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Old man yells at cloud

jonandnic.com

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Re: Old man yells at cloud

#61

Post by starky »

The extension to this is shareholders have made everything worse. Instead of a company making a product that does what the customer needs driving purchasing decisions and thus revenue, companies are now being held hostage to be constantly driving revenue number growth. This is easily done by implementing subscriptions or implementing hardware technologies with a limited lifetime.

For example, companies weren't happy with just having to replace your phone every 3 or so years so they removed the headphone jacks from phones to drive the sales of Bluetooth headphones that have built in batteries. Those batteries have a limited lifetime before the device has to be replaced, while a pair of wired headphones could theoretically last decades if cared for or repaired.

On the software side any device or software that has to connect to a server to work properly is merely a rental dependent on how long a company wants to continue supporting it.

Now, I'm not against this in cases where it is only realistic to use it for a limited period of time and the cloud provides meaningful usefulness, but there is no excuse for why many devices have any sort of smart or cloud connections.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#62

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

extr wrote: post #35

He had me until he started shitting on MS Office. I would disagree, I think O365 kind of crushes it value-wise. And yeah, they added the ribbon in 2007 . The UI hardly changes year to year, and if you know Excel 2013 you will pick up Excel O365 pretty quickly, and you will actually be pretty psyched about some of the new features.

Subscriptions for MS Office is nothing but a money grab. It is not useful to me. Maybe it’s useful for enterprises. But I use word and excel a couple times per YEAR. I don’t fit the subscription model, but there’s no option to buy once and upgrade again in, say, 3 years.

So I’ve mostly moved to Libreoffice and Google Docs.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#64

Post by shyn3 »

fastball wrote: post #27
shyn3 wrote: post #19

If your internet is down you can't play your gamepass games offline. Exciting stuff.

But Game Pass as an option didn't even exist before – more options is still net gain. However, if/when we get to the point where Game Pass is your only option, that will be a different story.

As options grow flexibility for power users disappears is my challenge.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#65

Post by etempleton »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #54
etempleton wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t mind touchscreens in cars, but there are just some controls that are used all the time and should be buttons. I think most car manufacturers are figuring out that right mix…except perhaps Tesla who is insistent on removing ever tactile button for a touchscreen or capacitive touch button.

Yep... radio, AC, all the lights etc. should always be physical buttons. Reseting TPMS settings can be done on a touchscreen too. Sadly, even stuff like radio and AC controls in some cars have moved to touchscreens, and that sucks a lot.

My new vehicle is almost perfect button -touchscreen, but the radio is all touchscreen and it is basically impossible to use while driving.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#66

Post by pketh »

I agree but I also wonder how much of this is a failing or ceiling of capitalism? Where things can never be complete or perfected, where we have to invent new problems to sell new crap?

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#67

Post by remram »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #26
porb121 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern cars are much safer than cars of even 10 years ago

For their occupants, maybe! It's getting harder and harder to see over the front hood. My wife, standing straight, is invisible to a new F150.

An F150 is only a car to USAmericans, to the rest of the world, it's a truck.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#68

Post by masswerk »

A key point of what is now old tech is/was multiple paths of operations. On the other hand we have what I'd call appification, where there is just a single path and anything else has to be weeded out, for the sake of simplicity and the benefit of the user.

As it happens, as of today, Twitter (which provided quite a remarkable number of paths of operation), succumbed to appification and removed the option to retrieve search results ordered by recentness. (Because this is not how you operate it? You do want the most prominent ones, as by Twitter-weight, and nothing else.) As this has been rather crucial to how I operated Twitter, I guess, you have to count me out.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#69

Post by etempleton »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #26
porb121 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern cars are much safer than cars of even 10 years ago

For their occupants, maybe! It's getting harder and harder to see over the front hood. My wife, standing straight, is invisible to a new F150.

Depends. Some cars have really good pedestrian detection and will stop automatically. But yes, some of those full size pickups and SUVs have a pretty large front blind spot.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#70

Post by theferalrobot »

> Playing together now a means an hour of downloading content from an online service before the game even starts — and this particular game is an entirely offline one!

Did nobody else spent the first 8 hours of 00s LAN parties trying to get the equipment set up, the networking to cooperate, the games shared? Then finally after a reformat of windows xp or two around 2am finally getting to the gaming? That was my only somewhat dramatized memory of things. I loved every second of that struggle which is maybe why remember it. This seems to be a case of seeing the past through rose colored glasses. It was sooo much harder to get a group of friends together to play some counter strike than it is today. It’s not even close.

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