On your first question: the current law is that DST is optional, but if a state opts out, they have to be on standard time. The new bill allows them to stay on DST permanently and removes the ability for states to opt-out unless they are already on year-round standard time. So, if this passes, every state in the union will be on either standard time or DST, depending on their status before, with no option to either go back to standard time nor to go back to changing twice a year.
Yeah I’m not holding my breath. It will be around for a long time.
A couple of things I could see changing that would be a) Microsoft in financial trouble, b) AI both making it harder to keep up with security bugs, and making it easier to migrate away from legacy systems.
The chances of .net framework being among the first to go is slim though.
Good call. I’m getting mired in the k8s side right now and we have dozens of small web apps that need upgraded and a couple beefier framework apps that need essentially rewritten. Unfortunately I can’t escape lol.
We an ecosystem I overall like .net core and I agree it will stick around. I just can’t wait to get off IIS and into Linux even if that means complicating things with kubernetes.
Modern. Net is portable and fast, yes. But .NET framework is (mostly) not portable and it’s tied to the version of Windows is on. We’ll see when Microsoft decides to EOL it but so far it has not been announced. It’s not getting more than security updates now, as far as I know.
We’re converting everything we can (mostly web apps) to modern .Net (formerly core) so it can run on Linux. I may be stuck on Windows at work for the office apps, but my code runs on Linux.
Great comment! Loved the flashbacks it gave me.
Just wanted to add some context to the quoted part of your comment:
A lot of people didn’t know how to download things, sure, but another barrier was most people were on dial-up. It would take a long time, sometimes on expensive calls, to download software. And getting disconnected often meant starting over.
Even if you didn’t mind downloading, it was unusual enough at the time that a lot of people probably just felt safer buying the disk from a retail store. It’s tangible. So people would get software either off the shelf at the store, or free as part of another purchase.
For example, when I worked for ISPs in the late 90s, we gave every customer a floppy or CD with a dialer and a browser. One popular one among ISPs was the Netscape dialer + browser bundle that we could customize and lock down the settings we wanted, like DNS, proxy, POP phone numbers. I remember we charged $19.95/mo for dial-up in 1998, but at least you got free email and a homepage so you could put up HTML pages with animated GIFs!
Early on there were many different browsers, too. Some based on Mosaic, some independent (e.g. Opera). Netscape eventually became the most common one. I think IE may have been based on Spyglass Mosaic. Microsoft definitively felt threatened by the idea that the web and Java (applets!) could make their entire golden goose, Windows, obsolete. Write Once Run Anywhere was an existential threat to them. So, eventually they ripped out the Microsoft Network (forerunner to MSN) and put Internet on Windows instead. It took them a while, though. And that was only in Windows 95. We were using the WWW before that. (Trumpet Winsock anyone?)
Sorry for going on an old-man rant. This triggered some really crusty memories.