Personally I disagree with the "Major version upgrades". To me that what I want, you release a product, I buy it knowing what it contains and what it does. My expectations are that I get security fixes for some period of time, but other than that the "no new features" is a feature all on its own.
I might be in the minority, but I'd pay $150 up front, rather than a $8 per month, knowing full well that I might need to pay another $100 the next time macOS is updated. It's not the money as much as it is the mental overhead of yet another subscription.
Customers need to be able to keep track of their subscriptions and after four or five that's it, you lose track and the money just disappear out of your account every month. Say that: Well the App Store lists all your subscriptions... is missing the point, because not all of my subscriptions are going to be centrally managed by Apple, Google or some one else. Again, it might just be me, but I believe that companies are losing out on sales because they're not offering straight up purchases. There's just no way to track sales lost because of it, so it's not on anyone's radar.
Edit: I checked the pricing on VMWare Fusion, it was release in 2020, it might have been cheaper on release, but let's assume it's not, that's $199 up front, I'd still be able to us it and I'm saving money. I can then upgrade it for $99, but I don't have to, unless I also upgrade my laptop to an M-series. So it's cheaper for me to buy an objectively better product. I might even get a discount if I buy bulk licenses or I'm already a VMWare customer. I get why subscriptions are attractive to the developers, but they provide no value to the customer.
> but I've explained why in the "Why a subscription?" box here
No you haven't, you've just regurgitated the usual argument made by people peddling subscriptions.
Its always the same old story, and charities do the same thing when seeking donation subscriptions...
The person selling the subscription says "oh, but its only $8 a month that's only half a Starbucks coffee"
Meanwhile, the REALITY for the person on the receiving end of the salesdroid is always the same ...."your sub is not the only thing going on with my life bud".
And its very true in IT, sub to this for $x, sub to that for $y, sub to that for $z, and soon enough you are "talking real money" as the old saying goes. And then if you are expecting the company to pay for an employee then that adds up exponentially in-line with the number of employees.
So, yeah, subscriptions suck ... for a real and valid reason.
Appreciate the transparency. Fwiw, I don't understand from the FAQ what's your opposition to jetbrains model, which has been universally praised for its friendly compromise of user vs developer needs. As the other commenter mentioned, a) subscriptions get too many and b) subscription model means I have to keep paying forever. It makes it crystal clear I am not buying and I am not owning my tool.
(that being said, I always appreciate and recognize the freedom of producer to charge whatever model they choose to, there's no moral qualms here:)
And maybe it is! We'll have to see how this all works out. I could very well be wrong about that.
In my opinion, JetBrains' perpetual fallback model is more of a psychological thing than something you'd actually utilize — at least I'd never consider staying on an old version myself, but maybe that's just me.
I've also talked to other devs, who mentioned that users staying on ancient versions because they don't want to pay again can be a major support burden.
One thing worth considering is that I plan to offer (optional) cloud services integrated into the app.
OrbStack is also relatively high-maintenance due to all the components it bundles.
It's not that, it's like others have said up the thread – the mental overhead of subscriptions is super annoying. (Sure, not if it was the only subscription you have, but it isn't.)
I let Jetbrains lapse a lot. But certainly not when I am actively using it. If I start using it regularly again (which I do, intermittently over the years) then I subscribe again.
But the thing is, that also solves the elephant in the room that devs don't want to talk about: a huge portion of subscription revenues comes from providing absolutely no value at all to customers. It's people paying for a subscription, being too busy to notice the charges -- or worse, too busy to figure out how to cancel them even thought they do notice, and mean to.
And devs can claim this is ethical, because they disclosed the subscription recurrence, and the responsibility lies with the customer to track all their subscriptions diligently, across all their platforms and billing methods, and cancel them whenever they stop using them.
And some people do that. But most do not.
So the other way to look at it is that subscription software models are just a scam. A way to exploit people who lack the organization, or have two jobs and kids, or whatever — and get money out of them without providing any value at all. For months, or even years in many cases. Of course it is great for your bottom line. But is it ethical? Even if you think it is, is it a cool thing to do?
I think both arguments make sense. It is debatable.
But personally, I would only want to do subscription billing if I had some means (perhaps via opt-in telemetry) to automatically detect when the product hasn't been used at all during the billing period, and not charge anything in those cases.
Crazy for what seems to be an alternative GUI for Docker. It's almost as much as we pay for Parallels licenses so we can use Vagrant on Apple Silicon. There's nothing "slow and clunky" about these VMs either.
Of course, you're free to build your own with a VM and at least a couple months of full-time work to get the same feature set, just like with Dropbox :) Not saying it's for everyone.
1) Runs containers / VMs ("linux machines"). Here you get a linux instance with access to your complete filesystem (everything is mounted), similar to I guess WSL
2) Full docker compatible + docker-compose
3) As of this week kubernetes support
Everything is blazing fast to start (think 100-200ms). Aside that, there's one thing that's awesome: networking.
Every container gets a unique IP. No more portmapping.
Every containers also gets a unique hostname (+ip) -> testapp.orb.local
Every every docker-compose gets a unique subdomain -> web.testcompose.orb.local
I think you'll find something you like in there :) To name a few: Performance, CPU usage/power efficiency, automatic domain names for containers, access to volumes and image files from macOS, native app, and more.
Hey, I just switched from Linux to MacOS and I wondered how to best set up a work environment on MacOS.
I don't really want to use brew as the sandboxing on MacOS seems to be much worse than I expected it to be e.g. as far as I see you can only prevent the access of $HOME/Desktop, $HOME/Documents and $HOME/Downloads.
I found out that using Canonical Multipass allows you to easily set up ubuntu VMs and this I think it is a good way to create a working environment for development and of course by using it one can improve the sandboxing as everything is executed inside a vm.
-------
Now to come to the point your OrbStack seems to be really similar to Canonical Multipass,
so I wondered how they do they compare to each other?
Why should I prefer to use OrbStack over Canonical Multipass (besides the possibility of being able to run other distributions than ubuntu)?
Hasn't been that common of a request, and honestly I've never used Vagrant so not familiar with its benefits. People are already using OrbStack machines and its "orb" command to build dev envs with setup scripts, and cloud-init support will also be added: https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/38
I think cloud-init will be more useful since it's already widely used for setting up servers, whereas Vagrant is only for dev envs, but correct me if I'm wrong.
Plenty of companies use Vagrant. OrbStack's pricing is almost as much as an annual Parallels license for each of our devs. Most places using Vagrant will be using VirtualBox on Intel, or Parallels on Apple Silicon. So you haven't seen many requests because Vagrant users already have a solution and OrbStack wouldn't save enough money to ever switch to it.
As much as I think you should support Vagrant in your tool, that isn't the point I was making - whether it's worth supporting is something you need to decide for yourself.
The point I was making is this:
Your claim is
> No matter the use case, OrbStack has you covered with features
But you don't support a common, cross-platform tool that's been around for ages and is used for managing developer environments - including running containers.
Can you give an example? OrbStack currently sets up an IPv4+6 interface linked to a "unified bridge" with both the macOS host and other Linux machines on it, plus NAT to the outside world: https://docs.orbstack.dev/machines/network
You're also free to create your own interfaces on the Linux side, of course.
Great to hear! Quick question for you actually: what's the value prop of having VMs and containers in one? I've been having a hard time with that from a marketing perspective.
I was a crypto skeptic for many years. If you look at crypto purely from an engineering lens, you'll always find it wanting. What I didn't understand was that crypto is as much of an economic and political project, as it is an engineering project. If you think decentralisation and trustlessness are valuable, you should think crypto is important. If you don't care for decentralisation then being negative on crypto is a consistent position.
I think this is very close to the truth. Most tech people, like the author of the article, look Bitcoin only from technological perspective. This completely misses the point, because Bitcoin is worse on many purely technical metrics compared to centralized currencies. The benefits are economical and societal, and they are not very easily understood. This misunderstanding leads to both "anti-crypto" and altcoins that are supposedly better than Bitcoin.
Exactly, if you have complete faith and trust in conventional FIAT currencies and the systems they use to transact the use cases for crypto also seem far less compelling.
As an example, the appeal of deflationary Bitcoin is much more salient to a citizen of Argentina than to a citizen of the USA (although recent inflation might make the appeal more obvious). Or on the even more extreme end, the citizen of Zimbabwe would much rather have decentralised solid crypto of one sort or another than their local currency.
No one has complete faith in anything. The institutional system in liberal democracies is such that no single institution has all the power, precisely because we don't completely trust the government.
The answer to dysfunctional governments is not get rid of the government. This is just dumb. We need well-functioning governments to enforce human rights, and law and order.
> The answer to dysfunctional governments is not get rid of the government.
As you're probably aware, central banks are usually intended to operate somewhat indepentently from governments. (One could argue to which degree it's actually the case, though.)
Which means that monetary systems are supposed to be somewhat indepentent from governments.
Assuming that Bitcoin were to be adopted as some kind of reserve currency (held by central banks) and also used by states and citizens, where exactly is the "getting rid of the government" happening there?
Exactly, nowhere.
> We need well-functioning governments to enforce human rights, and law and order.
Agree. But this doesn't rule out the possibility of indeed using Bitcoin.
Central banks are public institutions in charge of conducting monetary policy, they have a public mandate and are accountable to the legislative branch. They're therefore part of the government, even if they have some degree of independence.
Bitcoin undermines governments. For example, bitcoin adoption would seriously limit the government's ability to manage the economy via monetary policy. It would also affect its ability to prevent unrestricted movement of capitals in and out of the country, and within its borders. Financial regulations would be harder to enforce, and a larger chunk of the economy would go underground. So, clearly, it would weaken governments. I don't know that anyone disputes this.
Bitcoin undermines certain possibilities of governments, yes.
As most western governments have been successfully hijacked by big corporations so that politics are skewed heavily in favor of the corporations' interests, it has become a tough decision IMO between:
- A: letting governments continue to be the executive branch of the Exxons, Apples, Googles, Facebooks, Amazons, ... and letting the latter continue with making few people richer and letting Gini coefficient converge to 1
- B: taking away governments' favorite (because in the beginning it's so nicely subtle that people won't object) instrument (more debt) to enact politics and thus forcing them to make uncomfortable choices instead
The current system appears to be instable (at least to me). Instability hurts more than continuity, everything else being equal.
Bitcoin could become either an effective threat to discipline governments to not let their spending get out of hand or the very foundation to build a new stable monetary system.
We'll see. If it turns out to be more stable, people/institutions will in the long term converge to it.
> ... and a larger chunk of the economy would go underground.
Which is exactly what needs to happen (ideally not in a crash but in a soft transition) in order to get humanity's ecological foot print to a sustainable size in the short time that's left.
As soon as the economy has transitioned to sustainable processes, it may of course grow again, but right now, what we need is gentle shrinkage or "degrowth".
You seem confused about a couple of points. Monetary policy is not a tool to finance government spending. Sure, it might be used for this purpose, but this is not the point of it, and in fact, debt monetisation is illegal in most countries, afaik. Second, the underground economy has nothing to do with ecological sustainability or economic degrowth. It's simply a part of the economy that is hidden from the state, for the purposes of circumventing laws and regulations.
Well, I think I misunderstood what you meant by "underground", confused, I wouldn't say I am.
> Monetary policy is not a tool to finance government spending.
Ok, it is not officially intended to be, sure.
> Sure, it might be used for this purpose, but this is not the point of it, ...
Here's the problem. In reality, monetary policy is indeed doing exactly that. ECB is currently planning to stop buying up government bonds. Whatever technical term you use for this buying of bonds is irrelevant. Effectively this ECB policy has been supporting the growing national debt of Euro zone states.
IMO the actual situation matters more than the theoretical/proclaimed purposes/goals of policies.
Yes, the ECB can state "our goal is 2 % inflation". But that statement ought to be a lot less relevant to someone who wants to judge the current state of affairs and make decisions for the future than for example the actual number (inflation).
> Second, the underground economy has nothing to do with ecological sustainability or economic degrowth.
I read "underground" here as "shrinkage" of the economy. That was a misunderstanding on my part then.
To get to your take on this. The claim that Bitcoin would make the "inofficial" sector of the economy grow bigger/worse than it is under the current monetary system is IMO only that, a claim.
Sure, some cryptocurrencies provide working privacy. Bitcoin isn't really one of those.
I'd be confident that - were Bitcoin to become relevant as some kind of reserve currency - there would be effective measures taken, to make anonymous transactions really difficult if not impossible.
Buying bonds in the open market is not debt monetisation. Anyway, public debt is a political problem, and the idea that adopting some sort of a commodity standard will prevent sovereign debt crises is unconvincing, to say the least, considering that such crises were common under the gold standard. You can't be seriously suggesting that the world economy should switch to a whole new monetary system based on these half-baked arguments. Are you kidding me?
Who said anything about getting rid of governments? I certainly am not interested in this. I don't even think it would be a good idea to get rid of fiat (or at least state-backed currencies). At the same time having the option of holding currency that is not directly accountable to one of the 200ish current sovereign states in the world is deeply appealing to me (and many others) for a number of reasons.
I'd go even further: inflation is setting the incentive for full throttle in the economy.
When you're seeing one extreme weather event after the other and a climate catastrophe is imminent, is it a reasonable choice to run the world economy at full throttle, considering that this economy is still based on ~ 80 % fossil energy?
It's like when your car is speeding towards a concrete wall ... and you keep your foot on the gas ... because you "want to make a really fast turn to the side to avoid the wall".
No crypto project has managed to solve the trilemma problem so far. Decentralized chains are way too expensive and the cheap chains are heavily centralized.
ZK Rollups effectively solve this problem by moving computation and data storage off chain without sacrificing security. These protocols include on-chain exit mechanisms so that tokens are never at risk of being taken by the sequencer.
The point of the comment is: governments have abused their position of power, by bailing out irresponsible banks, by giving them an oligopoly in the first place, and by doing all this through spending your savings through inflation.
Therefore, an un-debaseable, trustless and liquid asset is crucial in making the powers-that-be accountable for their actions.
I'm taking it to mean union employees wouldn't get new grants. Which makes sense to me - I have a hard time squaring how you can be in a union with an adversarial relationship to management, whilst at the same time being an owner of the company. It's one or the other.
> I have a hard time squaring how you can be in a union with an adversarial relationship to management, whilst at the same time being an owner of the company. It's one or the other.
Unionized ESOP companies aren't uncommon.
You've got it a bit backwards about the adversarial relationship: having an ESOP and a union isn't some kind of organizational impossibility, and it can decrease the probability of a serious dispute between management and the union. [1]
Interesting, yeah those are good points. I can certainly see it reducing the severity of disputes in theory.
In practice though I'm skeptical. I've read a little about the history of UAW. They really seemed to view workers vs mgmt as an adversarial zero sum game. Meanwhile Toyota were developing their production system using the kaizen principle of bottom up continuous improvement. Unions played a huge role in making US autos uncompetitive against the Japanese brands for a long time.
I want to be pro-union but it's hard when you observe their real world behaviour. All too often they slowly strangle their company, making it less and less competitive and innovative and ultimately dooming it to defeat by new entrants who aren't yet encumbered by unions.
So it depends a bit on whether you talk about real world US unions like the UAW, or about what unions could be in theory and might be in other parts of the world.
Eg German unions have a reputation, at least compared to the US, of cooperating much more with their host companies. Similar also for Scandinavian unions.
It could also be the case that US unions operate in a country where power is held by a class of people who would really prefer their serfs to STFU and get back to whatever dangerous, ill-paid task they were assigned. When the most egregious wrongs are simply illegal and never happen then it is much easier for capital and labor to have a less adversarial relationship, but when you operate in a country like the US I would assume it is necessary for a union to be a bit more aggressive in its actions and objectives.
> It could also be the case that US unions operate in a country where power is held by a class of people who would really prefer their serfs to STFU and get back to whatever dangerous, ill-paid task they were assigned.
What makes you think European business owners are less greedy or evil? Capital is internationally mobile, and it's the same index funds owning a good chunk of all companies everywhere, too.
Business owners in Europe are not any less greedy or evil, they are simply constrained by laws and the political environment to be unable to commit the worst offenses.
Not sure. Workers in the US are better off than in Europe.
And within Europe, the places with the best off workers tend to be the ones with pro-business laws, like Switzerland (and in contrast to Greece or France).
It could also be the case that most people commenting do not have experience with very many unions and have adopted the portions of a goofy pro- vs anti-union argument that has existed in popular US culture since right-wing think tanks began poisoning public political dialogue in the seventies.
> They really seemed to view workers vs mgmt as an adversarial zero sum game.
That doesn't really affect the feasibility or otherwise of running an ESOP as a union shop. On the contrary, I imagine that if you view the entire thing as zero-sum, you might be more prone to think about what is going to happen to your stock's value if you strike, or take steps that negatively effect efficiency.
If you're not thinking zero-sum, you can use some pretty handwavey logic for thinking the next bonus you demand doesn't really negatively effect people like your coworkers or the shareholders, since you're merely being compensated for your inherent greatness that will inevitably lead to the company's greater success, blah blah... congratulations, you appear to be in senior management.
> Meanwhile Toyota were developing their production system using the kaizen principle of bottom up continuous improvement. Unions played a huge role in making US autos uncompetitive against the Japanese brands for a long time.
It doesn't seem unfathomable to me that a unionized company could develop something like the Toyota Production System. The German companies tout having learned from Toyota, and I don't know how true that is, but the successful, modern German car companies are all unionized. (in the greater context, Tesla is still nonunion and didn't appear to pay any attention to TPS when they brought their production online, which is maybe interesting)
And Ford gets GIANT markups on the F150s, they are super profitable for them and the best selling truck for many many years now. Toyota, Honda aren't even close to American truck and SUV sales.
So explain to me again how US autos aren't competitive with Japanese brands?
As an individual I feel like I have relatively more bargaining power, because when eg talking about pay I just need to convince the company to bump one total comp package, mine.
So I can negotiate much more aggressively and get more done, then someone who tried to get the company to raise thousands of pay packages.
Also, I have an easy time convincing the company that I am leaving (or not joining), if they don't accede to my demands.
No union can credibly threaten that all unionized employees will quit, if they don't get a 40% pay rise.
> I just need to convince the company to bump one total comp package, mine
> ...
> Also, I have an easy time convincing the company that I am leaving (or not joining), if they don't accede to my demands.
And when your aggressive negotiating is too much of a hassle for the company they just have to fire one "problematic" employee, you. And unless you have created a hellhole of a system architecture in your project that only you can maintain as insurance/backup to your aggressive negotiation, you will be surprised to see just how replaceable you are.
To be honest, I do most of the aggressive negotiations before I join the company.
So if that's too 'problematic' for them, they don't need to hire me.
If you want to negotiate just as aggressively while working for them, you have to have your outside options all lined up. Basically, yes, if you threaten to leave, you should not be surprised if they call your bluff and take wish you farewell.
Unions threaten that all employees will quit all.the.time. It’s called a strike. It’s their primary bargaining power. Yes, the workers will eventually come back to work, but only after they gain some concessions from management, and it can be a long time before they come back.
I know about strikes. They are different than everyone quitting.
> Yes, the workers will eventually come back to work, but only after they gain some concessions from management, and it can be a long time before they come back.
Workers don't get paid while on strike (they get some money back from the union that they saved there themselves). There's no guarantee that management will make concessions.
Yes, it can be a long time before workers come back.
Why are these things at odds? It seems like the ideal outcome for the union would be to have a significant ownership stake in the company and share in its success, rather than have an adversarial relationship and drag down profits. Making the company uncompetitive in the market is bad for the union in the long run.
Representatives of the union see the world differently. They don't see collaboration on the same goal, they see rich management exploiting employees to get even richer.
So it's really an us vs them mentality. Either I get richer, or you get richer. Don't expect these people to start reasoning about making the company they work for competitive.
Interesting that this would be the case in Europe. Germany has had 'codetermination' laws for decades, where they have (typically union) representation on the boards of large corporations[1].
This doesn't invalidate my remark though. Nothing says these union board members are there to make the company more competitive. They are there to provide better working conditions.
Still, the point stands that of all the European states, labor is arguably strongest in Germany, and at the same time Germany industry is extremely competitive. If strong labor was a huge competitive disadvantage you'd think Germany would be falling behind, but instead it's quite the opposite.
If I join a union at work, it has no bearing on my stock options. In the uk its illegal to discriminate like that, precisely because employers like tesla would make it economically impossible to join a union.
As an aside, if you take away the shares, there is little incentive to work together to increase the share value. So of course unions are going to be incentivised differently.
This is common anti-union rhetoric. Am I an owner, with my $600 stock, and can I convince 89.5% of the other stock holders to vote with me?[0] Doesn't sound like ownership.
Border security are not idiots. They know about travel mode.
Travel mode works because it can’t be changed on device and so moves the vault out of border security jurisdiction.
They can have probable cause to search your phone and will if they want to but they are unable to put you in a room with a browser and make you download something, so hence it’s out reach.
Whenever I’ve had to build PDF features I’ve found it tedious, and thought it should be easier.
Paperplane is basically an API layer on top of autoscaling servers running headless Chrome.
There are a couple of features that make this a little different to other solutions out there: automatic uploads to S3 and the ability to queue up batches of documents and be notified via webhook when they’ve been converted to PDF.
If you’re looking for a solution like this or are already using something similar, it’d be great to hear any feedback!
Thanks, I wasn't aware of htmldoc or that LibreOffice had a headless mode.
It does seem like htmldoc doesn't support CSS which is going to be a blocker for a lot of people.
Pandoc is definitely worth considering but I didn't include it as I believe it just delegates it's PDF rendering to a configurable engine like LaTeX, weasyprint or wkhtmltopdf.
I've used LO without an interface, but I don't know how effective it will be in general. It's very likely that the ones I mention are limited in their CSS or JS support, but my context doesn't use them (much) so I've got a much wider choice of things I can use.
In my context I'm producing documents that need to be displayed in both contexts, so I steer clear of things that are primarily HTML.
