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Comment by cowtools | Hacker News Reader

I think you're leaving out the fact that the airtags system is part of an intrusive global surveilance botnet run by the likes of apple. But I suppose putting all this power in the hands of so few people is worth it if some clueless consumers can find their keys faster.

Edit: This may sound ridiculous, but I seriously do not think companies like apple or microsoft have ever contributed anything of value to society. They are merely rent-seeking operations.

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I love Linux, though my love is waning and I’m starting to see the light of BSD, so don’t get me wrong here… but what you wrote is just painful to read.

Firstly, the “botnet” is afaik opt-in and it still has a semblance of privacy in its design. You might do well to inform yourself of how it works and how people have played around with it.

Saying that Apple or Microsoft have not added value to the world is just absurd.

For one thing; we would very unlikely be running windowing systems of any kind without them. I know that sounds absurd and like it was inevitable, but there was nobody else doing that at the time afaik.

Second to that Apple did put a lot of effort into typography on computers, something nobody else was doing: so you can thank them for fonts.

Microsoft made popular the idea of ad-hoc file sharing with samba/smb.

Microsoft’s office suites, love them or hate them, literally run the world; I can’t even imagine a company that doesn’t interact with excel.

Apple created (or at least heavily developed) CUPS; which remains the best way to print on every UNIX system I’m aware of.

These are just a few examples, and sure, the history is mired with anti-competitive bullshit and forced attempts at pushing awful technology, but…

Such blatant ignorance is unjustified on this forum. I’m honestly ashamed.

> I can’t even imagine a company that doesn’t interact with excel.

That's some very poor imagination. I run a company since 2007, haven't opened MS Excel even once since ~2006, ask me anything. Thing is, companies existed long before excel came to be, and will exist long after it will fade away to history.

Which bank do you use? They all use excel fairly extensively. Sometimes to disastrous effect[0].

Ever been audited? Nearly every auditing company is using excel.

Even if you’re not using excel, it is the lingua Franca of spreadsheets. The next closes thing is a CSV which largely exists as an interchange medium.

Excel is undoubtedly the world's most used and most popular database software even though there is a multitude of alternative more, efficient and frankly, even more, user-friendly solutions out there. It is frankly ubiquitous.

I hate that this is true, but it is reality.

[0]: https://www.efinancialcareers.co.uk/news/2020/10/excel-mista...

My business is not located in the US so the names of my banks will hardly say anything to you, but yes, I've been audited and always provided necessary information in stable open formats like PDF.

If I would ever be asked to provide some report in a proprietary format like MSOffice (I know it is pretending to be open, but this OOXML is nothing more but a mockery and corruption of an open standardization process), I'll ask to buy me licences for the necessary software to compile such report, including a licence for the operating system to run the OS-specific software on.

While this puffy talk holds no water of course if the tax man just demands you deliver files in a format he wants, you can easily do so for very cheap using the Office365 cloud offering, which doesn’t require you to be running a paid OS. I don’t think you can take someone to court for the $10 a month that costs.

I'm not familiar with how 'tax men' work in the US, but in countries i'm familiar with government officials do not dictate file formats, and all communication is done in formats that are open standards. In the slim chance that some bureaucrat would continue to insist on using .xls or .xlsx, I'd probably ship him an exported file from LibreOffice, and say that it's the best I can do. And then again, being a proponent of Free Software and open standards, I'd probably refuse using a proprietary format. So far, I had some luck in avoiding using microsoft office file formats in the past 15 years of entrepreneurship.

Many US Senators haven't used email, let alone a computer. Their imaginations must be incredible.

> Firstly, the “botnet” is afaik opt-in

You “opt in” by enabling “find my iPhone”. The same feature has now been scope creeped to include constant active scanning in your local area and reporting back. The original feature sent Apple your devices location periodically.

You have to dig through a series of menus and scary warnings to turn the additional garbage off.

It also gets used to find your iPhone if it’s turned off.

There is a specific setting for it under find my.

https://imgur.com/a/puh7JOY

You can retain the capability of the “find my” while not participating in the network.

EDIT: decided to see how hidden and scary the warnings are: https://imgur.com/a/lTgxzHt

I think we’re saying the same thing?

That does sound ridiculous. They have market dominance because of the value that they offer. IBM is a great example of a company falling from grace; it happens all the time and can happen to Apple.

Rent-seeking is a seperate issue, but no different to the Industrial Age and how Railway providers would do the same. We have inadequate governance.

> They have market dominance because of the value that they offer.

This isn't true for Microsoft.

They're a monopoly for most of the PCs on this planet and since they've been that for years now, changes to a different system which may still work out are hard and sometimes even impossible.

Same goes for the mobile infrastructure for different reasons. Someone who "grew up" in the Apple infrastructure will have a hard time changing to Android and vice versa. However people within the Android infrastructure have at least a greater choice of hardware (and for a few of them choice of an Android version).

Exactly.

Microsoft makes so completely bonkers amounts of money just from Windows and Office that they can use it to prop up other branches of their business that aren't generating profit yet.

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