You know what's really weird? The guy's reasons for representing himself:
1) He has no money because he hasn't worked since 2014, and
2) His attorney had a stroke, and he can't afford another one

Okay, yeah, maybe finding new work might be a little difficult if you were just fired from Apple after working there for 8 years for unprofessional conduct, but..... four years of unemployment? Come on. If you're an engineer who's good at what they do, and you live in Northern California as he does, surely you should be able to get a new job.

This isn't a "cross-platform development" issue, this is an "older operating systems are missing features that will help us make better software" issue.

In Adobe's case, OS X El Capitan is the first version to support Metal -- this API is much more efficient on systems with multiple CPU cores. Windows 10 is the first version to support DirectX 12, which opens op the capability of using multiple discrete GPUs for rendering tasks on Windows. There is no "cross-platform" or "backwards-compatible" way of doing these kinds of things -- all applications, including your mythical compatibility layer, will depend on the low-level graphics capabilities of the operating systems they use. It's completely unreasonable to expect Adobe to reimplement core OS features just to appease some technological refuseniks who prefer decade-old operating systems for aesthetic or emotional reasons.

And look, I get it, people don't like Windows 10 because they've bought into the hype that it's a "spying operating system". Yes, it sends a list of your installed apps to Microsoft, but they do that so you won't receive Windows Updates with known compatibility issues. And yes, it's measuring how long certain operations take, like opening the Settings app, but they do that so that Microsoft can prioritize performance improvements.

As for Apple, yes, macOS High Sierra has been the worst Mac OS release in over a decade, and macOS Mojave is shortening the leash on supported hardware range for Macs to 6-7 years, and it's removing features that people actually use like Back To My Mac... it's really super-frustrating.

But here's the thing: both operating systems also continue to add very useful programming APIs for developers so that they can continue to improve their software. The next update to Windows 10 is finally adding native Unix-style ptys, for instance, and the console natively supports xterm-256color. Mojave, for its part, is finally implementing the OpenType-SVG font standard, i.e. fonts with colour. Maybe these don't interest you, but there's literally thousands of low-level improvements like these over the last several years, many of which would make your computing life nicer.

But if you don't know about those things, and make personal computing choices based solely on press negativity, you'll never get to learn about, much less enjoy the upsides.

Why are you still using CMD in 2018? Why should anyone pay $100 per computer for the closed-source, proprietary Take Command when they could learn Powershell instead? Powershell has full Intellisense nowadays, access to the full .NET Framework library, comprehensive built-in documentation, and thousands of commands that can reach into every part of the system. Plus Powershell is an open-source Github project nowadays. Pair it with the open-source ConEmu for a wicked-good, fully configurable console environment.

Your wish has been granted.... like.... nine years ago. Where've you been, dude and/or dudette? As a random example: Microsoft added Managed Service Accounts in 2008 R2, and you can see a "Managed Service Accounts" folder in AD Users and Computers, but you cannot create or edit them there. You -must- do it through Powershell using New-ADServiceAccount. Here's a blog post from 2009 on the subject.

Pretty much the only parts of Windows you can't configure through the command prompt, are some of the GUI elements. For example, there is no way to change what is pinned to the taskbar, nor can you programmatically set whether a tray icon will always be visible or not. Folks at Microsoft have said that this limitation is intended to protect the user from app installers that inject themselves all over the place. Setting crucial visual things like display resolution is also disallowed (except on Server Core, where there is no GUI to do this).

Have you even been to West Virginia? High-speed internet service is a major technical challenge there because of the geography. It's really mountainous and sparsely-populated. You can barely even get 3G service outside the cities unless you're near an Interstate or state highway. Good places to put towers that effectively cover a large area few and far between.

On top of that, there is a complete lack of cell service, Wi-fi or even microwaves on the central-eastern side of the state because of the Green Bank Observatory. (If you don't know about this, read up on it because it's actually really interesting.)

WHOAH, whoah, hold up a second there dude.... all I have a solid memory of is a Beowulf cluster of hot grits, served up by a petrified Natalie Portman!

Theft and idiocy are not things that can be fixed with software updates.

No, no, no. It's a technical limitation of emulation, not some kind of insidious plan to block out competition.

Windows 10 on ARM supports shell extensions just fine -- the vendors have to recompile their applications is all. Nothing Mac OS developers didn't go through during the PPC -> Intel transition twelve years ago.

Literally anyone who's written shell extensions for Windows Explorer before will already understand the problem: shell extensions are loaded into the same process as Windows Explorer itself. Loading x86 code into a process that's running native ARM code just isn't going to work.... lots of issues that are pretty much impossible to work around, like calling conventions, endianness, memory layout, ASLR implementation.... all sorts of fun things. How would you even get an x86 emulator to pick and choose when to kick in? Based on memory ranges of loaded DLLs? No way -- you don't want that kind of voodoo horseshit going on in your apps, especially Windows Explorer, whose extensibility model is already pretty rickety as it is.

Whoah, whoah, whoah, now wait a sec here. We're talking about a program invented by Linus Torvalds, the creator of a kernel that routinely sits under userlands where a synonym of "feline" prints the contents of files, where a household cleaner (vim) is a text editor, where "more" and "less" do the same thing despite being literal opposites, and where sometimes, but not always, parameter names are case-sensitive (rm -r == rm -R but rm -i != rm -I).

So of course git is hard to learn. Just like Linux itself, it makes you fucking work for it.... but then it pays you back a thousand times over. I'm not going to try to convince you that git is the best source control solution out there, but boy oh boy can you ever do a lot with it once you understand its mental model.

Not long.

caniuse.com says that 67% of browsers currently in use in North America support WebAssembly. The 33% breaks down like this: 10% iOS 9/10, 6% IE, 4% Edge, 3% Samsung browsers, and 10% for every other rickety thing out there.

Give iOS 10 -> 11, Safari 10 -> 11, and Edge 15 -> 16 upgrades another 3 months to roll through (these are all safe and good-quality updates), then WebAssembly availability will be over 80%. That's good enough to take a dependency on. Millions of people keep on using IE, Android Browser and Opera Mini, which aren't getting any updates at all, and nearly 100% of those people have access to another device or browser which does support WebAssembly.

I know a lot of people have already checked out because they didn't like being sold a bill of goods. I totally understand those people. But for the rest of us who just want good games to play and don't care about the release-time controversy, it's looks like there's a better future coming. Hello Games has now added three major elements that were never announced or even hinted at prior to the original release: Land vehicles, base building, and now terraforming. Were these planned all along? Maybe, maybe not, but it's clear that more content and features will continue to be released.

For all we know, NMS will become a continually-evolving game like Eve Online, Elite: Dangerous, or even Starbound.

I've been reading Slashdot since late 1998. By March 2000 the signal:noise ratio in the comments was getting pretty intolerable, so I created an account and set my minimum reading level to 3. 17+ years later, that filter keeps on serving its purpose, dutifully hiding comments from people calling me a "millennial" because I had the audacity to stand up for enjoying what I've been paid to do for the last 30 years.

Never change, Slashdot.

The work that software developers do is extremely mentally challenging. We're often under pressure to not only create a product that is good enough to be profitable (or at least helpful), but also to not make extremely subtle mistakes that results in security vulnerabilities, information exposure, or denial of service.

That's why we like putting little jokes in our software. It helps us cope with the pressure. It's why song lyrics, movie quotes and ASCII art find their way into code comments. It's why JIRA's about page is presented as an 8-bit video game. It's why we have an RFC describing an "evil bit". It's why error pages for popular source code repository have anthropomorphic robots. Hell, even MS Excel had a freakin' flight simulator built into it at one point!

The world is bad enough as it is without the misery-mongers demanding we excise all forms of fun from our line of work. Leave us alone. Let us have our fun. We know what we're doing.

Some obvious reasons off the top of my head:

1. - Visual Studio and TFS already have full CLI, GUI, and web-based support for Git. No such tooling exists for Mercurial.
2. - Microsoft has contributed to libgit2 for years.
3. - Mercurial is written in Python -- it's a small thing, but it's one more thing for a dev to maintain on their system.
4. - Git is easier to hire for.

You can also make the argument that Git was designed from the beginning to be suitable for developing an operating system. Or, put more bluntly, it was designed to be used by programmers who are smart enough to work on an operating system, Yes, the Mercurial CLI is generally easier to come to grips with, but that isn't a compelling enough reason on its own.

Keep in mind also that the overall direction of Mercurial is increasingly being driven by the needs of Facebook's dev teams. Which is great to see, in the sense that they're returning their enhancements to the community..... but by and large they're building web properties, not operating systems, so the priorities may be different.