Except I also debunked his nonsense in the process. Did you come here to debunk anything I've said, or do you truly not have anything useful to add?
Also, don't worry, it appears my comment is already getting modded into oblivion, for telling the truth. His outright lies and misinformation are still modded insightful. You should be happy about that.
Yes, but Apple and Microsoft are not pushing computers with 16GB total storage and 9GB of free space and then giving 100GB or 1TB of cloud storage(free only for a few years mind you) to placate that. Google is pretty much the only one that's heavily pushing users towards being slaves of their cloud.
There is no doubt that local storage offers advantages, but you're dismissing the advantages of devices like Chromebooks.
My father called yesterday because his Windows computer got a virus. It'll cost him a few hundred bucks plus, most likely, days and days of angst and worry that some of his accounts (such as bank accounts) may have been compromised.
Let's see, a few hours of downtime a year because "the cloud" is wonky vs. constant vigilance, fear, and annoyance at keeping a Windows or OS X system running . . . you know, I think it's perfectly reasonable for some people to trade stress and complexity for something like a Chromebook, even if the Chromebook will likely involve a little downtime. Big deal.
Sadly, the main problem is the whole concept. While it might be a good idea, at some point in the future, that future is not yet here.
I respectfully disagree. The cloud is the right solution for a lot of people. Those people that are not technical and don't want to be technical, because they have non-technical jobs, interests, and hobbies. They want their technology to Just Work. The cloud gives them a pleasant, no hassles experience.
What major online service, e.g. iCloud (based on MS Azure), Amazon AWS, etc. has not gone down for a significant period in each of the last few years? I am having trouble thinking of one.
Sure, there's occasional downtime, but . . . so what? For many people, it's just a temporary annoyance, whereas trying to keep their computers updated, their application updated, stay safe from viruses, etc. is a never ending annoying battle.
And before anybody says "Yes, but it's still more reliable than your own servers" I call bullshit. My own servers have not been down at all in the last few years.
You know as well as I do that this is just anecdotal. Also, you're obviously technical in nature. For your Average Joe, having someone else maintain the servers he uses is a much better.
no one is saying that we cant ease out "dirty" tech, simply that we do it over time.
And you, of course, know precisely how much time we have, right?
Instead of inflating the existing costs of enery to make green techs look better now, all while hurting the people at the bottom the most, gas is 4 bucks a gallon, 10 years ago it was 98 cents.
When inflation is factored in, the price of has, on average, not changed very much.
instead of trying to make it all happen at once (in the scheme of things) let the tech mature.
Except nobody is trying to make it happen all at once. You're just trying to smear the opposition by accusing them of an extremist position they're not actually taking.
All technology matures, some faster than others, but let the tech mature and bring the price down to the levels of mature tech. not everyone jumps in to be a early adopter, most people wait for the price to drop, a 10K PC 8 years ago costs a few hundred bucks today.
A pathetic amount of government money is funneled into alternative energy research. What are you bitching about? It's estimated that the Iraq war cost over $3 trillion dollars. How much money did the government spend on subsidizing alternative energy last year? Give me your address and I'll send you a few dollars which should easily cover it, then you don't have to complain about the government spending your money on alternative energy research.
Also, why do you assume we have all the time in the world? Rising oceans will displace millions of people at an enormous cost. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Your lazy approach is shortsighted and foolish.
is exactly this. Now I dont know anyone who in their right mind wants to "destroy the environment" yet for the most part, environmentalists work on a knee jerk reaction style of attack.
Ad hominem.
"green" energy is too expensive to compete with proven yet "dirty" tech? well instead of developing the green tech to compete we must artificially increase the cost of the dirty fuel!
Begging the question.
we cant use plain old light bulbs anymore
Yes, you can.
that use more power (and give off heat, thus meaning one could in theory keep their heater lower)
Incandescent bulbs are obscenely inefficient at producing heat. Promoting them a mechanism to lower your thermostat is idiotic.
and now we are stuck with CFLs that are worse for the environment than the old bulbs!
No, they're not. They're much better for the environment when you factor in the fact that the much lower energy requirements means much lower emissions from power plants, such as coal fired power plants which eject tons of mercury into to atmosphere. The microdrop of mercury in a CFL is nothing in comparison.
The idea of "saving the earth" is a good one, but on the other hand, the earth will be fine long after humans inhabit it.
Who the fuck cares that the Earth will be fine if we genocide ourselves?
You embody everything that's wrong with the "environmental skeptic" movement. Go back to Fox News, leave actually thinking to the grown ups.
Could someone with knowledge and experience in the area of mesh networks tell us how feasible it would be for people to setup their own mesh networks that span cities, states, even whole countries? Obviously performance would be much lower than what we enjoy via the Internet right now, but I'm wondering if the people of the world could, without the assistance of government, setup their own large scale mesh networks. Then it wouldn't matter quite so much when the governments of individual countries do things like block Internet access for defense reasons.
A non-corporate solution would be nice, so that individuals without huge amounts of capital could bootstrap the whole thing in an entirely grassroots manner.
Even as a Microsoft hater of old, I'm beginning to feel sorry for MS. For sure, 15 years ago they were engaged in monopoly abuse to advantage IE. But these days, IE itself is on the way out. WebKit based browsers are the clear majority these days. And neither Apple nor Google have to offer users of their systems a choice of browser.
It must really rub salt in the wound to have a statutory obligation to offer alternatives to their minority browser.
Don't waste your emotions feeling sorry for them. They're still ruthlessly abusive.
They basically killed netbooks by only licensing Windows Starter to netbooks that were sure to offer a terrible user experience.
They lie and mislead to try to convince people to dislike their competitors (look at their whole "Scroogle" campaign).
Making Metro apps Windows Store only is going to hurt a lot of companies.
Locking Windows to hardware is just plain obnoxious.
Screwing loyal developers at every turn (Win API; no, MFC; no, WinForms; no, Silverlight; no, Metro... saying "f*ck you" to C programmers -- no C99 or C11 for you!; the list goes on and on).
Using their monopoly OS position to enable IE to dominate, and then letting it rot and fester.
The upgrade treadmill continues on many of their products.
Pushing into "time limited software rental" agreements.
Too many f*cking versions of Windows, with bizarre limitations on features.
Having to pay for f*cking Xbox Gold Live just to watch Netflix on your Xbox 360.
I could go on all day like this. Microsoft is as evil as they ever were. They are also still making boatloads of money. The fact that there are now a few areas where they don't totally dominate is a breath of fresh air. Don't feel sorry for them.
Choose "Click to play" so you can run Flash on demand (by clicking, of course), or "Block all" to make it impossible to run Flash, even if you want to.
Ah F it that was dumb lets ask something more realistic. I always ask coder/tech types whats their coolest hack / coolest piece of code.
Ugh, I hate that question. It always seems to "make the cut", and the answer is invariably dull, uninspiring, and boring. It's such a complete waste of a question.
Please people, quit asking the stupid "coolest hack" question, or at least don't vote it up!
This is true, but what I really meant is that the clones that followed were not expensive (at least compared to Macs).
Maybe you are thinking of the Edsel of computing which came two years after after the IBM PC. The Apple Lisa which was as much as a nice car.
Nope, I'm referring to Macs; however, you're right that the Lisa was outrageously expensive.
In reality, the failure of Apple was the closed architecture. The IBM PC was completely open and even published BIOS source code in their tech reference manuals. The bus specifications were published and open for anyone to build hardware for it. This allowed competitors, (CompaQ etc) to enter the market with clones and expand it.
That's a good point, though I think there was a convergence of factors: (1) Business acceptance of the IBM PC (2) Inexpensive (relatively speaking) IBM PC clones (3) Macs being outrageously expensive (4) Companies like Commodore and Atari making some strategic mistakes.
I think #3 alone would have eventually led to Macs being the #2 or #3 platform, even had the IBM PC never existed. I don't know that for sure, though. I do know that at the time I drooled over Macs, but could never afford to buy one from Apple when the competition was so much less expensive.
Ironically, we are seeing history repeat itself as Apple slides again due to the openness of Android.
I think you're probably right that the #1 reason was the lack of openness. It's hard for a single entity to compete against a whole pile of competitors. So while I think many factors were in play, I do believe I agree with your that the primary factor was openness.
If it were not for IBM and only corps and engineers buying computers in the 1980s the Mac would have one [sic] easily.
Wow, that is so just, incredibly wrong.
Macs were expensive, like real expensive. With the margins Apple insisted on, they practically guaranteed the Mac would not become the dominant platform.
There was solid competition from companies like Commodore and Atari. If the IBM PC had never existed, there's no telling where computing would have went in the 80s and 90s.
Of course, you're free to go on some religious or idealogical crusade in your spare time if you like, but getting emotional about a browser doesn't make much sense.
You should use a better browser. It would have pointed out that spelling mistake for you, and even suggested the correct spelling.;-)
Doesn't mean that's not the limiting factor overall in the marketplace. It just means it's not a limiting factor for you.
As a software developer and tech support geek for friends and family, it's my experience that at least half of them would be better off with a Chromebook than they are with Windows.
A Celeron CPU is also more than enough for those people, and so is an ARM tablet. If you bought an i7 to read emails and browse the web all you've done is waste a couple of hundred dollars.
I have an i7 for software development. If I didn't do software development, a ChromeBook / ChromeOS + Gmail / Google Drive would probably be more than enough for me. And my point is that most people fall under the latter category.
Not to mention with the ChromeBook all you are doing is trading the openness of X86 for a system that is as locked down as a cellphone.
Which is great in some places (e.g., education) and for some people (e.g., very non-technical users).
With a Windows laptop i can be booting up in under 10 minutes with any flavor of Linux or BSD that I want, I'm not beholden to ANYBODY to continue support of the machine as its mine and i can run what I want.
Running Linux or BSD on the desktop appeals to, what, maybe 1% of desktop users?
So while i'm all for breaking up the MSFT monopoly on X86 this is NOT the way to go about it, we are trading one corporation for another that is worse in every single way.
Wow! Claiming Microsoft is worse than Google in every single way is quite an extraordinary claim!
What we need is an open laptop running the latest Android NOT a locked down Internet only OS.
What's wrong with having both?
I thought MSFT locking systems down with UEFI was wrong, and its still wrong if a company does it while claiming they "do no evil".
I have a prepaid cell phone using T-Mobile. While it's true that the minutes expire after a year, if you put any amount of additional minutes on it (i.e. even $5 worth, for example), the timer is reset for all of your existing minutes. Additionally, after putting a certain amount of money into it over time (I forget the precise amount - been a few years), the cost is about 10 cents a minute. It's probably not the best deal, but considering I only have to put ~$50/year into my phone for talk and text (and the phone itself was only $30 off the shelf), I consider it a bargain.
I do the same. PAYG T-Mobile - 10 cents/minute - top off the minutes once in a great while - end up paying less than $6/month for my cell phone service. And my phone was only $20 off the shelf.
If and when I'm ready to upgrade to data and a smartphone, T-Mobile has earned my business for treating me so well. I also highly recommend them to anyone and everyone. I think AT&T and Verizon are abusively expensive and unfair to customers.
But I do worry a bit when people think all software should be held to the same standard as, say, bridges or medical devices. Unless the software is critical (such as running a medical device, or handling security for a bank, or an OS kernel, etc.), then there is insufficient incentive to make it super reliable and robust. The market would punish you terribly for having less features and more cost.
Well the way I see it, the market could keep costs while, for example, trading "innovation" for stability. Ever wondered what would happen if Microsoft would improve Windows XP's robustness until today, instead of revamping the whole thing at every release?
Unfortunately, new versions are a necessary evil in many application domains. Gotta pay the employees.
Slashdot Mirror
Except I also debunked his nonsense in the process. Did you come here to debunk anything I've said, or do you truly not have anything useful to add?
Also, don't worry, it appears my comment is already getting modded into oblivion, for telling the truth. His outright lies and misinformation are still modded insightful. You should be happy about that.
I was not talking about a cherry picked set of years, I was talking over a much longer term.
Yes, but Apple and Microsoft are not pushing computers with 16GB total storage and 9GB of free space and then giving 100GB or 1TB of cloud storage(free only for a few years mind you) to placate that. Google is pretty much the only one that's heavily pushing users towards being slaves of their cloud.
There is no doubt that local storage offers advantages, but you're dismissing the advantages of devices like Chromebooks.
My father called yesterday because his Windows computer got a virus. It'll cost him a few hundred bucks plus, most likely, days and days of angst and worry that some of his accounts (such as bank accounts) may have been compromised.
Let's see, a few hours of downtime a year because "the cloud" is wonky vs. constant vigilance, fear, and annoyance at keeping a Windows or OS X system running . . . you know, I think it's perfectly reasonable for some people to trade stress and complexity for something like a Chromebook, even if the Chromebook will likely involve a little downtime. Big deal.
Sadly, the main problem is the whole concept. While it might be a good idea, at some point in the future, that future is not yet here.
I respectfully disagree. The cloud is the right solution for a lot of people. Those people that are not technical and don't want to be technical, because they have non-technical jobs, interests, and hobbies. They want their technology to Just Work. The cloud gives them a pleasant, no hassles experience.
What major online service, e.g. iCloud (based on MS Azure), Amazon AWS, etc. has not gone down for a significant period in each of the last few years? I am having trouble thinking of one.
Sure, there's occasional downtime, but . . . so what? For many people, it's just a temporary annoyance, whereas trying to keep their computers updated, their application updated, stay safe from viruses, etc. is a never ending annoying battle.
And before anybody says "Yes, but it's still more reliable than your own servers" I call bullshit. My own servers have not been down at all in the last few years.
You know as well as I do that this is just anecdotal. Also, you're obviously technical in nature. For your Average Joe, having someone else maintain the servers he uses is a much better.
no one is saying that we cant ease out "dirty" tech, simply that we do it over time.
And you, of course, know precisely how much time we have, right?
Instead of inflating the existing costs of enery to make green techs look better now, all while hurting the people at the bottom the most, gas is 4 bucks a gallon, 10 years ago it was 98 cents.
When inflation is factored in, the price of has, on average, not changed very much.
instead of trying to make it all happen at once (in the scheme of things) let the tech mature.
Except nobody is trying to make it happen all at once. You're just trying to smear the opposition by accusing them of an extremist position they're not actually taking.
All technology matures, some faster than others, but let the tech mature and bring the price down to the levels of mature tech. not everyone jumps in to be a early adopter, most people wait for the price to drop, a 10K PC 8 years ago costs a few hundred bucks today.
A pathetic amount of government money is funneled into alternative energy research. What are you bitching about? It's estimated that the Iraq war cost over $3 trillion dollars. How much money did the government spend on subsidizing alternative energy last year? Give me your address and I'll send you a few dollars which should easily cover it, then you don't have to complain about the government spending your money on alternative energy research.
Also, why do you assume we have all the time in the world? Rising oceans will displace millions of people at an enormous cost. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Your lazy approach is shortsighted and foolish.
is exactly this. Now I dont know anyone who in their right mind wants to "destroy the environment" yet for the most part, environmentalists work on a knee jerk reaction style of attack.
Ad hominem.
"green" energy is too expensive to compete with proven yet "dirty" tech? well instead of developing the green tech to compete we must artificially increase the cost of the dirty fuel!
Begging the question.
we cant use plain old light bulbs anymore
Yes, you can.
that use more power (and give off heat, thus meaning one could in theory keep their heater lower)
Incandescent bulbs are obscenely inefficient at producing heat. Promoting them a mechanism to lower your thermostat is idiotic.
and now we are stuck with CFLs that are worse for the environment than the old bulbs!
No, they're not. They're much better for the environment when you factor in the fact that the much lower energy requirements means much lower emissions from power plants, such as coal fired power plants which eject tons of mercury into to atmosphere. The microdrop of mercury in a CFL is nothing in comparison.
The idea of "saving the earth" is a good one, but on the other hand, the earth will be fine long after humans inhabit it.
Who the fuck cares that the Earth will be fine if we genocide ourselves?
You embody everything that's wrong with the "environmental skeptic" movement. Go back to Fox News, leave actually thinking to the grown ups.
I miss Google Groups Digest Emails. :-(
They just stopped coming one day . . . with no announcement, I didn't even feel a sense of closure. ;-)
Yes, 2 is better then 1. But 3 is better then 2 and 20 is better then 3.
At a glance, that sounds insightful, but . . . what about the paradox of choice?
For example, a lot of people think that having too many options is one of the reasons Linux on the desktop has not been much of a success.
Could someone with knowledge and experience in the area of mesh networks tell us how feasible it would be for people to setup their own mesh networks that span cities, states, even whole countries? Obviously performance would be much lower than what we enjoy via the Internet right now, but I'm wondering if the people of the world could, without the assistance of government, setup their own large scale mesh networks. Then it wouldn't matter quite so much when the governments of individual countries do things like block Internet access for defense reasons.
A non-corporate solution would be nice, so that individuals without huge amounts of capital could bootstrap the whole thing in an entirely grassroots manner.
Even as a Microsoft hater of old, I'm beginning to feel sorry for MS. For sure, 15 years ago they were engaged in monopoly abuse to advantage IE. But these days, IE itself is on the way out. WebKit based browsers are the clear majority these days. And neither Apple nor Google have to offer users of their systems a choice of browser.
It must really rub salt in the wound to have a statutory obligation to offer alternatives to their minority browser.
Don't waste your emotions feeling sorry for them. They're still ruthlessly abusive.
They basically killed netbooks by only licensing Windows Starter to netbooks that were sure to offer a terrible user experience.
They lie and mislead to try to convince people to dislike their competitors (look at their whole "Scroogle" campaign).
Making Metro apps Windows Store only is going to hurt a lot of companies.
Locking Windows to hardware is just plain obnoxious.
Screwing loyal developers at every turn (Win API; no, MFC; no, WinForms; no, Silverlight; no, Metro... saying "f*ck you" to C programmers -- no C99 or C11 for you!; the list goes on and on).
Using their monopoly OS position to enable IE to dominate, and then letting it rot and fester.
The upgrade treadmill continues on many of their products.
Pushing into "time limited software rental" agreements.
Too many f*cking versions of Windows, with bizarre limitations on features.
Having to pay for f*cking Xbox Gold Live just to watch Netflix on your Xbox 360.
I could go on all day like this. Microsoft is as evil as they ever were. They are also still making boatloads of money. The fact that there are now a few areas where they don't totally dominate is a breath of fresh air. Don't feel sorry for them.
Chrome has flash built in, super annoying, its one of the reason I stick with FF.
That's not a good reason to stick with Firefox. Learn to use your tools. In Chrome:
Settings --> Show advanced settings --> Privacy Content Settings --> Plug-ins
Choose "Click to play" so you can run Flash on demand (by clicking, of course), or "Block all" to make it impossible to run Flash, even if you want to.
Ah F it that was dumb lets ask something more realistic. I always ask coder/tech types whats their coolest hack / coolest piece of code.
Ugh, I hate that question. It always seems to "make the cut", and the answer is invariably dull, uninspiring, and boring. It's such a complete waste of a question.
Please people, quit asking the stupid "coolest hack" question, or at least don't vote it up!
It boils down to a "64 bit clean" system. I'd prefer nothing die due to artificially limited resources -memory, in this case - being exhausted.
That would require a single Chrome tab using more than 2 gigabytes of memory.
That's not going to happen and not worth worrying about.
...they tolerate the GPL in the Linux kernel because they have no other viable option...
Just curious (really curious, not trolling) -- why is something like FreeBSD not considered a viable option?
The IBM PC was expensive too. Real expensive...
This is true, but what I really meant is that the clones that followed were not expensive (at least compared to Macs).
Maybe you are thinking of the Edsel of computing which came two years after after the IBM PC. The Apple Lisa which was as much as a nice car.
Nope, I'm referring to Macs; however, you're right that the Lisa was outrageously expensive.
In reality, the failure of Apple was the closed architecture. The IBM PC was completely open and even published BIOS source code in their tech reference manuals. The bus specifications were published and open for anyone to build hardware for it. This allowed competitors, (CompaQ etc) to enter the market with clones and expand it.
That's a good point, though I think there was a convergence of factors: (1) Business acceptance of the IBM PC (2) Inexpensive (relatively speaking) IBM PC clones (3) Macs being outrageously expensive (4) Companies like Commodore and Atari making some strategic mistakes.
I think #3 alone would have eventually led to Macs being the #2 or #3 platform, even had the IBM PC never existed. I don't know that for sure, though. I do know that at the time I drooled over Macs, but could never afford to buy one from Apple when the competition was so much less expensive.
Ironically, we are seeing history repeat itself as Apple slides again due to the openness of Android.
I think you're probably right that the #1 reason was the lack of openness. It's hard for a single entity to compete against a whole pile of competitors. So while I think many factors were in play, I do believe I agree with your that the primary factor was openness.
If it were not for IBM and only corps and engineers buying computers in the 1980s the Mac would have one [sic] easily.
Wow, that is so just, incredibly wrong.
Macs were expensive, like real expensive. With the margins Apple insisted on, they practically guaranteed the Mac would not become the dominant platform.
There was solid competition from companies like Commodore and Atari. If the IBM PC had never existed, there's no telling where computing would have went in the 80s and 90s.
As someone that has loaned friends optical discs and gotten them back scratched, I can see a silver lining...
"Sorry, I'd love to loan you this game, but it only plays in my console!"
That being said, I do think making used games unplayable is a greedy money grab.
Of course, you're free to go on some religious or idealogical crusade in your spare time if you like, but getting emotional about a browser doesn't make much sense.
You should use a better browser. It would have pointed out that spelling mistake for you, and even suggested the correct spelling. ;-)
Doesn't mean that's not the limiting factor overall in the marketplace. It just means it's not a limiting factor for you.
As a software developer and tech support geek for friends and family, it's my experience that at least half of them would be better off with a Chromebook than they are with Windows.
Microsoft killed the netbook, Tablets simply are immune to Windows.
I think this is one of the most insightful comments here.
Microsoft went out of their way to make sure the netbook experience sucked, thus it's no surprise the netbook market has shrunk considerably.
Fortunately, Microsoft has not been able to sabotage the tablet market.
A Celeron CPU is also more than enough for those people, and so is an ARM tablet. If you bought an i7 to read emails and browse the web all you've done is waste a couple of hundred dollars.
I have an i7 for software development. If I didn't do software development, a ChromeBook / ChromeOS + Gmail / Google Drive would probably be more than enough for me. And my point is that most people fall under the latter category.
Not to mention with the ChromeBook all you are doing is trading the openness of X86 for a system that is as locked down as a cellphone.
Which is great in some places (e.g., education) and for some people (e.g., very non-technical users).
With a Windows laptop i can be booting up in under 10 minutes with any flavor of Linux or BSD that I want, I'm not beholden to ANYBODY to continue support of the machine as its mine and i can run what I want.
Running Linux or BSD on the desktop appeals to, what, maybe 1% of desktop users?
So while i'm all for breaking up the MSFT monopoly on X86 this is NOT the way to go about it, we are trading one corporation for another that is worse in every single way.
Wow! Claiming Microsoft is worse than Google in every single way is quite an extraordinary claim!
What we need is an open laptop running the latest Android NOT a locked down Internet only OS.
What's wrong with having both?
I thought MSFT locking systems down with UEFI was wrong, and its still wrong if a company does it while claiming they "do no evil".
This hyperbole is beneath you.
Who cares? CPU isn't the limiting factor on either a tablet or a chromebook. The lack of productivity software is.
What lack of productivity software? I have a quad core i7, and Gmail/Google Drive is my "productivity software".
I understand what you're trying to say, of course, but for many, many people, web based software is more than enough for them.
I have a prepaid cell phone using T-Mobile. While it's true that the minutes expire after a year, if you put any amount of additional minutes on it (i.e. even $5 worth, for example), the timer is reset for all of your existing minutes. Additionally, after putting a certain amount of money into it over time (I forget the precise amount - been a few years), the cost is about 10 cents a minute. It's probably not the best deal, but considering I only have to put ~$50/year into my phone for talk and text (and the phone itself was only $30 off the shelf), I consider it a bargain.
I do the same. PAYG T-Mobile - 10 cents/minute - top off the minutes once in a great while - end up paying less than $6/month for my cell phone service. And my phone was only $20 off the shelf.
If and when I'm ready to upgrade to data and a smartphone, T-Mobile has earned my business for treating me so well. I also highly recommend them to anyone and everyone. I think AT&T and Verizon are abusively expensive and unfair to customers.
But I do worry a bit when people think all software should be held to the same standard as, say, bridges or medical devices. Unless the software is critical (such as running a medical device, or handling security for a bank, or an OS kernel, etc.), then there is insufficient incentive to make it super reliable and robust. The market would punish you terribly for having less features and more cost.
Well the way I see it, the market could keep costs while, for example, trading "innovation" for stability. Ever wondered what would happen if Microsoft would improve Windows XP's robustness until today, instead of revamping the whole thing at every release?
Unfortunately, new versions are a necessary evil in many application domains. Gotta pay the employees.