EU recently passed ban on selling cars from 2035, plus taxation etc.. So every car should be electric eventually. It takes decades (30 years) to build new new power plants, power lines etc..
So to make this plan realistic, there should be 50 (maybe 100) power plants under construction or in planning phase right now. Instead we are closing down power plants and reducing electric grid capacity!
my answer was everything - you miss the entire computing experience if you use windows or linux on desktop today or android on mobile. In 2022, if you aren’t using Apple you’re in the red. You might as well not have bothered. Windows is worse than nothing. Android is worse than nothing. Linux is awesome for servers, but the desktop experience isn’t quite there.
I’ve used all the platforms. Windows and android are incompetent, poorly designed, serve the user LAST, poorly updated, insecure, spying on you, and annoying AF to use. Worse than nothing. Worse than no computer or phone at all.
Just trying to help really. Using the wrong products has done a great deal of damage to me. Using windows instead of a nix back in the day blocked my progress. Android shares a number of windows like traits. Being a commercial imitation of an Apple product for instance. Or serving the user last. Or just being crap software full of bugs.
If you can't listen, your punishment is to keep using imitation product. Harsh. But it is what it is.
For the record, I'm very familiar with most of the OSs you mentioned: Windows, Linux, MacOS, and Android (on a variety of devices). And I think the only fair statement is that they each have unique strengths and weaknesses. You can worship MacOS to high heavens, but it is also lacking in many ways and owning a MacBook comes with numerous downsides (as well as upsides), compared to a Windows laptop.
The only OS I don't have much experience with is iOS. I've stayed with Android the whole time - largely with Samsung. A high end Samsung phone is an absolute powerhouse, while also looking pretty sleek, if I may say so. I personally think that iOS and iPhones are quite limiting in certain ways. But I would never knock on someone for using iOS. The OS and the phone look very nice and trendy, the whole experience is very well optimized and, at least in the U.S., you'll get certain social perks by having one. Even for older folks, it could be a great choice, because their grandkids will be able to fix most problems that could arise in their phones.
Let me revisit a prior point about iPhones - they're not very customizable. On my Samsung, I have a number of customizations: a custom "launcher" ("Nova"), which enables me to tweak things like icon sizes, density, and many many other things (my favorite feature is to use a custom icon set). I could easily keep naming countless other aspects that Android allows me to customize, even if I only customize a few of them. The default experience of a Samsung phone is quite solid, other than maybe having a few too many Samsung-specific apps pre-installed (though at least I never buy through a carrier, so I don't have to worry about any of that bloat). But it's very trivial to nerf them by disabling them or even simply uninstalling them using "pm-uninstall" through ADB. For me, it takes maybe 20 minutes total to apply various tweaks I like to a brand new phone. I have them all written down neatly and they haven't changed much for a while, so applying those customizations is not bother for me at all. But for others? It would be an unimaginable punishment. Many people prefer to buy an iPhone not only for all the benefits I listed out earlier, but also because it is more restrictive. Because of this, you don't have to deal with any of the 'pain' of trying to decide what should be customized and whether you should do so in the first place. But would I judge anyone for taking either route: 1) a Samsung that you customize to a reasonable extent - without rooting or unlocking the bootloader - vs 2) an iPhone that is effectively at stock settings, other than the apps you've downloaded? No, I absolutely would not. Which brings me to my last point..
I think we live in amazing times in terms of technology (aside from the obvious issues related to privacy and social media, which are discussed at great lengths here and elsewhere). We have many choices in terms of hardware and software and our devices can do things we could hardly fathom a few decades ago. I rather arbitrarily chose to focus on smart phones in my rant, but I could have easily discussed laptops, desktops, servers, or some other type of device to make the same point. So I say, "Live and let live."
Random, unregulated... Now try and use this argument against regular bikes. They suffer from the same problem for the same reasons. Having a motor or not has nothing to do with it.
Why does it matter whether an e-scooter is "powered"? Mine has a 500W motor and the power cuts off above 20 km/h. I'd be much more dangerous on a regular bike.
Me having or not having to spin my legs around has nothing to do with anything.
You are free to not spin your legs out of where I walk, unless you do so at reasonable speed and give me right of way. Normally I don't see that happening.
Where do you live? AirPods are completely transparent to me, i.e. I don't even consciously notice if a person is wearing them (just like I don't really notice earrings or watches).
Instead of building fast native application delivery and sandboxing we're taking the longer way around and reinventing OSes inside a document (!) browser.
Blame the OS vendors. There's no money in making an OS secure enough to run arbitrary portable code from a decentralized marketplace in a sandbox. All the money is in monopolizing app distribution, forcing use of their proprietary SDKs and APIs, and deleting any app they feel like "for your protection" (and also some other reasons but don't mind those...).
Blame web developers. There's no money in making web pages simple enough to be delivered to the client as fully functional hypertext without running arbitrary code. All the money is in stalking users across the app, forcing them to watch ads and navigate paywalls, and denying service to any ad blocker they feel like "for their survival" (and also some other reasons).
Oh, come on. Don't pretend like there are zero web apps with useful functionality. Or would you prefer Google Maps shut down and we all go back to Yahoo Maps where we click an arrow button that reloads the entire page with a new map tile displayed?
Oh yes. Not the slightest hyperbole. That would be amazing.
What we have now really is a tragedy of the commons situation.
edit: Google maps (or equivalent) is a true game-changer that has a lot of value and one of the very few websites with actual value from javascript. But, we could just use Google Earth as a separate application for it. Just as we did in the early days when google maps on the web was a poor fit.
But Google Earth was a terrible app with inconsistent UI! To my mind it’s one of the posterchildren of why making crossplatform native apps often ends up a total mess.
I feel like when everyone says “this should be a native app” their imagined app is absolutely flawless and integrates seamlessly on every OS. But reality has rarely matched that ideal.
Let’s take Google Docs as an example. A word processor where you can collaboratively edit a file with someone simply by sharing a link, without requiring anyone to install an application. How do you do this without the web and JavaScript?
That experience is one of the most empowering things we’ve ever invented. To me, “sacrificing the web” would be giving that up for your vision of purity.
Compared to just clicking a link and immediately having it working, yes. Installing software also has much bigger security implications than just visiting a website. And that’s if the application even works on my OS!
This is a total non sequitur in the context of the question implied by the top level comment, which is about why native app platforms haven't fixed some crucial issues that the web solved a long time ago.
Another way of looking at it is that we're inventing an app sandbox at the web browser level.
I'm not a huge fan of a lot of web apps either but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of introspection on the part of native app proponents. They're faster, they consume less memory, yet overwhelmingly people choose to make apps using web technologies. Why isn't anyone interested in exploring why native failed to offer what these people wanted?
Because many developers don't care about the user and UX.
They care only about themselves
It's easier for them to develop and easier to put trackers inside to monetize their work.
Bloated pages, crappy performance, battery draining? Who cares.
> I wish, most of the time web apps are either optimized for mobile phone, tablet or desktop not all three of them.
This. I'm fed-up of "mobile first". I know why it's done, more website hits are from phones than desktop/laptop systems. But "first" is supposed to mean that something comes after; an awful lot of projects aren't "mobile first", they're simply designed for mobile.
I hate smartphones. I can't use them. I can't read the screen properly, and my fingers all turn to thumbs when I try to interact with them. I own one, so that I can call a taxi when I'm out, and so I can receive SMS messages. And some government services require a mobile number. But I have no data plan, and my smartphone normally just sits on my desk.
Just wanted to call out point 4 — native apps can absolutely change without your knowledge and execute malicious code as well. And the potential risk is higher for native apps (on desktop, at least) — the browser sandbox is another advantage of web apps!
I don’t think this qualifies as introspection. You’re genuinely saying the only reason no one makes cross platform native apps is because the developers are lazy? You can’t think of anything else that turns people away?
There is no real cross platform, either the apps are native and take advantage of all the benefits or they are cross-platform and only represent what is possible on all systems, usually with poor performance and more space consumption.
For years I've been hearing about better frameworks and better tools for web development, but then when I open a website on the go, there are very often issues with rendering ot performance not to mention that a simple website consumes a large portion of my data bandwidth.
This also happens with native apps but more often with web apps.
> Why isn't anyone interested in exploring why native failed to offer what these people wanted?
I haven't looked into this in detail, but I did started out programming in QBasic, used Delphi for over 20 years on Windows, and done cross-platform (all three) with WxWidgets and Qt, and I have given this some idle thought over the last few years.
I'm sure the truth is multi-faceted, but I feel it's primarily a combination of smartphones, lack of good cross-platform UI toolkits with low barrier to entry and the rise of SaaS.
Existing programs were not a good fit for smartphones. You couldn't easily take your existing C++ product and just recompile it. Simultaneously, smartphones required drastically simpler UIs, simple enough that a web page could be sufficient.
While cross-platform applications were possible with toolkits like WxWidgets and Qt, for most non-trivial programs you'd still end up with a ton of special cases needing handling. In one project we had one developer tweaking the OSX build, changing fonts and layouts to make it look and behave "proper" on that platform. It was better with Qt, but not perfect.
Also, these toolkits require a lot of ceremony to get going. Making a basic web page and adding some rudimentary javascript is quite easy, it's interactive and it's visual, which is great for learning. It's way more exciting to program something visual than mess around on a command prompt. I know many who became programmers through this route, people who otherwise hadn't thought about becoming programmers. Many of these have not moved much beyond the frontend.
Most people though don't really want to deal with computers. They want to use them, but not have to mess with them. Figuring out how to install and maintain applications, keeping track of security updates and all that jazz. This goes for individuals as well as companies. Thus the rise of SaaS.
Now, where I currently work we provide a hybrid SaaS-ish model for a Win32 desktop application. Customers provide the metal or VM, and we install and maintain the server software and client applications. However most customers don't really want to host servers in-house, and for us it's a pain to deal with all the various IT departments and their peculiarities. So both want to move to a proper SaaS, where the servers are hosted by us. Customers also want to be able to use Mac's.
This means we need a proper frontend/backend split regardless. No more direct connection to the database server. With that in mind, if you have a not-too-complex application, maybe a web page frontend is easier for both developer and user?
Now for our case, we have a complex CRUD application, so it's not so clear-cut. But if you have a relatively simple application with a handful of controls, then the choice seems to be much easier to me.
It's amazing how stuck up people here on Hacker News are.
You've provided info on how Green Energy isn't green, as requested. You went far and beyond what they asked for and now they downvote you because it's inconvenient information.
Obvious China Shill is Obvious.
(China is the #1 beneficiary of Green Energy policy in the US, they buy off politicians to push this agenda so we are forced to buy Green Energy products that are only made in China currently)
Wow. I’m supposed to do a PHDs worth of work on a topic? I gave multiple arguments because the OP appeared to not now about the externalities of EV and the renewables in general. Love this site. The site of “science”.
You either get a chop-chop-chop, or a bzzzt, both incredibly loud. It's not the engine that makes the noise, it's mostly the propeller/rotor. The only advantage of electric VTOLs is easier manufacturing and better control.
Well, for instance, if they could line up the harmonics to create a missing fundamental (eg with the addition of external sounds), they could make propellers present an artificially lower pitch.
I would say the most viable solution is to not subject hundreds of thousands of people to an incredible amount of noise pollution, so that a couple of playboys get to skip a taxi ride to the airport.
Private-transport helicopters or equivalents have no place in cities. The gain is in no way worth the cost.
To complement that: they are only viable because they are heavily subsidized by the suffering of city dwellers. If you placed the cost of air pollution on the bill, they'd be much more expensive.
Its not just unreasonable because the person flying gets less utility that is otherwise lost. It is also an unfair form of theft.
You can stream games on a 25 Mbps connection if your latency is low enough. Now imagine downloading not a 30GB, but a 90GB game, and on this 25Mbps connection instead of your 960Mbps one.
> An email requesting system access went out to all employees . It triggered a reply to all frenzy that resulted in my blackberry pinging constantly for over an hour with people replying-to-all asking to be removed from the distribution list. Even Mike Lazaridis replied to all asking this to be stopped. Then as different parts of the globe started work, they would reply to all. Classic evening. I think system admins eventually shut down the frenzy at server level. Some of the replies were hilarious though. I think I still have some screenshots somewhere.
How are ICE cars being "banned" soon?
How will the consumption quadruple and why do you think that increased consumption won't be accompanied by infrastructure upgrades?