Except Microsoft doesn't offer WSL-based hosting, and they currently don't offer their own Linux distro. This is a complement to their Azure business, basically.
> IE4 came out at a time when Microsoft considered Netscape an existential threat. IE4 was really the last nail in the coffin. It was actually way better/faster than NS. By the time IE6 came around, there was no imminent threat to Windows in the form of the Web being a platform replacement. So IE6 stagnated and became the bane of the Internet. IE-specific hacks (and IE6 in particular) became the norm for Web developers. It was pervasive too. For example, IE had a completely different interpretation of the CSS box model to everyone else (specifically, how padding, margin and width should interoperate).
Well, let's also remember that the governments of the the United States and the European Union came in and intervened with Microsoft's use of Internet Explorer. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see this is an aberration -- every other major consumer OS (macOS, iOS, Android) has a bundled web browser that has significant market share among that OS's user base. No government seems to have gotten involved in these operating systems.
Microsoft's decision to stop investing so much in IE can be contextualized by noting that major world governments intervened to insist that Microsoft's marketshare in web browsers was reduced. It's not a shocker that organizations respond to their incentives, and Microsoft's incentives to spend a lot of money on IE were reduced by government involvement.
> ... every other major consumer OS (macOS, iOS, Android) has a bundled web browser
At the time Windows had a >90% market share and there weren't mobile Internet devices so it should be held to a different standard.
That being said, I do think governments rush to action on tech issues where it's completely unnecessary.
I do agree the agree the government suit did play a role in browser tech languishing at MS. I honestly believe they didn't think they were doing anything wrong. After all, this was part of MS's "embrace, extend, extinguish" MO. They tried the same thing with Java. So after that it felt to me (as an observer) that MS didn't really know what to do.
From the outside it appeared very strongly that Microsoft deliberately allowed IE to stagnate with the end goal that the web should mean IE and IE only.
That wasn’t a response to government but a strategy to tie the web to Windows as the only platform which could run real IE6.
They could bundle a browser with macOS or Linux but it was much use if it wouldn’t work with your bank, corporate or government sites.
They used the same strategy to have Office files be memory dumps of the programs that created them and formidably hard to support by 3rd parties.
In the UK, for a while at least, IE was pre-installed in desktop versions but would give you a browser choice on first run. I haven't installed Windows for a while. I don't think the server versions ever had that choice screen.
Okay, but how far down the stack does it go? If you are working at Cisco, should you be similarly horrified that human trafficking is being arranged using your company's routers? If you work at a Tier 1 Internet carrier, should you be horrified that people are arranging human trafficking over the backbone that you run?
(Even if Facebook is more responsible than those parties, I think it's easy to understand how the median Facebook employee wouldn't see it that way, especially if their day-to-day job is something not directly having to do with communities/the newsfeed.)
There are no hard rules, just values and precedents. If I were to summarize the precedent, it would be a three-prong test: Do you know about the behavior? Do you contribute to it? Do you have the power to stop it?
If (1) and (2), we're at the Nuremberg threshold. That is, if the crime at hand rises to that of crimes against humanity, (1) and (2) alone should be enough. If it doesn't rise to that level, test (3) comes into question. "Stop" is an ambiguous term, as is "crimes against humanity," so there is a lot of subjectivity here.
But to take your analogy, no, a San Francisco warehouse worker at Cisco wouldn't be culpable for e.g. their CFO bribing a foreign official. A content buyer at Instagram isn't responsible for the slave ads. But engineers deploying the ad systems, incentivized by ad metrics? Business development? Any executive at Facebook? Somewhat to totally culpable.
> If I were to summarize the precedent, it would be a three-prong test: Do you know about the behavior? Do you contribute to it? Do you have the power to stop it?
Have you ever voted for any US representative or senator that got elected and wasn't Barbara Lee? Congratulations, your tests (1) and (2) say you're a war criminal.
There's a big difference here. Facebook's apparent purpose is to capture audiences and feed them ads. Cisco's purpose (was... I have no idea what they're up to these days) it to enable low level communication via their infrastructure products. These are so very different...
Now, if Cisco were negotiating preferential deals with oppressive regimes or companies that were well known for committing what most would consider to be crimes against humanity, then Cisco should choose not to sell to those groups. This is exactly what I'm suggesting FB do.
Okay, but Moxie has actually produced a secure and usable messaging system, based on his stance. Have any of the people who disagree with him gone ahead and produced something that proves their viewpoint?
"Spartans can't be 80% slaves because the Spartans didn't consider their slaves to be Spartans" is perhaps a linguistic truth, but it requires an absurd literalism to keep banging that drum instead of understanding that he's talking about the society the Spartans built, which includes the helots. The Spartans owned the helots!
>> "Spartans can't be 80% slaves because the Spartans didn't consider their slaves to be Spartans"
That is not what I said. Why do you misquote me? This is what I said:
>> The people inhabiting the greater area of the Lacedeamonian city-state, the inhabitants of the settlements in Laconia and Messinia, were never referred to in any ancient text as "Spartans" or "Lacedaemones" and they were only referred to, to the extent they were ever mentioned, as "helots" ("είλωται") or, simply, as the Spartans' slaves.
Nobody in ancient times considered the helots to be "Spartans". This is in the same way that nobody in ancient times considered the slaves of the Athenians to be "Athenians" or the slaves of the Romans to be "Romans". And no historian in modern times does so, either. When speaking of the Gauls, subjugated by the Romans [1], no author, ancient or modern, cals them "Romans". For any ancient or modern culture that had slaves, the distinction is always there: the People of X on the one hand, and their slaves on the other.
Yet the author is deliberately muddying the waters playing on the confusion between "Sparta" the city-state and "Sparta" its capital city, and even invents new terms to refer to them: he calls "Spartiates" the free citizens of the capital city, and "Spartans" everyone else, a distinction impossible in the Greek language and unused by anyone except the author as far as I can tell.
All these deliberate confusions are the result of a perverse reading of history, clearly aimed at making an impression to people who are not familiar with the history of Sparta outside its depiction in popular media and it is clearly calculated to draw internet attention to the author's blog by riding on the coattails of the success of such popular media, and not to inform about history.
The only antitode I know against fudging and misdirection like this is to make language precise and clear.
It's not a silly response. The thing about IRC is that there's channels, and you chat with people in those channels. The deal with Twitter is you both publish and subscribe to short messages, but there's no enforcement of reciprocity -- I don't have to follow someone just because they follow me. There are replies, but that's not the same thing, and Twitter is starting to give people more tools to restrict replies to their Tweets, making the platform even less reciprocal. Everyone in an IRC channel gets the same experience, everyone on Twitter gets a unique experience.
