You seem to want to punish manufacturers for wanting to stay in business. What you propose is all stick with no carrot and would greatly increase the cost of new products to the detriment of the buyers (possibly majority) who don't really want to have the product last for more than a relatively short time.
Because the intent isn't to punish manufacturers. The intent is to punish bad practices. If a company sells a product that is subsidized by my future spending, then they aren't selling the product at a sustainable price point.
It is not new technology that drives the cycle. It is primarily more evolved application of old technology, and it happens fast - much faster than devices usually wear out even when non-repairable.
Most manufacturers want to stay in business with a product long term. To do this, they must continually improve the product.
The only way these two thoughts are harmonious is with planned obsolescence. If a product is improved enough, people will purchase them for that reason. That seems to be your logic here.
There will always be new versions that incorporate lessons learned or engineering development that was not ready at the time of an earlier product release.
...So then sell the improved product? If they are truly improvements, then let the public buy them. Eventually, the product will have enough cumulative improvements to warrant a purchase.
Even if the gains are fully in software, how do the companies get paid for the work of making them if they just give those gains to the old products forever?
I concur with this...but really it seems that this is only a problem in the context of operating systems. Sure, we can argue if the most recent Android release should be free, free-X-years-from-purchase-date, or a paid upgrade...but the bigger issue I have in this particular example is that it's very difficult to find a phone with an unlocked bootloader, and there's no Google-supplied analog to iTunes that allows end users to back up and upgrade their OS manually. The "OTA-only, un-declinable, only once carriers and OEMs agree" update process is a complete mess.
With the current system, they only gain via new sales.
Most consumers want those new features.
And some don't...but even if they did, the antiquated idea of "selling software" had been working for software vendors since the Reagan administration. I don't think it's impossible for most people to justify having to buy the new features.
Many, if not most, throw away or sell/trade their old devices for pennies on the dollar to get those new features - even when the old devices are in "perfect" working condition.
...and they're bought by people who are willing to put up with the current feature set.
This is because they aren't in perfect working condition. They are broke because they don't have the new features. There may be a scratch or two or some minor annoyances like the battery doesn't have quite the umph it used to. But if they look at the cost of fixing those versus getting a new device without those flaws AND with the new features, most will talk themselves into a pricier trade-in deal instead of a cheaper repair. Why? Because they feel they are wasting their money on the cheaper repair that leaves them missing out on new capabilities.
I'm pretty sure approximately 100% of iPhone owners weren't expecting FaceID to be retroactively added to their iPhone, but the golden 'duh' award here is that selling an iPhone with a new battery would improve its resale value to someone who is upgrading from an even-older iPhone.
So, from both the manufacturers' and most consumers' point of view, the system is not broken.
If you paint with a broad enough brush and cite no examples...yeah. However, the real issue is that there are a who
See, the whole "implantable computer chip" thing has been a recurring thing since the late 1970's; the movie "A Thief in the Night" was the first to widely circulate the idea.
However, on the topic of "the Mark of the Beast", implantable RFIDs aren't what worries me. China is currently doing the heavy lifting.
Instead of FICA scores, China's got social credit scores through Alibaba. One person not paying their bills affects everyone else who does, so they are far more likely to be ostracized. Many places won't rent you an apartment without a social credit score, and not having one can impact even your social circle.
By time chip implanting becomes mandatory, social credit scores will be the foundation of trust upon which buying and selling is founded. It's Social Credit that is truly the Mark of the Beast. The implanted chip will simply be the final step.
I find it interesting that important, critical even, systems such as police bodycams and election voting machines in this age appear to have almost an intentional absence of any sort of integrity mechanisms.
Even more infuriating to me is that these devices do not implement even basic security measures, but smartphones have gotten progressively more difficult to root - signed bootloaders and eFuses make it onto devices consumers pay for, but they're absent from devices explicitly intended to ensure security?
These measures are even more present in digital slot machines, where firmware needs to be byte-for-byte what has been approved by regulators...meaning that gambling has greater protection than voting.
The only thing more sad about the priorities illustrated here is the fact that I'm not actually surprised.
This brings up a whole host of mental images. I mean, the most obvious one is the "Rule 34" implication of Alexa and Cortana together. However, something tells me that looking past the attempts to humanize them and instead picturing them as the code they are would be far more horrifying. If you're a sysadmin, self-replicating code has been around for some time; we call them 'viruses'. If you're a developer and code replicates beyond your control, you're either fighting a massive memory leak or you've just put yourself out of work...and neither of those scenarios have the same appeal as Alexa and Cortana getting their swerve on...
Sorry, but that's crap. All businesses which have had huge successes selling something new to the market had to deal with the leveling off effect, and the vast majority kept right on going afterwards. In previous generations those businesses would have been selling objects, and succeeded (often massively) despite the fact that they still had to pay out serious money to keep manufacturing the items they sold, whether there were updates to it or not.
Yes, but there are businesses where there are, for lack of a better term, "de facto subscriptions"- like restaurants and supermarkets, since I will need to eat daily. Other businesses benefit from thermodynamics; cars and toaster ovens and clothing wear out eventually. Perpetually licensed software doesn't wear out, and if I buy it once there's no need to ever buy the same version of the product again.
A finished program's incremental cost is zero, and companies selling them can't make a go of it without sleazy business practices? Really? Do you know how ludicrous that sounds to anyone who's run any other kind of business?
Not ludicrous at all, actually. At some point, everyone who needs a particular piece of software will already have it. The issue is on the demand side - a piece of mature software has only so many customers, meaning that the revenue a particular piece of software can earn will decrease with time rather than increase, and commercial software vendors still need to pay rent and payroll. The incremental cost of a finished program is only 'zero' if the company lays off all its developers and closes its offices and distributes the software on a torrent; even if a piece of software is not developed further but is still sold to the asymptotic client base the company itself needs to remain solvent.
Now, I'm wagering that your response is going to be "so then developers should work on different software!" Well, that works, but only if a development firm can consistently produce disparate pieces of software that are all commercially successful with relatively little overlap. It's an incredible feat to make happen.
Software's problem is actually that the companies creating it have gotten used to truly obscene profits, and built their businesses around protecting those margins rather than producing a quality product. A company producing a mature program which only needed updating to keep up with changes in the environment in which it ran and the occasional feature request could easily support itself; its owners and employees would just have to accept that they'd make a good living, but nobody was going to be a billionaire.
I agree with this to a certain extent, but it is tough to make the raw numbers work. Prior to Creative Cloud, Photoshop cost $699. Let's pretend CS2 was the 'finished' version, with subsequent releases exactly what you describe - Formal Windows 7/8/10 support, a minor feature request here or there, and so forth. Do you think they'd be able to sell de facto service packs at $700 a pop? Let's assume that $600 of that was profit...would everyone buy $99 service packs every few years? Even if everyone decided they would be comfortable with a middle class lifestyle, I'm hard pressed to say that $99 service packs would be enough to keep everyone employed. Let's pretend that $199 would be able to sustain everyone...well, first off that's about the same price as they're charging for CC now, and second, it's high enough for there to be greater expectations on what comes in those service packs, especially since Serif is selling Affinity Photo for $50 outright.
Like I said, we agree that subscription software is undesirable, and it's why I don't subscribe to anything. However, I really don't see how the three options I presented don't describe the majority of outcomes for commercial software vendors.
Many different streaming appliances - but most commonly Amazon Fire Sticks - can be jailbroken to load additional software onto them. Kodi is the most common of the programs that are added. The reason for this is not because of Kodi itself, but because the third party repositories that allow pirated movie streams and other similar media to be consumed with relative ease, and obviously without paying for it or even the annoyance of picking out which streaming app has what, and so forth.
Less-tech-savvy folks tend to prefer these devices over traditional torrent downloads because ISPs have been stepping up on the *AA letters when public trackers are used. Unlike Plex or other DLNA servers they don't require a local server to be implemented, and the ability to buy a pre-configured device means that they don't even have to watch a Youtube tutorial to do it themselves.
Despite the fact that Kodi has done everything short of disallowing third party add-ons and repo addresses to dissuade people from utilizing pirated streams, their OSS software has been heavily circulated in this way, and since "Kodi" is the most prominently branded part of the process, it became the means by which non-Slashdot people identify "watching still-in-theaters movies, at home, for free".
And no, I don't own one...but at least five friends have asked me to jailbreak their Amazon Fire Sticks or Chromecasts for the purpose.
It's a wonder how companies like Broderbund, Sierra, and others survived back in the latter decades of the 20th Century without charging over and over and over for the same game or other piece of software?
Well, this is true. To be fair though, a whole lot of software has the problem of having matured, and done so many versions ago. Typically the number of additional features in the 2.0 release would easily double the 1.0 release, and 3.0 would streamline those and add even more broadly useful features than that. It was an easy sell to have people buy every version.
If I did a bit of research I could likely find a legit answer, but I'm having trouble coming up with even five new features in MS Word between Office 2007 and Office 2016 which I readily use. A four version difference and I can't think of even one occasionally-useful feature? That's software that was in bug-fix-only mode.
Adobe was in the same spot. I still rock my copy of Production Premium CS6 I bought back in 2012, primarily because I'm hard pressed to find even one feature in Creative Cloud that I need...and aside from 4K editing and one or two other random things, CS3 would be just fine. Photoshop, Acrobat, InDesign...basically everything they sell hit maturity at some point in the 2000s.
The examples go on and on of software that achieved success, but got to the point where upgrading every 3rd version was enough. It's tough for many companies to keep their staff paid that way.
Oh, that's right. Programmers back then continued to work on new products to also sell. It was almost like having a job.
Well, this is true. However, new products are always a gamble. Branching out from a core product and providing integration can help to an extent, and sometimes there's a clear market need like with InDesign (when *everybody* hated Quark but also used Photoshop, the DTP market was Adobe's for the taking)...but trying to keep a software company viable to be a place where careers can be made at some point will end up requiring a predatory practice of some kind. Intuit will milk the SMB Accounting cow because they artificially cripple their software after a few years. Oracle is notorious for needing their software installed by lawyers. Microsoft is selling spots on the Start Menu to the highest bidder. Quite simply, the three choices a software company has is: 1. Fold up when the software is done being written. 2. Employ some sort of predatory, artificial revenue stream. 3. Get bought out by another software company, probably one that employs a predatory, artificial revenue stream.
And if your software right out of the box requires constant updates, then you sold a defective product, and it is on you to make it right, without making your customer shell out even more $$ to fix your fuckups.
This, I completely agree with. I don't think anyone is expecting 100% code perfection, but reliable operation and "not being a massive security leak" should be reasons for patches...and by 'patches' I mean "a service pack or two", not "an infinite number of bug fixes".
For the record, I'm very much against subscription-based software for the very reasons you specify. I do, however, understand that software companies who have made their money on mature software are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Phone operating systems are required by law to track location data in order to provide E911 services. At the very least, the Phone application on your pocket supercomputer must be aware of your location 24/7 so that it can provide your location to emergency services. The law does not permit acquisition delay - the information must be transmitted to E911 the moment the call is picked up.
Uhm, yeah, okay...phones have been doing that since like 2005, and I'm not talking about Blackberry or WinMo, but Nokia candy bar phones had a GPS receiver in them for that purpose.
Somehow, that information got from the phone to E911 in a pre-Android, pre-iPhone environment, long before there was ever an infrastructure with which to collect and analyze that data by Google or Apple.
If it's an E911 thing, fine...but the entire issue here is that it's not up to Google to collect data for E911 unless they explicitly positioned themselves to do so at the expense of leaving it as a low-level function akin to what has been in phones since the Bush administration.
Microsoft is going to have to tiptoe through a minefield to avoid this royally backfiring.
First, MS will have to contend with Windows 7. They can yell "support ending in 2020" all they want, but there are no shortage of people who couldn't care less. If MS decides to update-bomb Win7 and prevent it from running, lawyers will be tripping over themselves to tell MS that they're in breach of contract.
Next, nobody else who makes OSes update at a cadence charges for those updates. OSX hasn't charged since 10.11 or something like that. Android and Linux have never charged (money, anyway). For Apple, the OS is a means to an end for selling hardware. For Google, Android is a means to an end for advertising and data harvesting. For Red Hat, Linux is a means to an end for support contracts. For free Linux distros, Linux is a means to an end for self fulfillment. Microsoft can't seem to turn Windows from "a product" into "a means to an end", yet they're trying to play by the same rules. It just doesn't work that way.
Microsoft then is going to face the ire of developers everywhere whose software is dependent on people paying their Windows bill. With Apple largely ignoring the professional market from a hardware perspective and Windows now requiring its own monthly fee, is Adobe going to sit idly by and watch their market get super shaky? Is Autodesk going to start relying on iPad users? How about a whole lot of niche software that runs doctor's offices and law firms and point-of-sale terminals? Are they going to just sit back and watch their call centers flood with customers being informed that they now have a new "Windows bill" to pay? It's only a matter of time before someone files a lawsuit...and in such a situation, it will be highly unlikely that MS will find a sympathetic judge when it is likely that everyone who still writes desktop software will be on the not-MS side of that one.
Finally, with so many government offices running Windows, it is only a matter of time before recurring Windows payments ends up on a desk of someone who is able - and willing - to legislate. MS isn't a Silicon Valley darling anymore; they're IBM, they're Xerox, they're Oracle - a massive company that is heavily entrenched, and can keep going so long as they are able to keep themselves out of the court of public opinion. Outside of maybe Washington state, legislation happening on the topic of subscription software likely won't go their way. While it might be wishful thinking, I wouldn't put it completely beyond the realm of possibility for Adobe and Autodesk to make their software run on Linux out of spite.
I can think of plenty of issues with this system off the top of my head...
1.) Storage and bandwidth costs double. Sure, it's not much for one phone, or even a thousand phones...but it *will* move the needle measurably for the telcos. 2.) There's no guarantee the FBI's private key won't be compromised. Snowden made it clear that the TLA's can't keep their sensitive data hidden well, and while I'm sure security has improved, it's a very, very lucrative target and a very, very small package to extricate. 3.) Even if it's never compromised and is only used by the FBI, it's not possible to verify that the message is being decrypted as the result of a warrant or other truly valid reason. 4.) This system doesn't address situations like data stored exclusively on the phone, only what is transmitted. Photos taken on the phone, for example, wouldn't be subject to this system. If the answer is that encrypted storage is possible to decrypt with the FBI private key, points 2 and 3 doubly apply. 5.) Revoking and reissuing the FBI key assumes the software vendors are able and willing to keep pushing updates to those phones. If they don't, then old phones will be forever compromised. 6.) There's nothing preventing the message being transmitted from itself being encrypted with yet another key...and the race begins all over again.
They keep talking about "compromise" as if Tim Cook and Larry Page have everyone's encryption keys in a file on their laptops that they refuse to hand over for convicted mobsters. That sort of mindset just does not reflect the nature of the situation.
Here is what it ultimately boils down to:
1. The user - and only the user - has the encryption key. 2. Companies are compelled to sell devices that cannot be secured at all, because a 'master key' lives somewhere.
That's it. Those are the two options. There is no way for the phone to verify if there is a warrant, or if the person inputting the master key is truly a law enforcement agent or not, or any other way to ensure the individual using the master key is justified in doing so, or any means of discriminating between a hack and a court order.
If Wray would like to come up with a third option that doesn't ultimately fall into the category of one of the other two, he's welcome to try. Smarter people have failed.
"provided pcAnywhere remote connection software... to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006,"
The same PCAnywhere that was so egregiously exploitable that Symantec - Symantec of all companies, gave out free copies of version 12 to users who owned literally any prior version no matter how old it was? THAT is the product that was being utilized on voting machines?!
It has become abundantly clear that any company selling technology-based solutions to the government which can successfully win a bid should under no circumstances be allowed to do the job.
Still, it seems MS can eventually recognize what works. This will give all those GUI-only IT "experts" fits, of course.
As one of those people likely to be maligned as one of those "GUI-only IT 'experts'", I'll throw a few quick thoughts out there for your consideration.
First off, CLI doesn't always scale down. Making a hundred users in a domain environment? Sure, that needs to be scripted. Making just one? in most cases, quicker in a GUI environment.
Next, GUIs make things discoverable. using "/?" and man pages is a start, but the results of things aren't always readily obvious; GUIs can better reflect this. Discoverability is also helpful in scenarios where a task is done once every four months - recently enough to generally-remember it, long ago enough to forget the precise syntax. StackOverflow can help with that, but if lookup time is factored into the time entering the command, it's basically-impossible to make the time saving argument.
Finally, at least for myself personally, I don't administer the same exact set of systems all day, every day. I deal with everybody's systems. Some run Hyper-V, others VMWare, some have Sonicwalls, others have Barracudas or SOHO routers. Supporting end users means I need a functional understanding of their software, meaning I can somewhat-interact with a number of pieces of software specific to law firms, doctor's offices, restaurants, retail establishments, and others. GUIs (well-done ones, anyway) provide cues so I can generally figure things out upon first use if I know the underlying concepts. CLI syntax isn't as easy to pick up, especially in situations where the goal is to pick it up fast.
Sometimes, GUI is the right tool for the job, and the people that administer them are dealing with many, many different kinds of systems. It doesn't make them dumb (though there are PLENTY of dumb ones), any more than knowing how to use a CLI doesn't inherently make one smart.
As a complete coincidence, according to the last census, people in the US age 45 and over account for 39.4 percent of the population. Expect the percentage of "live TV" viewers to drop almost directly as people born in 1975 and earlier age and drop off the end.
In other words, watching "live tv" is largely an old person's pastime. What I choose to call "the TV tray generation".[1] And it's dying out.
[1] Yes, I know 45 to 85 or thereabouts can arguably be called two generations. Work with me here.
See, I think the question's wording is going to alter the calculus in one form or another.
I've got more friends who will actively sit-down-and-expressly-watch a TV show on Netflix than they will watch it on the actual cable channel when it broadcasts. At the same time, many of those same people leave NCIS reruns or HGTV running in the background just to add a little noise to their apartment. I'm not saying the TV tray generation didn't do passive TV watching at all, but I think the lack of both streaming services as an alternative and internet services competing for attention (as well as generally-better radio content for 'apartment noise') factors in pretty heavily. I think it's similarly possible that Boomers and X-ers might be more willing to call apartment noise "TV watching", while millennials and Gen-Z might limit that term only to sitting down and explicitly watching a particular show.
As a non-American I find it odd to observe from a distance the esteem that a document written in 1787 is held.
Few other concepts from that era are held in unquestioning reverence by as many people. Horses and buggies? Leeches for tonsillitis? Nope we've moved on.
This statement ignores most major world religions, whose sacred texts predate 1787 by thousands of years. But, this is Slashdot, so let's sidestep the Bible, the Koran, the To'rah, and the Bhagavad Gita. The Kama Sutra goes back a cool millenium and a half, while admittedly not a single volume, Newtonian physics is still actively taught in high schools and colleges, as is Pythagorean theorem and all kinds of mathematical principles which long predate the US Constitution.
But suggest that a document in 1787 might require a bit of interpretation as society has moved on a bit since then? Somehow this is an unthinkable affront to the framers of said document.
The framers wrote *in the Constitution* Article 5, which states:
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
I'm very hard pressed to see alterations to the Consitution as an "unthinkable affront", though they did make it clear that amendments need to be about things a whole lot of people agree on, not just the wealthy or the coastline counties or the north or the south.
My own country holds our founders in a bit less regard. John A McDonald? Any decent highschooler will tell you he was an alcoholic, racist, womanizer and all around asshole. Why highschooler? Because we learn it in school. Canadians tend not to place our leaders in amber and preserve them forever more. We don't dietize them. We recognize their faults and virtues in equal measure.
Sometimes we do it to excess, but it might be worth thinking about. I'm reasonably sure the framers when they held it as self-evident that all men were created equal, they didn't intend to be placed on a pedestal for all time, nor I think would a person who truly believes that sentiment expect their words to be enshrined in amber, never to be looked at with a critical gaze?
This seems tangentially relevant. The founding fathers are not generally considered to be inerrant men without fault, but men who managed to have enough foresight to set up a government that didn't rely on a monarch like every major world power of the time, and gave more power to citizens (admittedly lacking on the 'women' and 'non-white' front for far longer than should have been) than most any other government in existence at the time. Their faults are known, but an esteem for the document itself does not inherently mandate putting the founding fathers on a pedestal.
Might it be time for a V2 rewrite as opposed to another patch release? Just a thought.
Well, the majority of the actual-Constitution involves the existence and operation of the Congressional houses, Executive branch, and Judicial branch. If we're doing a rewrite, I'm open to suggestions of government systems which aren't either pure democracy (Twitter and Reddit have proved that to be a generally-bad idea), a Monarchy (so much nope...),
Eventually the companies purchasing these ads will realize that this is all wasted money and the algorithms don't work.
No, I can see you've never worked with advertisers. Advertisers are very data driven. They always want to know how well their advertising campaigns have worked, and how much sales they've gotten from their advertising. If something isn't working, they stop doing it quickly because that's money wasted.
tl;dr internet advertising works, that's why it is still here.
I think the point being made isn't that internet advertising will cease to be relevant. Instead, that at some point, companies will start to look behind the curtain. They might like the deeper analytics that exists now vs. when they had little more than Nielsen ratings and newspaper circulation numbers to go on, but the question is whether advertising companies (e.g. Google and Facebook) can continue charging as much money as they are for the ads. All the analytics in the world won't justify the investments in online advertising if those ads don't ultimately turn into increased revenue for the company buying them. Once enough companies fail to get a good ROI on internet ads, it doesn't mean they won't continue to buy them, it means they won't be willing to pay as much for them. You are correct that internet advertising isn't going away, but the multibillion dollar valuation of Google and Facebook is subject to whether or not their revenue is sustained...and unlike Microsoft who still sells licenses to Windows and SQL Server, or Amazon who can stop all advertising tomorrow and still be sustainable by selling books and diapers and computing time, Google can't sustain itself very long by selling G-Suite, and Facebook doesn't even have something like that to fall back on.
tl;dr: ads won't go away, but the companies whose balance sheets fail with ad revenue being cut in half are going to be in trouble.
So, full disclosure, Nero gives me free beta/release copies for review and such. Even ignoring that, I feel the need to come to their defense just a bit, because it directly relates to the feature-bloat balance problem.
Yes, Nero's code got big. Far bigger than maybe it needs to be. However, Nero quickly found itself in a no-win situation.
In 1999, everybody with a CD burner had Adaptec CD Creator, with Nero being a purchased alternative or, in some cases, bundled with aftermarket burners. Either way, everybody was burning CDs, and paying $70 for a CD burning application made sense. Nero 6 will always be my favorite version as it was arguably the highlight of the title. However, as the iPod started to gain traction, high-capacity external hard disks that could sustain 40MBytes/sec over USB 2.0 became affordable, broadband started to make things like Carbonite viable, the need for dedicated CD burning software started to dwindle. Aside from Discspan's ability to auto-sort data to optimize multi-CD burns release in 2016 (I think), there really wasn't much to add to Burning ROM between v6 and 2016. I use Burning ROM when I need to burn discs because I happen to have a copy, but can I name the last time my CD burning needs weren't adequately met by InfraRecorder or IMGBurn? Off the top of my head...not really.
Nero opted to branch out into tangentially related media creation software, ultimately settling on making a consumer video editing title, along with a media streaming/library software that takes aim at Plex. Yes, it's big...but compared to Cyberlink, WinDVD, or Adobe, it's the smallest.
All that being said, its size is largely due to the shift in function. Sure, Nero isn't as ubiquitous as it once was, but do you know anyone still using Roxio? I doubt it.
With straight audio/data disc burning adequately covered by OSS and any version of Nero released since the Bush administration, the result is code bloat. The same happened to MS Office (can you name more than half a dozen useful new features since Office 2003?), iTunes, Photoshop, Winzip, PowerDVD, AutoCAD...the list of software in the same boat is quite extensive. Nero shifted focus. Microsoft went to subscriptions.
When CDs were introduced, they were hailed as the ultimate audio format--and not without good reason. They're more durable than cassettes or LP records. They don't have DRM, region codes or ridiculous menus to wade through like DVDs. The audio quality is fantastic without lossy (or otherwise!) digital compression. They were hyped as having "digitally perfect" sound, and although that may not have been strictly technically true, the specifications are actually pretty close to the capabilities of the human ear. It was marketed as a serious audiophile format, and it lived up to that.
I completely agree with the above statements and assessments.
And now its name is mud, the CD an object of widespread scorn. How did it come to this? Why did this brilliant thing fall so far out of fashion?
I personally put a pretty good portion of blame on the crushing dynamic range compression that so many rock-and-pop CDs are afflicted with. It's infuriating when disc after disc after disc comes out ruined (deliberately, it seems?) with bad mastering. It's got to where I'm afraid to buy any CD pressed after about 2000 or so. I'd rather get the LP release if I can, just because they generally don't lay on the super-compression.
I disagree with this part. It's trivial to refute - it's not that some well-mastered, high dynamic range recordings superseded the CD. On the contrary, the successor has been increasingly-poor-quality digitally compressed audio - MP3, AAC, OGG (courtesy of Spotify), and Youtube Videos (their own special hell of MP3). You may well value a high dynamic range and be willing to purchase 180-gram vinyl, but if that was a mainstream sentiment, iTunes would be selling FLAC and Best Buy would be selling LPs instead of CDs. Neither of these is the case.
The reason CDs fell out of vogue is because of everything except the audio quality aspect. Want to play a specific song while driving? "Hey Siri, play Highway to Hell" or something similar. Boom, it's playing. Have the same impulse with CDs? Open your 200-CD binder, flip through pages, try and find the CD with the song on it based on the corner-eye view of the cover art (good luck if it's all burned CDs, which themselves took hours longer to create than iTunes playlists), eject the CD currently in the stereo, put it somewhere it won't get scratched, insert the other one, and change to the correct track number...all with one hand and half an eye. It was approximately as dangerous as texting and driving.
Driving not the issue for you? Allow Gary Gulman to reminisce about the experience of owning a Discman for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... For the tl;dw crowd, they would only fit in the pocket of someone wearing pants with pockets explicitly sized for them. Battery life was relatively short (a problem greatly exacerbated by the use of the near-required anti-skip), and again, if you wanted more than *maybe* 20 songs, you had to carry around a CD wallet in addition to your CD player. It was a mess.
Oh, and just to put to bed the quality argument, CD players seldom came with headphones that were better than Earpods. I got a set with my first portable CD player (it came from Koss) that was halfway decent for a bundled pair of headband-style headphones, but pretty much everything after that was terrible in one way or another. While Beats inexplicably brought full-ear headphones back into vogue, nobody was wearing them at the time...and earbuds were outright atrocious; I never heard a pair that had anything that vaguely resembled bass until around 2011. Now sure, I'll absolutely agree that even a modestly priced set of bookshelf speakers and a budget Marantz receiver will produce an audible difference between a CD and a Youtube video...but I would say that 95% of CDs were never listened to on hardware that could make the difference audible.
What killed CDs was the evolution of a more convenient means of li
Worth asking why GNU/Linux, Diaspora and DuckDuckGo are not a viable alternative.
The assorted Linux distros vary in their usability. Mint and Kubuntu are pretty good, but there is no shortage of areas of inconsistency. A user with KDE isn't going to be able to have a useful discussion with a user running Cinnamon in the same way users share tips and tricks about using their iPhones. Most people have one or two pieces of software or hardware they use regularly that are Windows/OSX-only, with no FOSS alternative. If they don't, it's because they're used to Chromebooks, which are viable primarily because they are direct lines to the Google ecosystem.
Diaspora isn't a viable alternative to Facebook because of the network effect: Nobody is on it because nobody is on it. A quick search on my iPhone didn't show a mobile app for it either, making it far less accessible than Facebook or Instagram.
Duck Duck Go is the closest one in this list to being a viable alternative. Its search results aren't bad for garden variety internet searches, but they do have trouble with the local stuff (e.g. "sushi near me"). Additionally, DDG doesn't offer e-mail service, browser-based document creation and management, a mobile app for driving directions, or other aspects of Google's portfolio that lots of people still use daily.
It is possible to use the things you describe. It does, however, take lots of effort for most people. The article summary is about how Microsoft and Facebook make choosing the privacy-conscious options less apparent to end users and that being a problem for them. The people who are fooled by color contrasts and dimmed light bulb icons are the ones who are not going to lobotomize their workflows and make things far more difficult for themselves in order to stick it to The Man.
Laptop vendors can do more than new CPUs to bring some usefulness and features.
I agree with your point. I disagree with most of your examples.
Being able to have an OS in ROM would be handy, if only to have a way to restore an OS without having to worry about recovery media.
You'd need MS to agree to what basically amounts to shipping whatever the current slipstream build at the time of manufacture onto an internal MicroSD card. I mean, okay, but with them turning Windows into an OS Reinstall every six months, I see a ROM-based solution as being difficult to solve in practice.
If a Tandy MS-DOS clone back in the 1980s can do this, so can a PC vendor.
Tandy's MS-DOS clone was about 200kbytes that basically didn't change and used very rudimentary commands to interface with hardware. Literally none of those things apply to laptops today. What might make a bit more sense to put in ROM, however, is something like what Apple does - enough OS to download the real OS from the internet.
Other things come to mind as well, be it the ability to charge (albeit slowly) on USB-C for beefier laptops
With USB-C not quite in common parlance yet, this function would be lost on most users. Additionally, USB-C still hasn't been adequately commoditized such that I'd trust lower end chargers. For users who need that sort of charging capability, spare laptop chargers can easily be had for $20 on eBay.
allowing for multiple USB chargers to charge a battery at the same time
to then use multiple outlets? That seems far less convenient than a spare DC charger.
built in vitualization and encryption so one can have their gaming stuff, their work stuff, personal stuff, and stuff nobody should see, all on one laptop
There's a few issues here. First off, that's purely a software thing and has nothing to do with hardware. Laptop manufacturers seldom put that sort of first party software on their computers upon shipping because a lot of people wouldn't use it; software like Veracrypt has existed long enough that people who value their privacy to any level are already using it. Of those that do, a lot would be calling support because they forgot their password or put something in X container instead of Y container, making it an utter nightmare for phone support. Finally, even if Samsung or whoever *did* do this *and* managed to sort out the support aspects *and* it gained any sort of traction, you'd see alternatives pop up the next day and remove the advantage. If nothing else, QubesOS already makes all of this possible.
perhaps using something like PhonebookFS to further hide the presence of other VMs.
The new Blackberry phones have similar functionality. I'm not holding my breath for them to sell in droves. I just don't think that sort of isolation is truly valuable to anyone who isn't already using an existing solution.
Another idea would be to have better support for external GPU breakout boxes. That way, one can go from running command line stuff to Crysis fairly easily, as well as providing fast access to additional storage.
I do think there's something to be said for standardizing on an external GPU connector, but I feel like it's going to be tough for eGPUs to leave a niche. Gaming laptops don't need them, mainstream laptops probably don't have enough of a system bus to leverage them, small-but-i7 laptops would need a monitor as well, and the eGPUs would have to be inexpensive enough to not make a gaming rig a better investment.
As for storage, NAS is the way to go in most cases. From a DIY FreeNAS to an inexpensive-but-quick QNAP to a beautiful and simple Synology, there are no shortage of ways to get terabytes of data at you fingertips using garden variety ethernet. If that's not doing it for you, USB-C external drives are alrea
In some cases, but not all, the intruder also obtained payment card details were also stolen, such as the name printed on the payment card, the card's number, and its expiration date.
Seriously. How is it possible that this data is not stored on hosts on separate, fortified networks, with decryption keys available only on other locked down machines that exist only to generate bank settlements and/or transmit billing information to the hotel as needed?
There's not enough information to verify whether what happened was truly a function of the software itself. Allow me to illustrate...
A client at work and I got into a pretty bad argument at one point. They use a hosted Citrix app to book the things they book (don't want to say the name). The client's issue was that she had trouble copy/pasting credit card numbers into the PoS software, which "she used to be able to do". I told her I was not going to fix it, because she shouldn't be storing the credit card numbers in the Citrix app. "But then the clients need to read me their credit card numbers every time!" "Yes. That's the point." "These people pay thousands of dollars monthly; I don't want to inconvenience them and potentially use these regular clients!" "I am pretty sure that every single one of them would prefer to do that than to have their credit card numbers live in a system that is not even remotely PCI compliant, and for which your merchant account would likely drop you if they knew you were putting all of these card numbers at risk that way, preventing you from taking their credit card at all." "But it's fine because it's in the 'notes' section. It's not labeled 'credit card number', so if the system were hacked, nobody would know to look for them." "If you can get your payment processor to tell me it's okay to store credit card numbers that way, not only will I fix the issue, I won't bill you for the time. Do you want me to get them on the phone, or would you rather do it?" "No, it's fine. I'll just write them down in an Excel spreadsheet." "You cannot retain your client's credit card numbers in any form and retain your PCI compliance. Period. If your computer gets hacked and the hackers take that file, I guarantee you that the best case scenario is that you have lost every one of those clients, permanently, with the worst case involving multiple lawsuits. Moreover, the only reason you won't lose them beforehand is because I sincerely doubt they're giving it to you knowing that you have every intention of storing it in a very insecure manner. I know it's a pain, but the extra 30 seconds it will take them each order is preferable to every one of them than disputing credit card fraud. For the sake of your clients and the sake of your business, you *must* stop storing credit card numbers on your system, at all, period, full stop. Feel free to have the owner come out and discuss it with me, I will make the same case to him." "...okay, fine."
The user was entering credit card numbers where they weren't supposed to, and the software wasn't smart enough to detect a credit card number in a generic 'notes' field. While it's entirely possible the booking software was poorly written, it's equally possible that it was being used in a way where the end users were intentionally making end runs around safety mechanisms.
Individual end users can generally be trained. In aggregate, they will take convenience over security 10 out of 10 times. If they don't, they're not end users, they're infosec.
That's because Apple bought out the company that made the touchpads. PC users had to live with the crappy ones from Synaptics.
Synaptics touchpads aren't bad, as long as they retain the physical buttons. The ones with the virtual button zones are invariably crap, but Synaptics does have a pretty good feature set. They can be set to emulate most of the multitouch gestures of the Macbooks, or they can be set to turn all of that off. My favorite feature of theirs is Chiral scrolling, that allows an edge scroll to be performed infinitely by using a circular motion once the top/bottom edge is reached.
If you want the textbook definition of a crappy touchpad, the company you're looking for is Sentelic. I got a laptop with one of those once, and it was the primary reason I got rid of it. The palm detection was atrocious, the buttons were impossible to avoid while typing, its gesture response was inconsistent-at-best, and it was infuriating that there was no option to disable tap-to-click. It was Just. The. Worst.
So yeah...while the Macbook trackpads are excellent in their own right, on the PC side I will take a Synaptics touchpad any day of the week.
Wow...hows those rose colored glasses working for ya? Making the past all rosey are they? Because i played plenty of RPGs (and Mech and flight and shooters) during the 90s when anybody could run their own server and play and ya know what you got? CHEATING, tons and tons and tons of cheating!
First, keep in mind the number of single player games of late is not as high as the multiplayer games. I didn't have the issues you had during the 90's because I played by myself. Mechwarrior 2 and Descent were great like that. With more games targeting multiplayer for lots of mostly-money-driven reasons, there's more with which to take issue.
The second reason I didn't have this problem is because of this idea of only playing with people I knew. I would play multiplayer with real life friends, rather than randos online. Even those who didn't cheat simply had more time to play the games and were invariably above my skill level. Great for them, but there's no fun to be had there. When my friends and I scheduled a game (or, commonly, got together and LAN partied), half the fun was being able to rag on my friends for being better or worse. It was far more enjoyable than playing against 14 year olds who thought teabagging was actually funny.
Personally I'd rather play an online game where a company actually monitors and bans cheaters, nice to know if I lose in a game its because I fucked up NOT because someone is using a trainer.
Moderated servers would be just fine, but let my friends and I run our own. Life has happened so getting together for a LAN party has been a bit of a mess of late...but logistics notwithstanding, there's no technical reason we can't be playing multiplayer games whose servers would have been long gone if the companies didn't put the onus on end users to run them. In 2018, there's no technical reason why both official servers and unofficial servers can't coexist, aside from the fact that game developers have made games which ship with dedicated server builds a critically endangered species.
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You seem to want to punish manufacturers for wanting to stay in business. What you propose is all stick with no carrot and would greatly increase the cost of new products to the detriment of the buyers (possibly majority) who don't really want to have the product last for more than a relatively short time.
Because the intent isn't to punish manufacturers. The intent is to punish bad practices. If a company sells a product that is subsidized by my future spending, then they aren't selling the product at a sustainable price point.
It is not new technology that drives the cycle. It is primarily more evolved application of old technology, and it happens fast - much faster than devices usually wear out even when non-repairable.
Most manufacturers want to stay in business with a product long term. To do this, they must continually improve the product.
The only way these two thoughts are harmonious is with planned obsolescence. If a product is improved enough, people will purchase them for that reason. That seems to be your logic here.
There will always be new versions that incorporate lessons learned or engineering development that was not ready at the time of an earlier product release.
...So then sell the improved product? If they are truly improvements, then let the public buy them. Eventually, the product will have enough cumulative improvements to warrant a purchase.
Even if the gains are fully in software, how do the companies get paid for the work of making them if they just give those gains to the old products forever?
I concur with this...but really it seems that this is only a problem in the context of operating systems. Sure, we can argue if the most recent Android release should be free, free-X-years-from-purchase-date, or a paid upgrade...but the bigger issue I have in this particular example is that it's very difficult to find a phone with an unlocked bootloader, and there's no Google-supplied analog to iTunes that allows end users to back up and upgrade their OS manually. The "OTA-only, un-declinable, only once carriers and OEMs agree" update process is a complete mess.
With the current system, they only gain via new sales.
Most consumers want those new features.
And some don't...but even if they did, the antiquated idea of "selling software" had been working for software vendors since the Reagan administration. I don't think it's impossible for most people to justify having to buy the new features.
Many, if not most, throw away or sell/trade their old devices for pennies on the dollar to get those new features - even when the old devices are in "perfect" working condition.
...and they're bought by people who are willing to put up with the current feature set.
This is because they aren't in perfect working condition. They are broke because they don't have the new features. There may be a scratch or two or some minor annoyances like the battery doesn't have quite the umph it used to. But if they look at the cost of fixing those versus getting a new device without those flaws AND with the new features, most will talk themselves into a pricier trade-in deal instead of a cheaper repair. Why? Because they feel they are wasting their money on the cheaper repair that leaves them missing out on new capabilities.
I'm pretty sure approximately 100% of iPhone owners weren't expecting FaceID to be retroactively added to their iPhone, but the golden 'duh' award here is that selling an iPhone with a new battery would improve its resale value to someone who is upgrading from an even-older iPhone.
So, from both the manufacturers' and most consumers' point of view, the system is not broken.
If you paint with a broad enough brush and cite no examples...yeah. However, the real issue is that there are a who
See, the whole "implantable computer chip" thing has been a recurring thing since the late 1970's; the movie "A Thief in the Night" was the first to widely circulate the idea.
However, on the topic of "the Mark of the Beast", implantable RFIDs aren't what worries me. China is currently doing the heavy lifting.
Instead of FICA scores, China's got social credit scores through Alibaba. One person not paying their bills affects everyone else who does, so they are far more likely to be ostracized. Many places won't rent you an apartment without a social credit score, and not having one can impact even your social circle.
By time chip implanting becomes mandatory, social credit scores will be the foundation of trust upon which buying and selling is founded. It's Social Credit that is truly the Mark of the Beast. The implanted chip will simply be the final step.
I find it interesting that important, critical even, systems such as police bodycams and election voting machines in this age appear to have almost an intentional absence of any sort of integrity mechanisms.
Even more infuriating to me is that these devices do not implement even basic security measures, but smartphones have gotten progressively more difficult to root - signed bootloaders and eFuses make it onto devices consumers pay for, but they're absent from devices explicitly intended to ensure security?
These measures are even more present in digital slot machines, where firmware needs to be byte-for-byte what has been approved by regulators...meaning that gambling has greater protection than voting.
The only thing more sad about the priorities illustrated here is the fact that I'm not actually surprised.
'Oh great, now the vermin are breeding
This brings up a whole host of mental images. I mean, the most obvious one is the "Rule 34" implication of Alexa and Cortana together. However, something tells me that looking past the attempts to humanize them and instead picturing them as the code they are would be far more horrifying. If you're a sysadmin, self-replicating code has been around for some time; we call them 'viruses'. If you're a developer and code replicates beyond your control, you're either fighting a massive memory leak or you've just put yourself out of work...and neither of those scenarios have the same appeal as Alexa and Cortana getting their swerve on...
Sorry, but that's crap. All businesses which have had huge successes selling something new to the market had to deal with the leveling off effect, and the vast majority kept right on going afterwards. In previous generations those businesses would have been selling objects, and succeeded (often massively) despite the fact that they still had to pay out serious money to keep manufacturing the items they sold, whether there were updates to it or not.
Yes, but there are businesses where there are, for lack of a better term, "de facto subscriptions"- like restaurants and supermarkets, since I will need to eat daily. Other businesses benefit from thermodynamics; cars and toaster ovens and clothing wear out eventually. Perpetually licensed software doesn't wear out, and if I buy it once there's no need to ever buy the same version of the product again.
A finished program's incremental cost is zero, and companies selling them can't make a go of it without sleazy business practices? Really? Do you know how ludicrous that sounds to anyone who's run any other kind of business?
Not ludicrous at all, actually. At some point, everyone who needs a particular piece of software will already have it. The issue is on the demand side - a piece of mature software has only so many customers, meaning that the revenue a particular piece of software can earn will decrease with time rather than increase, and commercial software vendors still need to pay rent and payroll. The incremental cost of a finished program is only 'zero' if the company lays off all its developers and closes its offices and distributes the software on a torrent; even if a piece of software is not developed further but is still sold to the asymptotic client base the company itself needs to remain solvent.
Now, I'm wagering that your response is going to be "so then developers should work on different software!" Well, that works, but only if a development firm can consistently produce disparate pieces of software that are all commercially successful with relatively little overlap. It's an incredible feat to make happen.
Software's problem is actually that the companies creating it have gotten used to truly obscene profits, and built their businesses around protecting those margins rather than producing a quality product. A company producing a mature program which only needed updating to keep up with changes in the environment in which it ran and the occasional feature request could easily support itself; its owners and employees would just have to accept that they'd make a good living, but nobody was going to be a billionaire.
I agree with this to a certain extent, but it is tough to make the raw numbers work. Prior to Creative Cloud, Photoshop cost $699. Let's pretend CS2 was the 'finished' version, with subsequent releases exactly what you describe - Formal Windows 7/8/10 support, a minor feature request here or there, and so forth. Do you think they'd be able to sell de facto service packs at $700 a pop? Let's assume that $600 of that was profit...would everyone buy $99 service packs every few years? Even if everyone decided they would be comfortable with a middle class lifestyle, I'm hard pressed to say that $99 service packs would be enough to keep everyone employed. Let's pretend that $199 would be able to sustain everyone...well, first off that's about the same price as they're charging for CC now, and second, it's high enough for there to be greater expectations on what comes in those service packs, especially since Serif is selling Affinity Photo for $50 outright.
Like I said, we agree that subscription software is undesirable, and it's why I don't subscribe to anything. However, I really don't see how the three options I presented don't describe the majority of outcomes for commercial software vendors.
Here's the real-world answer:
Many different streaming appliances - but most commonly Amazon Fire Sticks - can be jailbroken to load additional software onto them. Kodi is the most common of the programs that are added. The reason for this is not because of Kodi itself, but because the third party repositories that allow pirated movie streams and other similar media to be consumed with relative ease, and obviously without paying for it or even the annoyance of picking out which streaming app has what, and so forth.
Less-tech-savvy folks tend to prefer these devices over traditional torrent downloads because ISPs have been stepping up on the *AA letters when public trackers are used. Unlike Plex or other DLNA servers they don't require a local server to be implemented, and the ability to buy a pre-configured device means that they don't even have to watch a Youtube tutorial to do it themselves.
Despite the fact that Kodi has done everything short of disallowing third party add-ons and repo addresses to dissuade people from utilizing pirated streams, their OSS software has been heavily circulated in this way, and since "Kodi" is the most prominently branded part of the process, it became the means by which non-Slashdot people identify "watching still-in-theaters movies, at home, for free".
And no, I don't own one...but at least five friends have asked me to jailbreak their Amazon Fire Sticks or Chromecasts for the purpose.
It's a wonder how companies like Broderbund, Sierra, and others survived back in the latter decades of the 20th Century without charging over and over and over for the same game or other piece of software?
Well, this is true. To be fair though, a whole lot of software has the problem of having matured, and done so many versions ago. Typically the number of additional features in the 2.0 release would easily double the 1.0 release, and 3.0 would streamline those and add even more broadly useful features than that. It was an easy sell to have people buy every version.
If I did a bit of research I could likely find a legit answer, but I'm having trouble coming up with even five new features in MS Word between Office 2007 and Office 2016 which I readily use. A four version difference and I can't think of even one occasionally-useful feature? That's software that was in bug-fix-only mode.
Adobe was in the same spot. I still rock my copy of Production Premium CS6 I bought back in 2012, primarily because I'm hard pressed to find even one feature in Creative Cloud that I need...and aside from 4K editing and one or two other random things, CS3 would be just fine. Photoshop, Acrobat, InDesign...basically everything they sell hit maturity at some point in the 2000s.
The examples go on and on of software that achieved success, but got to the point where upgrading every 3rd version was enough. It's tough for many companies to keep their staff paid that way.
Oh, that's right. Programmers back then continued to work on new products to also sell. It was almost like having a job.
Well, this is true. However, new products are always a gamble. Branching out from a core product and providing integration can help to an extent, and sometimes there's a clear market need like with InDesign (when *everybody* hated Quark but also used Photoshop, the DTP market was Adobe's for the taking)...but trying to keep a software company viable to be a place where careers can be made at some point will end up requiring a predatory practice of some kind. Intuit will milk the SMB Accounting cow because they artificially cripple their software after a few years. Oracle is notorious for needing their software installed by lawyers. Microsoft is selling spots on the Start Menu to the highest bidder. Quite simply, the three choices a software company has is:
1. Fold up when the software is done being written.
2. Employ some sort of predatory, artificial revenue stream.
3. Get bought out by another software company, probably one that employs a predatory, artificial revenue stream.
And if your software right out of the box requires constant updates, then you sold a defective product, and it is on you to make it right, without making your customer shell out even more $$ to fix your fuckups.
This, I completely agree with. I don't think anyone is expecting 100% code perfection, but reliable operation and "not being a massive security leak" should be reasons for patches...and by 'patches' I mean "a service pack or two", not "an infinite number of bug fixes".
For the record, I'm very much against subscription-based software for the very reasons you specify. I do, however, understand that software companies who have made their money on mature software are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Phone operating systems are required by law to track location data in order to provide E911 services. At the very least, the Phone application on your pocket supercomputer must be aware of your location 24/7 so that it can provide your location to emergency services. The law does not permit acquisition delay - the information must be transmitted to E911 the moment the call is picked up.
Uhm, yeah, okay...phones have been doing that since like 2005, and I'm not talking about Blackberry or WinMo, but Nokia candy bar phones had a GPS receiver in them for that purpose.
Somehow, that information got from the phone to E911 in a pre-Android, pre-iPhone environment, long before there was ever an infrastructure with which to collect and analyze that data by Google or Apple.
If it's an E911 thing, fine...but the entire issue here is that it's not up to Google to collect data for E911 unless they explicitly positioned themselves to do so at the expense of leaving it as a low-level function akin to what has been in phones since the Bush administration.
Microsoft is going to have to tiptoe through a minefield to avoid this royally backfiring.
First, MS will have to contend with Windows 7. They can yell "support ending in 2020" all they want, but there are no shortage of people who couldn't care less. If MS decides to update-bomb Win7 and prevent it from running, lawyers will be tripping over themselves to tell MS that they're in breach of contract.
Next, nobody else who makes OSes update at a cadence charges for those updates. OSX hasn't charged since 10.11 or something like that. Android and Linux have never charged (money, anyway). For Apple, the OS is a means to an end for selling hardware. For Google, Android is a means to an end for advertising and data harvesting. For Red Hat, Linux is a means to an end for support contracts. For free Linux distros, Linux is a means to an end for self fulfillment. Microsoft can't seem to turn Windows from "a product" into "a means to an end", yet they're trying to play by the same rules. It just doesn't work that way.
Microsoft then is going to face the ire of developers everywhere whose software is dependent on people paying their Windows bill. With Apple largely ignoring the professional market from a hardware perspective and Windows now requiring its own monthly fee, is Adobe going to sit idly by and watch their market get super shaky? Is Autodesk going to start relying on iPad users? How about a whole lot of niche software that runs doctor's offices and law firms and point-of-sale terminals? Are they going to just sit back and watch their call centers flood with customers being informed that they now have a new "Windows bill" to pay? It's only a matter of time before someone files a lawsuit...and in such a situation, it will be highly unlikely that MS will find a sympathetic judge when it is likely that everyone who still writes desktop software will be on the not-MS side of that one.
Finally, with so many government offices running Windows, it is only a matter of time before recurring Windows payments ends up on a desk of someone who is able - and willing - to legislate. MS isn't a Silicon Valley darling anymore; they're IBM, they're Xerox, they're Oracle - a massive company that is heavily entrenched, and can keep going so long as they are able to keep themselves out of the court of public opinion. Outside of maybe Washington state, legislation happening on the topic of subscription software likely won't go their way. While it might be wishful thinking, I wouldn't put it completely beyond the realm of possibility for Adobe and Autodesk to make their software run on Linux out of spite.
I can think of plenty of issues with this system off the top of my head...
1.) Storage and bandwidth costs double. Sure, it's not much for one phone, or even a thousand phones...but it *will* move the needle measurably for the telcos.
2.) There's no guarantee the FBI's private key won't be compromised. Snowden made it clear that the TLA's can't keep their sensitive data hidden well, and while I'm sure security has improved, it's a very, very lucrative target and a very, very small package to extricate.
3.) Even if it's never compromised and is only used by the FBI, it's not possible to verify that the message is being decrypted as the result of a warrant or other truly valid reason.
4.) This system doesn't address situations like data stored exclusively on the phone, only what is transmitted. Photos taken on the phone, for example, wouldn't be subject to this system. If the answer is that encrypted storage is possible to decrypt with the FBI private key, points 2 and 3 doubly apply.
5.) Revoking and reissuing the FBI key assumes the software vendors are able and willing to keep pushing updates to those phones. If they don't, then old phones will be forever compromised.
6.) There's nothing preventing the message being transmitted from itself being encrypted with yet another key...and the race begins all over again.
They keep talking about "compromise" as if Tim Cook and Larry Page have everyone's encryption keys in a file on their laptops that they refuse to hand over for convicted mobsters. That sort of mindset just does not reflect the nature of the situation.
Here is what it ultimately boils down to:
1. The user - and only the user - has the encryption key.
2. Companies are compelled to sell devices that cannot be secured at all, because a 'master key' lives somewhere.
That's it. Those are the two options. There is no way for the phone to verify if there is a warrant, or if the person inputting the master key is truly a law enforcement agent or not, or any other way to ensure the individual using the master key is justified in doing so, or any means of discriminating between a hack and a court order.
If Wray would like to come up with a third option that doesn't ultimately fall into the category of one of the other two, he's welcome to try. Smarter people have failed.
by Opportunist ( 166417 )
Now where is the kickback in that?
Username checks out.
"provided pcAnywhere remote connection software ... to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006,"
The same PCAnywhere that was so egregiously exploitable that Symantec - Symantec of all companies, gave out free copies of version 12 to users who owned literally any prior version no matter how old it was? THAT is the product that was being utilized on voting machines?!
It has become abundantly clear that any company selling technology-based solutions to the government which can successfully win a bid should under no circumstances be allowed to do the job.
Still, it seems MS can eventually recognize what works. This will give all those GUI-only IT "experts" fits, of course.
As one of those people likely to be maligned as one of those "GUI-only IT 'experts'", I'll throw a few quick thoughts out there for your consideration.
First off, CLI doesn't always scale down. Making a hundred users in a domain environment? Sure, that needs to be scripted. Making just one? in most cases, quicker in a GUI environment.
Next, GUIs make things discoverable. using "/?" and man pages is a start, but the results of things aren't always readily obvious; GUIs can better reflect this. Discoverability is also helpful in scenarios where a task is done once every four months - recently enough to generally-remember it, long ago enough to forget the precise syntax. StackOverflow can help with that, but if lookup time is factored into the time entering the command, it's basically-impossible to make the time saving argument.
Finally, at least for myself personally, I don't administer the same exact set of systems all day, every day. I deal with everybody's systems. Some run Hyper-V, others VMWare, some have Sonicwalls, others have Barracudas or SOHO routers. Supporting end users means I need a functional understanding of their software, meaning I can somewhat-interact with a number of pieces of software specific to law firms, doctor's offices, restaurants, retail establishments, and others. GUIs (well-done ones, anyway) provide cues so I can generally figure things out upon first use if I know the underlying concepts. CLI syntax isn't as easy to pick up, especially in situations where the goal is to pick it up fast.
Sometimes, GUI is the right tool for the job, and the people that administer them are dealing with many, many different kinds of systems. It doesn't make them dumb (though there are PLENTY of dumb ones), any more than knowing how to use a CLI doesn't inherently make one smart.
As a complete coincidence, according to the last census, people in the US age 45 and over account for 39.4 percent of the population. Expect the percentage of "live TV" viewers to drop almost directly as people born in 1975 and earlier age and drop off the end.
In other words, watching "live tv" is largely an old person's pastime. What I choose to call "the TV tray generation".[1] And it's dying out.
[1] Yes, I know 45 to 85 or thereabouts can arguably be called two generations. Work with me here.
See, I think the question's wording is going to alter the calculus in one form or another.
I've got more friends who will actively sit-down-and-expressly-watch a TV show on Netflix than they will watch it on the actual cable channel when it broadcasts. At the same time, many of those same people leave NCIS reruns or HGTV running in the background just to add a little noise to their apartment. I'm not saying the TV tray generation didn't do passive TV watching at all, but I think the lack of both streaming services as an alternative and internet services competing for attention (as well as generally-better radio content for 'apartment noise') factors in pretty heavily. I think it's similarly possible that Boomers and X-ers might be more willing to call apartment noise "TV watching", while millennials and Gen-Z might limit that term only to sitting down and explicitly watching a particular show.
As a non-American I find it odd to observe from a distance the esteem that a document written in 1787 is held.
Few other concepts from that era are held in unquestioning reverence by as many people. Horses and buggies? Leeches for tonsillitis? Nope we've moved on.
This statement ignores most major world religions, whose sacred texts predate 1787 by thousands of years. But, this is Slashdot, so let's sidestep the Bible, the Koran, the To'rah, and the Bhagavad Gita. The Kama Sutra goes back a cool millenium and a half, while admittedly not a single volume, Newtonian physics is still actively taught in high schools and colleges, as is Pythagorean theorem and all kinds of mathematical principles which long predate the US Constitution.
But suggest that a document in 1787 might require a bit of interpretation as society has moved on a bit since then? Somehow this is an unthinkable affront to the framers of said document.
The framers wrote *in the Constitution* Article 5, which states:
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
I'm very hard pressed to see alterations to the Consitution as an "unthinkable affront", though they did make it clear that amendments need to be about things a whole lot of people agree on, not just the wealthy or the coastline counties or the north or the south.
My own country holds our founders in a bit less regard. John A McDonald? Any decent highschooler will tell you he was an alcoholic, racist, womanizer and all around asshole. Why highschooler? Because we learn it in school. Canadians tend not to place our leaders in amber and preserve them forever more. We don't dietize them. We recognize their faults and virtues in equal measure.
Sometimes we do it to excess, but it might be worth thinking about. I'm reasonably sure the framers when they held it as self-evident that all men were created equal, they didn't intend to be placed on a pedestal for all time, nor I think would a person who truly believes that sentiment expect their words to be enshrined in amber, never to be looked at with a critical gaze?
This seems tangentially relevant. The founding fathers are not generally considered to be inerrant men without fault, but men who managed to have enough foresight to set up a government that didn't rely on a monarch like every major world power of the time, and gave more power to citizens (admittedly lacking on the 'women' and 'non-white' front for far longer than should have been) than most any other government in existence at the time. Their faults are known, but an esteem for the document itself does not inherently mandate putting the founding fathers on a pedestal.
Might it be time for a V2 rewrite as opposed to another patch release? Just a thought.
Well, the majority of the actual-Constitution involves the existence and operation of the Congressional houses, Executive branch, and Judicial branch. If we're doing a rewrite, I'm open to suggestions of government systems which aren't either pure democracy (Twitter and Reddit have proved that to be a generally-bad idea), a Monarchy (so much nope...),
Eventually the companies purchasing these ads will realize that this is all wasted money and the algorithms don't work.
No, I can see you've never worked with advertisers. Advertisers are very data driven. They always want to know how well their advertising campaigns have worked, and how much sales they've gotten from their advertising. If something isn't working, they stop doing it quickly because that's money wasted.
tl;dr internet advertising works, that's why it is still here.
I think the point being made isn't that internet advertising will cease to be relevant. Instead, that at some point, companies will start to look behind the curtain. They might like the deeper analytics that exists now vs. when they had little more than Nielsen ratings and newspaper circulation numbers to go on, but the question is whether advertising companies (e.g. Google and Facebook) can continue charging as much money as they are for the ads. All the analytics in the world won't justify the investments in online advertising if those ads don't ultimately turn into increased revenue for the company buying them. Once enough companies fail to get a good ROI on internet ads, it doesn't mean they won't continue to buy them, it means they won't be willing to pay as much for them. You are correct that internet advertising isn't going away, but the multibillion dollar valuation of Google and Facebook is subject to whether or not their revenue is sustained...and unlike Microsoft who still sells licenses to Windows and SQL Server, or Amazon who can stop all advertising tomorrow and still be sustainable by selling books and diapers and computing time, Google can't sustain itself very long by selling G-Suite, and Facebook doesn't even have something like that to fall back on.
tl;dr: ads won't go away, but the companies whose balance sheets fail with ad revenue being cut in half are going to be in trouble.
Maybe they will eventually become one company: Micro-Amazo-Google, and carry insufficient management to a new level.
And then they'll buy what's left of Sears, the merge with Wal-Mart and Target. The resulting company will be named "Buy-n-Large".
So, full disclosure, Nero gives me free beta/release copies for review and such. Even ignoring that, I feel the need to come to their defense just a bit, because it directly relates to the feature-bloat balance problem.
Yes, Nero's code got big. Far bigger than maybe it needs to be. However, Nero quickly found itself in a no-win situation.
In 1999, everybody with a CD burner had Adaptec CD Creator, with Nero being a purchased alternative or, in some cases, bundled with aftermarket burners. Either way, everybody was burning CDs, and paying $70 for a CD burning application made sense. Nero 6 will always be my favorite version as it was arguably the highlight of the title. However, as the iPod started to gain traction, high-capacity external hard disks that could sustain 40MBytes/sec over USB 2.0 became affordable, broadband started to make things like Carbonite viable, the need for dedicated CD burning software started to dwindle. Aside from Discspan's ability to auto-sort data to optimize multi-CD burns release in 2016 (I think), there really wasn't much to add to Burning ROM between v6 and 2016. I use Burning ROM when I need to burn discs because I happen to have a copy, but can I name the last time my CD burning needs weren't adequately met by InfraRecorder or IMGBurn? Off the top of my head...not really.
Nero opted to branch out into tangentially related media creation software, ultimately settling on making a consumer video editing title, along with a media streaming/library software that takes aim at Plex. Yes, it's big...but compared to Cyberlink, WinDVD, or Adobe, it's the smallest.
All that being said, its size is largely due to the shift in function. Sure, Nero isn't as ubiquitous as it once was, but do you know anyone still using Roxio? I doubt it.
With straight audio/data disc burning adequately covered by OSS and any version of Nero released since the Bush administration, the result is code bloat. The same happened to MS Office (can you name more than half a dozen useful new features since Office 2003?), iTunes, Photoshop, Winzip, PowerDVD, AutoCAD...the list of software in the same boat is quite extensive. Nero shifted focus. Microsoft went to subscriptions.
When CDs were introduced, they were hailed as the ultimate audio format--and not without good reason. They're more durable than cassettes or LP records. They don't have DRM, region codes or ridiculous menus to wade through like DVDs. The audio quality is fantastic without lossy (or otherwise!) digital compression. They were hyped as having "digitally perfect" sound, and although that may not have been strictly technically true, the specifications are actually pretty close to the capabilities of the human ear. It was marketed as a serious audiophile format, and it lived up to that.
I completely agree with the above statements and assessments.
And now its name is mud, the CD an object of widespread scorn. How did it come to this? Why did this brilliant thing fall so far out of fashion?
I personally put a pretty good portion of blame on the crushing dynamic range compression that so many rock-and-pop CDs are afflicted with. It's infuriating when disc after disc after disc comes out ruined (deliberately, it seems?) with bad mastering. It's got to where I'm afraid to buy any CD pressed after about 2000 or so. I'd rather get the LP release if I can, just because they generally don't lay on the super-compression.
I disagree with this part. It's trivial to refute - it's not that some well-mastered, high dynamic range recordings superseded the CD. On the contrary, the successor has been increasingly-poor-quality digitally compressed audio - MP3, AAC, OGG (courtesy of Spotify), and Youtube Videos (their own special hell of MP3). You may well value a high dynamic range and be willing to purchase 180-gram vinyl, but if that was a mainstream sentiment, iTunes would be selling FLAC and Best Buy would be selling LPs instead of CDs. Neither of these is the case.
The reason CDs fell out of vogue is because of everything except the audio quality aspect. Want to play a specific song while driving? "Hey Siri, play Highway to Hell" or something similar. Boom, it's playing. Have the same impulse with CDs? Open your 200-CD binder, flip through pages, try and find the CD with the song on it based on the corner-eye view of the cover art (good luck if it's all burned CDs, which themselves took hours longer to create than iTunes playlists), eject the CD currently in the stereo, put it somewhere it won't get scratched, insert the other one, and change to the correct track number...all with one hand and half an eye. It was approximately as dangerous as texting and driving.
Driving not the issue for you? Allow Gary Gulman to reminisce about the experience of owning a Discman for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... For the tl;dw crowd, they would only fit in the pocket of someone wearing pants with pockets explicitly sized for them. Battery life was relatively short (a problem greatly exacerbated by the use of the near-required anti-skip), and again, if you wanted more than *maybe* 20 songs, you had to carry around a CD wallet in addition to your CD player. It was a mess.
Oh, and just to put to bed the quality argument, CD players seldom came with headphones that were better than Earpods. I got a set with my first portable CD player (it came from Koss) that was halfway decent for a bundled pair of headband-style headphones, but pretty much everything after that was terrible in one way or another. While Beats inexplicably brought full-ear headphones back into vogue, nobody was wearing them at the time...and earbuds were outright atrocious; I never heard a pair that had anything that vaguely resembled bass until around 2011. Now sure, I'll absolutely agree that even a modestly priced set of bookshelf speakers and a budget Marantz receiver will produce an audible difference between a CD and a Youtube video...but I would say that 95% of CDs were never listened to on hardware that could make the difference audible.
What killed CDs was the evolution of a more convenient means of li
Worth asking why GNU/Linux, Diaspora and DuckDuckGo are not a viable alternative.
The assorted Linux distros vary in their usability. Mint and Kubuntu are pretty good, but there is no shortage of areas of inconsistency. A user with KDE isn't going to be able to have a useful discussion with a user running Cinnamon in the same way users share tips and tricks about using their iPhones. Most people have one or two pieces of software or hardware they use regularly that are Windows/OSX-only, with no FOSS alternative. If they don't, it's because they're used to Chromebooks, which are viable primarily because they are direct lines to the Google ecosystem.
Diaspora isn't a viable alternative to Facebook because of the network effect: Nobody is on it because nobody is on it. A quick search on my iPhone didn't show a mobile app for it either, making it far less accessible than Facebook or Instagram.
Duck Duck Go is the closest one in this list to being a viable alternative. Its search results aren't bad for garden variety internet searches, but they do have trouble with the local stuff (e.g. "sushi near me"). Additionally, DDG doesn't offer e-mail service, browser-based document creation and management, a mobile app for driving directions, or other aspects of Google's portfolio that lots of people still use daily.
It is possible to use the things you describe. It does, however, take lots of effort for most people. The article summary is about how Microsoft and Facebook make choosing the privacy-conscious options less apparent to end users and that being a problem for them. The people who are fooled by color contrasts and dimmed light bulb icons are the ones who are not going to lobotomize their workflows and make things far more difficult for themselves in order to stick it to The Man.
Laptop vendors can do more than new CPUs to bring some usefulness and features.
I agree with your point. I disagree with most of your examples.
Being able to have an OS in ROM would be handy, if only to have a way to restore an OS without having to worry about recovery media.
You'd need MS to agree to what basically amounts to shipping whatever the current slipstream build at the time of manufacture onto an internal MicroSD card. I mean, okay, but with them turning Windows into an OS Reinstall every six months, I see a ROM-based solution as being difficult to solve in practice.
If a Tandy MS-DOS clone back in the 1980s can do this, so can a PC vendor.
Tandy's MS-DOS clone was about 200kbytes that basically didn't change and used very rudimentary commands to interface with hardware. Literally none of those things apply to laptops today. What might make a bit more sense to put in ROM, however, is something like what Apple does - enough OS to download the real OS from the internet.
Other things come to mind as well, be it the ability to charge (albeit slowly) on USB-C for beefier laptops
With USB-C not quite in common parlance yet, this function would be lost on most users. Additionally, USB-C still hasn't been adequately commoditized such that I'd trust lower end chargers. For users who need that sort of charging capability, spare laptop chargers can easily be had for $20 on eBay.
allowing for multiple USB chargers to charge a battery at the same time
to then use multiple outlets? That seems far less convenient than a spare DC charger.
built in vitualization and encryption so one can have their gaming stuff, their work stuff, personal stuff, and stuff nobody should see, all on one laptop
There's a few issues here. First off, that's purely a software thing and has nothing to do with hardware. Laptop manufacturers seldom put that sort of first party software on their computers upon shipping because a lot of people wouldn't use it; software like Veracrypt has existed long enough that people who value their privacy to any level are already using it. Of those that do, a lot would be calling support because they forgot their password or put something in X container instead of Y container, making it an utter nightmare for phone support. Finally, even if Samsung or whoever *did* do this *and* managed to sort out the support aspects *and* it gained any sort of traction, you'd see alternatives pop up the next day and remove the advantage. If nothing else, QubesOS already makes all of this possible.
perhaps using something like PhonebookFS to further hide the presence of other VMs.
The new Blackberry phones have similar functionality. I'm not holding my breath for them to sell in droves. I just don't think that sort of isolation is truly valuable to anyone who isn't already using an existing solution.
Another idea would be to have better support for external GPU breakout boxes. That way, one can go from running command line stuff to Crysis fairly easily, as well as providing fast access to additional storage.
I do think there's something to be said for standardizing on an external GPU connector, but I feel like it's going to be tough for eGPUs to leave a niche. Gaming laptops don't need them, mainstream laptops probably don't have enough of a system bus to leverage them, small-but-i7 laptops would need a monitor as well, and the eGPUs would have to be inexpensive enough to not make a gaming rig a better investment.
As for storage, NAS is the way to go in most cases. From a DIY FreeNAS to an inexpensive-but-quick QNAP to a beautiful and simple Synology, there are no shortage of ways to get terabytes of data at you fingertips using garden variety ethernet. If that's not doing it for you, USB-C external drives are alrea
... is this even possible:
In some cases, but not all, the intruder also obtained payment card details were also stolen, such as the name printed on the payment card, the card's number, and its expiration date.
Seriously. How is it possible that this data is not stored on hosts on separate, fortified networks, with decryption keys available only on other locked down machines that exist only to generate bank settlements and/or transmit billing information to the hotel as needed?
There's not enough information to verify whether what happened was truly a function of the software itself. Allow me to illustrate...
A client at work and I got into a pretty bad argument at one point. They use a hosted Citrix app to book the things they book (don't want to say the name). The client's issue was that she had trouble copy/pasting credit card numbers into the PoS software, which "she used to be able to do". I told her I was not going to fix it, because she shouldn't be storing the credit card numbers in the Citrix app. "But then the clients need to read me their credit card numbers every time!" "Yes. That's the point."
"These people pay thousands of dollars monthly; I don't want to inconvenience them and potentially use these regular clients!"
"I am pretty sure that every single one of them would prefer to do that than to have their credit card numbers live in a system that is not even remotely PCI compliant, and for which your merchant account would likely drop you if they knew you were putting all of these card numbers at risk that way, preventing you from taking their credit card at all."
"But it's fine because it's in the 'notes' section. It's not labeled 'credit card number', so if the system were hacked, nobody would know to look for them."
"If you can get your payment processor to tell me it's okay to store credit card numbers that way, not only will I fix the issue, I won't bill you for the time. Do you want me to get them on the phone, or would you rather do it?"
"No, it's fine. I'll just write them down in an Excel spreadsheet."
"You cannot retain your client's credit card numbers in any form and retain your PCI compliance. Period. If your computer gets hacked and the hackers take that file, I guarantee you that the best case scenario is that you have lost every one of those clients, permanently, with the worst case involving multiple lawsuits. Moreover, the only reason you won't lose them beforehand is because I sincerely doubt they're giving it to you knowing that you have every intention of storing it in a very insecure manner. I know it's a pain, but the extra 30 seconds it will take them each order is preferable to every one of them than disputing credit card fraud. For the sake of your clients and the sake of your business, you *must* stop storing credit card numbers on your system, at all, period, full stop. Feel free to have the owner come out and discuss it with me, I will make the same case to him."
"...okay, fine."
The user was entering credit card numbers where they weren't supposed to, and the software wasn't smart enough to detect a credit card number in a generic 'notes' field. While it's entirely possible the booking software was poorly written, it's equally possible that it was being used in a way where the end users were intentionally making end runs around safety mechanisms.
Individual end users can generally be trained. In aggregate, they will take convenience over security 10 out of 10 times. If they don't, they're not end users, they're infosec.
That's because Apple bought out the company that made the touchpads. PC users had to live with the crappy ones from Synaptics.
Synaptics touchpads aren't bad, as long as they retain the physical buttons. The ones with the virtual button zones are invariably crap, but Synaptics does have a pretty good feature set. They can be set to emulate most of the multitouch gestures of the Macbooks, or they can be set to turn all of that off. My favorite feature of theirs is Chiral scrolling, that allows an edge scroll to be performed infinitely by using a circular motion once the top/bottom edge is reached.
If you want the textbook definition of a crappy touchpad, the company you're looking for is Sentelic. I got a laptop with one of those once, and it was the primary reason I got rid of it. The palm detection was atrocious, the buttons were impossible to avoid while typing, its gesture response was inconsistent-at-best, and it was infuriating that there was no option to disable tap-to-click. It was Just. The. Worst.
So yeah...while the Macbook trackpads are excellent in their own right, on the PC side I will take a Synaptics touchpad any day of the week.
Wow...hows those rose colored glasses working for ya? Making the past all rosey are they? Because i played plenty of RPGs (and Mech and flight and shooters) during the 90s when anybody could run their own server and play and ya know what you got? CHEATING, tons and tons and tons of cheating!
First, keep in mind the number of single player games of late is not as high as the multiplayer games. I didn't have the issues you had during the 90's because I played by myself. Mechwarrior 2 and Descent were great like that. With more games targeting multiplayer for lots of mostly-money-driven reasons, there's more with which to take issue.
The second reason I didn't have this problem is because of this idea of only playing with people I knew. I would play multiplayer with real life friends, rather than randos online. Even those who didn't cheat simply had more time to play the games and were invariably above my skill level. Great for them, but there's no fun to be had there. When my friends and I scheduled a game (or, commonly, got together and LAN partied), half the fun was being able to rag on my friends for being better or worse. It was far more enjoyable than playing against 14 year olds who thought teabagging was actually funny.
Personally I'd rather play an online game where a company actually monitors and bans cheaters, nice to know if I lose in a game its because I fucked up NOT because someone is using a trainer.
Moderated servers would be just fine, but let my friends and I run our own. Life has happened so getting together for a LAN party has been a bit of a mess of late...but logistics notwithstanding, there's no technical reason we can't be playing multiplayer games whose servers would have been long gone if the companies didn't put the onus on end users to run them. In 2018, there's no technical reason why both official servers and unofficial servers can't coexist, aside from the fact that game developers have made games which ship with dedicated server builds a critically endangered species.