> upset people who decided to pay for it for the first time in their life
It also upset paying customers. It's no longer possible to _own_ Adobe software, and so I don't anymore. Up until just a couple years ago I was still using the copy of Photoshop CS4 I paid for (as part of the Master Collection CS4, Student Edition) in 2008.
A monthly subscription is a complete non-starter for me.
You never owned any Adobe product, you licensed it. And that license could be revoked at any time; while it is unlikely Adobe would go after an individual, the license that you agree to allows them to do so.
Adobe can say whatever they want in their EULA; whether it's legally enforceable in court is another matter.
Imagine how these you-own-a-license-not-the-thing-itself shenanigans would play out for any other product we purchase. "No, you didn't buy that $40k car in cash upfront! You only bought Toyota's permission to operate the car, and we reserve the right to repossess it at any time."
> Tesla used to sell Model S vehicles with software-locked battery packs. This was a way to offer different range options without having to make production more complicated with different battery pack sizes.
> Later, Tesla started to offer owners of those software-locked vehicles the option to unlock the capacity for an additional cost. Tesla phased out the practice over the years, but the company still used software-locked battery packs when doing warranty replacements of battery packs of certain capacities that it doesn’t produce anymore.
Upgrading the head unit for a 2013 Model S triggered an error and reverted this old generation battery to software lock.
This clearly was a software bug and Tesla reverted it for all customers using these older batteries.
This has literally nothing to do with subscriptions (the word subscribe isn’t even in the article once). I don’t even think you read the article.
> Car is sold twice since, and now has a new owner (my customer). It says 90, badged 90, has 90-type range.
> He has the car for a few months, goes in and does a paid MCU2 upgrade at Tesla after the 3G shutdown.
> ...
> Tesla told him that he had to pay $4,500 to unlock the capability:
It's all in the article.
You can get all stuck-up about the word "subscription" but guy goes into Tesla for a non-battery related service and loses 2/3 thirds of the range the car claimed it had unless he forks over 5k.
Eastern Europe it looks like, but this story is remarkably similar to my experience as a graduate student / technical staff at public research institutions in both the United States and Japan.
I'm sorry, but your reply suggests an incredible disdain for both technical expertise and for educators. There is value in depth&breadth of knowledge, and it takes great skill to craft a good curriculum.
From a US perspective, students paying $50,000+ per year in tuition deserve better than an overworked PI who has crammed C++ over the weekend.
Interesting, I feel the opposite, I agree that an excellent teacher who knows the material back to front is invaluable.
My general model for how "being good at programming works" is that it's just mostly a stacking buff based on how much you've touched, I'm choosing to give the person in the anecdote the benefit of the doubt and believe in both their technical expertise and skill as an educator. Most technical things are kind of like other technical things, and if you've been around for a while everything is kind of like something you've done before, it makes it very easy to pick up new tools/domains. I fully believe that someone can open up a VAST gulf of knowledge of C++ between themselves and intro to C++ folks in a weekend if they're already a seasoned practitioner.
Nope, some superficially similar technical things are founded on very different concepts from other technical things. For example, grokking a functional language requires a whole different mental model than for an imperative language.
Also, remember that you could pick up a new language and start to dabble in it after a few days, but teaching it, ah, that requires much more than using it . Usually teaching something requires a much deeper understanding than just using it.
As an educator I disagree. In my field of expertise I am so far in advance of my students’ skills that I can be three standard deviations in skill better than the average student in my class in any cognate field in two days and further ahead than that in a week or a month. That’s what “technical expertise” is.
I won’t speak to crafting a good curriculum, God knows I’ve seen plenty of bad ones but it’s just not hard for me to be vastly better at any topic in English or History than any student I’m likely to see in a high school in two days because I’m that much better than them at what I do. I presume the same yawning gulf in capability exists between the average freshly minted PhD and undergraduates, or professors teaching graduate courses and PhD students.
Expertise exists, which is why I can be teaching a course that’s supposed to take 300 hours of instruction to cover in 15 hours, reasonably comfortably.
I'm an American software engineer living in Tokyo with 5+ years of professional experience (plus an additional 15+ years of hobbyist experience!). I got my start in high school uploading Flash games to Newgrounds, and learned early on to love the work that I do.
I'm a strong believer in local-first, interoperable, configurable software. I'm seeking to work on a product built to empower users, not lock them in.
I'm particularly interested in working on: rich document editors, programming languages & developer tools, game dev & simulation.
Please visit the about page on my website to learn more about my past work!
fwiw Chrome on Linux has no WebGPU support or hardware acceleration, so I often use Firefox for e.g. playing Ruffle content. The story is different on different platforms, and will slowly improve.
I live in Tokyo which arguably is one of the most transit friendly cities, and still bus to the nearby Costco to load up every month or two. Sometimes you just need a suitcase full of mozzarella sticks, no questions asked.
[1] https://www.alanzucconi.com/2017/07/15/cd-rom-shader-1/