They still are good products. If you stick your fingers in you ears and forget about the bad bits. It's like living in a garden shed which has been painted nicely inside. You can live a happy existence with a bit of ignorance.
This place can be quite bipolar. I actually quit HN for a long period over the "second coming of Microsoft" when the entire HN crowd was crowing of Satya's ascent into grand hegemon position because the sycophantry was making me wretch. My comments about the same old Microsoft were downvoted to oblivion and any dissident voices squashed. The US tech community spoke and would not listen to warnings.
Um, every .Net Core developer I know, which is quite a few at multiple companies, are still doing everything on Windows and Visual Studio classic. Windows is still a massive concern for the tech community and most of those people seem to absolutely dislike windows 11 to the point they're all using Macs at home. Even our windows-centric SQL Server DBAs have macs at home.
No one is going to buy corporate Macs though because Windows and Office is the best corporate dystopia for the compliance check boxers.
There’s literally another thread on the front page right now where one of the top commenters is taking about using macOS for this. A snarky “Um,” at the beginning of your comment doesn’t negate the fact that it sounds like you’re embedded in corporate hell, which doesn’t represent everyone making software.
yes I use it on macOS as well. I'm writing this on my Mac.
I am an active independent user group member. This isn't just about startups and big tech who are actually fairly low on seat counts. There are huge numbers lots of us corporate dystopias using this stack. On Windows. And you'll have never heard of any of us.
I think some of us aren't having as bad a time as others. The trick is to carefully select technologies and pay attention to what you actually need to operate. Blindly diving 100% into the Microsoft offering hellscape is definitely going to be a bad time.
I use .NET/VS/Windows/etc throughout. I recognize products like Azure and SQL Server are a potential trap. So, I use .NET6+ but with SQLite and minimal AspNetCore projects instead of SQL Server and IIS. I could deploy our product to Linux with a few tweaks (i.e. drop System.Drawing image conversion laziness).
At work, we are a Windows-only shop for the most part. My daily driver is still a Windows PC. I have an M1 mbp I use around the house, but I generally dont get emotionally invested in exactly who vended my OS/machine. I chase the UX. I have zero loyalties to trademarks either way. Other factors are give or take depending on moon phases. If the machine feels good and fast, I use it. I don't fight it anymore. There are bigger problems in my mind.
No it's not up for debate at all. Much like when Microsoft did this with .Net core, the Github thread is clearly a misguided post by RSC expecting the community to conform or support it. They didn't so now it's a damage control exercise. It will happen.
Any corporate controlled project on this scale is prone to this failure mode.
I think you're right on the mark there. I'm jaded and cynical enough to know what's going to hurt me and what's going to pay the bills and that's where my interest stops. 20 years of C# and 35 years of Unix now :(
Worshipping any vendor is quite frankly a bit sad.
I tend to avoid having to solve problems now. If I do it tends to go somewhere vendor neutral like python on whatever platform happens to be lying around and not annoying me at the time.
I think the comparison of telemetry and stealing is pretty harsh.
Is opt-out telemetry unethical ... depends. If you use it in a privacy preserving way no, if you spy on your Users, sell the data for money or advertising obviously it is unethical.
The hard truth is, nobody reads the manual. Opt in telemetry is often a minority, and you then work with niche data for a minority that influences your development in certain ways.
In my opinion, any data collection about me or my machines that occurs without my active informed consent is "spying". This is my fundamental problem with opt-out mechanisms. They do not indicate or imply that active consent was obtained.
Unless a Windows user is installing the software, that screen would be displayed in approximately zero of the cases where a package manager was used to install the software. Similarly, exactly zero widely-used Docker images that contain the software would display this splash screen, as the software would already have been installed.
In short, unless you're a Windows user there are so __very__ many ways to install software that aren't "Go to the project home page, download a generic install binary, run that binary with world-write permissions.". Aside from very small-time projects, I can't think of the last time I used an officially-maintained install script that I got from the project's servers to install something.
It would be better than nothing, but not really adequate. There are numerous circumstances where such a screen is impossible or impractical, and if every program did this, it would be as good as not doing it because people will react to it like they react to other common warning dialogs -- not really seeing it at all.
The world is full of people making decisions for one another. Did you consent to unix files not flushing on every write() call? Its not a meaningful complaint.
We have to ask for permission on our SaaS products to collect this data as it's not necessary to collect it for the product to function. The EU GDPR mandates this.
Russ Cox is suggesting that there is no permission step and that the data is collected by default.
From my reading focused on this specific issue of the GDPR and the national laws of member states, this is not the case. Opt-in is specifically required for personal information. The telemetry data outlined in the proposal would not fall under this requirement. You can even retain time-limited IP logs with some special caveats. The GDPR is actually quite reasonable and fair.
Russ Cox is a very intelligent and effective engineer. He has a history of projects where he first analyses the problem space, then arrives at great solutions. He puts a lot of effort into discussing the problems and proposal with the community, especially after the widely criticized go mod decision by the go team (which is now mostly accepted as unfortunate, but in the end, the correct decision, I would think).
My point is: We all suspect Google and telemetry to be bad. But can we be charitable enough to separate the Go project, that is run by individual humans, and telemetry from our superficial cliches to actually read the proposal?
Google or Russ Cox's reputation is irrelevant. The idea stands alone. I'm merely crediting him with the idea.
I read the proposal. There is no discussion of the legality of this at all. I'd expect anyone with any level of supposed technical competence to consider this in relation to global data protection. I suspect there has been no legal review as mentioned in the thread because I know how slow the lawyers in this space work and the timeline between publishing this and now is too short to have had a conclusive answer.
As for your point about GDPR, I think if you apply your right to withdraw from opt out data collection and what that entails and then ask how this glaring defect is missing from RSC's paper, then you'll see exactly how much privacy consideration really went into this.
It’s not that here. I use iOS because I don’t want anyone embedding several bloated half baked ancient hole ridden security nightmare browser engines in their apps which do everything possible to bypass system wide network restrictions so they can carry out whatever bad behaviour their business model thinks is acceptable. I want one system wide browser that respects the security configuration at OS level.
I want this for myself and the surface area of our 500 or so staff.
It is hard for me to disagree, because I understand that use case. The issue, however, appears to be that there is no 'version' that allows for it for users that accept the risks involved.
It is not completely unlikely the conversation with cops. In their perfect world, everyone would sit quietly at home with hands on the table. Life is more messy than that though for obvious reasons. In other words, I understand the need to have some level of control, but some balance is necessary.
For those cases, there is Android. My youngest one has an android phone, and everyone else in our family has an iPhone. It is not like you are forced to buy an iPhone. Those restrictions are actually part of its market differentiator.
No. All that happy talk about differentiation and market forces only makes sense when there is an actual competition. We have an effective oligopoly with no real choices between them. If there is no real choice, as consumers we have to force companies to adopt more consumer-friendly posture ( and yes, that means sideloading and all the dangers that entails ).
An oligopoly is not a monopoly. You can argue that there needs to be more differentiation, not that there isn't any.
Some people want to sideload, and they can have an Android. But some other people are pretty much satisfied with not being able to sideload, the uniformity it brings, and the other perceived positive side-effects they see.
What did I say though >> "We have an effective oligopoly"
I did not argue we have a monopoly. I argued we have an oligopoly at best ( if you count Pine and similar as viable candidates ) and duopoly at worst, which somehow manages to be worse than a monopoly for one reason and one reason only.. monopolies are more tightly regulated. Try talking about regulating current batch of market leaders and you will only hear 'private enterprise','if you don't like it, start your own', which completely manages to ignore the problem to begin with.
<< Some people want to sideload, and they can have an Android.
Hmm. Why is that statement somehow appear axiomatic why and does each sentence fragment logically follows one another? Why is it not 'some people want to use their purchase as they see fit so any device they pick they can do what they please with including "sideload"'?
<< some other people are pretty much satisfied with not being able to sideload, the uniformity it brings,
I would argue with that.
One. Not all users know it is an option.
Two. Existence of various workaround to allow sideloading suggests otherwise.
<< the uniformity it brings
If there is one thing world needs now, it is not uniformity.
<< other perceived positive side-effects they see.
