51–60 of 303 posts
Agreed on all points. Interesting to see this: > You can argue that all of this has existed for a very long time, back from the days of all kinds of toolbars and extensions that created multiple levels of address bar nesting in your web browser and taskbar. What I find ironic about the whole situation is, back then it was universally known that those toolbars and extensions are distributed by assholes. The whole soft…
Almost all of the examples listed are in relation to hardware. As far as I can see, hardware vendors see software as a cost centre and at best don’t care about quality and more often than not try to make up for the cost by bundling crapware with the drivers. General purpose application software is leagues beyond the crap that hardware vendors pull off.
Agreed on all points. Interesting to see this: > You can argue that all of this has existed for a very long time, back from the days of all kinds of toolbars and extensions that created multiple levels of address bar nesting in your web browser and taskbar. What I find ironic about the whole situation is, back then it was universally known that those toolbars and extensions are distributed by assholes. The whole soft…
I blame free (as in beer).
If you can’t sell software you have to monetize in other ways. This creates a huge forcing function to push acceptance of surveillance, adware, and worse as hard as possible.
It’s hard to complete with free. A free thing can build a network effect fast, then monetize with roundabout methods like surveillance. Payment also adds friction, and I have a rule that “every step required to adopt something halves the adoption rate.”
Greed for both lightning growth and profitability tends to put conventional economic models off the table.
With all the praise Brother laser printers get for being just a damn printer, I wonder what the end game is for some of those businesses. I can understand that monetisation and user well-being can be at odds sometimes (e.g. with free apps and services), but surely a generic hardware manufacturer wants to ensure a generic experience? This is why I tend to buy things that use generic, open standards. I don't trust some…
I hate my brother printer. Now I have to do some weird black magic that involves pulling out the power cable and paper tray and inserting the cable while holding some buttons in order for it to even turn on. A year earlier it suddenly stopped being able to print wirelessly and, as with all cartridge printers, the ink is crazy expensive. A month ago I bought an HP printer with an ink reservoir for my mother and it is…
My Brother has been running perfectly for years. Use cheap generic toner. It just works.
If you can't make any money selling your product then you will start looking elsewhere. That will include transactions that are against your customers interest like selling their profile to advertisers.
MTP exists, Windows and Linux can use it... but OS X still doesn't have a native MTP client.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Something weird happened over the past decade. I blame it on social media monopolies, or at least effective monopolies, oligopolies, and the network effect. Once everyone was sucked into these silos and unable to leave they could do whatever they wanted with the user experience without repercussions. And once everyone was used to it and took it as a given it was only a matter of time before it leaked even into deskt…
I blame it on web development, pure and simple. The relentless drive for analytics and advertising is what brought the acceptance of spying.
No developer cares about the level of analytics being pushed today, and unless they're profit sharing they probably don't care about the ads either.
Those anti-features are there because marketing departments want them there and have enough power to get what they want.
Don't let marketing make product decisions.
Agreed on all points. Interesting to see this: > You can argue that all of this has existed for a very long time, back from the days of all kinds of toolbars and extensions that created multiple levels of address bar nesting in your web browser and taskbar. What I find ironic about the whole situation is, back then it was universally known that those toolbars and extensions are distributed by assholes. The whole soft…
PR happened. The big players have figured out that if they want to keep misbehaving to make money, they needed people to not fight them. To do so, one amazing tool is to make sure the entire way to speak about the topic is controlled by them.
Internet gave us the ability to share more, and we though it would allow us to defend our self better, to make people more aware. But we didn't predict that an entire industry would specialize into creating submarine communication that pretend to be an organic one of such quality that the average human can't tell the difference.
With old school com and ads, you at least knew somebody was trying to sell you crap. Now, you are nicely having a chat in what you think is a community of peers, while being exposed to commercial and political influence that have been crafted to reach you here without raising your BS radar.
And with AI, it's going to get worse.
With all the praise Brother laser printers get for being just a damn printer, I wonder what the end game is for some of those businesses. I can understand that monetisation and user well-being can be at odds sometimes (e.g. with free apps and services), but surely a generic hardware manufacturer wants to ensure a generic experience? This is why I tend to buy things that use generic, open standards. I don't trust some…
Printer companies make money band over fist. It's a razors-and-blades recurring revenue model.
Agreed on all points. Interesting to see this: > You can argue that all of this has existed for a very long time, back from the days of all kinds of toolbars and extensions that created multiple levels of address bar nesting in your web browser and taskbar. What I find ironic about the whole situation is, back then it was universally known that those toolbars and extensions are distributed by assholes. The whole soft…
> Something weird happened over the past decade. I blame free (as in beer). If you can’t sell software you have to monetize in other ways. This creates a huge forcing function to push acceptance of surveillance, adware, and worse as hard as possible. It’s hard to complete with free. A free thing can build a network effect fast, then monetize with roundabout methods like surveillance. Payment also adds friction, and I…
For a piece of hardware I buy at a store I'd expect that the price I paid for it is sufficient to not require further monetization - mandatory cloud services (e.g. a web-available surveillance camera) excepted.
Anyway, there is another cause: continuous backward-compatibility breaks from OSes. Windows is ... relatively decent in that the only things that really broke drivers over the last decades were the shift in GPU driver architecture that came with Vista (IIRC) and the shift to 64-bit that began with Windows 7. The only change that busted old games was with Windows 8 and the DirectDraw removal, but other than that you don't need to do any maintenance for Windows drivers and software if you don't have new features.
Keeping software working on macOS or on Linux is a real pain in the butt, in contrast - Apple changes stuff around every minor release, and maintaining any support for Linux is just as a massive effort.
Kernel drivers pretty much have no choice but upstreaming (which is a hassle in itself when you have proprietary blobs/IP), and userspace stuff suffers from fragmentation (x11 vs wayland, flatpak vs deb vs rpm vs self-build/gentoo, systemd vs sysv, kde vs gnome vs ...).
And the worst of all to maintain anything for is Android, where an insane level of fragmentation collides with even more binary blobs, devices that are widespread in usage but haven't seen an upgrade for years if ever, shoddy (or none...) QA and preloaded crap from manufacturers and carriers.