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Microsoft’s Very Good Day

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Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#241
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have to essentially copy and paste fragments of things that work, it's so arcane. I have about the same problem when it comes to bash. While bash may very well be described as "arcane" I believe this is mostly a problem of unwillingness to learn something new or different. Understanding how PowerShell works takes a bit of time and re-thinking. It doesn't help that there's so much downright bad PowerShell code out…

Why are you comparing powershell to bash. the more accurate comparison is python.

Fair point. PowerShell is three things, actually: An embeddable scripting runtime, a scripting language, and a shell. The latter is (by name, probably) what people see it as, usually. Furthermore, most usage examples throughout the web use it for things that are traditionally done in a shell, e.g. interactive use, or small scripts that mainly do filesystem maintenance stuff.

You're right in that Python may be a more apt comparison, especially in that PowerShell's .NET foundation serves as the equivalent to Python's included libraries.

But that's a discussion that would have to happen every time people try to think of PowerShell as a weird bash. And it is a capable and useful shell, too. It just can do a lot of things much better than bash; they just look different.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#242
post #118
post #84

Microsoft's offerings still seem under-designed to me, on a second look. I still can't order Surface Pro (or Surface Book) with cellular modem; only Surface 3, an older and supposedly lower end device. I can't order Surface Book with 1TB drive, only a Surface Pro 4; despite the former being a more expensive and supposedly higher end device. Why so? As far as I understand, Microsoft still goes with the templates their…

> I can't order Surface Book with 1TB drive Surface Book storage options listed as: "Solid state drive (SSD) options: 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB." http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/devices/surface-book#... Is this just something not available right away, or do you not want a solid state? I am confused.

You're right, I didn't notice that it's going to be available; just not right now.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#243
post #213
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are just lawsuits between the two, wasn't the nature of the royalties for Android devices that they contacted OEMs and said "we have these patents, you better pay us or we'll sue you", and the OEMs paid up? That's different than cancelling outstanding lawsuits.

That's how patent licensing works (albeit a comically overaggressive caricature). Do you fundamentally oppose the concept of patents or do you think Microsoft is doing something else wrong by asking to be paid license fees by competitors using their patents?

I don't hold either of those views. I was just pointing out that the parent comment by sz4kerto seems to not be relevant to the question asked by NotOscarWilde.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my ehtical chart Apple (Worst Offender but also helped Open Source at times) Microsoft M$ (Middle of the road with it always depending on who you spoke with at the company) Google (Most powerful of the three in terms of control over people's lives if they wanted it, but I seriously think they stumble ethically not on purpose. I believe they try to follow, "Don't be evil" as a whole)

> Google (Most powerful of the three in terms of control over people's lives if they wanted it, but I seriously think they stumble ethically not on purpose. I believe they try to follow, "Don't be evil" as a whole) How do you explain things like this then? http://www.businessinsider.com/google-skyhook-emails-2011-5?... That's exactly what Microsoft is accused of doing.

Um I read every word. I fail to see the Lighting Bolt ah ha. Yes Google is in the data collection business. They have stated it since day one and in every product they produce. GMail was a GB of space if we get to send you ads.

That they were HUGELY upset that they would lose a data collection stream? Or that they were trying to figure out what to do? Android as a service has requirements or you can make a Fire Phone like Amazon did with the Open Source code of the product doesn't seem like M$.

You can explain what I am missing but the fact that we have Amazon Fire Phone and Fire Tablets all based on a fork of Android seems to kill the implications of these emails.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The Microsoft consent decree was about restricting browser choice by shipping their own browser as default and claiming it was unremovable" But it was technically unremovable, in those days you could open a windows explorer and type an URL and then you suddenly have internet explorer right into your window. It was an awful design flaw that costed them lagging apart after the post IE6 era. The other thing is that wou…

> in those days you could open a windows explorer and type an URL and then you suddenly have internet explorer right into your window This is still the case, isn't it? You can type "//google.com" into Explorer's address bar and it will launch your default browser to that address.

Yeah but before it didn't launch anything. The browser was embedded to explorer.exe

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went all in on XNA, and got very, very burned. It taught me a great lesson though: don't be locked into any vendor. I'm very happy about the .NET and Typescript developments as of late, and use Typescript for my web coding. But only because if Microsoft abandons it right now, I can continue on in plain JavaScript.

Have you looked into MonoGame ( http://www.monogame.net/ )? It is basically a fully open source re-implementation of the XNA framework with support for almost every major platform (iOS, Android, Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, OS X, Linux, etc.)

Yes, MonoGame is good, but at the time I was trying to salvage my XNA team+IP monogame was 2d only. (I think it can do 3d now?) we ended up moving to Unity but this technical roadblock plus some market related ones ultimately led me to abandon gamedev.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They also ushered in the modern era of web applications by inventing XMLHttpRequest ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest ). People were doing Ajax-like things before XMLHTTPRequest with hidden iframes. XHR was more convenient, but it didn't bring new functionality to the table.

People used hidden iframes as a fallback for browsers that did not support XMLHttpRequest, but not before XMLHttpRequest existed. XMLHttpRequest shipped with IE 5.0, which also happened to be the first browser where "DHTML" support was good enough that building anything resembling a modern web application was actually practical.

We aren't talking about modern web applications and all that entails though, we're specifically talking about the ability to load and send content without reloading the page. That was in use in browsers older than Internet Explorer 5.

Netscape Navigator 4 had frustrating limitations once you had the data, but people were doing all sorts with it regardless. More was possible with Internet Explorer 4, but again, you didn't need XMLHTTPRequest. And if you just want to strip it back to the bare-bones of loading and saving data, a few people were even doing that as far back as Netscape Navigator 2 if I recall correctly – by dynamically loading new images with varying query string parameters.

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