Does anyone know of a precedent for this? I've never heard of a social (or other) network claiming to own account identifiers, then again I don't read their ToS with a magnifying glass either.
The combination of 'it just works' and 'SSO integration' is a killer.
To be honest, in 20+ years of working in IT, I never understood the point of the latter until recently, on a gig salvaging systems for a client with ~650 users after their sole IT guy unexpectedly resigned after 20 years and left for the mountains.
IRL, SSO is gold. Many hackers, like me, underestimate it.
And not just SSO, but OIDC. You don't even have to be an admin on your domain to set it up. If you have a Gmail or Office 365 e-mail address @mycorp.com, you can set up SSO for it on your tailnet in seconds. Your team members authenticating for the same domain will join your tailnet automatically.
And that's for the free and cheap tier. If you want the fancy stuff (like SAML and automatic user provisioning / filtering), they've apparently got that, too, but it's in the more expensive tiers.
SSO is basically tablestakes for compliance: customers would ask about your access control (or just if you have _that_ audit report, which has a lot of questions about it).
And trying to do access control without SSO is crazy: you need to keep track of application and users and their interactions. I wouldn't run any team with more than 10 people without it.
> Or do people actually want their keybindings to change when they change their layouts?
It depends. As a counterpoint to the folks replying "yes", I have for years had Meta-[1..9] bound to "switch to desktop X". I also regularly use US English and Czech/Slovak keyboards.
In the X11 days, I never had to think about this, since for whatever reason (I believe technically a bug and/or X11-specific WM behaviour, but I've lost the reference...) Openbox would use the US English layout for its keybindings exclusively.
Since I switched to KDE Plasma on Wayland, I constantly get annoyed, every day, as I may have my keyboard set to SK, press what muscle memory says is Meta-[1] and instead I get a funky zoom, since that keystroke translates to Meta-[+] in the SK layout :-(
> Anyway, interesting idea. As another comment pointed out, I wish there was an easy way to mount NFS and 9p shares as a user.
Add e.g. foo.bar.com:/path /net/foo.bar.com nfs to /etc/fstab with options=user ?
> Regarding the article content, I find 9p to be even simpler and probably more ubiquitous than NFS, though I don't know if MacOS and Windows natively support it.
Windows certainly does not. MacOS I don't know, but if you mean "natively" as "stock install without third-party software", then probably not.
Actually, scratch that, comments below suggest that WSL2 uses 9P for file sharing with the host, so it's possible that a version of Windows with the WSL2 bits installed will support 9P.
This is awesome. NFS is very much undervalued as a cross-platform interface for talking to a (not necessarily remote) filesystem.
~20 years ago I was using SFS (Self-certifying file system), which was a SSH-like Internet-usable TOFU filesystem, using NFS as the "backend" for talking to the host OS. The site has since disappeared, but is archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20080330201843/http://www.fs.net....
As I commented on TFA, and will gladly repeat here:
Wow. Well put. The scariest thing is, this translates even to domain-specific apps such as Navionics Boating. I use it every time I go out, because, somehow, they've not yet managed to touch the charts and rendering and it just works, better than any of the competitors. But, the rest of the interface is like a Fisher Price toy. You want to add a waypoint based on a specific lat/long you got out of a pilot book? There is no such thing as "Add waypoint" in the UI, nooo, you enter the lat/long in "Search" and then tap on something or other to add it as a waypoint.
This attitude manifests itself throughout the application's UI, as if, indeed, the application is optimized for "Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero.".
So, I guess it would require a lot more research to make a real argument about this, but to me, this just sounds like an application that isn't very good, but I don't think is the same phenomenon described by the article. I definitely don't think charging money is any kind of guarantee of quality. Software is hard to make and lots of software sucks just because it sucks.
But the difference I see is that I think Navionics Boating has an incentive to make that app better. That if they make improvements for users like you, that will likely impact their bottom line positively, because they'll attract and retain more users like you.
But free mass-market consumer apps have the opposite incentive. They are incentivized to dumb things down to the lowest common denominator, because there will always be > 1 user that they attract with that approach for every 1 user like you that they alienate.
Basically: I think free business models can ignore retention, whereas for-pay subscription models can't, and that's why I prefer them.
> Basically: I think free business models can ignore retention, whereas for-pay subscription models can't, and that's why I prefer them.
I think that only holds if you have enough competition that it starts making a real dent in your profit margin.
I don't have any proper data, but pretty much everyone I've met in the sailing community just uses Navionics. Fair enough; the company has been in the ECDIS business for many many years before smartphones even existed, and their electronic charts are good.
Their competitors, based on my subjective use of some of them, more or less fall into two groups:
(1) Similarly big players. Basically just C-MAP (parent is Navico, also in ECDIS for many years).
(2) Startups: savvy navvy and Orca.
I've only really used (1) enough to form a proper opinion. I originally picked it because it was way cheaper (50 EUR/year for global charts), but gave up since Navionics, despite being Fisher Price, at the end of the day just works, is fast, offline, and does not crash. OTOH C-MAP feels like a neglected side-line of the parent company designed to steer you into buying their expensive chart plotter brands (B&G mainly).
To be fair, I also tried a FOSS alternative (OpenCPN), but the app suffers from such a lack of UI design of any kind that I don't even want to go there, so I don't count it as a real competitor. And there's also Imray Navigator which is surprisingly good, but a different product category (raster charts).
TL;DR: Boating is making good money for Navionics, there's not really an alternative, so they don't care.
My most recent Linux laptop upgrade as of 10/2022 was:
FROM a refurbished Panasonic Let's Note CF-SX3, Intel Core i5-4300U, ~2013 vintage, 8GB RAM, aftermarket Intel 400GB DC S3610 Series SSD, purchase price EUR ~1500 ex VAT plus random hassles with customs importing used tech from JP to EU
TO a refurbished Dell Latitude 7390, Intel Core i7-8650U, ~2018 vintage, 16GB RAM, 512GB SK Hynix NVMe SSD, purchase price EUR ~600 ex VAT
The new one unexpectedly came with 16GB RAM instead of the advertised 8GB, lucky me. My main reason for upgrading was "want Thunderbolt / DP capable of driving 4K display", which turned out to be a mixed blessing.
This person's compromise was going from 64GB of RAM to 32GB, and from 2TB of storage to 1TB.
You young whippersnappers are so spoilt.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
PS. Now that you know the exact CPU I run, I'll invite you out to dinner at a Michelin restaurant of your choice in exchange for my private key of your choice.
7390s have been sub $200 on ebay for the last year or more. They are circa 2019.
Great machine, I'm looking for a replacement currently but the new latitudes have moved the power button onto the keyboard and removed the touchpad buttons.
Yup, they even get firmware updates via LVFS/fwupd!
The relative high-DPI-ness of the internal display in combination with worsening eyesight forced me to migrate from X11/openbox to Wayland/Plasma. That has mostly turned out OK, with the caveat of getting used to/working around a non-zero set of desktop bugs in my daily workflow.
This, 200%. I have the same problem with my 87yo father, and no idea how to fix it. I've drawn up step by step instructions, labelled both the TV and set top box remotes and devices with icons, yet somehow he manages to press something on either that throws the whole system out of whack and results in a phone call about "the TV not working". Usually unsolvable without being there in person, which with Dad living 250km away is not doable on a daily basis.
We bought a kid's universal remote from Argos, with big colourful buttons, then I put together an Arduino-based gizmo which received button presses from the new remote, and played macros of button presses to the TV and set top box. It worked up to a point, but of course it's defeated by any buttons whose meanings are affected by state - the button which toggled between the TV's internal tuner and the AV input was a particular problem.
