Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

blog.miloslavhomer.cz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 238 posts

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#111

Post by ruszki »

privatelypublic wrote: post #29
gerdesj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way." I'm not interested in AAA games engines writing and nor is most of the world. If that is it, then you have damned MS with (very) faint praise.

I think you misunderstand- game engines are complex beasts and visual studio and/or .Net (in any of its incarnations) have the best debugging workflow I've seen. Typescript is also Microsoft. So is ONNX.

What makes it better than say IntelliJ? Is there some feature which helps you more with debugging?

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#113

Post by ArcHound »

lmm wrote: post #109
ArcHound wrote: post #83

Hello, author here. The main point is that it's not a financially rational decision to ditch Microsoft. There's just no real alternative for businesses, as most use AD, Teams, Outlook/Exchange and couple others.

I don't think expected value is the right way to evaluate this. All insurance is negative expected value (that's how insurance companies make a profit), but businesses find it rational to buy insurance. Also I'd say your risk of getting cut off is much more than 1 in 2 million, because there's nothing to say this can only be done to one company at a time. What if Trump adds e.g. a whole country to the sanction list,…

That's the trick behind ROSI. You weight the expected cost without mitigation against the mitigated cost plus the cost of your solution.

The risk of getting cut off is the most random variable on the list. I agree with your point, but I have no data to back it up with.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#114

Post by lmm »

ArcHound wrote: post #113
lmm wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think expected value is the right way to evaluate this. All insurance is negative expected value (that's how insurance companies make a profit), but businesses find it rational to buy insurance. Also I'd say your risk of getting cut off is much more than 1 in 2 million, because there's nothing to say this can only be done to one company at a time. What if Trump adds e.g. a whole country to the sanction list,…

That's the trick behind ROSI. You weight the expected cost without mitigation against the mitigated cost plus the cost of your solution. The risk of getting cut off is the most random variable on the list. I agree with your point, but I have no data to back it up with.

> That's the trick behind ROSI. You weight the expected cost without mitigation against the mitigated cost plus the cost of your solution.

Right but that's clearly not the right way to think about it; if you did that you'd never buy insurance (and probably never do any security work tbh, since very little of it can be justified in expected value terms). The impact of catastrophic damage is nonlinear.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#115

Post by kookamamie »

thefz wrote: post #88
nordsieck wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way. The reason all the AAA games are on it is because they're on the Windows platform, and more importantly their customers are on the Windows platform. If 95% of gamers ran MacOS…

Game customers are on Windows because DirectX has been superior to OpenGL - development wise - for what, 30 years?

Yes, that's the essential reason. Even though that barrier has been lifted with Vulkan matching DX12 in many ways, the accumulated mass moves slowly.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#116

Post by pimeys »

viraptor wrote: post #63
duped wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft, for all their warts, has the absolute best documentation for every public API in Windows. I'd go so far as to say it's better on average than manpages in Linux and BSD and light years better than the actively hostile bullshit from Apple. Submitting a bug report though, you gotta know people or know where to ask.

It really depends how far you go. The basics - they're pretty good. But for the more complicated things they just ignore all context and pretty much restate the names of functions/arguments without explaining how/why things work. See for example https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/tsvirtua... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/tsvirtua... What does the terminal services renderer d…

Some of the advanced stuff has great docs. E.g. SQL Server and its wire protocol. When you need to write client to a language that doesn't have one, the TDS doc from Microsoft is amazing. Compare that to e.g. Oracle and you know what I mean.

In general SQL Server is such a great product. If you cannot choose PostgreSQL for some reason, make sure your buying manager plays golf with the Microsoft sales people, not with Oracle.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#117

Post by ArcHound »

lmm wrote: post #114
ArcHound wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the trick behind ROSI. You weight the expected cost without mitigation against the mitigated cost plus the cost of your solution. The risk of getting cut off is the most random variable on the list. I agree with your point, but I have no data to back it up with.

> That's the trick behind ROSI. You weight the expected cost without mitigation against the mitigated cost plus the cost of your solution. Right but that's clearly not the right way to think about it; if you did that you'd never buy insurance (and probably never do any security work tbh, since very little of it can be justified in expected value terms). The impact of catastrophic damage is nonlinear.

Yes, at the end of the article I come to the conclusion that this method has flaws. But the general insurance can be modelled with ROSI.

Say you have a 300k USD car. Say that a crash will cost you the full cost. You expect one crash in five years. You then have a yearly expected cost of 60k. If you get an insurance that pays for it all, for 10k USD a year, your ROSI is 500% which sounds like this insurance product is great for you.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#118

Post by lmm »

ArcHound wrote: post #117
lmm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the trick behind ROSI. You weight the expected cost without mitigation against the mitigated cost plus the cost of your solution. Right but that's clearly not the right way to think about it; if you did that you'd never buy insurance (and probably never do any security work tbh, since very little of it can be justified in expected value terms). The impact of catastrophic damage is nonlinear.

Yes, at the end of the article I come to the conclusion that this method has flaws. But the general insurance can be modelled with ROSI. Say you have a 300k USD car. Say that a crash will cost you the full cost. You expect one crash in five years. You then have a yearly expected cost of 60k. If you get an insurance that pays for it all, for 10k USD a year, your ROSI is 500% which sounds like this insurance product is…

> Say you have a 300k USD car. Say that a crash will cost you the full cost. You expect one crash in five years. You then have a yearly expected cost of 60k. If you get an insurance that pays for it all, for 10k USD a year, your ROSI is 500% which sounds like this insurance product is great for you.

But in the real world those numbers are backwards - otherwise insurance companies would go bankrupt! Your insurance for that will cost, like, 70k/year, your ROSI will be 80%, and you'll still buy the insurance, and you'll be right to do so.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#119

Post by pimeys »

somenameforme wrote: post #73
bitpush wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most companies enter into a contract with Microsoft. That is infinitely better than using a 2 person startup that runs out of a garage. Contracts come with strict terms of service, SLAs, service expectations and such. If you had a restaurant, would you source your produce from your trusty friend who grows vegetables as a hobby or from an established mega-farming-company?

Ironically appropriate example. Many of the most famous restaurants in the world, like Noma [1], are famous precisely for sourcing ingredients that bypass mega-farming. At Noma many of the dishes are based on the produce provided from local foraging. And contrary to what you might expect from its presentation/reputation, the place itself is just a building surrounded by green houses and a guy growing and harvesting m…

Yeah, and many of these best restaurants in the world barely make a profit, compared to Olive Garden or McDonald's.

But yes, I'm with you here. I also like Noma way more than Olive Garden.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#120

Post by zdragnar »

bob1029 wrote: post #18

The trick with Microsoft is to very carefully separate the good parts from the bad ones. Labeling all of Microsoft as banned is really constraining your technology options. This is a gigantic organization with a very diverse set of people in it. There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situation…

Setting aside the debugger, visual studio has to be the worst IDE I've used. There are so many rough edges it is astounding.

On an ancient project, among other things I've been editing JavaScript code both in js files and inline script tags in aspx files. The indentation auto-formatting appears to choose new levels of indentation using a random number generator.

You can't add a new file to the project while it is running, or even create a file through the context menu, but it can detect when the files have changed externally and recommend restarting the project.

There's a thousand little things, but the indentation auto-formatting abomination is a constant burr under my saddle.

Post reply on HN