[it_does_follow]

> wondered why Microsoft was left out of the original 5

Same reason Cornell is typically left out of conversations about Ivy league schools.

It's just not that prestigious. Seeing MS on a resume is not as impressive as the others, and that's also reflected pretty clearly in the comp. It's not nearly as competitive to get a job at MS. The stock performance over the past decade has been pretty meh compared to the others.

[eggy]

How is Cornell Tech's campus doing at Roosevelt Island, NYC?

Microsoft has some really cool stuff going on aside from .NET Core. Simon Peyton Jones has been there since the late 90s working on Haskell. Some notable ones for me: F#, F*, Z3 (SMT solver), C# and its ubiquity in products like Unity, WSL2, VS Code, etc...

What's up with Hololens 2? Any uptake? I would like to make a short video of the ultimate PC vs. Mac parody with two armies facing each other with one wearing the stylish MR glasses coming from Apple vs. the more typical-looking HMD Hololens for nostalgia's sake.

I have been in computing for a long time, and all of my jobs have been on PCs with Windows other than the weird Banyan Vines, VMS, Irix, and QNX systems I have worked with over the years. All my graphic artist friends had Apple products. I have had one job where I used Quickbooks on an old Apple Macintosh (1994), but not much else with it. I did put a deposit on a NeXT machine, but that fell through!

I have had a computer since 1977, a Commodore PET 2001 followed by a Vic-20. A Toshiba dual-floppy laptop that probably wouldn't fit under the seat in front in Economy Class seating. My first Apple was a Power Macintosh in 1995/96 (I think the 7200) on which I loaded Minix or some Minix derivative at a later date, a pen-based NCR 3125. Amazingly slim for the time, and I updated the drive in it a year or two later. My first real micro-electronics project. The Newton came out around the same time. The NCR 3125 was a 386 running PenOS that I eventually put Windows with pen support on. Various PCs I built (a RAID 0, Dual-Athlon anyone?) in the early 2000s running Blender3D. I donated $50 to support Ton's efforts to take it open source back then. And so on...Microsoft has always had the tech, but not the marketing or style of Apple. I currently use a Windows 10 gaming laptop, an old Lenovo running Kali, a 2011 iMac (1TB HD! 16 or 32 GB of RAM - I have to look). I just want tools I can use. The only computer/OS I was evangelical about was mh Amiga 1000 and 500!

[fennecfoxen]

> How is Cornell Tech's campus doing at Roosevelt Island, NYC?

I dunno, but every time I head over to that end of the island it seems pretty dead. There is the Graduate Hotel with the swanky Panorama Room bar on top that’s fun to visit (watch seaplanes land every half hour some days), the fancy cafe is open, there’s nice open plazas between buildings, it connects to the park overlooking the river (and FDR memorial beyond) … but it’s all so empty. I can’t imagine it’s operating at normal capacity.

North end is better anyway ;)

[eggy]

That's a shame. It's a great location. Near Manhattan, but it has that 'other' feeling, but maybe that's me. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, and RI was always 'other'!

[daxfohl]

I think Microsoft and Amazon have the most interesting products as far as dev tooling. Unless you're really into ML I guess. Too bad they don't pay as well.

[eggy]

Yes, I actually liked VS Code a lot, and I was an emacs user before that. MSVS is pretty good too. I am still using F# here and there for small, personal projects but I use my iPad Pro (2015) with Frank Kruger's [1] Continuous app[2], an F# and C# IDE with a built-in compiler, syntax highlighting, code completion, and live debugging. Frank is a juggernaut in .NET and many other eclectic things within the tech domain! Check him out. Continuous is the best way to play with code outside of sitting at your desktop, and even then too!

[1] https://praeclarum.org/

[2] http://continuous.codes/

[daxfohl]

Funny, I'd just stumbled across his F# implementation of Hindley-Milner while working on my own inferencer (https://gist.github.com/praeclarum/5fbef41ea9c296590f23)

[bradleyjg]

> The stock performance over the past decade has been pretty meh compared to the others.

MSFT’s ten year total return (1482%) is better than AAPL’s (1256%) or GOOG’s (815%), but not as good as AMZN’s (1629%) or NFLX’s (6250%). FB hadn’t IPOed yet ten years ago.

This is per a site called finbox.

[lotsofpulp]

Per this website, AAPL has a 32.79% annualized return, and MSFT has a 31.84% annualized return over the past 10 years, dividends reinvested.

https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/

[bradleyjg]

Thanks. Don’t care enough to do a deep dive but it seems like at least MSFT is in the pack.