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I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

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Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#171

Post by guelo »

jimmies wrote: post #7

>In 2016, when I got a new phone, the default setting changed and I would just wake up to my device stating, "Tinder has been updated. Deal with it". I turned off auto-updates on my phone. So this happened. Last year or so I traveled to SF and tried to call an Uber home after a long day of walking around. My phone had 5% battery left. I opened the app and there it was... The maps and everything showed up, but then it…

Your complaint doesn't make much sense. These apps are pretty front ends for cloud databases, just like websites. You don't demand that websites serve you one version of javascript and then never update it again. These are not standalone local apps. They are client-server networked apps that need the client and server to stay in sync for them to work. Uber and Apple/Google have solved the problem you experienced by having the apps only be auto-updated while they're being charged so they don't chew up your battery. You decided to break that feature and then complain that your magical cab hailing device was slightly inconvenient.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#172

Post by fl0wenol »

Silhouette wrote: post #144
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which would mean exponentially growing testing requirements on the part of the company delivering the updates. "Should" in an ideal world doesn't equal "should" in a world with deadlines and limited resources. It's enough work to ensure that all the features work with ONE version of an app. If you had to also test every version of the app without this or that feature update installed, you just continually multiply th…

Your premise seems to ignore that maintaining several versions, even with numerous highly dependent variations, is something that was the norm in the software industry until relatively recently. Microsoft famously managed it with Windows for a long time until they lost the plot. I've run Debian systems for many years and never had unattended-updates break a box. The trouble with today's highly connected world is that…

To be fair, Microsoft is still doing it (maintaining several revisions through security and bug fixes) with Windows 10 and Server 2016 and priors, it's just not visible to customers outside enterprise. The change is the expectation for your typical consumer or small business user, who are now used to everything updating and obsolescing periodically.

I don't like this attitude either, though. Developers have gotten fat and lazy not dealing with any sort of variation in deployment, let alone versions. Everything is all Android or iOS. All Chrome and maybe Firefox. x86 or ... maybe arm. And not be connected to the Internet? That's unpossible!

With hindsight and better tooling we should be able to handle more complexity in how products are used, not less.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#173

Post by jacquesm »

ryandrake wrote: post #159
jacquesm wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is a problem: no updates means NO UPDATES, it does not mean all updates except for those that ignore the setting. The OS is supposed to enforce such things.

Exactly. People are forgetting the word "command". In the old days, users would command computers to do things, and the computers did those things. If I say rm -rf documents, I expect the documents directory to be removed. I'm not suggesting that the computer could do it, or asking the computer to do it. I'm issuing a command . And I expect it to be carried out completely. Delete it all. I don't expect the OS to keep…

Interesting. I have a blog post in draft called 'Do as I say', it echoes quite a few of the sentiments in your comment.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#174

Post by [deleted] »

marcosdumay wrote: post #158
sheetjs wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sucks, but that's the reality of SaaS. I'm a fan of using local apps whenever possible. For instance, Google Docs is just too damn useful not to use sometimes. But I still, majority of the time, will choose to use a local word processor whenever I can get away with it. And when I'm done working on a Google Docs project, I download it in several formats and put it in the drawer. Out of curiosity, would you pay fo…

Does the mobile MS Office keep working if it can't connect to the licensing servers for a month? Because the desktop version doesn't.

[deleted]

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#175

Post by HedgeSparrow »

markcerqueira wrote: post #136
DiNovi wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how I feel about this; you had the power to not auto update; you exercised it; the company had the power to not allow out of date apps use the service; they exercised it... seems right to me. You put yourself in that situation.

This is a recurring theme here where people over-engineer their devices, workflows, and lifestyle. Then they get burned by it and blame everything except that over-engineering.

It's more an issue of producers trying to control User Experience right down to the nitty gritty of what stays up-to-date on a device they've already purchased and are trying to use/integrate into their already running lives.

Your device, workflow, and lifestyle are generally pretty integral to your devices, work, and life, so it's natural to want to exercise control over them?

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#176

Post by ryandrake »

jacquesm wrote: post #173
ryandrake wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. People are forgetting the word "command". In the old days, users would command computers to do things, and the computers did those things. If I say rm -rf documents, I expect the documents directory to be removed. I'm not suggesting that the computer could do it, or asking the computer to do it. I'm issuing a command . And I expect it to be carried out completely. Delete it all. I don't expect the OS to keep…

Interesting. I have a blog post in draft called 'Do as I say', it echoes quite a few of the sentiments in your comment.

Maybe I'm just crabby but I even resent having to ask my computer via its software if it could please, pretty please, shut down. As if I need its permission. Back in the day, you threw the power switch and it was off.

And, yes, I understand disk caches and why we have a graceful shutdown process. What irks me is that the computer might be in the middle of doing something despite my not having told it to be doing anything.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#177

Post by tokai »

ryandrake wrote: post #160
samfriedman wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your car is fully self-driving, I'm sure you will be able to get a discount on the sticker/rental price by agreeing to view some ads on the in-car screens while you ride.

Sure, it will start that way. But we all know how that feature will progress: 1. ads play by default, with an option to pay to remove then to: 2. forced ads with no option to remove, and the car won't run unless they're playing

3. dynamic rerouting our your drive to maximize utility of cityscape ads

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#178

Post by khedoros1 »

BuildTheRobots wrote: post #165
jacquesm wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is a problem: no updates means NO UPDATES, it does not mean all updates except for those that ignore the setting. The OS is supposed to enforce such things.

To be entirely fair, the option (at least on my Play store) gives options of "Do not auto-update apps. // Auto-update apps at any time. Data charges may apply. // Auto-update apps over Wi-Fi only." It could easily and even possibly be fairly argued that there's a massive difference between updating 3rd party apps and updating the operating system itself. The Play services were originally an immutable part of the core…

> It could easily and even possibly be fairly argued that there's a massive difference between updating 3rd party apps and updating the operating system itself.

Updates to the OS come as OTA notifications that I can choose how and when to apply (download+install separately, for example). I don't monitor my Play Services version, but I assume that it's silently updating in the background, unlike either my apps or the OS itself.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#179

Post by jacquesm »

ryandrake wrote: post #176
jacquesm wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I have a blog post in draft called 'Do as I say', it echoes quite a few of the sentiments in your comment.

Maybe I'm just crabby but I even resent having to ask my computer via its software if it could please, pretty please, shut down. As if I need its permission. Back in the day, you threw the power switch and it was off. And, yes, I understand disk caches and why we have a graceful shutdown process. What irks me is that the computer might be in the middle of doing something despite my not having told it to be doing anyt…

Anything a little larger (say a 4381) 'back in the day' also needed to be asked politely to be switched off, even PDP-11's running UNIX wouldn't take kindly to an unscheduled drop in input juice. fsck or the local equivalent would be your lot. I'm actually quite happy with the shutdown speed of modern hardware running Linux, it's typically under a second or so but I can see how it might get to you that you can't just throw the switch. It might be interesting to do this on purpose a bunch of times to see what the end result is, I built a car computer once that was arranged purposefully so that losing power at any time did not make it lose stuff but that was quite a tricky setup with a supercap and a bunch of 'early warning' logic to let the computer know that powerdown was imminent. It did work but I was never quite sure how much leeway there was.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#180

Post by carapace »

wvenable wrote: post #126
acomjean wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard Stallman talk at graduate school in the early part of this century. I though he was a bit extreme at the time, but over time I've come to appreciate his position. Having software be open and modifiable is really quite an amazing thing. those open building blocks lets us do amazing things with software quite easily. Its time for an open source desktop os and software to go mainstream. We realize that apple is…

All the open source software I use on daily basis auto-updates.

> “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Couldn't find anything specific in re: auto-updates though...

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