You're on the right track, but I'm not sure you've thought it completely through. Software once evolved before moving into the stage you describe. I'm nostalgic for even that. What we have now is more akin to being bombarded by gamma rays. Yeah, the evolution might still be happening, but most of the mutations are just cancer.

No. Mandatory upgrades exist because recurring revenue, and if you aren't milking your customers on a recurring basis at an ever-increasing rate ...forever, you're businessing wrong.

PATCHES, existed before the internet and are more important than ever because of it. Unfortunately, as your comment demonstrates, most of us have been manipulated into conflating the value they once provided with the pay-forever subscription model that entails on-screen controls moving every couple months and pop-up pestering interrupting actual work just to campaign for the purported value of useless visual changes or ultra-niche added functionality.

Yeah, I'll concede that patches are a (wonderfully limited-scope) kind of upgrade that also can be distributed automatically, but it's clearly not what the article is talking about. Bits don't rot. If code you shipped has a vulnerability, it was there when you shipped it, and it should be on you to fix it without forcing me to change my way of working, all while paying you for the privilege of doing so.

By the way, eff flat "design" and get off my lawn!

It'd be all too easy to dismiss this as hysteria, given that we've known for 20 years that mobile devices can get warm when pushed. But, we're not talking just warm here... We're talking a few degrees warmer than a high fever! Seriously, have you ever touched the forehead of a sick relative? No? Good. You'd have third degree burns if you were so reckless. I have more thoughts I'd share, but I have to hop in my car that's been sitting in the post-summer sun here in the deep south. Until the A/C gets going, the black leather interior shouldn't be any warmer than, say, an iPhone 15 and half.

Huh? A judge forced Tesla to install chargers based on its half-decade old âoeself drivingâ fraud? Wow!

What a perverse incentive⦠reminds me of the time that literally every oil-guzzling auto maker was passing emissions testing by performing well during the test itself. I feel like I remember one of them being caught before the others and taking a bigger PR hit as a result. Eh, it was a long time ago⦠maybe just before the self-driving fraud started⦠around 2015, so I canâ(TM)t quite remember.

I don't think I ever saw tablets being particularly useful for tasks other than web browsing, but early-on, they were fantastic for that. I can't put my finger on all the reasons, but modern pages just don't seem to work as well on the tablet format. Part of it is that advertisers have adapted to intrusively grab your attention with slide-overs, and delayed pop-overs. Another might be a departure from columniation. Whatever the reasons, the convenience is gone, readability is down, and the whole experience just seems more cumbersome than it did in 2010.

Are you freakin' kidding me? How is a developer supposed to develop software that "requires administrator privileges" if he or she can't write to arbitrary directories and / or registry keys during normal, post-installation use? While you're at it, you might as well require your developers to use a 1080p screen, thus restricting their interfaces to actually rendering correctly on the displays of 99% of their users! What's next? Requiring the end product to run in an amount of memory likely to be supported on a single-socket motherboard and asking that code manipulating a database not be executed on the database server itself!!? Wow, just wow.

I'm with you but the problem is, that in today's world, you aren't expected to take and keep a job for any consequential length of time. In the blink of an eye, all of ITT's graduates will be subject to automated resume parsing and job application scoring. They will immediately fall prey to what the various HR software providers call "knock out" questions. If you haven't heard of these, they're essentially immediate disqualifiers that prevent your resume or application from ever bothering a busy HR admin due to running afoul of some education-tied rule, lack of an experience keyword, etc. I've been involved in a number of demos lately and have been horrified both by the ubiquity of this feature and the vendors' zeal for including them in product demos.

I imagine that someone who saw early gasoline engines spewing black smoke a century ago would have had similar thoughts about them.

If they didn't put the options in a different place and a layer deeper with each release, you wouldn't feel like you got any value when you're finally forced to upgrade.

Except I outsourced the manufacturing of the weapon to Ruger (LCP) and the "looks like a cell phone" aspect comes from keeping it in a pocket holster with an iPhone 4 back glass to reduce printing. Oh, you know what else helps its concealability? Being comfortable with it staying in my pocket. Always. ...not wanting to parade it around to find opportunities to preach about my rights or get approving nods from Bubba and Cletus. Jesus, redneck America, stop fondling your effing guns! Not only will they go unnoticed, but the people around you will be safer as well.

The court order specifically suggests several methods that Apple might use to comply. All ultimately involve physical possession of the phone in order for either Apple or the FBI to implement. For OTA and physical access alike, user intervention (authorized or not) is required. Furthermore, the integrity of the use of Apple's signing key is part of the security model, particularly for older devices such as the 5c in question. (Load whatever you'd like on newer ones - the hardware will still thwart brute force attacks.) If the government asks Apple to sign malware, even for good cause, they are asking them to intentionally weaken that model. Perhaps there are even issues of free speech involved since the government wants to force Apple to say (with its signing key) "This is legitimate, trustworthy software." in regard to something that is clearly not.

Didn't the cable companies finally kill CableCARD a year or two ago? Obviously, most will still give you one, but isn't the mandate dead? If so, it's only a matter of time before the remaining cooperation winds down.

  Regardless, I think a robust market for consumer-owned set-top boxes is better for the DVR community than CableCARD ever was. Let's face it, no such mandate is going to be open source-friendly, so why not have a variety of commercial products that actually have to compete with one another for customers? In the end, open source projects such as mythTV and the wonderful (but in desperate need of an installer) Sage TV will benefit through the variety of work-arounds and hacks that develop. If nothing else, I can see someone developing a recording and playback peripheral device that "protects" the content while allowing scheduling and UI to be handled by software of the user's choice.

Hardware limitations will tame bloat like nothing else. However, given some memory and CPU coupled with a drop-in framework for just about anything imaginable and the growth quickly becomes exponential. My Mario-comparable iOS "masterpiece" Cletus Land tallies in at 35MB. It's easy to get there and beyond when you start adding-in things like a physics engine, many times the screen resolution, quadruple the bits for color, support for several different screen layouts, etc. As I've earned about as much as the SuperTux developers, I'm thankful it didn't take me a decade to get to release.

In the old days, prior to ubiquitous hardware virtualization, you would have paid for more CPU time or more sessions. The key point being that your provider would have placed your workload on a shared system with greater capacity than necessary. How could they justify this excess capacity? Easy! By charging you dearly for access to it when you needed it on short notice. Hmmm... Sure sounds familiar.

I've been interviewing candidates for a high-end generalist position for six months now. (We're cheap and no-name) One thing that has struck me is that few people stay at an IT job for more than 18 months to 2 years. I'm an exception, having been here for 7 years and at my previous job for 9. But what really surprises me is that I've started to consider those 18 month stints as normal. Now, when I look at a resume where someone has been at the same place for 3 or 4 years, I ask myself "What's wrong with this person that they couldn't find another job?" It never crosses my mind that they, like me, might simply have found a relaxed environment in which they're comfortable and not expected to hold down a desk for 9 hours before doing the real work after everyone else goes home. It's scary. I'm both the senior technical person at my organization and my IT department's hiring manager... and by my own standards, I'm practically unhirable.