Back then, you could re-invent a shitty wheel, people would ignore you and your idea would die out. Now a shitty-wheel idea gets indexed into a search engine and can potentially fool a non-expert into believing that its actually a good idea. I suppose thats the problem education has been trying to solve...
Your example is off the mark. What people mean by that sentiment is that as long as you don't harm others, you should have the freedom to do what you want. Climate-change and ant-vax are issues that impact everyone else on the planet.
No man is island. So even if you are just harming yourself by drinking or taking drugs you are also ruining your family and indirectly society by making that behavior more socially acceptable. So there shouldn't be absolute freedom in anything.
I effectively never had one, so does that make it acceptable?
> and indirectly society
I know plenty of drug takers that function fine in society[0]. I anticipate your response might be "they would function even better if they didn't", but perhaps forcibly removing choice from adults is also damaging.
This is what it's like arguing with many anti-drugs person. Whatever you say, they'll counter it with anything to push their 'prohibitive' agenda.
It's not even that there's no room for compromise, there's no space even to discuss it, to try and understand their rationale. It's like being a kid again in a classroom with the teacher shouting at you that you can't do that and no they won't explain why.
The scary part is that drugs were only volunteered as an offhand example. Authoritarians (in this case openly) apply the same logic to literally any activity, such that even the most vague and indirect tertiary externalities can be twisted into an excuse to police other people. Even the most responsible engagement in [drug use]/[sex]/[motorcycle riding]/[controversial art]/[self-defense]/[political protest] is subject to their judgment and approval because your example might influence someone else!
But even though this loose standard can be stretched to justify literally any prohibition, in practice the only activities that get targeted in the name of community enhancement are the ones that make the group in power feel threatened or uncomfortable.
Maybe we need drinking licences. You need to pass multiple tests that cost a lot of money to administer, and if you are caught breaking the rules you get a fine or go to jail (depending on the legal framework, which rules you broke, and how good your lawyer is).
Capacity is the currency of the industry they're in. Its right in the article itself.
>What Saudi is trying to do by not revealing the true picture is to protect its reputation as a reliable oil supplier, especially to its target clientele in Asia, so we have to take all of these comments with a hefty pinch of salt,
That really isn't a like-like comparison. You are looking at just one product from Apple. In the Android and Windows world for each generation there are hundreds of thousands of hardware combinations from entry level to high end that are expected to run Windows. Also MS/Google cannot test their software with future un-released hardware. If anything, this should be a cakewalk for Apple - if they choose to. I don't know what special "tuning" is required that prevents Apple from supporting the hardware.
If that is indeed the real reason, its unfortunate that they cannot get an OS to run acceptably in 1GB of RAM. Especially when they have such a tiny amount of hardware variations to support.
Microsoft and Google both release their own hardware. AFAIK, Microsoft does a pretty fair job updating software for the Surface. The same cannot be said for Google and Pixel (Or for that matter, Nexus prior to Pixel).
The other huge factor is that developers love re-inventing stuff. Nobody wants to be content just maintaining something that has been working for 30 years, because thats career suicide in today's world. "Hey, tell me about the cool stuff you're working on.." "You guys are still using that framework? Wow!". Its an interesting contrast from the industry I'm in (vaccines) where people are extremely risk-averse and do not ever want to disturb code/process flows that work and are making money. I have come to appreciate software reliability a LOT more.
Also.. given the massive surface area of new untested code thats being constantly pumped out, visiting a website today, is absolutely no different than downloading a random binary from the internet and running it. The ".com" address might as well be an actual .COM file that is downloaded and executed...
We certainly love improving stuff. But more than half the point of programming is, that you only have to come up with and do it once.
We just copy the code, and add our improvement.
And open source developers aren’t interested in a ”career“, but in making a good program.
Frameworks are another pathological case of monolithism by the way.
Use libraries. That can be combined however you want. Under your rule.
Not frameworks. That accept no other framework beside them. Under their rule.
I completely agree on the second paragraph though. VMs are not a security solution. The OS has to do its job.
You haven't described what the problem actually is with schools. Homogenized knowledge systems are a simple way of having a common "API Layer" in our consciousness that other humans can access.
I don't think its a "racket". The thing with stuff like this is that nobody wants to be on the hook for re-certifying every single calculator as "equivalent".
Well the key difference is that on-paper anyway, MS claims they use telemetry to make Windows better and fix bugs, Google spies on you and your personal data so that they can sell your profile to the highest bidder who will attempt to convince you to open your wallet.
>I am afraid this business will fail (as a business). People, on average, prefer to have freebies at the expense of losing their privacy, than pay even a moderate amount for a service.
That is the current state yes, but I think that this was a manufactured type of psychology/expectation. I remember back in the day (90s 00s) when I used to install software for my family, one of my uncles was always flabbergasted that the software was free. "But why is it free?" "How do the make rent?!" I tried to explain the Hacker/OSS ethos and whatever else I could think of, but it never really sunk in for him.
I think paid software is going to make a comeback once clients realize that nobody except google (and a handful of companies) are actually benefiting from the pointless web surveillance. Hopefully that will happen when the tech industry stops giving Google a free pass for their spying and squarely puts them in the enemy camp...
