jarek
Not to mention people in London usually complain about the wealthy Russians and Saudis these days
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. One might inquire what the First Nations think about white man's towers of glass and Vancouver Specials in what used to be beautiful temperate rainforest...
(Disclaimer: I usually don't)
Oh, of course it does. Consider: when are you more in control, when you know the city you're in inside-out, or when you're depending on Google Maps?
Don't worry. If how the English treated First Nations is any guide, you'll get a reservation at the end of the day.
(Really brief history for those from outside the region: ethnic-Europeans have been ruling British Columbia for less than two hundred years.)
Orrrr the current team members can be proactive and do something that will reduce the number of bad bug reports they get.
Without Github Issues you might miss out on useful input such as https://github.com/kennethreitz/records/issues/10 though.
But saying "surely someone can just volunteer" is pointless in the absence of evidence that someone actually wants to volunteer. If anything the evidence points to not enough volunteer triage PMs - the OSS world is not short on projects that could use a triager.
That sounds simple. You're volunteering, then?
Great, so now they've all resigned and we're back to the start with no idea how to solve traffic congestion in a city with a bridge.
Best ask StackOverflow.
> Trying to access the documents ... they are not public domain, open licensed, nor indexed.
You have a long day ahead of you if you want to rant about non-open licensed academic papers
As well, in any profession with large public impact, there is a gap between what the professionals know and what the public accepts. A planner can tell you how to solve traffic congestion in a city with a bridge, but it might not be so simple for a politician to convince people to pay millions, or worse, alter their lifestyle to make it happen.
To give an example: do you think economists and policy professionals don't have a lot of ideas to simplify and improve the tax code? Then why aren't they implemented? Because lobbying and special interests, because talk radio, because social equality, because families, because people think of themselves as impoverished millionaires, because messy real-life stuff.
(At least person-to-person messaging works well - I have not attempted group chats or video or stuff)
But your argument can be advanced against electric light. I could do just fine with candles in my house. But in 2016 I'm not going to go back to candles, even if electricity isn't really saving me that much time or money.
Imagine in 2050 never having to turn on the lights again because they will turn on automatically and that will work well. Never deal with carrying things and reaching over with your elbow. It won't add more than $200 of value to your life, but will you actively opt out of it?
It's not that "IoT" will make your life vastly more efficient and save you tons of money. It's that when it's easy enough and good enough, it will become the new normal as mains electricity is now. Currently it's a buggy gadget, but so was every technology once.
A selling idea of the Nest is that it keeps your house warm when you're there, and not-frozen when you're not, and it will do so efficiently, so that the house is warm when you arrive home but not long before.
Now of course you can just turn up the heating as you walk in the door wait a few minutes to heat up, it won't hurt. But if technology can do it reliably, there's clearly some value. Compare, for instance, lighting a candle when you get home with just flicking the switch for those newfangled electric lights. The candle works but the technology is more convenient.
Of course, electricity doesn't give you failwhales these days, and there's a bit more engineering involved than "move fast and break things."
In practice, yes, most things we buy are designed to fail. But in principle 30 years is possible, if anyone is willing to pay for it. Lots of people aren't, for many reasons including time cost of money, fashion, or just not caring.
> Most software has to be replaced after at most 10-15 years, either because of security issues or just because it's no longer supported by hardware.
Yes, so there's the answer for why the software upgrade treadmill exists: it's for software not important enough to run on dedicated separated hardware. Few people are upgrading CNC controllers or power plant controllers or aeroplane controllers because of security issues or because the hardware is no longer available.
Anyway, even on the consumer side the lifespans are rapidly lengthening. In the 1990s running current software on five-year-old computers or using a five-year-old OS would have been basically unheard of in the mainstream. Today a five-year-old computer is only a step behind current and Windows 7 has turned 6 years old and is still extremely widely used.
The "rot" is because the environment is changing (the hardware you're running it on, other software you need to interact with) or the software is being carelessly updated.
If you need to, software rot can be eliminated. It takes effort but it can be done.
To give an example: you can run a space station with software installed in the 1980s, but you probably can't run a space station with seals or pumps installed in the 1980s.
For the software creator, once you've sold someone your software, the only way to make more money is to sell it to someone else, or create and sell a new version. Eventually you run out of someone-elses to sell to and can make new versions or go out of business.
... or sell a support contract or a subscription model.
I don't like it from a user's point of view, but squaring my preferences as a user with preferences of business isn't easy.
Sure but you can give examples of that for just about every country. The Britons will laugh at U.S.'s card payment infrastructure. The Koreans will laugh at metropolitan U.S.'s mobile broadband infrastructure.
I'm sorry, but what? Your whole initial argument is a narrow hypothetical "they will see our secrets" with no theory of what those secrets might actually be - what exactly do you expect in return? I gave you an answer based on your formula, and a follow-up comment afterward. Can you expand what about my answer was built on optimistic assumptions, in a way that your initial theory was not?
There are no private APIs nor secret data structures in software that you've distributed to users. It can all be decompiled and sniffed. "Oh but the competitors will see my code" is basically FUD. How many times has YC told us it's all about the execution, not the technology?
Yes - if you make a HTTP call from an app, it can be trivially sniffed. Sniffing HTTP is the first thing a third party trying to discover that undocumented API would do, and you don't need source code for that at all. (This is also why you must always sanitize data coming in from a user's device, even if it's from your own app.)
You can make the argument that there would be a time cost cleaning up the internal calls that will no longer work once the servers are turned off. Sure, but: 1) there are no secrets that would give competitors a new advantage, and 2) if you don't have that time, just chuck the code over the fence and see what happens - worst is that no one uses it, which will be the case with closed code anyway.
It's an email app. It talks IMAP^H^H^H^Hto Gmail. It runs on iOS. How many secret, commercially important techniques do you really suppose it contains?