Why? What magical power do you think is routinely listening in to everyone's private conversations inside their own homes?
There have certainly been technologies developed that could do such things, including phones, microphones on computers, and devices like "smart" TVs and gaming consoles. However, if anyone actually was routinely listening in using those sensors and transmitting the data somewhere else, it would be a significant privacy issue and potentially an expensive mistake in legal and/or PR terms (as, in a few cases, the makers of such devices have found to their cost).
The law in this area is still developing in most places, including the UK, as we try to find a reasonable balance between the benefits of new technologies and their ability to infringe privacy in ways that weren't possible before.
As for the ethics and what direction the laws ought to go in, I suggest that a sensible starting point is:
1. If you're just observing activity on private property that any member of the public might observe incidentally while going about their ordinary business, that's probably OK.
2. If you're using technology to observe activity on private property that would not be observed by an ordinary member of the public without unusual behaviour or the use of artificial aids, that might be a problem.
3. If you're recording anything that is happening on private property, that might be a problem.
For example, walking down the street and noticing that someone is in because their light is on and their window is uncovered: fine, anyone walking past would see the same thing. The other person can close their curtains if they want privacy and can reasonably be expected to know that someone walking past would see inside.
Hearing unfortunate personal details because a couple are having a screaming argument in their back yard and the sound carries out to the street where you're walking: also fine, on a similar basis.
However, walking right up to someone's house and looking through a small gap in someone's curtains and see what's happening inside: not OK, this is obviously intrusive and not something most people would expect or think was acceptable behaviour.
Using things like thermal cameras or long-range mics to look or listen inside a private home from across the street: not OK for the same reasons.
Monitoring unencrypted WiFi: a tricky area. On the one hand, the signals are being sent outside someone's private property by their own actions, just like leaving the curtains open or screaming in the back yard. It's hardly fair to blame someone who observes the results incidentally while doing normal things like setting up their own WiFi. On the other hand, an ordinary person wouldn't necessarily understand the implications of everyday technology or what they were exposing. However, someone who was deliberately connecting to and monitoring or recording data from someone else's network probably does understand the implications, and is morally little better than a peeping Tom at the window.
You seem to be assuming that manufacturers are only limiting the useful lifetimes of their devices for positive reasons, and not simply because they can make more money when customers have to replace their devices unnecessarily early. Your definition of planned obsolescence seems a very charitable one.
As for warranties, they are an indication of the minimum expected lifetime of the device. That is a very different thing from saying devices should be expected to fail on the day after their warranty expires.
For example, if Apple and Samsung started selling £600 flagship devices and were required by law to display a prominent notice that those devices would fail after two years and have no value at two years plus one day, are you really telling me that you think that would not affect their sales figures?
Apple's sales figures only tell us anything useful here if there is substantial competition from other suppliers whose products are different in these respects but otherwise similar, and if the differences are understood by the market and so potentially influencing purchasing decisions. Do you think that is the case?
I would have more sympathy for that idea if (a) the expected lifetime was clearly indicated at the time of purchase, and (b) the manufacturers were obligated to provide facilities for safe and efficient recycling at the end of the expected lifetime and to build their products so that such recycling was possible. These kinds of conditions are routine in other parts of the tech industry, and they are valuable for both customer and environmental protection reasons.
However, as things stand, the components used and the price charged for modern smartphones might reasonably suggest a much longer working life in the absence of clear up-front statements to the contrary, and the wastage of limited natural resources in constructing these devices with such short lifetimes is also significant.
I agree that planned obsolescence could be a useful principle under the right conditions, but only if it really does bring significant savings in return for shortening the working life of the product, and in any case only if it's done transparently and responsibly. I see little evidence that any of those things is true in the phone market today.
That would be more convincing if the average working lifetime of smartphones had more to do with the phone itself and less to do with the commercial lock-in plans of the phone networks that hide the true price of the device and/or the operating system updates pushed by the likes of Apple that encourage users of old devices to upgrade but then cripple the performance so those devices become unusable in practice.
Nothing stops you from cracking it open, removing the ROM components and replacing the software.
Part of the problem is that it's hard to know how true that is any more.
The right-to-repair debate obviously covers much broader interests than just Apple products, and elsewhere we've seen things like farmers' ability to maintain their tractors being impaired by intellectual property laws. I'm not sure what promoting invention, discovery and new creative works has to do with preventing tractor repair, but somehow I doubt that's how the original proponents of those laws or the public intended them to be used.
Whether Apple could or would employ any similar tactics to undermine efforts to repair Apple products is a different question, but looking at the way they've treated iFixit as an example, the way they manage their supply chains and their choices of components, or indeed their opposition to the proposals we're talking about here, the signs aren't exactly good.
But how about instead supporting manufacturers that do what you want?
Some of us do. But when you reach a point where most or all of the major suppliers in a particular market are employing similar tactics, you often reach a point where the general public just gives up and accepts the tactics as inevitable. This is exactly why we have regulatory oversight and consumer protection rules backed by the force of law.
I'd be fine with, "Manufacturers can prohibit personal and 3rd-party repair of devices sold for the advertised lifetime of the device, if and only if they provide free repair parts and services for that same period".
We used to call that a warranty.
Those used to be worth something.
And they used to last for a reasonable working lifetime for a device, not provide the bare minimum standard of protection required by law to private customers, and provide even less to business customers as an incentive to sign-up for overpriced maintenance contracts on top of the original purchase price.
The lack of repairability is not some kind of conspiracy.
Right, just like there is no ulterior motive when tech firms change connectors for each new generation of products even if the new ones do essentially the same things as the old ones, use unusual components where standard ones could have done the same job, or even remove most standard connectors altogether and maybe provide custom adapters or wireless devices with questionable reliability at much higher prices instead.
It's true that there is some merit in the argument that using custom components or things like glue instead of screws allows for making devices that are better in some way, but there is precious little evidence that the those improvements are significant or wanted by the market.
The point is that once a company has enough control of the market to restrict supply chains and/or information about how the device works, they can effectively limit compatibility, prevent repairs and other long-term maintenance, and ultimately constrain the continued use of the device, even if such use would otherwise be viable.
That leads directly to problems like built-in obsolescence, excessive repair charges for devices that fail earlier than might reasonably have been expected, wastage of limited natural resources used in manufacture, and devices that are hard to recycle or otherwise dispose of in safe and environmentally friendly ways.
Hardware producers in the tech industry have become very, very bad at these kinds of things, and they've made a lot of money as a result, and so now it looks like legal/regulatory action is needed. This is hardly a new concern and they've had years to get their own houses in order and have failed to do so, so I have no sympathy for them at all.
They had a choice, they could have made javascript pages, but instead they used Java.
You could draw interactive diagrams, or animate them, in JavaScript in the year 2000? It was difficult enough doing these things in JavaScript ten years later! The reason the <applet> tag existed was that Java was the standard way to do things beyond what basic HTML could handle for a long time before.
As for too much control, I invite you to consider that the likes of Apple, Google and now Mozilla have been successfully killing off access to useful content that has existed for 10-20 years for their own purposes, while encouraging us to instead use perma-beta web "standards" that have about as much stability and longevity as a drunk riding a unicycle over a beach ball floating towards a waterfall.
One could actually learn something, get good information from insiders, pose and get immediate answers to relevant questions, access that was hard to get otherwise, in those days.
Yes, that's the big difference. Going back maybe 15-20 years, if you wanted to learn a programming language, you bought a book or read the manual or help text that came with your compiler. We did have online programming communities to some extent, but they kept in touch through forums like bulletin boards or electronic mailing lists or Usenet groups. Discussions would take place over days or even weeks instead of the minutes or hours they often last nowadays. Those discussions were usually more civilised than a lot of online forums are today, but there were no YouTube videos of presentations by the key people who actually designed the languages and tools you were using, we had manually curated FAQs instead of the huge Q&A sites like Stack Overflow today, and so on.
In that context, going to a conference meant an opportunity to meet the experts at the top of a given ecosystem, watch presentations on the next big things they were working on, and even pick up a copy of the new version of your favourite compiler to take back.
Of course, today, we do have much better online channels. We can watch presentations on YouTube whenever we're ready. We can pose questions in forums and have a fair chance that more experienced programmers will answer them within minutes, and we can collaborate with other leaders in close to real time if we're in that expert position for some particular subject ourselves. We can share code snippets for peer review, download the latest tools, or upload our contributions to community projects. And we can do all of these things from the comfort of our own homes/offices, without worrying about where we're going to stay overnight, or who's going to look after the kids, or the frustration and abuse that is common with long distance travel in the 21st century.
In short, most of the key advantages conferences used to have don't really matter any more, and business travel isn't what it used to be either. Some people argue that they're still worthwhile for "networking", whatever that means. I'm pretty sure I have far more opportunities to connect with other people who share my interests online today than any conference ever offered, though.
Mozilla aren't the last hold-outs on NPAPI. Plenty of business users still run IE, and will continue to do so for a long time because of measures like this. All it's doing is turning IE11 into the new IE6.
They should have started converting those to Javascript long ago, it's not like they didn't know this was coming years ago.
That's... not how any of this works.
For one thing, JS has only recently become a viable alternative for a lot of what used to be done with plugins. In many cases it's still relatively slow and/or buggy as hell.
For another thing, it costs time and money to produce software, and big rewrites are notoriously expensive. Expecting people to just dump working software because it's inconvenient to continue supporting its platform is unrealistic.
As for criticism of Java's speed, it takes longer to display Facebook than almost any Java-based management interface I've used in the past five years. Where do you think a lot of the JIT compilation technologies that are behind modern JS engines were first developed?
Finally, while the Java language and ecosystem are far from ideal, with a JVM you can also write code in much more powerful programming languages if you want. And frankly, modern JS-based web development is such an unstable mess that almost anything else would be better for the kinds of long-term projects that typically used Java applets in the past.
Also, as browsers start to emulate the extra functionality that used to be provided by plugins, it is logical to assume based on past performance that they will probably start to suffer from related security issues as well.
But let's not let facts get in the way of bashing web technologies more than a year or two old and promoting replacement technologies that aren't necessarily as capable as the old ones, because that would totally spoil all the fun.
Still, I guess I'll have to stop updating firefox so as not to break compatibility with the Java stuff that I have to use.
Sadly, I doubt you'll be alone.
I work with a lot of networked devices, which is a common environment where Java in a browser still matters. While there are now alternative technologies that can be used for much of what we used to use Java for, people should remember that they have only quite recently become stable and reliable enough for long-term professional use in an embedded context, and even today, there are plenty of bugs and performance problems with both canvas and SVG, so they're still not a perfect replacement if you had an applet for some graphical presentation purpose. Obviously it takes time to develop new versions of these UIs and then time for customers to purchase and deploy them, so expecting these embedded systems to be upgraded before the next major hardware/firmware upgrade cycle is unrealistic.
Another case where Java applets are still useful is all the little demo pages, again typically graphical ones, that the academic community has written over the years. I came across one of them just this weekend, and was glad that I was using Firefox instead of Chrome so I could still watch them. It's a horrible shame that access to all of this content, much of it developed over two decades but as relevant today as ever, is being lost just because the browser developers and Oracle couldn't get their acts together. This isn't how the Web was supposed to work, no user benefits from the loss, and there's no magical fairy who's going to come along and rewrite all of these pages using shiny new HTML5 standards just because Google and Mozilla would prefer it if Java went away.
Wasn't the death spiral evident when they tried to turn Firefox into Chrome, but there was already Chrome?
It's a shame, because I've always been a fan of Firefox in general, just not of the numerous missteps Mozilla has made in recent years. They seem obsessed with rebranding, and moving the UI around, and adding clutter with half-related features a lot of people didn't want or need, and making everything work the same way across 73 different platforms. (Their strategy has been similar to another once-great giant of the PC world that is now struggling in spaces it used to dominate, now that I think about it.) Sadly, none of those things matter very much to someone running traditional FF on a desktop or a mobile app equivalent.
I wish they had instead put all of that effort into defending their position as the open/free browser that was customisation-friendly, while implementing solid support for the important new features in the fundamental web technologies. All of the evergreen browsers are awful when it comes to quality of implementation and stability/regressions, but Firefox has suffered from not ticking the new features boxes either, so what is its USP in 2017?
The icons shown on the ribbon include dozens of things that no normal user ever uses
Microsoft were collecting extensive telemetry about how Office was being used for a long time before moving to the Ribbon interface. They even had people blogging about the process and how they'd adjusted the UI based on the real data they had available.
Now, it's certainly possible that some people turned off that telemetry, and therefore that the design of the Ribbon is biased on data towards the functions used by people who left it on. In that case, it seems more likely that in fact the Ribbon is a very good representation of what normal users want, but not necessary of what the kind of geek who also turns off telemetry wants.
Personally, I'm with you on not much liking the Ribbon, but then I also only used a couple of icons on the toolbar of most Office applications before, and they were just the ones that were too much of a pain to do with just the keyboard and where it wasn't quicker to change lots of related things together in a dialog. I'm hardly a typical user, and I accept that mainstream software like Office is inevitably going to cater to normal people before it caters to my geeky tastes.
Those that know it can make it jump up, sing, dance, and pretty much do anything a a thousand times faster than the pretend databases.
Of course it can. That's why companies like Google and Facebook, with their modest but slowly growing database needs, have all moved from pretend databases to Oracle as they've scaled up.
On the other hand, after CS was so dominant for so long, it took about two years from when Adobe gave up the perma-licence ground for potential competitors to start appearing and taking market share, and it's only relatively recently that those competitors are starting to pose a more serious threat outside of enthusiast support or niche markets.
IMHO, the real test for the subscription model for premium software will be how well the likes of Adobe can maintain their subscription revenues once (a) they've had people converted for a while, so subscribers are finding out how useful the updates are and how the costs are working out in practice, and (b) the premium subscription packages are facing significant competition that costs about as much to buy a licence outright as just a month or two of subscription.
I didn't dismiss it entirely -- I just said most things don't need to be online.
I'm always open to genuinely useful ideas, but for example in the case you gave, most likely any phone app to do that would be using NFC or some similar technology, so there would still be no need for remote access to the whole key system from outside the hotel.
It won't necessarily be an oral statement, and even if it is, there's a good chance that it was written down in the interview and that at least two of their people were there at the time.
In any case, they will know that you lied if evidence of that turns up later, and so will you. Whether either of you has enough motivation to take formal legal action over it is something else, but it will inevitably sour the employment relationship for as long as it lasts, which is almost always a bad thing for everyone involved.
If they do just fire you on the spot on the basis that you lied on your application and they then refuse to pay any compensation you would normally be entitled to if you were let go by their choice, it is most likely going to be down to you to argue that their actions were unreasonable or unfair in law, and that probably isn't going to end well in any of the situations we've been discussing.
Creative Cloud might work out cheaper for those who really did buy every Creative Suite update as it was released. I don't know many people in that category outside maybe agencies or freelancers who deal with a lot of different clients, though. My experience is rather different to yours, in that I have found very few new features since even the last few versions of the CS days that actually helped with any of my work, and which might have justified an upgrade or switching to a subscription for someone who already had one of the later CS revisions. It's also worth pointing out that the pricing for CC is much higher in a lot of places outside the US.
I suspect the real gain for the rental model switch is that it becomes accessible to those who can't or won't spend a relatively large amount up-front. For businesses, it might be a capex vs. opex question. For individuals, it might just be that they aren't willing to spend a significant chunk of a whole month's income on some software, but they might be willing to pay a little each month.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? What magical power do you think is routinely listening in to everyone's private conversations inside their own homes?
There have certainly been technologies developed that could do such things, including phones, microphones on computers, and devices like "smart" TVs and gaming consoles. However, if anyone actually was routinely listening in using those sensors and transmitting the data somewhere else, it would be a significant privacy issue and potentially an expensive mistake in legal and/or PR terms (as, in a few cases, the makers of such devices have found to their cost).
The law in this area is still developing in most places, including the UK, as we try to find a reasonable balance between the benefits of new technologies and their ability to infringe privacy in ways that weren't possible before.
As for the ethics and what direction the laws ought to go in, I suggest that a sensible starting point is:
1. If you're just observing activity on private property that any member of the public might observe incidentally while going about their ordinary business, that's probably OK.
2. If you're using technology to observe activity on private property that would not be observed by an ordinary member of the public without unusual behaviour or the use of artificial aids, that might be a problem.
3. If you're recording anything that is happening on private property, that might be a problem.
For example, walking down the street and noticing that someone is in because their light is on and their window is uncovered: fine, anyone walking past would see the same thing. The other person can close their curtains if they want privacy and can reasonably be expected to know that someone walking past would see inside.
Hearing unfortunate personal details because a couple are having a screaming argument in their back yard and the sound carries out to the street where you're walking: also fine, on a similar basis.
However, walking right up to someone's house and looking through a small gap in someone's curtains and see what's happening inside: not OK, this is obviously intrusive and not something most people would expect or think was acceptable behaviour.
Using things like thermal cameras or long-range mics to look or listen inside a private home from across the street: not OK for the same reasons.
Monitoring unencrypted WiFi: a tricky area. On the one hand, the signals are being sent outside someone's private property by their own actions, just like leaving the curtains open or screaming in the back yard. It's hardly fair to blame someone who observes the results incidentally while doing normal things like setting up their own WiFi. On the other hand, an ordinary person wouldn't necessarily understand the implications of everyday technology or what they were exposing. However, someone who was deliberately connecting to and monitoring or recording data from someone else's network probably does understand the implications, and is morally little better than a peeping Tom at the window.
You seem to be assuming that manufacturers are only limiting the useful lifetimes of their devices for positive reasons, and not simply because they can make more money when customers have to replace their devices unnecessarily early. Your definition of planned obsolescence seems a very charitable one.
As for warranties, they are an indication of the minimum expected lifetime of the device. That is a very different thing from saying devices should be expected to fail on the day after their warranty expires.
For example, if Apple and Samsung started selling £600 flagship devices and were required by law to display a prominent notice that those devices would fail after two years and have no value at two years plus one day, are you really telling me that you think that would not affect their sales figures?
Apple's sales figures only tell us anything useful here if there is substantial competition from other suppliers whose products are different in these respects but otherwise similar, and if the differences are understood by the market and so potentially influencing purchasing decisions. Do you think that is the case?
I would have more sympathy for that idea if (a) the expected lifetime was clearly indicated at the time of purchase, and (b) the manufacturers were obligated to provide facilities for safe and efficient recycling at the end of the expected lifetime and to build their products so that such recycling was possible. These kinds of conditions are routine in other parts of the tech industry, and they are valuable for both customer and environmental protection reasons.
However, as things stand, the components used and the price charged for modern smartphones might reasonably suggest a much longer working life in the absence of clear up-front statements to the contrary, and the wastage of limited natural resources in constructing these devices with such short lifetimes is also significant.
I agree that planned obsolescence could be a useful principle under the right conditions, but only if it really does bring significant savings in return for shortening the working life of the product, and in any case only if it's done transparently and responsibly. I see little evidence that any of those things is true in the phone market today.
That would be more convincing if the average working lifetime of smartphones had more to do with the phone itself and less to do with the commercial lock-in plans of the phone networks that hide the true price of the device and/or the operating system updates pushed by the likes of Apple that encourage users of old devices to upgrade but then cripple the performance so those devices become unusable in practice.
Nothing stops you from cracking it open, removing the ROM components and replacing the software.
Part of the problem is that it's hard to know how true that is any more.
The right-to-repair debate obviously covers much broader interests than just Apple products, and elsewhere we've seen things like farmers' ability to maintain their tractors being impaired by intellectual property laws. I'm not sure what promoting invention, discovery and new creative works has to do with preventing tractor repair, but somehow I doubt that's how the original proponents of those laws or the public intended them to be used.
Whether Apple could or would employ any similar tactics to undermine efforts to repair Apple products is a different question, but looking at the way they've treated iFixit as an example, the way they manage their supply chains and their choices of components, or indeed their opposition to the proposals we're talking about here, the signs aren't exactly good.
But how about instead supporting manufacturers that do what you want?
Some of us do. But when you reach a point where most or all of the major suppliers in a particular market are employing similar tactics, you often reach a point where the general public just gives up and accepts the tactics as inevitable. This is exactly why we have regulatory oversight and consumer protection rules backed by the force of law.
I'd be fine with, "Manufacturers can prohibit personal and 3rd-party repair of devices sold for the advertised lifetime of the device, if and only if they provide free repair parts and services for that same period".
We used to call that a warranty.
Those used to be worth something.
And they used to last for a reasonable working lifetime for a device, not provide the bare minimum standard of protection required by law to private customers, and provide even less to business customers as an incentive to sign-up for overpriced maintenance contracts on top of the original purchase price.
The lack of repairability is not some kind of conspiracy.
Right, just like there is no ulterior motive when tech firms change connectors for each new generation of products even if the new ones do essentially the same things as the old ones, use unusual components where standard ones could have done the same job, or even remove most standard connectors altogether and maybe provide custom adapters or wireless devices with questionable reliability at much higher prices instead.
It's true that there is some merit in the argument that using custom components or things like glue instead of screws allows for making devices that are better in some way, but there is precious little evidence that the those improvements are significant or wanted by the market.
The point is that once a company has enough control of the market to restrict supply chains and/or information about how the device works, they can effectively limit compatibility, prevent repairs and other long-term maintenance, and ultimately constrain the continued use of the device, even if such use would otherwise be viable.
That leads directly to problems like built-in obsolescence, excessive repair charges for devices that fail earlier than might reasonably have been expected, wastage of limited natural resources used in manufacture, and devices that are hard to recycle or otherwise dispose of in safe and environmentally friendly ways.
Hardware producers in the tech industry have become very, very bad at these kinds of things, and they've made a lot of money as a result, and so now it looks like legal/regulatory action is needed. This is hardly a new concern and they've had years to get their own houses in order and have failed to do so, so I have no sympathy for them at all.
They had a choice, they could have made javascript pages, but instead they used Java.
You could draw interactive diagrams, or animate them, in JavaScript in the year 2000? It was difficult enough doing these things in JavaScript ten years later! The reason the <applet> tag existed was that Java was the standard way to do things beyond what basic HTML could handle for a long time before.
As for too much control, I invite you to consider that the likes of Apple, Google and now Mozilla have been successfully killing off access to useful content that has existed for 10-20 years for their own purposes, while encouraging us to instead use perma-beta web "standards" that have about as much stability and longevity as a drunk riding a unicycle over a beach ball floating towards a waterfall.
It's an English word, used with its normal English meaning. If you read more into it than that, maybe I'm not the one with bandwagon issues?
One could actually learn something, get good information from insiders, pose and get immediate answers to relevant questions, access that was hard to get otherwise, in those days.
Yes, that's the big difference. Going back maybe 15-20 years, if you wanted to learn a programming language, you bought a book or read the manual or help text that came with your compiler. We did have online programming communities to some extent, but they kept in touch through forums like bulletin boards or electronic mailing lists or Usenet groups. Discussions would take place over days or even weeks instead of the minutes or hours they often last nowadays. Those discussions were usually more civilised than a lot of online forums are today, but there were no YouTube videos of presentations by the key people who actually designed the languages and tools you were using, we had manually curated FAQs instead of the huge Q&A sites like Stack Overflow today, and so on.
In that context, going to a conference meant an opportunity to meet the experts at the top of a given ecosystem, watch presentations on the next big things they were working on, and even pick up a copy of the new version of your favourite compiler to take back.
Of course, today, we do have much better online channels. We can watch presentations on YouTube whenever we're ready. We can pose questions in forums and have a fair chance that more experienced programmers will answer them within minutes, and we can collaborate with other leaders in close to real time if we're in that expert position for some particular subject ourselves. We can share code snippets for peer review, download the latest tools, or upload our contributions to community projects. And we can do all of these things from the comfort of our own homes/offices, without worrying about where we're going to stay overnight, or who's going to look after the kids, or the frustration and abuse that is common with long distance travel in the 21st century.
In short, most of the key advantages conferences used to have don't really matter any more, and business travel isn't what it used to be either. Some people argue that they're still worthwhile for "networking", whatever that means. I'm pretty sure I have far more opportunities to connect with other people who share my interests online today than any conference ever offered, though.
Mozilla aren't the last hold-outs on NPAPI. Plenty of business users still run IE, and will continue to do so for a long time because of measures like this. All it's doing is turning IE11 into the new IE6.
They should have started converting those to Javascript long ago, it's not like they didn't know this was coming years ago.
That's... not how any of this works.
For one thing, JS has only recently become a viable alternative for a lot of what used to be done with plugins. In many cases it's still relatively slow and/or buggy as hell.
For another thing, it costs time and money to produce software, and big rewrites are notoriously expensive. Expecting people to just dump working software because it's inconvenient to continue supporting its platform is unrealistic.
As for criticism of Java's speed, it takes longer to display Facebook than almost any Java-based management interface I've used in the past five years. Where do you think a lot of the JIT compilation technologies that are behind modern JS engines were first developed?
Finally, while the Java language and ecosystem are far from ideal, with a JVM you can also write code in much more powerful programming languages if you want. And frankly, modern JS-based web development is such an unstable mess that almost anything else would be better for the kinds of long-term projects that typically used Java applets in the past.
Also, as browsers start to emulate the extra functionality that used to be provided by plugins, it is logical to assume based on past performance that they will probably start to suffer from related security issues as well.
But let's not let facts get in the way of bashing web technologies more than a year or two old and promoting replacement technologies that aren't necessarily as capable as the old ones, because that would totally spoil all the fun.
Still, I guess I'll have to stop updating firefox so as not to break compatibility with the Java stuff that I have to use.
Sadly, I doubt you'll be alone.
I work with a lot of networked devices, which is a common environment where Java in a browser still matters. While there are now alternative technologies that can be used for much of what we used to use Java for, people should remember that they have only quite recently become stable and reliable enough for long-term professional use in an embedded context, and even today, there are plenty of bugs and performance problems with both canvas and SVG, so they're still not a perfect replacement if you had an applet for some graphical presentation purpose. Obviously it takes time to develop new versions of these UIs and then time for customers to purchase and deploy them, so expecting these embedded systems to be upgraded before the next major hardware/firmware upgrade cycle is unrealistic.
Another case where Java applets are still useful is all the little demo pages, again typically graphical ones, that the academic community has written over the years. I came across one of them just this weekend, and was glad that I was using Firefox instead of Chrome so I could still watch them. It's a horrible shame that access to all of this content, much of it developed over two decades but as relevant today as ever, is being lost just because the browser developers and Oracle couldn't get their acts together. This isn't how the Web was supposed to work, no user benefits from the loss, and there's no magical fairy who's going to come along and rewrite all of these pages using shiny new HTML5 standards just because Google and Mozilla would prefer it if Java went away.
Wasn't the death spiral evident when they tried to turn Firefox into Chrome, but there was already Chrome?
It's a shame, because I've always been a fan of Firefox in general, just not of the numerous missteps Mozilla has made in recent years. They seem obsessed with rebranding, and moving the UI around, and adding clutter with half-related features a lot of people didn't want or need, and making everything work the same way across 73 different platforms. (Their strategy has been similar to another once-great giant of the PC world that is now struggling in spaces it used to dominate, now that I think about it.) Sadly, none of those things matter very much to someone running traditional FF on a desktop or a mobile app equivalent.
I wish they had instead put all of that effort into defending their position as the open/free browser that was customisation-friendly, while implementing solid support for the important new features in the fundamental web technologies. All of the evergreen browsers are awful when it comes to quality of implementation and stability/regressions, but Firefox has suffered from not ticking the new features boxes either, so what is its USP in 2017?
The icons shown on the ribbon include dozens of things that no normal user ever uses
Microsoft were collecting extensive telemetry about how Office was being used for a long time before moving to the Ribbon interface. They even had people blogging about the process and how they'd adjusted the UI based on the real data they had available.
Now, it's certainly possible that some people turned off that telemetry, and therefore that the design of the Ribbon is biased on data towards the functions used by people who left it on. In that case, it seems more likely that in fact the Ribbon is a very good representation of what normal users want, but not necessary of what the kind of geek who also turns off telemetry wants.
Personally, I'm with you on not much liking the Ribbon, but then I also only used a couple of icons on the toolbar of most Office applications before, and they were just the ones that were too much of a pain to do with just the keyboard and where it wasn't quicker to change lots of related things together in a dialog. I'm hardly a typical user, and I accept that mainstream software like Office is inevitably going to cater to normal people before it caters to my geeky tastes.
Those that know it can make it jump up, sing, dance, and pretty much do anything a a thousand times faster than the pretend databases.
Of course it can. That's why companies like Google and Facebook, with their modest but slowly growing database needs, have all moved from pretend databases to Oracle as they've scaled up.
On the other hand, after CS was so dominant for so long, it took about two years from when Adobe gave up the perma-licence ground for potential competitors to start appearing and taking market share, and it's only relatively recently that those competitors are starting to pose a more serious threat outside of enthusiast support or niche markets.
IMHO, the real test for the subscription model for premium software will be how well the likes of Adobe can maintain their subscription revenues once (a) they've had people converted for a while, so subscribers are finding out how useful the updates are and how the costs are working out in practice, and (b) the premium subscription packages are facing significant competition that costs about as much to buy a licence outright as just a month or two of subscription.
I didn't dismiss it entirely -- I just said most things don't need to be online.
I'm always open to genuinely useful ideas, but for example in the case you gave, most likely any phone app to do that would be using NFC or some similar technology, so there would still be no need for remote access to the whole key system from outside the hotel.
Just make sure you don't accidentally subscribe for a year, cancel after a month, and get dinged with huge cancellation fees. :-)
It won't necessarily be an oral statement, and even if it is, there's a good chance that it was written down in the interview and that at least two of their people were there at the time.
In any case, they will know that you lied if evidence of that turns up later, and so will you. Whether either of you has enough motivation to take formal legal action over it is something else, but it will inevitably sour the employment relationship for as long as it lasts, which is almost always a bad thing for everyone involved.
If they do just fire you on the spot on the basis that you lied on your application and they then refuse to pay any compensation you would normally be entitled to if you were let go by their choice, it is most likely going to be down to you to argue that their actions were unreasonable or unfair in law, and that probably isn't going to end well in any of the situations we've been discussing.
Creative Cloud might work out cheaper for those who really did buy every Creative Suite update as it was released. I don't know many people in that category outside maybe agencies or freelancers who deal with a lot of different clients, though. My experience is rather different to yours, in that I have found very few new features since even the last few versions of the CS days that actually helped with any of my work, and which might have justified an upgrade or switching to a subscription for someone who already had one of the later CS revisions. It's also worth pointing out that the pricing for CC is much higher in a lot of places outside the US.
I suspect the real gain for the rental model switch is that it becomes accessible to those who can't or won't spend a relatively large amount up-front. For businesses, it might be a capex vs. opex question. For individuals, it might just be that they aren't willing to spend a significant chunk of a whole month's income on some software, but they might be willing to pay a little each month.