THE way to build a UI that worked and looked consistently across platforms at the time as well. It was a great time! Even now it still takes some work to achieve the same!
Same. But I switched because I felt that Adobe got very abusive with customers that paid for a $2,000 and had the misfortune of having a serial number tied up in a crashed machine that wasn't deactivated. The interrogations and scoldings were ridiculous. The lack of an online deactivation instead of having to call every time was annoying as hell too. For a company like that, the subscription model was a "no deal" because then they'd have zero incentive to improve. I don't miss Adobe at all.
Funny. I've basically done the same with UltraEdit. Although, when it comes to certain languages, I prefer to use the dedicated IDE. Especially if the GUI is involved. For .net, it's straight up Visual Studio. For Java, OpenBeans. And so on. I think VS Code will serve the same niche as the text editor + compiler crowd. IDEs are way too comfy to resist.
These services can't be trusted anymore as a single point of failure. Distributed torrent like systems need to replace them. Trusting any of these companies as the stewards of content is foolish at this point.
It's about time now to declare the "social media" experiment dead. We're basically learning that there is value in excluding. The all inclusive buffet only brings you down to a neutered lowest common denominator. You're not really going to get any real thought or discussion when you're conversation is monitored by outside moderators. It was doomed to fail anyway.
I'm convinced that implementing so-called "free speech" sites in public doesn't work. Real free speech happens in closed networks, invite only. The only downside is those take more time to grow.
Also, I think begging politicians to see it any other way is a waste of time. Widespread disobedience and resistance is the only way to knock it down. Make it cost a lot to enforce.
When Phil Zimmerman created PGP one of his stated use cases was protection of speech in totalitarian regimes. Well... looks like we're approaching that use case. Encryption is permissionless by design.
After listening to the conference it just boils down to whether these social media companies are public forums protected from liability or publishers. Once they made the move to edit content, they became publishers. It's actually pretty clear. All that is happening is that they're losing their public forum status, rightfully so.
The idea that this won't be abused is nuts after seeing what's already been done by the likes of Facebook, Zoom, Microsoft and others. Privacy is privacy. No one has the right to take that away.
What is it about weak encryption that has these politicians convinced that using it won't lead to higher incidents of hacking and identity theft? We're already dealing with one blow to our economy, should we bracing for a second?
If you think identity theft is bad now, wait until this gets passed! Not to mention embezzlement, corporate espionage, etc. They'll need to set up a recovery fund in addition.
I hear people junk talk the iPad all the time but I love mine. I rarely open a computer at home because of the iPad. A lot of times I don't even turn on my TV and just use it as my mini TV. It's basically a laptop in a truer sense of the word IMHO.