I remember reading a story a while back about someone who owned a legit CS version with a proper serial and activation.

They had to change computer, and in doing so had to reactivate Photoshop, but it wasn’t working. They contacted Adobe support and explained the situation but support basically told him nope, not a chance, we aren’t helping you. You need to subscribe to new Photoshop.

So Adobe accepted that yes, he bought a perpetual licence for Photoshop and that yes, the reason it isn’t working is the online activation, but they still refused to help.

Scumbags.

As the video suggests, it’s an impending problem in many places in the world, US and UK included.

And the bitter truth is that all of us could have avoided this, if not for the insatiable greed of the 1%

If the wealth earned from economic growth was spread fairly, we could all be working half the hours we do now, with all the time for socialising and family we could want.

And the real irony is that when people have more free time, they will spend their time and money on the culturally enriching things that the government is otherwise being forced to try and subsidise and give grants to keep afloat. Visit historical sites. See a play, pick up a creative hobby, eat out at independent small restaurants.

But instead we are working longer and longer hours for less, leaving us with no time for anything, and that sends all our surplus money into the exact industries that are exploiting us. 11PM depression impulse buys from online megacorps, and food delivery through gig economy apps where the delivery person gets next to nothing and the app reaps the rewards.

People are stretched to breaking point. It’s inevitable that at some point, this is all going to collapse.

As a citizen of a former EU country (UK, of course) I think that too.

I’m still salty about Brexit.

It’s just not fun anymore.

It used to be kinda humorous in an irreverent way back in the 2000s when Google used April Fools to announce things like the Google Romance search engine, or a facility to archive all your Gmails on printed paper. It was tech making fun of itself.

But these days when the mask is fully off, and we recognise that big tech and social media has been one of the greatest problems the world has ever faced, we’re not laughing any longer.

“Temporarily closes” may have been a better headline.

I thought it meant they were shutting for good, which would be pretty ridiculous.

Oh no!

Anyway…

10 years isn’t the worst run, but it still proves the point that anything which needs an app or connected web service to function will inevitably become e-waste, and maybe sooner than you’d like.

Earlier today, I was looking at reviews of portable Bluetooth speakers. One had a bullet point “No equalizer app, with only basic EQ functions available on the speaker itself.”

The review intended that to be a negative, but I was like “Hell yeah that’s what I want!”

Functionality in pure hardware means it will keep on working as long as the hardware works. It means that I myself get to be the one who decides when I need an upgrade, not when the company forces my hand.

Every single tech purchasing decision I make these days, having freedom from apps, cloud, or any other ticking time bomb is top of my feature list.

Personally, I don’t feel that analogy is a fair comparison.

Begging a dev for new features for free would definitely be entitlement, because it’s demanding more, but what OP is upset about is reduction in the service they already had.

I don’t think any free tier user of any service could have any right to be upset if new features were added only for paying customers, but changing the free tier level is different.

In my opinion, even if you aren’t paying for it, the free tier is a service level like any other. People make decisions about whether or not to use a service based on if the free tier covers their needs or not. Companies will absolutely try to upsell you to a higher tier and that’s cool, that’s business after all, but they shouldn’t mess around with what they already offered you.

When companies offer a really great free tier but then suddenly reduce what is on it, then in my opinion that’s a baiting strategy. They used a compelling offering to intentionally draw in a huge userbase (from which they benefit) and build up the popularity and market share of the service, and then chopped it to force users - who at this point may be embedded and find it difficult to switch - to pay.

So yeah, it doesn’t matter in my opinion that the tier is free. It’s still a change in what you were promised after the fact, and that’s not cool regardless of whether there is money involved or not.

You have to suffer for your art, I suppose

For sure right!

What really changed though wasn’t the size of the computer, but how the computer produced value.

Initially, a lot of what people wanted computers for was to get their “document stuff” done, and that was what took up all the room, because of the printer, and scanner, and paper, and filing drawers, and so-on. And soooo many CDs for software you needed to get that all done.

Back when I was a kid, my babysitter used our Windows 95 machine to write up and print off a cover letter for job applications, and it was 9 year old me who taught her how to do it, lol. And that was the value.

I bet even when your friend set up their shiny new all-in-one, they still had the old computer and all its attached devices hiding away shamefully in the ‘office’ there somewhere…

So it wasn’t really miniaturisation that killed the computer room as much as it was every aspect of life going online. No physical disks anymore because software comes over the Internet. No need to print because 99% of our life and business can be done online. So all the things that filled up the computer room just ceased to be needed, and so did the room that held them.

There was a brief and remarkable period in history from the mid 90s to the late 2000s where homes all across the land had a room that was referred to as “The Computer Room”

Not “The Office” no; for this room was not so pedestrian. It was a room whose entire function was to house the great monolith of The Computer.

A corner desk in veneered pine-effect plywood, atop which sat the great beige tower and CRT. A printer and a scanner straddling the desk like sentinels. Racks of CD holders built right into the fake pine, and a lidded box for floppy disks in a smoky translucent plastic, that for some reason came with lock and key as if the disks were precious jewels.

These days we have no need for such things, and the home office is once again simply an office. But for a while we had The Computer Room, and some part of me misses you.

The purpose of the video is to test a hypothesis, not to total a car.

Mark Rober is a youtuber sure, and some of the stuff he does is to feed the algorithm. But he’s also an engineer, and that involves experimentation and a good dose of science.

Engineers won’t set up tests that intentionally destroy their expensive test equipment if they can conduct an equivalent test non-destructively.

The one I self-host shares nothing with nobody :)

Fair :)

As well as the pure cost saving there was also the notion that it was a futuristic look that would sell, and so boost profits that way, too.

And probably it did sell and market well - for a while.

I feel that consumers had become too trusting of carmakers - after all, cars have been getting better and better in terms of their usability for decades, so when carmakers went touchscreen everything, the first instinct of the average consumer would be to trust it and assume it represented an improvement.“They wouldn’t do it if it was worse, right?”

And so people buy the fancy futuristic car with no buttons, and only after driving it for a month does it sink in how much they truly hate it, and that they got sold a lie.

So there was always going to be that one generation of touchscreen-everything, before the people who got burnt by it are now the ones thinking “I won’t buy anything again that doesn’t have some buttons!”

This may in part be motivated by new guidance from NCAP, which will from next year require that all new cars have physical controls to earn the highest safety ratings.

https://www.evo.co.uk/car-technology/207666/buttons-could-replace-touch-controls-in-cars-thanks-to-new-euro-ncap-tests

Whatever the motivation though, I’m glad for it. Getting rid of buttons was always a dumb idea and I’m happy to see pushback.

My previous phone used to pocket-dial the emergency services annoyingly often, and it’s very not fun getting called back by the police to discuss why you’re dialling and hanging up on emergency services multiple times over.

This automatic emergency call is fine, but they really do need to minimise the number of false positives, which it looks like they’ve taken good steps towards.

I’m doing it slowly. Anything new I register with the new email, obviously. I moved over the most important things, and then everything else I switch at the point I come to use that site or service again.

I keep my gmail available in my browser on the laptop for this purpose, but have signed out from it on phone and removed the app from phone, so the friction encourages me to keep switching things over.

Ironic how the typo directly inverted the meaning.

will not adopt = will not use the new Firefox terms

will not adapt = will use the new Firefox terms exactly, without any rewording

I can’t make any recommendations, as having a desktop or alternative email client isn’t what concerns me - I just want a non-Google provider. I’m currently using Proton.