M$ never helped any OSS project crack any of it's many, many proprietary formats. At the bottom of this is M$ desire to profit on the back of hard graft by unpaid (in many cases) devs and their desire to cherry pick OSS for their ends?

Let them go OSS also, put up their source repository including things like DirectX, or give them the middle finger. My â0.02Â

From Fools & Horses: "what's that smell? Sheep's? Cow's? No, I know - BULL!

22 seconds long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I deleted facebook & co years ago, and disabled my mobile apps.

+1 on the title. Why indeed?
In the 1970s, the z80 had the jump on Intel's 8080, and became the heart of most CP/M systems. I could see myself using one once, but not twice. The 68k was out about the time it was released. But CP/M programs were usually in 8080 assembler anyhow (In case some twit had an 8080 box). It did 4Mhz (=1Mhz bus speed), and had a video update interrupt every 20ms to copy it's 4k of video ram to screen. Likewise, the specs of the new box are pathetic. Their basic was crap. My enduring memory of it was trying to learn assembler on my one in the 80s. I would spend the best part of 2 hours after work loading an Assembler & Monitor via cassette tape, only to have the baby crawl over and unplug the psu :-/.
There was a half decent flight Sim on it, however.

Edge on Linux? /Lazily raises one eyebrow. Any time M$ tries to take on Linux (or MacOS) on a level playing field, they lose badly, IME. Where's their profit? Spyware? Silver light Reborn or some other proprietary POS coming down the line? Some other manipulation? I would need source, code, GPL, and a developer support forum. If there was a source obn GitHub or source forge, with a browser If I didn't have to sign in to use it, who knows. I would sooner see them support a linux project than issue a binary blob. There's A LOT of suspicion to overcome.

Yes, that's right. The EPA first warned about this as early as 1984, and the U.S.Government still is doing nothing
https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/101984012

It's hardly surprising nobody listens much to engineers.
I'm an electronic engineer; The course was 2 years math, 1 year outdated crap & jumping through hoops,
3 Months physics and the rest electronics.
The requirements for lecturer is that you're a bore with a phd looking for a permanent, & pensionable.
Only mechanical engineers are understood when they talk by their employers; So they get the management jobs.
Turning the boss' mad idea into a product is an unpredictable road. Look at the 737 Max.

Every degree sets out to cover a syllabus which was set before year 1 begins. It's Rarely updated Mid-year, and never in meaningful ways end of year.
My degree was in Electronics. The course and lecturers have their heads in the last millennium. They didn't teach me thermionic valves, but did teach much redundant crap. They all ran scared when I ran my project at 250Mhz, and had no facilities for building my board.
Lecturers get lazy, and are reluctant to go learning new tech. Most of them wouldn't get a real-world job, because they are out of date in Electronics anyhow.

I Avoid Flu shots annually. No, we don't take them. My mother-in-law had 2 bad reactions to them, and two other close relations have had serious side effects from flu shots. We're relatively healthy. There's every chance we will be exposed to every flu because of the circles we move in, but we'll survive if we get a flu. I'd rather chance getting the flu than annually expose myself to the vaccine . We never know the side effects of a flu vaccine. When I was younger with kids, we had a 3 in 1 vaccine for kids shoved at us energetically. We opted for a tried & trusted 2 in 1 for them, despite strenuous opposition from medical folks. I found out later we were in a small group (I have epilepsy) whose kids would suffer serious damage from the vaccine. That information wasn't available to dispensing staff. Many folks blame their children's autism on that 3 in 1 vaccine. I don't buy the 'few proteins' argument. Do you work for a drugs firm?

I'm charmed to read such vitriol against systemd. I thought people were losing it. My pet hates in Linux atm are: Systemd; Grub2; PulseAudio; RHEL NetworkManager (More properly named GuessworkManager); Bloatware Window Managers KDE & Gnome.

Yeah, Sysvinit is slow, Yeah, Systemd is a POS. Init has stood the test of time, is no slower than windows, and surely can be paralleled more than it is. Systemd has FAILED the test of time. Slackware also offers init and systemd - you don't need Devuan. I have yet to be convinced Devuan is not going to go the way of so many other forks for lack of developers.

+1 on these comments. It is a fact that people in IT have to get off their butts and work nights if necessary to learn stuff and stay relevant. It is a fact that the company should have reacted to a migration in OS used and trained current staff, or fired them and hired new.
I have a son who earned his degree with lectures in C, and C++ under Windows; He did a project using Chuck, another in some movie-centric media language, taught himself Mac OS, linux, Python, VB, HTML 4&5, a bit of Perl, Python, objective C, Swift, bash scripting, Swift, CSS, Android, etc. That's what they SHOULD have been doing. So let them get off their asses now and start learning pronto, or fire them. Red Hat do online courses; CCNA does online courses; OSX, Linux, and BSD all have forums and support for newbies doing stuff. Let them do Linux From Scratch. Give them an old pc or two, let them install distros, set up others in a vm, and get them in at the deep end. Let them patch a bug in some program they never heard of. They will love you for it, or quit.

On the wisdom of the Gates Purchase: Richard Feynman put it fairly well:
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy."
And Again:
"In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself."
But heck, it's ONLY $80 million. Not like he'll miss it. But it doesn't show much thought for those who really need a dig out. :

Another thing you could do is open or spruce up your github account. Backend code could be put there (as backend code) and whatever you do/want to advertise goes up also. Advertising yourself means doing the latest thing. Already I have my doubts about you because 1. You didn't think of this yourself. 2. You want to be on the cutting edge (what's coming in, and I bet the code you have could have been written in the last millenium). 3. "If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas." I gather you've got fleas; you've spent too long in that last job. You want a neat, commented, organised, succint code in an OSS project doing clever things. You need to improve continually, show variety and brains.

As an electronics guy, I can say that the 6502 was the most primitive 8 bit cpu, never clocked above 1 Mhz, was single threaded and was digital (i.e. 1 or 0 output). It never thought, but simply executed given instructions. "Processing" was (and is) converting these digital instructions through digital logic circuits into actions. A 6502 can never have an original thought. The brain processes multiple inputs, is analog (not 1 or 0 but level sensitive) and processes multiple threads, some consciously & more subconsciously. A brain uses chemicals and electricity, and outperforms all processors ever made. The funny thing is - the CPUs have intelligent designers, but evolutionists & atheists would have us believe the brain is the result of a series of accidental mutations.

I know there'll be flames, but I reject this message.

To get approval for a gmo, corporations like Monsanto have to submit 2 reports to the FDA saying the thing is better. Nobody cares if they (as is done) don't publish 5 or 10 unfavourable reports. That passes for "science." It's worth noting that approving GMOs as essentially the same as normal foods was done by an ex-Monsanto head of FDA against the advice of FDA Scientists. What do they know?
The soil degredation evident over 5 - 10 years with monoculture GMO crops is evidence that they're not the panacea they're cracked up to be. Instead of balanced natural soil diversity, repeated ploughing & spraying leaves the soil impoverished, the farmers with the expense of weedkillers, fungicides, pesticides, fertilisers and the food poisoned; the essential microbes & fungi in the soil are wiped out,. & worms greatly diminished. In some places, the workers on the breadline end up poisoned too, but have no choice but to continue.
Are they harmful to humans? Physically, I don't know, but I don't like where some genes inserted in foods are said to come from.
Economically, very often. All that Amazon rain forest cleared for GMO Soy & Corn has not brought wealth to the locals, but it degrades by the year.

Agree 100%. I ran a business for 17 years repairing Industrial Electronics. The real repair work on which I survived (on PCBs, instruments or factory machinery) required undivided attention, and then I could usually fix what had eluded many others. It also required a certain carelessness with regard to electric shock :-P.
Given that I had the latter, I cannot consider myself unusually brilliant, so I presume 100% concentration gave me the edge that kept things going for so long.
O & M guys in industry write that a phone call to you at your desk costs 20 mins of your time before you get back up to full concentration. Mind you, concentration, & patience are vanishing commodities in today's world.