle remains evil, Google's nowhere close.

~~~
dieterrams
This is about where things are heading, not where they stand right now.

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kloncks
I'd say that compared to Oracle's evilness, Google seems quite innocent and
tame. Certainly the most evil company in this whole debacle is Oracle, not
Google.

~~~
napierzaza
I don't know about that. What Google is doing should be illegal. What Oracle
is doing is immoral.

~~~
jallmann
Illegal? Immoral? No need to be dramatic. "Do No Evil" may have been a good
tagline when you're a startup going against The Man, but unfortunately that
doesn't always resonate when you're considering the bottom line going forward.
And Oracle is only trying to maximize the utility of its new (and expensive)
IP.

We are seeing some fascinating strategic plays unfold here. This is how the
big boys operate; future Larry Ellisons, take note.

------
purpledove
Speaking of evil, let us not forget Goldman Sach's treatment of Sergey
Aleynikov. Makes Oracle look like Mother Teresa.

~~~
dctoedt
> Goldman Sach's [sic] treatment of Sergey Aleynikov > [m]akes Oracle look
> like Mother Teresa

I don't see how this follows. I'm no fan of Goldman Sachs, but the grand jury
apparently was shown enough evidence to justify indicting Aleynikov for
stealing Goldman's source code on his last day working there before jumping to
another company. See the detailed allegations in paragraphs 12-15 of the
indictment at [http://www.docstoc.com/docs/25202761/Aleynikov_-Sergey-
Indic...](http://www.docstoc.com/docs/25202761/Aleynikov_-Sergey-Indictment).

~~~
ig1
Agreed. While Sergey was probably just being stupid and GS over-reacted, the
guy did copy lots of confidential propriety data and source code from GS
servers to an off-shore server and then tried to cover his tracks by deleting
bash history, audit logs, etc.

It was the later that actually triggered an alarm. In much the same way you'd
be suspicious if you came into work late on a sunday night and found someone
in accounts shredding audit trail documents, Goldman had to do something.

If the stolen data was used to make illegal trades and Goldman hadn't done
anything about the breach than GS could find themselves subject to criminal
proceedings for being an accomplice.

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dstein
Meh, he stole that from my post on Techcrunch:
[http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/13/google-net-neutrality-
video...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/13/google-net-neutrality-video/)

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todayiamme
... And there was never a better time to create.

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m0nastic
Am I alone in thinking this was written in the style of the introductory text
for chapters in Accelerando?

------
prgmatic
Dugg for its accuracy.

