I suppose it's similar to how people used to buy things like Directory Opus. The point isn't so much that the default one doesn't work. A bunch of functions like those listed here, e.g. batch rename and easy image conversion, would be a great help to power users, and should be better than having to install a separate program for each one.
I doubt it's aimed at everybody, but it shouldn't need to be. Software tailored to a specific group's needs is likely to be better for them than something too generic.
This article seems to be worse than most, as if someone's deliberately overused the LLM tropes as much as possible. This is not good. It's bad. This is not human. It's AI. This is not nice to read. It's awful.
This is betraying a way of thinking that suggests what's normal now is the way it's always been.
Given "there was a time that subscriptions for software were virtually unheard of", it's safe to assume we're talking about more than a couple of years ago. To talk as if most users always used to upgrade, suggests you might be young enough not to remember the software industry before a decade or two ago.
In general, users very much didn't upgrade. That's exactly why the industry forced subscriptions on us. They weren't getting income anymore, when the older version of their software did the job perfectly well.
Indeed, unreadable typography (and the need for Reader View) is one of my most common annoyances with sites posted to HN - but I don't see how it's applicable to this site in any way?
"Beyond bizarre"? Why? "3:59pm" (and 7:30pm, regarding the post above) is exactly what's usually written in the UK. Technical use (24-hour) is different from the standard use used by the general population.
It probably does a better job of getting the point across to a general readership than if they'd used overly technical domain-specific jargon about quantity of cases and speed of its spread.
> social engineering was a small part of his work, and it's OK that you don't know that... totally blatant ignorance... Kev was a good person. Full stop.
I understand you're defending your friend, but that's a little uncalled for. Personally, my first real knowledge of him was from his 2002 book The Art Of Deception, which is specifically a book about social engineering. That is how he himself chose to present himself - as a successful social engineer - so you can't criticise others for that.
There's good and bad in all of us. I don't think the person you responded to said Kevin was all bad, and made it clear it isn't hate.
Indeed, no relevance at all. Sorry rob74, that's a misunderstanding of how large applications most often tended to work on the Amiga. They didn't generally open a window on the Workbench screen, they opened their own screen. The keyboard shortcut <Amiga key>-<M> cycled between them. A word processor's screen could then have 16+ colours.
I opened this comments page wondering if anyone would point this out. The idea that all sales have moved to online is always trotted out as the main excuse, but the reality is that most of the big well-known UK retail failures were caused by private equity, asset-stripping and loading them up with debt until the interest payments are too high to be payable.
True, but "Amiga made lots of assumptions about the use that ended up..." seemed an odd way to phrase it, given that it was originally designed as a games machine, although the plans were expanded later in development.
As I understand it, its custom chips were a brilliantly clever solution to a problem that existed at the time. It couldn't be called a mistake, because they couldn't see into the future. As a games machine, the Amiga ended up hamstrung by those same custom chips because they weren't the right architecture for Doom and all the 3D games that followed it. That made no difference to its productivity software though, did it?
The release of Windows 95 was weird. There were PC users talking about how amazing Microsoft were, to have come up with all the things their marketing people were shouting about, such as pre-emptive multitasking and plug-and-play. Then all the Amiga (and Mac) users, completely underwhelmed, pointing out "we've had all these things for years, how has it taken so long?".
Yeah that was a big part of it, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it more important than preventing immediate bankruptcy.
"We'll give you a wodge of cash and we'll keep supplying Office for Mac, so you can continue to supply the market with a rival to our OS at a volume that's insignificant to us, but just significant enough to prevent Windows from falling under the DoJ's definition of a monopoly".
"Wut" indeed! I was only skimming it anyway, but stopped there. I'm sorry, that paragraph is so effed up, I can't take anything else seriously from this author.
This is too often the problem with stuff about Steve Jobs. People worship him, and credit him with inventing everything. So, even ignoring how thoroughly mangled that quoted section is in every way, now he's the inventor of OOP. Did he also invent a time machine to take OOP back to the 1960s?
> Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away... They just...
This is historical revisionism, and there's a lot of it around, where Apple is concerned. Since those days, Apple has done a great job of controlling the narrative in the media, and has managed to bury a great deal of what was written back then.
Microsoft was in the middle of one of their antitrust investigations, where they were accused of monopolising the market for computers. They had demonstrated others in the courtroom, running non-Microsoft OSes and office suites, including an Amiga and a Mac. But Commodore had already gone bust, so there was only Apple left.
Then came the news that the previous post was referring to - Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy. By all accounts of the time, Microsoft absolutely shat themselves, expecting the biggest fine in antitrust history. They could not allow Apple to fail, so investing was their only option. Nowadays, even that investment is sometimes framed as yet another amazing feat that could only be carried out by the deity that is Steve Jobs. Jobs even had to drop their still-ongoing OS look-and-feel lawsuits against Microsoft as part of the deal.
It can be very interesting to read opinions in such places as "Letters to the Editor" in newspapers from the 1800s. The conviction that "things were so much better in the past" and "everything's gone to shit" (in the face of clear evidence to the contrary) is, and always has been, an integral part of the human condition.
I suppose it's similar to how people used to buy things like Directory Opus. The point isn't so much that the default one doesn't work. A bunch of functions like those listed here, e.g. batch rename and easy image conversion, would be a great help to power users, and should be better than having to install a separate program for each one.
I doubt it's aimed at everybody, but it shouldn't need to be. Software tailored to a specific group's needs is likely to be better for them than something too generic.