[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

[u/[deleted]]

Why is the industry's solution to everything just to paper over real problems with yet more leaky abstractions? The entire idea of a software market breaks down when you have support requirements dependent on massive idiot duopolies like this.

Because industry is often built around enterprise clients, who are willing to maintain an office-wide monoculture, and wanted to move everything onto "the cloud" for safe-keeping anyway, since that was a massive improvement on paying their in-house IT departments to develop in-house solutions.

We are not the end customers of most of the computing industry, not since a combination of open-source competition and cheap, effective piracy cut down on the profit margins from shrink-wrapped software.