Nationalistic and ideological flamewar are not what this site is for, and people are routinely descending into near-madness about this. The comments are predictable, over the top, and unbelievably lame. Users who want to yell at each other and blare national/ideological rhetoric need to post elsewhere. Boilerplate talking points belong elsewhere also.
This is becoming epidemic on HN. I think we are going to have to ask the community to get a lot more systematic about flagging comments that flout this site's rules and intended spirit—regardless of which side of the battle they're on.
This is the point at which some angry zealot accuses us of being secret communist agents. Not at all—we're just trying to have an internet forum that isn't dominated by cartoonish ideological and nationalistic yelling. Grandiose rhetoric is not intellectually interesting, so this follows from what we're trying to optimize for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
Well perhaps that's not really Beijing's narrative? But an attempt at creating a you are either with us it against us narrative? Same thing was used when us went to war with Iraq but look where we are.
There are U-Schiffe too, which are larger than U-Boote, but the claustrophobia element wouldn't have been as intense in the film. On the other hand, an U-Schiff would have never become unstuck from the bottom of the Mediterranean. Another example of ships getting stuck where boats don't. (If you haven't seen the movie, this likely makes zero sense.)
The problem with that metaphor is it implies 100% of microsoft's profits only exist because of theft. Their software added legitimate value to people's lives. It still does - Outlook & the office suite are still world class at what they do. DirectX pushed the stagnant OpenGL to innovate. Visual studio is fantastic (miles better than current XCode). C# is a worthy successor to Java. VS Code is excellent too. And so is the XBox. And I'm glad windows exists as a counterpoint to the hardware lock-in in the macos ecosystem, and to keep Apple honest.
Microsoft's customers weren't all robbed of their money. And on the other side, Bill Gates has committed to giving away all his money before he dies.
Its like, a man steals one pizza from his neighbor and makes 10 more. He eats one then he gives the rest to the homeless. Should we call him a hero? No - that theft wasn't ok! Is he a villain? No - he made pizzas and gave them away. Villains don't do that.
What is he? He's a man. He exists somewhere in the ethically murky middle. As Solzhenitsyn said, "The line between good and evil passes through every human heart." History will remember him for a lot of things - some good, some bad. Saint and sinner both. Like the rest of us.
> Outlook & the office suite are still world class at what they do.
Yep, corporate GMail had made me detest email, but corporate Outlook made me stop using it.
Also, Outlook for Mac was the only app that I had to actually quit before sleeping a macbook or the battery would die in my bag. Nothing else could compare.
On the server side, nothing mutilates mail quite like Exchange, although recent versions aren't as good as that as the old ones were.
Word and Excel are kind of nice, but I don't use them enough to pay for them, so OpenOffice it is.
Thats nice for you. Personally I use Apple Pages to compose word documents.
But this isn't about us. The question is whether Microsoft's products add real value to their customers. From your nephew with an xbox, to devs in the C# ecosystem, to office workers who use word and excel to get their work done the answer is obviously yes.
> The question is whether Microsoft's products add real value to their customers.
I'm pretty sure Outlook convincing me not to read corporate mail was not of value to my employer (Microsoft's customer). At the very least, it added confusion and delay when other employees expected me to see things they emailed. Perhaps letting me focus on other stuff was of benefit to the employer, but that's tricky to measure; it's hard to imagine employers want to use a terrible email system to subtly discourage email use, there are more effective ways.
My next door neighbour is a lawyer. I asked about her workflow when visiting during the lockdown.
There's about 40 lawyers in her office, and they have a lot of ongoing cases between all their clients. She spends some of her time each week "filing". For her this means sifting through the firehose of emails and documents that their office receives and assigning every one to the correct case, marking if it needs attention (and from whom), tagging the types of documents, etc etc.
She does all this from home through a custom workflow built on top of Outlook. I'm sure its not pretty in the backend, but can you name a system that would let her do her job more effectively? MacOS Mail? Gmail? Hah! No. Outlook is the tool they use; and it looks like it works well - even working from home.
I don't use anything in the office suite myself, but for my neighbour's office I don't think there's a better choice. Hate on outlook if you want, it solves problems for real users.
I have the feeling that this movement has the potential of destroying our public discourse culture, to undermine free thinking and remold our societies to be more unfair, capricious and despotic.
We're seeing the modern equivalents of witch hunts and book burnings.
There's passion, and then there's dirty fighting. Name calling and dismissiveness. A veritable army of straw men. Unwillingness to even attempt to understand an opposing viewpoint.
I don't disagree. But isn't calling anybody who disagrees even slightly with you a racist, or a bigot, or a xenophobe, or a hate monger, or any of a thousand other things, the very height of "unwillingness to even attempt to understand an opposing viewpoint." I don't hear critics of CRT and wokism calling their opponents the most reprehensible and odious names they can imagine. I see plenty of CRT advocates doing just that. Why is this okay?
> This is a useful reminder. It's a reminder that associative thinking can invert causal relationships and turn anything into a symbol for anything else. There is no rational limit to things that can be attacked this way.
I've never heard this stated so clearly and succinctly. Thanks for advancing the conversation.
There is no third party deciding these things. People who have experienced racism are offended when it continues to happen. They can then advocate for a change and hopefully broader awareness.
