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Many of us dislike Microsoft and big corporations, but here’s my (possibly unpopular) take:

1. Open source worked as expected. Some MIT-licensed code was forked under the same licence, giving users more options and contributing further to the open-source codebase.

2. I don’t understand the claim about users being confused between Spegel and Peerd. These are two products with different names and maintainers. Maybe some users are also confused between Ubuntu and Red Hat Linux - so what? I’m glad users have more choices.

3. The point about the original author not being given enough credit is the only valid one. The legal side, discussed in other comments, seems to suggest they’re within their rights, but they could have done better.


They continue to baffle users with their version numbering. Intiutively 4.5 is newer/better than 4.1 and perhaps 4o but of course this is not the case.

I guess the lesson is: don’t get emotionally attached to your job. Despite all the “we’re like a family” talk, at the end of the day, you’re just an employee. Never forget that.

We all want to be seduced though, we all want to believe we are special, we all want to believe our work has value and we anthropomorphize the company on the other end of the relationship, believing it's a partnership.

Protect yourself, but it's a sad way to spend 40-60 hours of your life, constantly reminding yourself that your job is just a paycheck and not putting yourself into your work.

Not sure how so many can do it and be motivated. My current strategy is compartmentalization, and it all just seems unsustainable long term, cause in the back of my mind it all seems so empty.


Here is a type of question I wish your site can help me answer:

Amazon Fresh online purchases : AMEX Gold or Chase Reserve? Format gives 3x reward for groceries but later have a promo (shown on your web site).


I hear you and this is a problem that I currently face as well! We actually source offer data from all the major credit cards and one of the features we are going to implement is to show you offer data next to your optimal card (once we make improvements to our optimal card decision engine)

The idea is to later incorporate the promo and give you the ultimate best card, something we still need to figure out and perfect but as of now we can show you the best card for groceries and offers on the merchant selected


One thing I would definetely do is to secure my password manager. This would minimise potential exposure in the future in case your phone is backed up in some government database. 1Password have a feature for that: https://support.1password.com/travel-mode/


I find it absolutely mind blowing that people trust their secrets to be kept secure by a commercial company that needs to obey the laws in another country. In the light of recent geopolitical turmoil it makes even less sense.


Are some taxes due for this "sale"?


Probably not. He bought twitter for $44bn and this is valuing it at $45bn. There probably isn't a profit after costs and what not.


That reminded me:

Back in the early '90s, I wrote an MS-DOS TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) "boss key" program. It would bring up a fake TurboC compilation screen whenever I pressed a key - just in case my boss walked in while I was playing a game. (The tricky part was restoring the graphics state back to normal, but that's another story.)

My boss wasn’t stupid. After a few close calls, he started asking why my compilation was taking so long without producing any results. That motivated me to improve my "boss key" app - I ended up adding line numbers that incremented on the screen, making it look like the fake compilation was actually progressing.


I recall playing an 80s-ish submarine (WW2?) game with a "spreadsheet mode".


Better known as "boss key": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key


Lots of old games have this, I played many MicroProse flight simulators and they all had it.


These days even Tinder (website version) has a boss-key.

But yeah I remember a lot of games had boss-keys that would let you pretend to be working.



Creative use case for a TSR :)

The classic "fun" TSR use-case was to make an app that installs an interrupt vector to decode mouse hardware "events" directly from the RS232 port before exiting via 0x21h, so that DOS screen would display a pointless "native" mouse cursor that doesn't do anything :)

When I say mouse cursor, I mean an ASCII block character with the blink bit on.


Some mouse drivers used an upper ascii range (less used) and rendered 4 “arrow” cursor parts into it over 4 chars over which the cursor ought to be. And then replaced those 4 chars on screen temporarily. As a result you had a fully pixel-perfect cursor in text mode.


Norton Utils had it. Mind blowing for its time.


That's clever!


why was it pointless? it worked in the text guis of the time


You're right, TUIs had mouse support. This is a TSR, and exits to shell after running, so there's a mouse cursor visible without any app running. Like, there's nothing to "click" :)


Another use of TSR !

I implemented a password protected access to A:


So, yeah, yes he was.


We tried something similar 17 years ago. We couldn’t achieve true P2P, but we managed to relay a data stream via a server without store-and-forward. The startup was called Pipebytes, and we even got a bit of news coverage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATqKvra1X3o

It was later sold to another company, which scrapped the P2P part and repurposed it for regular cloud sharing. :(


"he decided against breaking up Algorithm X between different pages"

He should have used TeX ;) I've heard handles such layout problems automatically.


I wonder if they could use a time-sharing approach. Instead of permanently shutting down instruments, they could run different sets, with a maximum of three at a time.


Take a day for them to send commands. If anything goes wrong and they use too much power, that's it.


Could the heat changes from being powered on/off multiple times not risk damage?


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