Good enough is about meeting the business requirement. Not building something that meets the maybe future requirements.

Good enough still needs the bugs worked out before release.

Since there isn't un-needed extra functionality the validation surface area is less.

Haven't seen this in a long while.

About 20 years ago Good Enough IT was a thing. It was in flavor at about the same time Agile started it's big upswing in IT.

Good enough IT has always been a directive in my work. I interpret it as this.
- Delivered functionality meets the business need.
- Delivered functionality is designed and built such that it does not overtly block future iterations.
- Delivered does not hide or fake or stub out important internal capabilities that could give rise to obvious bugs in near future iterations.

So in my world it is not the absolute bare minimum. It is a non-blocking minimum that does not result in excessive tech debt that can be easily avoided.

General this process requires thought, experience and a solid understanding of the business environment that it is working with in.

So far Google, FaceBook, and now Apple have sunk huge sums of money into this space.

With each round dying out fast than the last.

I've said this a hundred times. The form factor is wrong. And there is no upcoming tech that can fix this.

Successful toys need to be casual. Something you can just grab and instantly start using. With the ultimate being the phone. Game consoles are close. But a VR/AR headset requires a lot of preparation before entering into the "space". In almost all cases the best experience is in a dedicated largish room.

So now you have to plan when and where you are going to use this thing. Instantly not a casual exercise.

Secondly the "experience" once inside the "space" is still very much a vomit wagon for a lot of users. Which means there is a large segment of the population that simply can't use the devices. Which then violates another problem. It's not social. You can or you can't play. So the potential of ubiquity is lost.

Cost. Yeah Apple made a huge mistake here. The price point was even outside of the range for Apple users. Seriously financing an obviously dead end device. Are you mad?

The killer suite of apps. Not just one app. You need a significant number of apps used for a multitude of things. Hopefully some of them stick with each user. But sadly I don't actually know anyone that talks about that killer app in Vision pro. Not one. And I know a lot of cashed up Apple fan boys that purchased one.

Unfortunately the form factor is the biggest down side. As long as you have to strap an isolation bell over your head it's not going to work. Apple tried with camera's and displays etc. But it didn't solve the problem. Once our eyeballs can be directly stimulated, Bypassing the need for rap around face hugging helmet then we might have something. ( Note this will be huge as this solves our aging eyes issues as well. ) Is this any time soon? Nope. The science, tech and social acceptance all need to happen first. I honestly don't expect this in the next 40 years. As this is such a huge science and technical leap. And once it's there it's price of entry needs to come down a lot.

I personally know several people that went all in on Apple vision Pro. When I say all in I mean all in. Like Mortgage the house all in. Making start ups that were going to be the leader is some completely irrelevant area of VR/AR. With most already closed down, No funding other than their own cash, no market, no actual product idea, nothing. At best I saw most of these guys play with AR and trying and do detection and attributing of things in their view. So popups, labels, data searching etc. Almost always they set it up so that these extra elements were dead centre of view. So you were basically a step away from a hospital visit. Which did happen in one notable case.

Will Apple help these guys out now that their investments into the space are worth ZIP and they are now jobless and deep in debt? Of course not. Should Apple be forced to help these early developer adaptors out? Absolutely they should. Apple will never admit it was a scam in the end.

In the end do not invest in VR/AR. Unless of course you are shorting the stock.

Putting a back door into encryption is the same as removing it. Worse actually. A back door implies there is some level of trust with the encryption.

The problem is that once a back door has been compromised the ones using it are not the trust worthy.

Back doors are implemented in code. Code that is burned into systems and often never updated. So the belief that it will be patched if the back door is discovered is false. The back door will remain forever. This is increasingly a problem as more and more of our lives becomes more and more interconnected.

Who uses back doors?
1. Law enforcement
2. Governments
3. Private corps
4. Bad actors

Each and every group in that list has shown that members of those groups will abuse the ability. As they have with every other ability they have gained over time. Some of the digital tech that has been used to perform bad things.
- Email
- SMS
- web browsing
- Mobile apps

To remove E2EE effectively makes everything we do compromised.

I like most of the readers here fear that the crimes to be committed by various parties after E2EE is removed will be far greater and worse than those being committed today under the secrecy of E2EE.

But here is the rub. Say E2EE is abolished. You think the criminal community is going to stop using it because government says they can't? Of course not. It's a trivial matter to create an opensource high level encryption comms capability. Now you are in the position that the criminals have encryption and are protected and law abiding citizens are not. Which is obviously the exact opposite of the so called purpose of removing encryption in the first place.

At first the general lifestyle improvement made remote work really accepted by the masses.

But now it's an economic one more than anything else. The cost of living pressures seen around the world are making it impractical or even impossible for workers to be located near enough to the office to accept a 5 day week in the office.

Cost of living increases have dramatically outpaced salary growth. With new higher interest rates that seem to be settling into a new long term level these pressures will remain.

Add on top of this that municipalities simply can keep up to the infrastructure costs. A billion for a bridge here. 10 billion for a tunnel there. These projects have long term cost of living impacts on governments. This is offset or delayed at least by a more decentralised work environment.

I moved further out from the core of the city at the midway through Covid. The place where I lived is now well over double to the cost in rent. It was already on the highend of rental prices before I left. Parking in the area has moved to a pay for a pass to park in front of your own home. The local tolls in that area have gone up considerably. These higher income earners in that area are now barely scraping by. A large number have left the area.

So moving further out from the core office space areas is now a necessity for a lot of people. Some will brave hybrid, most will opt for fulltime remote even at lower wage rates. A commute of 2 hours 1 way to the office is now far more common than it used to be. It makes less and less sense to go into an office.

There is a group of people that do suffer more than others. Those junior staffers that really benefit from personal contact and knowledge transfer are having there skill sets hindered over time. They will catch up but it will take much longer.

Long story short. I think Hybrid will evolve into team gatherings on some sort of regular basis. Something like once ever 2 weeks or even monthly. This will become more increasingly common. I don't think Hybrid of 2/5 days in the office will last very long.

Well the OS is becoming more and more irrelevant.

Compared to just a few years ago the number of "Apps" I have installed on any OS is far lower. I'm constantly moving content into cloud or cloud like storage. My daily driver "machine" is quickly becoming my daily driver "account". ( But secretly My actually daily driver machine has been Linux for well over a decade. )

You are right once grandma is only using the web and email it really doesn't matter what OS is in use. For my father I'll be moving him to an arm device with a giant screen and keyboard in the next year. And he won't know the difference at all.

Noting one of the reasons for the move is he is becoming more and more susceptible to scammers. He's starting to respond to the calls and the popups. So I need to reduce the surface area where attacks to take hold.

Because of the central server model and the reliance on users to verify shared keys fingerprints manually there is an opening for a man in the middle attack.

Telegram could very well be very strong. But it also has a gapping hole that could be exploited.

Great achievement.

Here's the but.

Is the new format suitable for long term data storage? In excess of 50 years?

I think physical media only future is the long term storage of data. So capacity and longevity are both factors.

This is an honest question.

I've worked with many large Enterprises.

In almost every case where they get serious about managing there platforms in the cloud they achieve dramatic cost savings over on prem. I'm speaking of 10's to 100's of millions of dollars in savings. In ever case where savings have occurred is where that enterprises product or service is a digital one.

Typically things like dynamic scaling, proper archival management of data, and deprecation of legacy systems have big impacts. Operational Automation also has a huge impact reducing the OPEX costs. This if done right has one of the larger overall impacts on costs. I'd love to say that modernisation of software stacks has played a big role. It hasn't in my experience. Most Enterprises have very little will to modernise a software stack that is "working".

Now don't forget the huge costs associated with keeping that well past due HPUX, or AIX box working in the corner. Migrating these workloads to cloud even if done in ways that make my hair curl will achieve big cost savings. ( And wow I've seen some really sketchy migrations. )

But remember this all hinges on the organisation actually committed to paying down some of that tech debt usually around operations and committing to monitoring/operating/planning their cloud workloads. If they just cram it on AWS and walk away. Yeah it will cost a fortune over time.

I completely agree,

Unfortunately I deal with a lot of Enterprise that suffer from bill shock. For very simple reasons.

The fail to Manage/Monitor/Plan resource utilisation in the cloud. They think it's something they no longer have to do.

But if done right the cost savings are enormous.

For an org that has there **** together cloud is far cheaper.

On prem requires excess capacity already spun up. On prem resources need far in advance planning. On prem lacks burst capacity capabilities for the most part. On prem also has an additional overhead of operations overheads to maintain, physical and the virtualisation platforms.

Now there are very valid reasons for on-prem kit. Lots actually. But for most organisations cloud solves huge volume of issues.

It falls apart when that org however forgets the cloud does require maintenance. On-prem forces orgs to not forget about some level of maintenance.

I agree,

Cuts to IT when cloud resources need management and maintenance cause some big blowouts in cloud subscription costs.

I still see to this day the non-sensical lift and shift being a goal of Enterprise organisations. Expecting that cloud will solve ever growing costs of maintaining everything. As application usage, data rate, and data storage increase if your crude infra that you uplifted to the cloud doesn't adapt it's cost are going to spiral.

You can't treat cloud as simply on-prem virtualisation.

Some things you have to do.
- Offload commodity services to cost efficient cloud alternatives. This is typicall things like identity management, Domain name services, Secrets management etc.
- Automate your workflows.
- Tune your storage requirements. Not all your storage needs to be Tier 1 always on storage.
- Migrate your apps from bare metal -> VM's -> containers.
- Adapt your needs to use autoscaling features.
- Build solid reporting on resources utilisation.

And last but not least.
- Decommission legacy Enterprise applications aggressively. Get you business team on board with this. Kill off those legacy services as quickly as possible. This is by far the biggest cost saver.

All this sounds like a lot of work. Of course it is. But it doesn't all have to happen at once. As long as there is a constant tech debt pay down rate in the org then there isn't really a huge expense here.

The primary excuse for kicking will be this.

Anything that modifies content before it is presented to the end users can present a danger the the users. An example will likely be to talk about how modified content on your banking site is dangerous.

But the real reason is a drop in ad revenue.

The vast majority of offshoring goes to commodity jobs.

Jobs that require very little up skilling, that are highly repetitive and require minimal oversite.

The companies that offshore core business product maintenance and development almost always get burned. If it's central to the business it needs to be close at hand. If it's a commodity task that anyone can do then get rid of it.

Every single instance I have encountered of core jobs going overseas has met with a massive disaster for the company, most often with major issue popping up half way through the process.

If however the complete function of the business is moved then there is a high chance that it will succeed.

However offshore jobs tend to have very little adaptability. The functions that migrate are very slow to adapt to changes in the business. Often resulting in that offshore component being replaced by a completely separate team in times of change.

So Why do I say all this? Basically offshore labour can not replace all aspects of onshore labour. It's those commodity jobs that do not require the ability to adapt and adjust over time that can be off shored. This generally leaves highly skilled jobs locally.

Will this work for every and every company. Nope. But those with the skills and experience can expect a good chance working remotely where they want.

Actually it'll be an evolution in ad blocking technology.

Gen 1 ad blockers are those that redirect whole ad serving sites to nothing.
Gen 2 ad blockers looked at url patterns and cookie patterns. And effectively blocked the requests.
Gen 3 ad blockers will take a deeper look at the page and artefact contents to rewrite code in the browser.

We are entering into the Gen 3 era. These ones will be outright blocked from the browser as addons. As the game of whack a mole will be rapid. As new ad blockers pop up in addon stores the app stores will kick them out. This will drive the tech outside of the "app" space and will likely merge into products like those of geo avoidance VPN's. You'll also start to see them as opensource products popping up here and there. The most popular will like be those that end up as containers added to fancy home routers.

In the end ad blocking will not be as pervasive as it is today. The technical minded out there will always find a way. However the vast majority of people will unfortunately be victims of even more ad saturation.

Ad blocking and privacy considerations will continue to be an issue. We will see some rather poor attempts at governments around the world to regulate this. Since governments will always be 10 steps behind the technology it will be a losing battle for decades to come.