Because the original Bourne Shell was limited in many ways as a scripting environment (vastly better than csh of course). That's why people kept doing different shells. Korn Shell was a big improvement over /bin/sh, even with just scripting. And if you want just play /bin/sh, do you want the earliest version or the later versions that started adding features? Do you want /bin/sh to be Bourne Shell or do you want it to be a POSIX compliant shell?

The reason bash succeeded wildly is because it a great job of unifying both the easy of use of csh with the scripting of sh, along with the more advanced features and scripting from ksh, and it was POSIX compliant. Even better, if you invoke it as /bin/sh (which most systems do) then you get a subset of bash functionality for POSIX and sh compatibiliy (especially with respect to startup), meaning you can have portable shell scripts which can work on other shells.

Also the original /bin/sh had some licensing issues for awhile. It was AT&T intellectual property. People wanted an alternative implmentation. You can't get the "real" Bourne sh on many systems anymore, and if you could it was last updated back in 1989 I think so it's out of date with many things and not fully POSIX compliant.

Personally I think that's kind of goofy, their reasoning at least. It's not dash because of security, but dash because they think bash is big and bulky. Which is not a great argument on a PC (a good argument for an embedded system, which Debian isn't targeting). OpenWRT makes sense because it's an embedded system, so a full featured bash is not appropriate compared to a stripped down and limited shell.

This mis-feature is suppressed in restricted shells (bash -r), which I suspect is a good workaround for systems that use subshells but which can't guarantee that bash is patched. Except for this description with a restricted environment, I see nothing in the man page that hints that this feature exists.

I think it's actually a side effect of having exported functions be implemented as exported environment variables. A weird feature that lets you do "export func='() { commands; };'". This means that anything can export functions to a bash subshell. It's just plain weird in my view, but I guess if the only way to communicate to a subshell is with the plain environment then that's the only way to export functions.

Actually it rhymes better with hash.

Though, for future reference, different countries use different words for the same thing. Even English speakers do not all use the same slang used in England. It's called the pound key because for much longer than a century the "#" was used as abbreviation for pound (avoirdupois, not sterling) in ledgers and signs in groceries. You must be new to computers I suspect to not realize the hundreds of names assigned to '#'.

I used to think Adventure Shell was safe, until I met a grue in the dark.

Same as moving workers from Redmond to Detroit.

The competition isn't on the up and up though. Skilled workers are being pushed aside in preference to cheap workers with less skills. Then the work doesn't get done or doesn't get done well, and even more cheap workers are hired to make up for it. Competing does not mean being the cheapest.

It possibly comes around to need for short term quarterly profits, rather than long term profits. Thus hire the cheap people now, make it look like you're cutting costs, but remain rather mediocre with few technological advances (or get a huge fan base so that trivial tweaks cause them to buy new products on demand). You see this in technology, the new breakthrough products, small companies that get noticed for innovation, start off with local highly talented workers, then later when it's time to grow the company and it's publicly traded you get lots of cheaper workers to milk it for you.

The difference I think is that Microsoft has the gall to time this badly, just after massive layoffs, plus the gall to defend this publicly instead of quietly bribe the senators behind closed doors.

What is "seniorship"?

I was also discouraged that I had to debase myself and visit Facebook to see the video.

They can get 10, 20, or 50% cheaper jobs within the US too, just put the jobs in a cheaper area of the country. No different that picking an inexpensive area of Canada for the jobs instead of picking Vancouver.

Not quite right. Giving $100 to charity does not reduce your taxes by $100, instead it reduces your taxable income by $100. You do not "write off" that $100.

I agree, that was a bad video hitting all the corporate dogmas. It makes an unwarranted assumption behind the scenes that only H1-B workers have computer or technological skills. And that's the lie being told, that no domestic worker with the skills can be found, despite these jobs often needing only basic IT drone skills.

As for Microsoft, it should be made to prove under penalty of perjury that for any H1-B worker they want to get that they did not lay off a worker that had those skills.

What about neighbor's houses? Shoot them up, they're ugly and block your view of all the flat stuff that's on the other side.

Isn't the yuppie crowd a niche also?