It's lazy in that they are trying to make one crapy app that works on everything. Instead of making multiple good apps that are tailored to the platform they are running on.
If you use a Mac as your primary computer: Would you rather have web apps, which run on all major platforms, or Windows apps, which run only on a PC with a Windows license?
Otherwise: Would you rather have web apps, which run on all major platforms, or Mac apps, which run only on a Mac?
If your answer is "Then make five apps, one for each major platform": If the web app was available without charge and the five native apps, one for each major platform (Windows, macOS, X11/Linux, Android, and iOS), were paid in order to recoup platform-specific engineering costs, would you buy one of the five native apps?
I was in no way referring to VBA. An application or device driver written in C++ and released as a Windows binary works only on Windows, unless it is an application that requires no custom drivers nor features unimplemented or poorly implemented in Wine. Are you claiming that a mobile app that requires laboriously keying things into an on-screen keyboard on a display that cannot show two applications side by side as a standard feature is a close substitute for an application that can use the physical keyboard and multi-window window management of a Windows system? Or that a web application whose use on a laptop away from a desk costs $10 to $15 per GB for cellular data is a close substitute for an application executed locally that can wait to sync to the Internet once you return to a desk?
You know what you pay for in a way you know it when buying a newspaper (you see headlines but do not read articles) and you decide if it's worth the price.
There are two problems with a too-literal application of the newspaper model to websites. First, it can become very expensive to buy five whole newspapers in a day for one article in each newspaper. Second, electronic payment has per-transaction payment processing costs that cash sale of locally printed physical newspapers lacks.
Perhaps your country didn't go through a rough racial civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s whose resolution required busing children to desegregated schools.
[My Brother network printer] can even generate a CSR which you can sign with your own CA or an external CA.
In order to sign the CSR with a CA that other devices on your network already trust, including devices brought in by friends and family visiting your home, you'd first need to buy a domain and dynamic DNS service for that domain to allow the CA to verify that you own the domain. It'd take a huge shift in Internet culture to convince the administrator of each home network to buy a domain for that home network.
I was hoping for a text article, not videos, because I can skim a text article in a lot less than 8:18 + 14:57 = 23:15 plus interstitial ads. But from the first minute of the second video, it appears to have a separate GPU for each guest operating system. I don't see that happening very easily in a laptop. GPU bypass with one GPU means you can run one guest operating system at once, making this a glorified dual boot.
a particular application that is free software or otherwise distributed without charge.
For the DIY stuff you already can just use Let's Encrypt. [...] contributing button push "Make sure the machine has an actual FQDN then press this button" one click SSL setup
The "Make sure the machine has an actual FQDN" is the hard part. Each user of an application will have to buy a domain, keep the domain renewed, buy dynamic DNS service for that domain to publish the required TXT record, and keep the dynamic DNS service renewed. Many domain registrars bundle basic DNS service with domain registration, but it's often not dynamic; a user has to edit the zone file through a web form. The application's developer can't just buy its own domain, give subdomains to users, and let all users of that application obtain certificates for those subdomains, because of the rate limit of Let's Encrypt. This means that if an application gets a million users, a million domains will need to be registered, which breaks the "distributed without charge" constraint.
It's the difference between the person whose WiFi network is named "I Can't Even" and the person whose WiFi network is named "FooCom-E5B206". The latter person probably doesn't even know what an ESSID is, and doesn't care how to change it, but auto-naming is better than the situation where every other WiFi network is called "Netgear".
But who would pay for the renewal of foocom-e5b206.net after the device's warranty expires?
Hey, a paywall is only fair. You will definitely learn, what's the worth of your content.
Do you mean a pay-per-page paywall or a pay-per-month paywall? Not knowing which you meant, I shall take the time to answer both:
If you meant pay-per-page
That would require a micropayment processor, and I'm not aware of any. Apart from scholarly journals whose articles cost upwards of $10 each, a merchant can't charge, say, 5 cents per article because mainstream payment processors charge the merchant a prohibitive cost to process each payment, on the order of 30 cents per transaction, in addition to a percentage of the payment. Even Bitcoin has a similar fee per transaction thanks to the Chinese mining cartel keeping block sizes low and transaction fees high.
If you meant pay-per-month
Interesting articles found through a web search are spread out across too many different sites, but notable paywalls still in operation are specific to one site. Even if I subscribe to (say) The Wall Street Journal, that won't help me view pages on other paywalled sites such as Financial Times or WIRED or The New York Times or The Boston Globe. So if I read one article on each of twenty different websites in a month, I'd end up having to buy twenty different subscriptions. A decade and a half ago, a company attempted to set up a cross-site paywall called Adult Check, on the theory that grown-ups can pay for nice things, only to get successfully sued by the publisher of a magazine whose photographs several Adult Check member sites had plagiarized.
replacable by other funny stuff as soon as they demand money (or even adblocker switched off).
I don't run an adblocker. I use Flash Player click-to-play, which blocks only ads in SWF format, as well as Firefox Tracking Protection, which blocks only those ads that rely on third-party tracking scripts. Yet sites still treat users of tracking blockers and malware blockers the same as users of adblockers rather than selling ad space directly to advertisers and serving ads through their own servers.
I wonder how much of this dislike comes from the SD Card Association's having made a Microsoft patented file system a requirement for the microSDXC logo. I forget where I read it, but Microsoft reportedly made more money licensing patents to Android device makers than it ever made on Windows Phone 7 and later.
Where "best" means speed (? that one always seemed weirdest for handhelds, but maybe because I've never had a slow one)
"Speed" means not having to wait several seconds for the UI to unfreeze. Lag like this is typical of Nexus 7 (2012) tablets upgraded to Android 5 "Lollipop", especially if you don't clear the cache often. I think what's happening is that Android 5 loses all the RAM efficiency gained in the Project Svelte focus of 4.4 "KitKat", and apps end up terminated more often to reclaim memory. A bunch of applications saving state to the N7's relatively slow-to-write NAND storage in reaction to an onTrimMemory signal causes other applications to be blocked on storage access.
That works as long as Google continues to sell Nexus devices. There already isn't a Nexus tablet since late May, and Nexus phones appear to be on their way out as well since a couple days ago. Or did you mean a used Nexus?
Without HTTPS, how can you be sure that the information presented on "static html websites" was not modified in transit by a man in the middle on its way from "static html websites" to you?
At 21 you could buy and drive a car, but if you were caught driving before that you would be arrested.
The difference is that many U.S. cities have chosen to make a car a necessity to get and keep a job. Case in point: There will be no public transportation at all in Fort Wayne, Indiana, from 5:45 PM tomorrow (Saturday) to about 6 AM the following Tuesday. (Source: fwcitilink.com) Alcohol, by contrast, isn't a necessity for anything I can think of.
If you have a teen age child - you know how hard it is to get them to all of their activities, school, friends, work... The easy solution is to have them get their drivers license and get them a car to use.
Then use "other forms of transportation." In my state, any K-12 student more than 2 miles from the nearest school is eligible for a tax-funded bus ride to and from school. Below grade 9, it's even closer. There's also no minimum cycling age.
Not everybody wants to have to buy two computers, one on which to run each operating system, and use a keyboard, video, and mouse switch. It's especially impractical for laptop users.
(looks down past the ads) Oh, you meant that KVM. How well do, for example, games and CAD run under the Virgil virtual GPU?
If there is so little demand and nobody builds their own systems why is there such a huge selection of motherboards, cases, processors and peripherals to chose from? Not just online but local retail?
Because some people's use cases allow a desktop PC. Other people, on the other hand, really need a laptop in order to get work done during the carpool or transit commute. And perhaps I haven't looked hard enough or live in the wrong place, but I haven't seen a wide variety of barebone laptops in "local retail".
Have you used an Android phone lately, as perhaps the most recognisable example of [Linux on ARM] actually being done?
No. I've bought a couple Android tablets, but my phone is still an old flip phone because I haven't yet been bothered to buy an unlocked Android phone at retail price and separately buy and activate a SIM online in order not to have to pay for cellular data.
One problem with Android as the public face of Linux is that Android pre-Nougat can't show more than one application at once. A 7-8" tablet is as big as two phone screens side by side, and 10" tablet as big as three, but prior to Nougat, Android's window management experience was 'all maximized all the time; enjoy your 10" four-function calculator'. One of my tablets won't even get Marshmallow, let alone Nougat, and the other (Galaxy Tab A) upgraded from Lollipop just a few weeks ago.
Sometimes there isn't one. Players for rented movies are a big deal for this, as is tax preparation software updated annually for dozens of jurisdictions with guaranteed accurate calculations.
Rented streaming movies come with digital restrictions management to deter keeping a movie longer than the agreed-upon rental period. This cannot be made free software because a user of free software could insert the equivalent of a tee command to make a pristine digital copy of the work to keep.
Likewise, individual and small business income tax preparation software has to be updated annually for each state or province, and "ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY" on the expert translation from legalese into program code doesn't cut it.
Assuming that by PlayStation you meant a PlayStation 4, not the original 1995 PlayStation, how many PS4 games tolerate mods? True, some people have reasons to prefer a vanilla experience, but without mods, there wouldn't be Team Fortress or Counter-Strike or the entire MOBA genre (which began with a mod titled DotA).
Slashdot Mirror
It's lazy in that they are trying to make one crapy app that works on everything. Instead of making multiple good apps that are tailored to the platform they are running on.
If you use a Mac as your primary computer:
Would you rather have web apps, which run on all major platforms, or Windows apps, which run only on a PC with a Windows license?
Otherwise:
Would you rather have web apps, which run on all major platforms, or Mac apps, which run only on a Mac?
If your answer is "Then make five apps, one for each major platform":
If the web app was available without charge and the five native apps, one for each major platform (Windows, macOS, X11/Linux, Android, and iOS), were paid in order to recoup platform-specific engineering costs, would you buy one of the five native apps?
I was in no way referring to VBA. An application or device driver written in C++ and released as a Windows binary works only on Windows, unless it is an application that requires no custom drivers nor features unimplemented or poorly implemented in Wine. Are you claiming that a mobile app that requires laboriously keying things into an on-screen keyboard on a display that cannot show two applications side by side as a standard feature is a close substitute for an application that can use the physical keyboard and multi-window window management of a Windows system? Or that a web application whose use on a laptop away from a desk costs $10 to $15 per GB for cellular data is a close substitute for an application executed locally that can wait to sync to the Internet once you return to a desk?
You know what you pay for in a way you know it when buying a newspaper (you see headlines but do not read articles) and you decide if it's worth the price.
There are two problems with a too-literal application of the newspaper model to websites. First, it can become very expensive to buy five whole newspapers in a day for one article in each newspaper. Second, electronic payment has per-transaction payment processing costs that cash sale of locally printed physical newspapers lacks.
Perhaps your country didn't go through a rough racial civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s whose resolution required busing children to desegregated schools.
[My Brother network printer] can even generate a CSR which you can sign with your own CA or an external CA.
In order to sign the CSR with a CA that other devices on your network already trust, including devices brought in by friends and family visiting your home, you'd first need to buy a domain and dynamic DNS service for that domain to allow the CA to verify that you own the domain. It'd take a huge shift in Internet culture to convince the administrator of each home network to buy a domain for that home network.
[youtube.com]
I was hoping for a text article, not videos, because I can skim a text article in a lot less than 8:18 + 14:57 = 23:15 plus interstitial ads. But from the first minute of the second video, it appears to have a separate GPU for each guest operating system. I don't see that happening very easily in a laptop. GPU bypass with one GPU means you can run one guest operating system at once, making this a glorified dual boot.
a particular application that is free software or otherwise distributed without charge.
For the DIY stuff you already can just use Let's Encrypt. [...] contributing button push "Make sure the machine has an actual FQDN then press this button" one click SSL setup
The "Make sure the machine has an actual FQDN" is the hard part. Each user of an application will have to buy a domain, keep the domain renewed, buy dynamic DNS service for that domain to publish the required TXT record, and keep the dynamic DNS service renewed. Many domain registrars bundle basic DNS service with domain registration, but it's often not dynamic; a user has to edit the zone file through a web form. The application's developer can't just buy its own domain, give subdomains to users, and let all users of that application obtain certificates for those subdomains, because of the rate limit of Let's Encrypt. This means that if an application gets a million users, a million domains will need to be registered, which breaks the "distributed without charge" constraint.
It's the difference between the person whose WiFi network is named "I Can't Even" and the person whose WiFi network is named "FooCom-E5B206". The latter person probably doesn't even know what an ESSID is, and doesn't care how to change it, but auto-naming is better than the situation where every other WiFi network is called "Netgear".
But who would pay for the renewal of foocom-e5b206.net after the device's warranty expires?
Availability of CS:GO or TF2 for Linux doesn't help if my friends refuse to play CS:GO or TF2 with me.
I was referring to the market for desktop software, not mobile software, video game console software, or server software.
Hey, a paywall is only fair. You will definitely learn, what's the worth of your content.
Do you mean a pay-per-page paywall or a pay-per-month paywall? Not knowing which you meant, I shall take the time to answer both:
If you meant pay-per-page That would require a micropayment processor, and I'm not aware of any. Apart from scholarly journals whose articles cost upwards of $10 each, a merchant can't charge, say, 5 cents per article because mainstream payment processors charge the merchant a prohibitive cost to process each payment, on the order of 30 cents per transaction, in addition to a percentage of the payment. Even Bitcoin has a similar fee per transaction thanks to the Chinese mining cartel keeping block sizes low and transaction fees high. If you meant pay-per-month Interesting articles found through a web search are spread out across too many different sites, but notable paywalls still in operation are specific to one site. Even if I subscribe to (say) The Wall Street Journal, that won't help me view pages on other paywalled sites such as Financial Times or WIRED or The New York Times or The Boston Globe. So if I read one article on each of twenty different websites in a month, I'd end up having to buy twenty different subscriptions. A decade and a half ago, a company attempted to set up a cross-site paywall called Adult Check, on the theory that grown-ups can pay for nice things, only to get successfully sued by the publisher of a magazine whose photographs several Adult Check member sites had plagiarized.replacable by other funny stuff as soon as they demand money (or even adblocker switched off).
I don't run an adblocker. I use Flash Player click-to-play, which blocks only ads in SWF format, as well as Firefox Tracking Protection, which blocks only those ads that rely on third-party tracking scripts. Yet sites still treat users of tracking blockers and malware blockers the same as users of adblockers rather than selling ad space directly to advertisers and serving ads through their own servers.
Dropping automatic overages in favor of throttling is more like T-Mobile falling back to EDGE once you run out of 4G data allowance for the month.
Google seems to dislike microSD.
I wonder how much of this dislike comes from the SD Card Association's having made a Microsoft patented file system a requirement for the microSDXC logo. I forget where I read it, but Microsoft reportedly made more money licensing patents to Android device makers than it ever made on Windows Phone 7 and later.
Where "best" means speed (? that one always seemed weirdest for handhelds, but maybe because I've never had a slow one)
"Speed" means not having to wait several seconds for the UI to unfreeze. Lag like this is typical of Nexus 7 (2012) tablets upgraded to Android 5 "Lollipop", especially if you don't clear the cache often. I think what's happening is that Android 5 loses all the RAM efficiency gained in the Project Svelte focus of 4.4 "KitKat", and apps end up terminated more often to reclaim memory. A bunch of applications saving state to the N7's relatively slow-to-write NAND storage in reaction to an onTrimMemory signal causes other applications to be blocked on storage access.
So buy a Nexus.
That works as long as Google continues to sell Nexus devices. There already isn't a Nexus tablet since late May, and Nexus phones appear to be on their way out as well since a couple days ago. Or did you mean a used Nexus?
static html websites don't need https
Without HTTPS, how can you be sure that the information presented on "static html websites" was not modified in transit by a man in the middle on its way from "static html websites" to you?
At 21 you could buy and drive a car, but if you were caught driving before that you would be arrested.
The difference is that many U.S. cities have chosen to make a car a necessity to get and keep a job. Case in point: There will be no public transportation at all in Fort Wayne, Indiana, from 5:45 PM tomorrow (Saturday) to about 6 AM the following Tuesday. (Source: fwcitilink.com) Alcohol, by contrast, isn't a necessity for anything I can think of.
If you have a teen age child - you know how hard it is to get them to all of their activities, school, friends, work... The easy solution is to have them get their drivers license and get them a car to use.
A local bicycle shop has an even easier solution.
Then use "other forms of transportation." In my state, any K-12 student more than 2 miles from the nearest school is eligible for a tax-funded bus ride to and from school. Below grade 9, it's even closer. There's also no minimum cycling age.
Google KVM?
Not everybody wants to have to buy two computers, one on which to run each operating system, and use a keyboard, video, and mouse switch. It's especially impractical for laptop users.
(looks down past the ads)
Oh, you meant that KVM. How well do, for example, games and CAD run under the Virgil virtual GPU?
If there is so little demand and nobody builds their own systems why is there such a huge selection of motherboards, cases, processors and peripherals to chose from? Not just online but local retail?
Because some people's use cases allow a desktop PC. Other people, on the other hand, really need a laptop in order to get work done during the carpool or transit commute. And perhaps I haven't looked hard enough or live in the wrong place, but I haven't seen a wide variety of barebone laptops in "local retail".
Have you used an Android phone lately, as perhaps the most recognisable example of [Linux on ARM] actually being done?
No. I've bought a couple Android tablets, but my phone is still an old flip phone because I haven't yet been bothered to buy an unlocked Android phone at retail price and separately buy and activate a SIM online in order not to have to pay for cellular data.
One problem with Android as the public face of Linux is that Android pre-Nougat can't show more than one application at once. A 7-8" tablet is as big as two phone screens side by side, and 10" tablet as big as three, but prior to Nougat, Android's window management experience was 'all maximized all the time; enjoy your 10" four-function calculator'. One of my tablets won't even get Marshmallow, let alone Nougat, and the other (Galaxy Tab A) upgraded from Lollipop just a few weeks ago.
Nah! Find an open source equiv app
Sometimes there isn't one. Players for rented movies are a big deal for this, as is tax preparation software updated annually for dozens of jurisdictions with guaranteed accurate calculations.
Rented streaming movies come with digital restrictions management to deter keeping a movie longer than the agreed-upon rental period. This cannot be made free software because a user of free software could insert the equivalent of a tee command to make a pristine digital copy of the work to keep.
Likewise, individual and small business income tax preparation software has to be updated annually for each state or province, and "ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY" on the expert translation from legalese into program code doesn't cut it.
Assuming that by PlayStation you meant a PlayStation 4, not the original 1995 PlayStation, how many PS4 games tolerate mods? True, some people have reasons to prefer a vanilla experience, but without mods, there wouldn't be Team Fortress or Counter-Strike or the entire MOBA genre (which began with a mod titled DotA).
That doesn't help if all the online multiplayer games that your friends are playing at the moment happen to be Windows-exclusive.
Then where's the evidence that developers of applications for desktop PCs (not phones) have abandoned Windows (desktop, not phone)?