Re: So much for German efficiency
Peanuts in comparison to the "new" Berlin airport, Elphi, Stuttgart 21 or any SAP project.
12110 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
or at least no worse than that of a battery.
Batteries have shit energy densities when compared with LPG or liquid fuels. These will not be replaced on a large scale by anthing that doesn't have comparable energy density.
Your electrolysis filling station is similarly whacko: all current examples are just there for the handouts. Machines may run on hydrogen but storage and transportation will be in another form.
People publish Open Source software because they're hobbyists who think others might find their work useful.
I am serious and I do run a reasonably popular open source project. Communicating clearly why your library works they way it does means you don't have to continually explain and justify it.
Not taking any shit from your users does not mean you have to treat them like shit. See the Mark Twain comment as to why this is important. The vast majority of users will be happy with what you have but some may well take the time to make worthwhile suggestions or submit patches / pull requests. The trolls are best just ignored (or banned).
Be[ing] a maintainer of large open source project is not a fun task. You['re] alway[s] face[d] with rude[ness] and hate, everyone knows better how to build software…
This could apply to any software project. The key is always communicating clearly and setting reasonable expectations. If your project is successful and popular you will attract the slugs, the uses who want it to do everything for them but aren't prepared to contribute. Be prepared to write "design defence" documentation to defend your decisions and be firm but fair. At the end of the day, you decide what gets accepted and what gets rejected. Some people will never accept this: get over it, because there are fuckwits all over the place, but don't get dragged into their discussions. As I think Mark Twain said: don't argue with an idiot, they'll drag you down to their level and win.
But, one of the great things about open source, be prepared to walk away and let someone else take over. Software development and review takes time and energy which we don't always have as much as we'd like. Our lives and priorities change.
Kaggle is a bit of fun, but it should be obvious to anyone with any experience of online competitions that anything where something can be won will attract cheats.
Companies see Kaggle at its ilk as a cheap way of getting solutions to problems and that is their problem. And any company that values ratings in such competitions is also asking to be screwed.
Why does your printer and scanner require specific software?
I'm not sure if it requires it. It certainly comes with it and it won't work with Catalina. I think I bought it in 2013 and replacement cycles for printers are much longer than for PCs.
Again, this isn't really about going 64-bit (Apple fumbled the transition in Snow Leopard but has since been fairly consistent) but about APIs that Apple wants to remove.
Many vendors updated their mac apps to 64bit years ago, so they just continue working if you update to catalina and users don't notice a thing.
And some didn't and users are being punished (by Apple) as a result.
And the software for my printer and scanner? Apple seems to want us on I-Phone refresh cycles for everything… Again, whatever you think of the merits of the approach and of the relevant developers, it's customers who're actually getting punished.
I'm sure Apple will miss you. Not.
Yes, because I'm the only person who's pissed off at this kind of behaviour. Look through history at how well companies have done with this kind of approach. A 32-bit VM would have been a cheap and easy way to solve this for everyone.
but it requires the OS to contain (and maintain) mountains of code to allow cross-compatibility.
For x86 and x86_64? Not really. It's always more work for the application developer. But this is really more about Apple's fairly rapid turnover of APIs in the last few years and it tries to force MacOS into an IOS corset.
You really can't say that they didn't give enough notice.
It's not just the ability to compile to x86_64 but also the changes in the APIs, which have been extensive over the last few years. I have quite a lot of software that will not run on Catalina and don't expect to use it as a result. But this is fine by me: I don't have any iThingies, don't use any of Apple's online services so the walled garden of convergence holds no appeal for me.
This approach, which punishes the user, is actually untypical for Apple. The shift from PowerPC to Intel was handled much better, but there remains a fundamental problem with the value proposition: porting costs money and on its own brings no discernible beneift.
That's basically it: Apple wanted some kind of intermediary language for developers. In a sense it's competing with Dart and Typescript and the other also rans. Rust has at least carved itself a niche in the systems world. For the rest, it's increasingly looking like be able to compile to Web Assembly is all that matters.
Apple hasn't helped by being lukewarm about the project: slow to open source it and not giving it the kind of resources Google likes to throw at projects. That said, it's probably got a dedicated group of happy users.
USB A & B haven't changed, though USB 3 is a completely different beast so it's essentially USB 2 + USB 3 crammed into the same mechanical package. USB-C attempts to solve common problems assoiated with the nearly symmetrical USB design: if it had been asymmetric from the start lots of people wouldn't have damaged cables and ports by jamming them the wrong way round. And this is easy to get wrong with micro-USB: the port on my reader is handily inverted from the way it generally is on a phone but I can only see this clearly if I take my glasses off and look at it closely.
So, symmetric wasn't a requirement, but there's no doubt that USB-C is much more user friendly than USB-B ever was.
I'd be interested to see just how may people actually would go back to Opera were they to release the much maligned integrated mail client. I'd bet not that many after all.
Probably not many, though I think Opera Mail (which itself borrowed many ideas from BeOS) was great. E-mail, for those of us still using it, is moving towards things like Spike, which follow a similar view not folder-based approach with some ML thrown in supposedly to make our lives easier.
Personally, I think it's got better by focussing on being a better browser rather than trying to do everything. It's noticeably faster and more reliable since they switched to the new engine. This doesn't mean I agree with the dumbing down of the UI, but, on balance, I think they've got most things right.
Vivaldi is probably still the only browser that's trying to cram more and more features into the browser but, because they messed up a few things and have consistently failed to deliver the promised mail cient, I jumped ship to Firefox and MailMate, which I even pay for. I used to pay for Opera and would consider paying for Firefox if it meant that I could get real support.
Yeah, GPL is mainly about ideology but also an invitation for lawyers. I have several contracts that explicitly forbid GPL code for customer projects because of this.
This doesn't mean that there isn't a threat posed by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, RedHat, et al. potentially extinguishing some open source development because there the only ones that can make money and, hence, pay developers, but the fiddling with the licence won't change this.
though isn't it a basic law and not a constitution
It's both: Grundgesetz == basic law and Verfassung == constitution. The two are used interchangeably.
There are several issues where the GCC has unequivocally ceded sovereignty to the ECJ. The ECB judgement made reference to it – the ECJ sits above the GCC – but the ECB was trying to do things that weren't covered by its mandate (buying national debt directly is explicitly prohibited) so that the Bundesbank could, and is, restricted in its asset purchases. The rulings from "Karlsruhe" as the court is also referred, though another court also sits there, are usually very well worth reading.
The German Constitutional Court has already agreed in several instances that sovereignty may be ceded to the relevant supranational institutions: UN, ECJ and the ECB being notable examples. Brexit is a problem, but for the EU fortunately only for a couple of weeks. After that the rules can be redrafted so that the UK isn't a compulsory signatory but can join as an observer (similar agreements with non-EU states exist).
Text documents are really pretty easy to do in an SGML/XML environment because the number of nodes is limited. Spreadsheets are a real nightmare.
The "native" apps are probably nothing more than wrapped web-views and will remain shit until web assembly becomes a standard compile target.
Reworking a Chrome App into a PWA is mainly about packaging and, to be fair, Google is only depreacting a proprietary format because it supports an open one.
I don't know about you, but I only ever used one Chrome App, and that was to see what the fuss was about. It's pretty much the same story with Web Assembly replacing NaCl.
Google doesn't actually care: it uses licence agreements to enforce GMS. If Samsung has a deal with Facebook to install its shit on phones, then Google can do nothing about this.
But Google isn't the right person to talk to about this. This can, and should, be handled by consumer protection legislation. Unfortunately, in the US at least, this usually means post facto injury suits targetting limited liability, because consumer protection exists in name only, because everyone hates regulations, right?
I can't drink black tea without milk or lemon juice: the physical reaction is simply too strong. Never tastes greasy to me, but, in hard water areas it's likely to taste sweet because of the lactose in the milk. NB. without some kind of acid regulator, it's not so good for the teeth.
Black tea also has anti-oxidants and, as long as you don't drink it with sugar – which only perverts do – has long been considered to be "beneficial". Or at least not harmful. Fermentation is a trade off: personally I find green tea very harsh. I seem to recall that tea is also a good source of fluoride, but could be wrong.
The entry-level Mate X model retails at roughly $2,500 — or nearly eight times the monthly minimum wage in Shenzhen, where the company is headquartered.
Yes, it's expensive so average earnings are not really relevant for comparison. More important are the number of people in China earning say USD 200,000 a year, that can afford such status symbols. This might only be a tiny percentage of the working population to still be a significant number of total sales. For example, assume there are around 800 million working Chinese, you're looking at around 0.25 % of these keen on having the latest shiny, shiny, ie. a high-end flagship every year, especially if it's something that other people don't have.
I think the number of fatal accidents is still low in absolute terms, though there have been some impressive records: first fatal accident in less 48 hours when they were introduced in Sweden. But the injuries are nearly always worse than for cyclists travelling at similar speeds: different centre of gravity, shorter wheelbase with much smaller wheels, different stance. Unles involving a motorised vehicle most cycling injuries are superficial. On a scooter they almost always break of fracture something badly.