Apple stocks worth over 40 times what they were 7 years ago today - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:AAPL <comment><USER2> My Grandad had a huge "Forest Gump" moment a few months ago when going through my Gran's estate. He kept waffling on about how he was sure she had some investments in "fruit farms or something".

Apparently she, for some reason, bought some Apple shares back in the 90's. No idea why because she had no idea about computers! I wish we could find out why.

<comment><USER3> Maybe she thought it was a fruit farm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Heh. Back in Macworld Boston 1996, I bought one share of Apple stock at $16 and got a framed commemorative stock certificate. It went into a box when I moved later that year and I completely forgot about until I found it a couple of weeks ago. It's worth almost $1,000 now!

Unfortunately the state seized it as abandoned property (I moved a couple of times since and I never updated my address with the stock transfer agent) and I'm in the process of trying to reclaim the stock now. :(

<comment><USER5> Pardon me for not being very knowledgeable about the laws regarding stocks, but _you have the certificate_... Isn't that your proof?

I mean...don't people keep stock certs in safety deposit boxes and soforth? Does the sec mail you ever year asking if your heart is still beating or something?

<comment><USER4> Which is exactly the question I asked of the transfer agent, but it seems that if the TA can't get in contact with you over a certain period, they can consider the stock "abandoned".

Since I actually have the certificate (well, not anymore, I had to send in the original certificate to the state as proof of ownership), getting the stock back is a straightforward process. But until the state relinquishes its claim, the stock certificate literally isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

See [http://www.stocktransfer.com/index.cfm?action=shareholders.F...](http://www.stocktransfer.com/index.cfm?action=shareholders.FAQ.transferStock&displayMenu=FAQ&ssl=0#21)

<comment><USER6> Actually, it is worth the paper it's printed on.

<comment><USER7> I disagree. Isn't a blank piece of paper worth slightly more than one with something useless printed on it?

<comment><USER8> It's probably worth significantly more:

<http://www.oldstocks.com/>

People pay good money for cancelled stock certificates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a friend who invested ~$10k in AAPL in 2003. He's considering moving to NV or TX for a year, to avoid the massive CA 10% long term capital gains tax.. we joke that Steve Jobs is partly responsible for CA's mass exodus.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you spent the money on an original ipod in 2001 on apple stock ($499), you would have 14,513.78 today.

<comment><USER11> This calculation cries out for a table, including all Apple products over the years: if you'd bought AAPL instead of the product, how much would your stock be worth?

<comment><USER12> So I decided to do just that <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1292276>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Selling my Apple stock a couple years back was what let me quit my day job and start out on my own. :)

Years ago as a kid, I invested a tiny amount and the broker was so adamant I was making a mistake that he made me sign an acknowledgement that I was acting on my own wishes against his advice.

</comment><comment><USER14> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias>

For a more fun example: <http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3Adndn>

</comment><comment><USER15> My parents bought me 20 shares at $10 for a birthday present several years ago. They were very close to buying me 200 shares but the broker heard the wrong number of zeros over the phone.

At least that's their excuse... :)

<comment><USER16> If they spoke out the numbers, wouldn't it be hard to confuse "two hundred" with "twenty"?

<comment><USER15> That's why I cry foul every time they tell the story. I doubt that's what actually happened and they just feel bad.</comment></comment></comment>


Neurocircuits, Neuromorphic Processors, and Computational Neuroscience - <AUTHOR> http://biocircuits.ucsd.edu/special/winterschool2014/2014%20Winter%20School%20Schedule.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> If anyone is going, please take notes? I was planning to drive down from LA but deferred at the last moment due to jetlag/fatigue...</comment>


One Child Policy: China's Worst Policy Mistake - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/07/chinas-worst-policy-mistake/ <comment><USER2> I couldn't disagree more strongly. The one-child policy was one of the most visionary and far-sighted policies of any government at any time.

Already Beijing is so polluted the air is literally (not metaphorically) poisonous. Can you imagine the toll on the environment if there were hundreds of millions more people there?

<comment><USER3> "In the West, there's a tendency to approve of it as a necessary if overzealous effort to curb China's population growth and overcome poverty. In fact, it was unnecessary and has led to a rapid aging of China's population that may undermine the country's economic prospects."

Let's see how this unnecessary policy, which is not visionary or far-sighted, was implemented:

"All fertile married women in their region were obliged to pee into a cup for a pregnancy test every three months; a positive result could lead to a mandatory abortion. Any couple that somehow evaded the controls risked a fine, the demolition of the family home, and forced sterilization."

In the US we like to talk about the so called "war on women" and infringing on reproductive rights and the right of a woman to do what she wants with her body. What they were doing to women in China pales in comparison to anything women in the West go through. This is a precipitously high price to pay to mitigate the toll on the environment of having more people there.

The article mentions that China even had a better method of family planning before implementing the one-child policy. It dramatically reduced the average children per family, and more importantly it was completely voluntary:

"by the early 1970s China had adopted a highly successful voluntary family planning program called "Later, Longer, Fewer." Its slogan was "One child isn't too few, two are just fine, three are too many." And within about a decade it managed without coercion to reduce the average number of births per woman from six to three, a remarkable achievement. It's rarely acknowledged that the biggest drop in Chinese fertility came not from the one-child policy, but earlier during this voluntary birth control campaign. If it had continued, China's birth rates would have continued to drop"

Far from visionary or far-sighted, the one-child policy was disastrous for families and threatens the Chinese economy, and was completely unnecessary. The Party wanted dramatic cuts, instead of the gradual decrease that was occurring with "Later, Longer, Fewer". In spite of several high ranking Party officials warning it would be disaster, the Party pushed forward with the policy, and it took them over 35 years to walk it back.

Part of the reason they're walking back may be that, as China's economy continues developing, it is starting to cost families more to raise children, so economic forces may be forcing them to one or two children anyway:

"One survey found that of Chinese families who today have one child, 60 percent say the reasons have nothing to do with the one-child policy. The cost of educating a child is often the foremost obstacle."

Disastrous family planning didn't save Beijing from disastrous city planning. Shanghai is larger still than Beijing in terms of population, yet Beijing still has the worse solution problem. (To be fair, Shanghai still has a pollution problem, but there is little precedent in city planning at the scale of Shanghai and Beijing.)

The article paints a vastly different picture to the idea that the one-child policy was one of the most visionary and far-sighted policies of any government at any time. In fact, the evidence presented by the article says the one-child policy is almost the complete opposite of a visionary and far- sighted policy.

<comment><USER4> One child policy was meant to be educational than actual enforcement. The problem happens when local governments takes policies literally (as the examples provided, pay docks, quotas etc). What was meant to be a family planning policy turned into another statistics for the local municipal governments to look good on paper to their bosses, and their bosses to their bosses.. etc. Good intentions, bad execution.</comment></comment></comment>


Interesting logos are being replaced with boring ones - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2018/12/13/interesting-logos-are-being-re.html <comment><USER2> Except for 'Balmain', the rest became worse with the transition to bold sans- serif. The worst was Burberry's, it's like they now manufacture OEM car parts or something.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure. In each case it's a transition from slightly pretentious and kitschy lettering to more-or-less carefully calibrated typography.

More people have the visual literacy to appreciate typography now than did 20 years ago. Maybe it's preferable to go with a more refined, subtle form of visual comm.

<comment><USER2> I disagree. Rather than pretentious, I'd say style and individual character. The new logos remind me of the aborted redesign Gap went through (JC Penny as well).

These pretty much all look very generic. Something a machine shop in Indiana would pick for a font. Only one old logo/typeface did I find looked dated because it used a 'toy' typeface.

<comment><USER4> The main thing is to get rid of the absurd typefaces that look like handwriting. It's print. Those just don't belong.

<comment><USER2> None of the replaced logos had "handwritten" typefaces (I'm thinking Coca- Cola, which by the way, it'd be brutal, if thry changed it like Pepsi-Cola did). And I don't think this 'neu bauhaus' look works for any but one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can these still be called logos?</comment>


Why j for imaginary unit? - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2013/04/23/why-j-for-imaginary-unit/ <comment><USER2> But this is only a problem if you use i, j, and k as unit vectors. I found $\hat e_{x,y,z}$ or even $\hat{e}_{1,2,3…}$ etc. to be the usual convention in physics, as it generalises much nicer to more dimensions.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I was just about to write a similar comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Before vector notation became popular in the last 1800s, people used quaternions. The three independent square roots of -1 in quaternion notation are i, j, and k. Therefore the use of j or (in need) k as a square root of -1 seems natural to me.

My understanding is that this history is why people in physics - even today - frequently use i, j, and k as the names of the three spatial unit vectors. (The real numbers, of course, represented time.) However I've not personally looked into any of this history, so you should treat my understanding more as hearsay rather than informed comment.

<comment><USER5> People still use quaternions. They are an excellent method of representing spatial rotations, since they avoid Gimbal lock (and similar phenomena caused singularities in polar coordinates).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternions_and_spatial_rotati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternions_and_spatial_rotation#Quaternion_rotation_operations)

<comment><USER6> Addendum: frequently used in Aerospace, Navigation, and Motion Tracking applications.

<comment><USER7> And computer games!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I actually see that as an argument against using j. The _meanings_ of a unit vector in real space and a dimensional unit in imaginary space are different concepts even if it's common to represent both in 2-dimensions plots. It seems to me that this would only cause confusion/ambiguity. When I look at a plot I want to know what it's representing as soon as possible, and the way the axes are labeled is part of what helps me.

<comment><USER6> Exactly what I thought. I studied EE in undergrad so I used this sort of notation all the time, and my thought upon reading the article was that I'd be rather confused upon looking at the graph and would struggle to figure out what it was even representing.

<comment><USER9> Yes, ultimately we are bound by tradition, since changing over to any system is too expensive and confusing.

Path dependence and local optima.

See also: English vs Metric units.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Want to know what's worse? Spherical coordinates.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_coordinates#Conventio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_coordinates#Conventions)

You need to remember two different sets of conversions from cartesian to spherical coordinates and two sets of differential elements -and of course, you need to remember which is assumed by which audience.

</comment><comment><USER11> Speaking as someone just graduating high school in India, this sort of unintuitive convention discrepancy often flummoxes people at the 9th grade level, causing them to drop out of Physics altogether. Once you drop Physics, it's essentially impossible to get onto the Engineering or CS tracks in India, and U.S. universities are often too expensive.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps my comment will be considered harsh, but my view has long been that if you are hung up on the notation, you miss the physics, you miss the science.

There is no such as "an intuitive convention". Notation is simply that: Convention. If someone cannot grasp this, they lack either or both of the intellectual maturity and the doggedness necessary to understand the science.

If teachers failed to make the point that notation is simply convention, chosen for largely historical reasons, then they have not helped the situation - but fundamentally it is up to the student to see past, to see through the conventions and to perceive what the notation is saying.

Why does "W" represent the "wa" sound? Convention. Do you see the individual letters or do you read the words, the sentences?

Arguing whether you should use i or j for square root -1 is like arguing whether you should o or u for a particular vowel sound.

<comment><USER9> > If someone cannot grasp this, they lack either or both of the intellectual > maturity

Yes, that's entirely the point! >> flummoxes people at the _9th_ grade level,

> There is no such as "an intuitive convention".

 _consistency_ is intuitive. _inconsistency_ is _un_ intuitive. That's not the same as a hypothetical complaint that a certain convention is unintuitive.

<comment><USER2> Even if we set out to build an entirely consistent set of notation for use in all of physics, maths and engineering today, we would face obvious problems, mostly that there are only about 100 different symbols (Latin + Greek + some extras) with maybe a handful of modifiers (primes, dots, tildes…and no, combining them is not good) and typefaces (difficult to replicate in handwriting).

So if we wanted to name every quantity and every concept possibly encountered by physics/maths/engineering today consistently, we already would have a hard time fitting everything in. Add to this that you also need a 'working space' of free, unencumbered symbols, a space of symbols free to use in the future[0] and the possibility that seemingly unrelated concepts today might well be linked in a few years time, and you will come to the conclusion that there is no way we could possibly build a consistent set of notation.

Really, be happy with what we have at the moment, choose a convention suitable to your current field of work[1] and everything will be fine.

[0] Some people started using Arab letters for new mathematical functions. Try googling for that.

[1] Or even invent the n-th one if you work at the edge of two existing fields or recognise that you can get stuff done more easily if you choose other symbols.

<comment><USER10> Relevant xkcd: <http://xkcd.com/927/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> An interesting side-point -- Python supports imaginary numbers and uses j:

          In [2]: a=5-4j

          In [3]: b=1+2j

          In [4]: a+b
          Out[4]: (6-2j)

<comment><USER14> Another interesting side-point -- MATLAB supports imaginary numbers... unless of course you redefine i to be something else. Then it doesn't.

<comment><USER2> Fortunately, Mathematica makes that somewhat more difficult (and has a strong convention of inbuilt ./. user-defined variables in the form of upper/lowercase).</comment></comment></comment>


Java collections framework for newbies - <AUTHOR> http://mikemainguy.blogspot.com/2011/12/java-collections-framework-for-newbies.html

<comment><USER2> As of Java 1.5, generics were added. Before generics you had to cast every object you read from a collection. If someone accidentally inserted an object of the wrong type — possible in the OP's example code — casts could fail at runtime.

With generics, you tell the compiler what types of objects are permitted in each collection. The compiler inserts casts for you automatically and tells you at _compile time_ if you try to insert an object of the wrong type. This results in programs that are both safer and clearer. So please use generics when using the collections framework.

I'm now going to briefly run through the examples provided in OP's post and update them accordingly.

      List<String> myList = new ArrayList<String>();
      myList.add("Second Thing");
      myList.add("Second Thing");
      myList.add("First Thing");

Note that I've used the interface form of _List_ over a specialised type. This is so that any caller of a method which returns a collection can use the interface provided and they don't need to worry about the specific data structures you've used. This also means that you can update the underlying data structure without having to update any calling code. E.g. changing the above case from _ArrayList_ to _LinkedList_.

      Set<String> mySet = new HashSet<String>();
      mySet.add("Second Thing");
      mySet.add("Second Thing");
      mySet.add("First Thing");

It is worth noting that Hashtable was _not originally_ part of the Collections framework. It was retrofitted to conform to the Map interface in 1.2. You should instead use HashMap, which is the non-synchronized (sic) version of Hashtable. Although you can just as easily use Hashtable, the below example is just me being a little OCD.

      Map<String, String> myMap = new HashMap<String, String>();
      myMap.put("a", "Second Thing");
      myMap.put("b", "Second Thing");
      myMap.put("c", "First Thing");

_EDIT_ : Updated some sections to read clearer.

<comment><USER3> > It is worth noting that Hashtable was not originally part of the Collections > framework.

An other class in that case being Vector, and that's the reason why they have _a lot_ of duplication in their methods: they have the original ones, and they have the new ones coming from the Collections framework interface (this is also the source of having both Iterator[0] and Enumerable[1] in the JDK: Iterator is the Collections framework iterator interface, Enumerable is the pre-Collections one)

An other big difference, which you hinted at, is that Hashtable and Vector are both synchronized collections (method calls will take the collection lock and behave "atomically"), whereas Collections framework classes are not, instead the Collections framework has compositional wrappers[2] which provide this behavior independently of the underlying collection implementation.

finally, a little trick for more fluent Collections initialization: you can abuse anonymous subclasses and instance initializers to get something much less imperative:

        List<String> myList = new ArrayList<String>() {{
            add("Second Thing");
            add("Second Thing");
            add("First Thing");
        }};

[0] [http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/Iterator....](http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/Iterator.html)

[1] [http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/Enumerati...](http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/Enumeration.html)

[2] [http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/Collectio...](http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/Collections.html#synchronizedCollection\(java.util.Collection\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am sort of dumb-founded that this is on the front-page of HackerNews. I know this isn't a constructive comment in any way, but this link is to a basic post that is going over the different between a list, a set, and a map?

Really?

<comment><USER2> There are a number of people I know who have never touched Java and are being exposed to the eco-system through languages like Clojure and Scala and this kind of overview may be useful to them.

However, I agree that it's not worthy to be on the front-page of HN.

<comment><USER5> These are not Java-specific data structures. If you already know these concepts -- and I don't see how you could write code without inevitably bumping into them -- the Java implementations should be intuitive and trivial to learn. Not to mention clearly documented.</comment></comment></comment>


How fast is fscanf? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alexflint/fscanf-speed <comment><USER2> The "lean C program" alternative author presents is neither the correct equivalent of fscanf nor technically correct, and people here recognized this, my attempt to summarize:

\- The proper conversion has enough corner cases that naive implementation practically certainly misses. Author's version produces provably different results than the library one for a lot of the same inputs.

\- The fscanf must process the format string on every call, therefore we're not comparing the same functionality. There are library functions that don't need the format string to work.

\- The standard library must be able correctly process Unicode and locales.

See the other comments for more details. Of course, it can be that the author doesn't need more than what he implemented, but he didn't discuss the tradeoffs or incorrect reading in the article and the other readers are advised to investigate more before using his code.

<comment><USER3> Another source of overhead is that fscanf() on POSIX systems (like most operations on FILE *) is required to lock the underlying FILE structure. Even without contention, the overhead is non-trivial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is partially because converting strings into floating point numbers _accurately_ is a surprisingly subtle thing to get right; the following links describe a bug in a library function that has been around for over 2 decades:

[http://www.exploringbinary.com/gays-strtod-returns-zero- for-...](http://www.exploringbinary.com/gays-strtod-returns-zero-for-inputs- just-above-2-1075/)

[http://www.exploringbinary.com/glibc-strtod-incorrectly- conv...](http://www.exploringbinary.com/glibc-strtod-incorrectly- converts-2-to-the-negative-1075/)

[http://www.exploringbinary.com/a-closer-look-at-the- java-2-2...](http://www.exploringbinary.com/a-closer-look-at-the- java-2-2250738585072012e-308-bug/)

[http://www.exploringbinary.com/java-hangs-when- converting-2-...](http://www.exploringbinary.com/java-hangs-when- converting-2-2250738585072012e-308/)

[http://www.exploringbinary.com/php-hangs-on-numeric- value-2-...](http://www.exploringbinary.com/php-hangs-on-numeric- value-2-2250738585072011e-308/)

</comment><comment><USER5> If you have numeric data in e.g. NumPy arrays and you care about performance, numpy.savetxt() followed by text parsing in C++ will never match the speed of just storing the binary data. For example, use numpy.save() then load the NumPy format in C++ (it's a pretty simple format), or use a more cross- language format like HDF5.

Even if you have received data from an outside source in text format, perhaps the first thing you should do is convert it to a binary format on disk; this will save you a lot more overhead than any amount of scanf() optimization will.

<comment><USER6> Certainly it depends. One one side, if your input data is read only once or a few times, introducing any intermediate binary format will often not be worth it, and optimizing reading the ASCII is the way to go.

On the other hand, if you have to crunch through huge amounts of locally stored data, try to make most of your binary file-format resemble the in- memory layout as closely as possible. That way you can, with some luck, mmap() your file and just use pointers into the bulk data. Saves at least one level of copying, from the filesystem cache to application heap. Be careful with validation of lengths and offsets, though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In my opinion that's bad C/C++ code: it's C/C++ code, two `while (!feof(fd))` loops, compiled without enabled diagnostics, and an inferior parser with at least one possible integer overflow (in ConsumeInteger()).

If it works without problems for your data, good for you, but for general purpose it isn't nearly a replacement as fscanf() or strtod() (hopefully) work correctly and don't have weird limitations like 300 / -300 as max / min base 10 exponent. Parsing floating point numbers is not easy.

<comment><USER8> It's very bad.

Using feof() to somehow ask if a stream has reached EOF before doing any I/O is wrong. Code like this comes up very often on Stack Overflow so it seems it's somehow intuitive for people, or suggested by some tutorials or something.

The purpose of feof() is to answer, after I/O has failed, if it failed due to the stream reaching EOF.

It's also utterly pointless in this code, it should just _check the return value_ of fscanf() and stop when it fails to convert the desired number of values. This, on the other hand, seems deeply surprising to most people, you very rarely see code that cares about the return value when scanning. Which is strange; I/O can fail.

Further, since fscanf() basically ignores embedded whitespace, I'm not at all sure it will do as expected and read six floats per physical line of input.

Lastly, yes of course it's strange to use the super-flexible fscanf() if you're looking for performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> fscanf has to parse and execute the format string. It might be interesting to compare your custom ascii-to-float converter to one which calls strtof in a loop.

<comment><USER10> It would also be interesting to compare it to C++'s ">>" operators; one of the reasons to introduce them was exactly to avoid run-time parsing of format strings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Try setting LANG=C before running the program, or doing setlocale(LC_ALL, "C"). That _might_ improve the speed. In any event, locale handling--such as determining whitespace--will slow things down considerably. I presume this is happening on Linux, and glibc's locale handling is dog slow. Solaris' is ridiculously fast by comparison. Why, I don't know.

</comment><comment><USER12> I had an application where I was reading a 3GB text file into memory, directly from and SSD. Using fscanf the speed would top out at around 100-150MB/s. Only after I've switched to fread the data was actually read at the maximum speed of the drive - over 400MB/s. I guess it's due to parsing fscan is doing.

<comment><USER13> Hint: It's the way data is read when using fscanf.

Hint++: Parsing is not the bottleneck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The C program isn't doing the same thing. It overwrites the array of variables each time it scans a line. numpy.loadtxt returns an array of the parsed lines. So you'd need to do some dynamic allocation to store the parsed values. If the number of fields per input line isn't hardcoded, you'll need to walk sscanf() across each input line while managing input and output buffers (you can call read(), which is much faster, but you'll need to handle partial line reads). numpy.loadtxt has additional capabilities, all of which add per-line overhead. A fully functional clone of loadtxt in C is unlikely to run enormously faster, i.e. enough to justify the programming involved. In any case, this toy exercise isn't testing the speed of fscanf() in a meaningful way.

</comment><comment><USER15> You can probably make it even faster with this [https://github.com/assimp/assimp/blob/d228dbeab7b6f2ee71a0a5...](https://github.com/assimp/assimp/blob/d228dbeab7b6f2ee71a0a5744ddee2d87851fe11/code/fast_atof.h)

</comment><comment><USER16> Some benchmarks for difference C++ methods of converting a string to double:

[http://tinodidriksen.com/2011/05/28/cpp-convert-string-to- do...](http://tinodidriksen.com/2011/05/28/cpp-convert-string-to-double- speed/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm really not surprised. fscanf is a _really_ general thing, it handles many cases and has to do 'perfect' text to floating point conversions.

As a rule of thumb the formatted I/O functions are quite slow, and floating point makes this much much worse.

It's one of those few places where rolling your own functions for your particular use case will be much more efficient than using the one size fits all standard library solutions.

</comment><comment><USER18> [sf]scanf is also significantly faster than the C++ iostreams equivalents. I sped up a IO bound program stream processing program recently by 40+% by converting it back to sscanf().

</comment><comment><USER19> Also it's worth knowing about "%a" format (like %f but in native radix). Properly written, it'll be damn fast. [If both sides support it of course.]</comment>


Microsoft's "Love" of Linux - <AUTHOR> http://pedrocr.pt/text/microsofts-love-of-linux/ <comment><USER2> Microsoft loves Linux because it makes them money. I'm not sure why anyone would expect differently.

They won't release products like Office for Linux (though a web interface is possible), and they won't move away from Windows-only APIs. Neither of those actions would have any tangible benefit for the primary users of those produts (Windows users and Windows developers, respectively).

Active Directory is so deeply integrated into the Windows stack that it will never come out. You can authenticate Linux clients against AD, but I doubt they'll be writing a Linux AD server any time soon. I'd imagine most corporate mail servers also support SMTP/IMAP, and Office365 has a web client. As far as ActiveSync goes, that hasn't been a thing since 2007.

<comment><USER3> _> They won't release products like Office for Linux_

Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering.

The whole reason they "love Linux" now is because Linux on the server gained too much market share for them to realistically oppose. They had to find a way to make money in that market that didn't involve somehow boiling an ocean of Linux machines. So they did.

Windows is still overwhelmingly strong in the desktop market, though, so they have no such incentive to accommodate it there. Nobody retreats from a battlefield they've already won.

<comment><USER4> Microsoft have an established track record of offering, then withdrawing, MS Office for alternate platforms (or refusing to offer it at all).

I seem to recall that there was an Office version for Sun Microsystem's Solaris, which is 99.99...% of the way to a Linux variant. That was killed.

(This may have been MSIE or an Exchange-compatible email client, I'm researching this still.)

OSX is better supported, though for a long time Microsoft's email client was not Outlook but Entourage, a now-discontinued project. It had a typical-for- Microsoft opaque binary data storage format, though it's proved possible to extract useful information from this using Linux utilities.

Microsoft discontinued MSIE support on Mac in 2005, an issue given that many enterprise Web / intranet tools relied exclusively on nonstandard MSIE web extensions.

Office was never offered for BeOS, which I believe was a deliberate strategy decision, though I'm not finding evidence of this (JLG should be able to comment, if anyone has current contact). The lack _was_ seen as a kiss-of- death for the OS and hardware.

Alternatively, what made RIM's Blackberry as popular among business executives as it was was its integration with MS Exchange email servers.

Strategic control over what ports were and were not supported by Microsoft, regardless of technical difficulty or merits, was a major element of that company's monopoly abuses.

<comment><USER5> You're citing things that happened almost 20 years ago if you're talking about Solaris and BeOS.

<comment><USER4> Precisely my point. The tiger rarely changes its stripes.

<comment><USER6> Microsoft isn't a tiger, it's a group of people. There is some continuity, but the people making those decisions are not the same people making those decisions now.

<comment><USER4> [https://www.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_meaning_of_the_phrase_...](https://www.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_meaning_of_the_phrase_%27miss_the_boat%27)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure I follow what the author is getting at other than "We should hate MS and do our best to not work with them on anything!".

First it was "MS breaks compatibility on purpose, screw those guys!". Now it's "sure, they're playing nice but they don't have a product in every market segment we want so they must have some nefarious master plan we haven't figure out yet!"

Everytime I hear someone say "just look, they don't support office on Linux!" I ask: and what exactly do you think the market share is of guys who love Linux so much they use it on the desktop, but also would _PAY_ Microsoft for Office vs. just using LibreOffice or Google's office suite? If you think MS hasn't done the math and figured out that solution would never break even much less turn a profit, I guess I'd ask anyone making that claim to show their work.

I can tell you unequivocally the thing holding back the average enterprise from moving their entire business to Linux on the Desktop is _NOT_ Microsoft Office, if it were they'd just tell everyone to use Office Online and move on with life.

PS: I assume all these Linux on the Desktop guys complaining about not having Office on Linux already are subscribed to o365 and use Office Online exclusively, proving to MS there's demand. Right?

<comment><USER8> If Office was available for Linux, some organizations could consider deploying Linux workstations with Office since that's what most users/employees need is basically a browser (100%/users) and the Office suite (50-90%/users). Office Online is severely gimped as noted in the article and is solely to counteract adoption of Google Office.

<comment><USER9> What kind of an assumption is this. Most people need an operating system they are comfortable doing their daily work, not just a browser and a notepad. Jesus christ, not all non-devs work only in office.

<comment><USER8> > Most people need an operating system they are comfortable doing their daily > work.

True, and Windows is very entrenched partly due to Office and legacy software depending on it. Chromebooks and Mac OS seem to be adopted without to much hindrance from a UI perspective. i.e How much more populate would Chromebooks be if they ran the full desktop Office suite?

> not all non-devs work only in office.

Certainly not all but a lot of jobs, particularly in management consist mostly of emails, meetings, spreadsheets, word documents + a few web apps.

Also, lets not forget about all the jobs where the computer isn't really part of the job at all; it's just a tool to communicate (email) and for document production/consumption. These machines are basically kiosks that Microsoft has milking licenses out of for Windows + Office + 365 Storage.

Some businesses can switch to Google but many rely on existing Excel spreadsheets elsewhere in their organization so there is a lot of momentum to switch away from non-desktop spreadsheet and document applications.

<comment><USER10> I disagree with this 'legacy software's moniker, all the most productive software falls into this category.

Look at the Autodesk Suite, Adobe Suite, Enterprise Architect, blender3D, Unity game engine, a traditional IDE like Jetbrains or VisualStudio.

They have waay more power than the their web-based or, worse yet, electron competitors.

<comment><USER8> I was only referring to software that's still tied to Windows out of legacy/inertia. I'm not saying all desktop applications are legacy. But It's appropriate because if those application were going to be rewritten today, there is no way they would tie them exclusively to the Win32 API.

Blender, Jetbrains IDE's, and even VSCode (pretty sure Unity is multiplatform too) are all working just fine with multiplatform and aren't dependent on any particular OS. If you've ever had to deal with Autodesk like software, it's a mess of old code and poor practices. It's a nightmare getting that kind of software working for Enterprise/Educational environments. Just looking at the Enterprise Architect site brings me back to the days when software used to come on actual disks in large, book-like boxes.

Yes, the software is useful and has yet to be replaced by something more modern, whether web based or at least multi-platform. But that's why it's entrenched in many businesses and Microsoft is riding on the back of that by making sure it's tied to their platform.

<comment><USER10> I agree in principle, i really want most software to be multi-platform.

However I cannot ignore the reality that multi-platform software is fraught with peril, either for the developer (QT and the like) or for the user (electron).

Each platform moves, introduces updates, removes support and features (looking at you, OsX!).

For some people the choice is: single platform, or no software at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm honestly surprised that Microsoft aren't working with Linux vendors in an attempt to solve Linux problems _by_ more deeply integrating Windows-styled solutions into Linux, such that the Linux _client_ ecosystem becomes more dependent on the Windows _infrastructure_ ecosystem. That'd be the natural Azure-focused equivalent to "embrace, extend, extinguish."

For example, Linux DNS resolution is an arcane mess of upstream components bodged together over decades, about the place where sysvinit was before systemd came along. I could totally see Microsoft releasing some FOSS Linux über-network-client-daemon that combines DNS, NMBD, and Bonjour resolution together (sort of like Apple's mDNSResolver) in an attempt to "clean up" that mess—where, just by coincidence, parts of the SMB stack begin to seep directly into the operation of the system. Then a subsumption for Kerberos+libpam+GSSAPI that also supports NTLM; etc. until eventually Linux ends up needing to talk to a real Active Directory Domain Controller to boot. Might be Microsoft's one, might be a Linux FOSS one—either way, it gives Microsoft an advantage.

...but, so far as I can tell, they're _not_ doing this. I wonder why not?

<comment><USER12> > ...but, so far as I can tell, they're not doing this. I wonder why not?

Because maybe, just maybe, they're a tad bit less evil?

<comment><USER13> Nonsense, a publicly traded corporation is inherently an immoral psychopath. They are required to single-mindedly pursue shareholder profit.

<comment><USER14> The people who make up the corporation are people. They need to be motivated, and they no not mobilize immediately.

<comment><USER15> Depends on shareholders, doesn't it? Those are the people that 'make up' the corp. The rest are pawns that either fall in line or end up recognizing that the only way to win the game is to not play (and thus quit).

<comment><USER16> If employees think their employer is doing something unethical, that harms morale.

If morale is harmed, good people are more likely to leave. If an employer has a poor reputation, it becomes harder to hire employees with in-demand skills.

Poor retention and difficulty in recruiting employees can end up harming the business.

<comment><USER15> Sadly there are far more workers with a broken moral compass than you'd think. Luckily, there are also enough with ethics and key positions to somewhat cancel that out, but I wouldn't say that unethical employers have a much harder time than ethical ones. It's probably simply a different spread on money/package/freedom within one such company. Plenty of people will believe what they are doing is justified and ignore any signs of cognitive dissonance if the pay check is right and internal communication is 'managed' enough by HR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> From what I see in general MS like Linux on the server, not so much the desktop. The reason for that is pretty obvious.

They want as many organizations as possible to use their cloud platform, for that to work, they need first class Linux server support.

On the desktop, they'd prefer people to be using Windows, but they want to ensure that developers who deploy to Linux have a great experience, thus WSL, VS Code et al.

With that said, I think there are some groups inside MS who would like to see more desktop Linux support, thus announcements like the Linux Teams client. It's probably a mistake to view MS (or any other v.large corp) as a unified entity. There will be groups inside that corp. with differing goals.

You only have to look at MS presence at Kubecon where you'll often see MS staff with Macs or Ubuntu laptops on their stand.

<comment><USER18> They don't _like_ it, that's the author's whole point. They would obviously prefer that everyone pay for windows server, but they've lost that battle. "Like" is pure marketing.

>You only have to look at MS presence at Kubecon where you'll often see MS staff with Macs or Ubuntu laptops on their stand.

marketing in a market.

I think we (or you and the author, I'm just re-iterating his points) are talking past each other and you probably agree, but his whole point again is that the "Love" is just public facing market strategy.

<comment><USER9> Just a question-- what would be a path you deem the best? Should Microsoft just work in its silo, while Linux develops in its silo? Should Microsoft not embrace linux? I feel like the 2 strategies mentioned by the author simply let you point to the other one when the first one doesn't grip. I'm always at a loss when these HN posts come about, because I feel like 99% of the hate/sentiment stems from the time Microsoft was actually a shitty company (I'm sure it is still shit in great lengths today, but not comparable to the Ballmer years).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It feels like this article is a lot of FUD spreading. MS is a business that likes to make money. At this point, there are developer minded people at the helm, and it makes more sense selling their software and cloud services than chasing negative returns on Windows. I can see that side of it through and through.

MS has open sourced huge amounts of resource and platform building code in .Net Core the past several years, and ASP.Net earlier than that. They did buy, and have expanded on the tools from Xamarin not shutter it. I'm not saying they're altruistic in nature, no company is. I will say that their behavior in the community, especially since Nadella took over has been better than any other company of it's size or larger that I can think of.

I'm not saying forget or forgive the past, but accept the present. Corporations, despite legalities, are not people. They are made up of people, and a significant portion of management has rolled over in the past decade and the outward facing culture shows that.

<comment><USER20> You couldn't be more wrong.

Since Nadella is at the helm, Microsoft have started to aggressively gather customer data from their desktop OS and many other products, including office.

They used to be very decent at this before Windows 10, but they went completely nuts with telemetry. At the beginning they were completely opaque, to the point that a German gov agency had to reverse engineer the communications to see just wtf was being transmitted.

More recently the Dutch gov told them to fuck off if they don't cut off the crap and MS was forced to negotiate new privacy terms with them.

Anything they have already and will open source pales in comparison to the harms to our privacy, just like for Google. Although Google at least open sources some useful things now and then... .NET is Microsoft's dev platform that no one cares about except Windows devs. It started as a JVM/Java clone and grew into its own product, but for anyone not already all-in on MS tools it makes zero sense to use it when there's so much choice.

<comment><USER19> Windows isn't great... It's a single product of many from a very large company, and one that other than the assigned computer at work, I don't typically use. Beyond that, I don't mind the telemetry so much, though their decision to emphasis telemetry over test labs and staff is irritating.

Also, been a few hours since I read TFA, but isn't even a focus of TFA.

They aren't locking their services and much new software into windows, and aren't using windows to leverage other things in ways that don't make any sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can't really follow the article. Too much paranoia, or negativity, I guess.

All I care about is having a usable Linux shell and Linux tool on my Windows machine. What else can you expect from Microsoft? Yeah, they are doing it so that people don't switch over to Linux completely. What more can you expect?

Is it even Microsoft's job to establish a standard for 3d Graphics and what not? Or is the ball in the park of graphics card vendors and game developers?

Why do I have Windows on my machine? I don't fully trust Linux to achieve the same level of power management. I can play games. I have a dual graphics card, which would be a hassle to use on Linux.

It would be notebook vendor's job to release Linux notebooks with good power management. Chip vendors to release specs that enable Linux developers to create such drivers. And so on.

<comment><USER22> Why wouldn't an Operating System developer be responsible for providing an interface between hardware developers and applicaton developers?

<comment><USER21> OpenGL seems to have coexisted with DirectX for a while. I don't know enough about OS development to be able to judge if Microsoft prevented OpenGL from achieving the same performance as DirectX.

Given the abysmal security history of Windows, my guess would be that it was possible to get close to the metal as a driver developer, at least in the old days.

Also MS couldn't be expected to take care of an interface that works on iOS and Linux. They are responsible for Windows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The author misses the bigger picture completely.

Microsoft used to see Linux as competition, and while that might still be true in some ways, it's largely moot for a couple of reasons.

In 2019, Windows isn't competing with Linux for desktop market share not because Linux poses no threat there, but because _the desktop doesn't matter anymore_.

Windows, and the desktop operating system as a concept, is competing with the web browser in the enterprise and mobile devices in the retail market (and even then, it's not really a competition - most casual users gave up computers for smartphones years ago).

Viewed in that lens Microsoft _genuinely_ embracing Linux makes a lot of sense - most of their revenue now comes from service contracts, and the one bedrock they've always had is their second-to-none developer support. If developers want them some Linux, then by gosh Redmond is going to give them more Linux than anyone else. Maximum Linux for your organisations' Linuxy needs!

Microsoft still has great support for gamers on Windows as an incentive not to check out Wine/Proton and things happening there, but really, when was the last time you paid for a Windows license for home use? One way or another they've been literally giving the software away as quickly as they can for years. The future is about services, and that means market share (if users leave because they can get a free OS elsewhere then the license has to go). Likewise, if it gets more developers to stay in the ecosystem, then Linux support it is.

<comment><USER24> Since when? That's nonsense. Browser and a whole operating system are two different things

<comment><USER25> You're talking to SV web devs who's careers depend on and are entirely focused on web tech.

<comment><USER23> Exactly.

I sometimes wonder if people are so in the bubble that they don't realize we're rarely the audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think the article misses a bigger fight which is between Microsoft's Azure vs. AWS. All what Microsoft is doing is catering to devs who want better tools to deal with servers in the cloud.

Imagine this potential tactic:

1\. Create great tools such as Visual Studio Code to serve as first point contact with devs of all types and stacks 2\. Start creating plugin or easy to integrate dev workflow in those types of tools with Azure 3\. Make it so easy and reasonably cost effective that people may start switching away from AWS to Azure

I don't think Microsoft is trying to kill or encroach Linux but instead cooping those devs into moving to Azure platform where the market growth is; while still protecting the existing cash cows.

</comment><comment><USER27> > I think all of these would be strategic blunders from the point of view of > Microsoft shareholders. But they're the kind of things you do for love. > Otherwise this is just "love" if your standard is abusive one-sided > relationships.

This is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER28> The author is partly right. You shouldn't trust Microsoft. But the landscape has changed. Focusing too much on Microsoft as the sole, main rival of OSS and Linux keeps you tunnel visioning like it's the 90's. And back then Microsoft was huge and overbearing. Now there's many, many other threats to OSS and Linux, several of them bigger than Microsoft.

Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook.

They're keen OSS contributors, where it doesn't matter for them and keen closed source proponents, where it _does matter_.

</comment><comment><USER29> This article makes it sound like Embracing is a bad thing, because necessarily Extend, and Extinguish will follow. But it doesn't really work that way with Open Source.

<comment><USER30> Google proved the model for embracing, extending and controlling open source by way of Android and the shift to Google Play Services.

Start open and let the walled garden grow within.

<comment><USER22> How does a not-open-source product control open-source?

Anyone can try to build an open source alternative to GPS on whatever hardware they can obtain, using Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Without Google open source, they've have to replicate it's functionality from scratch.

If AOSP never existed, Android would still be Android (GPL allows proprietary Android) and would still be as popular as it is. iOS was never open source, and did fine.

<comment><USER31> When was the last time a Google-free AOSP fork had a successful handset on the market? We've seen almost nothing but failures: Amazon Phone, Cyanogen, …

The market seems to have spoken that Android isn't Android without "Google Play Services" secret sauce, and that's entirely proprietary walled garden.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm having a tough time drawing a conclusion from this article. In my experience with commercial/open source projects the only reason they are open source is because of some sort of market advantage. Is the author suggesting that Microsoft doing all this OSS work out of the goodness of their collective heart? Corporations are about making money, while that goal and OSS happen to align we'll get open source from Microsoft. The second it stops being strategically relevant: bye-bye.

<comment><USER33> I think the article takes issue with "Microsoft loves Linux" as a blanket term, where it's more like "Microsoft loves† Linux‡"

(† supports in only a very specific way because of losing to Linux on the server side.)

(‡ Linux as used only for servers. Linux as a desktop OS can still get bent, and we're trying to get devs to abandon it when working on code that deploys to Linux servers.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I used cygwin to do web development circa 2007/2008\. It was a huge pain in the ass and one of the main reasons I switched to Macs. I've been back on Windows for a couple of years now using WSL and it's been pretty great. I'm excited for that integration to get even tighter with WSL2.

The broad categories I use professionally are office crap, web dev, and creative tools. Macs used to suck at the first and rule the last two, but they've really fallen behind in the last few years. The new macbook pro looks like a good machine, but I switched to a gaming laptop to get a better GPU and 64gb of RAM. This (2-year-old) machine does everything I need it to do and I'm now at a point where Macs are going to have to do something pretty spectacular to get me to switch back (or have Windows screw up in a comparable way to what Apple has done the last few years).

What's the point of all this? I think this article misses the boat pretty badly on who Micrsoft's talking to when it says it loves linux. It's talking to web devs like me who work and deploy to linux, not software philosophers who want to debate the meaning of free. From my point of view, they're doing great right now.

<comment><USER35> Could you describe your workflow with WSL?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Data point: MS teams disables all of Teams' A/V features for Linux users based on browser user agent. If you use chromium and spoof your UA as if you were using Edge/Windows, said features work. [1]

Microsoft is what it is - a very large company with various business units with differing priorities. I do feel like they are much improved from the bad old days, where they seemed to enact a company-wide strategy aimed at actively sabotaging Linux. In the face of that, I suppose indifference is an improvement, and their "we love linux" marketing is at least an admission that Linux support is a consideration for some elements of their business.

[1] [https://github.com/meetfranz/franz/issues/1095](https://github.com/meetfranz/franz/issues/1095)

<comment><USER37> A proper Microsoft Teams port for Linux is coming by the end of this year.

[https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...](https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/16911565-linux- client)

<comment><USER36> I wonder if they will stop disabling features for the chrome UA if/when they release their electron app on Linux? One could hope...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> With regards to Linux, Google seems like a far bigger danger.

Have a look at the "locking-in manufacturers" section of [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip- on...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on-android- controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/).

In a more general sense, cloud computing is the biggest danger to Linux, since it allows companies to allow access to forked versions without needing to distribute source - this is why the AGPL exists.

There's also potential for bad faith actors to utilise closed source build tools to distribute releases that are technically opensource - but that cannot be built by anyone but the distributor.

</comment><comment><USER39> Even if Microsoft does really love Linux, I'd rather want to know _which_ Linux they love: a generic one such as any popular distro out there, or rather _their_ own version of Linux, which could be a frankenpenguin where some obscure proprietary technolgy, no matter how small, would magically make their software run "better".

I am 100% speculating, of course, but if I was in Microsoft pants and wanted to kill Linux because it makes essentially impossible to achieve domination in some context (server, embedded, mobile, etc), once realized I can't destroy it for failing many moons ago to understand its potential at step 1 of "first they ignore you..." , the best alternative would be to embrace it, pollute it discreetly injecting closed technology in key areas (all it needs is a key driver or library), port some great software to it with seemingly innocuous strings attached to the proprietary parts that will make it _run better or run at all_ , have its users love my software and get used to it, make its use appealing to business users as well (offering discounted pro support as an example), acquire game companies and port their titles as above, etc. Once I have say the 20 most used apps depend on that closed blob or technology, I'd be ready to roll out my own distro which of course by being the favorite one among "normal" users will be the one dictating other Linux distros future. To make it short, Microsoft will indeed love Linux, although not before making Linux one of their products.

As I wrote, that's pure speculation, but think of it when the first "best run on WSL" Linux software comes out.

<comment><USER40> To be fair, this sounds just like Google's strategy with Android.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm in the camp of moving my stuff out of GitHub (thankfully so many nice options, like GitLab, gitea/gogs, and of course sourcehut) because the only reason I do not hate Microsoft is that I was able to avoid any of their tech successfully for the past 15 years.

In it for the money, and gone if there's nothing more to capture. Simple story. That's exactly how something like a community does not work.

</comment><comment><USER10> I am getting the impression the author is fighting yesterday's war and on top of that has not been following what's going on in windows/.Net development lately. There has been a large-scale effort to open-source and port chunks of Windows and .Net Framework

WinForms 'the win95-style UI' [https://github.com/dotnet/winforms](https://github.com/dotnet/winforms)

WPF 'the Vista-style UI' [https://github.com/dotnet/wpf](https://github.com/dotnet/wpf)

WinUI3 'the Modern-style UI' [https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui- xaml](https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml)

Windows Communications Foundation [https://github.com/dotnet/wcf](https://github.com/dotnet/wcf)

And more stuff I am not aware of. Judge as you wish, but if you are going to discuss the topic, they are important.

<comment><USER42> None of the UI frameworks have been ported.

<comment><USER10> Efforts like Avalonia and Uno platform enjoy a level of support from MS, and Microsoft produces Xamarin Forms to enable Xaml-based cross platform development.

Microsoft themselves have stated that it's a requested development, but they have not yet figured out a sensible way forward.A lot of effort was invested and I feel accusing them of ill will is unfair.

Meanwhile Linux UI/Graphics situation is a mess and Avalonia developers struggle with it. The same flexibility that makes Linux a good as embedded/server, makes it a horrible target for client application development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Hmmmm, Linux has proven itself on its own. The GPL has done its work. POSIX is a working standard. Linux isn't completely POSIX compliant. I don't think there is much Microsoft can do about it.

</comment><comment><USER44> _" I think all of these would be strategic blunders from the point of view of Microsoft shareholders"_

It seems to be working well for MS thus far, so I'm curious why the author thinks this.

<comment><USER45> it's referring to the author's suggestions to show authentic love.

<comment><USER44> I'm not clear on why that would help shareholders as compared to current course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> TBH, Linux as a desktop productivity environment is a small enough market that I wouldn't expect MS to make a big investment there. It's either iOS, Android, Mac or Windows for the average user so MS is trying to stay relevant in those areas by focusing on the server side and Windows client side.

</comment><comment><USER47> Tremendous. Well written and well played. If there are two facets to divide and conquer (in this case, play along until you can conquer and conquer right away) Microsoft is certainly doing their best to fulfill the Caesarian commandment. Thanks for revealing this very snide practice, clearly if their intent was an embrace of OSS there would be much revamped in the base layers of their offerings. Yet, here we are. The number of life-seconds lost to Microsoft greediness is likely measurable and might even out-exceed the wealth of shrewd and pernicious altruists like Billy G. Not to be nefarious with this comment, but to assume that propaganda is honest is to wonder why the propaganda has to exist in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER48> An anti-MS article full of FUD, Delicious.

If anyone is embracing, extending and extinguishing its Redhat's giant lovecraftian eldrich horror starting at Pid 1 as it's tentacles spread across the (user)land to incite madness and crush the life out of system administrators.

</comment><comment><USER49> I don't think it's a particularly good thing for Microsoft to cozy up with Linux, let alone any of the larger tech firms. In particular, I don't think it's great that Microsoft is such a heavy contributor to the Linux foundation.

If the people who work on Linux become financially dependent on large tech firms, this creates potential conflict-of-interest. For instance, is it impossible to imagine that as Proton becomes more capable of making the Windows gaming experience portable, there couldn't be pressure to kneecap it in some way at the kernel level? If Ubuntu had dropped 32 bit app support as planned, it would have done just that.

<comment><USER50> Linux development is _already_ dependent on large tech firms and has been for a long time.

<comment><USER49> I understand that. I'm saying I don't think it's a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Microsoft loves Linux ... On the Azure Cloud. And nothing else. This strategy was only discussed in this context and nowhere else I assume.

So do not interpret more in it than what is said. Microsoft earns money. What does not earn Money is not supported.

</comment><comment><USER52> This blog appears to argue that by bringing some but not all of it's products to Linux, Microsoft is engaging in Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (EEE). That's a tough sell. If you apply the same standard, virtually ever large company that has ever contributed to Linux is EEE-ing Linux because they released some product that doesn't run on vanilla Linux. The bad action in EEE is extending APIs in incompatible ways and then dead ending them - it's hard for me to see how not shipping Office to Linux qualifies.

<comment><USER53> I think the author refers at the fact you release just a bit of functionality for Linux but if you want the full stack you have to use Windows. Like you make .Net for Linux but only some parts, release other tools but not the admin part etc.

I would be convinced when MS and Wine project has an agreement so the Wine devs can access the Windows source code.

<comment><USER52> > I would be convinced when MS and Wine project has an agreement so the Wine > devs can access the Windows source code.

This is exactly what I'm saying is absurd. Microsoft isn't EEE-ing by not giving Wine devs access to Windows source. There is a difference between not helping and actively sabotaging. Conflating the two is an unfair attack.

<comment><USER53> The part about Wine is not related, it was about what would convince me that Microsoft "loves" Linux or at least is not intimidated by it. The WSL seems to me as the first part of the EEE and the competition would be fair if Linux could have it's own project Wine supported by Microsoft, as it is now it feels as an exploit, MS can do WSL but Linux and Mac have to struggle with Wine and the FUD around it.

<comment><USER54> > Linux and Mac have to struggle with Wine and the FUD around it.

What FUD? I don't think I've ever seen someone spread FUD about Wine. Are you referring to the website that lists how well games/apps work with it?

<comment><USER53> The accusation that Wine devs were looking at the Windows code and it is "illegal" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341022)

<comment><USER52> This post is about ReactOS, not Wine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> While things improved in some aspects (like recent freeing up of exFAT), as a Linux gamer, I still see MS if not outright hostile, then surely by far not friendly when it comes to Linux.

Thanks to Phil Spencer, they didn't join the Vulkan working group, and continue pushing their DX lock-in. For Linux it means dxvk and vkd3d are important tools to break it. When MS will start using Vulkan proper, I might change my mind about them being hostile towards Linux.

Same applies to other lock-in cases the article mentions.

</comment><comment><USER56> There was more of a case in the 90s, but the fact is that today's Microsoft has a strong open source development presence, and incompatibly embracing and extending was always, even in the 90s, an odious GNU practice that they happily perpetrated against non-copyleft Unix.

"FUD" is a mindkilling term, so I won't call this apparently sincere post "spreading FUD", but I will suggest that you try PowerShell Core (MIT licensed) on the platform of your choice.

</comment><comment><USER57> Can add Visual Studio to the Office/DirectX/Outlook/ActiveDirectory section.

<comment><USER58> They're sort of heading in this direction with VSCode. I can imagine that VS itself is a non-portable COM-infested disaster area.

<comment><USER59> COM is good and it is anything except disaster. It its raw form, COM is just a small and natural abstraction over plain C interface.

Just like a C interface is a small and nice abstraction over plain registers/stack call models of the past.

The advent of calling conventions like C was a huge step forward in 1970s. Before that, there was a mad zoo of passing parameters via random CPU registers and praying that you made no mistake and it would work without a crash.

COM is no different. IUnknown is just 3 methods (QueryInterface, AddRef, RemoveRef) over a plain C. It immediately brings an ability to use service model design in APIs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Personally strikes me very much as an article making valid points but generally in bad faith. Microsoft can both begin to change and embrace Linux gradually as they've been doing recently and at the same time have an unsavory past with the ecosystem. If anything, they're willingness to change, however small, should be interpreted generally as a positive shift.

</comment><comment><USER61> Oof. All these Linux-on-desktop replies.

(1) The web is (slowly) destroying MS on the client-side. Sure, there's a ton of existing WinForms/WPF stuff now, but I think new development is on the web.

(2) Linux is destroying MS on the server-side. It is simply impossible to beat the price (both AMZN and MS offer Linux images at half the price of Windows images).

So, where does that leave MS? Competing with AMZN in cloud infrastructure. They have the technical chops and maybe other-than-1st mover advantage gives them a chance to present a cleaner experience, although it ain't easy being sandwiched between AMZN and Digital Ocean/Netlify.

I think even Blazor is a stretch, dependent on the maturity of WASM, but... requiring devs to switch from React/Angular? And competing with whatever else moves to WASM.

Of course MS loves Linux. It'd be stupid not to.

(For now.)

</comment><comment><USER62> Within the company you have to remember that there are greedy executives (as anywhere) built on top of a fatty layer of incurious middle management and mixed in with enthusiastic tech heads. Whether or not the happy chaps working on the Linux support have their work mutilated by the fat cats has yet to be seen ... it's always like this in the beginning of an embrace. And in the meantime I think there's a lot of good being done even if it's just serving as a model for FOSS projects. So as the support fades and the dream dims, there will be things to pop up to continue the legacy.

In the meantime, I'm quite happy to see Microsoft participating feverishly. I much prefer that to the alternative of intentionally making my life hell when not using their software / systems.

</comment><comment><USER63> I would love to see MS release a version of Windows that is built on Linux but with a custom GUI to look and behave like Windows.

They could even add support for Windows apps through WINE to make it _feel_ like a native experience. Especially if they are willing to dedicate additional resources to better hardware optimization for WINE*

I have always hated Windows because I grew up on UNIX-like systems, whenever I want to do something non-trivial involving the OS I tend to get lost and give up pretty quickly. But I don't mind Windows GUI from a UX perspective, and I would be interested in running a "Linux-Windows"

*I am not sure what MS official stance on WINE is, however I would imagine that supporting it is likely in their long-term best interests.

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm not too sure what to think of this article. There are some valid points to me made for sure, but intent today isn't as clear cut as it was 20 years ago.

For example, almost 20 years ago, I stood in front of a group of _mostly_ sales people in a board room at Microsoft Canada to answer emotionally-charged questions about this "Linux threat" that was looming. Just under a year ago, I sat on a couch at Microsoft with some talented Microsoft developers drinking a custom Americano listening to them talk about how Microsoft recognizes their personal open source and ethical values in a way that makes them love their job.

As a Linux developer and geek, it's difficult to hate Microsoft today.

</comment><comment><USER65> It seems possible to me that they may make Office usable from web browsers on non-Windows systems (probably with a few features missing, some of that just due to the limitation imposed by the web browser anyways), but probably not a native Linux program. I do not expect them to drop Win32 and DirectX; however, maybe later they might make a few contributions to ReactOS (although probably not enough). What they say about Active Directory I suppose may be done in the way mentioned in that article, seems not very unlikely to me.

I do not really think Microsoft "love" Linux all the way, although it seem to me they do "love" Linux more than they used to, at least.

</comment><comment><USER66> When I had to deal with Windows 10 recently I got the impression MS has given up on Windows completely. The last notable improvements were introduced in Win XP. Most stuff that came later was just changing the look&view of a few settings windows with the only effect that all consistency was lost and Win looks more like a mess than a Linux desktop where some apps were built for X, Kde, Gnome, ... It was also funny that SQL Management Studio crashed at the same use cases as it did 10-15 years ago. It would be interesting if there were any developers working on anything but cloud at MS the past 10 years.

<comment><USER67> The last time there was a real UI and UX consistency was with Windows 2000 (or ME, if you want to stay on the consumer side). With Windows XP Microsoft introduced themeable controls but instead of making them available to all applications, they used an opt-in mechanism (based on special EXE resources or manifest files) so even nowadays unless you use that mechanism you get the Win2K era of controls.

Even then, with Windows 7 _most_ things were consistent and if you really cared about consistency even with non-themed apps you could always switch to Windows Classic theme (which i always did, not so much because of consistency but also because i just like that theme :-P).

Since Windows 8 with the introduction of Metro/UWP/WinUI/WinWhateverNext consistency was thrown out of the Window, without even trying to pretend otherwise (it isn't a coincidence that the UI guidelines for desktop applications in Microsoft's site still use the Win7 theme).

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Why would any Linux shop use SQL Server anyways? Why would they use .NET Core? The only people I know pushing .NET Core are .NET people, not Linux people. My general rule is to never use a technology where your primary platform is a second class citizen. It just makes things a pain: not only could support be dropped in the future because there's no profit in it, its also harder to find answers to problems on the internet.

<comment><USER69> I'm a Linux person who likes .NET Core. I like C# quite a bit, and I don't think Linux is a 2nd class citizen for .NET Core.

<comment><USER70> It is still a 2nd class citizen, IMO – but I think that's improving rapidly. Some examples:

-IDE support from MS is markedly better on Windows (real Visual Studio) and Mac (VS for Mac). VS Code+Omnisharp is still pretty rough around the edges for C#.

-Many of the older .NET class libraries were just not designed with *nix in mind. System.IO still doesn't support symlinks [https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/issues/26310](https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/issues/26310)

<comment><USER54> > Many of the older .NET class libraries were just not designed with *nix in > mind. System.IO still doesn't support symlinks

Windows supports symlinks, so that problem is not unique to netcore on nix. Many of the newer APIs are designed with explicit support for nix.

<comment><USER70> Yup, but I think the problem stems from symlinks being relatively uncommon in NTFS compared to nix filesystems - it just wasn't a priority for the original .NET designers who were mostly targeting Windows. [https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2016/12/02/symlin...](https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2016/12/02/symlinks- windows-10/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Microsoft "loves" linux because it failed to beat Linux with FUD etc.

Microsoft to me is the cancer to the OSS, why not just admit that you had never, and will never love Linux, you are simply doing all these for financial purposes solely, which is totally fine --- just don't ruin the "love" word, it's so awkward.

Life is too short to be cheated multiple times, I will never trust Microsoft since I switched to linux fully 15 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER72> I'm going to add a data point here: I work at Microsoft and my primary e-mail client is... Firefox. The Outlook web UI is so good these days that the UX for mail, viewing attachments and booking meetings is much, much better than the native app (which I only use for ensuring I have an offline database when traveling).

And yeah, I use WSL extensively, and work from a Mac at home. There is a lot more to the story than the article covers.

</comment><comment><USER73> Use SoftMaker FreeOffice, or SoftMaker Office. It is a pretty nice and performant replacement for MS Office.

<comment><USER74> Google docs works like a charm

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Hm. MS started to support React, especially React Native project lately with their react-native-windows and AppCenter, but I honestly have no idea why would they do that instead of going with something like Electron, since they started to invest in Chromium and V8 anyway.

<comment><USER19> They've done a lot with Electron as well... Github now being a subsidiary of MS. VS Code is really nice, and Teams is decent. I'd be surprised if we don't see new cross platform Office releases based on the Web versions wrapped in Electron in the next couple years.

<comment><USER31> Office has been heading towards React Native and React Native for Web, according to BUILD talks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> The quote at the end of this piece is misattributed.

[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/12/05/fake- honesty/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/12/05/fake-honesty/)

</comment><comment><USER77> How on earth can you have any kind of meaningful conversation about Microsoft's Linux strategy and not even mention Azure?

Microsoft's Cloud service is one of their fastest growth businesses and Linux is a huge piece of that.

</comment><comment><USER78> The whole reason for doing WSL2 was running Docker on Windows, which is currently one of the development "killer apps". AFAIK in the previous implementation they could not get Overlayfs to work properly.

</comment><comment><USER79> 0\. Embrace

1\. Extend

2\. Extinguish (or at least Exhaust Energy on Extraneous complexity through Engineering design-by-committee feature creep)

(But never Excellent Enginerding, unless trying to gain status at a conference.)

</comment><comment><USER80> "I fucking love open source!" \- Microsoft

If this doesn't make you want to use the term 'free software' I don't know what will.

</comment><comment><USER81> "Embrace, extend, extinguish"

*nix is too big to really extinguish, but MS can certainly bear hug some cash out of them.

</comment><comment><USER82> The technology landscape has changed so much in 20 years. Is this analytical framework still relevant?

</comment><comment><USER83> nah. MS was dangerous in windows era. And had another go at that with their docx shenanigans.

...but in cloud era their teeth are just as long/short as google/AWS in my opinion. No more win32 .exe home turf advantage.

That said I consider all 3 clouds dangerous in a sense.

</comment><comment><USER84> The only 'Loves' that Microsoft has are 'Love of Control' and 'Love of Money'.

If you ever trust Microsoft, you have only yourself to blame when you get hurt. That's been true for at least 25 years, and I don't see it ending any time soon.

</comment><comment><USER85> Was this article really written this decade?

</comment><comment><USER86> I love Linux, but I hate Linux Desktop.

</comment><comment><USER87> First, desktop Linux sucks, so there's no point of porting anything to it. Second, office suites including MS Office are now cloud-based.

</comment><comment><USER88> They'll turn linux in a microsoft app.

<comment><USER89> I know this is hyperbole, but funny enough you can download "Ubuntu" for WSL from the Windows app store: [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/p/ubuntu/9nblggh4msv6](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/p/ubuntu/9nblggh4msv6).

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> Embrace Extend Extinguish

</comment><comment><USER22> Every dollar and every minute of attention you give to proprietary software, hurts open source.

</comment><comment><USER91> Dear new corporate overlord, if you want to disprove this, please invest in wine!

It is an alternative option that would yield great dividends for both linux and windows user. win32 binaries are just more multiplatform that .net/uwp/the next shiny new thing you will try and fail to spin.

<comment><USER92> I think they want to go the HyperV route for this purpose, wine is not really the solution a company like Microsoft would choose (based on their business needs). HyperV based hybrid desktop seems to be much easier to develop, maintain, sell etc.

<comment><USER91> Easier, maybe, but it will not succeed. hyperv will be the next big shiny thing to fail.

Meanwhile, wine keep my old binaries useful - and will keep them long after uwp or whatever shades into obscurity.

<comment><USER92> I kind of agree with you, but that does not change anything about it being the strategy of choice for Microsoft</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A New Digital Currency Whose Value Is Based on Your Reputation - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/ <comment><USER2> To be honest, I don't really get what this is for. Everybody I buy things from, and everybody that buys things from me, has no idea who I am. I don't know who they are either. I'm not "famous" so no stranger is going to afford me any "reputation", and I intentionally have zero financial interaction with people I know. (money and friendship don't go together in my opinion.)

<comment><USER3> Part of the idea is the commercial relationships you have, while being fairly weak, are also a pretty good proof that you are a person and not a bot. So spending coins provides a different kind of basis for public key trustworthiness. Which when combined with the higher trust activity of minting coins with your friends, could make maybe a deeper way to map identity to public keys.

<comment><USER4> Where does privacy fit into the philosophy and tech?

<comment><USER3> Short answer is I hope coins are shareable but that there's no requirement to run them through any central authority. So they disclose information in exchange for not privileging a particular party.

Edit: it should be possible to write an app that works only locally on the phone via p2p sync, with no central server, that collects public signatures from friend-of-a-friend wallets, that can provide a decent reach if there were ever a critical mass of users. Opening the possibility to have a functioning trust network without needing everyone to see everyone's coins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey, Chris Anderson here, this article is about my project. Here are slides from my Open Source Bridge talk on the subject. First half is philosophy the second half is tech: [https://speakerdeck.com/jchris/subjective-crypto- currency](https://speakerdeck.com/jchris/subjective-crypto-currency)

<comment><USER5> Perhaps you should rename it "whuffie".

<comment><USER3> Down and Out is a good one, I also like [http://www.shareable.net/blog/the- guy-who-worked-for-money](http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-guy-who-worked- for-money)

I think there is something problematic about those stories, mostly because they insist on making reputation into a single scalar value.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, your improvement is important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The last paragraph of the article, literally verbatim:

If it does take off, it will probably start small. It's not hard to picture groups of friends using it to create custom coins based on inside jokes. Anderson says there would actually be a big benefit in the system being used in this way, since it would get people to create and maintain public encryption keys, setting the stage for more interesting uses later on. "Everything has to start out as a joke these days," he says. "Otherwise people won't take them seriously."

<comment><USER8> _literally verbatim_

Seems like you have some duplicative redundancy going on there...

<comment><USER9> I've reported the incident to the Department of Redundancy Department.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hi! This is the Market Economics Fairy! I can't tell whether this is just a case of the journalist not understanding what properties make for a good unit of exchange, or if the actual creator of the currency has never heard of the Law of One Price! But we should always suspect the journalist first because they have poorer incentives! Let me know if there's any link explaining what the point of this currency really is! Sincerely, the Market Economics Fairy!

<comment><USER11> Hi!

Even though you have a great point there, snarkiness is usually frowned upon in Hacker News.

I'd also like to point out that, even if it's called a Law, it isn't a Law (especially since there's an intent to challenge our notion of currency here).

<comment><USER12> > _snarkiness is usually frowned upon in Hacker News_

Hey!

Give it a pass; the Market Economics Fairy has been with us here for a long time, and usually has some insightful things to say ;).

Sincerely,

Random HN'er who likes that style.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish you good luck with your project, but your materials so far skirt over the difficult problems (collusion, botnets, etc) and just discuss the easy parts of building this type of system. Nonetheless, good luck, there's definitely a market for a quality product in the niche.

<comment><USER3> What I like about the reaction so far is that folks get what I'm going for, even with such a vague short description. I bet multiple engineering teams all starting from just the stuff published so far would come out not too far from each other. I think the Sibyl attack is blunted by the idea that this system is designed to bootstrap from face to face interactions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Incredible incredible stuff. It will be so massively niche for such a long time, so you must have faith, but if you do, one day it will be very very huge.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is a deeper look. Not quite a spec, but a step in the direction of a spec. So that folks can understand more precisely what I'm doing: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-0D75T4_xjMNDdMdgaeRPtNv...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-0D75T4_xjMNDdMdgaeRPtNvU- ggBJ_Z-FNg0DZIA_c)

</comment><comment><USER14> For each person's coin I hold if that person goes "off the rails" then would the value of any of their coins that I hold depreciate (possibly to 0)?

If yes, then how do you protect yourself from folks like Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Bernie Madoff, Mel Gibson, Rob Ford, OJ Simpson... and so forth?

<comment><USER3> You got it. Coins value is totally subjective. So even junk coins might be interesting in aggregate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How is this different from Ripple?</comment>


Samsung sells a million Galaxy Tabs, ups 2010 estimates 50% - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/12/03/samsung-sells-a-million-galaxy-tabs-ups-2010-estimates-50/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fortunebrainstormtech+%28Fortune+Brainstorm+Tech%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> The most informative comment on the original article was this:

"Maybe, but I bet they are talking about units shipped or sold into chain, not sold retail. As assistant manager of an electronics outlet store, I see 30+ iPads leave the store every day, sometimes more, and we are often sending people away to wait for the next shipment. This is a city of only 300,000 and we are not the only seller. We've had the Galaxy Pad in stock for only a short time now, a couple of weeks, but have sold....ZERO. NONE. People complain mostly about it's form: thick, kind of heavy for it's size, too small (or too big - that was my own thought, as it seems 'almost' pocketable). It's not a bug, it's a feature?"

Posted By JW, Sackville, NS.: December 3, 2010 8:18 AM

<comment><USER3> That's just an anecdote, not data. Samsung has confirmed that it's devices sold, not shipped.

<comment><USER4> _it's_ != _its_

The parent comment quotes an original source with two examples of this error, but you are not obligated to repeat it. :-)

<comment><USER5> Compare

"Samsung has confirmed that it is [the number of] devices sold [that the number refers to]."

with

"Samsung has confirmed that its [Samsung's] devices have sold in quantity."

I think the snake was right. :)

<comment><USER4> Good Lord, I'm mortified, and apologize to the snake and to everyone else. It looks like my anti- _it's_ zealotry has finally crossed the line.

Face <\-- egg

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am shocked, considering it is $600 in Best Buy and doesn't look at all impressive. What am I missing?

<comment><USER7> Hardware that's waiting for 2.3 to come out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Dumb question. Why would someone pay more than an iPad to buy this?

<comment><USER9> Dumb answer, I guess, but perhaps because they want it more than an iPad? For me personally the form factor is better in various ways and I greatly value the increased flexibility of Android over iOS, plus getting the "real" full web instead of Apple's definition of that.

Having said that - I won't argue for a minute that it isn't too expensive. I'm as curious as anyone about who is buying these.

<comment><USER10> I bought one for a very particular reason, it acts as a router for up to 5 devices. As a freelancer I am always on the road. The wireless hotspot was $300 with no contract and the Tab was $500. So for $200 more I got a tablet. Given that the kids also play pbskids.org and disney.com games we where holding out for an android tablet that supported flash. That said, I am extremely happy with the Tab, quality wise I think it is as good as the iPad, the voice recognition is far better than the iPad and the 7" form factor makes it easier to type on the virtual keyboard.

<comment><USER11> Interesting. Is the screen as good as the iPad? (Samsung should be able in this area.)

The killer iPad feature for me is that I can browse web pages as on a normal computer. At least my eyes can't handle 7".

Does the Galaxy have a trick with its keyboard? In vertical mode, I'd start to get more faults with a smaller keyboard than the iPad.

<comment><USER10> On paper I think the iPad has better specs for the display. But the Tabs display is very vivid videos almost look 3D. I do not notice a difference between the two. It seems at least for me, that 7 inches is the perfects size for a new style of thumb based typing where you type with your two thumbs. It is really fast and I like it now that I have used it for a little while. If you think about holding a Tab in the vertical position with your fingers under the Tab, and your thumbs above it, that is the way you hold it when typing, the 7" (at least for me) is the perfect size to efficiently reach every key. It is not as fast as a physical keyboard, but then again none of the virtual keyboards are. That being said, the voice automation and dictation is second to none, and free me from using the keyboard for simple items. You can get turn by turn directions by just speaking directions to "somewhere", you can email a contact by saying send email to "jim" "hey lets do dinner tonight" same with a SMS and several other commands, search the web and a host of others. The nice part about the Tab is it comes with a widget on the desktop that you just click the mic speak and off it goes. The voice activation alone is worth it to me.

<comment><USER12>
      On paper I think the iPad has better specs for the display.
      But the Tabs display is very vivid videos almost look 3D

Ouch. There is "accurate color representation" (which IPS offers), and there is "very vivid videos".

<comment><USER13> The Tab has an IPS display as well.

Though of course IPS (S-IPS) by itself means nothing. The iPhone 4 has a bad color gamut. It's bright and very dense, but it is quite heavily undersaturated, and not in any way from an "accuracy" perspective.

<comment><USER12> Alas, accurate colors tend to look undersaturated to those used to boosted vividity.

<comment><USER13> I'm saying that from a scientific measurement perspective the iPhone display is very undersaturated. It is more than just a perception thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Samsung claims 7 hours battery life compared to 10 hours for the iPad, but it seems satisfactory in the reviews. Not sure if it will last one whole day without charging, especially if you used to watch movies on a road trip, for example. Any experience with the battery life?

</comment><comment><USER15> The first flexible (or partly flexible) , collapsible device similar to an iPad or the Samsung device is going to blow them all away I'm surprised nothing has come out yet and no doubt there are prototypes ready to go.

<comment><USER16> Why is this getting upvotes? There's plenty of devices like this. Dell just introduced one. They always flop. So much for "blow them all away".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Something smells fishy here.

Fr something that has allegedly sold more than 1M units, I soulve seen at least one in the wild (in NYC). It did nt take long iPads to appear.

Who exactly is buying these?

Frankly I think if anything Samsing has shipped 1M units, which of course means something entirely different.

<comment><USER18> Considering how much more popular the Galaxy S Phone is in Korea than outside of it, it's entirely possible that the Galaxy Tab is similarly popular there.

I suspect that's true, as you can't presently buy the Wifi only version in the U.S. (but apparently you can elsewhere).

<comment><USER17> The only breakdown Samsung has released is that 100,000 of the 1M are from Korea. US carriers aren't releasing numbers. All the articles I've found on this are just parroting the press release.

There is still a huge question here of who are the buyers. Being more expensive than the iPad and there being plenty of anecdotes of slow to nonexistent sales (at least in the US), I can't imagine who that might be.</comment></comment></comment>


IP Blacklists Analysed – let's see what they do, how they compare - <AUTHOR> http://iplists.firehol.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> My little contribution to the InfoSec community!

This site analyses, documents and compares IP Lists, with a focus on attacks, malware, abuse.</comment>