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The Day AppGet Died

keivan.io

361–370 of 566 posts

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#361
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find MS seems quite immune to terrible publicity in the recent years. "But it's not the same company as before! They are doing open-source now!" yada yada

They are not immune. As someone who has been supportive of Microsoft getting their act together, and who recently spoke at a Microsoft-sponsored conference, this stuff makes me hesitant to give any Microsoft-owned properties money and discourages me from trying new Microsoft products.

Giving them constructive criticism and using their open source stuff, but strictly not giving them money might be an acceptable way with dealing them.

For example, I wanted to buy Win10 recently, and also wanted to sign up for Teams. Both experiences were so unimaginably ridiculously terrible, that I ended up cancelling the Teams subscriptions the same day and not buying Win10.

On the other hand .NET (Core), PowerShell, TypeScript and VS Code are all great things.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About Nestlé's poison baby formula: I though their baby formula was safe, but the problem is that they gave it away (maybe still do?) for free to new mothers in developing countries and when the mothers stopped lactating (because their own milk wasn't being drunk) they made the price hopelessly unaffordable so now the babies couldn't drink from either source, or at least needed to over-dilute the formula. Totally rea…

That's more recent. A long time ago (and I'm working from memory, so best to fact check anything I say, because my memory is terrible) it was common to use a particular rat poison in dry milk (and I forget exactly what it was). There were certain standards as to how much rat poison you were allowed to have. It was well known that this would kill a small percentage of babies, but it was thought to be a reasonable trad…

This is the episode I could find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morinaga_Milk_arsenic_poisonin...

Which was inadverted addition of arsenic specific to Morinaga in Japan, and not Nestle. However, the committe which managed the case and dragged it on was not created by the company but the Japanese government consisting of a newspaper publisher (??), a hospital director, 2 lawyers and a human rights lecturer.

So it seems like an insufficiently related market and lack of oversight made this drag on causing many deaths and even more people crippled by arsenic. One person was sentenced to 3 years in prison.

Compare with China who executed 2 people involved in the 2008 milk scandal and gave much harsher sentences to others. Although that scandal was deliberate rather than a cover up of bad practices.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#363

I remember the "good old days" of the Microsoft Borg. They were infamous for getting small companies in under NDA, then grabbing their tech, and dumping the small companies (often putting them out of business). They are not alone in this (Apple has done the same thing. I think they even have a term for it -"to Watson" * ). It's just that MS was the most egregious. It makes me sad to see they are still doing it. I've…

I believe the more common version of that term is "Sherlocked"

You are correct.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#364
what do I learn from that? I will not talk with a Microsoft representative before they pay me at least 5000 US$ consulting fees.

Never give them something for free, not one minute of my precious lifetime.

They seem to me as 'friendly' as the aliens in the "Mars attacks" movie.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About Nestlé's poison baby formula: I though their baby formula was safe, but the problem is that they gave it away (maybe still do?) for free to new mothers in developing countries and when the mothers stopped lactating (because their own milk wasn't being drunk) they made the price hopelessly unaffordable so now the babies couldn't drink from either source, or at least needed to over-dilute the formula. Totally rea…

That's more recent. A long time ago (and I'm working from memory, so best to fact check anything I say, because my memory is terrible) it was common to use a particular rat poison in dry milk (and I forget exactly what it was). There were certain standards as to how much rat poison you were allowed to have. It was well known that this would kill a small percentage of babies, but it was thought to be a reasonable trad…

What's the point of even adding rat poison in baby formula? What does that accomplish?

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#367
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not immune. As someone who has been supportive of Microsoft getting their act together, and who recently spoke at a Microsoft-sponsored conference, this stuff makes me hesitant to give any Microsoft-owned properties money and discourages me from trying new Microsoft products.

There will be newer people after you flocking to the new Microsoft. Given how scummy and bad they have been in the past and how many people have been cheerleading them here, do you really think it works that way? When people were warning against Microsoft on this forum they were just set aside as cynical, grumpy Unix-beards. If that happens even here, what do you think will happen elsewhere?

I think it's changing. I was one of the young people who did not believe the neckbeards (who are evangelists in their own right) since I wasn't around when the EEE strategy happened. I was happy with Windows because for me it was a better user experience, but today I run Linux and OSX. The world is more connected now than it was. These sentiments can spread faster now.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some higher ups decided no, they don't need to hire you Total misjudgment on their part. Thanks to this one HN post they already lost in terms of developer good will way more than his potential salary would be. Every time anyone who uses WinGet, who read this, will think 'oh, yeah, that's the tool that Microsoft build their version of behind original author's back, while stringing him and ghosting for few months".

Yes. Microsoft really dropped the ball on this one. So much of what Microsoft has been doing — GitHub, .NET Core, NPM, Visual Studio Code, Windows Subsystem for Linux, etc. — has been to build goodwill with “developers! developers! developers!” Taking the resources to do an acquihire (or hire + bonus) right is small relative to the PR hit.

> Windows Subsystem for Linux, etc. — has been to build goodwill with “developers!

WSL has been built for webdevs not to flock to *NIX from Windows, nothing else.

Even naming it "Windows Subsystem for Linux" is an insult, since it sounds as if it was something for Linux, when in reality it's a "Linux Subsystem for Windows" and doesn't benefit Linux itself in any way.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#369

Microsoft pretends to want to acquire a product or software and then release their own implementation. The developer was obviously brain-picked for any implementation ideas, as stated at scale. They should have been paying a retainer, or had an offer inside of two weeks. Let this be a warning for other developers.

If the developer had asked for a retainer straight off the bat I feel like MS would have just ignored him and started building WinGet earlier. All the AppGet source was right there for them to look at. They wouldn't have had the benefit of Andrew picking his brains one to one, but that probably wasn't 100% necessary anyway.

Re: The Day AppGet Died

#370
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows NT is designed out of the box for extending and embracing Unix. The whole Linux Subsystem thing isn't something new that required deep reworking of the kernel.

You should read the book Showstopper! to learn that NT was actually designed to be as far away from Unix as it could be. Dave Cutler, NT’s chief architect, hated Unix with a passion. He thought it was a rubbish OS. The internals are based on VMS, Cutler’s previous OS. That’s why NT has never been a good posix system and why microsoft has essentially given up with WSL2 and is now just running linux in a vm.

Great book. Another interesting wrinkle that’s been somewhat lost to time is that (as the book documents) NT was developed simultaneously on x86 and a RISC architecture (MIPS I believe).
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