Look at the incentives of the people who made Bonzi Buddy and Comet Cursor. That kind of crud and malware will continue to exist as long as spying and advertising are the prevalent business model, which they still are. This isn't going away with a walled garden, in fact the device manufacturers welcome it with open arms.
So tell me what is the equivalent of Bonzi Buddy on the iOS App Store?
While there are occasional apps that aspire to such, the fact that basic OS functions are private APIs and are not distributable on the only widely available vector into devices prevent malware and many (but not all) privacy breaches.
They also face considerable risk for sticking around when an employer has expressed interest in underpaying and overworking them or just outright firing them. If you're hiring people at 50% of their desired pay, then you're generally only going to get 50% of their skill. This is a double-edged sword. Employees also have an inherent need to accomplish things, and if you're not using them to their full capacity, that's also a risk of them leaving, or being completely checked out at work.
It's difficult when you don't have a lot of free time to spend doing random mundane interview questions. It's doubly frustrating when this is because you're spending a lot of time doing work on free (libre) software and technical recruiters can easily see tons of your code and communication style openly on Github and whatnot, but for various reasons this isn't adequate for them.
The goal of a capitalistic government is still unfortunately to have a wholly predictable economy. There is competition, but only until a winner is declared, i.e. a monopoly is granted. After this the rents that the winner charges can be raised and lowered freely, but in a controlled manner, in order to manage where and when the value is actually generated.
This gets weird with software businesses as these companies tend to insulate from losses relatively well. This coupled with the fact that in some markets there is no way to generate additional value without a huge public investment happening upstream (utilities) is why a lot of VC goes so crazy for it. Keeping the cash flowing is the only way to avoid being taxed profusely – All you can do in some situations is raise rents and spend hastily, for better or for worse.
I do. There are all kinds of things wrong with requiring 20 years of study just to be able to have a chance to do a job properly. If done properly, we can reduce that time significantly.
I imagine most doctors would be just fine as doctors if they graduated from high school at age 16 and also skipped 1 year (maybe 2) of undergrad.
A great way to spend more money on education would be to target lowering high school graduation age to 17, with at least a year of training oriented education for students that weren't interested in an academic track and a faster academic track for students that did want it. The idea that everybody gets value out of Algebra II is pretty confused and at my Big 10 university, I often knew more history on days I hadn't done the reading than most of the people in my discussion class (that is, our "well prepared" high school students aren't coming out of high school well rounded anyway, lets drop the pretense).
I've noticed Facebook seems to be really good at spamming me with useless notifications, it even somehow manages to do it after I've unfriended 90% of the people that I am not close friends with and blocked most notification types. Yeah I could prune my friends list even further and only check it passively, but then all I'm stuck with is basically an incredibly bloated email/chat service that is loaded with ads. Then again this is the 21st century, a lot of other tech products seem to fit that exact description too. In any case, I'm a lot happier after deleting it.
Some time last year Facebook began giving me notifications within the application that... "Your friend uploaded a photo" or "your friend updated their status."
Maybe this is because I stopped using Facebook for so long, there weren't any real notifications to give me. They wanted it to seem like I'd missed something.
Biggest mistake I did with my Instagram account was to link it to my Facebook. I believe it is impossible to unlink them, even having disconnected all external application access as far as I could go in both.
Why? "Your friend Xxx is now on Instagram". Etc etc. I don't want to know, and I don't want my account visible to everyone there. Please just respect my wishes to make the integration go away!
I recently spent a week out of any mobile signal range and when I got back, I had email from FB (normally I don't get notifications by email, just in the app) for the most banal things like "Friend X has just uploaded a photo!". FB definitely enters panic mode if a regular user doesn't use it for a short while.
Yes, it does this when you stop using it, also it will spam you with "do you know person Foo?" messages. I guess is because they assume you stoped using it because your timeline was boring.
I don't use Facebook that much, but I definitely used to associate a notification with something important, like being tagged in a status / photo or invited to an event. Since a year or two ago for me as well, it's usually useless or sometimes a straight-up advertisement. If you admin a group, you'll even get the "boost this post" messages as notifications.
Can't you just disable notifications from the Facebook app? Android allows it, and I reckon iOS does too. I found this to be a nice solution to deal with obnoxious apps because you remove the annoyance but can still use them should the need arise.
I had the impression that it was a probing thing. Trying to figure out who in my friend list I'm interested in keeping up with. Annoying enough that I decided to uninstall the app.
This might be something to do with effect of not winning every time: it's studied method to get and keep us addicted. You will get a bigger dopamine hit when only some of notifications are "wins" like tagged photo etc. Slot machines are a great example of this along with other gambling.
I agree, and it would be nice to have those things done. Free software has a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem now where there is a lot of demand for certain things like you mention, but it's difficult to find funding to actually do them. I don't know what the way forward is, but it's something our community needs to be better about.
Open source and free software is thriving. Always have. Look around you. Look at what runs the internet you use. Look at the number of projects and the number of contributors.
A business friendly license (like BSD) usually results in exactly what Apple has done. Take whatever they want, close it off, and hardly contribute back upstream.
>The GPL licence just causes more pain and frustration to developers.
I don't think this is true. It's not particularly hard for developers to comply with it, especially those who are used to operating in an environment where most software is proprietary. This is the world where corporate licenses and contracts end up regularly end up into triple-digit page lengths. It's where the answer from management to the question "can we use this third party software?" usually defaults to no regardless of the license. So as long as there is this kind of restrictive proprietary licensing, I believe there will be a need for copyleft to counterbalance it. Sometimes there is a real risk of a rogue organization trying to take free (libre) code in order to crush the community with it.
The fact that there is so much software out there that uses non-copyleft free software licenses I think is testament to how many, many of our techniques and algorithms have become trivial and commonplace. This is good that friction is being removed in these cases, no matter what license the downstream developers are planning on using. It's the sign of a mature industry.
Don't be fooled by the showboating, behind every attempt at executing these aggressive strategies is a crumbling organization rife with disharmony and malcontent. They would not be focusing on what other companies were doing nearly this much if they did not feel threatened by it.
Yes, when your success relies on a monopoly or dominant position, your future is at stake if you don't use your dominant position to remove any competition that may chip at your domination.
This is exactly why monopoly are hurting everybody but the people profiting from it.
This will continue to be the norm in industries where the marketing cycles are so short and high-stakes. Firms get burned by picking the wrong contractors. Contractors get burned by spending a lot of time bidding on the wrong projects. These problems will continue to get worse as the stakes rise, as there will be even less time to make decisions properly. The project management debt they mention doesn't go away, it increases exponentially.
The article suggests industry shifts more towards project-based economies as they progress, but I think this is wrong. The examples of Hollywood and video gaming are both outliers, because both of these industries have put up huge resistance to lengthened product cycles. In part they perceive it as reducing competition. And it's true, but personally I am starting to wonder what all this competition is actually getting us. Prices for customers are dropping, however we seem to get a lot of sequels and recycled content in the name of cost-cutting, and then a lot of extraneous fighting over who gets to release what on what platform just to push royalty charges up. And what do we have to show for it? A lifetime of fickle and perpetually unhappy customers? Please make it stop.
The only solace that I have is that a lot of this is still driven by the hardware arms race. This won't end, but we will start to see more consolidation as the industry continues to mature.
a lot of this is still driven by the hardware arms race
Only a handful of AAA games are in the "HW arms race". By sheer numbers, the overwhelming vast majority of games sold are casual games downloaded on mobile devices.
The game industry is driven by people's short attention spans. It doesn't matter how fast you upgrade the technology, people get bored of playing the same game in the same way they get bored of watching the same movie even if you upgrade it to super-purple-ray-3D-smellivision. You already know the plot.
The industry is in a weird space these days. If you build for mobile the best bets are either focusing on a small handful of free-to-play micro transaction games or focusing on many bite-sized, $1.99 or ad-supported games. Those who build for consoles and are backed by a publisher go for big next-gen spectacle that takes teams of hundreds to develop, so when its time for the next project they are pushed to work on a few sequels that reuse assets and their engine over trying something new and different (which is ironically what probably gave them success in the first place). Franchises have been a thing for a long time, but the scope of them is now huge, to the point where some release something new every year to stay relevant. If you want to build something original its best to stick with a medium-sized team backed through Kickstarter, which has its own set of problems in terms of constantly needing to keep up with PR and paying out all of the promised rewards. I've always been interested in joining the industry because I love the medium for its potential, but I think I'll stick to hobby projects for the foreseeable future considering all of those options.
Kickstarter also has the issue of possibly not raising enough money to get the job done too. Shovel Knight, for instance, burned through all of their Kickstarter money and the team had to work without any income for five months to get the game out the door:
"We ended up operating for five months without money or payments to the team here," the post reads. "It was a difficult period, where some of us were awkwardly standing in front of cashiers having our credit cards declined, drawing from any possible savings, and borrowing money from our friends and family. But we made it to the other side!"
Would you work for anyone for five months with no paycheck? I couldn't afford to even if I wanted to.
Granted, Shovel Knight has seen huge success since its release, and I'm sure they made all of their lost wages and then some, but still, that project could have potentially died before it got released, and many more lower profile Kickstarted video games never get released.
You completely missed the whole AA and smaller market which has significantly grown due to wide availability of online stores - especially Steam. A lot of midsized publishers are building excellent games in that space.
I think contract work is common in these industries because most work is project based and often different in essence. A comedy and a thriller likely needs different creative talent. It's also very much based on personal networks, so a producer or director may bring with them a core of people.
