For many organisations there is a real risk that a browser update will unexpectedly break a key internal application, which could have a catastrophic impact on operations.
The vast majority of large companies will control and test key software updates, balancing the various risks (security patches, obsolescence, operational incidents..).
Not allowing auto-updating to be controlled basically means that the software is not intended to be deployed in enterprises.
I prefer Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR)¹ for this though. Every year (currently in March) the current normal Firefox version (that does auto-update) is forked for a new ESR support cycle and made available for acceptance. Three months later if all is stable, it replaces the previous ESR release series, and for a year corporate IT gets a browser that will only be updated with critical (security) updates; no new features, no removal of features. At the end of that year the cycle repeats itself, and you can roll out the new ESR series when you've confirmed everything works as it should.
Most of those horror stories won't happen if you go through the upgrade cycle once a year. A year's worth of chances is manageable for whoever is maintaining the software, three or five years worth of browser features will make the heart of any developer sink.
It is a fallacy to believe that you can stave off updating a modern internet connected browser indefinitely; the IE6/7/8 hell has driven that lesson home in the industry, and security updates are a necessity. If you do need to stay with one particular browser version, then you use a virtual machine or some other properly sandboxed environment to offer it. You can keep running IE6 on Windows XP for as long as you like with a VM that thinks its the year 2003 and which for some reason can only reach http://oldunmaintainedapp.legacy.intranet.example.com. That's fine too (although I would hate to maintain that solution).
Couldn't orgs just use multiple browsers to reduce risk? With some monitoring of which clients are used, one could remove e.g ie8 support once it's established that every internal product has been used long enough with ie10
This works reasonably well for applications that are used daily or weekly (deprecation notifications help). But then, after you phased out IE8 after months of no problems with IE10, during the holiday period the accountant tries to close the yearly accounts, finds that the form does not work with IE10, and hell breaks loose.
Can't you just build on HTML and JavaScript api's that are widely utilized and accepted? I know before I call something I'm unfamiliar with I'll look up what browsers support it. Most of the problems with IE versions have to do with plugins be it ActiveX or a Java applet. In my mind that isn't a web app but an application packed in a web browser (often so the consultants can call it a web app, "you go to a website to lauch it, see?”)
> Can't you just build on HTML and JavaScript api's that are widely utilized and accepted?
Absolutely. I still have websites that I designed with ie6 in mind that work just fine. But if modern design trends are any indication, it just won't happen. Designers want too many of the new flashy features.
Some computer languages are case-sensitive for their identifiers (C, C++, Java, C#, Verilog, Ruby and XML). Others are case-insensitive (i.e., not case-sensitive), such as Ada, most BASICs (an exception being BBC BASIC), Fortran, SQL and Pascal.
> Far from it. They are not deposit constrained, no matter how much mainstream economics likes to think so.
But there are important constraints - from the overview in the article you linked to:
"Although commercial banks create money through lending,
they cannot do so freely without limit. Banks are limited in how much they can lend if they are to remain profitable in a competitive banking system. Prudential regulation also acts as a constraint on banks’ activities in order to maintain the resilience of the financial system. "
The main constraint is called Capital Adequacy, and is based on the requirement for a bank to hold some of its own money in reserve compared to the amount of loans it issues. And importantly this money held in reserve must be money that is not pledged to anyone or anything else - i.e. cannot be money from depositors or from issued loans. The banks cannot easily increase this amount of unpledged money (which is called Tier 1 Capital) and hence it acts as a real limit on the amount they can lend.
I think the article is mixing up banking with payment processing (payment processing is an important but small part of retail and wholesale banking).
Retail banks make most of their money by charging for loans - either individual overdrafts, personal loans or coporate loans. For apple to be a profitable bank they would have to start assessing businesses and individuals for creditworthiness. It seems quite far from their current business model and not obvious why they would want all the regulatory oversight that comes with it.
They're better capitalized than most banks and have nearly the entire infrastructure set up for end to end payments processing, I'm proposing acquiring Square to complete their processing arm. So why not be a bank AND a payments processor? They can run the bank as a separate entity and not have the regulatory scrutiny come down on the whole company.
Although a similar argument could have been made as societies industrialised, that once the value of farming work fell (which nearly everyone did), then there would be mass unemployment. It didn't play out that way.
The idea that loans can never be paid back is a myth. I can lend someone money, and have it paid back with interest without more loans being necessary or more money being created.
Yes, some people will be able to pay off the loan + interest but this anecdote ignores the others that by design cannot. As Hörmann explains, the amount of money in existence + the amount of money that is contracted as being owed is a negative sum.
Well the banking model is to take demand deposits to issue longer term loans. Is that bad? People want loans, people want to deposit cash... Why should banks not operate this way?
Would it be better not to have deposits and loans?
I didn't say anything about good or bad in my post - I'm just commenting about what is.
I suspect that you (and probably other readers) are injecting some of the sentiment around the "You're the product, not the customer" meme that surrounds advertising-supported tech companies. I don't think those are bad things either, but a number of other HN readers do. I'm just pointing out that this business model has existed for centuries.
I think there used to be a balanced trade - like exists in many small banks and credit unions now. For holding your money with FDIC insurance and whatnot, the banks got fractional reserve and the right to lend your money at a particular interest rate - which they then shared a small piece of.
Now, banks are predatory. They charge you fees for everything (including having a deposit account!!), barely if at all share revenues derived from your money, and routinely flirt with disastrous insolvency, propped up only by the largest government on Earth.
That's why people feel like they've gone from customer to Matrix-style energy plant.
I think "supplier" would've been a more accurate term when bank accounts actually paid interest. Savings accounts at my bank pay 0.01%; standard CD rates top out at 0.05% for a 1-year.
(I do have a high-yield online-only savings account that pays significantly more than that, and feel like I'm much more of a supplier to them, although in some way "supplier" connotes that I'm actively doing work to provide a product or service for them, which I don't feel toward my bank. But the article is about retail banks; the bargain with most retail banks these days is "They give you convenience; you give them money, which they can loan out to make more money." That's much more like the bargain that Internet companies and TV make than the one that say AdSense, App Developers, and Uber make.)
You say this implies causation... I have my doubts in any sense of the word implies.
For sure, a correlation could lead to something to investigate, but look at enough data and you will find plenty of correlations that mean nothing. A lot depends on how the correlation is discovered (number of variables involved etc.).
>You say this implies causation... I have my doubts in any sense of the word implies.
Couples divorcing people their partner got fat on margarine?
Besides that's not the best way to check correlation charts. You first have to remove bias components influencing both curves, e.g. the mere act that both are rising over time.
When you do that, do they still match each other, e.g. following increases and decreases? I very much doubt so. So this plot doesn't actually show correlation -- just that both "increase" over time in a similar way.
The same kind of "same plot trends" happens or every set of things that e.g. both have an exponential growth curve -- but it's not correlation unless both change consistently as the other changes.
A lot of the confusion comes from the fact that there are two sorts of money that are in circulation: base money and bank money. This blog post is only talking about bank money, and does not reference base money.
Base money (dollar bills, Euro notes, pound notes etc.) is controlled entirely by the central bank and base money can be created and destroyed by the central bank, whenever they like. Think of it as like digging some more gold or creating some more bitcoins.
Bank money is created by people either depositing base money with a bank, or indeed by a bank issuing a loan as described in the blog post. A deposit can be seen as a loan to the bank: all deposits are loans, all loans are deposits when looked at from the other PoV. Anyway, bank money has similar characteristics to base money - it can be used by purchase goods, it stores value etc.
I can buy a book with base money, by handing the merchant a few dollar bills. Or I can buy the book with bank money, by handing my bank card to the merchant and after some settlement magic my bank will stop owing me some money and will instead owe it to the merchant. The IOU is the bank money, it is a claim on base money that was previously deposited. Base money and bank money act similarly from my PoV, they are both denominated in dollars (or Euros or pounds or...) and they are normally interchangeable at a 1:1 rate. Sometimes they are not.. e.g. if my bank was nearly going bankrupt with no deposit insurance, I might be happy to get my base money back at 80 cents on the dollar from my bank money. Bank money has credit risk of the bank, base money has no counterparty risk.
Banks do need to have reserves of base money relative to the amount of bank money they are allowed to create; this is called Capital Adequacy and is a primary restraint on bank money creation. A bank has a limited amount of capital (its own real base money that is not owed to anyone else) and it cannot easily create more capital. If a bank is lending out too much to borrowers, then its Capital Adequacy Ratio will get out of line and it will have to stop lending.
Base money is 3% of all money. Go ahead pull the lot out. It won't matter. Only parking meters that can't take cards will feel it.
Reserves are unconstrained as banks lend to each other after creating credit via deposits from borrowers. If two banks create 400k and then each borrower buys land with this 400k and the seller then deposits the fresh "money" with one another's bank they have 400k credit. Demand is pulled forward and the credit will be destroyed only when it is paid down.
Money supply since the end of the gold standard (I'm not a goldbug) has rocketed. What constrained the near vertical rise? Nothing.
Capital is absolutely not unconstrained! It is one of the most difficult things for a bank to increase its capital base.
Base money is a low percentage compared to bank money - its true - but all bank money is a claim on base money. Pull out the base money and every bank has a liquidity crisis and would in turn have to recall every loan. More than parking meters would feel it; a bank cannot issue a loan without appropriate capital base, and only high quality liquid unencumbered assets can be considered capital, which cannot be created by a bank (a new loan/deposit is not an unencumbered asset). In practice capital can only be increase by a new share issue or by retaining profits over years.
I read the bank underground blog post. It is fine and interesting, but it is talking entirely about bank money creation (loans/deposits) and not about base money or capital ratios. That's OK, no reason for an article to talk about everything. But just because one article doesn't talk about capital in the point it is making, doesn't mean that capital is not an important constraint in banking.
There is a reason why bank CEOs have been in recent years judged heavily on their Tier 1 capital ratios, and why they consider it difficult to adjust these ratios. Issuing a new loan makes the bank's capital ratio worse not better.
linux on the desktop failed for the same basic reasons many startups fail. They didn't listen to their users or focus on making a product that their users wanted.
By users I mean the core market of Windows - the business desktop. How often did linux outreach staff come to a large business and listen to the concerns of the customers? Never (in my experience). How often did Microsoft do this? Often (again in my experience).
It's confusing when you address Linux this way. Most Linux distributions are not for-profit, so they're going to have any staff going to businesses. Plus, even if they did, they'd have to offer support, which they aren't able to.
The only distributions that can do that are the enterprise paid ones, and those are mostly meant for the server side. AFAIK there isn't really an enterprise desktop distribution of Linux really intended for that kind of use. Linux on the desktop is what it is -- it's an option for those who want it. Market share is not a big consideration at all.
Another element is that anything above the kernel is subject to change at whim of some primadonna developer.
MS has in the past bent over backward to maintain binary compatibility.
Some of the same attitude is present in the kernel mantra of not breaking userspace, but userspace devs seems all to happy to break stuff at the drop of a hat.
The vast majority of large companies will control and test key software updates, balancing the various risks (security patches, obsolescence, operational incidents..).
Not allowing auto-updating to be controlled basically means that the software is not intended to be deployed in enterprises.