An alternative take is that we've endured thousands of years of propaganda aimed at keeping women as child bearing, house keeping slaves, and we're finally starting to see the end of that in at least some cultures.
But of course, it's only "propaganda" when you don't like it.
On one hand we have propaganda not even a century old, only possible by the invention of birth control, the creation of tv, radio and newspapers, which itself required the invention of many things such as communications faster than horseback, the existence of strong centralized states which guarantee welfare to the elderly even if they don't have children to maintain it, and technological advances and social changes which make children an expense instead of an economic asset. And this propaganda leads to societies slowly economically collapse and their populations go extinct.
On the other hand, we have the "propaganda" which has existed for thousands if not millions of years, needed no technological, scientific or economic advances to exist, and the societies that followed it grew and made all the advances required for the other.
Of the two, I know which seems to be truer and more natural.
Both priests are assumed to understand Latin. The situation they want to avoid is starting up a conversation with someone in a language they don't know.
So the options are:
1) Use Polish, with the risk of being rude if you happen to speak to the Spanish priest
2) Use Latin and ask "do you speak Polish?", and both the Polish and the Spanish priest will understand.
You could of course argue that it's not so very rude to accidentally try to strike up a conversation with someone in a language they don't know, but apparently Tade0's father thinks it is.
> But unfortunately these addresses are hard to remember and "nobody" recognizes them when reading examples.
How does that matter? The point isn't that the reader should know that "oh, this is a reserved address". The point is that there should be no room for the address that's actually being used by someone to end up being used incorrectly just because it showed up in some random documentation.
Much like how you probably wouldn't be thrilled if your phone number was used as an example in some random documentation somewhere.
Well, TRAMP was preceded by ange-ftp, which let you edit files remotely over ftp. I was using that in 1995, and I didn't get the impression then that it was brand new, so it had probably been around for a while already.
Of course, if your problem is "/usr won't mount", then it's likely that the ftp server isn't running either, so the advice still makes sense.
> Are you comfortable with anybody being able to ring up the hospital and say "yo, it's majorchord, how are my gonnorhea results?"
No, that's why we have safety protocols in place. When you call a doctor they ask you for your birthdate or sometimes also a PIN/password on your account to protect your data.
How would that still be considered a breach of privacy?
Alright. I didn't know that. "Just call them" did not sound like it included any kind of authentication procedure.
But giving birthdate (available to anyone via a single query in a public database) and (sometimes?! - what?!) PIN over the phone wouldn't really be considered good enough here. Birthdate is, as I said, public knowledge. And a phone is too insecure a medium for transmitting a password.
I'm not super interested in an long argument about whether it's reasonable that this isn't considered secure or not. I'm just letting you know what reality looks like. And the reality is that "just call them" is not a solution, because such information will simply not be handed out over the phone.
Odd point to raise in a thread about a family killed while waiting at a bus stop in broad daylight. Do you think reflective clothing would have changed the outcome of the event significantly?
I guess there's a difference between talking about how many requests a system is capable of handling, and how many they actually get.
At least when i encountered the discussion initially (some thirty years ago) I'd say we usually talked about how many requests the system was capable of handling. Then requests per second was the obvious unit since a request usually took less than a second to process (obviously depending on the system and so on - but mostly), so using that unit often gave a fairly low, comprehensible number.
Was it ten? A hundred (very impressive)? Perhaps even a thousand (very, very impressive!)?
Multiply those numbers by 60, and there's suddenly a lot more mental gymnastics involved. By 3600 and you're well into "all big numbers look the same" land.
> Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages.
Not sure I agree. I've been gaming on Debian since 2005, and while it certainly was some work in the beginning, it's been pretty painless for the last five years or so. I'm on Debian stable (mostly) at the moment, and don't really know what "bleeding edge" packages I would be missing.
Oh, this is just the usual Microsoft Stockholm syndrome. I've been witnessing this for over 20 years now and have been told that it has been a thing for much longer than that.
"No, we can't switch to OpenOffice you weird Open Source hippie! I can't e-mail documents to other people anymore, nobody can open them. Besides, the UI is all different, I won't be able to find anything!"
Then Office 2007 happened, tossing out the waffle menu for the ribbon and people started receiving e-mails with strange docx/xlsx files that nobody could open. IIRC that was still an issue 3 years later.
But no, when Microsoft does it, it is different: "This is progress! Are you against progress, you weird Luddite?"
I remember by the time Windows 8 was released ("Kachelofen edition" - "hurr, your desktop is a tablet!"), I was discussing with a Unix graybeard friend in the cafeteria how long it will take until the complainers accept that "this is the way now". I think it was him who suggested that if Microsoft sent a sales rep around to shit on peoples lawns, it would take at most a year until they start defending it as the inevitable cost of technological progress.
No matter how slow and bloated the GitHub web UI gets, or how many nonsense anti-features Microsoft stuffs into it. People will accept it and find funny excuses (network effect will be the main one).
> I think it was him who suggested that if Microsoft sent a sales rep around to shit on peoples lawns, it would take at most a year until they start defending it as the inevitable cost of technological progress.
They would inevitably say that Linux was not viable because you had to buy your own fertilizer.
Every time someone claims “everyone on HN thought X”, I go back to check and find out that it was not true and that the discussions had both people in favour and against. Every time. But this case is particularly bad, I’m checking the top voted comments and so far the feeling is of dread and wariness, the complete opposite of what you claim.
I really wish people would stop this silly “everyone thought X” shtick. It’s embarrassing. Verification is trivial. What do you gain from it? It’s just spreading heated reactions based on a lie.
Well, yes, that sentence definitely simplified matters a bit. The fact is though, that those who expressed concerns about Microsoft - in that particular thread, and in others - were generally ridiculed in roughly the tone I imitated in my original post.
Of course there were people raising concerns, though. I figured that was pretty obvious in my original post. If there hadn't been any people raising concerns, nobody would have had to dismiss them - condescendingly or not.
So yes, I (incorrectly) used the word "everyone" to mean "a lot of people" in a sentence where I figured it was quite obvious that that's what I was doing, and in a way I've seen it used before in English so many times that I thought it was a common and accepted pattern. Perhaps I am wrong about the last bit though. ESL speaker, so that's quite possible.
> The fact is though, that those who expressed concerns about Microsoft - in that particular thread, and in others - were generally ridiculed in roughly the tone I imitated in my original post.
The fact the top voted comments are wary of Microsoft suggests otherwise. When people agree, they upvote and seldom comment. Of course responses are contrarian (that’s mostly when you have something to add), but that doesn’t mean that view is prevalent.
> If there hadn't been any people raising concerns, nobody would have had to dismiss them - condescendingly or not.
OK, yes, fair.
> So yes, I (incorrectly) used the word "everyone" to mean "a lot of people" (…) and in a way I've seen it used before in English so many times
It’s perfectly fine to use “everyone” and “no one” to mean “the overwhelming majority”. As in, not literally everyone but enough that the outliers are a rounding error. For example: “no one wants ants biting their genitals” (I’m sure you’ll find someone who wants that, but it’s pretty safe to assume the overwhelming majority of people don’t). But I don’t think it’s OK to use “everyone” to mean “a lot of people”. A lot of people live in China, but it would be ridiculous to say “everyone is Chinese”.
So it's true that the several of the top topmost comments are anti-MS or at least worried, but there are plenty of replies to those that are defending MS. A few of them:
> I go back to check and find out that (…) the discussions had both people in favour and against.
The point is that “everyone here thought” complaints have so far never been true.
> I don't think it's safe to say that the prevailing opinion there is one of concern.
Comment position matters, because it means people upvoted it. If one agrees and upvotes they are less likely to comment. But even if we were to nitpick what the prevailing opinion was, it’s still not true that HN was in agreement with the sentiment expressed by the OP.
This common trend of invoking the goomba fallacy is a thought-terminating way to excuse and justify away any popular opinion. Even if single individuals have different opinions, the common sentiment on the forum was that Microsoft of 2010s was not Ballmer’s Microsoft, and the unsavoury anticompetitive behaviours had been done away with.
> the common sentiment on the forum was that Microsoft of 2010s was not Ballmer’s Microsoft, and the unsavoury anticompetitive behaviours had been done away with.
Maybe it was a common sentiment, but clearly not the. Again, we can see from that acquisition thread that people were wary of it. The second top post even makes Microsoft seem like a domestic abuser.
I've had so many discussions with friends over the past 15 or so years where they've praised Microsoft and their embracing of open source, and have given me a hard time for continuing to distrust them. To be fair, I was a teenager in the 90s, and a huge computer nerd who followed the MS antitrust case very closely; quite a few of these friends are 5-7 years younger, rendering them a bit too young at the time to experience that going on in real-time.
But damn... I enjoy a good "I told you so" as much as the next guy, but most of the time it sucks to be right.
Startups are about making money, take they capital with a promise of making more capital, and the logic of capital is uniform, no matter where it comes from. It always, without exception, will end up the same, with the only difference how much time it will take.
It really depends on what kind of investment they took. Venture is probably worse than going public with the desire to moonshot. A loan is pretty harmless, since they want you to repay a fixed amount with as much stability as possible.
Does it matter these days if a company or administration are "the good guys"? Does "good" even have a meaning anymore? The "good" part of the world rotates in disbelief since Trump was re-elected in a democratic vote. Everyone says Microsoft is evil, since, what, the 90s?! But still, Windows is everywhere. Is anyone still buying this moral bullshit? "Goodness" obviously has no majority.
But of course, it's only "propaganda" when you don't like it.
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