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A world where people pay for software

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#501

Post by asyx »

xormapmap wrote: post #442
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you say that because the most popular 3D printer firmwares are open source. Does QA’ing 3D printer firmware sound fun to you? No? Great well you don’t have to do that someone else is literally doing that right now because they thought it was fun. By the way this is a decent job for an apprentice under supervision. It’s a good way to learn with minimal risk and young people are often willing to do this kind of t…

Nobody is QAing 3D printer firmware because they thought it would be fun. They are doing it because their printer crashed and now they can no longer print.

But we're talking here about thermal runaway protection. Not "my prints are ugly let me fix this".

In the same way you want your 3D printer to not burn your house down you want your dishwasher to not flood your house.

Sounds very similar to me.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#502

Post by elcritch »

lend000 wrote: post #424
smolder wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it seems crazy on its face. And I'm sure those leftists you refer to didn't have a coherent concept of how such a system would actually work . There's no way we could just replace paychecks today with rations and social credits and have a functioning system. It'd be an extreme destabilizing change to a system we built incrementally over a long time to be self reinforcing. But I also have the view that people a…

You seem smart and it always amazes me how popular communist concepts are with smart people on HN. Didn't you have some assigned group projects in school? Perhaps some people are easily satisfied by carrying the burden of other people who they don't know and who don't appreciate them, but I'd wager a ridiculously high majority of value producers would not be. Humans are social animals, but we're individuals first and…

There's lots of kibbutz (communes) in Israel. Apparently most aren't too bad. The one I visited seemed decent. But Jewish culture has a pretty strong community ethic which is key.

I also visited a couple of Greek Orthodox monasteries and they were not just nice but beautiful. So for small scale communities with a strong cultural binding "communes" can totally work. It doesn't scale though.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#503

Post by TastyAmphibian »

bee_rider wrote: post #388
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #306

Computers have an unprecedented ability to reproduce value for free. Programmers need a relatively fixed amount of resources to thrive. (The value of resources varies by location but we all need things like food, shelter, transportation, clothing, tools, etc etc) If we can find a way to make sure every person has what they need to thrive regardless of their income, programmers can open source all of their software an…

We should guarantee minimum income, and abolish intellectual property. Build an economy around actually doing things rather than calling dibs on solutions. Let the market sort out the doing of things, just make sure everyone can participate.

Building a modest economy where everyone can participate is the way to go but to be honest, this world isn't fair, there are some who have more power over others

Re: A world where people pay for software

#504

Post by grishka »

vel0city wrote: post #488
grishka wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As for why change the window dressing, the market for style changes over time. Software is a tool, a means to an end. It doesn't need to participate in fashion. > Are you arguing that Windows and MacOS should continue to look like it's 1.0 release? Yes. It should remain an option at least. Not the literal "1.0", but the version when a decent UX was figured out. For Windows in particular, that's clearly 95. I know p…

> that's clearly 95 I wouldn't say that's very clear. There were still lots of refinements and redesign that happened as Windows started becoming more of a multi-user OS with NT and later XP. Just because there was a classic skin in 7 doesn't mean it was the same UX. Even with the "classic" skin there's pretty massive changes in the behavior and usability of most of the UI. Maybe you find 95 to be the end-all be-all…

> Even with the "classic" skin there's pretty massive changes in the behavior and usability of most of the UI.

The windows themselves, the taskbar and the desktop all worked the same in 7 as they did in 95. Many of the changes made over that time came with settings to revert them — like that new thicc taskbar with icon-only buttons and window grouping.

> Imagine a user who has only used an iPad gets dropped in front of a Windows 95 machine

I'm sick of perfectly good desktop UIs getting redesigns which are compromised by the existence of iPads and other touchscreen devices. This just should not happen, period. Windows 95 UI is straightforward enough once you get the basic principles, which takes all of one hour of poking around. Microsoft didn't conduct all that research for nothing, after all.

What frustrated people about Windows 95 (and 98, and ME) when it was current wasn't the UI. The UI was nice. It was the inherent instability of the system itself due to its architecture. Same for classic Mac OS, it doesn't matter how nice your UI is if the system itself can be trivially crashed or locked up by a single misbehaving app because of cooperative multitasking and lack of memory protection.

> One could make the same argument of a bed or a couch or hell even a whole house.

All beds and couches work the same and look largely the same. You know a bed when you see one.

All buttons and text fields and window titles used to also look largely the same and everyone was fine with that. But then the plague of flat design happened.

Imagine being exhausted after a long flight, walking into your hotel room only to see white, textureless walls, floor, and ceiling, and multiple white textureless blocks of different sizes inside. You get to figure out which one is a bed, which one is a chair, which one is a toilet, and which one is a sink! How exciting! This is what modern affordance-less UIs feel like. A good tool shows how it's meant to be used by its form.

> And yet people are pretty dang picky about their furniture choices and paint comes in thousands of colors.

That same classic Windows theme was extremely customizable for that very reason. You could change all colors and fonts to your liking, and some people did! You could make yourself a dark theme way before dark themes became mainstream.

> Say there's two pieces of software with identical feature sets.

You mean the control skins are the only thing different between them, otherwise all UI/UX being identical down to the layouts?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#505

Post by Chris2048 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #405
thorncorona wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the exact same answer every leftist I've talked to says when I ask them who will run the garbage system, and who will clean the sewers.

The obvious answer is "pay people more". If we had UBI, for instance, and people did not have to work in order to have basic needs (food and shelter) met, then the willingness to do unpleasant jobs like sewer cleaning will go down, and it'll be necessary to pay people more to do that work. And the need to pay people more will then drive technological innovation that may today not be worthwhile because "just hire some…

The UBI argument seems fundamentally flawed - things like food-stamps or free social housing make more sense.

Let me give you an example: If the government offers anyone buying a house an incentive of $10K, every house asking price will go up by $10K and wipe out the discount. The relative/competitive nature of the market opposes many en-mass pay-outs.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#506

Post by Chris2048 »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #499
drekipus wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UBI plus a free market If there's a ubi, then there's price floor that is higher than a non ubi price floor, meaning that the median prices of goods go up, less taxes to find the ubi, and the ubi must then increase to meet the increased costs for a basic standard of living. Well done you invented inflation.

Maybe, maybe not. It does depend on how efficient we could make basic necessity items, and those are only a tiny portion of the modern economy, I suppose. Though I don’t trust the government to not simultaneously screw with the incentives for producing those items, whether by accident or not, which would make a situation like the one you describe more likely. Also it’s not at all clear how housing would work— I’m gue…

> basic necessity items, and those are only a tiny portion of the modern economy

If housing/shelter is a necessity, it might not be cheap. I think housing projects aimed to do exactly this. You'll eventually find 'poverty' redefined to those receiving UBI only, stuck in undesirable locations, who don't consider it true that "work is optional".

Another issue is policing, which is also increasingly expensive, and has all sorts of issues in the US. People like to just shout "fix the police", but have no answer as to how you can recruit for such a job.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#507

Post by cranberryturkey »

askvictor wrote: post #462
ben0x539 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 200% convinced there are plenty of people out there who could easily be nerdsniped into building an open source dishwasher! Hackers get up to all kinds of stuff that doesn't seem traditionally fun!

Yeah, for sure. The only issue would be that I wouldn't be as interested in building an open source dishwasher for every possible (or even the most common) users/use cases, but for myself.

That's exactly why Torvols wrote the first linux kernel. He wanted it for himself, and decided to give the source away so people would contribute.

I don't think this is limited to just digital items like software.

I would absolutely use an open source dishwasher if I could ship my custom design to a manufacturer to build.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#508

Post by skydhash »

zer8k wrote: post #373
r00fus wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I would agree for large traditional software companies like Autodesk or Adobe that charged large sums for software versions you typically don't update yearly (Creative Cloud), that a flat subscription model seems to be a bad fit. Probably less so for software you use daily or make your living off of.

I use a text editor daily. I see no revolutionary methods being added to text editing that could ever justify me paying monthly. Even something as simple as a calorie counter has a monthly charge for features that never change (MyFitnessPal).

I pay for Bear.app. It amounts to something like $14 dollars a year. But it's a beautifully crafted app and while it uses a database instead of files, it has good export capabilities. I consider that a donation at this point.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#509

Post by vel0city »

grishka wrote: post #504
vel0city wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's clearly 95 I wouldn't say that's very clear. There were still lots of refinements and redesign that happened as Windows started becoming more of a multi-user OS with NT and later XP. Just because there was a classic skin in 7 doesn't mean it was the same UX. Even with the "classic" skin there's pretty massive changes in the behavior and usability of most of the UI. Maybe you find 95 to be the end-all be-all…

> Even with the "classic" skin there's pretty massive changes in the behavior and usability of most of the UI. The windows themselves, the taskbar and the desktop all worked the same in 7 as they did in 95. Many of the changes made over that time came with settings to revert them — like that new thicc taskbar with icon-only buttons and window grouping. > Imagine a user who has only used an iPad gets dropped in front…

> All beds and couches work the same and look largely the same.

It's almost like you've never been in a furniture store. They come in tons of different sizes, shapes, textures, colors, features, and more. There's not just a single couch model that you can then change the color on.

> The UI was nice.

I highly disagree. The taskbar would get filled up quickly and get squished for me since there was no grouping. The notification tray couldn't hide things. No virtual desktop support. The start menu was incredibly basic in form. No search from the start menu. Editing the start menu programs list was extremely non-obvious and not self explained. Navigating the nested start menu shortcuts was a huge pain. Installers just threw everything in the start menu leading to a ton of clutter. UI elements are miserable at scaling, in that there is zero scaling support. The taskbar was only on your primary display. Difficult to change default sound output device straight from the taskbar. No central place to see previous notifications. No jumplists. No Win+Number shortcuts to quickly swap between things on the taskbar. Alt+Tab prompt doesn't have window previews. I could go on and on and on and on and on about what I perceive to be massive failures of 95's UI/UX.

I didn't really care for the overall icon design throughout the OS and generally see the overall style in the OS as pretty basic, bland, and boring. Changing the color or setting the title bar font to Comic Sans isn't solving that.

In the end though, you probably disagree with a lot of these things. I think your couch is ugly and uncomfortable, and you probably think my couch is ugly and uncomfortable. UI/UX has some subjectivity involved. Not everyone agrees 95 was the ultimate software design unable to be improved upon.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#510

Post by picadores »

askvictor wrote: post #462
ben0x539 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 200% convinced there are plenty of people out there who could easily be nerdsniped into building an open source dishwasher! Hackers get up to all kinds of stuff that doesn't seem traditionally fun!

Yeah, for sure. The only issue would be that I wouldn't be as interested in building an open source dishwasher for every possible (or even the most common) users/use cases, but for myself.

Luck us, templatable CAD exists. Tailor the dishwashers to the end-users.
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