Posts by RLWatkins

Windows Terminal 1910 preview is quite literally a more rounded affair

It is an exciting time to be alive.

It is difficult to believe that (a) anyone is excited over yet another version of the Windows command-lline shell, that (b) Microsoft is again making and again correcting mistakes it has made dozens of times previously in its design of dirt-level basic UI widgets, and that (c) Ms actually got some mileage out of exclaiming, "Look at all of our shells! Look how many of them there are!"

(Kind of reminds me of: It's a big book! All the words! All the pages! [sigh])

This is reminiscent of a post I saw recently on Reddit, of people going over the top, gushing and waxing eloquent, because Apple finally got around to telling the company which manufactures its wireless earphones to make the casings from plastic which was some color other than white.

Is this news? Really? Or, as I often ask, are we awash in triviality because Hell full and the dead are now walking the Earth?

Think your VMware snapshots are all good? Guess again if you're on Windows Server 2019

Remember DR DOS? Word Perfect...?

I recall asking on this very forum, a couple of years back: Why would anyone migrate a working VM to Hyper-V?

In keeping with a long history of motivating migration to their own products by creating pain for customers of other vendors through subtle - or sometimes blatant - forms of sabotage, it looks as if Microsoft have devised a reason for people to migrate their VMs to Hyper-V.

It astonishes me that people tolerate this kind of thing, and have done for decades.

Dodging derailment by SUSE, OpenStack Train is scheduled to arrive this week

Suse isn't trying to "de-rail" Open Stack...

... it's just that their customers don't use it very much, so they're spending their time elsewhere.

There's nothing sinister about that. It's called Looking After Your Own Customers. It's why I like the company.

Microsoft says .NET Framework porting project is finished: If your API's not on the list, it's not getting in

It was the EU who compelled Ms to make Ms.Net an open standard....

... after Ms' forcible "de-supporting" of VB6 rendered some tens of billions of dollars of investment in software written in VB6 pretty much worthless.

(By "forcible" I mean that for a couple of years they omitted a library from their new OS releases which allowed VB6 programs to run on newer boxes, although they caved after people began copying that part, 'MSVCRT40' I think it was, to their newly purchased equipment.)

That measure was intended to compel everyone to buy a new set of programming tools.

Hopefully this is not a repeat performance. Then again, knowing Ms perhaps it foreshadows something similar.

When one of NASA's sun-studying satellites went down, AI was there to fill in the gaps

[sigh]

EUV emitted by solar flares aren't dangerous to us. It's the solar flares which are dangerous. Looking at light in the EUV region is how we *detect* the flares.

Serverless neither magically faster nor cheaper, dev laments

Re: Duh

It's all serverless.

Remember the invention of the client / server model of distributed computing?

Up to then services, i.e. non-application-specific stuff like file storage, printing, database and telephony, all ran on the same computer as application software. The term "server" was coined to describe a separate computer which ran no application code, but only services.

So if your application is running on the computer, it is, by definition, not a server.

Oh, also, it's still turtles all the way down.

Tesco parking app hauled offline after exposing 10s of millions of Automatic Number Plate Recognition images

Still investigating...?

What's to investigate? They didn't secure a DB hosted on a service bureau. They need to do that. End of story.

We need two new words in our vocabulary: for handwaving-in-order-to-stall-for-time, and for stalling-for-time-in-hopes-that-everyone-will-forget.

Granted, folks have been doing this since the dawn of recorded history, but lately it's become something one encounters daily. [sigh]

Care for a Flutter? Google emits fresh version of all-things-app-platform, plus a tart-up for Dart

"It's a first, a ground-breaking achievement!" Er, no, it isn't.

What about "the Xamarin-like thing of allowing developers to fling a single codebase at multiple platforms"? We've been doing that for years. It's called Java, or it's called Mono. (What Xamarin did was to port Mono to Android.)

And yes, Microsoft is now touting their "multi-platform Dot Net Core!" While Microsoft claims, as is their wont, that they got there first, we've also been doing *that* for years: one could use Mono to run ASP.Net apps on Linux five or ten years ago.

I *like* the new Google stuff, but the idea isn't new, nor is the capability new. Let's see whether it represents an improvement, and let's see whether they support it.

Geo-boffins drill into dino-killing asteroid crater, discover extinction involves bad smells, chilly weather, no broadband internet...

Correct me if I'm wrong here....

But didn't it take the dinosaurs something like another half-million years to die out after the Chicxulub event?

On, and the crater isn't in the Yucutan peninsula, it's in the ocean. Yucutan borders it, and indeed was a lot larger before all this happened.

Four-year probe finds Foxconn's Apple 11 factory 'routinely' flouts Chinese labour laws

I'll try this again....

That headline should read: 'Four-year probe confirms the common knowledge that Foxconn's Apple factories routinely flout Chinese "labour laws"'.

There. That's better. It's best to proofread carefully.

... Oh, and one more correction:

"We have contacted Apple and will update this story if it responds," should read "We have contacted Apple and will update this story if they respond."

Apple Computer Corp is not some alien, faceless non-human sentient entity, it is a group of people. People are responsible for this. People.

Handcranked HTML and JPEG japes. What could possibly go wrong?

We need more Fionas.

A realistic viewpoint, a realistic assessment of one's colleagues, and a realistic attitude toward the drooling horde of Chinless Crustaceans who strut and preen as they plague the upper ranks at least of American Big Business is to be treasured, indeed cherished.

Re: Hand coded HTML

I still do, occasionally.

You've heard the old saw: 30% of all Internet traffic is Netflix and You Tube videos, 30% is advertising, 30% is JQuery, Angular, et al., and 10% is actual content.

When I want to completely avoid one of those 30%s, I code by hand. They come out nice, small, and fast.

For in-house stuff, nobody cares about bandwidth and they're inured to poor response times. They can settle for WYSIWYG.

Clutching at its Perl 6, developer community ponders language name with less baggage

Re: Why exactly is Perl any worse than Python?

On Slash Dot I was downvoted into oblivion for making the remark, "The best programming language is the one your present client is paying you to use."

In 45 years in the business I've had to use an equal number of distinct languages. Each client had a compelling reason for their choice, within the framework of their own priorities.

So: the best programming language is the one which at present feeds your family. Period.

Re: doesn't matter who hates it...

I'm upvoting for part of the comment, but the remark about use cases? No.

PERL was designed for one use case: turning logfiles into legible reports. Everything else was added to it because people who knew it for that purpose kept trying to use it for other things, rather than learning more appropriate languages.

(How do I know? I'd already been coding nearly twenty years when PERL was created.)

Capital One 'hacker' hit with fresh charges: She burgled 30 other AWS-hosted orgs, Feds claim

Not engineer, but "engineer".

Good that you put "hacker" in quotes, as calling computer criminals hackers is a lot like calling car thieves "automotive engineers".

However, she is not an "ex-Google engineer", but an "ex-Google 'engineer'". There are things that one must know to be an engineer, and most programmers are too lazy to learn them... yet they love being called engineers. Time for them to put up or to shut up.

Don't panic! Don't panic! UK IT job ads plummet as Brexit uncertainty grabs UK tech sector by the short and curlies

Why Brexit to begin with?

Given all the problems it's causing, why is Britain even still considering this?

Why not have another referendum, since it was discovered that so much Russian money was behind the PR preceding the first one?

Why are the British letting ASBO Bo dine out on this one, instead of just dropping the idea? (If you did, maybe he'd go away....)

Come to think of it, given that we have Trumplestilskin and you have ASBO Bo, has something gone seriously wrong with the governance of what used to be civilized, English-speaking countries?

This is all profoundly perplexing.

J'accuse! Amazon's Rekognition reckons 1 in 5 Californian lawmakers are crims in ACLU test

Re: 50 / 50 false positives

Hey, I looked at a sample of the output from a Chinese AI, neural, trained to recognize "criminal types". What it actually did was to separate photos of Mark I Rev 0 ethnic Chinese from those of people who looked like foreigners or Chinese non-majority ethnic groups. Classic GIGO.

Bzzzzzt! Wrong. They are all unarmed, or armed and friendly, until determined to be otherwise.

If one can justify shooting someone by saying, "I thought he was dangerous, so I'm justified in killing him," with no more evidence than an unsubstantiated belief that someone is armed, then that standard should apply to *all citizens*. Everyone. Without exception.

I.e. if I walk past you on the street I should be able to shoot you, then and there, because of my otherwise unfounded assumption that you are armed, and therefore a danger to me.

Symmetry: It's an important principle of ethics.

Re: 1 in 5 lawmakers ...

Yeah. An 80% false-negative rate isn't promising.

"invading the police officers' privacy"? Wait... what?

No employee of any organization has a right to privacy from the organization's owners while on the clock, drawing pay, discharging their responsibilities as an employee.

That includes police officers, or any other public official, while performing their on-the-job responsibilities. The public employ them, and have the right to know what they're up to.

Once they clock out they can enjoy privacy.

Looming US immigration crackdown aims to weed out pre-crime of poverty. And that may be bad news for techie families

I'm a US taxpayer...

... to whom the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost roughly $100,000, to whom banking and insurance bailouts, and "quantitative easing" each has cost similar amounts. Works out to tens of thousands of dollars per year. Money given to big companies like GE and Exxon adds up to another few thousand. Add to that my share of government debt due to a series of tax-cuts for rich people and other large companies, also a similar amount.

On the other hand, feeding and housing poor people every year costs me a few hundred dollars, the National Endowment for the Arts costs ten or fifteen.

Someone needs to buy a truckload of corrective hats and start handing them out in Washington DC.

Hey dudes, we need to start living together in Harmony: Huawei puffs up new distributed OS

Bafflegab

It's odd how much of what Huawei is saying here is a series of non-sequiturs, e.g. that micro kernel OSs support "write once run anywhere" or that they are inherently more secure than others. These are orthogonal attributes, i.e. the one has nothing to do with the other.

Moreover, it's odd how Google's one response reported in the article is also nonsense.

Looks like we've wandered into Rod Serling's "middle ground between science and superstition". Why not? Hell is getting crowded.

'Cockwomble' is off the menu: Uncle Bulgaria issues edict against using name in vain

Poor choice of sample Hopkinsisms

Much though I loathe Hopkins as a thoroughgoing nitwit and although I consider 95% of what she says to be utter nonsense, 3-1/2 of the seven sample Hopkinsisms you published actually make perfect sense. Please don't whitewash this sorry waste of oxygen.

Facebook chucks 1.5 hours' profit at Citizens Advice anti-scam charity to defuse consumer champ's defamation suit

There is a typo in the first graf of this story.

"The fake-Facebook-ad-spotting service" should read "The fake Facebook-ad-spotting service".

HTH.

In Rust we trust: Brave smashes speed limit after rewriting ad-block engine in super-lang

That's a couple of pretty misleading lead paragraphs there.

They did not achieve a 69X increase in performance because they re-wrote it in Rust. Indeed, for a given algorithm Rust is no faster than C++.

They achieved a 69X increase in performance because they replaced a lousy algorithm with a good one. Rust had nothing to do with that.

SQL databases? No, because there are faster ways to find keys in large lists than by using SQL.

Oh, and SQL is nothing more than a command language for a database. The performance of the underlying databases themselves vary widely.

Perhaps they should be introduced to hash tables.

Still sniggering at that $999 monitor stand? Apple just got serious about the enterprise

No, not really, they didn't.

Apple has been producing gear used by professional graphics and video people for a long time. So has everyone else. I think they beat Microsoft to the punch on things like color profiles for monitors, but there just isn't a lot of difference between one Intel desktop computer with a 6K monitor and any other.

Moreover, people who do that kind of work for a living day in and day out (I know several) don't bother much with monitors which swivel from portrait to landscape, but instead just have multiple monitors: one for HQ video or imagery, another to control the software, a third for bits and pieces being edited in.

Not real sure what's going on here, but it seems the usual sort of Jobsian smoke and lasers, the modern version of smoke and mirrors.

But I gotta say, while I wouldn't buy one from Apple I've seen 6K monitors and they're quite nice....

Nginx nJS will need patches, hotels exposed via security systems, Docker containers dinged, and more

"Nginx nJS" needs a patch.

Really? Nginx nJS needs patching? I know just the person to help out, good old Shrdlu etaioN. He's a colleague of the widely-respected Montuewed Thufrisat. Everyone knows Shrdlu, been in the business for ages.

I realize that this is nothing more than an outburst of sarcasm, but I have watched my beloved profession, which used to use real words and plain language, descend into the tar-pit of novelty-naming. "No! They have an edgier name than we do! Make something up that's all consonants. Yeah, that's the ticket."

[sigh]

Tangled in .NET: Will 5.0 really unify Microsoft's development stack?

What does Mono have to do with any of this?

Mono is not a Microsoft product. Microsoft would like to take control over it, have been trying to for a decade and a half now, but it's open-source. No one owns it.

Try to stay with me here....

Microsoft "de-supported" Visual Basic 6, and stopped (for a while) even distributing the parts which would allow software written in VB6 to run on their newer OS releases. Microsoft's plan was to "encourage adoption" of the new VB.Net language and its twin, C#.

The EU raised hell, because in one fell swoop Microsoft had rendered worthless many tens billions of dollars of investment in software written in VB6. By "raised hell" I mean that they refused to use the new Microsoft products unless Microsoft registered their designs as open standards.

Microsoft did exactly that, registering the design of the CLR and the libraries with the ECMA.

Novell reacted by hiring a team of programmers to make an open-source version of the CLR, libraries and compiler, known as the Mono project. (The principal programmer explained the name Mono: "'Mono' is Spanish for 'monkey'. I like monkeys.")

Microsoft began desperately trying to put that genie back into the bottle, at one point even trying to buy Novell. In the mean time, Mono was ported to... well, to just about everything. It runs on about as many platforms as does Python.

Xamarin released a set of programming tools for writing C# code, to run on Android, using the Mono CLR. Microsoft then bought Xamarin and declared victory: "We now own Mono." And now, "We can converge our forks of .Net and Mono into a single product line."

Er, no. Someone went off their meds. Mono is still Mono, doesn't belong to Microsoft, isn't under Microsoft's control except in their demented dreams.

And that's a damn' good thing, as I've used Mono to run C# programs on Linux for something like ten years. I want it to keep working properly.

How do I know all this? I was using both systems, including the Android version, while all this was unfolding.

In the claws of a vulture: Nebra AnyBeam Laser Projector

Mom...! Mom, 2009 is on the phone!

We're talking about tiny video projectors, are we? Small ones, that one can hold in one hand? That accept digital video input, or video via USB?

You know, I have one of those. It's quite handy, works pretty damn' well. Uses LEDs to form an image. Bright, crispy. I bought it TEN YEARS AGO.

[sigh]

US government internet and spectrum overseer resigns, along with legislative director

language

1) Mr. Ross got it backward: their service was first to American citizens, then to the department, and last of all to the president. The secretary, and a lot of other government officials, forget who it is who employ them.

2) Stop, for god's sake, using "spark" as a verb. We have plenty of words: cause, elicit, invoke. It's just lazy. Trendy, yes, but lazy.

Liz Warren: I'll smash up Amazon, Google, and Facebook – if you elect me to the White House

Big media companies should come first...

... because any effort to break up other monopolies will fail as long as media monopolies control the information which reaches voters.

IBM so very, very sorry after jobs page casually asks hopefuls: Are you white, black... or yellow?

Re: sorry or not

Gee whiz, I think that may be the least of their problems.

Mind you, I've never met a yellow person, but I'm in the Southern US and I've never met anyone who was black or white either. Most of us are some shade of pink or brown. So why is it acceptable to describe some people as being black or white, while yellow is not?

(It amazes me that people here who can't seem to get along will describe themselves as polar opposites and then wonder out loud why the problem persists.)

And why is that information required on a job application to begin with? Granted, in the US one must report the numbers of employees on staff by ethnic group to the EEOC, but there are no actual quotas to fill so why make it a factor in making a hiring decision?

This may be a Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious, but it looks like there are more problems here than just referring to Asians as "yellow".

Sure, you can keep Grandpa Windows 7 snug in the old code home – for a price

Re: Happily

Linux running KDE isn't bad. I took a KDE netbook and a big screen on vacation a few years back. Mom, 80, who had Win7 at the time, sat down in front of the screen and just started doing what she needed to do. Not much of a learning curve there.

The chips are down: Now Microsoft blames Intel CPU supply shortages for dips in Windows, Office sales

Windows and Office sales down because... they're unreliable.

Microsoft are so accustomed to people buying their products even though they're either (a) unreliable, or (b) finally reliable, but de-supported so the company can compel people to pay them again for the *new* one... which is unreliable. It astonishes them that their customers resent that, and that the fraction who are not quite firmly locked in are seeking alternatives. Sounds like a particularly clueless brand of hubris, but it was 35 years in the making.

Red Hat gets heebie-jeebies over MongoDB's T&Cs squeeze: NoSQL database dropped from RHEL 8B over license

Really, Bruce?

Well, sure, an open-source license which compels making the underlying infrastructure open-source as well is pretty silly, perhaps even stupid, but it's still open-source.

But Perens is entitled to his opinion: It isn't something I'd do, so "... don't call it Open Source." I guess that settles, it, huh?

Oracle exec: Open-source vendors locking down licences proves 'they were never really open'

Java, anyone?

As I recall, Sun placed Java in the public domain before Oracle bought the company, yet Oracle has been trying to stuff that genie back into the lamp ever since, to the point of telling users during this last Java update to be prepared in the future to pay Oracle for its use, so Oracle's people are in no position to criticize anyone.

Man drives 6,000 miles to prove Uncle Sam's cellphone coverage maps are wrong – and, boy, did he manage it

This was a good series of tests

This was a good series of tests, despite not covering the entire state in the manner specified by the FCC, because all cell relay towers are near roads. Running additional tests from somewhere in the middle of a farm or a forest, where there were no roads, would actually have yielded worse results.

While Windows 7 wobbled, AI continued its relentless march at Microsoft

Embrace, extend, extinguish

"Yes, we still have problems getting our heads around Microsoft’s born-again evangelising of Linux, too."

Really? You haven't been a serious Microsoft customer for very long, have you? Recall the Microsoft anti-trust trial, where the company's stratagem of adopting widely accepted standards, then gradually introducing non-compliant features, was described as "Embrace, extend, extinguish."

Then, recall the company's embrace of ANSI standards for SQL and C++, then their slow drift away from those standards so that users of Microsoft's products found that later migrating their work to compliant, competing platforms had become quite costly. The other term for that is "lured into a lock-in".

They've been doing this for years. They're not even reticent about it. And why should they stop? It isn't unlawful, and people keep buying into the scam.

Steamer closets, flying cars, robot boxers, smart-mock-cock ban hypocrisy – yes, it's the worst of CES this year

That depends on what a squid looks like when it's excited, doesn't it?

And I'm afraid to ask how you do know how one looks.... [grin]

Two out of five Silicon Valley techies complain Trump's H-1B crackdown has hit 'em hard

Wait... what? It's employers who don't like it, employees on the whole are pleased.

This is a pretty small sample size, and I'm kind of puzzled whence it came.

Being on the front lines of this business, both as a contract and a salaried programmer for 40 years, and being in management for 5 years (I hated it and returned to the trenches of my own volition), taught me something very important:

Any government policy which helps depress the salaries of highly skilled professional employees will be unpopular with production employees, who work their asses off to maintain proficiency, and popular with managers who work their asses off to secure funding from executives.

So something tells me that this sample was derived almost entirely from a pool of managers and foreign workers, perhaps with an executive or two thrown in as ringers.

In this case Trumplestilskin, like the proverbial stopped clock, got it right for once. A policy which puts a bit more money into the pockets of citizens at the expense of mostly giant companies which don't pay taxes, or buy cars, houses or groceries, is Good For America.

Oh, and the survey was worded in proper English. "Impact" is not a verb; the proper term is "affect".

Your two-minute infosec roundup: Drone arrests, Alexa bot hack, Windows zero-day, and more

"Internet" of "things"

And while I'm thinking with my mouth open, or rather with my hands on the keyboard, there is no "Internet of things".

An internetwork connects other networks. Your things, if you have any of those, are connected to *your* network.

It seems almost as if the companies which wish to collect the data which your things record have promulgated that terminology specifically so that people would think, quite without really thinking about it, that it's OK, or even desirable, to connect your network of things to their network using the Internet.

It almost sounds like a conspiracy theory, only to be a conspiracy it would have to be secret. Said companies are quite open about wanting access to video of your front porch, the things you say at home, details of your finances, a map of your house. They don't make any secret of it.

There's an amazing level of gall and stupidity at work there. Just amazing.

"No Russian vote hack."

Of course not. No "hackers", foreign or otherwise, seem to be tampering with US elections. Russia still provides us with myriad examples of what not to do, but we can't blame them for that. It's our own political parties doing it, one mainly although the other doesn't get off the hook entirely.

I recall some thirteen or fourteen years ago when a memo was leaked from a voting machine company which shall remain nameless. It described in some detail the measures by which said company would "deliver the presidential election to the {insert name of criminal enterprise here} party". And did they deny it? No. They sued the journalist who published it, citing US trade secrets law, claiming he "revealed confidential company information".

No, I am not joking.

Agencies outside the US are indeed interfering with our elections, using our now freer-than-ever media to disseminate propaganda, but all the actual, direct election-tampering appears wholly to be Made In the USA.

We rig our elections better than those damn' foreigners ever could. 'Murica!

Serverless is awesome (if you overlook inflated costs, dislike distributed computing, love vendor lock-in), say boffins

No, it really is "serverless".

Yes, really. At least according to terminology which has been in use for sixty years.

Remember when those guys invented the "client/server" model of distributed computing? Computers called servers ran services, to wit non-application-specific functionality such as file storage or printing.

The computers which ran both application and service code were at the time called "hosts". They still are, since about 1960, except at companies which are dominated by marketroids. (We all know who.)

So yeah, most of the computers in those datacenters are hosts, not servers, and yes, if it's running my application code it is indeed "serverless". See? They got it right by accident. Stopped clock, etc....

Astroboffins spy a rare exoplanet evaporating before their eyes

Re: This should be an object lesson

And vaporwave, while we're at it. Can't abide the genre.

It's all a matter of time: Super-chill atomic clock could sniff gravitational waves, dark matter

Re: Neat

About that third Google hit, you should spend some time on USENET. Take a gander at 'sci.physics' or 'sci.physics.relativity'.

I don't read either group lately, got tired of all the you're-stupid-and-everything-you-know-is-wrong posts, but some of them are justified: the crowd of relativity-deniers who gather there beggars belief.

What makes that all the more sad is the relative technical sophistication required even to use USENET. These are fairly intelligent people, bandying around some absolutely crackpot notions. [sigh]

Super Micro chief bean counter: Bloomberg's 'unwarranted hardware hacking article' has slowed our server sales

I'm puzzled about all the controversy here.

This is the kind of thing which, if the Chinese government had thought of it, they would have done. And they have more than an adequate number of qualified people to have come up with the idea.

Moreover, the simpler integrated circuits are quite tiny. It's possible to embed the things into circuit boards where only a fine-tooth X-ray could find them. We know how. So do they.

Finally like most states, they have the attitude of "Whatever happens to you is OK, because you aren't us." And unlike all but a few other states, they discuss the stratagem openly.

Our own (EEC, US) people have been warning us about this for twenty years. Really, if I were in the upper echelons of the Guo Yi, it's what I'd have done. Why not? Why the skepticism?

We, all of us, are a bunch of large-animal, mammalian, top-predator, omnivores. We live in a big world. And the only people in it who don't want to defeat us are the ones who haven't noticed us yet.

It's been going on all along. Get used to it.

5.. 4.. 3.. 2.. 1... Runty-birds are go: 12,000+ internet-beaming mini-satellites OK'd by USA

Sorry, I was picking my mandible up off the floor...

... which delayed posting of this comment.

Anyone remember that Iridium sat banging into that out-of-commission Russian recon bird? That's where many, maybe most, of those 10cm pieces of junk came from, by the way.

Anyone know any statistics? Anyone care to calculate the disjunctive probability of non-mutually-exclusive events, in this case collisions, when the sample size increases by a factor of six?

Anyone recall that our (US) FCC has already lost its tiny little collective mind? Or whether were they ever competent to manage a "space debris policy" to begin with?

Yep, folks, once again it appears that Hell is full and the dead are walking the Earth. So, hey, what's new?

Microsoft reveals xlang: Cross-language, cross-compiler and coming to a platform near you

"Oh, sure, we've got one of those...."

The above is the MMM: the Microsoft Marketing Mantra.

Normally Ms do it an a (sometimes successful) attempt to claw bits of market share back from small startups: "Oh, sure, we've got one of those. It ships with Windows." Done with media hubs, graphics editors, object-based databases, the list goes on and on. And occasionally, after ten years or so, they manage to make the puff of smoke into a real product.

More often they just blather along in that vein until something else captures people's attention.

But in this case they aren't going up against some small startup, they're trying to jump on a bandwagon that left them behind decades ago. 'JohnFen' is right: We have GCC. We have multi-platform BC-based languages like Python and Java. Hell, we have Mono, which runs C# on nearly anything. (I clearly recall Ms' efforts to stuff that genie back into its lamp.)

Had 'em for ages. Going to stick with 'em because Ms will likely lose interest before they have anything useful to sell us.

Let's say it all together: IT'S BEEN DONE.