Quoting: gradyvuckovicDirectX is a cancer.

Aye, true.

OK that's some strong language so let me walk back a bit from that.

No, that's fine.

What Microsoft's now announcing with DirectX coming to WSL only, I find very concerning.

Effectively Microsoft are now attempting to do something which will fragment Linux. There will be one version of Linux available to a HUGE number of people across the world, everyone with access to WSL (think about how many Windows users there are in the world) will have access to a version of Linux that can directly access a reliable high performance version of DirectX.

This I disagree with, though. This isn't fragmenting Linux. These people aren't using Linux. They're using Windows, which already has DirectX. Nearly all of them aren't even aware that there's a Linux in there, and those who are, aren't using it to play games, with or without DirectX.
Everyone who would have been considered a Linux user before this announcement is unaffected by it; they were lacking DirectX as compared to Windows users before, and they still are. This seems to me a pretty minor development.

Software written for 'WSL' that uses DirectX won't work on regular Linux.
Software written for regular Linux that uses Vulkan won't work on WSL.

If anything, that just makes WSL less useful. I mean, surely one of the major points of WSL must be to be able to test things that you're writing in Windows but intend to run in production on Linux. Another might be to run Linux software that doesn't run on Windows. If neither of those are going to work what's the point? It's not like anyone's going to deploy production software designed to run on WSL, surely. Nobody's going to have cloud servers running Windows so they can use the Linux VM inside it.

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Quoting: Dunc

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThat's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. It's part of how they (briefly) won the browser wars. It is not how they got rid of Lotus 1-2-3, for instance.

Fair enough, but my point was really that the precise EEE strategy is just a specific manifestation of a general mindset at Microsoft.

Not gonna argue with that.

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So, does anyone else mentally pronounce "WSL" as "Wizzle"? Or maybe "weasel"?

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Quoting: Dunc

Quoting: BoldosJust a sidenote: If this is some kind of a long-term strategy of MS's, such a thing as an immediate adoption might not be really important.

That. I think it's important to bear in mind that “extinguish” doesn't necessarily mean the elimination of competition; it's about the elimination of the threat. Microsoft EEE'd the Mac with Windows. Apple's still there, the Mac is still around, but the existential threat it posed to Microsoft's DOS business in the late '80s is no more. MS even owns part of it.

Think of EEE more in terms of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer than a T-Rex devouring everything in its path. And yes, in the same way that (I believe) Valve wants to make Steam OS the best way to play Windows games, I suspect this is part of a move to make WSL the best way to develop Linux software. Or something like that.

I disagree. Actually, I think people use the "EEE" expression too much and too loosely. It is/was a fairly specific strategy; many of the things Microsoft did to nobble competition were not "EEE". The key "E" is the middle one: Extend. If that's not happening, it's not really "EEE".

The point of EEE is, you have a competitor and they have a technology. You want that technology to stop competing with you and your technologies. You could try to freeze them out, but it's looking like that might not work; it's a good technology and people like it. So instead you say, "That's a great technology! We're going to be good citizens and do it too!" Then, when people are used to doing the technology with your stuff as well as their stuff, you say, "We love the technology so much we're going to make improvements!" and you add some functions, ideally useful ones but at any rate ones you can get people in your ecosystem to start using. Now people using your stuff can use your version and their version, but people using their stuff can only use their version. If you're bigger, that's a big incentive to switch to using your stuff, not so much to take advantage of the new features themselves, but just so you're not stuck with incompatibility problems. That's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. It's part of how they (briefly) won the browser wars. It is not how they got rid of Lotus 1-2-3, for instance.

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Quoting: GuestAlthough I don't like the writing style and generally try to follow through and make sure I'm as informed as possible, the info from techrights.org is pretty hard to ignore. Microsoft doesn't need technical superiority for EEE to work - there are other ways to achieve the same goal, and what they're up to is very, very worrying to anyone who values software freedoms.

Techrights might sometimes have a point, but I get turned off when I read one of the articles, follow the links, and realize the guy is quoting himself quoting himself quoting himself. I don't trust the accuracy, is what I'm saying--I want to because I'm on what I'd consider the same side as the guy, but I don't. At best, Techrights for me is something that might flag an issue for further investigation to see if it's real this time.

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Quoting: Dorrit

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI'd wager fewer economies have gotten in trouble from running the printing press too much than have gotten in trouble from owing too much debt in a currency they can't print.

Running the printing press or creating debt is the same thing done differently; both erode the common citizen's wealth: either through inflation or taxes.

They are not the same thing done differently at all. When you create debt you owe something to someone--and it really matters who. If you owe it to foreigners, particularly foreigners who have more influence over the international financial system than you, most particularly if it's in their currency rather than yours, they have you by the balls. There has been crisis after crisis caused by this. The miserable state of much of the third world has been more influenced by this than by any other single factor; creditors are able to manipulate interest rates and dictate policies to the vast detriment of the place. Internal debt isn't nearly as bad, but it's still distinct from money creation or "borrowing" directly from the central bank. Debt has distributional implications money creation does not--interest is paid mainly to certain wealthy groups.

More generally, though, IMO that drastically misinterprets what "wealth" and "money" actually are and the relationship between the two, not to mention the function of government. The question isn't whether you run the printing press, it's what you do with the money.
I see two levels. At a fundamental level, money is a fiction and wealth is real things. If you've built a bunch of railways and school buildings and hospitals and factories and grain elevators and telecommunications networks, that matters a good deal more than how much some symbols on spreadsheets are apparently "worth". At that level, government spending creates wealth simply because it literally creates wealth. Infrastructure is valuable. It enables a strong economy. Businesses borrow to grow the business all the time; it's the same with the government and the country.

At a less fundamental, accounting level, government spending is spent into the private sector. If governments run a surplus, that means that the private sector is in deficit--money is coming from the private sector into the government. After all, if it's neither printing money nor creating debt, the money has to come from somewhere. Government surpluses retard economic growth because they suck money out of the economy. Government deficits create economic growth by putting money into the economy.

True, if the economy is already running at full employment that's going to cause inflation--but only then. And that means that if government prints money during a deep recession for Keynesian "priming the pump" purposes, that will not create inflation unless and until the spending succeeds in bringing economic recovery.
(Inflation itself isn't as huge a deal as bondholders would have us believe. Inflation doesn't destroy wealth; no real asset goes away. What it does is redistribute claims on wealth--specifically, mostly away from bondholders, since bonds pay out at fixed interest rates. And to some extent towards debtors, because if you owe a fixed amount on, say, your mortgage, but the dollars aren't worth as much, you effectively have a smaller debt. If it's going so fast that people can't adjust it causes dislocation, for sure. But 5%, even 10% don't have a big impact on the economy as such)

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Quoting: The_Aquabat

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: The_Aquabat

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe individual countries can't print money, devalue their currencies to encourage exports

As I see it there is two main economics schools, Keynes and Hayek... I think both of them agree that destroying the value of the currency is bad.

The major policy implication of Keynesian economics is that the ability for governments to stimulate the economy during recessions is crucially important. The Euro combined with the EU rules on deficits make it impossible for Eurozone governments to do that. EU "austerity" doctrine is pretty much explicitly anti-Keynesian. And it has created a worse-than-lost decade in much of the EU.

if you devaluate too much people will simply use another currency that doesn't like here... nobody uses our local currency for things like purchasing a car or buying a house.

I'd wager fewer economies have gotten in trouble from running the printing press too much than have gotten in trouble from owing too much debt in a currency they can't print. In fact, often when the proximate cause of a problem is running the printing press too much, the real problem is actually that other thing. So for instance, Weimar Germany's hyperinflation was caused by desperate attempts to scrape together "reparations" for WW I, which had to be paid in things like gold and British pounds. Their economy was too small to really produce enough stuff to pay the outrageous reparations, so they tried just buying gold with marks, and more marks, and more marks. But what few people know is that after the hyperinflation was over, they tried austerity, and bad though the hyperinflation was, the austerity hurt people even worse.
And that's the problem with the Euro--the member states can't print them. Anyone using the Euro is in effect using a foreign currency for their money, a currency they can't guarantee to pay debts in. If that weren't the case all those worries about Greece or Spain or Italy imploding financially due to a panic would have been irrelevant (and they went away precisely the moment ECB head Mario Draghi said that he'd print as many Euros as it took to make the problem go away--suddenly there was no risk in the loans, the vultures stopped circling and the interest rates went back down).
Japan on the other hand borrows yen like they're going out of style--but they control the yen so it's fine, they can't even get inflation to 2%.

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I was prepared to hate the aesthetic. Like, "wonders of the Canadian wilderness" and "low-poly", give me a break. But, well, I'm still not sold on the look, but I have to admit that despite (or perhaps because of) the low-poly it somehow gave me a whiff of an Emily Carr feel. So that's pretty nuts.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: haikuFinally a tux badge that look modern :wink:

Wow. That looks gorgeous.

Funny, to me it looks bland and kind of depressed. Guess my heart's really never been in "modern".

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Well, it's not open source.
On the plus side, when I saw the headline I thought "It's probably some dying thing and the owners said 'What can we get out of this any more?' and concluded 'About all it's good for is a bit of community good will if we open source it'". But it doesn't seem to be that kind of abandonware at all.

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