Ending the crappification cycle

[Beholder]

Most tech startups don't care about making a profit while using investors to unfairly push out competitors from the market at a loss. As soon as they stop growing, they cut staff and add fees (Twitter/X) or malware (Windows 10), sending all customers running. The crappification cycle only works together with vendor lock-in, so there is plenty of incompatible things. Due to lots of companies not understanding the dangers of vendor lock-in (all customer information controlled by Facebook), they have to spend lots of money transitioning from one walled in garden to the next. Would be nice if services provided could just continue to function for as long as needed, by being honest upfront about what it actually costs to run the whole thing.

Can there be some kind of limit on investments per profit margin, without loopholes or huring growth of companies with a sustainable bussiness model? A percentage of their growth would have to be financed using real profits once a growth criteria based on staff and users has been reached. Then they have to raise prices early to break even.

Is the solution to just ban vendor lock-ins that are not essential due to real hardware patents? They might just buy bad patents to justify the lock-in.

Should people just continue the crappification cycle but screw over the investors by getting their free shit before the party is over, letting late investors (such as Elon Musk) pay for all the destruction as it burns down?

Should open standards simply be the cultural norm like the web and e-mail? Have not worked so far, because people are still sending Microsoft Office documents to companies that might not use the same software as them. Students would have to be trained in spotting the red flags before getting trapped with garbage.
* Using a cloud without user benefits (SAAS only exist to steal data and lock you in)
* Advertised but free (will cost later)
* Walled in (so that they can raise the price)
* Agressive marketing (looking for market cuts using investors, not profit)
* Cult-like peer pressure (like a pyramid scam)
* Easy to step in but impossible to step out due to complexity (Nobody decides to use Jira, but after trying it, they are stuck and can't admit their mistake)

 

[MODAT7]

During my admin days, this is why I went with linux early on. (Having grown up around unix also helped.) I couldn't (and still can't) stand Micro$loth costs, bloatware, instabilities, and compatibility issues. Many companies still charge a stupid amount for a simple database like it was a brand new technology.

* Using a cloud without user benefits (SAAS only exist to steal data and lock you in)

And don't forget the monthly fees. The total cost of ownership for the end user goes up quite a bit with this model. If you don't need the software for months on end but will sometime later, keeping the account active is expensive.

* Advertised but free (will cost later)

The end user is the "product" in this model. Fakebook is the biggest end user data rape product created to date.

people are still sending Microsoft Office documents to companies that might not use the same software as them.

I get offended when someone sends me a Word doc. I remember when StarOffice came out, then moved to OpenOffice, and now LibreOffice. Page layout isn't exactly revolutionary technology anymore.

Can there be some kind of limit on investments per profit margin, without loopholes or huring growth of companies with a sustainable bussiness model? A percentage of their growth would have to be financed using real profits once a growth criteria based on staff and users has been reached. Then they have to raise prices early to break even.

There are some in the financial media calling out the crappy Initial Public Offerings (IPO's) at billions of dollars just to have them worth millions of dollars a year later. A lot of people (both retail and professionals) get screwed over by this. They get away with it because of hundreds of pages of legalese... but if their true assets and accounts were properly scrutinized, the government would already have the legal authority to put them in jail... but it NEVER happens. Government gets paid off under the table, and that should be prosecuted with a vengeance.

Following your limits comment, this is a slippery slope towards communism, and no matter what others say in its fake glory, that government model just doesn't work. You don't see revolutionary products coming out of Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, etc... Free markets and people getting rewarded for their own risks and efforts is what moves society forward. Also consider that Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. don't have much of an illegal immigration problem. Nobody wants to go where government control and manipulation of the population is taken to an extreme.

China tries to come out with new products, but they usually end up stealing from others and producing e-waste that quickly finds its way into a landfill. I'm really tired of nearly everything being made in china. Being a communist dictator, Emperor Xi is close to the point of holding that over everyone's heads for political manipulation when he takes back Taiwan.

Is the solution to just ban vendor lock-ins that are not essential due to real hardware patents? They might just buy bad patents to justify the lock-in.

There really needs to be some kind of patent reform. If you've ever skimmed the patent database, there's a lot of stupid crap in there... but that's the government and lawyers for ya. I'm wondering how much patent trolls pay off politicians under the table. Licensing on older products don't need to keep those product costs high just to enrich a few and piss off the rest of the consumers. I'm all for the original creators to reap the rewards of their efforts for new technologies and developments, but when the patent trolls get involved, it's time to expire the older patents.

As it is slowly becoming cheaper for newer hardware like massively integrated computer chips to be developed, lock-ins to various physical technologies are becoming more difficult. Right now most chips are still developed in VHDL or Verilog, which is about the same as trying to write software in assembler. I discovered SystemC a couple years ago and have been curious to try it on some FPGA's, but my health has been holding be back big time. SystemC has been around a long time, and if it could be optimized a little more, that would greatly decrease chip development time.

Open source software, as mentioned, has already broken some holds on some types of lock-ins. Some of the old industrial manufacturing hardware that got entrenched and abandoned has been ported/emulated on open source. The stuff with expired patents and abandoned copyrights has been given new life. The market is small for this kind of stuff, but the costs are high because of customization. Many of the original ideas and breakthroughs for this stuff are still valid but just need a modernizing update to current technology.

For the overly nerdy among us, have a look into the RISC-V (pronounced "risk 5") project. There have been open source processors before, but this one has really been catching on. In the next 15-25 years, this (or its currently unknown successor) will pose a significant risk to Intel and AMD. Open source graphics cores will eventually pose a risk to Nvidia.

 

[Beholder]

During my admin days, this is why I went with linux early on. (Having grown up around unix also helped.) I couldn't (and still can't) stand Micro$loth costs, bloatware, instabilities, and compatibility issues. Many companies still charge a stupid amount for a simple database like it was a brand new technology.


And don't forget the monthly fees. The total cost of ownership for the end user goes up quite a bit with this model. If you don't need the software for months on end but will sometime later, keeping the account active is expensive.


The end user is the "product" in this model. Fakebook is the biggest end user data rape product created to date.


I get offended when someone sends me a Word doc. I remember when StarOffice came out, then moved to OpenOffice, and now LibreOffice. Page layout isn't exactly revolutionary technology anymore.


There are some in the financial media calling out the crappy Initial Public Offerings (IPO's) at billions of dollars just to have them worth millions of dollars a year later. A lot of people (both retail and professionals) get screwed over by this. They get away with it because of hundreds of pages of legalese... but if their true assets and accounts were properly scrutinized, the government would already have the legal authority to put them in jail... but it NEVER happens. Government gets paid off under the table, and that should be prosecuted with a vengeance.

Following your limits comment, this is a slippery slope towards communism, and no matter what others say in its fake glory, that government model just doesn't work. You don't see revolutionary products coming out of Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, etc... Free markets and people getting rewarded for their own risks and efforts is what moves society forward. Also consider that Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. don't have much of an illegal immigration problem. Nobody wants to go where government control and manipulation of the population is taken to an extreme.

China tries to come out with new products, but they usually end up stealing from others and producing e-waste that quickly finds its way into a landfill. I'm really tired of nearly everything being made in china. Being a communist dictator, Emperor Xi is close to the point of holding that over everyone's heads for political manipulation when he takes back Taiwan.


There really needs to be some kind of patent reform. If you've ever skimmed the patent database, there's a lot of stupid crap in there... but that's the government and lawyers for ya. I'm wondering how much patent trolls pay off politicians under the table. Licensing on older products don't need to keep those product costs high just to enrich a few and piss off the rest of the consumers. I'm all for the original creators to reap the rewards of their efforts for new technologies and developments, but when the patent trolls get involved, it's time to expire the older patents.

As it is slowly becoming cheaper for newer hardware like massively integrated computer chips to be developed, lock-ins to various physical technologies are becoming more difficult. Right now most chips are still developed in VHDL or Verilog, which is about the same as trying to write software in assembler. I discovered SystemC a couple years ago and have been curious to try it on some FPGA's, but my health has been holding be back big time. SystemC has been around a long time, and if it could be optimized a little more, that would greatly decrease chip development time.

Open source software, as mentioned, has already broken some holds on some types of lock-ins. Some of the old industrial manufacturing hardware that got entrenched and abandoned has been ported/emulated on open source. The stuff with expired patents and abandoned copyrights has been given new life. The market is small for this kind of stuff, but the costs are high because of customization. Many of the original ideas and breakthroughs for this stuff are still valid but just need a modernizing update to current technology.

For the overly nerdy among us, have a look into the RISC-V (pronounced "risk 5") project. There have been open source processors before, but this one has really been catching on. In the next 15-25 years, this (or its currently unknown successor) will pose a significant risk to Intel and AMD. Open source graphics cores will eventually pose a risk to Nvidia.

Verilog is more like placing logic chips by hand, because unlike VHDL, it does not allow procedural if statements around wire assignments, due to wires being shared between processes. Have to write functional conditions on all wires or inline all wires into nested expressions assigning directly to the pipeline stage's final registers.

 

[steven chiverton]

that word crapification cycle the first thing that jumped out at me was recycling human waste ?

 

[Beholder]

that word crapification cycle the first thing that jumped out at me was recycling human waste ?

Every time you like a post, you recycle someone's brainfart, saving server capacity on the internet.