Maybe we'll wake up and realize that putting WiFi and stupid "cloud enabled" Internet of Shit hardware into everything was an absolutely terrible idea.
What exactly does "produced" mean in this context? That the final assembly was done here, software was written here, PCB was assembled here, SoCs and ICs wwre manufactured here, or something else? Regardless, while consumer routers are 9 of 10 times insecure garbage, it's hard to think of any that aren't manufactured outside the US.
RockAuto also has what some might consider a "dated" interface, but honestly it's light years better than trying to use NAPA's or CarQuest's website or god forbid looking through dealership parts counter websites. I honestly wish regular retailers would have stuck more closely with what worked for more B2B focused ecommerce, i.e. I wish shopping Best Buy or Home Depot was more akin to McMaster, Fastenall or some of the nicer supply house web portals.
Even the navigation part, I'm not so sure. I remember Dad would bring a laptop when we would drive new places and it would be running Microsoft Streets and Trips with a GPS dongle, and I think that have been late 90s or early 00s. I remember seeing other people do that and by the time I was driving a lot in 07 I remember having a dash mounted GPS, maybe a Magellan or Garmin, that didn't cost that much and again I remember a lot of people doing it. The smartphone definitely displaced it, but it wasn't a complete novelty even for the general public.
I think you lived in a strange bubble when you were a kid. When I was a teenager in the 90s, we'd have paper maps that we'd bring with us. We had no GPS. I don't think we knew what GPS was.
In the late 90s we'd print out directions from MapQuest. That was a game-changer. Still no GPS, though.
As an adult in the early 00s, I was still printing out MapQuest maps. In 2004 I got a car with a built-in navigation system! (Complete with a DVD drive in the trunk with a disc holding the maps.) It was still incredibly uncommon; I was one of the few people I knew who had one. I did know a few people who had Garmin GPS devices that they'd suction-cup to their windshield, but not many.
By 2007 most people were aware of GPS devices with little screens that you could bring into the car, though I'd guess maybe 25% of the drivers I knew then had one.
If your dad was bringing a laptop with a GPS dongle in the car in the 90s, I think you were very unusual. Hell, I didn't even have a laptop until 2004, and even then it was a hand-me-down from my dad's work. And I was in my 20s by then!
I remember GPS being something mountaineers had. People who would take their jeeps up to the glacier had them. Boats also had them. Coincidentally I was a fisherman back then and did observe my captain using a super fancy navigation device with an interactive map (and yes the map did come on a DVD); I also knew a couple of jeep men (or jeppakarlar as we call them in Icelandic) who had something similar (though more compact) in their jeeps; and to top it of, I would spend hours on google earth, just having fun looking at the map on my desktop.
I however did not see this technology coming to our phones, and becoming this commonplace.
It has been a day since I wrote the upthread post, and navigation is still the only novel capability of smartphones, which I think would have been a hard sell in 2007. I really can‘t think of another example.
> I however did not see this technology coming to our phones, and becoming this commonplace.
I didn't see a lot of things coming to phones. I never expected that I'd pay for things by hovering my phone over a payment terminal. Didn't think it would replace my iPod (or MP3 CD player, or Discman, or Walkman). Absolutely had no idea it would replace my camera.
And on the other side of the coin... my "phone" is barely a phone. The phone features are probably what I like least about it.
Booking, boarding, change/gate notifications, rebooking options, customs and immigration is done via phone.
Transit to/from the airport via Uber or a transit pass stored in your smartphone wallet.
Baggage tracking via airtags
Yeah, there's vague precedents for this stuff from the desktop computer era, but it only _really_ works when you've got an internet-connected device in your pocket.
Ahhh, payment via phones is also a new thing that I think very few people saw coming (including me). However it is also a very recent development and not really a part of the supposed smartphone revolution. In 2007 we did not have touchless payments (except in some public transit systems; gyms; etc. but it was limited to a special cards you couldn’t use for anything else) so this is definitely a new capability which was probably hard to sell in 2007.
The others you mentions, I would argue against. Yes it is convenient to order a taxi via an app on your phone, but in 2007 you could do so via SMS or a phone call, so not much has change really other then we now have one more interface to pick from.
I don’t see how smartphones have changed rebooking, nor customs, and especially not immigration which has become 100x more of a headache then it was in 2007. And finally, airtags are a separate technology from smartphones.
Hand-waving away ride-sharing as not much of a change makes me wonder what you would actually consider to be significant. It completely upended the taxi business.
2007: arrive in a new city, figure out who to call (or maybe text) for that particular city, wait, hope someone will pick you up and understand enough of your language and the local geography to get you where you want to go, possibly some unpleasant haggling over the fare
2026: arrive in a new city/country, open Uber, specify in the app precisely where you want to go, choose a vehicle, when to get picked up, etc, track vehicle progress in real-time, up-front pricing
And that's the consumer side. The provider side was even more radically changed.
If you don't see how smartphones changed the experience of flying... maybe you don't fly anywhere?
Airtags are entirely dependent on the ubiquity of smartphones.
I have already said navigation and tuchless payments are worthy examples of smartphones providing new and unpredictable innovations.
Your ride sharing experience sound more like you would expect from any consumer product gaining a global market share (or even monopoly). 1980 - Arrive in a new city and not knowing how to get a hamburger. 2000 - Arrive in a new city, find the nearest McDonalds and get your usual BigMac.
> arrive in a new city/country, open Uber, specify in the app precisely where you want to go, choose a vehicle, when to get picked up, etc, track vehicle progress in real-time, up-front pricing
This is actually something we should be a little uncomfortable about. It's a fine example of monopolists at work. The convenience does come with downsides.
I do like it, though, for exactly the reasons you state. If I end up in a country with cabbies who generally have good English skills and aren't out to rip me off, it's fine, and often easier to take a taxi. But you never know until you get there, and that can be stressful. The consistent Uber/Lyft experience is a breath of fresh air after a long flight when you just want to get to your lodging and pass out.
> If you don't see how smartphones changed the experience of flying... maybe you don't fly anywhere?
Eh, I'm not convinced. Sure, it's changed, but the general paradigm is the same. The main big change is the mobile boarding pass, seamlessly delivered after checking in on your phone, which is a genuine improvement. (But so many airlines still require you to check in with a human at the airport for international travel.) Print-at-home does come close enough, though, and still means you avoid lines at kiosks or (gasp) waiting for a real person to print you a boarding pass. Some airlines now charge you to print out your boarding pass (because of the availability of mobile passes), and that's disgusting. (I know people who still insist on printing at home, because they've had bad experiences around their boarding passes refusing to load, app crashing at exactly the wrong time, etc.)
Yes, all the airlines have apps, though after traveling a bit in Central America and in the Balkans recently, I've found that some airline apps are absolute trash, worse than having to wait in line for an hour to talk to a person. Most of my digital interaction with the airline is done on my laptop before the trip anyway. Notifications about gate information or delays are useful, but a push notification from an app is not markedly better than an SMS, and either way I always feel like I need to verify on a physical departures board, especially if connection timing is tight.
In instances where my flight has been delayed or cancelled, it's definitely an improvement to be able to rebook in the app, instead of waiting in line to talk to someone, or getting on the phone with the airline (or both, as I'd usually do, to find out which would resolve the problem faster).
I've never used airtags (don't have an iPhone anyway); I've checked bags at most twice in the past 20 years when I had no other choice (my mantra: checked luggage is lost luggage). But even considering that, I feel like all the fuss people make about airtagging their luggage is overblown.
Some airlines have eliminated seat-back entertainment and expect you to use your phone. That's crap.
Meanwhile, as GP has pointed out, security, customs, immigration have all gotten worse. Boarding processes have not improved, food hasn't gotten better, and airplane seat comfort has gone down. I say this not to blame smartphones, but to suggest that there are other, more important problems with air travel that have nothing to do with phones.
Who stops and looks for a physical departures board in 2026? I already know the gate I'm going to because I've had ample time to check my smartphone while I'm waiting for all the carry-on maximalists to get their oversized roller AND stuffed "personal item" backpack from the overhead bins. ;)
I think you've understated/missed some of the aspects of flying itself, but probably not necessary to litigate it further. There's also all the stuff at the destination that the smartphone has enabled, eg
- rental cars with carplay
- walking directions on a paired smartwatch
- transit pass via NFC (and transit-specific directions)
- checking into accomodations (airbnb-type places especially)
- authenticating Netflix, etc on tv at your airbnb/hotel
- bike-sharing apps
- activity passes in your digital wallet
Hopefully your question is sarcasm, as it should be obvious why this is a terrible idea on many fronts.
In case it isn't, for starters, especially given the way the world seems to be changing these days, if you put all of your critical supplies in the hands of another nation, especially an adversary like China, you basically are at their beck and call when things get ugly. Even non-advesary states can either have regime change or just not want to deal with you, and all of a sudden everything is completely out of your control. Others basically own you at that point, which is obviously unacceptable from a defense or critical logistics standpoint.
On a whole other level, it's incredibly immoral and stupid that we're ok with externalizing problems that labor and environmental standards protect. If you wouldn't accept having your kin or friends work in the sort of conditions you see in many exploitative "cheap labor" centers overseas so much so that it's codified in law, why is it OK to just pawn it off on another nation's people? If you wouldn't accept the environmental damage that other countries seem willing to inflict, why is it suddenly ok when laundered as free trade, especially given how concerned we are with the global reach of environmental problems. If there were ever an application for tariffs that made sense it would be to ding the shit out of products and services that come from states that don't meet minimum levels of labor and environmental law.
The only reason we don't do this is that we're addicted to cheap shit and can't think more than maybe a year ahead.
Well read about the last years of the British Empire. They too spent a lot of time and energy giving speeches about what is "unacceptable" but that has nothing to do with what actually happened to the country after the empire wound down.
Paper tigers preach and bully because words are cheap, winners build. Americans who have only known unearned prosperity through historical inertia are in for a painful century.
Just a single data point, but the BSDs in general, as much as people like to jerk them off, having tested both recent FreeBSD (which should be much faster than OpenBSD) and Debian on I guess the now kind of elderly APU2s I have, netfilter is noticably faster (and I find nftables to be frankly less challenging than pf) and gets those devices right at gigabit line speed even with complex firewall rules, where as pf leaves performance on the table. It probably has to do with the fact it's an older 4 core design that wasn't super high power to begin with (does still does its job extremely well), but still.
One issue I've seen from a fair number of people on the APU2s running FreeBSD is if they've got PPPoE; inbound traffic (at least) all hashes to the same RX queue, and as a result there's no parallelism... if you're on gigE fiber with PPPoE, the APU2 can't really keep up single threaded. The earlier APU (1) boards use realtek nics that I think only have a single queue, so you won't get effective parallelism there either. If I'm finding the right information, APU2s with i210 have 4 rx queues which is well matched with a quad core, but those with i211 only have 2 rx queues, which means half of the processors will have nothing to do unless your kernel redistributes packets after rxing, but that comes at a cost too.
Linux may have a different packet flow, or netfilter could be faster than pf.
> I find nftables to be frankly less challenging than pf
I also don't really care for how pf specifies rules. I would rather run ipfw, but pf has pfsync whereas ipfw doesn't have a way to do failover with state synchronization for stateful firewalls/NAT. So I figured out how to express my rules in pf.conf; because it was worth it, even if I don't like it :P
"This guy 100% must be in Ukraine. It would be one of the few places in the world where you can feel relatively safe right now to not just design but build and launch and even better, publish documentation on the web of you doing such. Surely there is NO WAY person is in any other country."
looks at his githubsee's he is a US college student
I kind of doubt that. Chris Sawyer is on record being really hostile to open source reimaginations, especially OpenTTD (and it's just a reimagination at this point as OpenTTD shares no assets or code with it's predecessor). It wouldn't remotely surprise me if Atari was putting legal pressure on the OpenTTD devs.
I think really hostile is overstating it. He's clearly not a fan, but he seems content to (mostly privately) disapprove rather than take actions against it, which is what would to me qualify him as hostile.
He did reacquire the rights in 2010 in order to release his mobile port, and only sold them back to Atari in 2024 (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/atari-acquires-transport-tycoo...) for them to do this re-release. So that's 14 years where he owned the rights and was aware of OpenTTD and left it alone.
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