romanoderoma

UX can be paternalistic as well

It can also be very bad or the very opposite of what Apple does and also be the best around and still let people free to explore all the options available.

There is nothing specific in what Apple does that can be reduced to simply UX.

Maybe ergonomics is more correct to define what Apple tries to do with their human interfaces, but the Apple store or the locked down platform have nothing to do with either UX or ergonomics.

What Apple does is to remove electric plugs from the walls because someone could put a fork inside them and experience an electric shock.

And I am not the one saying it, I was answering to "Apple removed trojan and viruses to help people who don't know better".

That's paternalism.

Not really

It was 6 centuries ago, when it was first invented, it has a much broader meaning now.

Anyway Apple is State and Government in Apple ecosystem

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paternalism/#Intr

> The civil law does not allow the enforcement of certain kinds of contracts, e.g., for gambling debts. It requires minors to have blood transfusions even if their religious beliefs forbid it. Persons may be civilly committed if they are a danger to themselves.

Doctors do not tell their patients the truth about their medical condition. A physician may tell the wife of a man whose car went off a bridge into the water and drowned that he died instantly when in fact he died a rather ghastly death.

A husband may hide the sleeping pills from a depressed wife. A philosophy department may require a student to take logic courses.

A teacher may be less than honest about telling a student that he has little philosophical ability.

All of these rules, policies, and actions may be done for various reasons; may be justified by various considerations. When they are justified solely on the grounds that the person affected would be better off, or would be less harmed, as a result of the rule, policy, etc., and the person in question would prefer not to be treated this way, we have an instance of paternalism.

As the examples indicate the question of paternalism is one that arises in many different areas of our personal and public life

What if you're both right?

They're just jealous but Apple really is bad?

> Rather it is about making sure it is easy for regular users to get Apps in a safe manner without malware and Trojan horses.

I don't intend to sound dismissive, but this line of thinking has a name

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternalism

If we talk about their importance and longevity, Pascal deserves a spot

It ran in many places in the 70s and was quite popular at the time of Turbo Pascal.

TP compiler was created by Anders Hejlsberg, that later became chief architect of Delphi, that convinced Microsoft to hire him to work as chief architect on C# and now he's a core developer on Typescript.

As I've said "if you sit at a restaurant add a couple of euros" on average it's around 7-8 euros

We were talking retail prices though.

Also, we don't pay mandatory tips at the restaurant

Pizza size is a function of cooking then uniformly, large pizzas are considered a bit tacky here (not judging anybody, just trying to explain why pizza in Italy is smaller, it's actually a feature)

Size does not matter

You will find a great variety of pizza sizes, from the giants to the tiny, I for example prefer smaller pizzas, I don't like feeling bloated after eating a big one, but the price is always the same (more or less, you can pay 15 euros for a pizza in Italy, but it's not the norm )

If you refer to the fact that pizza is usually shared in US, we have a different kind of pizza for that, it's called pizza al taglio (sliced pizza, but it's not really the same thing) and you can have an entire pan for 12-18 euros, but at least 4-5 people can feed on it and you can have different toppings

I can get a whole "not too bad for Italian standards" marinara for 3.5 euros and a very good margherita for 5-6.

For traditional toppings like mushrooms, pepperoni, sausages or anchovies add something between 0.5 and 1.5 euros.

That's for a take out or a delivery (it might sound strange but pizza being delivered costs a little bit less per sé, because it's considered of a lower quality, pizza should be eaten fresh from the oven, but add the delivery fee and the prices are more or less the same)

If you sit at a restaurant, it's usually a couple euros more.

And I'm talking about the prices I actually pay in Rome, in the city centre, I live at 5 minutes walking distance from the Colosseum.

> AirBNB is helping city dwellers escape their tiny apartments

In my experience, both personal and relative to my country, kicking out AirBNB from cities has helped people escaping from their tiny apartments because a lot more apartments have returned back on the regular mid/long term rental market.

It's crazy how much pizza costs in USA

In Italy pizza costs a third of that

Very good points

On the other hand, I am a programmer and receive a lot of ads about basic programming courses or even something slightly tech related (build your own startup, how to improve your UI/UX skills etc.) that target me for what they think I do, but not for what I am really interested in.

I think good advertising shows people something that they don't already know a lot about to get them interested, knitters probably already have their channels to research about the tools they use.

Content creation is an elite

Only a few make a living out of it

And there's a limit on the amount of tik tok like videos that will get attention, once everybody will start making them

Interesting points.

I think that social networks are not public utilities, but they need to respond to the laws of the countries they operate.

For example: IMO it's not up to YouTube to decide automatically if something is a copyright infringement but rather the copyright holder should file a legal complain and the jurisdictional system should have the final word.

Social networks on the other hand should be liable if the only way to contact them is some private ticket system that do not engage a public investigation.

For example: a comment has been deleted because it's been signaled. The author should have a way to appeal through an independent state run office that will take the final decision.

Maybe it would not make things faster or better, but since public offices duty is to serve the public, it's their natural role to respond and resolve disputes, if we let private companies decide on what's right and what's not, we lose control of the public speech, what we achieved building up democracies.

There are a lot of ways in which this setup could be abused by tyrants and dictatorships, but it's already happening and letting SN do all the work it's not gonna fix it.

I had complicated experiences with Linux in the past, but I was young and the problem solver in me loved it.

But, honestly, at lest in the past 5 years, I had no problems especially if we consider laptops that usually have more or less the same standard hardware.

4 years ago I bought an Xiaomi 13' laptop to use it as a browsing machine and occasionally as a media player.

It came with a Chinese windows preinstalled.

Without even looking at the specs I installed Ubuntu on it and I've never had a problem.

I upgraded it from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 to 20.04 and I'm using it right now to watch the 4th season of Fargo

I never had to tweak the configuration or change a single .conf file, it simply worked

The battery lasts 8 hours and if I close the lid it automatically goes on suspend

It's been the best setup I ever had.

Unfortunately it's too underpowered to use it as a working device, but if I could I would be the happiest man in the World.

Same here.

Plasma is great and it feels lightweight compared to Gnome

I've been using Linux on and off since 1996, but I settled on it for the past 10 years and the most traumatic thing I had to do since has been changing gear.

And even then, moving your entire setup from a machine to another have never been easier, when you know how to do it.

Corporate OSs are more polished, that's undeniable, Apple especially provides the best out of the box experience, but it's nothing comprared to the flexibility I can experience using Linux.

I can have a beefed up work laptop with Plasma and all the effects enabled and the same exact setup on the cheap low end laptop with XFCE.

Everything, really, just works.

And when it doesn't, I can somehow make it work.

There have been times I spent days trying to make the Nvidia card work, but it was because I was looking for the perfect setup that I usually don't experience on Windows or MacOS, but there's nothing I can do about it, no matter how much time I spend trying to fix it.

It's simply out of reach.

I'm aware that that's not what the average user is willing to go through, and that's perfectly fine, I don't feel better than them because I use a more complicated system, but I cannot go back to being limited in what I can do because I am not allowed to.

Also, modern distros are really really stable out of the box.

The laptop I use as a replacement for media server is an Ubuntu 20, it was an Ubuntu 18 and 16 before, I simply upgraded it to the new version and it worked, every time better than before.

If there's something I've learned in the past 25 years is that freedom do comes at a cost, but as of today, that cost is actually negligible.

P.s. forgot to mention that I do not have to care anymore about bloatware, automatic updates, things calling home, software you rely on going out of business and, most of all, lack of support or documentation

benchmarked against Core i5-7267U released 3th of January 2017, 4 years ago.

Maybe you could try to send and email to Jeff Minter before giving up

Honestly in Europe we have the same quota system for milk.

Quality here is not a function of the market being more free.

It's a function of a better food production chain

Instead of competing on prices many food products in Europe compete on quality and locality (small areas that produce some unique product of extremely high and renowned quality: Champagne in France, Parmigiano Reggiano in Italy, jamon serrano in Spain, etc. etc.)

This was published in 1972 in Italy

The title translated in English reads as

"SOCIALIZATION OF THE COSTS OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE LARGE INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISE"

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41630721?seq=1

"Socializing costs" is a widely used idiom, at least in my language, it might be true that America is miseducated to the meaning of socialism, but subsidizing the production of goods and services it's a form of socializing the costs in a non socialistic way (in which the state produces those goods and services)

Social is used in this case to intend the society, public money, people taxes.

> Imagine xbox was called "Windows Gaming".

isn't Windows gaming the richest market for games since a proper market for games exists?

> In fact, Photoshop 6 was still compiled for PowerPC CPUs

It's the license that counts.

> Maybe you think it's unreasonable for Apple to not support a program made for an operating system

No, I don't think that.

Apple doesn't have good backward compatibility, especially compared to Windows.

That is my point.

But of course they are free to not support what they think it's not worth it.

It's not a something against Apple.

> the "Photoshop 6 is literally two decades old" is the issue

True, but why is it a problem?

Does the software need to be new to work?

I think that if something still works after 20 years the authors did a great job.

We need to start thinking of software like infrastructure.

We don't rebuild a bridge after 6 months because a new material or technique has been invented.

Or at least as tools, considering them something that lasts, potentially forever.

Most of the problem we'll be facing in the future will be about digital rot, we'll deal with data that we cannot read in any way.

Apple, Adobe, and their idea of disposable working tools are helping it, nor prevent it.

Of course one cannot support everything forever, Windows lost the ability to run DOS binaries years ago and virtualization can help, the problem is companies like Adobe not selling their licenses anymore.

Recently I had to work on a SOAP client after almost 15 years from the last one.

I remembered there was a good XML editor at the time, that did a good job.

One caveat is that it is Windows only and I run Linux, so I checked on WineHQ and found out that the version 2003 works perfectly.

I go to the software's web site, there is a "download older versions" button, I think "great!" and proceed to the download.

The software installs perfectly on Wine but when I launch it there is no option to start it in trial mode, you have to either use a pre-existing license or ask for a trial one.

I clicked the second and soon after an email warns me that that product is not supported anymore and even if I had a regular license, the servers that check the licenses are not online anymore.

So why put a download button there then?

These are the kind of things that software should avoid at any cost, in my opinion.

They've lost a customer, I would have bought an old license at the price of a new one if I could chck that everything that I needed to do worked as intended, instead I downloaded SopaUI which is inferior, but free and functioning.

In this case, the solution could have been virtualization, but you have to pay for a Windows license as well, which was not necessary in the first place.

In the case of macOS virtualization is not even an option, because you can't legally run it on a VM outside of Apple HW.

For some people, that is a big problem, not because they think Apple is bad, but because they don't care who supplies the infrastructure as long as it works.

There are people installing XP on new HW to keep using their old software.

It is doable, but on macOS you can't count on it, every time they change architecture something gets lost forever.

As I said before, nobody value backward compatibility until they need it.

And when you need it and it works it's much more satisfying than when you need it and you are asked to upgrade or be on your own.

you are not wrong, but Photoshop 5, released in 1998, works on Windows 10 because Microsoft made it possible

CS6 works officially from XP SP3 (2008) to the end of Windows 8 (2015)

It works unofficially on XP pre SP3 (2001) and on windows 10, almost 20 years later and it's guaranteed to work on the LTSC for another 8 years (last LTSC is from 2018)

CS6 on Mac is supported on systems that span from 2011 (OS X 10.6.8) to 2014 (when Yosemite came out)

On May 2020 Adobe updated the release notes on CS6 saying that "If you are running Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 3, Photoshop will run in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. However, Adobe does not officially support the 64-bit edition and you may run into problems."

So they are still supporting it on Windows XP on their official channels.

Most of the problems with old applications in Windows come from installers using ancient techniques to detect the OS version

Most of recent Adobe software theoretically could also run on older windows versions (8 or 7 for example), but are not supporting old platforms anymore with the new subscription versions and recebtly dropped support for the LTSC versions of Windows 10, so probably keeping the old versions around is a smart move if they work well enough for you

People who bought licenses for old versions should be in their right to use them as long as they can

Which simply is for longer on Windows than on MacOS

I got it from Adobe Web site

> Mac OS X v10.6.8 or v10.7. Adobe Creative Suite 3, 4, 5, CS5.5, and CS6 applications support Mac OS X v10.8 or v10.9 when installed on Intel-based system

They work, maybe, they are not supported though

It means that if it doesn't work, Adobe won't provide any support

The hardware, which is not the main tool in his craft

He draws by hand on paper and the final preparation on Photoshop is for printing

After almost 10 years he needed a new laptop (things wear out with time and he could not install more RAM) but not a new Photoshop version with a different and more costly license

The need to upgrade software is an artificial one and it's only needed because some platforms don't have a good backwards compatibility

Windows does

For many people the OS doesn't make any difference, as long as they can keep using the tools they already know

There is a limit on the improvements a new software will provide if your workflow is already good as it is and you already paid for the version that works for you

I know many small businesses that still use Office 2003

They can install it on new hardware on new Windows versions, it's simply not possible to do the same on Mac

It's not better or worse, backwards compatibility it's a feature and as any other feature some people value it a lot, some don't care at all

Photoshop 6, not CS6

I'm talking about Photoshop 6

That's why I said "MacOS Sierra can't even run CS6"

Technically in Italy if you bought a license and the manufacturer won't support it anymore, you can use it on another platform even downloading an illegal copy.

As long as you have the original license.

That's the same reason why you can listen to mp3s if you own the original record, you have the right to keep a copy and the right to use it even if the manufacturer stop supporting it, because you bought it in perpetuity when you bought the product

That's why I stay away from the new licenses that give you none of those rights

And that's why backwards compatibility sometimes is what drives people choices

Well, it depends

The Renault Zoe EV and Tesla Model 3 have the same price.

The Renault Zoe is very low end compared to a Tesla, what make them cost the same?

An EV includes technology that is very costly and even a middle end car ends up costing like a base offer in a higher segment (because the Zoe EV is the premium offer in their segment)

You can't get any lower than that

A Zoe with an ICE engine costs in fact 10k less.

The same exact car.

There is no equivalent for Tesla, Tesla does not make cars in that segment and even if they could, they won't do it.

Said in other words: a low end Mac costs and has specs of a high end machine

Highly castrated from the manufacturer (only 16GB of RAM tops?) but definitely not low end, not even for Apple

It's their base offer for the high end segment

Which is very different from saying it's a low end machine.

Their aren't low end, they are simply not premium (there isn't going to be a big difference in performances between the two, only a different positioning, equipment and less artificial limitations from the manufacturer)

They are like AMD K6 CPUs that you could overclock using a pencil

The conclusions of this review support the idea that the specs of the Mac mini are not far from what we could expect from the pro models

> In the new Macbook Pro, we expect the M1 to showcase similar, if not identical performance to what we’ve seen on the new Mac mini

Just as testimony, it probably doesn't mean much, but bakcwards compatibility you either have it or you don't, there's no middle ground

Apple is one of the most capitalistic companies out there, they want you to buy new stuff and they'll try everything they can to force users to upgrade sooner or later

The story is this: a friend of mine is a well respected illustrator and he has been a long time Mac user (at least since I remember)

Few days ago he asked me advices about a new laptop and he asked for a PC because "new Mac OS will not work with my Photoshop version"

He owns a license for Photoshop 6, payed for it and has no need to uograde, especially to the new subscription based licensing

MacOS Sierra doesn't even work with Photoshop CS6

The only option he had to keep using something he owned was to switch platform (Adobe allows platform change upon request)

End of story.

Backwards compatibility has no value until you need it.

Just like an ambulance or a pacemaker.