Posts by jonathan keith 768 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Aug 2007
No - enshittification is taking something that used to be good (for a given value of 'good') and making it worse to generate greater short-term profit. A key point is that the product was already a paid product (somewhere along the line, not necessarily with the end-user.)
It is not requiring corporations to pay for OSS.
Does AGI in this context stand for i) Artificial General Intelligence or ii) something significantly different? Because if it's i), then ARM is either a) hiding a genuinely profound breakthrough or b) lying through its marketing-led teeth. And if it's ii), then an explanation in the text would be appreciated.
I've always found that the phrase "Excuse me, but would you explain what [the fuck] that actually means?" tends to bring such meetings to an unexpectedly early end. It may also have something to do with the fact that I have also had a succession of short-lived jobs instead of anything remotely resembling a career.
Why, yes, I have recently received an autism diagnosis. What made you ask?
The water industry can now take this new technology on board as their 100% method for leak detection. All other leak detection systems can now be disbanded, saving huuuuge amounts of money, meaning more bonuses for the bosses and better income for the shareholders! The fibre companies will be mandated to do the leak detection so they may as well keep and maintain the leak database as well, so no need for the water companies to do any extra record-keeping! When it all goes wrong it will definitely not be the water companies to blame either. It gets better by the minute!
Amanda. This memo was discovered accidentally by an alert volunteer data-archaeologist during a random archive trawl in November 2088. Along with other material recovered from the same tranche, it provides some useful insight into the circumstances leading up to the Great Blackout of 2029, and helps explain the pressure-cooker society that the British population were living in at the time. On a personal note, having reviewed the material as a whole, I'm frankly astonished that it took so much to make them revolt in the first place, although that might also be why the following few months were quite so bloody. Looking at documents like these, from such a tragic and hideous moment in our history, we can only remind ourselves how lucky we are today to live in more enlightened times!
Tell you what - this sounds like it might be really useful for some sort of hypersonic SSTO spaceplane project. Something that could Take-Off and Land Horizontally, perhaps using a novel propulsion technology like - oh, I don't know - a Reaction Engine. I don't suppose anyone has any plans for a project of this nature?
I think you missed an important part of the article. Windows now supports MIDI 2.0. Windows has supported the original MIDI system for - as you say - decades.
And MIDI is one of those rare things: an industry standard that has actually stood the test of time remarkably well*, to the point where it's taken this long to get to the point where it really benefits from being revised. And the opportunities that MIDI 2.0 present are genuinely exciting for musicians.
* unless you're talking about the Suzuki Q-chord, which has the most demented MIDI implementation I've ever come across, and which could only have been a product of the copious ingestion of recreational drugs. (The MIDI implementation, not the Q-chord. Although...) Those crazy music-industry engineers, eh?
This seems to be as good a place to start as any:
Why is it that, for quite a long time now, the corporates appear to have confused dystopian fiction with instruction manuals?
Is it as simple as seeing 'board makes massive short-term profits / bonuses and to hell with the consequences' and they think "that's a really good idea" ?
Not the steam machine itself, per se, but SteamOS. I can only speak for myself, but I am sick to the back teeth of Microsoft's bullshit, and the moment I can jump to something that will run *all* my Windows software that isn't Windows, then I'm gone. SteamOS looks promising. I wonder, out of interest, how long it will take Microsoft - if it isn't already - to code Office365 to not launch if it detects it's running on SteamOS?
Controversially, I'll assert that big companies shouldn't be allowed to challenge regulators through the courts
Absolutely nothing controversial about that as far as I can see. Corporates have chosen to push the pendulum as far as they can, and we're starting to recognise that we've had enough of their nonsense. We need to sustain the pressure on lawmakers to start moving the pendulum back, to ignore the howls of outrage from the corporates, billionaires, and lobbyists, and to ultimately make sure these greedy swine can't ever do it again.
Now hear me out, but What If…? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
There is no 3.
I agree wholeheartedly. How do we make this happen, please?
For far too long now appealing against every negative court judgement has become simply another cost of doing business for multinationals. Penalties - meaningful penalties - must be introduced to put a stop to this.
Want to appeal? Go right ahead, but if the judge decides you're doing so simply to avoid paying the fine, drag the case out, cost the government department (read: taxpayer) you're appealing against, etc. etc., then your fine has just gone up by an order of magnitude, and it's payable in 30 days or the bailiffs get sent round, your operating licenses are revoked and your executives are liable.
Fuck these people. They need to be beaten with sticks until they learn to respect the society we all live in.
Yes, 98, Vista, 8 were pretty (ok, very) crappy, but their service packs (98SE, 7, 8.1) eventually fixed them up pretty well. Even XP only really shone after three service packs.
Nobody much likes change, but the big problem with Win11 is that it is actively more difficult and time-consuming to use than previous versions, for no obvious or clearly-explained reasons. Change because it's significantly more efficient once you've adapted? Grumble, moan, demand proof or examples, but all right. But change for the sake of change alone, or more cynically change for the sake of profit alone is not good enough. The only carrot in view is the promise of bonuses (or just continued employment) for those at Microsoft and their satellite businesses, but for the users, Win11 only offers a stick, and that does not make a compelling sales pitch.
... so that the lesson includes "The differences between protected free speech, unprotected free speech, and liability to any resultant consequences".
Or maybe just put together a short yet informative public information film and broadcast it everywhere for a month.
I've said it before, and I have no doubt I'll be saying it many times again, but c-suite jail terms are the only effective deterrents against corporate malfeasance. Write the laws so that if a regulator decides that a company has knowingly breached them, ALL c-suite executives face a minimum of a year in chokey. Let them pass that off as simply the cost of doing business.
In exactly the same way as everything else gets fixed these days: despite plenty of detailed warnings about this flaw, nothing will be done at any of these companies until either a) people (by which I mean white westerners) die as a direct result of this, or b) the flaw causes significant reputational damage to a multinational corporate customer, or a (again, western) government.
At that point, something will be done to address this flaw. Nothing will happen right up to that point, however, because any activity would "harm stockholder value" (and bonuses).
Climate change is going to result in the end of either late-stage capitalism or humanity. At the moment I don't honestly know which I'd prefer.
You also then avoid having to do any difficult critical thinking.
"I'm all right, Jack" (so by extension fuck the rest of you all) is such a poisonous attitude, and one of the reasons we're in our current parlous circumstances.
Sorry for the rant. It's one of those mornings.
The significant problem in that cartoon is that it omits the movement of the political centre (the Overton window) ever-rightwards for decades.
