troyunrau

troyunrau, 1 year ago

This is a marketing trick, part of the shrinkflation treadmill.

(1) Step one, make a box with three rows of cookies.

(2) Step two, make two products, one with two rows (at a slightly lower price than the three rows), and introduce a Family Size/Share Size/etc. with four rows that costs just under double.

(3) Step three, return two step one, but now with a higher price.

Repeat ad nauseum.

The thing is, as a single consumer who is trying to buy at the best price point at any given time, I’ll fall for it repeatedly.

troyunrau, 1 year ago

Not sure if it’s still the same as it was back in my day, but KDE’s “release candidate” nomenclature was always a bit of a misnomer. You’d never see RC1 actually released as final. What it really means is that the alpha “feature refinement” beta “bug fixing” phase is over, and it’s the final testing phase for showstoppers. However, the definition of showstopper seemed always to be very wide. Thus, a lot of bugs still get reported and fixed during this phase, and RC really means “beta, but towards the end of the pipeline”.

Which is in contrast to the Linux kernel where a RC can be declared ship-ready and simply get renamed.

Admittedly there’s a fairly large impact difference between kernel level bugs, and say a bug in Okular…

troyunrau, 1 year ago

If you’re as old as I am, you’ll recall software using the term “gamma” release instead of “release candidate” for that phase. ;)