With all this freemium stuff showing up in the commercial world and people asking for decades how to make money on FOSS, is anyone really surprised Linux distros are jumping on the bandwagon?
They can easily but 100x to 1000x slower than a program written in C, C++ or Fortran.
One of my biggest gripes about performance on Java is that people always say, "Java approaches the speed of native code." Well, what does that mean? Half as fast? A tenth as fast? A hundredth as fast? What's the ballpark? Of course, they never go into those details.
The same goes for Javascript. I found it hilarious years ago when Javascript engines were getting much faster, like 40x faster after a single update, and advocates were saying Javascript "approaches" the speed of native code. Big deal, because that still tells us nothing.
I'm old enough to know when calculators were the only mobile computers even possible in the classroom. We were still required to buy the TI-84 because other brands of calculators were not allowed.
If you want to drop all support for your OS, you have to drop product activation and all that other crap that makes it difficult if not impossible for me to tweak and rebuild the system to my needs.
I don't expect support forever, but I do expect the right to continue using my license forever.
The great problem with this argument is that nobody ever explains what those jobs are. All I ever hear is people talking about burger flippers needing to become robot repairmen, which isn't realistic, and if people can't learn new trades, it's because they're stupid and they're screwed no matter what. There's never a solution presented except for people to go back to school. If AI gets good enough to the point where even a brain isn't enough to hold a job, and humans are officially obsolete... then what? Cybernetic enhancement? Everybody will have their own AI robot to do their work for them, paid for with money they don't have?
Oh, don't worry, magic UBI will save us. Of course, we have no idea how that works either, but we'll figure it out within the next 15 years... just like fusion.
Never in my life have I heard somebody say, "I'm only getting 1% on the money that I've been saving for retirement. I think I'll piss it away on stupid crap that's going to be broken in three years."
I can't remember who said it, but a couple weeks ago I read a comment on Slashdot that essentially said this. The commenter has little confidence in Social Security and long-term economic outlook or something, and said he would instead concentrate on living life to the fullest now rather than worry too much about retirement.
Guy ended up being modded +4 Insightful or some nonsense. But then, it was in one of those political Trump threads, so...
A real fix to this problem would be a single download on their web site, in an obvious location, that patches Windows Update to the latest version. No need to hunt down this stuff yourself. But, that would be too simple given that they don't want you to reinstall Win7, in favor of buying Win10.
Instead, you have to surf their forums to find other people complaining about Windows Update running for days (literally) at 100% CPU usage. MS lackeys suggest you reboot your computer. Forum people argue about what magic combination of KB patches will fix it this time, since it seems to break regularly and you have to hunt to find which KB patches are the latest ones. Denial and user-blaming abounds.
The last time I checked a few months ago, the KB patches required on a fresh reinstall are KB3020369, KB3102810, KB3138612, KB3172605, and WindowsUpdateAgent7.6
Unlike Google, Microsoft bundles many apps that outright can't be removed or even have their icon nixed from the start menu.
Not to mention the practice of automatically deleting applications from your system with no prior warning, let along asking your permission. MS insists they only do it because the apps are "incompatible", but they don't tell you why, of course.
I'm not talking about a legal requirement. Either you make a minimum amount of profit that the market expects (or re-invest all your profits) or investors bail (or fire the management).
You don't get delisted because you failed to make some 'minimum profit'
Generally, you do. Many stock exchanges will boot you off their listing if your company doesn't meet certain minimum requirements, such as minimum revenue or capital value.
Here is a little company you may have heard of: Amazon. It was 7 years between their IPO and the first time they made ANY profit.
You're confusing gross with net. They don't make net profit because they reinvest everything very aggressively. To say they make NO money is completely ridiculous. If they didn't, they wouldn't be building all those huge, fancy warehouses full of robots.
Both must make profit to be sustainable, but public companies are required to meet a minimum amount of profit or they get delisted, reorganized, the CEO gets the axe...
The IPO. At least when you have a small number of investors, it's easier to find out what you're getting yourself into and you can always refuse to sell. If you're so low on funds that you can't refuse any deal no matter what (or you're just stupid or greedy), then an IPO won't help you.
Not that I doubt it's a problem for some people, but I'm 40, and according to audio calibration tests I can still hear the full normal frequency range. It probably helps that I always wear hearing protection at work, keep my headphone volume low, and don't have any kids. 8)
Not talking about Slashdot, here, but a new plague appearing on the Internet is webpages that intentionally disable the scroll bar. Sometimes you can still use the scroll wheel, but the page is designed so you have to click on buttons or use PgUp/PgDn to "scroll". Apparently, the scroll bar is taking up too much space that could be better used for ads. What is the world coming to?
That sounds like a decent scheme for cinemas, but for home viewing it's not going to work. Unless it is deemed acceptable that my entire bluray collection is bricked when I replace my TV, or that I have to go and obtain new keys for everything in my collection.
That strategy worked (and to some degree still does) for music and games. Ever buy a new PC and have to purchase a new copy of Windows to attach to that specific motherboard serial number?
If they were upgrading a component of my car, I would not have a problem with it
Define "upgrade". Companies are constantly telling us that the latest is the greatest, but we all know they're looking for every excuse possible to remove features and slip in extra telemetry and crap we don't want. Even minor changes that are supposed to be improvements can break shit in unknown ways. Maybe I need the older version for testing and/or legacy support reasons? Has it ever occurred to you that not everyone is a dumb, ordinary user who just surfs YouTube and plays games all day? Maybe some of us actually have work to do and rely on software for our livelihood.
Maybe you're happy living in a world of ignorance, thinking that every update is an upgrade, just because the manufacturer told you so. I'll make my own decisions based on research and critical thinking.
Your line of thinking just makes it more difficult for me to have any choice in the face of so much corruption.
Navigator was becoming stagnant due to a lack of competition (somewhere around 75% of the market). When IE was becoming a real threat, Netscape went into panic mode and suffered feature creep, and Navigator 4.0 was a horrible crash-fest. It didn't help that Netscape tried very hard to push all their value-added software like e-mail and web authoring with the browser itself (ironically, a huge amount of "bundling"). When I was at school, everyone was using Explorer 5.5 for Mac, because Netscape was well-known to be shit. For the record, Netscape shipped with the MacOS install CD, and IE did not. Even Apple fans were explicitly going out of their way to replace Netscape with Microsoft software.
We're seeing the same thing with Mozilla right now. Will people eventually blame Google's dominance of the smart phone market as the true reason Firefox died, or will people correctly remember that Firefox just went to all levels of suck?
Remember video tape players being like Jack the Ripper? That want even the first. Piano rolls were going to be the death, as has just about everything new since then.
Piano rolls cannot be copied at almost zero cost, and analog videotapes cannot be copied indefinitely, so these analogies don't help when applied to digital downloads.
Eventually, she got a Macbook. She LOVED that Macbook, and used it for over ten years. She never had that malware issue with the Macbook, obviously. Mostly, now she uses ios devices.
That has nothing to do with DRM. That has to do with the fact the default MacOS browser doesn't let you install stuff with a click like those other browsers will. It's harder to install software when the OS is just naturally hostile towards (but does not totally block) 3rd party solutions.
I used Macs for many years when I was at college, owned a couple myself, and stopped using them entirely for this and many other reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing new... just becoming more common.
With all this freemium stuff showing up in the commercial world and people asking for decades how to make money on FOSS, is anyone really surprised Linux distros are jumping on the bandwagon?
They can easily but 100x to 1000x slower than a program written in C, C++ or Fortran.
One of my biggest gripes about performance on Java is that people always say, "Java approaches the speed of native code." Well, what does that mean? Half as fast? A tenth as fast? A hundredth as fast? What's the ballpark? Of course, they never go into those details.
The same goes for Javascript. I found it hilarious years ago when Javascript engines were getting much faster, like 40x faster after a single update, and advocates were saying Javascript "approaches" the speed of native code. Big deal, because that still tells us nothing.
They need this, huh?
I can only pray antivirus on a car works better than antivirus on... anything else.
You, and society, will be fine, I promise.
People kept telling me this after Trump was elected. Now pre-existing conditions are back on the menu. Yeah, I'm sure society will be just fine.
Having a browser that leaves a whole metric ton of free RAM around benefits no one.
Except other applications.
Believe it or not, there's even an upper limit to how much L3 cache you actually need.
I'm old enough to know when calculators were the only mobile computers even possible in the classroom. We were still required to buy the TI-84 because other brands of calculators were not allowed.
If you want to drop all support for your OS, you have to drop product activation and all that other crap that makes it difficult if not impossible for me to tweak and rebuild the system to my needs.
I don't expect support forever, but I do expect the right to continue using my license forever.
The great problem with this argument is that nobody ever explains what those jobs are. All I ever hear is people talking about burger flippers needing to become robot repairmen, which isn't realistic, and if people can't learn new trades, it's because they're stupid and they're screwed no matter what. There's never a solution presented except for people to go back to school. If AI gets good enough to the point where even a brain isn't enough to hold a job, and humans are officially obsolete... then what? Cybernetic enhancement? Everybody will have their own AI robot to do their work for them, paid for with money they don't have?
Oh, don't worry, magic UBI will save us. Of course, we have no idea how that works either, but we'll figure it out within the next 15 years... just like fusion.
Never in my life have I heard somebody say, "I'm only getting 1% on the money that I've been saving for retirement. I think I'll piss it away on stupid crap that's going to be broken in three years."
I can't remember who said it, but a couple weeks ago I read a comment on Slashdot that essentially said this. The commenter has little confidence in Social Security and long-term economic outlook or something, and said he would instead concentrate on living life to the fullest now rather than worry too much about retirement.
Guy ended up being modded +4 Insightful or some nonsense. But then, it was in one of those political Trump threads, so...
A real fix to this problem would be a single download on their web site, in an obvious location, that patches Windows Update to the latest version. No need to hunt down this stuff yourself. But, that would be too simple given that they don't want you to reinstall Win7, in favor of buying Win10.
Instead, you have to surf their forums to find other people complaining about Windows Update running for days (literally) at 100% CPU usage. MS lackeys suggest you reboot your computer. Forum people argue about what magic combination of KB patches will fix it this time, since it seems to break regularly and you have to hunt to find which KB patches are the latest ones. Denial and user-blaming abounds.
The last time I checked a few months ago, the KB patches required on a fresh reinstall are KB3020369, KB3102810, KB3138612, KB3172605, and WindowsUpdateAgent7.6
Because you never can know when your hobby or innocent curiosity can get you locked up and used against you.
Or you click on an innocent-looking link, or you're a phishing victim, or a nice piece of Javascript comes along and pats you on the head.
Unlike Google, Microsoft bundles many apps that outright can't be removed or even have their icon nixed from the start menu.
Not to mention the practice of automatically deleting applications from your system with no prior warning, let along asking your permission. MS insists they only do it because the apps are "incompatible", but they don't tell you why, of course.
There is no such 'minimum requirement'.
I'm not talking about a legal requirement. Either you make a minimum amount of profit that the market expects (or re-invest all your profits) or investors bail (or fire the management).
You don't get delisted because you failed to make some 'minimum profit'
Generally, you do. Many stock exchanges will boot you off their listing if your company doesn't meet certain minimum requirements, such as minimum revenue or capital value.
Here is a little company you may have heard of: Amazon. It was 7 years between their IPO and the first time they made ANY profit.
You're confusing gross with net. They don't make net profit because they reinvest everything very aggressively. To say they make NO money is completely ridiculous. If they didn't, they wouldn't be building all those huge, fancy warehouses full of robots.
Both must make profit to be sustainable, but public companies are required to meet a minimum amount of profit or they get delisted, reorganized, the CEO gets the axe...
I honestly don't know which is worse.
The IPO. At least when you have a small number of investors, it's easier to find out what you're getting yourself into and you can always refuse to sell. If you're so low on funds that you can't refuse any deal no matter what (or you're just stupid or greedy), then an IPO won't help you.
The mainstream media is absolutely retarded and when they see a bunch of Twitter posts about something they jump on it and run with it.
They may have looked like teh fools, but they got teh ratings. Mission accomplished.
Not that I doubt it's a problem for some people, but I'm 40, and according to audio calibration tests I can still hear the full normal frequency range. It probably helps that I always wear hearing protection at work, keep my headphone volume low, and don't have any kids. 8)
Not talking about Slashdot, here, but a new plague appearing on the Internet is webpages that intentionally disable the scroll bar. Sometimes you can still use the scroll wheel, but the page is designed so you have to click on buttons or use PgUp/PgDn to "scroll". Apparently, the scroll bar is taking up too much space that could be better used for ads. What is the world coming to?
That sounds like a decent scheme for cinemas, but for home viewing it's not going to work. Unless it is deemed acceptable that my entire bluray collection is bricked when I replace my TV, or that I have to go and obtain new keys for everything in my collection.
That strategy worked (and to some degree still does) for music and games. Ever buy a new PC and have to purchase a new copy of Windows to attach to that specific motherboard serial number?
Legally?
Please name a streaming service that lets you permanently archive what you're watching, you stupid idiot.
If they were upgrading a component of my car, I would not have a problem with it
Define "upgrade". Companies are constantly telling us that the latest is the greatest, but we all know they're looking for every excuse possible to remove features and slip in extra telemetry and crap we don't want. Even minor changes that are supposed to be improvements can break shit in unknown ways. Maybe I need the older version for testing and/or legacy support reasons? Has it ever occurred to you that not everyone is a dumb, ordinary user who just surfs YouTube and plays games all day? Maybe some of us actually have work to do and rely on software for our livelihood.
Maybe you're happy living in a world of ignorance, thinking that every update is an upgrade, just because the manufacturer told you so. I'll make my own decisions based on research and critical thinking.
Your line of thinking just makes it more difficult for me to have any choice in the face of so much corruption.
Netscape destroyed themselves.
Navigator was becoming stagnant due to a lack of competition (somewhere around 75% of the market). When IE was becoming a real threat, Netscape went into panic mode and suffered feature creep, and Navigator 4.0 was a horrible crash-fest. It didn't help that Netscape tried very hard to push all their value-added software like e-mail and web authoring with the browser itself (ironically, a huge amount of "bundling"). When I was at school, everyone was using Explorer 5.5 for Mac, because Netscape was well-known to be shit. For the record, Netscape shipped with the MacOS install CD, and IE did not. Even Apple fans were explicitly going out of their way to replace Netscape with Microsoft software.
We're seeing the same thing with Mozilla right now. Will people eventually blame Google's dominance of the smart phone market as the true reason Firefox died, or will people correctly remember that Firefox just went to all levels of suck?
No product has ever had a 98% satisfaction rate... not even chocolate.
Remember video tape players being like Jack the Ripper? That want even the first. Piano rolls were going to be the death, as has just about everything new since then.
Piano rolls cannot be copied at almost zero cost, and analog videotapes cannot be copied indefinitely, so these analogies don't help when applied to digital downloads.
Eventually, she got a Macbook. She LOVED that Macbook, and used it for over ten years. She never had that malware issue with the Macbook, obviously. Mostly, now she uses ios devices.
That has nothing to do with DRM. That has to do with the fact the default MacOS browser doesn't let you install stuff with a click like those other browsers will. It's harder to install software when the OS is just naturally hostile towards (but does not totally block) 3rd party solutions.
I used Macs for many years when I was at college, owned a couple myself, and stopped using them entirely for this and many other reasons.