More likely there will be constant "negotiations" between the big players like Google, Facebook, and the authorities, and things will allow to function as normal. It's the small media sites that will suffer, since they don't have the resources to cope with complying with regulations. Thus, the innovative, small guys will end up going under.
All in all, it could end up helping the big players swallow up even more of the market.
One "evolution" I could live without is the idea of replacing hyperlinks with proprietary Javascript. In the HTML, the hyperlink looks normal, but scripting is used to "disable" the browser's standard navigation and allow the script to handle events. The result is that a large number of web pages work like those old Flash sites, where standard browser navigation doesn't work. You know, so you can't open links in a new tab/window, and you can't "Copy link location".
You'd think with the death of Flash, we could finally get away from breaking standards for the sake of propriety crap in the name of innovation. Nope. All these UX idiots don't understand why the web was designed as a document-centric architecture and why it's better, and they keep trying to force things to be application-centric. That's why they keep breaking everything.
Long-time Slashdot reader shanen writes:
Any OS feature that isn't used by a LARGE majority of the users should be REMOVED from the OS.
Yeah... fuck you. Every piece of software is being gimped like crazy to cater to the lowest common denominator, and features I need are being wiped out every day in the name of improving my experience. Microsoft already requires signed drivers, so whatever happened here is purely a political problem, not a technical one.
If Huawei is installing some stupid "helper" that fucks up the machine, I won't buy a Huawei. I'll build the machine myself and use an OEM copy of Windows, just as I have been doing for the last 20+ years. The last thing I want is for Microsoft to lock down the system even more to ensure I have even less control of my machine.
For the record, I stopped upgrading at Win7. I won't touch Win10 with a barge pole.
You're implying that bugs eventually go away. I started using computers more than 30 years ago, and I'm still bitching about many of the same things I was back then.
I keep watching mechanic videos on YouTube about a car not shutting off because the keyfob has a bug in its firmware, and even after several years of it being a known problem, the manufacturer can't fix it. That's not even a complicated thing to correct, yo.
Thankfully, unlike passenger jets which are airborne laboratories that must maintain a minimum speed and may drop out of the sky at any moment, thus making autopilot a necessity, it's perfectly possible to drive a car manually.
As such, my determination of how safe and reliable a car will be is how computerized is it. The more computers and the more electronic crap is on it, the more things that can go wrong, especially if the car makes (or promises to make) way too many decisions for me. I'll never feel safe letting a car drive itself. Practically every time a computer tries to do something for me, it screws up.
It's also pretty well demonstrated that bigger, heavier, more luxurious, and more expensive doesn't make it safer. People insist SUVs are safer, just so they can justify spending huge amounts of dough on an over-glorified truck. Watch some Russian dashcams if you want to see how SUVs handle crashes. They still rollover and crumple like crazy, despite their heft.
So, to complete your obligatory car analogy, I'd say that the more I pay, the worse it will be. My WRX is a furiously fast and powerful car, but I consider it safe and reliable, as it has excellent handling and crash ratings, and none of the nannying electronics (or even an automatic transmission) that other sport cars do. Money doesn't ensure safety -- understanding physics and marketing bullshit does.
I once signed up for a health insurance company, and when I got my first bill (in the mail, no less), they printed my online account password right on the bill in plain text, for my convenience.
Are you sure you're not thinking of RAD drives on the Amiga? MacOS didn't get RAM drives until close to the release of OSX, and not all Mac models supported it.
It would help if modern OSes did their job. They have all the fancy graphics APIs for games and entertainment, but how many of them have built-in backup software (not attached to a cloud), and how many users even know what those options are? Even in the Linux world, people still refer you to rsync, even though it is a mirroring utility, not a backup utility.
Nobody does backups because it's just not important to the bean counters. Remember when the standard practice to fix any laptop was to do a factory reset?
For a long, lone time now, the biggest problem with cars has been electrical and computer failure, not mechanical failure. Somehow, I don't think electric cars will make that better.
Ask any modern mechanic, and they'll tell you it's impossible to survive as a mechanic without spending thousands of dollars on scan tools. Hell, I just watched a YouTube video showing that you can't replace the rear brake pads on a certain VW unless you use a scan tool to put the car into diagnostic mode. It's not a job you can do yourself.
Please don't say that animations make things more intuitive. Every web page today is trying desperately to mimic what they were doing in Flash 15 years ago, and it's not any more intuitive today using HTML5 than it was back then using single-threaded proprietary technology.
"We just have to work faster to meet the same goals in less time"
A raise is when you get more money for the same job. When they expect you to work harder for more money, that's a "promotion".
I used to work in a medical warehouse, so I know what's going on here. Amazon is simply cutting staff, and the "raise" is a PR stunt.
I've been through that at my last job working in a medical warehouse. We "modernized" with a computerized performance tracking system and the only thing that happened is that we lost about 50% of our staff and went from an average 10-hour day to an average 14.5-hour day. The company was trimming staff left and right (using the tracker reports to do so), while insisting that they only way we could reduce hours was by increasing productivity, which we simply could not do. Had they offered me more money and fewer hours, I'd still have turned it down, because there was no way I could increase my numbers without literally throwing boxes around, which is what many people were doing. You can't throw around medical products when they cost $3,000 a box, but people did what they had to keep their job.
I'm middle aged and have been saving money for a couple decades, so I could afford to quit when things got really terrible. I feel bad for the 20-somethings still working there, as they don't yet have the financial stability to walk away from that kind of abuse. They pay is never worth the pace.
That was back when it was called Phoenix (which I made my default browser back in the day). Phoenix started losing the plot shortly after the re-branding to Firefox, and Firefox 2.0 was when things really started going downhill.
Are you kidding? Firefox had severe memory management problems for well over 10 years, resulting in chronic freezes and pauses every few seconds. They spend hardly any time trying to fix that and kept redesigning the UI many times over, despite users balking about useless cosmetics and "brand experience."
Mozilla only ramped up efforts when market share severely tanked.
All that tells me is that the software is grossly overpriced, and that the subscription model is the "proper" price. It's just a variation of the JCPenny model of selling something at 4x its real cost and having perpetual 75% off sales.
I just use software that suits my needs. A copy of Photoshop several years old does everything I need, and I don't have to worry about Adobe pulling the rug out from under my feet, either by yanking access or "upgrading" in a way that breaks my workflow... or livelihood.
I don't think our throwaway culture cares much. We keep using aluminum for consumer goods because it looks cool and spiffy, even though said items keep cracking due to metal fatigue.
I'm sure Apple will be among the first to seriously apply metal-to-glass welding... whether it works well or not.
I expected this question to be about data collected from my computer, not the data I send to the web site.
Ad blockers are a security tool, and the main reason I use them is to keep ad companies from trying to break into my computer. I've come across way too many malicious scripts in ads over the years. Given how many legitimate companies have been caught doing that, is anyone taking that seriously?
I don't own a smartphone at all. I don't even want to know how much questionable yet suspiciously legal data collection is going on in that arena.
I have a macro key next to my left shift key, which I've mapped to the "close window" command. My style of surfing the web is to shift-click to open each link in a new window, not a tab, and use the macro key to close pages. I use the OS taskbar to manage windows (the way a window manager is supposed to work), not whatever custom tab management each application devises.
I absolutely love this arrangement, but apparently I'm the only person in the world who does it this way. It pisses me off how many web pages use proprietary Javascript to open links, ensuring that standard hyperlink navigation (among other things) is totally broken.
What really killed Netscape was releases a lousy product. 4.0 suuuuucked. (Folks on the web in '96/97 remember.) And IE at the time was releasing it's first good version, a better version. Fact is, at that time IE was better than Netscape.
This exactly reflects my experience. In college, we all used Macs, and MacOS had Netscape installed by default as it came with the install CD. Everybody was explicitly replacing it with IE5, because it was a much, much better browser.
Mac people intentionally using MS software by choice, because it was actually better? Say it ain't so!
Will they use Apple servers, too, and will Apple's ARM chips (which they are designing themselves) be compatible with ARM's official cores? Will the servers run OSX?
I remember all the problems with Motorolla PPC chips not being binary compatible with IBM PPC. There's more to think about than just a base ISA, and ARM has more than one.
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More likely there will be constant "negotiations" between the big players like Google, Facebook, and the authorities, and things will allow to function as normal. It's the small media sites that will suffer, since they don't have the resources to cope with complying with regulations. Thus, the innovative, small guys will end up going under.
All in all, it could end up helping the big players swallow up even more of the market.
As much as I want to agree with you emotionally, artists *give* rights away to the distributors.
Artists have always starved throughout history while the publishers make all the money. It sucks. But, there's a reason why it's called "selling out."
One "evolution" I could live without is the idea of replacing hyperlinks with proprietary Javascript. In the HTML, the hyperlink looks normal, but scripting is used to "disable" the browser's standard navigation and allow the script to handle events. The result is that a large number of web pages work like those old Flash sites, where standard browser navigation doesn't work. You know, so you can't open links in a new tab/window, and you can't "Copy link location".
You'd think with the death of Flash, we could finally get away from breaking standards for the sake of propriety crap in the name of innovation. Nope. All these UX idiots don't understand why the web was designed as a document-centric architecture and why it's better, and they keep trying to force things to be application-centric. That's why they keep breaking everything.
Long-time Slashdot reader shanen writes:
Any OS feature that isn't used by a LARGE majority of the users should be REMOVED from the OS.
Yeah... fuck you. Every piece of software is being gimped like crazy to cater to the lowest common denominator, and features I need are being wiped out every day in the name of improving my experience. Microsoft already requires signed drivers, so whatever happened here is purely a political problem, not a technical one.
If Huawei is installing some stupid "helper" that fucks up the machine, I won't buy a Huawei. I'll build the machine myself and use an OEM copy of Windows, just as I have been doing for the last 20+ years. The last thing I want is for Microsoft to lock down the system even more to ensure I have even less control of my machine.
For the record, I stopped upgrading at Win7. I won't touch Win10 with a barge pole.
You're implying that bugs eventually go away. I started using computers more than 30 years ago, and I'm still bitching about many of the same things I was back then.
I keep watching mechanic videos on YouTube about a car not shutting off because the keyfob has a bug in its firmware, and even after several years of it being a known problem, the manufacturer can't fix it. That's not even a complicated thing to correct, yo.
What I want an "Amazon of on-line media consumption". One place, one bill.
I'd be content with more choice. Streaming for free with ads, or subscribe to remove the ads. Most places force one option or the other.
Thankfully, unlike passenger jets which are airborne laboratories that must maintain a minimum speed and may drop out of the sky at any moment, thus making autopilot a necessity, it's perfectly possible to drive a car manually.
As such, my determination of how safe and reliable a car will be is how computerized is it. The more computers and the more electronic crap is on it, the more things that can go wrong, especially if the car makes (or promises to make) way too many decisions for me. I'll never feel safe letting a car drive itself. Practically every time a computer tries to do something for me, it screws up.
It's also pretty well demonstrated that bigger, heavier, more luxurious, and more expensive doesn't make it safer. People insist SUVs are safer, just so they can justify spending huge amounts of dough on an over-glorified truck. Watch some Russian dashcams if you want to see how SUVs handle crashes. They still rollover and crumple like crazy, despite their heft.
So, to complete your obligatory car analogy, I'd say that the more I pay, the worse it will be. My WRX is a furiously fast and powerful car, but I consider it safe and reliable, as it has excellent handling and crash ratings, and none of the nannying electronics (or even an automatic transmission) that other sport cars do. Money doesn't ensure safety -- understanding physics and marketing bullshit does.
I once signed up for a health insurance company, and when I got my first bill (in the mail, no less), they printed my online account password right on the bill in plain text, for my convenience.
Needless to say, I was not a customer for long.
The price of glass has dropped? What's all this I hear about us running out of sand?
Are you sure you're not thinking of RAD drives on the Amiga? MacOS didn't get RAM drives until close to the release of OSX, and not all Mac models supported it.
...a lot of Russians think that Putin has made Russia strong again.
Funny, I hear many US citizens saying the same thing about their leader.
It would help if modern OSes did their job. They have all the fancy graphics APIs for games and entertainment, but how many of them have built-in backup software (not attached to a cloud), and how many users even know what those options are? Even in the Linux world, people still refer you to rsync, even though it is a mirroring utility, not a backup utility.
Nobody does backups because it's just not important to the bean counters. Remember when the standard practice to fix any laptop was to do a factory reset?
For a long, lone time now, the biggest problem with cars has been electrical and computer failure, not mechanical failure. Somehow, I don't think electric cars will make that better.
Ask any modern mechanic, and they'll tell you it's impossible to survive as a mechanic without spending thousands of dollars on scan tools. Hell, I just watched a YouTube video showing that you can't replace the rear brake pads on a certain VW unless you use a scan tool to put the car into diagnostic mode. It's not a job you can do yourself.
Please don't say that animations make things more intuitive. Every web page today is trying desperately to mimic what they were doing in Flash 15 years ago, and it's not any more intuitive today using HTML5 than it was back then using single-threaded proprietary technology.
"We just have to work faster to meet the same goals in less time"
A raise is when you get more money for the same job. When they expect you to work harder for more money, that's a "promotion".
I used to work in a medical warehouse, so I know what's going on here. Amazon is simply cutting staff, and the "raise" is a PR stunt.
I've been through that at my last job working in a medical warehouse. We "modernized" with a computerized performance tracking system and the only thing that happened is that we lost about 50% of our staff and went from an average 10-hour day to an average 14.5-hour day. The company was trimming staff left and right (using the tracker reports to do so), while insisting that they only way we could reduce hours was by increasing productivity, which we simply could not do. Had they offered me more money and fewer hours, I'd still have turned it down, because there was no way I could increase my numbers without literally throwing boxes around, which is what many people were doing. You can't throw around medical products when they cost $3,000 a box, but people did what they had to keep their job.
I'm middle aged and have been saving money for a couple decades, so I could afford to quit when things got really terrible. I feel bad for the 20-somethings still working there, as they don't yet have the financial stability to walk away from that kind of abuse. They pay is never worth the pace.
That was back when it was called Phoenix (which I made my default browser back in the day). Phoenix started losing the plot shortly after the re-branding to Firefox, and Firefox 2.0 was when things really started going downhill.
I've posted this a few times: I never understood why Tesla pursued self driving so vigorously.
Publicity. That's always been Musk's specialty, which keeps the investors coming.
I love how these console companies go out of their way to make sure you can't remap the controls the way you like.
Are you kidding? Firefox had severe memory management problems for well over 10 years, resulting in chronic freezes and pauses every few seconds. They spend hardly any time trying to fix that and kept redesigning the UI many times over, despite users balking about useless cosmetics and "brand experience."
Mozilla only ramped up efforts when market share severely tanked.
All that tells me is that the software is grossly overpriced, and that the subscription model is the "proper" price. It's just a variation of the JCPenny model of selling something at 4x its real cost and having perpetual 75% off sales.
I just use software that suits my needs. A copy of Photoshop several years old does everything I need, and I don't have to worry about Adobe pulling the rug out from under my feet, either by yanking access or "upgrading" in a way that breaks my workflow... or livelihood.
Fuck SaaS.
I don't think our throwaway culture cares much. We keep using aluminum for consumer goods because it looks cool and spiffy, even though said items keep cracking due to metal fatigue.
I'm sure Apple will be among the first to seriously apply metal-to-glass welding... whether it works well or not.
I expected this question to be about data collected from my computer, not the data I send to the web site.
Ad blockers are a security tool, and the main reason I use them is to keep ad companies from trying to break into my computer. I've come across way too many malicious scripts in ads over the years. Given how many legitimate companies have been caught doing that, is anyone taking that seriously?
I don't own a smartphone at all. I don't even want to know how much questionable yet suspiciously legal data collection is going on in that arena.
I have a macro key next to my left shift key, which I've mapped to the "close window" command. My style of surfing the web is to shift-click to open each link in a new window, not a tab, and use the macro key to close pages. I use the OS taskbar to manage windows (the way a window manager is supposed to work), not whatever custom tab management each application devises.
I absolutely love this arrangement, but apparently I'm the only person in the world who does it this way. It pisses me off how many web pages use proprietary Javascript to open links, ensuring that standard hyperlink navigation (among other things) is totally broken.
What really killed Netscape was releases a lousy product. 4.0 suuuuucked. (Folks on the web in '96/97 remember.) And IE at the time was releasing it's first good version, a better version. Fact is, at that time IE was better than Netscape.
This exactly reflects my experience. In college, we all used Macs, and MacOS had Netscape installed by default as it came with the install CD. Everybody was explicitly replacing it with IE5, because it was a much, much better browser.
Mac people intentionally using MS software by choice, because it was actually better? Say it ain't so!
Will they use Apple servers, too, and will Apple's ARM chips (which they are designing themselves) be compatible with ARM's official cores? Will the servers run OSX?
I remember all the problems with Motorolla PPC chips not being binary compatible with IBM PPC. There's more to think about than just a base ISA, and ARM has more than one.