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Why Johnny Won't Upgrade

jacquesmattheij.com

311–320 of 588 posts

Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VMs might work. It's hard (impossible?) for most versions of osx.

I think people have gotten pretty much every version of macOS virtualized. It’s a bit of work, yes, but not a huge amount.

I think Parallels has directly supported this for a while.

That may change, soon...

Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even that is risk-free. I was doxxed by a developer after Google's idiotic real-name policy put me in his crosshairs for my one-star review.

Tip/suggestion: Make a separate Google account with fake name/suername for reviews on Google. I have a few Google accounts. Only one is my actual name. Especially for games and reviews I use an aliased account (just like I use an alias here). Google can still track me I guess (IP) but a single dev will never find who UnrealName UnrealSurname is. And I do tend to leave brutally honest and detailed feedbacks whether po…

You can't create a Google account these days without a phone number, and you can't reuse phone numbers. Worse, in my country, you need to register to get a phone number (anonymous /unregistered sims were outlawed a few years ago).

Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade

#314
post #292
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much better with computers, though. I am able to decently run modern games on 2015 gaming PC. My 2015 flagman phone from meizu seems to have the same processing power as potato. And I don't even play games on it.

> It's much better with computers, though. I am able to decently run modern games on 2015 gaming PC. Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates were and are obsessed with backwards compatibility, and _not_ breaking user programmes. I am not sure how much the Great Man Theory applies here ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory ) or whether personal computers would have a culture of backwards compatibility without those t…

The winners in the competitive struggle are going to be people who don't break things. People who routinely reset their ecosystem tend to lose then get forgotten.

It isn't so much their influence as much as there is a community that is constantly searching for reliable platforms to build on.

Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you don't need them, but have fun filling in those blanks on your own time for 10x-100x the effort. Hope none of those missed connections are important, and I hope nobody gives you a pregnant pause after you insist, "no, I don't use Linkedin" at your next networking event. Network effects are strong. Too strong.

I literally setup almost everything I personally need in about a day on a VPS. As for services like LinkedIn I almost never got anything of value from it, it is worse than most job board it is filled with slimey recruiters these days and not a lot else. I bought a NAS for backups with freenas and moving my email to a domain with a provider literally took me a few minutes (plugging DNS entries into my domain provider)…

How someone get off GMail if they have already been using it for a decade or quite a few years more than that? Has anyone done this? How do you do that with the fewest issues possible?

Having the most important communications with other people and companies, and the login verification all in the hands of one company which could shaft your access in all sorts of ways (screw up, removing service, ban) is just terrible in the long term. And if someone is using their ISPs email address, that is something that would keep them signed to that ISP even though another may offer a service much better for them.

Anyway, anyone migrated away from their email provider after a long time signed up and could answer some of the questions in the first paragraph? Thanks.

Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade

#316

If I open the Play Store on my Android, I see 28 updates pending. Why haven't I hit Update All? Well, lets see what the release notes say (i.e. why should I update): New features added and bug fixes. Information not provided by developer. Bug fixes and enhancements. Information not provided by developer. (Description makes it clear it will break something for me). We're always making changes and improvements :) Infor…

This is my issue. How hard is it to add some patch notes? The people who don't care won't read them anyway. It's helpful for the company as well to document their changes, so hopefully someone is doing it internally regardless.

Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade

#317
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you downgrade the firmware? I feel like I am at the whim of anti social behavior and conspiracies at some anonymous office with auto updates enabled. The Scrum Agile morning standups at Toaster Corp. could just as well be in my kitchen pushing user hostile features for "business reasons" or enforcing ideologically pure ways to use their toaster.

Latest-generation devices contain hardware fuses purposely designed to make prevent downgrading. I think that tells you all you need to know about the position the industry has towards downgrades and whether updates are in the interest of the user or not.

Do you have anything you can cite in support of that, please? I've been planning to raise some of these issues with my representatives, so any solid evidence I could include might be helpful.

Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade

#318

Don't forget: "Never slow down the user interface". I have a 4K Sony television that was their flagship model when it was new, but a couple of years ago they "updated" it with a new version of its OS that looks identical but is incredibly sluggish. Not technically broken, but frustrating to use. Moving around between menu items is a good 2-3 seconds, up to 10 in some cases. There is literally nothing I can do about t…

I have a Sony TV, one thing I've learned with them is that you have to wipe your tv after each upgrade... I do agree with you tough, it's still really sluggish, full of things I never asked for (icons of netflix, hulu and other stuff that I don't use) and I definitely don't feel that this TV is smart at all. My next tv will definitely be as dumb as possible. If I needed anything smart, it will be via a pi or a similar board connected to it.

Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade

#319

Don't forget: "Never slow down the user interface". I have a 4K Sony television that was their flagship model when it was new, but a couple of years ago they "updated" it with a new version of its OS that looks identical but is incredibly sluggish. Not technically broken, but frustrating to use. Moving around between menu items is a good 2-3 seconds, up to 10 in some cases. There is literally nothing I can do about t…

If you're in the EU you should have a right to send it back. Failing that, if you have a blog, publicise that so others get put off buying that brand. Complain to them (edit: sony) directly also. Don't just sit there are take it, it's what they're relying on.

Unfortunately, even if you have a right to send something back, it's not always practical.

Typically those consumer rights only protect individuals, leaving businesses (even small ones, who are at a similar disadvantage to consumers in not being able to negotiate anything with huge manufacturers/suppliers) with little if any protection.

One key difference from days gone by is that modern devices often contain large amounts of private data, which you might not be willing to hand over.

And it's all rather academic anyway if competition in that market has failed and all the major products are doing to same user-hostile things. This is normally the point where government intervention would be required, for example through legislation or regulatory action, but governments have been unwilling or unable to keep up with the pace of technological advancement.

I believe this is, at least in part, because representatives usually aren't technical experts and so may not understand the implications of modern technologies or the potential alternatives to current practice. I have reached the conclusion that until we educate those representatives and show them that people do care about these issues, the tide of increasingly user-hostile actions will only continue to rise. But of course that means people have to care enough themselves to get involved in contacting their reps or at least supporting organised campaigns, and sadly, it seems a lot of people either don't care enough to do that instead of moaning on Twitter of Facebook and then accepting their fate.

Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade

#320

Don't forget: "Never slow down the user interface". I have a 4K Sony television that was their flagship model when it was new, but a couple of years ago they "updated" it with a new version of its OS that looks identical but is incredibly sluggish. Not technically broken, but frustrating to use. Moving around between menu items is a good 2-3 seconds, up to 10 in some cases. There is literally nothing I can do about t…

I own a LG smart TV. Wary of those and other problems I never connected it to the net. I bought it because it cost only 50 Euros more than the dumb model and the display looked much better, which should be the main point of a TV. If I really want to do smart things with my TV I attach something I control to one of its HDMI ports (phone, tablet, laptop, Raspberry.) I'm not thrilled about the idea of TV sets with an em…

I'm not holding my breath about the TV use-case of 5G. The ISPs will just make it too expensive to allow you to watch as much TV as you like.
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