If there is a larger shift to companies paying for the software they rely on that is currently free, it's not going to be companies paying open-source maintainers, it's going to be companies paying other companies that they can sign contracts with and pass legal responsibility to.
Adam, the problem I'm running into is due to the IP proxy I normally use having been changed from ARIN to RIPE due to an ownership change at the hosting datacenter, which is still in NYC. Thus, nevertheless, I show up as coming from the UK, it looks like, when I access Cloudflare-protected sites in the US, and I'm running into more and more of them. The local newspaper, grocery store, credit card co's, etc., It seems that Cloudflare IPv6 geolocation is broken, and interferes even if you're coming from an IPv4. This is just asking for trouble if you ask me.
Troubleshooting done. If it's any consolation, I don't think Cloudflare is the only offender. Geolocation is a crappy idea to begin with, if you ask me.
When I started having this problem logging into a certain credit card co.'s website beginning with about Firefox 105.0.2 on Fedora 38, I was told by their apparently outsourced customer service that I had to use Chrome, which I don't have installed there and couldn't try. Yeah, they wanted me to use LogMeIn so they could fix the problem, too. Right.
Firefox on Android was still working, though, loathe as I am to put passwords of any significance on my phone. Doesn't directly address your question, which I'd like to know the answer to as well.
Brings me back. My company "upgraded" the time entry system at the beginning of this century.. Issue, our whole dev team was on unix (hpux, Solaris) and used firefox, which didn't work anymore (IE only). They solution to have 3 separate terminals we would "cytrix" into an NT machine to do our time machine on Internet Explorer...
PayPal's "secure browser" effectively becomes broken by Firefox's first part isolation. that took some time to figure out.
In terms of being blocked by CloudFront (not cloudflare),I actually got a website to fix their policies by just emailing their tech support and showing that simple user-agent changes bypasses their policy anyhow.
If my own bank/credit card blocked Firefox I would cancel with them. I'm pointing out that this isn't really normal or justifiable.
To your specific point about just moving elsewhere, complaining in public about bad industry practices is part of Capitalism and part of how consumers regulate the free market. "Take your business elsewhere instead of complaining" has never really been how this has worked; businesses don't get to opt out of being shamed just because they have a cancellation form, and they shouldn't have any expectation that users will or should be quiet about their bad business practices. The free market is not a replacement for criticism within social spaces; the free market works alongside that criticism and is reinforced by that criticism.
Public complaining is an essential part of how consumers within a free market coordinate with each other and educate each other about abusive corporate behavior, and it serves as an additional mechanism alongside boycotts and cancellations to help punish bad actors in the market.
> I'm pointing out that this isn't really normal or justifiable.
Oh well, what can you do? Vote with your wallet. Tell everyone on HN and Reddit. I agree. But at a certain point it wastes too much of my energy, so I'll basically just cancel cand tell them I can not use their service because reasons, very disappointed, bye.
Maybe back when standarts where on shaky ground and different versions of the same content was made? I too cant see the performance advantage of it. Deprioritizing less mainstream browsers to mess with the nerds?
Ahhh yes I remember those days... if you wanted to use advanced IE-only features, send to one codebase, if you wanted broader compatability, send to another. Similar to how mobile websites used to work. Thanks for the ideas! Any other hypotheses?
Dunno about "we", but I learned to recognize self-serving bullshit when I see it, from people who have no concern for my aspirations in particular, and those of humanity in general, only their own, and those of those paying their way with the fruits of your and my labor. Too bad their only aspiration in the end is just that, sticking their heads further up their asses, dragging along as many of the rest of us as they can.
What's next is more of the same, as we've seen over the last few years.
Good a time as any to ask if anyone has come across the sources for the OS. Bob Supnik has been looking for it a long time for simh. The story is it disappeared at some point into the bowels of the company that took over the service contracts for these machines. Possibly Indian. Anyone know for sure or have any contacts?
I remember at CCE (consumer electronics company in Brazil) they had an A-6 with hot failover to a bank’s A-10 across the street. It was pretty normal to see the MCP guru reading the source code for the OS (in ALGOL).
"Burroughs software was designed to run only on proprietary hardware. For this reason, Burroughs was free to distribute the source code of all software it sold, including the MCP, which was designed with this openness in mind. "
You can download an official emulator from their website. It’s proprietary and runs on Windows, and you have to sign a license promising you’ll only use it for development.
But I have to warn you: It is one of the most user hostile OSs I’ve have ever seen.
If anyone thinks vi or Emacs are hard, they should play with CANDE.
Part of the technical school tranship was on OS/400 state of the art in early 1990's doing system backups to tapes, I also did my typing exam for computing in PCs running MS-DOS 3.3 with edlin, I think CANDE is manageable. :)
CANDE is not software you use. It's software you fight and submit to your will. It's a bit like Emacs, but made by people with 4-digit IQs, for people with 4-digit IQs.
Unisys has been very supportive of our efforts to find and preserve early Burroughs software and generously provided corporate time to arrange licensing and provide copies of anything they still had.
Burroughs B5000 series now has a rich library of software and several emulator implementations (web-browser, simh and standalone). However the B6000/7000 family software recovery is sparse with critical pieces still missing, we are unable to bootstrap a working MCP as yet.
Nice to know, navigating the site to get stuff like the latest NEWP manuals, the new Web interface and other similar stuff, seems to have moved into "talk to sales" kind of stuff, so hence why I was wondering that.
somewhat ironic, but I'd say effective.