It's funny how Apple's model assumes that small developers will support their $5 apps indefinitely, but not that a huge business will provide essential security updates for their $500 devices and operating systems (without breaking anything else) for the same period.
You canâ(TM)t expect Apple to continue providing free upgrades for eternity.
Perhaps not, but we're talking about expensive, connected devices where the hardware is still working fine. Expecting essential security updates for a reasonable working lifetime of the device isn't entirely unfair, given that by definition security problems were defects in the original product.
If Apple wants to define that working lifetime so it ends artificially before the hardware stops working, it also seems appropriate for them to disclose this up-front. "The New iPad, 2017 edition: WARNING: This device will cease to function on 1 September 2021". If customers are still willing to buy the product on that basis, that's fair enough, but requiring transparency about what they're getting for their money is reasonable.
Firefox has been losing users for some time and has a fraction of the market share it once had. The breaking changes to extensions and plugins and the UI rearrangements surely aren't helping.
Undoubtedly, some idiots will still press "Yes" and proceed to bitch afterwards, but that's people for you.
Or maybe Apple could let people downgrade iOS if a newer version doesn't work? It's not as if that would be difficult for them, and it's not as if the upgrade ratchet hasn't caught out significant numbers of people and made their experience worse over the years.
And, with iOS 4.3, you only have about 50 known remotely exploitable vulnerabilities, so it's probably completely safe to use, as long as the WiFi is disabled.
...Making this another excellent example of why essential updates for security should be provided separately from updates that change (or break or remove) functionality.
This is not the first time Apple has played this game: iOS7 had a similar kind of effect on users and the app ecosystem about four years ago, for example. Dumping responsibility for "keeping up" on developers who wrote working apps and users who already paid for them is hardly reasonable. Nor is artificially limiting the life of expensive devices through software hacks.
I suspect the time is fast approaching when we will need laws to protect the buyers of "platform" software that is essential to the functioning of a device. Too many vendors are now abusing their control over the related software and/or copyright and related laws to force in changes that are not in their customers' interests after the sale.
In many contexts we mandate certain minimum standards for purchased products and require by law that the vendor makes good any defects for a reasonable period afterwards. Despite frequent and sometimes serious bugs in software, developers have mostly had an easy ride on that one in the past, partly because a culture evolved that you released security updates free of charge to customers later. If the developers in the age of always-online, "evergreen" software are no longer going to do that without attaching strings, perhaps they no longer deserve so much special treatment under the law when their products don't work properly either.
It's simply not possible to avoid all personal use when you have been assigned a general purpose machine and you are forced to use all day.
Of course it is. How do you think the many millions of people whose jobs do not involve sitting at a desk and using a computer at all manage, or those who do work on a PC but with limited access because it's locked down for security reasons? This isn't nearly as clear-cut an ethical issue as you're making out.
The only outcome that ever arises from restricting what your employees can do and monitoring them round the clock is *reduced* productivity
Reduced productivity compared to them taking your money, using your gear, but doing work for someone else entirely?
The employer might have gone about this the wrong way, and apparently they paid for that when their day in court came, but I suspect your hypothetical business school would have a few words to say about how the employer should deal with employees who are flagrantly abusing their position as well.
On the other hand, you are also typically expected as part of an employment contract to do your job and not to collect a salary from your employer and use their resources but actually be working for someone else. Obviously there are serious privacy concerns with the kind of mass surveillance used here, but let's not pretend the employee was somehow making reasonable personal use of the equipment either.
Also, you're generalizing as if the law is the same on this issue across all of Europe. It's not.
It seems like our views are actually pretty similar then, we just adopted different definitions of "job-hopping".
And yes, contracting is certainly different. If someone is taking on short, fixed-length engagements then of course you expect them to move on frequently, and that would be true even if both sides were entirely happy with their relationship. It's the person who was taken on as a permie but then either the employer or the employee was so dissatisfied with the relationship that it ended after just a few months that you have to be careful about. That could happen to anyone occasionally, through sheer bad luck and no real fault of either side, but a pattern of that happening several times with few or no longer-term spells of employment would be a pretty big red flag.
No, we don't wonder, it's because of a lack of reproducibility.
Well, of course, but part of that is because people unwisely equate statistical significance with a hypothesis being true or false. Suppose you run an experiment twice and you get similar raw data in both cases, but in one case your result is marginally significant at whatever level and in the other it falls just short. The situation didn't fundamentally change between the two experiments, but a regrettable number of people who don't understand that the whole statistical analysis is built around probabilities and not absolute truths would probably report that the original result was "not reproducible". Even if the original researchers do understand, whoever is writing the headline when the result is reported might not.
Scientists who aren't statisticians care passionately about only their topic and it isn't statistics. If anyone tries to use something else, everyone including reviewers will demand they use what everyone else uses anyway.
And then people wonder why the credibility of published science has been called into question so much recently.:-(
The idea that any specific value -- whether it's 0.05, 0.005 or something else -- should be regarded as a universally appropriate choice is nonsensical and betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of what the statistics being published mean.
This is certainly true, and of course anyone can be unlucky if something really unexpected happens to their employer not long after they join. One short term gig does not make a pattern, and if someone has had a short term job and has a plausible reason for leaving so soon, I'm not going to hold that against them. If they've had five short term jobs in a row, on the other hand, then they're probably never going to get the chance to explain to me why.
It's not the ones who are there for three years that would bother me. That's a reasonable length of time to make a useful contribution in almost any job.
It's the ones who have done 5 different jobs in the last three years that I'm talking about when I refer to job-hoppers. Someone who is just going to come along, train up one way or another at an employer's expense, but never reach the point of really being productive for that employer is just a time and money sink, and the employer is almost certainly better off never hiring them at all.
It's never as simple as that, though, is it? Employers take a risk on hiring anyone and employees take a risk on moving, because usually neither party has enough information at the time of making and accepting a job offer to know if they're doing the right thing. However, particularly for employees, the grass often looks greener on the other side. Someone who habitually crosses the road just to find out if it really is will be a much bigger risk in terms in investing in their training, giving them access to commercially sensitive information, and so on.
It's probably how it works in trendy places like the Bay Area, where tech salaries have been astronomical in recent years because of crazy VC money and the occasional unicorn, and where half the 25-year-olds earning those salaries don't even realise that almost nowhere else in the world pays at anywhere near that level or costs anywhere near that much to live.
Here in the UK, for example, if you're working as a tech employee and outside of a few quite specific niches or commission-based roles, you'll probably reach a salary ceiling within the first 5-10 years of your career, and you'll need a bigger shift than just finding a new job to get much of a raise after that.
You also have to be careful because while your 25-year-old self might think job-hopping is great for your career, your 45-year-old self is one day going to be looking at CVs and put the job-hoppers straight to the bottom of the pile. People say this doesn't happen as much as it used to, and with more job-hopping and short-term positions I'm sure that's true, but it's definitely still a factor, particularly for the kinds of employers who actually do try to take care of their staff and support long-term careers.
With that VC-driven boom looking more shaky by the day, if I were a younger programmer or online marketer or whatever today, I'd be a bit careful about job-hopping too much. You can afford to be picky in boom times, and at that age you might never have experienced anything else, but ask anyone who was around in the dot-bomb era how fast that can change.
It's not uncommon for a hosting provider to require admin and technical contact as a condition of service.
But surely this is exactly why there are multiple sets of contact details attached to a domain?
The registrant details should always identify the true owner of the domain, and there also ought to be a money trail leading back to whoever is paying the bill. I can't imagine any legitimate reason for any hosting provider to interfere with either of these aspects.
Agreed. If anything, this change is well overdue. Unfortunately, there is plenty of evidence that a significant number of people buying drones don't know the legal rules for operating them and are doing so in ways that are dangerous, invade people's privacy, etc.
Given that there have already been multiple near-miss incidents close to major airports, for example, it's obvious that we've basically just been lucky so far, and the consequences when that luck runs out will be very bad.
We're not that big, but in any case, there's certainly no such restriction in the EULA for the off-the-shelf versions of Office anyone around here uses, all of which are licensed for commercial use. I just checked.
Maybe they've put that into the EULA for more recent versions? There seems so much junk attached to everything Microsoft releases these days that I don't think we've got much that they've launched in the past five years installed on anything anyway.
Just like when Adobe went CC only, we've found alternatives to use for our new systems and projects, and we just keep the odd copy of Office around for compatibility if we need them.
I tend to agree, but since the legal systems in many countries still operate with the technical savvy of a 10th century monk, many lawyers couldn't change even if they wanted to, because they wouldn't then be compliant with the court-mandated formatting conventions for their documents.
But also, there's not really any denying that the familiar revision control features in software like Word are much easier for non-technical folks to use than the diff tools in a typical programmer's version control system.
It would be nice to think that one day we would need neither court-mandated awful formatting nor clunky UIs in software just to present and share basic information in a clear and reliable way. Surely we must have the technology...
Sounds like in this case the businesses had already locked themselves in to some extent, presumably in exchange for significant discounts through enterprise licensing rather than buying individual copies, and now Microsoft is exploiting that lock-in to get its fingers deeper into the pie.
Sure, I understand that and it's a perfectly reasonable position if it genuinely does meet your business requirements better than any other available option. Presumably if and when you reached that "paying through the nose" stage, the balance would change and the costs of migrating to an alternative would look less prohibitive.
Unfortunately, while your reason is a good one, it is certainly not the only reason that big businesses lock themselves into these agreements. I've seen purchases made for corporate political reasons that were literally multiple orders of magnitude bigger than they needed be to meet the actual business requirements. Heck, in one case, I could have hired the necessary dev team and built the software involved from scratch for less money than was spent buying something off the shelf under... dubious... circumstances. That team would have delivered results sooner, too.
It's a general principle, not specific to Microsoft. In any case, it's clear that Microsoft is quite willing to update its software in ways that its customers don't want and try to force them to adopt the changes, and life's too short to put up with that sort of abuse.
Looks like that comment ruffled some feathers. I think it's a fair question: in what way was any business forced to buy an enterprise licence and then to switch to Office 365? I've never heard of this in any big business I've worked at/with. It could be that Microsoft has recently changed policy and somehow forced this shift as the GP implied. Or it could be that the GP has misunderstood the situation or is exaggerating significantly for effect. It's not unreasonable to ask which is the case.
Software "ownership" is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
That's the fear, but I'm not sure it's actually working out that way. It took what -- 2-3 years, maybe? -- from the Adobe CC switch for multiple credible competing products to be available for some of the big CS/CC applications. They aren't the same 800lb gorilla products, but rather like Google Docs compared to MS Office, they do enough for many users, and in some respects they might even be better.
Enterprise IT is often awful in terms of cost-effectiveness, because everything is worked out at a high level based on brand perception and support contracts and dare I say the odd dinner at the golf club. If they're foolish enough to pay through the nose and lock themselves into deals with specific software brands, so be it.
Smaller businesses tend to be much more price-conscious and much more nimble about their IT policies, and I see little evidence that they are keen to move to rental pricing as the default way of doing things. Where they do, it seems to be more the kind of online SaaS offerings that are attractive for whatever reason, not so much the software they used to buy but are now being asked to rent instead.
Slashdot Mirror
It's funny how Apple's model assumes that small developers will support their $5 apps indefinitely, but not that a huge business will provide essential security updates for their $500 devices and operating systems (without breaking anything else) for the same period.
I mean funny-weird not funny-amusing, obviously.
You canâ(TM)t expect Apple to continue providing free upgrades for eternity.
Perhaps not, but we're talking about expensive, connected devices where the hardware is still working fine. Expecting essential security updates for a reasonable working lifetime of the device isn't entirely unfair, given that by definition security problems were defects in the original product.
If Apple wants to define that working lifetime so it ends artificially before the hardware stops working, it also seems appropriate for them to disclose this up-front. "The New iPad, 2017 edition: WARNING: This device will cease to function on 1 September 2021". If customers are still willing to buy the product on that basis, that's fair enough, but requiring transparency about what they're getting for their money is reasonable.
Firefox has been losing users for some time and has a fraction of the market share it once had. The breaking changes to extensions and plugins and the UI rearrangements surely aren't helping.
Undoubtedly, some idiots will still press "Yes" and proceed to bitch afterwards, but that's people for you.
Or maybe Apple could let people downgrade iOS if a newer version doesn't work? It's not as if that would be difficult for them, and it's not as if the upgrade ratchet hasn't caught out significant numbers of people and made their experience worse over the years.
And, with iOS 4.3, you only have about 50 known remotely exploitable vulnerabilities, so it's probably completely safe to use, as long as the WiFi is disabled.
...Making this another excellent example of why essential updates for security should be provided separately from updates that change (or break or remove) functionality.
This is not the first time Apple has played this game: iOS7 had a similar kind of effect on users and the app ecosystem about four years ago, for example. Dumping responsibility for "keeping up" on developers who wrote working apps and users who already paid for them is hardly reasonable. Nor is artificially limiting the life of expensive devices through software hacks.
I suspect the time is fast approaching when we will need laws to protect the buyers of "platform" software that is essential to the functioning of a device. Too many vendors are now abusing their control over the related software and/or copyright and related laws to force in changes that are not in their customers' interests after the sale.
In many contexts we mandate certain minimum standards for purchased products and require by law that the vendor makes good any defects for a reasonable period afterwards. Despite frequent and sometimes serious bugs in software, developers have mostly had an easy ride on that one in the past, partly because a culture evolved that you released security updates free of charge to customers later. If the developers in the age of always-online, "evergreen" software are no longer going to do that without attaching strings, perhaps they no longer deserve so much special treatment under the law when their products don't work properly either.
It's simply not possible to avoid all personal use when you have been assigned a general purpose machine and you are forced to use all day.
Of course it is. How do you think the many millions of people whose jobs do not involve sitting at a desk and using a computer at all manage, or those who do work on a PC but with limited access because it's locked down for security reasons? This isn't nearly as clear-cut an ethical issue as you're making out.
The only outcome that ever arises from restricting what your employees can do and monitoring them round the clock is *reduced* productivity
Reduced productivity compared to them taking your money, using your gear, but doing work for someone else entirely?
The employer might have gone about this the wrong way, and apparently they paid for that when their day in court came, but I suspect your hypothetical business school would have a few words to say about how the employer should deal with employees who are flagrantly abusing their position as well.
On the other hand, you are also typically expected as part of an employment contract to do your job and not to collect a salary from your employer and use their resources but actually be working for someone else. Obviously there are serious privacy concerns with the kind of mass surveillance used here, but let's not pretend the employee was somehow making reasonable personal use of the equipment either.
Also, you're generalizing as if the law is the same on this issue across all of Europe. It's not.
It seems like our views are actually pretty similar then, we just adopted different definitions of "job-hopping".
And yes, contracting is certainly different. If someone is taking on short, fixed-length engagements then of course you expect them to move on frequently, and that would be true even if both sides were entirely happy with their relationship. It's the person who was taken on as a permie but then either the employer or the employee was so dissatisfied with the relationship that it ended after just a few months that you have to be careful about. That could happen to anyone occasionally, through sheer bad luck and no real fault of either side, but a pattern of that happening several times with few or no longer-term spells of employment would be a pretty big red flag.
No, we don't wonder, it's because of a lack of reproducibility.
Well, of course, but part of that is because people unwisely equate statistical significance with a hypothesis being true or false. Suppose you run an experiment twice and you get similar raw data in both cases, but in one case your result is marginally significant at whatever level and in the other it falls just short. The situation didn't fundamentally change between the two experiments, but a regrettable number of people who don't understand that the whole statistical analysis is built around probabilities and not absolute truths would probably report that the original result was "not reproducible". Even if the original researchers do understand, whoever is writing the headline when the result is reported might not.
Scientists who aren't statisticians care passionately about only their topic and it isn't statistics. If anyone tries to use something else, everyone including reviewers will demand they use what everyone else uses anyway.
And then people wonder why the credibility of published science has been called into question so much recently. :-(
The idea that any specific value -- whether it's 0.05, 0.005 or something else -- should be regarded as a universally appropriate choice is nonsensical and betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of what the statistics being published mean.
That's certainly not true in my industry (software, web stuff, and so on).
But the rules of the game can change by that time in a techie's career, and you do have to play by the new rules if you want to keep winning.
This is certainly true, and of course anyone can be unlucky if something really unexpected happens to their employer not long after they join. One short term gig does not make a pattern, and if someone has had a short term job and has a plausible reason for leaving so soon, I'm not going to hold that against them. If they've had five short term jobs in a row, on the other hand, then they're probably never going to get the chance to explain to me why.
It's not the ones who are there for three years that would bother me. That's a reasonable length of time to make a useful contribution in almost any job.
It's the ones who have done 5 different jobs in the last three years that I'm talking about when I refer to job-hoppers. Someone who is just going to come along, train up one way or another at an employer's expense, but never reach the point of really being productive for that employer is just a time and money sink, and the employer is almost certainly better off never hiring them at all.
It's never as simple as that, though, is it? Employers take a risk on hiring anyone and employees take a risk on moving, because usually neither party has enough information at the time of making and accepting a job offer to know if they're doing the right thing. However, particularly for employees, the grass often looks greener on the other side. Someone who habitually crosses the road just to find out if it really is will be a much bigger risk in terms in investing in their training, giving them access to commercially sensitive information, and so on.
It's probably how it works in trendy places like the Bay Area, where tech salaries have been astronomical in recent years because of crazy VC money and the occasional unicorn, and where half the 25-year-olds earning those salaries don't even realise that almost nowhere else in the world pays at anywhere near that level or costs anywhere near that much to live.
Here in the UK, for example, if you're working as a tech employee and outside of a few quite specific niches or commission-based roles, you'll probably reach a salary ceiling within the first 5-10 years of your career, and you'll need a bigger shift than just finding a new job to get much of a raise after that.
You also have to be careful because while your 25-year-old self might think job-hopping is great for your career, your 45-year-old self is one day going to be looking at CVs and put the job-hoppers straight to the bottom of the pile. People say this doesn't happen as much as it used to, and with more job-hopping and short-term positions I'm sure that's true, but it's definitely still a factor, particularly for the kinds of employers who actually do try to take care of their staff and support long-term careers.
With that VC-driven boom looking more shaky by the day, if I were a younger programmer or online marketer or whatever today, I'd be a bit careful about job-hopping too much. You can afford to be picky in boom times, and at that age you might never have experienced anything else, but ask anyone who was around in the dot-bomb era how fast that can change.
It's not uncommon for a hosting provider to require admin and technical contact as a condition of service.
But surely this is exactly why there are multiple sets of contact details attached to a domain?
The registrant details should always identify the true owner of the domain, and there also ought to be a money trail leading back to whoever is paying the bill. I can't imagine any legitimate reason for any hosting provider to interfere with either of these aspects.
Exactly.
/guy who still uses a dumbphone to, like, make calls and stuff
Agreed. If anything, this change is well overdue. Unfortunately, there is plenty of evidence that a significant number of people buying drones don't know the legal rules for operating them and are doing so in ways that are dangerous, invade people's privacy, etc.
Given that there have already been multiple near-miss incidents close to major airports, for example, it's obvious that we've basically just been lucky so far, and the consequences when that luck runs out will be very bad.
We're not that big, but in any case, there's certainly no such restriction in the EULA for the off-the-shelf versions of Office anyone around here uses, all of which are licensed for commercial use. I just checked.
Maybe they've put that into the EULA for more recent versions? There seems so much junk attached to everything Microsoft releases these days that I don't think we've got much that they've launched in the past five years installed on anything anyway.
Just like when Adobe went CC only, we've found alternatives to use for our new systems and projects, and we just keep the odd copy of Office around for compatibility if we need them.
I tend to agree, but since the legal systems in many countries still operate with the technical savvy of a 10th century monk, many lawyers couldn't change even if they wanted to, because they wouldn't then be compliant with the court-mandated formatting conventions for their documents.
But also, there's not really any denying that the familiar revision control features in software like Word are much easier for non-technical folks to use than the diff tools in a typical programmer's version control system.
It would be nice to think that one day we would need neither court-mandated awful formatting nor clunky UIs in software just to present and share basic information in a clear and reliable way. Surely we must have the technology...
OK, that is clearer, thanks.
Sounds like in this case the businesses had already locked themselves in to some extent, presumably in exchange for significant discounts through enterprise licensing rather than buying individual copies, and now Microsoft is exploiting that lock-in to get its fingers deeper into the pie.
Sure, I understand that and it's a perfectly reasonable position if it genuinely does meet your business requirements better than any other available option. Presumably if and when you reached that "paying through the nose" stage, the balance would change and the costs of migrating to an alternative would look less prohibitive.
Unfortunately, while your reason is a good one, it is certainly not the only reason that big businesses lock themselves into these agreements. I've seen purchases made for corporate political reasons that were literally multiple orders of magnitude bigger than they needed be to meet the actual business requirements. Heck, in one case, I could have hired the necessary dev team and built the software involved from scratch for less money than was spent buying something off the shelf under... dubious... circumstances. That team would have delivered results sooner, too.
It's a general principle, not specific to Microsoft. In any case, it's clear that Microsoft is quite willing to update its software in ways that its customers don't want and try to force them to adopt the changes, and life's too short to put up with that sort of abuse.
Looks like that comment ruffled some feathers. I think it's a fair question: in what way was any business forced to buy an enterprise licence and then to switch to Office 365? I've never heard of this in any big business I've worked at/with. It could be that Microsoft has recently changed policy and somehow forced this shift as the GP implied. Or it could be that the GP has misunderstood the situation or is exaggerating significantly for effect. It's not unreasonable to ask which is the case.
Software "ownership" is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
That's the fear, but I'm not sure it's actually working out that way. It took what -- 2-3 years, maybe? -- from the Adobe CC switch for multiple credible competing products to be available for some of the big CS/CC applications. They aren't the same 800lb gorilla products, but rather like Google Docs compared to MS Office, they do enough for many users, and in some respects they might even be better.
Enterprise IT is often awful in terms of cost-effectiveness, because everything is worked out at a high level based on brand perception and support contracts and dare I say the odd dinner at the golf club. If they're foolish enough to pay through the nose and lock themselves into deals with specific software brands, so be it.
Smaller businesses tend to be much more price-conscious and much more nimble about their IT policies, and I see little evidence that they are keen to move to rental pricing as the default way of doing things. Where they do, it seems to be more the kind of online SaaS offerings that are attractive for whatever reason, not so much the software they used to buy but are now being asked to rent instead.