Posts by Marcus_Bond 8 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Nov 2018
Allegedly you could get Adobe flash player back, locked to one domain, for around $25,000 per annum. But actually Harman won't publish their prices... and their license T&C's... well lets just say we'll probably never know which organizations paid a ransom to Samsung/Harman to release their IT systems, or how much they paid. Seems like pricing was based on an organizations size, how desperate you were, and how much they thought they could sting you for.
Anyway, I reckon I'll have to pay out around 10k in redevelopment costs by the end of this month, but at least its going to nice people, and I'm not giving it to Shantanu Narayen.
Last month, Mozilla was still saying Firefox ESR would support flash until the 3rd Qtr of 2021, and we were working towards that timescale (it's been removed now), and absolutely no one at Adobe, had ever mentioned that Flash would be time-bombed, just that Adobe would stop supporting Flash, and that the latest browsers would drop support... (imagine if MS timebombed Windows 95, or Mozilla timebombed firefox 56.0 jeez... )
What happened was Adobe did a deal for $$$... so that Samsung/Harman could take Flash away using a Timebomb, then offer to licence it back for what is frankly obscene amounts of Money. (As far as I'm aware, MS is also keeping it, but only available for $$$ Enterprise licences). And it would be most effective at earning revenue if the Timebomb was kept quiet, than lots of companies would get caught out, and Harmon would make a tidy little earner.
We were up against it already following development work on the EU's Data Protection, then the UK's making tax digital, and then EU's Strong Customer Authentication, then Brexit customs/vat changes etc, then Covid-19 hit, and quite sensibly, the UK moved SCA enforcement back a few months to give us a breather...
Once I found out on the Adobe Flash forum late December that some enterprising soul had just tried putting his PC's clocks forward, and discovered Flash was timebombed, I prioritized the redevelopment of what is a tiny, but critical and horrible bit of remaining flash used on an internal network, but it was too late, our developers were to busy to fix it, it's hooked into some old legacy code which slow and difficult to fix. It will be done by the end of this month, meantime Adobe can do one, for foul business practices.
Something similar happened with Photobucket. What Samsung/Harmon and Adobe have done is not a million miles away from Ransomware...
Storm in a teacup. Just a way of the establishment drawing a line under Trump, in case he wants to come back in 4 years. Actually I quite like Trump, about as much as I can like any other rich privileged person... the majority of the global establishment wanted to go one way (a new way)... where as Trump and the rest wanted to go another way (the old way), which in my opinion included around a little less than half of the US.
Now the 'new way' group will have to work their socks off to make the 'new way' irreversible, they have just 4 years to achieve as much as possible. All the old western countries have crucified their economies to push through as much structural change as possible during this crisis, and will continue to use it in the future.
Here in the UK, enormous changes to planning laws later this year will allow permitted development of any city/town center shops and offices, turning them into thousands of redeveloped residential homes for inner town/city living. Private car ownership will rapidly decline due to rising costs. Automated electric taxis, and electric home deliveries will take their place.
I can't really blame the US for pushing back against this change, Continental North America has over 300 years of unconventional oil reserves available, there is no need for the US to change anything, and change is uncomfortable. Never-the-less, Trump was rather naughty thinking the US could hold back the rest of the world from making this change, whilst attempting to control all the major global oil reserves, (barring Russia).
I had two tablets, a Tab 10.1 which I found was a poor experience and quickly stopped using it, then I thought I'd try again with a Lenovo tablet that was recommended to me a couple of years ago, but it was just as bad. I found both tablets were pretty slow, and unresponsive compared to my iphone, and large, quite heavy, cold, hard and uncomfortable in use, they quickly went in a drawer and were never used again.
Found a desktop PC was my productivity machine, and the iphone did most everything else. Never got on with laptops, give me crick in my neck looking down at the monitor. Nowadays I'm more focused on security and privacy hardware and features with a desktop setup using a new Chromebox for general internet stuff & a Win 10 PC for other important software, and an iphone.
Interesting discussion... my own opinion is that shareholders generally have very little interest in a company's products, they are only interested in how much money than can get out of their investment. They are quite happy to take their money out of Nokia and put it Apple if it will make them more money, it's all the same to them, and they don't tend to be interested in taking risks.
Big companies generally can't innovate, they can really only grow by the acquisition of smaller companies. As a big company Nokia just couldn't react to the iphone broadside fast enough. Combined with the problem of shareholders who probably wanted to salvage as much money from Nokia as possible... that was the end of Nokia.
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