> Youve lost the OS, and the server realm. Lose the developers, and youre on your way to becoming the Xerox of the 21st century.
This is a very HN take. MS is terrible or at best "second tier" on everything they do including gaming, they also lost the mobile race, they're very likely going to lose the AI race, but they'll still hold hostage of the vast swathes of average white collar workers with Office, people that don't care at all about technology as long as they have Word and Excel.
There's a reason why writing .docx was one of the first proper skills that Claude got.
It's something that Microsoft leadership themselves certainly seems to have believed at times. From "developers, developers, developers, developers!" to courting Linux-targeting webdevs with WSL to VSCode, they've done lots to court developers, sometimes explicitly professing it as a central part of their strategy.
I can't disagree with any of the rest, though. Microsoft's (anti-)competitive strategy has never been about excellence so much as positioning worse stuff to win in virtue of network effects and integrations.
I think it's more accurate to say that Wine contains some components that are emulators, not that it is an emulator. Sure, it has to emulate the x86 MMU's segmentation behavior, because Linux doesn't set it up the same way. It has to emulate x86 interrupt & CPU exception delivery, because Windows delivers those to applications in a different way than Linux does. For some very old programs, it has to emulate I/O ports and some device behavior. I think GDI and DirectDraw require emulation of a framebuffer and palette hardware.
But the vast majority of Wine's code is not emulation; most of it is a clean-room reimplementation of the win32 APIs, a PE/COFF loader, Windows registry, etc. All of those parts are implementations of API contracts and binary format parsers, not emulation, in the same way that GNUstep is a reimplementation of NeXTSTEP/Cocoa, and not an emulator. (The main difference being that Wine can run Windows executables unmodified, whereas GNUstep expects you to recompile/relink from source. That is a sizeable difference, but not an emulator-sized difference.)
And yes, the computer science definition of "emulator" doesn't specify hardware: it's simply a system that reproduces the externally observable behavior of another system. But if we follow that definition too closely, then things that are clearly not emulators become emulators. Like musl and glibc are emulators of the C standard library (or of each other?), Android is an emulator of the Java virtual machine, and Mesa's software renderer is an emulator of OpenGL or a GPU (that latter bit is tempting, but it really isn't a GPU emulator). At this level, "emulator" just means "abstraction layer", which makes it pretty useless as a term if we take it that far.
So I think "WINE Is Not an Emulator" is true. It contains some bits that are absolutely emulators, but it is not, in its entirety, an emulator, and emulating isn't the function of the bulk of its code.
(I'm not trying to be pedantic here; this was actually a fun thought exercise about emulation in general and Wine in particular.)
> but they'll still hold hostage of the vast swathes of average white collar workers with Office, people that don't care at all about technology as long as they have Word and Excel.
I can't wait for the anti-trust lawsuits. M365 and O365 are already super shady in terms of being able to migrate out or be interoperable with other solutions. "Accidental" roadblocks almost everywhere.
Basically, Microsoft furiously bribed their way into formally standardizing the utterly broken MS Office formats, so EU and potentially other regulators couldn't mandate them to be "interoperable" with existing standards (e.g. OpenDocument, based on OpenOffice, which was on its normal way to become standardized with no fast tracking and no bribing). They even called it "Office Open" to foster confusion.
They can do whatever they want and get away with it because a big part of their business model is, much like Oracle and SAP, based on bribing government bodies across the world.
Yes, but this time there’s the additional driving force of countries trying to become more self reliant and not get locked into US software giants (France and Germany for example). A long way to go, but it’s gaining more traction than the past half-assed attempts.
People have been saying that MS was becoming obsolete for at least two decades. And a few times, it did seem heading to obsoletion: first when Google Docs launched, and second when Windows Phone failed.
And yet we're where we are. MS is still one of the most important corporations. Perhaps the most important one if you only count enterprise usage.
FWIW I also think an underappreciated advantage is Windows Server (last I checked that was still rock-solid) and Active Directory. Lots of CIOs / CTOs would correctly veto a move off of these, absent a specific technical problem. This is really more of a "hard knocks" lesson than anything fundamental to operating system design or implementation, but: the two Linux shops I worked at got at least a little sloppy about the sudoers list, or got frustrated and gave too much access to a "shared" folder, etc etc, largely because the admins got fed up with all the Mother May-I-ing. It just seemed to inevitably turn into a mess; sometimes that mess is fun and even productive, sometimes it's actually unacceptable.
Even the research hospital I worked at had a proper SELinux setup on the Red Hat installations, but by-quantity most servers were CentOS and it was way more of a free-for-all than it should have been, e.g. I was the fed-up admin when I was really not qualified! I screwed up a lot. Not that big of a deal: this was research-related computing and deidentified data. All the clinical computing was Windows Server. That is not a coincidence, it is really a market difference.
As someone who hates Windows 11... I do like the core Windows kernel, and would much rather do IT on Windows machines than Linux machines. Windows NT is very fussy and a bit bloated, but a huge part of that is an admirable commitment to backwards compatibility; a lot of XP applications run fine on Windows 11, except DPI wonkiness. And Windows' driers advantage isn't just commercial support; the kernel is fundamentally leaner and faster than Linux at real-time IO, and better about cleanly isolating driver processes across privilege levels. Very broadly, compared to Linux I find administering Windows easier to navigate and harder to screw up, especially with handling user permissions. Surely part of this is what I grew up with, but there's also a values difference: a lot of Linux users like how low-friction it can be since the OS doesn't get in your way. I kind of like that Windows makes you turn an excessive number of disarming keys... even when I am frustrated by it.
It does make me quite sad that the only real general-use OS options are the apex of a 20th-century operating system family, Apple's version of that, and a truly 21st-century monolith-microkernel hybrid whose specific design is a mystery to public science.
They're referring to the Windows kernel; see the preceding paragraph on the Windows kernel - the three general purpose OS families are Linux, macOS, Windows.
Personally I think not enough credit to macOS here; Apple's Mach/XNU has been microkernel flavored since the NeXT days and many subsystems run in userspace like Windows.
Last years Crowdstrike outage never hit any of the macOS computers with CS installed because on macOS the Crowdstrike agent runs entirely in userspace thanks to the Endpoint Security framework.
Really the security of macOS is probably the best of all of the desktop OSes, and as annoying as it can be.
I'd say that for the majority of old-school, established, non-tech organizations (oil, steel, manufacturing, governments, etc), it's not only an issue but it's the de-facto standard, along with Exchange, ActiveDirectory and all the nice things that come with it.
Second this. There's no money in donations. Also the target demographics for donations is individuals, who rarely donate and are kind of desensitized to the whole thing at this stage (as everyone and their mother asks for donations).
Companies need to jump through legal and accounting loopholes to donate, they very much prefer a simple purchase, which is nice! But setting up actual purchases is a whole different ordeal with open source, now the question is why is the company paying for something that's free?
Source: my own 5-stars open source project with 500k+ active users that paid for 3 coffees in total over 10+ years. I still get like $2 sometimes after a long while.
The most annoying thing is the people who demand most loudly that you setup donations don't actually donate once you go to the trouble to do so. We had a guy make an issue about it in github, and followed up over and over...we finally did it. Nothing. I guess they think making demands is helping.
Color me impressed. Even being very well versed in database design myself, this is just pragmatic and straight to the point, the way I'd have liked it back in the day.
I think the main problem of how 4NF and 5NF formal definitions were taught is that essentially common sense (which is mostly "sufficient" to understand 1NF-3NF) starts to slip away, and you start needing the mathematical background that Ed Codd (and others) had. And trying to avoid that is how those weird examples came up.
If you know Spain, you know this makes total sense:
- Half the country or more just doesn't work or do anything else when there's an important match anyway.
- There's a big intersection between "people that doesn't care about soccer" and "people that knows how to use a VPN"
- Matches are usually at night, past 7pm. It's well after the average citizen work hours.
- There's not really huge internet companies there that can lobby the other way around (e.g. infrastructure collapse because of the block).
So in short, the ruling is incredibly stupid because they're allowed to do so, save for the vocal minority, the vast majority of the population doesn't care: they're watching the match.
> Matches are usually at night, past 7pm. It's well after the average citizen work hours.
That's exactly when I would want to work on a side project after my full time job. Seems really harmful if Spain wants to have the possibility of individuals with full time jobs developing ideas that can turn into startups that could become unicorns.
> Half the country or more just doesn't work or do anything else when there's an important match anyway.
This is completely false. In the first half of this LaLiga season, the most watched match had 3 million viewers: https://barloventocomunicacion.es/informes-barlovento/el-fut... Spain has a population of almost 50M. So the most viewed match was around 6% of the population.
I’m not sure what makes you think you “know Spain” enough to throw this kind of ridiculous claim around, but please inform yourself.
Complaining on the internet every time laliga shuts down github etc isn't going to change anything, we can't solve your problems, the change has to come from within.
> So in short, the ruling is incredibly stupid because they're allowed to do so, save for the vocal minority, the vast majority of the population doesn't care: they're watching the match.
Is it actually worth fighting for principles to prevent slippery slopes? It seems most political battles in the US, especially the culture wars, are just about people's personal beliefs. It’s not that these issues affect them directly. It's they just want to make sure the other side doesn’t change their vision of the future.
I'm still amazed that something as ubiquitous as "daemon mode" is still unreleased.
- Claude Chat: built like it's 1995, put business logic in the button click() handler. Switch to something else in in the UI and a long running process hard stops. Very Visual Basic shovelware.
- Claude Cowork: same but now we're smarter, if you change the current convo we don't stop the underlying long-running process. 21st century FTW!
- Claude Code: like chat, but in the CLI
- Claude Dispatch: an actual mobile client app, not the whole thing bundled together.
- Daemon mode: proper long-running background process, still unreleased.
Unfortunately this is probably just getting started. Con men always existed, but a full scale exploitation of this would make "Nigerian Prince" scams look like artisanal work.
It was a cheaters website and you could pay to send messages to other cheaters, I think that was the business model at least.
Anyways, since the userbase was like 99.99% male, there just were not the numbers to talk with others. So, they just side stepped it and has very crummy chatbots that you would pay like $1 per message to talk with. (this was well before AI LLMs, think AOL bots from the naughts). Thing was, just like with the 'Nigerian Prince' scams, the worse the bot, the better the john.
It all got exposed a while back, but for me, that was the real Turing test - take people and see if they pay real actual money to talk with bots. Turns out, yes, if couched correctly (...like selling ice to Eskimos, just call it French ice).
So, I'm not sure that LLMs are going to unveil a wave of scams. Likely it will be a bit higher, of course, but the low hanging fruit is lucrative and there is enough of it to go around, and that's been true since really forever.
It's like outrunning a bear, you don't actually have to run faster than the bear, you just have to run faster than the poor sop next to you. Same goes for the bear, there is plenty of prey if you just do the little amount of exercise.
The company I work for uses a contracted recruiter for hiring, and the other day he was telling me that they're seeing a huge amount of scams, fake candidates, and "hands off" applications where people are trying to use AI to do basically the whole interview process - apprently even video interviews. We've mandated at least one on-site interview just so we can be sure we're getting actual people.
And most of these job candidates aren't even doing it maliciously, just "life hacking" the interview process. It's going to be a shit show if organized criminals start using AI.
It’s already happened tho, I recall a case in 24 ish, where a person got phished into joining a zoom call with their CFO and team. They were told to transfer money and they complied.
Heck, I think it was in 23/24, after an apple launch event, I saw a video of Tim Cook talking about a crypto coin. I had to look at it twice to reassure myself that it really was a scam. This was immediately after the event, and YouTube very helpfully suggested it for me.
Then there was the paper with Bruce Schneier as an author, about how LLMs result in significant targeting improvements and process efficiency gains for criminals. These enhancements mean that entire demographics that were too poor to be worth targetting, are now profitable.
Plus this is all for people in the developed world, who still haven’t seen the worst of it.
In the majority world, shit was already fucked six ways to Sunday. For example, in India, things are so outrageously, that people who deal with fraud are relieved when people lose less than $100k.
Someone in another thread pointed out that people on HN seem to be very unaware of how bad things are online for some reason.
> I think it was in 23/24, after an apple launch event, I saw a video of Tim Cook talking about a crypto coin
I think around that time there was a trend of phishing large YT channels and uploading deepfaked crypto ads. The channel's popularity ensured the recommendation algorithm showed it to many people.
> Someone in another thread pointed out that people on HN seem to be very unaware of how bad things are online for some reason.
That's probably true, but not totally unexpected. I suspect HN readers are relatively tech savvy, and probably do an above average job avoiding the seedier parts of the internet and generally know to be cautious online.
Religions have been doing it without tech for thousands of years. The 3 inch chimp brain is not exactly immune to delusion. In fact delusion or story telling is fundamental to how it handles unpredictability.
This is a very HN take. MS is terrible or at best "second tier" on everything they do including gaming, they also lost the mobile race, they're very likely going to lose the AI race, but they'll still hold hostage of the vast swathes of average white collar workers with Office, people that don't care at all about technology as long as they have Word and Excel.
There's a reason why writing .docx was one of the first proper skills that Claude got.
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