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Yeah, I'm somewhere between "that's fucking expensive" and "if it can legitimately replace a monitor for hours on end, that might well justify the price."

I'll admit one sticking point for me is the lack of noise cancellation on the earphones. I'm sure that is coming, so holding off for a generation or two might be a good bet.

I'm personally highly skeptical of the claims he's making—or that extraterrestrials are here in any capacity—but to take a stab at your questions:

- the folks who do believe in UFOs would say these crashes happen worldwide, but it's countries like the US/Russia who use their influence to swoop in, recover the pieces and then mount a coverup.

- UFOs have been sighted over urban areas, although it's rarer. If I were a UFO pilot, I'd probably avoid cities for the same reason the USAF doesn't fly classified aircraft over urban areas either (at least during the day)

I don't know what his angle is here—fame, mental issues, a genuine belief that he's onto something. I'll admit the recent focus on these things has aroused my curiosity, but like I said, aliens aren't at the top of my "credible explanations" list.

I think he's so used to being ensconced in vast sums of money—and mostly shielded from any consequences—that he's largely disconnected from the world. He's not in the habit of doing the rational cost-benefit calculations that we assume he's doing because we'd do them ourselves if we were in that position.

Everyone assumes this guy is still acting according to some process of reasoning. I really don't think that's the case anymore.

Either of those sounds quite fair, as long as the software isn't bricked once the year is up.

Wouldn't even consider a subscription.

I'm still dismayed at how Windows Phone fizzled the way it did, and I've been an Apple user for three decades now. The Metro UI was one of the more innovative UI approaches I've seen—from anyone, and definitely from Microsoft. I remember looking at the Zune and thinking, huh, this is not the "Windows attempt at an iPod" that I was expecting.

I probably wouldn't ever have bought one, but Windows Phone was not, for once, a mere iOS clone, and I respect that.

ah yes, the immortal "um...I am no longer high, what the hell has happened in the past six hours" expression.

Not entirely, but pretty close to it. I use this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-javascript-s...

I probably have JS off on more than 70% of the sites I browse. That's because JS is so widely abused: popups, autoplaying videos, sites demanding my location, etc. turning it off is the only way to make sites usable again.

Well, that selfie for one.

I like it!

I guess that depends how you define "interesting". For me, the interesting part of this would be the information, not how it's delivered.

The Big Tech Alert bot is pretty straightforward when it comes to writing style (although they get a little saucy whenever they mention Elon Musk) but they add some personality through emoji, like those "oh my, what happened here" googly eyes when some major account unfollows some other major account.

Maybe other people like the pirate brogue, I don't know. Like I said, it just gets in the way of the information for me.

https://twitter.com/bigtechalert

Interesting idea, but—and this is a kneejerk first-impression thing—I find the pirate talk hard to get past.

It's not even the silliness of it, which I might find appealing under other circumstances; it just takes longer for me to understand the tweets.

Just curious, what do you use for analytics now? I don't like GA; never have, since it's too complicated and I don't trust Google, so I'd be interested in knowing some alternatives.

Ew. Any browser pulling that shit with me goes straight to the discard pile. I get that enough from websites; I should never have to see that from my own browser.

Really sad to see that from Firefox, though. I'd have expected it from Edge or even Chrome; suggests that Mozilla is getting desperate.

I use my own email address (web host's mail server; I don't run my own).

Used Gmail for a while, but I trust Google less and less. The thought that some automated process could simply lock my account for an imagined infraction—and once that happens, it's over; you'll never actually deal with anyone at Google—was a pretty major impetus for me to fully switch away from Gmail.

"earning $2,500 a month consulting for a law firm"

I think I would look twice at any law firm taking advice from someone like Martin Shkreli.

It's been a while since he was a regular presence in the news, but he wasn't just some stuffy white-collar criminal (which would've been bad enough, given what he did); the guy has a really vile, trollish side to him that you'd think would make him a liability to any legitimate business.

I've gone back over my posts to see if I said anything out of line, and I don't think I did. I'm just being direct; I haven't been nasty, or even snarky (which you were, consistently, in your last response). I am indeed rightfully disturbed by what I see as a greedy, lazy business model that shuts lower-income folks out of the tech world, so the tone's not going to change.

I'm not going to address most of your post, because there honestly is not a lot to reply to: you're just reiterating assertions and—more problematically—insisting I said things I didn't say. I don't think it's the best use of my time to indulge that.

> If you don't think the users who derive value from the app every day, and need it to keep existing, should be the ones who pay for that app to keep existing, well, I don't know what to tell you.

Show me where I said I don't think users should pay for the app to keep existing. I'm fine with paying for app releases. Once per release.

> There are other advantages for consumers too. For instance, you can pay like $20-30 for all Adobe's top-end apps for a month - to try them out or to do a one-off project now and then.

Cool! If it's such an advantage for consumers, I'm all for offering that. Just include a lifetime license as well. If rentware is so beneficial to consumers, then there wouldn't be any problem offering people a choice, correct? Let the market decide.

> But it's clear you think that continuing to make sure software works forever, fielding support issues from customers, making updates for every new OS feature, is "sitting back" and doing nothing

Again: Show me exactly where I said that. I'm getting tired of this; you saw that I said the exact opposite as far as updates. Regarding support, again, I have no problem charging for that. That's a service.

I'm disappointed by this last response of yours. You came off as reasonable initially, but the shift to deliberately misquoting me is not cool. I don't think you should do that; it implies a lot about how confident you are in your reasoning.

Anyway—I suspect the rentware fad will be over in a few years, since everyone hates it and subscription fatigue is still setting in. (Especially if a recession, which I think is coming, makes a lot of folks question why they're paying $50–$100 in subscriptions every month for software they would have owned a few years ago.) The market will settle down to either a hybrid—apps offered under both rentware and lifetime licensing—or simply back to charging a more reasonable one-time amount.

And devs will be fine; they'll just have to treat their businesses as actual businesses, not lifestyle passive-income streams. I'm good with that.

> That means judicious adding of things people really want, but also NOT adding crap just to add a bullet point on a box.

So if you didn't do anything, why should you get paid?

> those paid updates are very likely to either be not consequential enough to justify paying, or to add bloat. Presumably, when you bought the app, you were satisfied with the functionality it already had (and indeed if they make big changes it often gets hate just for the disruptiveness).

So if your updates aren't doing me any good, why should you get paid?

> But my point is software costs money (time) to support, forever. And once a product (especially a specialized one) has already found most of its buyers, that means the developer has every incentive to abandon the app because maintaining or updating it is never going to justify the cost.

Some things aren't meant to last forever. Some apps aren't meant to be ongoing business models. Apple isn't still producing the computers it sold in the 90s. Sunsetting a product and ending support for it is a natural part of a product's life cycle. This is how pretty much every company operates.

Part of running a successful company is handling change and continually innovating and evolving, not just expecting your customer base to subsidize your stagnancy.

> So yes, a developer doing your preferred model absolutely must have a half dozen apps ... The mature ones will be left to wither even if they are widely-used and popular, because there aren’t enough new buyers.

That's part of business. I can't think of any successful business with only one single product that it maintains for eternity. There might be one, but that's not how normal businesses operate.

> many modern apps have a server-side component which needs to be paid for forever.

I don't have a problem with paying for resources I'm actually using. I use a note-taking app that includes a cloud subscription for syncing across devices; I'm fine with paying for that, because I'm getting something in return that I actually want and use.

> The updates I’m talking about, which you “don’t want to pay for,” include “making the app continue to run on a current OS”

What I said—and what you included in your quote—was "maybe I don't feel I need any updates". I want a choice. "Stupid feature we added just to justify demanding 10 bucks a month from you" is one thing. "This app works on the latest OS release" is another.

Copying-and-pasting from above: I'm fine with paying for that, because I'm getting something in return that I actually want and use.

Your basic logic here is that you just want to write one little app and then sit back and have that one little app support you for the rest of your life. That's not a reasonable business model. I'm sorry if this sounds blunt, but that's just you wanting money without having to work for it.

Essentially you're trying to take an unprofitable way of working and force it to be profitable by demanding money you don't deserve. I think that's wrong. A lot of us think that's wrong. And I'd go so far as to say that, judging by every tech forum I'm active on, most of us—with the exception of a handful of wealthy tech influencers and their dev friends—think that's wrong.

So yeah. As I said: Grubby.

> they need to keep earning your money a little at a time

So release new products or paid updates, the way everyone did before subs.

> A one-time unlock front-loads 100% of revenue

Also known as "buying", which is a thing

> making all maintenance work have negative ROI unless the app experiences constant, consistent growth forever

Unless you release paid updates, which is what a number of developers do.

> Eventually that ceiling will be hit, and the app's revenue could drop to effectively zero, even if a million users count on it daily.

So don't put all your eggs in one basket. Have different products. Explore different things. You're essentially asking to be rewarded for stagnation here.

Subscriptions are about (1) being paid for work you didn't do, since you get paid whether you did anything or not; (2) disrespecting my choice as a consumer, since maybe I don't feel I need any updates and I don't want to pay for them, and (3) encouraging bloat, since there's more pressure to pack in needless features just so you can justify demanding payment every month.

You're basically saying "I need regular handouts because I couldn't make money otherwise." That's a problem with your business plan, and it doesn't justify demanding money for work you didn't do, or requiring me to pay for things I don't need.

I'll agree with you on one thing: years of free or artificially cheap software have conditioned people to not want to pay a lot for software. I always thought $0.99 per app was ridiculously low. I don't have a problem paying tens or even hundreds of dollars for good, powerful software, but I want to own it. If I'm going back through old files a decade or two from now, as a lot of us do, I want to be able to open them. And I don't want to have every one of my apps draining my bank account bit by bit.

If you want to offer a subscription for people who want every update you release, fine. At least they're getting something. But the fairer model is what a number of developers are doing: more money upfront, which includes a lifetime license and one year of updates (which is nice, but I would understand if they didn't include it).

There's a reason why so many people despise subscriptions, and why I doubt that model—while it seems to be the fad now—will ever be normalized. Most of us can't afford it, it denies us long-term access to our own content, and we know on a basic level that it's wrong.

The fact that this isn't grubby subscription pricing immediately puts this app on my radar as something worth buying. I was steeling myself to write it off as soon as I saw the "in-app purchases" section.

I'll agree that charging $6 for dark mode does come off as nickel-and-diming. Honestly, I'd have avoided a free version and just made the basic price at least $6, one-time, with options for larger donations to the dev if you really like it.

I hadn't heard of Kaleidoscope, but this is one of those utilities that I might have bought if it had a lifetime license, even an expensive one.

I won't spend even a second considering it now.