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Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

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Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#91

Post by giancarlostoro »

gerdesj wrote: post #37
privatelypublic wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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." I think you misunderstand: the market, ie the number of people who actually care about developing game engines, is tiny. How many games developers do you know as a subset of the people you know of? OP only managed to find a niche product area for MS to shi…

ONNX is a format that allows you to run AI models without Python in any language that implements ONNX, there's even an ONNX implementation in Go, meaning you can churn out even more performance out of AI models and waste drastically less resources (Go, Rust, C++, Zig, C, D etc could be used to squeeze performance). Think of it how Java produces a JAR file, well an ONNX file is a file that could be run by any runtime built for it. Another reasonable analogy would be WebAssembly, but to a degree.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#92

Post by boolit »

gerdesj wrote: post #37
privatelypublic wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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." I think you misunderstand: the market, ie the number of people who actually care about developing game engines, is tiny. How many games developers do you know as a subset of the people you know of? OP only managed to find a niche product area for MS to shi…

Typescript is used by web developers over the world and ONNX for deploying deep neural networks. Two huge markets.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#93

Post by metaltyphoon »

protocolture wrote: post #89
jongjong wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why is it that every person I know or even heard about who switched to Linux never went back to OSX or Windows? The only thing which made them use OSX or Windows in the first place was their ignorance of alternatives. Clearly you've never used any consumer-grade Linux distro like Ubuntu.

Are you kidding? By the time you get through the first half of the requirements document of most windows customers, OSX and Linux alternatives have already been thoroughly ruled out.

When it starts with the phrase “FIP-S compliant”, hardly anyone is wants to do that on Linux.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#94

Post by bluefirebrand »

majkinetor wrote: post #79
jiggawatts wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you found yourself in some bizarre dark corner of a huge ecosystem of products, that's just not true. Deployments are just "file copy". You don't even need Docker, because Windows isn't Linux, it has stable user-land APIs so apps are portable . Not to mention that the dotnet sdk can create container images directly without even needing Docker installed: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/containers/…

All that, and finally, PowerShell, literary light years ahead of everything Linux has to offer. I have PTSD from bash and friends. It is so good, that I rarely even write C# nowadays for most of the critical government stuff and simply run smallish scripts as services, and change them on the server when intervention is needed in notepad, in a couple of minutes, while my colleagues still worm up their full-blown Visua…

> change them on the server when intervention is needed in notepad

How is this any different than a Linux setup where you can just ssh into a box and edit your scripts in the shell using something like nano or vim if you're into that sort of thing?

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#96

Post by dismalaf »

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?

No, they're on Windows because it was the only viable gaming desktop environment during the 90's and 00's. Apple was all but dead and hardware was limited, Linux was in its infancy, Unix vendors didn't care about normal desktop users, etc...

In the early days of 3D gaming, there were studios that used OpenGL over DirectX on Windows. ID Software were the best known example of choosing OpenGL over DirectX.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#97

Post by dismalaf »

jiggawatts wrote: post #30
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.

To paint a picture: I’ve worked with Microsoft technologies almost exclusively for decades but recently I was forced to pick up some Node.js, Docker, and Linux tooling for a specific app. I can’t express in words what a giant step backwards it is from ASP.NET and Visual Studio. It’s like bashing things with open source rocks after working in a rocket manufacturing facility festooned with Kuka robots. It’s just… end-t…

Everything you describe has more to do with the state of JavaScript development than MS vs. Linux tooling.

I wouldn't touch .NET for ideological reasons (and fear of a rug pull) but I also wouldn't touch any server side JS because I value my sanity.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#98

Post by dismalaf »

bitpush wrote: post #43
hilbert42 wrote: post #41

I still find it hard to believe that so many people and companies are prepared to use Microsoft's online/cloud services. Not ony is this a single point of failure but it's one they've no control over whatsoever. Same goes for Google/Youtube etc. It's as risky as flying a passenger jet with only one engine. What are they thinking, why are they prepared to risk everything? It boggles my mind.

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?

> 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?

You sure you like this analogy? Every ambitious restaurant (Michelin stars, World's 50 Best, that type) uses small farmers to try obtain higher quality produce.

It's chain restaurants and shitty family restaurants that use the large suppliers.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#99

Post by ArcHound »

not_a_bot_4sho wrote: post #87
ArcHound wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, author here - yes exactly. And also I don't think companies depend that completely on e.g. AWS

Maybe that's a good correction or follow up article to consider. These concerns aren't specific to Microsoft in any way. They apply to all tech companies that wish to operate within the United States.

It is a good point and a weaker spot of the article.

First of all, I now cover MS since this incident made headlines. If you are aware of any such incident from the other providers, I am interested.

Another argument is that more companies depend on MS more. Even in high-tech startups and scaleups you'll find traces of Win machines, AD and Office. On the other hand, there are plenty of companies that don't have AWS deployments at all.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#100

Post by ArcHound »

firesteelrain wrote: post #4

For most businesses, the cost and difficulty of shifting away from Microsoft outweigh the benefits

That is the conclusion I've reached in the article. The biggest variable here is whether we start seeing more sanctions enforced by MS. If yes, the risk will become more unbearable.
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