Comment by spkthed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spkthed | Hacker News Reader

This quote is one of my favorite Linus quotes ever. Bashing on Microsoft is such an 'in' thing to do and honestly it's so pointless. Many IT folk are stuck using their products for any of a number of reasons. Many of their products simply are the best fit for specific applications. It's so irritating to hear the constant Microsoft Sucks(tm) from people that either honestly know little about it or that bash unnecessarily. Every OS sucks, none are perfect.

The biggest gripe I have with that attitude is that it destroys the FOSS, Apple, and Linux movements. People that are new to the IT world don't have years of backgrounds with projects and are going to be picking up on the attitudes of the people already there as well as struggling through technical problems. If they're instantly exposed to a very negative attitude (towards themselves, others, or really anything) it's going to be a huge turnoff to whatever project it is. The negative/hateful attitude that a lot of people have towards Microsoft actively hurts the same cause that they're trying to help.

The other part of that is that with any social interaction someone that is constantly putting something down is perceived (usually rightfully so) as being insecure about their own inadequacies. I don't know about others, but Linux and Apple have both matured to the point that I'm quite comfortable quietly evangelizing and building others up, regardless of the OS choice.

It's time to relax guys, we finally have an atmosphere with the freedom to pick your own OS and to be happy with it. This is a GOOD time to be a nerd, and a fantastic time to share that passion and excitement with people from whatever background.

Besides, if there's someone to demonize, it's the people that don't take the time to secure their boxes. Those come from all distros/OS's and I'll gladly pass the pitchfork around for them!

If one looks at a graph of MS stock from 1986-2000 and compares that to 2000-2009 it shows the stock has basically languished. MS is a cash cow, slowly dying. They were the first and perhaps only company ever able to successfully leverage large network effects and create a proprietary lock-in model that has enabled them to dominate the desktop for a long time. Moreover it's so dominant that the only thing now worse than Office is Google Docs :)

Their business practices, particularly with respect to extortionary illegal contracts with hardware manufacturers were only finally stopped with a government anti-trust suit against them.

Although it may be enticing to spend a few years with a slick point and click IDE such as VisualStudio and pretend you are programming, as anyone who has ever done so knows at some point you run into something broken and it's tough shit because you can't fix it.

But you can relax, you are correct. They were never able to "own" the net and they don't own the pipes (which I've read is the real reason Buffett never invested in MSFT, he's a very long investor).

Please don't think ill of those who lived through those years. About three years ago now I swore off windoze for good and my health has improved considerably. I truly hope others have that same opportunity.

I might be early, I often am, but if you have the stomach for it I'd say MSFT is a good short, even if you like the stock it can be just as profitable on the way down as it was for those on the way up :)

"Although it may be enticing to spend a few years with a slick point and click IDE such as VisualStudio and pretend you are programming, as anyone who has ever done so knows at some point you run into something broken and it's tough shit because you can't fix it."

Really? Pretend? Really? That's what you think? I hope what you mean is the potential for over-reliance on wizards, which is easily countered by, oh, I don't know, learning what they're doing so you can accomplish it on your own, just 20-100x slower. Then use the wizard.

I'm sorry to respond to flamebait but I use visualStudio and emacs, compile by pressing a button and using make. As long as you understand what's going on it's all good.

I also think it's strange that in the Linux community there seems to be such a negative vibe around anything that even slightly raises the level of abstraction on the "tooling" side, yet on the languages side it's mostly a good thing, in my eyes they're both just tools, as long as understanding is sound then bring on the productivity boosts, again IMHO.

Actually I used all of these tools also but what I meant was if you build a tool any idiot can use then rest assured every idiot will use one. It's all good if the goal is leveraging the skills sets of the folks you hire. For programmers who really love to know things all the way down these tools are at best boring, and many hackers avoid them because when you really need them for something and hit a bug you're dead. There's nothing worse than going to upper management and saying I got stuck because VisualStudio won't let me do X.

This wasn't meant as flamebait.

" if you build a tool any idiot can use then rest assured every idiot will use one"

True, but not making something because idiots would misuse it isn't a good road to go down either.

"For programmers who really love to know things all the way down these tools are at best boring"

Do you mean boring in the sense that they just work and once you understand them they do exactly what you want, or boring as in you don't care it exists and you'd rather write it yourself, boilerplate included?

For me something that helps speed up a 20 minute job into a 20 second job is pretty cool, speed increase is one of the fundamental advantages of using computers.

"There's nothing worse than going to upper management and saying I got stuck because VisualStudio won't let me do X."

I haven't been hit by that, though I can imagine it leaves a mark.

"This wasn't meant as flamebait."

Roger, remark retracted ^_^

But now I'm curious about ya, When I only knew c++ I would sit and smugly think about how what the java people were doing wasn't real programming because they weren't managing their own memory, they were letting some program do that work. I now consider this a completely silly opinion.

I think control/productivity tradeoffs like garbage collectors are a much harder decision than, say, using a code generator and tweaking the output, as you the programmer have a lot more control over the generated code than you do a VM. What say you?

agreed. I mean boring in the sense that I don't care how my car works.

control/productivity tradeoffs like GC are indeed a tougher decision. For a real-time trading system I would think a JVM might be a disaster, though Erlang/OTP also uses GC so it largely depends on the app and where the GC enters into it. Code generation is interesting. Statically typed languages like Java, enable IDEs that can generate a lot of the boilerplate, through annotations, etc.. but there is also the issue of control/productivity and the economics of programming teams that enters into it. I haven't looked closely but I think GWT is a good example of where folks can leverage their Java assets by generating javascript, for which rich toolsets seems to be lacking.

For what it's worth, having been raised on CLOS and Lisp on a Symbolics, C++ was a step backward and I considered working with it for 3 years a net loss. As I understand it C++ was an attempt to codify what folks were already doing in C with macros. As some famous programmer whose name I forget said, "Java took us about half way back to Lisp".

"True, but not making something because idiots would misuse it isn't a good road to go down either."

Erm... I am not sure about that one. Idiots cause a lot of harm.

The speed increase you get when using a wizard that makes code you don't understand you pay back with time and headaches when you have to fix the code you didn't write that no longer runs against the current runtime you are using.

As for Java and C++, they both make writing programs hard. The edge Java has is that it makes writing the bugs much harder.

"The edge Java has is that it makes writing the bugs much harder."

well said!

"I'm sorry to respond to flamebait but I use visualStudio and emacs, compile by pressing a button and using make. As long as you understand what's going on it's all good."

While I don't "hate" Microsoft, as a professional programmer who has worked in both Microsoft's world and the open source world, I am very glad to be able to work entirely in the open source ecosystem precisely because there is a limit to how much you can understand. You hit it when you hit the closed source components.

I grant you that having source for everything may not be everyone's cup of tea, but being able to dive into the source of everything has saved me so often that it results in a qualitative difference in the experience of developing. I haven't spent two weeks trying disparately to figure out how to get around some bug since I used a closed-source PDF generation library three years ago, but this was a routine experience in the Microsoft world. (Not always two weeks, granted, but it can be!)

We've fixed the kernel, read the source of glib and other fundamental libraries to figure out why our things weren't working, hacked up other things in ways that are two-line fixes in what would be closed source in the Microsoft world but would be huge masses of unreliable code to work around at a different layer.

(It should be pointed out that this is simply an effect of having source and the right to build it and use the built result, which some permissive commercial licenses do permit, but my understanding is that this remains the exception and not the rule, with most people still working under the idea that opening your source is tantamount to handing out the family jewels.)

Slowly Dying? Please. I can't remember which blog these numbers came for, but this "MSFT is Dying" meme has been circulating for a while and there's a post out there with a fantastic treatment of the notion..

The gist is that Microsoft, as it's supposedly "dying," has gross revenue growing by BILLIONS each year. Yes, their stock has underperformed their sector. But their revenue hasn't. And a company can fudge profits 7 ways from sunday. But you can't fudge topline numbers without out and out fraud.

The author put it in an interesting way: Microsoft revenues grow the size of 1 Adobe or 1 Yahoo!, each year.

There's not a single American (nay GLOBAL) company that wouldn't love for a "death" like that.

And about Buffett... he's often written that he doesn't invest in a company he doesn't fully and completely understand.

Does John Carmack count as a real programmer?

The issue was not exclusion, nor bashing. The code has been accepted by a driver maintainer, and there were surprisingly few critical undertone mails on lkml, however legitimate (namely, adherence to the Linux coding conventions).

What is not pointless is honesty, and not even Linus[1] can say, that the code drop was honest. Microsoft should have said: somebody found us in violation of the license we think is important [the licensing legalese itself, not the GPL], and this is how we fixed it. Sorry for our mistake, we do our best. This is not what happened: instead it was sold as an act of benevolence. Voleurs.

You cannot blame people for hating dishonest legal persons.

[1] should take a long look in the mirror and ask themselves why they are being so hypocritical.

Except that's not what happened. MS didn't "get caught" for a GPL violation -- there was no license requiring them to submit the code.

They didn't do it out of the goodness of their hearts, correct, because MS is a corporation -- not a person. MS did this out of business sense -- increased interoperability with Linux just makes Windows/Microsoft all the more valuable.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/23/microsoft_open_sourc...

Despite not being natural persons, corporations are recognized by the law to have rights and responsibilities like actual people. Corporations can exercise human rights against real individuals and the state

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation

Yeager said Stanford's lawyers asked him to review a copy of Cisco's software. He found his own work in it.

Stanford officials in charge of licensing debated what to do. ``Cisco mess'' was the heading of one e-mail discussing the issue.

Earnest urged a lawsuit and even raised the idea of criminal charges against Bosack. He e-mailed colleagues: ``The fundamental problem is: how do you negotiate an equitable agreement with crooks?''

http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/2001-December/007210.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

Your response in no way addresses what I said -- MS didn't act out of empathy, b/c corporations have none -- they don't have a "heart" b/c they are persons only by law.

As to the Cisco cite -- how is that relevant to MS? Moreover, copying software code is not a criminal offense -- it's a civil tort. Finally, equitable estoppel is not a matter of negotiation, it's a matter of one party's unilateral acts.

they don't have a "heart" b/c they are persons only by law.

This is a well-known phenomenon [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation ]. Organizations acting without moral, conscience, responsibility and ethically towards real humans/natural persons can certainly happen, but it goes without saying, that it also does have consequences. This is what I pointed out: You cannot blame people for hating dishonest legal persons.

Acting such and expecting loyalty and gratitude in the same time is hard to achieve.

History is littered with examples, and I am inclined to think the recurrence of such attitude is partially responsible for the self-inflicted trouble we face.

"We learn from history that we learn nothing from history." -- George Bernard Shaw

Cisco is relevant, because History is relevant, from my point of view.

"When Americans say "that is history", they often mean it is no longer relevant. When Europeans say "that is history", they usually mean the opposite." -- Javier Solana, 2006

Except that's not what happened. MS didn't "get caught" for a GPL violation

Just as a record in the Memory Hole, a paste from a separate thread, now buried:

-8<---------------------

MJF: Hemminger is claiming Microsoft put the LIC code under the GPL because it was in violation of the GPL. Is this true? Did you have to suggest to (Microsoft Platform Strategy Chief Sam) Ramji & Co. that they were in violation in order to get them to agree to release the code under GPLv2?

GKH: I didn’t have to “suggest” anything, I only had to merely point out the obviousness of the situation :)

MJF: If this isn’t accurate, could you let me know how to interpret (Hemminger’s) comments on his blog.

GKH: No, that sounds accurate.

[...]

Ramji didn’t come right out and deny the GPL violations claim, but I guess that’s as much as we’re going to get.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3433

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