Ah, the usual propaganda from the fucking content mafia and the lobbyists they bought:

“The takedown of Fmovies is a testament to the power of collaboration in protecting the intellectual property rights of creators around the world,” Knapp says.

“Strengthening intellectual property rights is an important element of the U.S.-Vietnam Comprehensive Partnership,” Knapper said

I’ll happily repeat again and again and again:

• If pirate sites offer a better user experience than your paid offerings, you don’t deserve payments at all
• The money goes mostly to some rich fucks, fucking shareholders, lawyers and bought politicians and and not to the artists/creators of the movies (with some exceptions for the really big names)
• I will very happily pay a service which is not shitty, not region locked, doesn’t annoy me with advertisement and is reasonably priced. The illegal sites are demonstrating that it is possible to sustain such an offer on advertisement alone. Don’t give me fucking bullshit that it is not possible for companies like Netflix while most of the subscription fees are going to shareholders and higher management instead into creating new content

Seriously, fuck all the politicians and governments which act against the benefit of most of their population to conspire with the content mafia.

there is no android phone that I am passionate about,

Not what you asked for:

A phone is a tool which should enable you to do stuff. Be passionate about friends, hobbies, art, not a piece of plastic.

Being forced to use iOS (work phone) and Android (Samsung, also work), both suck IMHO but Android sucks less.

My next Android will be a Pixel, as others suggested custom roms are the way to go, but even vanilla Android is more functional/open/practical for my needs than iOS.

I would never buy Apples shit with my own money: Dumped down, locked down and in the end you are renting a device from Apple to pay fees for their Appstore and Cloud offerings and vendor lock in. No thanks.

In my personal life, I run Linux on all my devices and I would never invest in non-opensource technology for my career. (Work forces me to run macOS, but that’s another story).

For years now, I happily and only buy games on Steam, even if I have the choice between Steam and NoDRM. Simply because Steam just works™ and is convenient. (Of course one never buys games on steam with a forced additional starter from Ubisoft etc.).

Steam is really great from a technically POV, from a giving back to the community point and from a customer friendliness point (never had a problem with a return).

I even bought a SteamDeck although I am no big fan of handhelds, and for what it is, it is great.

I’ll happily waste more money on my Steam backlog of shame. ;-)

Amen! One thing which drives me crazy is that most people confuse beginner friendly and user friendly, the two things are absolutely not the same thing. There is nothing wrong with having tools which are beginner friendly, especially for stuff one does once in a while. There is everything wrong with nerving tools which are for pros or even everyday usage: If I use something everyday I have rather an optimization for the mid or long run, than for the first few hours…

TDD as in religion is overrated. TDD done right is IMHO extremely effective.

The problem is, writing good tests is really hard, and I have seen/committed/experienced a lot of bad tests… just the top of my mind problems with TDD done wrong:

• testing the implementation instead the interface
• creating a change detector
• not writing / factoring the tests in a good way
• writing tests / TDD w/o having an overall design for the software

For every non trivial piece of software written w/o TDD, I always saw the same pattern: First few hours/days/weeks, rapid progress compared to TDD, afterwards: hours/days/weeks wasted in debugging, bug fixing etc… and the people can not even catch up with tests if they wanted.

Is TDD always the answer? Of course not, it is a tradeoff like everything else in technology. OTOH I have yet to see a project which benefited from not using TDD by any metric after a few days in.

“WEI can potentially be used to impose restrictions on unlawful activities on the internet, such as downloading YouTube videos and other content, ad blocking, web scraping, etc.”

WTF. Most of these activities are actual lawful in the country I life in. (Especially with adblockers, the content mafia tried to outlaw it and failed in court, several times.)

I agree with your points, but by that logic, Google (Android), Apple and all other smartphone/smart appliances provider should be sued, too. Think about FaceTime(?), Apple Safari (where they even force their shitty browser engine on iOS on you) etc.

If we all agree that this bundles are a problem, the solution is simply: Don’t allow any bundling at all, for no one.

Microsoft does Microsoft things.

I complain about the EU and my own technical incompetent government for a simple reason:

For years now, we have Open Source Software that is good enough ™ for the public sector, and for example the French police showed already that you can move to Linux (https://www.zdnet.com/article/french-police-move-from-windows-to-ubuntu-linux/).

The EU should get independent of Microsoft for something so important like the IT infrastructure, instead of painting lipstick on a pig.

Edit: And if the EU is independent from Microsoft, I would prefer to use a messaging system like Matrix instead of blowing money into something like Slack.

I totally grasp the situation. The same could be said about notepad.exe, the File Explorer and everything else that comes preinstalled with Windows. According to the preinstalled logic, Windows should just be delivered with a kernel to even the competition.

AFAIK Slack is a Startup, backed by VC. If we would speak about Sublime Text vs. Notepad.exe, we might have ethical/moral grounds for a discussion.

Edit: … and just to be more clear: We have SublimeText, Directory Opus etc. - great software from great teams, which can survive although they compete with preinstalled software on Microsoft Windows. If Slack would provide something really valuable, Teams wouldn’t have had such an easy play. Same is true for Zoom.

Thanks for your elaboration, I am not qualified to know or answer, if Microsoft broke the law concerning Teams.

I am referring to the motivation for Slack to file a complaint, look at the numbers (50 vs 300 millions) which clearly show that Slack is loosing. Do you seriously imply that Slack is filing their complaint to reduce bloatware? (In that case, I am happy to see Slack starting to debloat their client. :-P)

As I already said, I am no fan of Teams, Microsoft, etc. but IMHO by now everyone grown up can decide what messenger app to install, there is enough competition (Apple, Linux) on the desktop for people who want less/different bloatware.

I am just seriously tired of the EU investing time and energy in this bullshit instead of investing energy in important/useful topic for its citizens.

Seriously, this is so ridiculous: So Slack filed a complain because their chat application looses against Teams?

I mean, Slack could have like innovated and make their application really, really good so that customers choose Slack over Teams because of the value it brings.

Instead they go the legal/lobbyist way and cry because a chat application obviously isn’t a forever gold mine.

The EU being technically illiterate and dump enough to play along is even more ridiculous than Slacks entitlement.

(For the record: I don’t like Teams, Office, Microsoft, Slack etc… but this is just such an obvious/bullshit lobbyist move.)