“Activists”. pfff.

Yyyyeah, fuck that, will forever be filtering flights to avoid the late-stage capitalist death trap.

What specifically do you mean when you say “Open MacOS”? Open to what? You can already install anything you want on it. It’s unix based, so your terminal works mostly the same as in Linux. You’ve even got a package manager (homebrew), so you won’t miss apt or whatever else you use. iOS is another discussion, but imho, OSX is “open” enough.

Superb write-up, well done! Echoes my experience completely.

B&H in New York has some pretty good inventory, usually. I’ve bought a lot of stuff from them through the years.

KitKat is Nestle. Fuck that, never give those cunts any of your hard earned money.

🍿

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it as many times as I need to. I’ve lived in “3rd world countries”, and I’ve lived in Texas. Texas is worse.

MVP

Off the seven seas? Try Britbox. Relatively affordable, no ads whatsoever. They’ve got Cats does Countdown, QI, Mock the Week etc.

Britbox has all the series since the start, when Stephen Fry was presenting.

Thank you for your hard work! 🫡

You know what REALLY bugs me about the NYPD? Whenever there’s any big event like the NYE you just mentioned, they always put those fucking metal barriers up EVERYWHERE. Some places I get, you have to separate say a parade route from the stands, fine. But they close off random bits of sidewalk, or funnel everyone through a tiny opening, so there’s always huge clumps of humanity. Last year in Brooklyn, for July 4th, they made a fucking maze of barriers and they let too many people in so it was jam packed, you couldn’t move in any direction. People were getting crushed against the barriers and couldn’t get out, we were all screaming at them to move the fucking barriers and they just stood there, hands on their guns, like the cowardly assholes they are.

So fucking dangerous, it’s by sheer dumb luck that no one died there (afaik).

And all of it is completely pointless. I was just in Toronto for the NYE fireworks. No cops, no barriers, tons of people, and it was completely fine.

Guess they need to spend all that extra budget they got from defunding the library on something. Might as well be barriers and big SUVs, ey? Fuckers.

Agreed, fucking let them. They try all the time, it’s obviously something they want. It would be good riddance.

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3886527-texas-lawmaker-files-texit-bill-to-spur-vote-on-exploring-secession-from-us/

I’ve lived in “third world countries”, and I’ve lived in Texas. Texas is worse.

You fail to sell when you fail to timely implement desirable features. And you fail to prioritise properly when you disregard or misinterpret feedback.

None of this is better mitigated by subscription models.

This sounds almost identical to the script our former VP of PM parroted. Everyone in engineering was vehemently opposed. But the C suite loved it, so we switched to a subscription model. Guess what, NEMs and govt clients don’t like paying subscriptions. No one does, but these are huge, powerful business entities we’re talking about here. You can’t force their hand. We lost 3 of our 4 biggest clients within 6 months. It took a massive amount of work to reverse course.

Just admit it. Subscriptions are nothing more than a blatant money grab. We (the SW industry) have been successfully releasing software and making fucktonnes of money for decades before some bean counter decided to get too greedy and come up with this bullshit.

they actually need to be able to consistently make pretty sizeable upgrades

Precisely! It keeps them honest. Furthermore, it forces closing the feedback loop with users. Developers need to understand what features users want most, and what bugs or usability issues need to be prioritised. Not listening to feedback means no future revenue, simple as that.

The subscription model does none of that. It’s just a greedy money-grab.

There’s actually quite a lot of software that monetises similarly to what you’re proposing. DxO and Ableton, just off the top of my head. Millions of happy users between those 2.

You get minor version updates for “free” (included in the one-time purchase). Upgrades to the next major version are discounted. Don’t need the features in the next major version? Stick with what you have for however long it works for you.

It’s by far my favourite model because it allows the developers to get paid, whilst not squeezing my neck. Everyone’s happy.

Hahahah good luck to them if they try to pull any of this shit in Western Europe 🍿