Microsoft's Software Is Malware
gnu.org
gnu.org
And yet I hate what they're doing now. I turned off automatic updates, or so I thought, and returned to my machine one day last week to find it had restarted anyway. I'd spent a fair amount of preparing a commit and most of my work had vanished. Another time I returned to an unwelcome restart and I had actually lost a fair amount of work. Sure, I retyped it, but really?
On the same machine, I have another account on the same machine that I use for testing. Every single time I sign in to that account, I have to start Task Manager as an administrator and then kill Windows Compatibility Telemetry, even though I have allegedly(?) disabled it several times. Otherwise it consumes so much CPU that I can't get my work done.
Also, Visual Studio is a hot mess. Why do I have to wait when I drag and drop an int into the watch window? Why does my machine slow to a crawl when I'm running debug builds? Why are there so many bugs with breakpoints? A lot of the time, I have to use page up/page down to see the breakpoint appear even though I hit F9. Why is it agonizingly slow to type things when I'm debugging? Why do I fantasize about finding a new job that doesn't require me to use Visual Studio? Visual Studio has become my least favorite piece of software. There are days when I just write code in Notepad++ and only use Visual Studio to build.
It's frustrating. The seeming inability to exert developer-level control over Windows makes me feel like my devices aren't mine. For fuck's sake, I had to tell Windows that my internet connection was metered in order to get them to stop with the updates.
Yes, the article might be hyperbolic, but the whole jail argument is starting to line up pretty well with reality. Dear Microsoft, please stop fucking with everything.
Judging from what I've seen from Windows game programming streamers like Casey Muratori and Jonathan Blow, it's not an uncommon practice to live in your preferred editor then flip to VS for build/debug.
It all seems very strange and ridiculous to me coming from a gnu/linux/vim/screen/make/gdb background. Obviously not so much having separate tools, but more the despite having a massive beast of an IDE purportedly providing All The Things, you're still context switching to/from your usable editor.
Those streamers also often resort to using RemedyBG for debugging instead of using VS's integrated debugging. They're basically living without an IDE, while paying all the overhead for an IDE, because the IDE is such trash.
Apple has had functionality that is moved and taken away in the quest for "perfect tomorrow someday" UX and functionality (merging macOS and iPadOS).
No Linux/GNU distro, not even Ubuntu, has reached a point to where functionality AND UX were both good enough for average non-engineer grandma.
FreeBSD usability is about in the Linux/GNU camp. There's less to manage under FreeBSD but it's not as ubiquitous.
Disagree. I have my (extremely) non-technical wife and 8 year old son on Linux laptops and it's totally fine. Is it perfect? No. But it's good enough. I'm the one who updates them, though.
PS: Which Linux distro?
If I did it again, I'd probably use Linux Mint Cinnamon.
IMO, Windows UI/UX has gotten so bad, even Gnome seems like an drastic improvement.
I did a T480 motherboard integrated i7-8550U -> discrete i7-8650U swap and rebinding of the license with their phone support. I somehow finagled a Windows 11 Enterprise (retail channel) license that Redmond doesn't have a problem with. It's a cheapskate gaming machine for an eGPU RTX3060 Ti. They can try to pry my dual battery T480 from my cold dead hands, but I'll probably reinstall Qubes on it.
Yes, a few weeks I spent an hour on the phone walking my Dad through registering Windows 11 and registering his copy of Office. It was abso-fucking-lutely terrible. He didn't even want a live account/address, nor one drive. My Dad browses the web and writes short stories.
Despite spending $149 on his Office license, he has warmed to Google docs, especially that he can share the document and I can help him with the layout very easily. I hope he'll just stop using Word altogether.
We ended up with this, BTW:
Set-ItemProperty 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU\' -Name NoAutoUpdate -Value 1That is absolutely insane having Windows Server auto update and reboot.
What if it was something critical, like a production line or a server supporting medical devices?
If I open SSMS, it also takes upwards of a minute to load. Some things I used to take for granted, like being able to see the cursor when scrolling with the arrow keys, instead makes the cursor invisible, so now I have no idea where my cursor lands when I release the key. When a connection to a DB bonks out (which happens at least once a day), it takes another minute to close out my open windows, because each one had an open session and it needs to prompt me on close.
If I open Excel, another minute passes before it loads. If I stupidly decide to change the font for some cells, I expect to see the app lock up for another minute or two. If I want to save the document, I have to go through several layers of menus and garbage just to save to my computer and not the cloud. And then I will still get an alert in Excel that indicates it was unable to save to the cloud and that I need to take some action to resolve the files. The best part is now I can't simply scroll the rows in a spreadsheet in the background while I have another app in the foreground. I have to make another click to bring the spreadsheet into focus to scroll.
If I go into the Azure Portal, I can expect no sane or consistent interface. Components seem to be cargo-cult designed without regard to how they are used. I was looking at some app service logs today, and I'm stuck using their ugly UI, which truncates/hides important data, like the actual log message. The UI is so antithetical to what a logging user interface should look like (think Splunk or Sumo), you'd be better off just downloading the CSV file.
The same goes for build logs in Azure DevOps. It doesn't word-wrap, so now you need to scroll all the way across the screen, line-by-line, to figure out the message. If I click on the Raw Log link, I get the logs, but polluted with ANSI escape codes. If I try to copy the text as is, the UI may or may not select all of it.
And this is just the very start for the disaster that is Azure Portal/DevOps.
And Teams, lol.
When you have to deal with all these problems, all day long, it really starts to sink your productivity. MSFT badly needs a leadership shakeup, but I doubt that will happen as long as Azure is profitable. Until then, I expect to see more decline in the quality of their developer and productivity applications.
The decline happened after they fired off their SDETs and turned their customers into testers. The hyperfocus on cloud didn't help. Neither did the move towards clunky Electron apps, instead of first-class Windows applications.
Lifers may be there still, but they have to march to the beat of the stock market.
I have to imagine there a bunch of software engineers at Microsoft who have worked their asses off and are proud of what the core of Windows has become but are also super frustrated at all of the BS that is loaded on top in 99% of installs.....
Any power user would be well served to reuse one of their old 7/8 Pro licenses or buy a 10/11 Pro license instead of cheaping out on a Home license.
Also, the user should be able to assume that there aren't multiple switches for the same action. As a general rule - I know this is Windows.
So yes, you can rely on Windows and Microsoft to respect Group Policy. The catch is you need to pay for enterprise privileges if you're not.
Like AI, until someone shows me something that can come up with novel solutions to deeply technical problems, simple tools and intelligence on the part of the programmer is what works.
Unfortunately I don't have any choice in the matter of compiler or platforms. I do some work work on Linux and I use GCC there. It feels much more sane.
Visual Studio makes me want to take more blood pressure medication.
Until then, enjoy your MSFT environment that they've created for the lowest common denominator. You try the code-gen / no-code tools yet? Maybe they'll make you happier. Developers, developers, developers!!
As shareholder-driven greed consumes these large monolithic companies and their overhead eats them out of their massive office campuses, they will eventually realize that product coexistence and maintaining product reliability/performance while putting customers first will be the only way to survive once their guaranteed government buying partnerships face a new audit and dry up fast.
The cycle is terrible to productivity and for our sanity, and ad revenue is not worth all of the stress they put all of us through. There will also be lawsuits and many other issues raised eventually once people realize that getting robbed at an ATM because you had to watch a 5 minute ad, before your withdrawal completes, is a very stupid idea.
Microsoft helped lift me my family out of poverty. I grew up in Seattle, in the shadow of Microsoft and their Redmond campus. My father was a laborer who helped built Bill Gate's mansion, and who helped built parts of their Redmond campus.
He was incredibly, incredibly, proud, that I drove to work everyday down the streets he had helped plant trees on. He told almost everyone he met that his son worked at Microsoft.
Microsoft did a lot of good in the 90s and early 2000s[0], they created a standard platform which the world built upon. They created a stable foundation for thousands upon thousands of developers to build their livelihood. They paid for generations of children to learn programming in free or next to free programs across the country (and across the world). Since their missteps and the rise of mobile, the industry hasn't had a stable development platform to build upon, and we've collectively wasted untold billions of dollars in productivity on crappy cross platform solutions.
When I was at Microsoft, the customer was king. I put a stop to plenty of bad behavior by saying "is this what is right for the customer?" and if the answer was no, code didn't ship.
But Microsoft is a fear driven company, they were afraid of the rise of the tablet so they made Windows 8, and then they became afraid of Google so they constantly attempt to go for ads. (First they went for search, but then eventually realized Google isn't a search company...) Heck the original reason Explorer was supposed to get tabs was so ads could be shown in new explorer tabs[1].
The other problem is, Microsoft got rid of Software Development Engineers in Test, and they replaced them with devs doing test. But at Microsoft, SDETs served as the last line of defense for the users, as an SDET it was made clear to me from day 1 of my employment that I had the power to stop shipment of software if I felt the code wasn't up to snuff. As a junior SDET I only ever used that power once, I was damn well scared, and when I spoke up and said we had open bugs that I personally considered ship blockers, the lead dev said no problem, the release would be delayed until his team fixed the bugs.
No one has that role anymore. Before I left MS around 2016 or so, I saw a fellow developer instructed by the design team to make a UI component behave as if it followed the MacOS design guidelines. The (junior) dev didn't realize that was what he had been told to do, and it obviously took a long time for him to beat the Windows UI controls into shape until they worked like the MacOS UI controls, and when I asked him why he was doing this, he said he was too scared to push back.
That is what SDETs were for. To hold the bloody line. Facebook's "move fast an break things" motto gave the industry an excuse to gut dedicated test teams, and now all software everywhere sucks, but no one under 30 realizes anything is wrong because from their perspective things have always been shitty and broken.
[0] Yes yes and Linux bad lawsuits etc etc, separate discussion. [1] The ads were to be for Microsoft Store apps IIRC.
I worked for almost 27 years, for a Japanese optical corporation that is synonymous with "Quality."
Their QC department was the most powerful one in the corporation, and all the devs lived in fear of failing QCT, as that would have C-Suite-level notice.
In the US, there used to be a joke, saying "If you have 'Quality' in your job title, your career is over." At this company, it meant you were just short of a God.
That said, it tended to make life stressful for us. As an American development team, we were often treated as "Bad Software Cowboys." Most folks here, would consider us to be completely uptight, anal-retentive, risk-averse, babies, but they thought of us as reckless.
I would welcome this as a cultural change in the US. It just sucks living downstream of people dumping tons of cowboy code into the river.
The video that I saw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9eQth4Q5jg
Nice tip. Any downsides to this?
The implication is that FOSS developers have no control over their users. Sure, you COULD fork your favorite tool's repository and spend many hours trying to figure out how to make it do 'what you want instead of what the developers wanted'; but very few people are really willing and/or able to do that.
Nearly all software (open source or proprietary) except trivial programs, are controlled by the developers who build it and maintain it. They are given that power by the mere fact that most programs are sufficiently complex that few others can and will assume control instead. If someone does (and that someone isn't you) then the new boss is same as the old boss (to quote a line from a song by The Who).
Free software makes it possible for me (my business, etc) to pay someone other than the original developer to make the software do what I want. No proprietary license gets me that.
In the context of personal use software by an individual it may not make sense to pay, but in the context of groups of individuals or a business it becomes viable.
Few people are willing to do it because the kinds of restrictions/annoyances imposed by free and open source software are much less severe than that of nonfree software. Sure, there might be the odd feature or two missing in a FOSS project that you would like but that the author blocks from being added to the project for XYZ reasons. I'll concede that those kind of decisions give the maintainer of a FOSS project some semblence of "power". But it's not like proprietary software, where trackers, atrocious adverts and news links (looking at you, Microsoft start menu) and other arbitrary restrictions are a continuous reality. If those things were in a FOSS project, you can bet that _someone_ would make a fork with that stuff removed.
And this does happen! The response to Oracle's anti-F/OSS, user-hostile moves when they bought Sun is a powerful example.
Free software also means that you can pay developers to take the software in a different direction if you can't do so yourself.
There are lots of user-serving forks in the world. Cinnamon and MATE really did serve Gnome 2 users who were pissed off and disappointed about what they saw in GNOME 3. LEDE really did resurrect OpenWrt by giving people a way to push the project forward when development had stagnated. yt-dlp saved a bunch of youtube-dl users who would have been left in the lurch.
Of course creating and maintaining a fork requires non-trivial resources. But forks do happen and their possibility absolutely makes a difference to end users, lots of the time.
I’ve also contributed patches upstream to open source software plenty of times and the majority of time the maintainers have been willing to accept it.
Tons of Linux distros maintain their own set of patches on top of loads of software to make it work better with the rest of their system.
Sure, there are examples where it’s infeasible to change things but in practice it’s a lot more likely than with proprietary software.
Would also be appreciated to see an example.
Arch is a swing and a miss
> Arch has no policy against distributing nonfree software through their normal channels, and nonfree blobs are shipped with their kernel, Linux.
Debian is a no go
> Debian also maintains a repository of nonfree software. According to the project, this software is “not part of the Debian system,” but the repository is hosted on many of the project's main servers, and people can readily find these nonfree packages by browsing Debian's online package database and its wiki.
Sorry Gentoo
> Gentoo includes installation recipes for a number of nonfree programs in its primary package system.
BSD
> FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all include instructions for obtaining nonfree programs in their ports system. In addition, their kernels include nonfree firmware blobs.
Nonfree drivers are not OK.
Nonfree BIOS/EFI programs are not OK.
Nonfree kernel blobs are not OK.
We may use them out of necessity and pragmatism (some nonfree software is better than 100% nonfree software! an Arch user still has more intact freedoms than a Windows user), but we should still reject them ideologically and remember that they are tolerated but not accepted.
The same also applies to copilot. I've trained myself to give it prompts to generate code that matches what I would've generated by hand years ago. But without copilot, I wouldn't program. Simply not practical.
Why? If a vendor sells a fingerprint scanner or something why do they need the driver to be closed source? Why does somebody tweaking the source bother them?
I've never really understood this. Sure, Microsoft word needs to be closed source but why a driver?
Plus there's just a lot of belief in the nonfree circles that the software freedom movement is just religious zealot hippies who think software should never be paid for and that microsoft programmers should work for free and starve, and that anyone who does develop novel software should have it immediately ripped off and copied by competitors and make no money because capitalism is bad.
(I'm being a bit hyperbolic but not much.)
If I fix a bug or desire some new functionality and implement it for myself, am I free if I cannot legally share it with my neighbors? Certainly not.
Also depending on exactly how they release the source, you may still not know that's what the blob is actually doing. I suspect many vendors, even if forced somehow to provide source, would try to not allow (or make very annoying) building it or signing it. And if you can't build it yourself, or if you can but can't run it and the build isn't bit-perfect reproducible, then you can't know the blob is actually the output of building the source.
You could decompile but let's be real, if security researchers looked at Heartbleed not once but twice, specifically in the context of it being a bug, and both times asking if it's a security vulnerability, and said no - then I am not going to believe that a human inspecting decompiled machine code is going to be very good at finding well-hidden malware in blobs.
> people can readily find these nonfree packages by browsing Debian's online package database and its wiki.
Today, I am using Debian myself and avoid nonfree packages knowingly. However I am glad that FSF keeps reminding users about it. Note that they do not prohibit the usage of Debian. They just don't endorse it.
Why is it unethical?
Would it be unethical to be required to use an entirely mechanical machine that was still covered by patents or trade secrets?
All these questions are answered in book "Free Software, Free Society" (with better explanations than I can give).
> mechanical machine that was still covered by patents or trade secrets
I would say, yes, it would be unethical, too.
The idea that non-free software is unethical and should be abolished is the bedrock of all of the FSF’s philosophy, and is held almost as a religious view for RMS and his adherents.
In the ports tree, there was a makefile. http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/ports/devel/jdk/1.3-linux/Attic/Ma...
If you open that makefile, there is a url. http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/download.html
If you open that url in a browser, you will be presented with the opportunity to download nonfree software.
A few weeks ago I filed a couple of bugs a few days before buggering off on hols. Both were fixed within a couple of days. One was for a pretty esoteric snag on Arch Linux relating to Python, Kerberos and WinRM. Ansible now works again. I can't remember what the other one was but it was to do with Graylog - again fixed with alacrity.
I've done time on the Gentoo and Arch and many other forums and sometimes actually fixed stuff 8) and of course had stuff fixed for me. I have also been called a wanker and may have had some fairly heated discussions - that is the way of the internet. I have also apologised for being a knobend a few times and that gets a good response.
My experience with Windows is not the same as my Linux experience and I started off with Windows 2. OK I actually started off with a ZX80, ZX81, Spectrum and I still have a C-64 (with USB nowadays).
When you search for a Linux snag these days you get an awful lot of blogs that are at least nicely formatted copies of canonical sources. I use uBlacklist to get rid of the worst. Search for a Windows snag and you generally fall into a whole world of hurt. sfc /scannow or reinstall your OS is a common answer. I'll drop here that sfc has never fixed a snag for me (I worry about roughly thousands of Windows boxes) but someone a third my age will still insist it is the dog's nadgers.
Windows isn't malware, it's just lost the plot. There is a lot to love still in there somewhere but the copy n paste icons are an absolute aberration and W11 is just plain odd in places.
You cannot use telemetry to work out what is going on in someone's mind. My wife uses Arch Linux with KDE as a WM and has no idea what that even means. I divorced her from Windows at Win7 and never looked back.
Microsoft outsourced the support to some chinese guys who are the masters of /dev/null'ing any support request they have. It's always to reboot your machine and sfc /scannow, but of course, it never works.
The classiest part of the act is that the same support guys mark their own "answers" with big green check marks to signify their "importance". I think this helps them to meet the corporate metrics. The whole Windows support thing is a total joke since 2008.
I could participate myself but MS insist on using users as unpaid "volunteers" to work for them and that's not my bag. If they'd like my experience then they might feel free to pay for it and I am very cheap compared to the usual 'softies.
In some countries, time spent on MS Social is a requirement or sufficient for a job.
If you do a search you will probably find that I am apparently so wrong that I need to report into Room 101.
I think that what goes wrong is an inability to look at logs - laziness. Windows has rather a lot of logging. It took Linux years to catch up with journald (Events) plus various random text logs in /var/log. No matter how much logging you have, getting technicians to actually look at the bloody things is a really hard problem. The little darlings think they are omnipotent and can deploy a cure based on what I call wankery. It might work but probably doesn't.
Medics are way ahead of us here - I've never heard the term contra-indication in IT. Perhaps we should learn from experts in dealing with weird symptoms and very, very complicated diagnosis.
At the time, I thought it seemed a little over-the-top.
Yet since then, I have personally lost control of many of the computing devices I use. The phone was the biggest one, and I can't (don't?) avoid phones altogether like RMS. His words were actually accurate.
Now, I do think that some people try to get a message across, and are not heard, so they use stronger words until they get a response. Those messages do become over-the-top.
But I have come to realize that RMS himself carefully chooses his words.
No, you haven't. Or rather, you didn't lose control because of any software license. We lost control because of cryptography and enforced signature verification. Just because software is licensed as open source doesn't mean it allows for third-party firmware modification.
Maybe it's because I came up through the RE scene, but the false association between open source and ownership or security has always stood out to me. Many of the modding and hacking communities that orbit proprietary software are/were more vibrant than anything that exists in the totally open source space.
Yes, the term for this is "tivoization." It is a large part of why the GPLv3 exists.
> Just because software is licensed as open source doesn't mean it allows for third-party firmware modification.
Yep, "open source" and many copyleft licenses are insufficient for this job.
> “Installation Information” for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.
> If you convey an object code work under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product, and the conveying occurs as part of a transaction in which the right of possession and use of the User Product is transferred to the recipient in perpetuity or for a fixed term (regardless of how the transaction is characterized), the Corresponding Source conveyed under this section must be accompanied by the Installation Information. But this requirement does not apply if neither you nor any third party retains the ability to install modified object code on the User Product (for example, the work has been installed in ROM).
(https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GiveUpKeys clarifies that this applies to cryptographic keys.)
I'm not sure what you mean by this. It's the law that's a barrier, not cryptography. If you break the DRM on a game you can still face legal consequences, even if the company that licenses it doesn't support it anymore.
Exactly, you just named a subset of all the things you could do to a machine, partitioned by copyright protection. I'd agree with your general point in the context of power users, but it's worth noting that the average Joe will try to faithfully follow company policy as well as the law.
To run afoul of the DMCA a modder needs to (1) strip a binary of its copyright protection (2) distribute the unpacked executable or the unpacker tool (3) likely facilitate mass third-party piracy (more damages = more lawsuit potential). It’s principally warez and hacking groups that meet these criteria, and they probably ought to be sued.
I’ll add a point in your favor and say that for non-games DRM is often a big problem when reversing or patching code.
lol. Look, in practical terms - as well as by definition - proprietary software is owned by someone else.
It makes them feel righteous.
but they live in their own world
Even most of the vendors of free software today (e.g. Confluent) are using some kind of SaaS or open core model.
Unlike physical objects, where the sale accounts for the cost of production of material etc, what value does someone trying to sell a GPLv3 software add? I argue that the added value is zero, and hence, the price must be zero as well.
This is moronic pseudo-religious doublespeak. They're saying it's acceptable to charge a fee for the one part of software creation that's effectively cost-free.
For example, (referencing the "Jails" section here), the author says, "Jails are systems that impose censorship on application programs." Not sure if I'm interpreting this next quote from the GNU.org site (https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html) correctly, but it seems like this is exactly their definition of a "Free GNU/Linux distribution" is meant to do: "They will reject nonfree applications, nonfree programming platforms, nonfree drivers, nonfree firmware "blobs," nonfree games, and any other nonfree software, as well as nonfree manuals or documentation."
"They will reject" seems an awful like "won't run on my distribution", and not because it's not compatible because of runtime or kernel differences, but because of its 'being nonfree'.
From Merriam & Webster:
BIGOT: a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices.
I love free software. I don't have to pay for it, I can share, customize, and use it as I want without the author of the software ever needing to know or care, because he did it out of either love for software or because he had a need to fulfill and was nice enough to release it to the world.
I also use paid software and software containing "nonfree" software blobs. I have an Android because it works for me. I use Spotify on all my devices, and pay for Premium, because I find it convenient, the same reason I use GNOME and VS Code and drive a used Chevy.
I value my time and quality of life too much to be extreme "beCaUSE iT wASN't FreEEE".
Just my 2 cents. I'll have that with a side of Kale please.
It doesn't sound like "won't run on my distribution" to me. It seems that you intentionally took this line out of context just for the argument (or to defend MS).
The full paragraph:
> These distros are ready-to-use full systems whose developers have made a commitment to follow the Free System Distribution Guidelines. This means they will include, and propose, exclusively free software. They will reject nonfree applications, nonfree programming platforms, nonfree drivers, nonfree firmware “blobs,” nonfree games, and any other nonfree software, as well as nonfree manuals or documentation.
Next paragraph:
> If one of these distros ever does include or propose anything nonfree, that must have happened by mistake...
"This means they will include...". Not "This means they will run...".
"include or propose...". Not "execute or install...".
It clearly means that they don't include nonfree stuff with their systems. Not they don't allow nonfree stuff to run.
It's not; first (as referred in article) is preventing user from using the machine as they see fit.
Second one is not accepting software into distribution that tries to take user's freedom to modify it; they don't stop you installing non-free software in free distribution, they are just not shipping the non-free software. It's a stance on not promoting (by including and making installing trivial) the non-free software but you are still free to install on your own.
Going by tired
> "They will reject" seems an awful like "won't run on my distribution", and not because it's not compatible because of runtime or kernel differences, but because of its 'being nonfree'.
Nope, it explicitly means "will not distribute, with their distribution, for free". Software actively stopping you from running other software would actually be nonfree, as the whole deal with OSS is "do with sofware what you want" and GNU deal being "and pass same priviledge forward"
Do you value the time and quality of life of the billions who can't drive a Chevy, nor will ever have a device that can run an Electron app or $10/month for Spotify?
It's not all free as in beer you know, free software is meant to serve a free society by allowing everyone to participate in the social construction of technology, not provide consumer luxuries. I think the term you're looking for is "open source"
That's certainly one common recent use of that term. Although more often than not it's just "I don't like them but don't really have argument that passes first smelling therefore they are bigots"
> proportion of women represented in the computer science field peaked around the mid-1980s and has declined ever since
I thought ‘surely not’. I was wrong.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-are-too-few...
Steve Jobs was in a way quite typical of the sort of people who showed up in the IT field. He would have a tough time getting hired today.
I suggest staring deeply into why culture and natural language work like they do (or used to do, seems only stubborn 'artistic' types are working with culture like that nowadays)
No it doesn't. You are free to install whatever software you want. None of these systems will prevent a user from using non-free software. They just won't encourage it.
I find GNU's position too dogmatic, but it's not as bad as you pretend.
As an obvious example, I honestly can't imagine the Linux kernel having had the impact that it has had if all of the myriad corporations building on it weren't forced to contribute their work back to it under the same conditions.
> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.
On the side, I've even learned to like kale on pizza. The Kale-Zer Soze at Central Pizza in Seattle is outstanding.
It's shocking to spend time with Federal Workers and see how much of their days are wasted waiting for anti-virus and other bad closed source software, and then to realize we all are paying taxes to support this! Same goes for Oracle. BG and LarryE got the country to fund their yachts and stuck us with the bill.
I'm gonna run for Congress under a platform of banning any Federal money from being spent on closed source, non public domain software.
I no longer need to worry about Windows, but now wondering what to do about UEFI. I've heard about things like coreboot, but doesn't seem to be offered by mainstream manufacturers. Not sure I wanna risk bricking my machine. Has there been any recent progress here?
If you want to be fully free, you may be interested in the Raptor Talos II, which is based on OpenPOWER and has free firmware. It is pretty pricey however.
And it's good enough for many purposes.
Calling Microsoft software malware is so over the top that it turns off normal users and is only appreciated by people who are already committed to free software.
Excel, like the entirety of the titles in the Office Suite, was originally developed on the Mac - where it was hardly used since the Mac wasn't targeted to business at the time. Excel was ported to Windows 2.0, but like the Mac, hardly any business was using that. In the 1980's business ran on Lotus 123, not Excel.
All that changed after the release of Windows 3.0, but by that time Microsoft was already "The Dominator" as you put it. Excel 3.0 was released for Windows, Lotus took way too long to come up with a Windows release and Excel, with its GUI, had come to dominate the market. The rest is history, as they say.
Later we found out that while Microsoft was saying one thing in industry press releases and conferences, they were preparing Windows 3.0. I've never trusted that company since, and they've never failed to meet my low expectations of them.
Thing is, I remember a very different Microsoft. They used to be a great company. Then they made a deal with the devil in the 1987 timeframe and they've been evil ever since.
Lotus had its own proprietary menu structure generally invoked with slash. ALL programs did when Lotus was introduced. Its partisans made it hard for Lotus to abandon it, but its failure to shift into the new reality meant the oodles of new people flocking to computing as Windows exploded went to Excel by default, because 1-2-3 was impenetrable.
Word vs. WordPerfect played out in much the same way.
In both cases the MSFT offering was, in many ways, superior, but a key piece of it was the legacy player's refusal to adjust to the common menus Windows users expected.
"208.3. Microsoft's unresponsiveness and its actions to delay the Windows 95 license negotiations with IBM followed soon after IBM announced that it was seeking to acquire Lotus Development Corp., a direct competitor of Microsoft in messaging and office suite software, among other products.
IBM announced on June 5, 1995 a hostile takeover attempt of Lotus. On June 11, IBM and Lotus reached an agreement for IBM to acquire Lotus. IBM completed the acquisition on approximately July 5, 1995. Norris, 6/7/99am, at 35:9 - 36:12. Among other products, Lotus offered Lotus Notes, an e-mail product, and Lotus SmartSuite, an office productivity suite, that competed with Microsoft's software. Norris, 6/7/99am, at 35:21 - 36:5."
"Microsoft repeatedly penalized IBM for competing against Microsoft
Microsoft withheld a Windows 95 license from IBM until 15 minutes before the product's launch because of IBM's preloading of competing products Microsoft conditioned access to critical marketing support, and other terms and conditions for Windows provided to other OEMs, on IBM's not preloading competing products with the PCs it shipped Microsoft sought to condition substantial MDA price reductions on IBM's ceasing to support competing products
Search for "quicktime" for more joy.
That they did it is clear. Whether they did it for simple profit (Office/Works) or to further enhance the moat around Windows (Java, QuickTime). They did it using Windows as both carrot and stick, to gain compliance. Because OEMs had no other choice.
It is undeniable that Excel has provided massive value for end users and been massively empowering for them.
Whether or not Microsoft software is malware is a different question that if Microsoft is a good or bad company.
I think building a good spreadsheet program that is both accessible and powerful is very difficult. Excel might be the most non-trivially used "programming language" in the world.
Excel is genuinely excellent. I was as big a MSFT-hater in the 90s as you are likely to be able to find, but credit where credit is due: Excel provides a level of data analysis power to a lay user that is just not available elsewhere.
Sure, tech people (cough HN readers cough) often want to trot out arguments about how "well, that sort of stuff just shouldn't be done in Excel! They should learn to use R or SQL or some other $MoreCorrectTool". That's poppycock. Excel is already on the analyst's desk. It's immensely powerful while ALSO being very accessible. Nothing else comes close.
Excel was just better by miles.
Well...
Joke aside, its not like I came up with this definition.
> Malware is software that is installed on a computer without the user's consent and that performs malicious actions.
https://www.mcafee.com/en-us/antivirus/malware.html#:~:text=....
Do you manually inspect every CPU clock cycle spent, or every data connection or packet sent by every piece of SW running on your system, to make sure it was all done with your consent?
Excel rode on the popularity of VisiCalc and Lotus 123 for years.
https://thehistoryofcomputing.net/visicalc-excel-and-the-ris...
“They released an early spreadsheet tool called Multiple [sic] in 1982. But Lotus 1-2-3 was the first killer application for the PC.”
Windows annoys me because of prevalent active app stuttering and lag that has never been resolved with more soft-realtime IO and context schedulers to what the user is focused on. Debugging tools have somewhat improved but you have to be a nuclear engineer to locate what is impacting performance.
You can't modify the system enough, it's not designed to be modified, its too complicated to be tested in any state but their defaults.
I've finally fully embraced Linux. Microsoft made it happen.
- Google: https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-google.html
I can figure out iPhony is an iPhone, but I'm not certain what iBad and iMonster are supposed to reference. I could dig into the source references and try to figure out WTF they're trying to convey, but that shouldn't be necessary.
Things like this hinder their credibility.
Regardless of context, it harms one's argument (and is blatantly disrespectful) to refer to people or groups or items with labels other than their actual names. That kind of foolishness has the same level of rhetorical value as MAGA types calling the opposition party the "Dummycrats" or whatever.
> Pick your poison
Alternatively, you could use a GNU/Linux on PC and phone.
Calling software malicous because it prioritized security over freedom just reads to me as being ignorant.
Let's tally up every RCE in GNU software and call it a backdoor if we're misrepresenting other's intentions.
Shame on GNU, the quality of the foundation's work speaks for itself without this drivel.
I was right.
One of the more interesting additions to the article linked in the OP refers to this site: https://www.techspot.com/news/97535-windows-11-spyware-machi... - I'm not sure if I would consider techspot is good journaling. That's all I'll say about that.
> Microsoft is imposing its surveillance on the game of Minecraft by requiring every player to open an account on Microsoft's network.
It's ok when it was Mojang, but it's "surveillance" when Microsoft does it? I mean - Mojang required a login account for the longest time, also. I considered it a good approach simplifying accounts so people can play together across iOS and PC.
Anyways... onto commenting the comments below;
I see people complaining about Office being slow, and taking very long to load. Office apps are one of the fastest applications on my system, often taking a second to load. Yes, Excel loads in a ~second. It's so fast, that it puts LibreOffice to shame taking at least 30 seconds to load for me. And Excel is one damn polished of software. I wouldn't trade it for Calc, or Apple's Numbers.
VS being a terrible dev environment; yet I don't see anyone suggesting something better. It takes 15 seconds to load cold and is pretty quick to load after. Doing dev in Notepad++ and then building in VS afterwards is just.. what?
> Free software makes it possible for me (my business, etc) to pay someone other than the original developer to make the software do what I want. No proprietary license gets me that.
Why not pay the original developers if they're doing such a good job?
> Nonfree software is controlled by its developers, which puts them in a position of power over the users
Yet most users cannot modify software because they do not have the technical know-how. The developers are still in control, and even if you are an experienced developer yourself - there's a good chance you aren't familiar or comfortable enough with the target language to make such changes yourself.
I do acknowledge that FOSS has an important place in our society and our future. I've been a UNIX/Linux sysadmin for a very long time, yet treating it as something of a religion and taking a "cult-like" approach isn't really the best way to make progress. GNU is being held back by this, because there is tons and tons of non-free software built by sole developers who don't want their work and time stolen from them (which the GPL purports to prevent- but this is not true in practice). Yet by the FSF definitions, that makes sole developers evil- and pushes many of them away from the free software platform.
Re; forced software updates...
Anyways, forced software updates is the results of years and years of people not wanting to update their software through their own obstinance, getting viruses and malware as a result and blaming Microsoft and leaving them on the hook for damages. Yes, you can disable the updates with Windows Server - I have NO IDEA how some of you guys are complaining about that. I'm only a middling Linux admin but even I know how to manage Windows boxes at a basic level.
> A lot of malware comes from piracy, not from vulns.
My sweet summer child. A lot of malware and/or viruses do not come from piracy. They come from people who click random web links and/or e-mail and run software that pops up on there. While piracy obviously exists and the web has made it much easier to do so, the vast majority of malware and viruses come from "stupid" users that don't understand what it is they're doing.
Anyways, that's all the energy I have for today. I'm not under any illusion about Microsoft either but being evangelistic about this matter isn't going to help anyone.
Anything can be "malware" if you get to make up your own definition for the word.
I've checked the normal places for definitions of malware, and none of them are as broad and simplistic as this.
The ideal user to Microsoft appears to be an uninformed one, not interested in control and apprently willing to reliquinsh it. Not all Microsoft users are uninformed or disinterested in control. There are profound exceptions. Some of those exceptions will read this comment and respond accordingly. But hundreds of millions of non-exceptions will remain uninformed and disinterested, to the benefit and delight of Redmond.
Obviously, malware can thrive under the auspices of uninformed, oblivious users, Microsoft's ideal customers. Microsoft will purportedly protect them, when it wants to and assuming it can; of course, it won't protect them from Microsoft itself. For those Microsoft employees and users not reading, commenting and/or voting on HN, enjoy the ads injected into Windows. Microsoft is happy with the result.
1. Worth noting perhaps, Microsoft was making an estimated $2B annually from patent royalties on Android. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-may-relinquishing-b...
(The point that commenters/voters appear to be missing is that it is the nature of the customer/user that creates the attractant for malware as much if not more than the software itself or the size of the user base. GNU regardless of what one thinks of them is AFAICT advocating for user control in this communication. That implies users who care about control, not the average Microsoft user. Users who are paying attention and who do not blindly trust companies like Microsoft. One can argue it is the "insecurity" of the software or the number of users that creates the attractant, and there is certainly some truth there, but it makes no sense if, e.g., the user base is a large number of paranoid users who read HN. They are going to avoid/prevent/detect malware better than a random sample of Microsoft users. User behaviour is relevant. If 9 out of 10 users who run program X on operating system Y are careless, then program X and/or operating system Y is arguably an excellent target for malware.)
Were that king Linux or Mac or BSD or god damn Haiku, they would be seeing the brunt of malware attacks instead.
If MS dealt with all their technical debt and built a brand new OS following proper disclosure as well as OSing most of their kernel, you'd see that it would be much harder to exploit.
Think of linux that runs over 90% of all servers in the world. How many ransomware attacks have they been hit with?