Why do you need major performance increases for old looking games that are already maxing out your monitor's refresh rate? Next you're gonna say programmable shaders are overkill.
And what makes you think 1) company culture is no longer a thing and 2) that microsoft won't swing back towards being openly hostile or worse, 'secretly hostile' towards open source software when someone else is at the healm?
I hope time will prove me wrong, but this acquisition is literally the 'embrace' phase of E3. Next comes the 'extend'.
Why would they acquire github just to turn on it and run it into the ground? You can do that if your users are locked-in or maybe you have a competing service but neither are the case here; there are numerous alternatives and it's pretty easy to switch, as we are already seeing. If they have anything but good intentions this would be just a giant waste of time/money.
They did it with Skype. They don't have good but rather business minded intentions or how to make money from a product. This can change the product for the worse or at least for another audience (business users).
The mobile hardware division of Nokia had been heading this way for a long time - I have no idea why they went through with that. Is it fair to say all Microsoft's attempts at hardware (except XBOX) have failed?
The other example would be the Kin phone. A feature complete working phone that Microsoft decided needed to be rewritten from scratch to use the Windows Mobile / Phone stack
It took 18 months and nearly $1B to rewrite only to find the market had moved on. Canned and written off
I can imagine a situation where Microsoft thinks that GitHub would benefit from being re-implemented using Microsoft tech. Rewriting in APS.net, using Microsoft Login, integration with Office 365. The whole enchilada :)
It would take years, cost billions and, at best, deliver exactly the same experience as GitHub today
Worse case would be that GitHub stagnates during the rewrite as the alternatives spend their time and money developing new features
Microsoft has shown themselves to be very pro-open-source in the last 5+ years. Just look at things like VS Code. Microsoft is just the Nickelback of software, its cool to hate on them for no real reason (any more).
Do you believe that on Mr Ballmer's last day he put the company culture into a box along with some desk plants and framed photos and walked out of the building with it?
Why must they be communicated? Surely it is the rest of civilization that decides which ideas it is ready for, and which it isn't. Go ahead and write a song like "Imagine", or give a speech like "I Have a Dream", and you'll see how well the rest of civilization responds. Civilization isn't pretty; communicating ideas the people aren't ready for gets you killed.
Knowledge that's not propogated and retained isn't cultural knowledge, it's personal knowlege. It dies with the individual.
That's one of the distinguishing elements of humans: we learn, and retain, knowledge, and transmit it beyond the individual.
We have an entire class of indivduals whose sole productive contribution is dedicated to the task of training and instructing others. No other species has anything remotely that.
Biology is an information transfer system: molecules, DNA, learned behaviour, taught behaviour. Humans came up with writing, teaching, and now electronic information, genetic engineering, and perhaps AI, as extensions of that.
Each allows for the acquisition, storage, transmission, and application of knowledge in new ways.
(I'm not saying "without limit" or "forever accelerating". But I am noting that we've far exceeded any other life forms of which we're aware in this degree.)
If you think having more lines of code makes something slower then you should disabled the JIT in your browser and see the amazing performance wins of javascript being interpreted with less lines of code!
Google sucks and you're complaining to Mozilla? I can't believe people have become so complacent with search they will start blaming great content on the internet for being hidden by shitty algorithms.
This is the prep for fiber. They're releasing something with deprecation warnings so when they have to completely remove those things in 16 (w/ fiber), everyone will be ready.
