That shows a misunderstanding of what EEE was. This team was sending changes upstream which is the exact opposite of "extend" step of the strategy. The idea of "extend" was to add propriety extensions on top of an open standard/project locking customers into the MSFT implementation.
Microsoft "embraced" open-source ecosystems with an "open-source" editor, extended it with proprietary extensions DRMed to binary blobs hidden in VS Code binary builds, and used it to extinguish SSH, Python, C++, etc. development in open-source and derivative works of VS Code.
Funny you linked that page because that’s where I got activex from :D
> Examples by Microsoft
> Browser incompatibilities
> The plaintiffs in an antitrust case claimed Microsoft had added support for ActiveX controls in the Internet Explorer Web browser to break compatibility with Netscape Navigator, which used components based on Java and Netscape's own plugin system.
Honestly I kept it vague because I didn't actually know so your call-out was totally valid. I know it better now than without your clarification so thanks :+1:
At this stage the cliched and clueless comments about embrace/extend/extinguish are tiresome and inevitable whenever Microsoft is mentioned.
A few decades ago MS did indeed have a playbook which they used to undermine open standards. Laying off some members of the Python team bears no resemblence whatsoever to that. At worst it will delay the improvement of free-threaded Python. That's all.
* VSCode got popular and they started preventing forks from installing its extensions.
* They extended the Free Source pyright language server into the proprietary pylance. They don’t even sell it. It’s just there to make the FOSS version less useful.
* They bought GitHub and started rate limiting it to unlogged in visitors.
Every time Microsoft touches a thing, they end up locking it down. They can’t help it. It’s their nature. And if you’re the frog carrying that scorpion across the pond and it stings you, well, you can only blame it so much. You knew this when they offered the deal.
Every time. It hasn’t changed substantially since they declared that Linux is cancer, except to be more subtle in their attacks.
I actually hate this trope more because of what is says about the poster. Which I guess would, that they're someone wearing horse blinders.
There's a part of me that wants to scream at them:
"Look around you!!! It's not 1999 anymore!!! These days we have Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, etc, which are just as bad if not worse!!! Cut it out with the 20+ year old bad jokes!!!"
Yes, Microsoft is bad. The reason Micr$oft was the enemy back in the day is because they... won. They were bigger than anyone else in the fields that mattered (except for server-side, where they almost one). Now they're just 1 in a gang of evils. There's nothing special about them anymore. I'm more scared of Apple and Google.
That’s only reasonable if you believe you can only distrust one company at a time. I distrust every one you mentioned there, for different reasons, in different ways. I don’t think that Apple is trying to exclusively own the field of programming tools to their own profit, nor do I think that Facebook is. I don’t think Apple is trying to own all data about every human. I don’t think Microsoft is trying to force all vendors to sell through their app store.
But the thing is that Microsoft hasn’t seemed to fundamentally change since 1999. They appear kinder and friendlier but they keep running the same EEE playbook everywhere they can. Lots of us give them a free pass because they let us run a nifty free-for-now programming editor. That doesn’t change the leopard’s spots, though.
All these posts and no one mentioned their numerous, recent, abusive deeds around Windows or negligent security posture, all the while having captured Uncle Sam and other governments.
MS has continued to metastasize and is in some ways worse than the old days, even if they’ve finally accepted the utility of open source as a loss leader.
They have the only BigTech products I’ve been forced to use if I want to eat.
I don’t know what to tell you, except that you obviously haven’t read a lot of my stuff on that topic. (Not that I would expect anyone to have, mind you. I’m nobody.) I agree with you. I only use Chrome when I must, like when I’m updating a Meshtastic radio and the flasher app doesn’t run on Firefox or Safari.
I’m not anti-MS as much as anti their behavior, whoever is acting that way. This thread is directly related to MS so I’m expressing my opinion on MS here. I’ll be more than happy to share my thoughts on Chrome in a Google thread.
It’s not just EEE, though. They have a history of getting devs all in on a thing and then killing it with corporate-grade ADHD. They bought Visual FoxPro, got bored with it, and told everyone to rewrite into Visual Basic (which they then killed). Then the future was Silverlight, until it wasn’t. There are a thousand of these things that weren’t deliberately evil in the EEE, but defined the word rugpull before we called it that.
So even without EEE, I think it’s supremely risky to hitch your wagon to their tech or services (unless you’re writing primarily for Windows, which is what they’d love to help you migrate to). And I can’t be convinced the GitHub acquisition wasn’t some combination of these dark patterns.
Step 1: Get a plurality of the world’s FOSS into one place.
Step 2: Feed it into a LLM and then embed it in a popular free editor so that everyone can use GPL code without actually having to abide the license.
Step 3: Make it increasingly hard to use for FOSS development by starting to add barriers a little at a time. <= we are here
As a developer, they’ve done nothing substantial to earn my trust. I think a lot of Microsoft employees are good people who don’t subscribe to all this and who want to do the right thing, but corporate culture just won’t let that be.
Note I wasn’t the one who said EEE upstream. I was just replying to the thread.
Hanlon’s razor is a thing, and I generally follow it. It’s just that I’ve seen Microsoft make so many “oops, our bad!” mistakes over the years that purely coincidentally gave them an edge up over their competition, that I tend to distrust such claims from them.
I don’t feel that way about all corps. Oracle doesn’t make little mistakes that accidentally harm the competition while helping themselves. No, they’ll look you in the eye and explain that they’re mugging you while they take your wallet. It’s kind of refreshingly honest in its own way.
> Oracle doesn’t make little mistakes that accidentally harm the competition while helping themselves. No, they’ll look you in the eye and explain that they’re mugging you while they take your wallet. It’s kind of refreshingly honest in its own way.
I suspect it's a pretty hard optimisation problem if you want to be lean. And if you want to overprovision... you end up with something that looks a bit like status quo.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for this to exist. Just, as someone with optimisation experience, it seems pretty gnarly.
I think the cheapest and easiest starting point would be to offer people a time guarantee if they book, and contract with cab companies to provide capacity.
E.g. a bus route near where I used to live was frequent enough that you'd usually want to rely on it, but sometimes buses would be full during rush hour. Buying extra buses and hiring more drivers to cover rush hour was prohibitively expensive, but renting cars to "mop up" when on occasion buses had to pass stops would cost a tiny fraction, and could sometimes even break even (e.g. 4 London bus tickets would covered the typical price for an Uber to the local station, where the bus usually emptied out quite well)
Reliably being picked up in a most 10 minutes vs. sometimes having to wait for 20-30 makes a big difference.
Even just letting people know how full the bus is, in advance, would help a lot with that decision to take a cab etc. There could easily be a map or list of the physical buses and how full they are.
If the bus is full then the transit agency needs to run more service. Unless this is a "short bus" or your fares are unreasonably low (free fares are bad for this reason) your bus is paying for itself and you can run more service on that route to capture even more people.
The status quo in many cities is ~5x overprovisioning just in terms of capacity actively on the road at any given time, and way more than that if you count idle capacity. You could overprovision by a lot and still come out ahead.
Not an American, or SE, or homeowner - I can't relate nuch. But just at a human level - good luck. It sounds like you're in a tough spot, and kudos for looking after your mother despite all that.
Fingers crossed for you, good luck finding a way out and up - I'm surely you'll make it.
Beef CO2 emissions is more than cows breathing. Theres a lot of fuel burned when moving them around, making feed for them etc. I can't quite remember, but for every 100 calories of food eaten by cows, you end up with 3 calories worth of beef.
So right there off the bat, beef CO2 / calorie is 30x higher than the plants they eat (or whatever the multiplier was).
The usual counter is that even then, afforestation is better than grazing lands. And that's a CO2 sink. I don't know specifically about the land down under.
Basically, anything and everything. Anecdotes. Who I spoke to and if they were nice or otherwise. Cool bits of technology I saw. How something works. What I did well, what I did wrong. I tend to include a date for context.
One file is just a time-ordered log where I put loose observations. Then for specific projects/themes I have separate files.
It is a bit of a mess, but it doesn't matter. It's a sort-of append only log.
I'm not a believer in conspiracy theories, but it's fun to recognize that the reasons you highlight makes such theories very unlikely rather than actually impossible. That means that given enough hypotheses, some will turn out to be true. Imperfect examples that come to mind include Watergate, the Snowden revelations or Big Pharma's role in the opioid crisis.
I think of it whenever I hear a tin-hat theory - it's probably fantasy but from time to time it isn't.
To add to the list, this article [1] alleges that a number of Afghan special forces were refused a UK visa upon withdrawal, so they couldn't testify in the UK against the UK special forces. Then when the Taliban took over, the predictable happened. Pretty shocking.
I'd say the hardest bit about running a business is not running the business. It's everything else - admin, figuring out what you actually want to do, reaching customers, retaining customers etc.
But also that's the bit you have lots of time to figure out. Focus on the bits you enjoy and try to learn as much as you can (unless you are really desperate for cash out of this, in which case focus on all that!). You can figure out the boring bits later.
Thanks, I’m working on making the ui better for flash cards and tests right now. Appreciate your feedback. This post was all I needed for some user feedback to know that I need to work on next.
EU is financing rearmament and Ukraine deal, poaching scientists from the US, common economic and agricultural policies seem to be working. On the diplomacy front, hard to tell but they are showing a united and focused front against Trump. It is discussing some kind of closer cooperation with the UK. So in short, doesn't seem to be failing terribly at lots of things.
Do you think the EU is so bandwidth-limited it cannot do other things while discussing hate speech laws with Ireland?
Political failures compared to what other large bureaucracy? It is miles ahead, IMHO, US federal government or UN. Hard to compare to China.
Crimea is complex, but I can't really see what the EU could have done to prevent Brexit, while keeping itself whole. UK was so desperate to leave, they ended up crashing out.
I personally think the EU gets the blame for a whole load of things that are not really in their remit, while not getting the credit for other things it does well. Like hate speech laws, or the other things I listed.
Despite losing a relatively large economy in the block, the results of Brexit were so embarrassingly disastrous for the UK, that even the far right parties in the mainland, that had the common talking point of leaving the EU, had to switch their rhetoric to "reform" the EU (which is weakening it from the inside). Leaving the EU became sort of unpopular.
reply