Just don't look too closely at the compliance audits and root cause analysis of previous faults while you're googling that one, or you may have a disappointed scowl all week. The trouble with standards like this is that unless there is some compulsion to actually follow them effectively, they are just squiggles on a piece of paper or someone's computer screen.
This is the industry where those stories about comparing the cost of the lawsuit when people die against the cost of the recall originated, remember. If things are going to change, either the damage to the business from any serious accident has to be dramatic, such that selling vehicles where engineering failures causing damage/injury/death are more than isolated freak incidents is literally an existential threat to the business, or the senior executives who set these policies need to be personally on the hook for the results without hiding behind the corporate veil, such that if there are serious failures that are a result of either negligence or active decision-making other than in the interests of safety then people go to jail, or both.
Yes, it's a real problem. But I think you're being generous in your characterisations here.
For one thing, some users are interested in features that sync data to remote repositories, but not everyone is. Moreover, when positively informed about privacy and security issues and then asked similar questions, a lot fewer people support some of these behaviours than the cloud services would like to admit. For example, I doubt you'd find many people who thought it was OK to upload all of their photos automatically when they thought they'd turned that behaviour off, even if they had previously turned it on. Don't mistake users going along with some behaviour because they think they have no choice for users actually wanting, agreeing with, or supporting that behaviour.
For a second thing, while there is certainly some truth in your comments about the difficulty of whether to implement these features in software used by a diverse range of users, your characterisation of the available options is very biased. For example, dealing with this specific issue isn't "way too many options", it's one option. Apparently it was fine to have that one option to turn it on, and the usability problem here is that the user could not turn it off again without going to another option somewhere completely different that they didn't know would be relevant. Maybe that first suggestion of yours to have each app do this sort of thing its own way isn't such a bad idea after all for mobile devices where separate apps is the normal model?
I build user interfaces for a living. Sometimes that means figuring out how to present very complicated technical details in a much simpler way so that users can actually take advantage of them. That can be very challenging at times, in part for the kinds of reasons you mentioned. Sometimes you have to redesign whole sections of your UI to work in a new way because of a new feature or interaction between features. However, that doesn't mean you can just give up, and in the context of privacy and security issues specifically, it certainly doesn't mean you can do something shady by default and then blame the user for the consequences. The default with privacy and security issues should always be to err on the side of safety if you can't figure out how to do better.
Thanks for making the rest of your argument totally invalid. Established and known issues aren't shady.
The fact that I chose not to use Google devices, because I don't trust them not to pull exactly this kind of stunt, doesn't invalid anything. The facts are what they are.
And the discussion here is all about how some people who do use those devices were surprised by behaviour they believed they had disabled by uninstalling the app. So to those people the behaviour obviously was hidden and deceptive instead of established and known.
As for your question about apple and M$. Yes, One-drive and IOS do upload without knowledge. The fact IOS did this as default was discovered during the fappening. M$ has been doing this since 2000.
So you can describe a verifiable series of user actions, on each of those platforms, that will result in photos being secretly uploaded when they explicitly think they have turned such behaviour off? I don't think you can.
I don't know how UK politics works but here in Canada, going against the party line is a good way to get yourself backbenched.
That depends a lot on the circumstances here.
The Conservatives have a handful of very high-profile MPs, including at least one former leadership contender, who have consistently stood by their principles on this sort of issue. All of them would almost certainly rebel again this time.
On top of that, the Conservative government has a wafer-thin majority, and there are plenty of back-benchers who would not be sorry to see the Cabinet members given a bit of a bloody nose at this early stage in the new administration. It would remind them that they can't take the support of hundreds of other MPs for granted just because they had the same colour on the ballot paper last election, and the ethical and practical aspects of this particular issue would give them some cover politically if this was how they chose to make their point.
Calling Google shady now is BS. This is and has been established behavior for Google since Gingerbread.
I don't personally use Google devices (or much else that Google does) so I can't comment on that. I certainly wasn't commenting on it before. I was commenting on one specific behaviour, and I don't see why the amount of time it's been going on for is material to whether or not it is shady right now.
You think apple or Microsoft are any better? No they are worse. Apple has been doing it secretly for alot longer. So has Microsoft.
An iOS or Windows Phone automatically uploads all photographs taken with it when the user specifically believes they have disabled that function?
But it will continue to happen because we all sold our privacy for the sake of convenience.
Speak for yourself. No-one is forcing you to carry a smartphone everywhere you go, or to have a Facebook account, or to upload your pictures or location or views on sensitive subjects to web sites operated by giant data-munging corporations. Not everyone sold their privacy, and corporations that pretend everyone did or that it's OK to do stuff like this should be called out for doing so to protect those who want to make a different choice.
(Sorry, I missed an editing screw-up in the above. It was meant to say that either communications are secure or they are vulnerable, but if they are known to be vulnerable then those consequences follow.)
The point is that it doesn't matter. Either communications are secure, or they are known to be vulnerable. If they are known to be vulnerable, every trader and financial service on-line is now vulnerable to the resulting lawsuits, every professional identity thief and fraudster is going to have a party with UK citizens' data, and the UK on-line economy will collapse as a result.
The one thing I find reassuring is that actually going ahead with plans as absurd as the way the Snoopers' Charter is being described would be so catastrophically, obviously, disastrously damaging that even significant parts of Cameron's own party are likely to vote against it and block the legislation. And since he really can't afford that fight so early in the new administration and with such a narrow majority and with other even more controversial issues like Europe in the game as well, I think it will turn out that his carefully crafted comments were just misinterpreted and of course he was never really suggesting something so foolish at all, honest.
If your claims are correct then there is no good way to implement this feature with informed consent for the privacy implications, and maybe in that case it shouldn't have been implemented at all.
You don't get to write software that does dubious things and then just pass the buck to the user because your system was so complicated they couldn't understand it and you buried the details behind sufficient small print that they wouldn't be aware of them.
That would require a Windows 10 computer to be anywhere near me. On the evidence so far, that seems unlikely.
But seriously, every time another one of these stories comes out, it does remind me why I like feature phones, and why Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia has me nervous.
Deleting the app that you used to change a system-level setting used by other apps should NOT change the setting.
That's a reasonable policy, as long as it is absolutely clear in the app that:
1. it was a system-level setting you were changing,
2. the system would continue to honour that setting independent of the app, and
3. you could subsequently turn the system setting off again by doing X independent of the app.
However, if that wasn't clear, and this setting involves uploading data to Google silently and automatically, then the current behaviour is shady as hell. A device that is recording and/or uploading anything without its user's knowledge, or worse when its user explicitly thinks they have turned that behaviour off, is always a usability and privacy issue, and it is always the software developers' responsibility to fix it.
Well, I have a few issues with the cloud hype, starting with the scarcity of evidence to support claims about cloud services being cheaper and/or more secure and/or more reliable than doing things yourself. Every major cloud provider has had serious downtime, and there is only so much you can attribute to being more visible at greater scale or to users not configuring HA tools properly. Far too many on-line services also run into significant security/privacy problems. And cost-wise going with the cloud rather than your own systems tends to be favourable at certain levels (other things being equal) but it can be outrageously expensive in other cases.
These myths aren't really the point here anyway. The point in this case is that no matter how fast your recovery time may be, whatever was happening on your hardware at the time it failed is lost, and in some cases you simply can't make that transparent to your users. Not everything in the world of programming is a distributed map-reduce where losing a hardware node means you just redistribute the 0.0001% of the job it was doing to another and no-one notices. Not everything in the world of networking can tolerate a multi-second failover process without an observable blip in connectivity. As for redundant/HA storage, the CAP theorem called and asked to speak with you about your database, but I think you were on with physics at the time so I just took a message.
It's not just about whether the wastage due to more frequent failures works out cheaper economically than paying a premium for better hardware. It's also about how much downtime you (or your customers) are willing to tolerate and what proportion of overall system time is spent just recovering from failures. If you've ever had the joy of watching the (N+1)-th drive fail in your RAID with N-way redundancy while it's still rebuilding from replacing the earlier failures, you'll know what I mean.
I think the point is that so far it is only used by "the most successful corporations on the internet". In fact, you can probably count the number of organisations in the entire world that qualify on the fingers of one hand, though it will take a few more fingers to count how much money they have invested to reach this point.
Unfortunately, as lovely and friendly as all the Software Defined X advances seem with their mantra of openness, almost no-one is actually building a "web-scale data centre" with a 24/7 staff dedicated to just swapping out broken hardware and effectively unlimited resources to devote to designing hardware architectures and building control software that can cope with frequent failures without losing significant amounts of real money. For normal organisations, even those with heavy IT requirements and 12 figure market caps, running your critical infrastructure on hardware that does have a serious level of testing and consequent robustness may still be advantageous.
(Full disclosure: I sometimes work for clients in the networking industry, though whether an industry shift towards things like OCP would benefit or harm them would be open to debate so I think I'm still reasonably neutral here.)
If you had actually bothered to read my posts before commenting, you might have noticed that at no point did I suggest Firefox must or even should try to keep up with Chrome's bleeding edge features. In fact, I think the drive for quantity of features over quality of implementation that Chrome exemplifies is the worst thing to happen to the Web since the stagnation of the IE6 era, and I would be the last person to suggest that Firefox mimicking that policy is desirable.
And no, the quality of Firefox has not always been as questionable as it is today. I do this stuff for a living, and the bug tracker does not lie. Issues in all real world projects I work on jumped sharply in the period after Firefox transitioned to Chrome-style rapid releases and have never settled back down to their previous level, and I've never identified any other plausible explanation for that.
I actually meant before the Mozilla Foundation and by extension Mozilla Corp, but either way works. In any case, yes, one of the things I really don't like about the way Firefox seems to be heading recently is the kitchen sink strategy. As you say, that was what led to Firefox (and Thunderbird) taking over from the old Mozilla suite in the first place. I've no objection to having a co-ordinated range of communication tools, but I'm not sure why they all need to be built into the browser like some sort of 21st century Zawinski's Law, particularly when that browser famously has a vibrant ecosystem of extensions for those users who do prefer to customise it.
Thanks for the offer. And yes, in a couple of cases I've reported a URL via the Firefox made me sad feature.
I'm torn about doing more. On the one hand, of course I'd like to see the issues fixed and in principle I'm happy to help. As a software developer myself I understand the usefulness of detailed technical information and test cases.
On the other hand, every time I go near Bugzilla I seem to spend 15-30 minutes trying to figure it out, before sometimes getting to the stage of actually submitting a useful issue but more often just giving up. I'm sure it's great for people who use it regularly, but for an occasional contributor it's awful. And unfortunately the reality is that I can't justify spending a client's money like that every time I find a bug in a browser if I have four other browsers available to me within 10 seconds that can load the site just fine, and as selfish as it sounds, there's only so much income that I'm willing to give up by working on non-billable activities.
So again, thank you for the offer, but if you have any pull with Mozilla I would encourage you to spend it on either improving the reporting systems so we can all contribute more effectively in the future, or on improving the built-in diagnostics in Firefox so if I come across a site that does hang there is still a mechanism available to capture what was really going on internally at the time and report it back.
In that specific case it would be understandable. Frankly I'm expecting Perl 6 and Half-Life 3 before Electrolysis ships anyway, but if it ever does, I think most people would understand that it's a significant architectural change and there are very good reasons for making it.
It's the frequent breakage of useful extensions just because someone felt like rearranging the UI or some superficially unrelated APIs that winds up a lot of users and extension developers, I think.
I was there before Mozilla existed, and I respectfully disagree.
To answer your question about how it's bloated since 1.0, please consider this: which updates in the past year or so have not added an extra icon to the main toolbar and/or come with a splash screen about the update that primarily advertises a new feature that isn't a core part of the browser and would previously have been handled with an add-on (if at all)? Why is there an "Apps" entry on my "Tools" menu now? Pocket? Hello?
Meanwhile, quality seems to have dropped significantly since the rapid release schedule. There are currently several sites I visit regularly -- as part of work, mind, so these are professional business sites not bleeding edge web geek blogs -- that will crash Firefox. I literally have to fire up another browser to use them, and that could be IE or Chrome or even Safari on iOS, so it's not that someone has written an IE-only site in 2015 or anything like that. Of course it's particularly annoying with Firefox because unlike every other major browser for many years, taking out one tab in Firefox can still take out everything else as well.
Perhaps instead of trying to be all things^W^WChrome to all people, they would do better to go back to their roots as the simple, expandable browser the AC mentioned, and perhaps focus on the robustness issues with plug-ins and cross-tab contamination that have plagued them for so long. They might not take over the entire Web that way, but at least they'd still be the best choice for a significant part of the market instead of slowly drifting into obscurity on their current course.
I really hope they do, because the two reasons I still tend to use Firefox by default on most PCs are the add-on ecosystem and my general distrust of Google and more recently Microsoft. Mozilla seem to be going the wrong way on both fronts right now.
Sorry, but I think you're mistaking a somewhat similar historical position for what we're talking about here.
You're talking about the published support times for existing operating systems, not the support period based on hardware lifetimes that Microsoft has been referring to in connection with Windows 10. The supported lifetime for the OS itself becomes a concept with little meaning if they plan to treat Windows 10 as an evergreen system, but to my knowledge they have not yet given any clarification of how to interpret their hardware-related statements objectively.
You're also talking about contracts that typically only large organisations will have. Those contracts are irrelevant to home users, because that's not how they buy Windows. Clearly there will be bigger changes than you are implying with Windows Home, because for a start you have no option to ignore or defer updates; you'll need Windows Pro or higher for that from 10 onwards. And of course if you take Windows 10 as a free upgrade, so you haven't paid anything for it, it's questionable whether you'd have any basis in law for complaining even if Microsoft shut down tomorrow. At least with previous versions, if you purchased for real money (or got Windows preinstalled on a new computer you paid for) you could refer to public statements Microsoft have made about support durations and backing out of those commitments would probably lead to a class action suit in the US, for example.
However, there appears to be a more general problem (and a more deliberate strategy) with Apple than any one device or platform. In theory, there are still updates available for my iPad (an early Retina model) but in practice they are widely reported to perform so poorly that we daren't "upgrade". However, that means we are locked out of various apps or upgrades, because Apple forces app developers to target its more recent versions of iOS only. Need a new app? No problem, upgrade your iOS. New iOS makes your device so slow it's barely usable? No problem, just buy a new device. Want to just use what worked fine before on a device you only bought a few years ago, and run apps that developers would be happy to write for it? Sucks to be you.
With the direction Microsoft has been pushing in for a few years now, with what-was-Metro and RT and it looks like now with some of the Windows 10 integration as well, I'm very wary of being forced down the same artificial-obsolescence path. And at least with Apple you can ignore the prompt to update your system and keep using what you had before. The fact that Microsoft are disabling that ability for Windows 10 Home makes me extremely sceptical about their motivations.
I doubt anyone actually believes Microsoft considers the "supported lifetime of your device" to be only a year or two for a desktop computer.
True, but people would have said the same about Apple once upon a time, while lately Apple's software policies seem tailor-made to artificially limit the lifetime of its already relatively expensive product range, up to and including the high-end business laptops and such.
I think the concern is that this is a one-way trip. Once consumers and particularly businesses start making the switch to Windows 10, it is unlikely there will be any going back.
If Microsoft then ships one box-bricking Windows update to all those Windows Home users, who will have no option to defer or skip any update under the current proposals, there is going to be carnage.
The other significant risk I can see is that if Microsoft's new business model doesn't work out -- after all, it seems they're essentially betting on giving away Windows for a considerable time in the hope that it will drive more sales of other software, media content, and related services -- then they are going to need to make their money somewhere else. It would be a brave person who bet against a major tech company exploiting its locked-in users in the face of shareholder anger and probably changes in senior management under those conditions.
It is the likely change in philosophy that concerns me.
Very often, once software has moved to on-line upgrades from static installation, or from on-line upgrades being available to routinely applying rolling updates for new versions, the quality at initial launch time drops sharply, and the quality of rolling updates is significantly lower than professional standards should dictate. There's something about the mindset that means shipping half-finished products is now somehow OK, like the "perpetual beta" junk that even some of the biggest companies in the business have inflicted on us in recent years.
This slide towards version-less rolling updates has so often been used as an excuse to ship sub-standard products, or to actively damage previously acceptable products after the fact, that I don't want anything to do with it for anything I actually rely on. Browsers have turned to sh*t since Google started doing it with Chrome and Mozilla started copying them with Firefox. Apple have been systematically nerfing iDevices by forcing apps (which are only available through the App Store that they control) to update to match recent iOS versions, even though there are widespread reports of those newer iOS versions crippling performance on "old" (like, maybe two years old) devices to the point where they are basically useless. Adobe have alienated a substantial part of the creative/design industries with the move to Creative Cloud rentware, and I have yet to see anyone say a good word about the updates they rolled out a few days ago (complete with awful performance and blatant bugs). Even Microsoft, long the champions of doing things with professional standards of stability and backward compatibility in mind, seem to have gone full see-what-sticks in recent years, and I don't see this changing given they appointed Nadella as CEO.
Personally, I like my operating systems working and staying that way. That's why I no longer install anything but designated security updates on my Windows 7 systems unless I have an active reason to do so; I just ignore everything else on the assumption that it's going to break something, hurt performance, start nagging me to update to Windows 10, or otherwise make my experience worse. And so far, after following that policy for some considerable time, I'm quite happy with not having those updates and having a stable system I can actually use.
"While the RTM process has been a significant milestone for previous releases of Windows, it’s more of a minor one for Windows 10. Microsoft is moving Windows 10 to a 'Windows as a service' model that means the operating system is regularly updated."
Yay, now my OS can also ship as bug-ridden, slow, insecure software, because "we'll patch it later".
Sounds about as promising an upgrade as moving to subscription software-for-rent for something I rely on to earn my living. Ask anyone using Creative Cloud since the latest updates how well that one works out.
And should I also put the bigger screen, full size keyboard and mouse in my bag and carry it with me every time I visit a client on-site?
Taking a portable computer with a big screen with me is better than taking a portable computer with a small screen with me, for exactly the same reasons that having a big screen (or more than one) on my desktop is better than having a small screen on my desktop. Yes, it's balanced out modestly by weight and power issues, but carrying a bag that weighs an extra pound from the train/car to the client's office/facility is hardly a burden for any reasonably fit adult.
I don't need to install an alternative shell. I've got one that works just fine out of the box. It's called the Windows 7 UI.
FWIW, it's not the start menu I'm bothered about. Since Win7 I hardly use it anyway, I just have my regular applications set out in the task bar and use jump lists probably 90% of the time I load one. This gets me to anything from a spreadsheet I worked with recently to a shell on a remote server I use regularly with two clicks and is one of the cleanest UI set-ups I've ever seen in an OS GUI.
The thing that annoys me about the Win8+ GUIs is how dumbed down and in-your-face they are. Huge areas of bright colours (yay for eye strain), boxy styles where you never quite know what you can click (sorry, tap) until you try, clumsy icons that don't really tell you anything anyway, and everything all spaced out so fat-fingered people with tablets don't accidentally reformat their disk instead of sending an e-mail. For someone using a keyboard and mouse with good screen(s), all of this is moving backwards. If I wanted dumb UIs for simple stuff, I'd buy an iPad and use web apps instead of desktop applications.
I do realise that some of this related primarily to what was then called the Metro UI in Win8 and some changes have been made since then. But from what I can see so far with Win10, it looks like they're pushing the overall UI theme even more in that direction, even if the default method of interaction looks more like a traditional desktop again.
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Just don't look too closely at the compliance audits and root cause analysis of previous faults while you're googling that one, or you may have a disappointed scowl all week. The trouble with standards like this is that unless there is some compulsion to actually follow them effectively, they are just squiggles on a piece of paper or someone's computer screen.
This is the industry where those stories about comparing the cost of the lawsuit when people die against the cost of the recall originated, remember. If things are going to change, either the damage to the business from any serious accident has to be dramatic, such that selling vehicles where engineering failures causing damage/injury/death are more than isolated freak incidents is literally an existential threat to the business, or the senior executives who set these policies need to be personally on the hook for the results without hiding behind the corporate veil, such that if there are serious failures that are a result of either negligence or active decision-making other than in the interests of safety then people go to jail, or both.
Yes, it's a real problem. But I think you're being generous in your characterisations here.
For one thing, some users are interested in features that sync data to remote repositories, but not everyone is. Moreover, when positively informed about privacy and security issues and then asked similar questions, a lot fewer people support some of these behaviours than the cloud services would like to admit. For example, I doubt you'd find many people who thought it was OK to upload all of their photos automatically when they thought they'd turned that behaviour off, even if they had previously turned it on. Don't mistake users going along with some behaviour because they think they have no choice for users actually wanting, agreeing with, or supporting that behaviour.
For a second thing, while there is certainly some truth in your comments about the difficulty of whether to implement these features in software used by a diverse range of users, your characterisation of the available options is very biased. For example, dealing with this specific issue isn't "way too many options", it's one option. Apparently it was fine to have that one option to turn it on, and the usability problem here is that the user could not turn it off again without going to another option somewhere completely different that they didn't know would be relevant. Maybe that first suggestion of yours to have each app do this sort of thing its own way isn't such a bad idea after all for mobile devices where separate apps is the normal model?
I build user interfaces for a living. Sometimes that means figuring out how to present very complicated technical details in a much simpler way so that users can actually take advantage of them. That can be very challenging at times, in part for the kinds of reasons you mentioned. Sometimes you have to redesign whole sections of your UI to work in a new way because of a new feature or interaction between features. However, that doesn't mean you can just give up, and in the context of privacy and security issues specifically, it certainly doesn't mean you can do something shady by default and then blame the user for the consequences. The default with privacy and security issues should always be to err on the side of safety if you can't figure out how to do better.
Thanks for making the rest of your argument totally invalid. Established and known issues aren't shady.
The fact that I chose not to use Google devices, because I don't trust them not to pull exactly this kind of stunt, doesn't invalid anything. The facts are what they are.
And the discussion here is all about how some people who do use those devices were surprised by behaviour they believed they had disabled by uninstalling the app. So to those people the behaviour obviously was hidden and deceptive instead of established and known.
As for your question about apple and M$. Yes, One-drive and IOS do upload without knowledge. The fact IOS did this as default was discovered during the fappening. M$ has been doing this since 2000.
So you can describe a verifiable series of user actions, on each of those platforms, that will result in photos being secretly uploaded when they explicitly think they have turned such behaviour off? I don't think you can.
I don't know how UK politics works but here in Canada, going against the party line is a good way to get yourself backbenched.
That depends a lot on the circumstances here.
The Conservatives have a handful of very high-profile MPs, including at least one former leadership contender, who have consistently stood by their principles on this sort of issue. All of them would almost certainly rebel again this time.
On top of that, the Conservative government has a wafer-thin majority, and there are plenty of back-benchers who would not be sorry to see the Cabinet members given a bit of a bloody nose at this early stage in the new administration. It would remind them that they can't take the support of hundreds of other MPs for granted just because they had the same colour on the ballot paper last election, and the ethical and practical aspects of this particular issue would give them some cover politically if this was how they chose to make their point.
Calling Google shady now is BS. This is and has been established behavior for Google since Gingerbread.
I don't personally use Google devices (or much else that Google does) so I can't comment on that. I certainly wasn't commenting on it before. I was commenting on one specific behaviour, and I don't see why the amount of time it's been going on for is material to whether or not it is shady right now.
You think apple or Microsoft are any better? No they are worse. Apple has been doing it secretly for alot longer. So has Microsoft.
An iOS or Windows Phone automatically uploads all photographs taken with it when the user specifically believes they have disabled that function?
But it will continue to happen because we all sold our privacy for the sake of convenience.
Speak for yourself. No-one is forcing you to carry a smartphone everywhere you go, or to have a Facebook account, or to upload your pictures or location or views on sensitive subjects to web sites operated by giant data-munging corporations. Not everyone sold their privacy, and corporations that pretend everyone did or that it's OK to do stuff like this should be called out for doing so to protect those who want to make a different choice.
(Sorry, I missed an editing screw-up in the above. It was meant to say that either communications are secure or they are vulnerable, but if they are known to be vulnerable then those consequences follow.)
The point is that it doesn't matter. Either communications are secure, or they are known to be vulnerable. If they are known to be vulnerable, every trader and financial service on-line is now vulnerable to the resulting lawsuits, every professional identity thief and fraudster is going to have a party with UK citizens' data, and the UK on-line economy will collapse as a result.
The one thing I find reassuring is that actually going ahead with plans as absurd as the way the Snoopers' Charter is being described would be so catastrophically, obviously, disastrously damaging that even significant parts of Cameron's own party are likely to vote against it and block the legislation. And since he really can't afford that fight so early in the new administration and with such a narrow majority and with other even more controversial issues like Europe in the game as well, I think it will turn out that his carefully crafted comments were just misinterpreted and of course he was never really suggesting something so foolish at all, honest.
If your claims are correct then there is no good way to implement this feature with informed consent for the privacy implications, and maybe in that case it shouldn't have been implemented at all.
You don't get to write software that does dubious things and then just pass the buck to the user because your system was so complicated they couldn't understand it and you buried the details behind sufficient small print that they wouldn't be aware of them.
Soon coming to a Windows 10 computer near you.
That would require a Windows 10 computer to be anywhere near me. On the evidence so far, that seems unlikely.
But seriously, every time another one of these stories comes out, it does remind me why I like feature phones, and why Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia has me nervous.
Deleting the app that you used to change a system-level setting used by other apps should NOT change the setting.
That's a reasonable policy, as long as it is absolutely clear in the app that:
1. it was a system-level setting you were changing,
2. the system would continue to honour that setting independent of the app, and
3. you could subsequently turn the system setting off again by doing X independent of the app.
However, if that wasn't clear, and this setting involves uploading data to Google silently and automatically, then the current behaviour is shady as hell. A device that is recording and/or uploading anything without its user's knowledge, or worse when its user explicitly thinks they have turned that behaviour off, is always a usability and privacy issue, and it is always the software developers' responsibility to fix it.
Well, I have a few issues with the cloud hype, starting with the scarcity of evidence to support claims about cloud services being cheaper and/or more secure and/or more reliable than doing things yourself. Every major cloud provider has had serious downtime, and there is only so much you can attribute to being more visible at greater scale or to users not configuring HA tools properly. Far too many on-line services also run into significant security/privacy problems. And cost-wise going with the cloud rather than your own systems tends to be favourable at certain levels (other things being equal) but it can be outrageously expensive in other cases.
These myths aren't really the point here anyway. The point in this case is that no matter how fast your recovery time may be, whatever was happening on your hardware at the time it failed is lost, and in some cases you simply can't make that transparent to your users. Not everything in the world of programming is a distributed map-reduce where losing a hardware node means you just redistribute the 0.0001% of the job it was doing to another and no-one notices. Not everything in the world of networking can tolerate a multi-second failover process without an observable blip in connectivity. As for redundant/HA storage, the CAP theorem called and asked to speak with you about your database, but I think you were on with physics at the time so I just took a message.
It's not just about whether the wastage due to more frequent failures works out cheaper economically than paying a premium for better hardware. It's also about how much downtime you (or your customers) are willing to tolerate and what proportion of overall system time is spent just recovering from failures. If you've ever had the joy of watching the (N+1)-th drive fail in your RAID with N-way redundancy while it's still rebuilding from replacing the earlier failures, you'll know what I mean.
I think the point is that so far it is only used by "the most successful corporations on the internet". In fact, you can probably count the number of organisations in the entire world that qualify on the fingers of one hand, though it will take a few more fingers to count how much money they have invested to reach this point.
Unfortunately, as lovely and friendly as all the Software Defined X advances seem with their mantra of openness, almost no-one is actually building a "web-scale data centre" with a 24/7 staff dedicated to just swapping out broken hardware and effectively unlimited resources to devote to designing hardware architectures and building control software that can cope with frequent failures without losing significant amounts of real money. For normal organisations, even those with heavy IT requirements and 12 figure market caps, running your critical infrastructure on hardware that does have a serious level of testing and consequent robustness may still be advantageous.
(Full disclosure: I sometimes work for clients in the networking industry, though whether an industry shift towards things like OCP would benefit or harm them would be open to debate so I think I'm still reasonably neutral here.)
If you had actually bothered to read my posts before commenting, you might have noticed that at no point did I suggest Firefox must or even should try to keep up with Chrome's bleeding edge features. In fact, I think the drive for quantity of features over quality of implementation that Chrome exemplifies is the worst thing to happen to the Web since the stagnation of the IE6 era, and I would be the last person to suggest that Firefox mimicking that policy is desirable.
And no, the quality of Firefox has not always been as questionable as it is today. I do this stuff for a living, and the bug tracker does not lie. Issues in all real world projects I work on jumped sharply in the period after Firefox transitioned to Chrome-style rapid releases and have never settled back down to their previous level, and I've never identified any other plausible explanation for that.
I actually meant before the Mozilla Foundation and by extension Mozilla Corp, but either way works. In any case, yes, one of the things I really don't like about the way Firefox seems to be heading recently is the kitchen sink strategy. As you say, that was what led to Firefox (and Thunderbird) taking over from the old Mozilla suite in the first place. I've no objection to having a co-ordinated range of communication tools, but I'm not sure why they all need to be built into the browser like some sort of 21st century Zawinski's Law, particularly when that browser famously has a vibrant ecosystem of extensions for those users who do prefer to customise it.
Thanks for the offer. And yes, in a couple of cases I've reported a URL via the Firefox made me sad feature.
I'm torn about doing more. On the one hand, of course I'd like to see the issues fixed and in principle I'm happy to help. As a software developer myself I understand the usefulness of detailed technical information and test cases.
On the other hand, every time I go near Bugzilla I seem to spend 15-30 minutes trying to figure it out, before sometimes getting to the stage of actually submitting a useful issue but more often just giving up. I'm sure it's great for people who use it regularly, but for an occasional contributor it's awful. And unfortunately the reality is that I can't justify spending a client's money like that every time I find a bug in a browser if I have four other browsers available to me within 10 seconds that can load the site just fine, and as selfish as it sounds, there's only so much income that I'm willing to give up by working on non-billable activities.
So again, thank you for the offer, but if you have any pull with Mozilla I would encourage you to spend it on either improving the reporting systems so we can all contribute more effectively in the future, or on improving the built-in diagnostics in Firefox so if I come across a site that does hang there is still a mechanism available to capture what was really going on internally at the time and report it back.
In that specific case it would be understandable. Frankly I'm expecting Perl 6 and Half-Life 3 before Electrolysis ships anyway, but if it ever does, I think most people would understand that it's a significant architectural change and there are very good reasons for making it.
It's the frequent breakage of useful extensions just because someone felt like rearranging the UI or some superficially unrelated APIs that winds up a lot of users and extension developers, I think.
I was there before Mozilla existed, and I respectfully disagree.
To answer your question about how it's bloated since 1.0, please consider this: which updates in the past year or so have not added an extra icon to the main toolbar and/or come with a splash screen about the update that primarily advertises a new feature that isn't a core part of the browser and would previously have been handled with an add-on (if at all)? Why is there an "Apps" entry on my "Tools" menu now? Pocket? Hello?
Meanwhile, quality seems to have dropped significantly since the rapid release schedule. There are currently several sites I visit regularly -- as part of work, mind, so these are professional business sites not bleeding edge web geek blogs -- that will crash Firefox. I literally have to fire up another browser to use them, and that could be IE or Chrome or even Safari on iOS, so it's not that someone has written an IE-only site in 2015 or anything like that. Of course it's particularly annoying with Firefox because unlike every other major browser for many years, taking out one tab in Firefox can still take out everything else as well.
Perhaps instead of trying to be all things^W^WChrome to all people, they would do better to go back to their roots as the simple, expandable browser the AC mentioned, and perhaps focus on the robustness issues with plug-ins and cross-tab contamination that have plagued them for so long. They might not take over the entire Web that way, but at least they'd still be the best choice for a significant part of the market instead of slowly drifting into obscurity on their current course.
I really hope they do, because the two reasons I still tend to use Firefox by default on most PCs are the add-on ecosystem and my general distrust of Google and more recently Microsoft. Mozilla seem to be going the wrong way on both fronts right now.
Sorry, but I think you're mistaking a somewhat similar historical position for what we're talking about here.
You're talking about the published support times for existing operating systems, not the support period based on hardware lifetimes that Microsoft has been referring to in connection with Windows 10. The supported lifetime for the OS itself becomes a concept with little meaning if they plan to treat Windows 10 as an evergreen system, but to my knowledge they have not yet given any clarification of how to interpret their hardware-related statements objectively.
You're also talking about contracts that typically only large organisations will have. Those contracts are irrelevant to home users, because that's not how they buy Windows. Clearly there will be bigger changes than you are implying with Windows Home, because for a start you have no option to ignore or defer updates; you'll need Windows Pro or higher for that from 10 onwards. And of course if you take Windows 10 as a free upgrade, so you haven't paid anything for it, it's questionable whether you'd have any basis in law for complaining even if Microsoft shut down tomorrow. At least with previous versions, if you purchased for real money (or got Windows preinstalled on a new computer you paid for) you could refer to public statements Microsoft have made about support durations and backing out of those commitments would probably lead to a class action suit in the US, for example.
Yes, that was part of what I had in mind.
However, there appears to be a more general problem (and a more deliberate strategy) with Apple than any one device or platform. In theory, there are still updates available for my iPad (an early Retina model) but in practice they are widely reported to perform so poorly that we daren't "upgrade". However, that means we are locked out of various apps or upgrades, because Apple forces app developers to target its more recent versions of iOS only. Need a new app? No problem, upgrade your iOS. New iOS makes your device so slow it's barely usable? No problem, just buy a new device. Want to just use what worked fine before on a device you only bought a few years ago, and run apps that developers would be happy to write for it? Sucks to be you.
With the direction Microsoft has been pushing in for a few years now, with what-was-Metro and RT and it looks like now with some of the Windows 10 integration as well, I'm very wary of being forced down the same artificial-obsolescence path. And at least with Apple you can ignore the prompt to update your system and keep using what you had before. The fact that Microsoft are disabling that ability for Windows 10 Home makes me extremely sceptical about their motivations.
I doubt anyone actually believes Microsoft considers the "supported lifetime of your device" to be only a year or two for a desktop computer.
True, but people would have said the same about Apple once upon a time, while lately Apple's software policies seem tailor-made to artificially limit the lifetime of its already relatively expensive product range, up to and including the high-end business laptops and such.
I think the concern is that this is a one-way trip. Once consumers and particularly businesses start making the switch to Windows 10, it is unlikely there will be any going back.
If Microsoft then ships one box-bricking Windows update to all those Windows Home users, who will have no option to defer or skip any update under the current proposals, there is going to be carnage.
The other significant risk I can see is that if Microsoft's new business model doesn't work out -- after all, it seems they're essentially betting on giving away Windows for a considerable time in the hope that it will drive more sales of other software, media content, and related services -- then they are going to need to make their money somewhere else. It would be a brave person who bet against a major tech company exploiting its locked-in users in the face of shareholder anger and probably changes in senior management under those conditions.
Except for the small elephant in the room, which is that they still don't seem to have defined "for the supported lifetime of your device" anywhere.
It is the likely change in philosophy that concerns me.
Very often, once software has moved to on-line upgrades from static installation, or from on-line upgrades being available to routinely applying rolling updates for new versions, the quality at initial launch time drops sharply, and the quality of rolling updates is significantly lower than professional standards should dictate. There's something about the mindset that means shipping half-finished products is now somehow OK, like the "perpetual beta" junk that even some of the biggest companies in the business have inflicted on us in recent years.
This slide towards version-less rolling updates has so often been used as an excuse to ship sub-standard products, or to actively damage previously acceptable products after the fact, that I don't want anything to do with it for anything I actually rely on. Browsers have turned to sh*t since Google started doing it with Chrome and Mozilla started copying them with Firefox. Apple have been systematically nerfing iDevices by forcing apps (which are only available through the App Store that they control) to update to match recent iOS versions, even though there are widespread reports of those newer iOS versions crippling performance on "old" (like, maybe two years old) devices to the point where they are basically useless. Adobe have alienated a substantial part of the creative/design industries with the move to Creative Cloud rentware, and I have yet to see anyone say a good word about the updates they rolled out a few days ago (complete with awful performance and blatant bugs). Even Microsoft, long the champions of doing things with professional standards of stability and backward compatibility in mind, seem to have gone full see-what-sticks in recent years, and I don't see this changing given they appointed Nadella as CEO.
Personally, I like my operating systems working and staying that way. That's why I no longer install anything but designated security updates on my Windows 7 systems unless I have an active reason to do so; I just ignore everything else on the assumption that it's going to break something, hurt performance, start nagging me to update to Windows 10, or otherwise make my experience worse. And so far, after following that policy for some considerable time, I'm quite happy with not having those updates and having a stable system I can actually use.
I couldn't agree more.
"While the RTM process has been a significant milestone for previous releases of Windows, it’s more of a minor one for Windows 10. Microsoft is moving Windows 10 to a 'Windows as a service' model that means the operating system is regularly updated."
Yay, now my OS can also ship as bug-ridden, slow, insecure software, because "we'll patch it later".
Sounds about as promising an upgrade as moving to subscription software-for-rent for something I rely on to earn my living. Ask anyone using Creative Cloud since the latest updates how well that one works out.
And should I also put the bigger screen, full size keyboard and mouse in my bag and carry it with me every time I visit a client on-site?
Taking a portable computer with a big screen with me is better than taking a portable computer with a small screen with me, for exactly the same reasons that having a big screen (or more than one) on my desktop is better than having a small screen on my desktop. Yes, it's balanced out modestly by weight and power issues, but carrying a bag that weighs an extra pound from the train/car to the client's office/facility is hardly a burden for any reasonably fit adult.
I don't need to install an alternative shell. I've got one that works just fine out of the box. It's called the Windows 7 UI.
FWIW, it's not the start menu I'm bothered about. Since Win7 I hardly use it anyway, I just have my regular applications set out in the task bar and use jump lists probably 90% of the time I load one. This gets me to anything from a spreadsheet I worked with recently to a shell on a remote server I use regularly with two clicks and is one of the cleanest UI set-ups I've ever seen in an OS GUI.
The thing that annoys me about the Win8+ GUIs is how dumbed down and in-your-face they are. Huge areas of bright colours (yay for eye strain), boxy styles where you never quite know what you can click (sorry, tap) until you try, clumsy icons that don't really tell you anything anyway, and everything all spaced out so fat-fingered people with tablets don't accidentally reformat their disk instead of sending an e-mail. For someone using a keyboard and mouse with good screen(s), all of this is moving backwards. If I wanted dumb UIs for simple stuff, I'd buy an iPad and use web apps instead of desktop applications.
I do realise that some of this related primarily to what was then called the Metro UI in Win8 and some changes have been made since then. But from what I can see so far with Win10, it looks like they're pushing the overall UI theme even more in that direction, even if the default method of interaction looks more like a traditional desktop again.