Weren't enterprises already on yearly contracts with licenses and support included? I know developer tools from Microsoft in the 90's had subscriptions, but I never dealt with Enterprise licensing back then. But, given some of the blanket enterprise licenses I did have to deal with, I always thought at that level it was always a subscription model.
I think the shift wasn't that the SaaS model is now new, but that the SaaS model was now also taking over consumer and small business accounts.
We used to buy Microsoft MSDN subscriptions, which got us constant upgrades of Visual Studio and other development tools. Those licenses were perpetual - you'd get a disk with e.g. Visual Studio 2007 on it, and you were legally entitled to use that version forever.
IIRC if we didn't think we'd need a new version anytime soon, to reduce costs sometimes we wouldn't purchase MSDN renewals.
I think Microsoft's licensing 20 years ago shows the prevailing view then was that companies wanted the certainty of perpetual licenses.
20 years ago, most businesses and consumers didn’t have reliable and fast internet. MSDN came in dozens of CDs/DVDs in a binder.
Back then, most people only had one computer and if you switched between Windows and Macs you had to buy a separate copy of Office. Now I can run Office on my Mac, iPad (and pair it with the same mouse and keyboard I use with my laptop), and iPhone. If I’m not near my computer but want to use Office on another computer, I can do it on the web.
There is also a lot more churn in the mobile space as far operating system and hardware upgrades that mean needing to update your apps. Despite bad blood between the two back in the day. Microsoft has been keeping up with the latest Apple hardware/OS initiatives since 1980.
My guess is that those integration points are intended to be used by University owned and operated services. Having a service that the University doesn't control wanting to do this would be difficult to get approval. Student data is highly protected (legally), so access to it through another application (where the operators could see other students' data) is problematic.
That makes sense. Now, with that in mind, a reasonable response to OP's request would involve just saying "no". Maybe even politely explain why, but that isn't required.
> passes through a third-party HTTP redirect service
The vendor might not be the only party to use an HTTP redirect service too! My email goes through a security screen by $EMPLOYER, which also rewrites links to get processed through their redirect service. Sure, it's for company-approved reasons, but it's still another party that has access to the login token.
They aren’t referring to the client side of this question. Airline websites generally have the quality of any generic corporate IT project…
I assume what the parent was referring to is the backend systems like Sabre that coordinates travel and ticketing between airlines, travel agents, etc. It is a truly ancient system by today’s standards, with origins in the 1960s and mainframes. Systems like this actually have started to limit what airlines can do and how many flights they can manage.
I’m not sure I buy the argument that tools necessarily need to be fixed.
> It feels like we created these tools when software became a thing. Then, we forgot them.
Sometimes the best tool is the hammer you already have. A lowly, simple, reliable hammer. I know software isn’t the only field where we like to chase the new shiny thing and call it “modern”. But, sometimes it really seems like that feeling is deeply embedded in programmer culture.
I’m not against building new tools, but they have to solve legitimate problems. And an old GUI from the 90s doesn’t seem like a legitimate problem for me. Have you ever seen how quickly a trained worker can move around on a TUI from the 80s?
Scaling? Data interoperability? Data models and new use cases? This is not an exhaustive list, but these all seem like good reasons to revamp tools. But, if the problem is attaching one piece of wood to another with a bit of metal… just use the hammer.
"how quickly a trained worker can move around on a TUI from the 80s". I worked at Ticketek many, many years ago and witnessed the move from dumb terminals running a TUI, to a new browser based system. The old timers were seriously pissed and I could totally understand why. You could navigate the old TUI entirely via a keyboard and they had memorised all of the shortcuts: want to buy a ticket to the latest show? That's 6 key presses. These people could smash out the sales at a phenomenal rate.
The new app was browser-based, looked really pretty and basically forced you to use the mouse. I think we lost most of the TUI-guns, but the replacement staff were cheap and the training was simple. Not sure if it was an economic success, but that's progress.
I dunno .. a lot of the medical software like the one referred to in the software really were (are?) written on a shoestring budget by crap programmers. The last one I set up in the 90's used a MS Jet database backend on a CIFS networked drive ... as you can imagine, with more than one or two clients the thing was constantly freezing up due to CIFS clients issuing oplock breaks etc. trying to get exclusive access to the Jet database.
(Not a lawyer.) To have rights to a trademark, you have to use it in, well, trade. It’s not enough for a term to refer to a specific thing in normal usage, you must have a widely recognized claim on that thing. It should be in the customer’s interest that your thing not be confusable with thing-alikes that others may offer, specifically by having an exclusive right to be sold as the thing. And Oracle demonstrably does not deal in “JavaScript” any more than many many other companies and individuals do.
The only JavaScript offering from Oracle that I know of is GraalVM[0]. It's funny though - they use "JavaScript" and "ECMAScript" interchangeably in their docs. They call it "A high-performance embeddable JavaScript runtime for Java" but then tout it as "ECMAScript Compliant", basically acknowledging that JavaScript is defined by ECMAScript specs and the terms mean the same thing.
Them calling it ECMAScript in some instances means that it follows the actual ECMA spec for ECMAScript (what everyone calls JavaScript historically). Them calling it JavaScript implies it could be their flavor, or something like Node and not necessarily strictly ECMAScript, at least that'd be the reason I'd use it interchangeably.
This is why I think Deno has a solid chance here. Sun may have filed for the trademark, but it’s not clear to me how much it has been used by Oracle. I also think this is why this step is likely the beginning of litigation, not the end. With Oracle not voluntarily withdrawing the trademark, it allows the rest of the process to invalidate the trademark to begin.
Not only that, but other company's not-technically-javascript products are widely known as JavaScript. And have been for close to 3 decades now (Microsoft's JScript was released in 1996)
The relationship between those two things is more like the relationship between burgers and fries, two things that some people may think belong together, but having a claim on one surely has connection to having a claim on the other.
Or like saying McDonald's shouldn't have a trademark on "Big Mac" outside of beef burgers, because they don't regularly deal in "Big Macs" made out of chicken.
> On the face of it, JavaScript seems like a pretty solid trademark.
It seems to me that it's the exact opposite of that: It's been so thoroughly genericised that it might as well not exist as a trademark. Also, I couldn't even tell you of a single product Oracle sells that uses the mark.
Do you have showdead on? There is definite moderation going on, but a lot of it is collectively imposed (down votes, flagging). But, if you have your HN account set to show dead posts, you’ll see that even with this demographic there are still a good number of low quality posts.
I read with showdead on. I feel like people don't get modded for opinions here. Usually if the comments are dead it's because something is perceived as ad hominem, hostile, aggressive, violent, etc. It's usually the tone that gets them modded out and the content of the message, and a polite version of the same statement would stand.
There are outliers of course, but that's the general vibe.
> I feel like people don't get modded for opinions here.
Agreed. That's why I used the term "low quality". The comments that get downvoted or flagged are usually either blatant spam/trolling or rude. If someone makes a quality argument, regardless of the opinion, it generally sticks around. I'll even up-vote comments I disagree with, if the author is making a good-faith effort. Not everyone does that, but enough people do and do so often enough that it helps to keep a complete hive-mind at bay (about most topics...).
But, I think that it's that simple level of moderation (which, I consider to still be moderation) that helps to keep discourse around here civil and interesting...
Yes, there are some threads that start where you just know nothing good will come from it, and in those cases we do see some admin moderation (hi @dang!). But, even then, I think the idea is that when discussing some topics, the thread will invariably end up going sideways. Those are the topics that end to get immediately flagged. And that's okay with me, because who has time for that, when we have so many other, more interesting things to argue (civilly) about?
What does tmux control mode do in practice? I use both (iterm2 and tmux), but not for this specific reason. I have just used both as a default for a long time.
Yes, this was such a nice feature when I used a Mac. And indeed the session seamlessly works as a normal tmux session. I believe WezTerm does tmux-style terminal multiplexing, but doesn't integrate with tmux.
> It's boring database engine that powers boring business applications
I'm taking that as a positive thing... it's boring and does its job with little fanfare. That's pretty much what I want out of a RDBMS. So long as it is "fast-enough" with enough features for the applications that use it, that seems like a good place for an RDBMS to be.
One could still argue about Windows and licensing fees, but from a technical point of view, for business customers, boring isn't necessarily a bad thing.
There’s other boring databases that also reliably fill that job, and they also cost far less.
It can also be a bit of a pain outside the C# ecosystem, whereas every language ever has nice postgres drivers that don’t require us to download arms setup ODBC. It runs on Linux as of a few years ago, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if many people didn’t realise that.
I think the shift wasn't that the SaaS model is now new, but that the SaaS model was now also taking over consumer and small business accounts.
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