One day it was returning only German results for me despite my region being set to US and language to English. Every search, didn't matter what the keywords were.
I was in my office (my geoIP was still US) where dozens, maybe hundreds, of Germans work. I wonder if that had anything to do with it but I'm not sure how.
Probably not but I think GPs point is that if the rhetoric of the article was different and better data included then stuff like this would be harder to tear up and dismiss. This happens on both sides on all issues.
I think most of the people making this criticism are misunderstanding both the intended audience for the article and the point the writer was trying to make. The article was focused on problems Miami will likely be facing in the next 40 years due to rising sea levels and their pattern of development over the past 50 years.
It is not trying to make the case for/against global warming to a non-scientific audience. It is trying to make the case against bullish development in S. Florida to investors who subscribe to Bloomberg. The point is basically, "Even if these guys don't end up under the ocean in 50 years, they're still going to have to pay more in taxes and water rates just to keep the city afloat"
Again I think you're right that it won't help sway peoples thoughts on the subject _alone_ but in aggregate if all the rhetoric from one side became harder to target by the opposing pundits then maybe that would help at least slow down conversion or heel digging.
I don't know if I agree with the GP that this article would be considered fluff, or that it could be an easy target for pundits, but I definitely see that pattern pop up a lot. ACLU/EFF frequently disappoint me with completely valid points steeped in FUD and bad methodologies that make them easy to rebut. The opposition finds the errors, turns around, gets their base hype on some key emotional rebuttals or mocking while ignoring the real valid points, and all we end up with is stronger division between sides.
If we're trading anecdotes about a really specific subset of users here, I know a bunch of "retired people" who also almost exclusively do email, but you know they also like things to be easy, intuitive, familiar, functional and still kind of pretty like they're actually part of the future. They absolutely can not have it break. And you know what? They do want more features that they can use, it isn't that they only want email because it is all they can use, it's just the rest is not easy/intuitive/familiar or is providing no greater value to their now limited time. What value does linux desktop bring to them? It's a liability with no advantages.
So now a bunch have started using things like amazon photos which has encouraged them to become more interested in their android devices, branching out into other fun photo apps and home IoT crap. Another bunch (quite the dividing line here) has gotten more involved in iCloud shared albums and thus again more interested in the Apple ecosystem. They went from cheap "PC" buyers to MBP because they thought the UX was that much better, because facetime and iMessage and other cool things.
Linux Desktop can't compete even in that easiest of user segments.
Totally agree with your familiarity argument. I think that's the main reason why Linux can't compete.
One can think that the desktop OS for a regular user is a commodity, so why replace it? The benefits for the regular user of using Linux are not tangible, so there's no point for them in not using what has worked for them throughout the years.
What I don't agree with, is that you make it sound like Linux "breaks" and would cause problems, and more extreme that it can not even compete.
There are lots of segments where Linux can adapt perfectly to user's need. The fact is that user's are not willing to change and don't really NEED to change. It is not because of supposed Linux short comings.
I don't think there's even an argument that it can compete when it comes to integrations with mobile, other in-home devices, and other peoples data/devices. Yeah it's an issue that there are basically two walled gardens people get into, but Linux isn't even in the neighborhood. It can certainly compete on "a web browser exists and works" but my point is people actually do want more than that.
And it does break. I mean even if the drivers and necessary software is all great, at some point something weird happens and doesn't unhappen. My Fedora install has software I downloaded in the software GUI that won't update. It sends me (garbage) messages about SELinux constantly. The toast doesn't autohide and toast pops up for too many things. It's still usable, nothing is "broken", but it's death by a thousand cuts. No one wants all this confusing crap that isn't "just working". I don't get that feeling in macOS or Windows 10.
Of course, but I think that your portrayal of the regular user is not of a regular user at all. The regular users I know don't even know what syncing is, what the cloud is, what integration is. I know lots of people that have their home computer running with the "walmart" or "samsclub" user.
Of course Linux breaks, I've seen it break in all the imaginable ways in all layers in all the distros I've used (from Gentoo stage 1 back in the day to Ubuntu). But I hardly see problems when running Ubuntu on regular hardware.
I could perfectly argue the same thing about Windows, it is a well know fact that Windows over time without expert supervision, will end up badly: full of unwanted adware, bloatware, and shitty software ruining the experience. I'm sure most of us were asked a lot of times to fix an aunts/friends PC.
I could also say the same thing about MacOS. The UI experience is completely different from Windows, personally, I hate the interface and I don't enjoy it. On the other hand, regular users are willing to put up with the difference, why? because it's a Mac! It's a beautiful industrial design product and people who are able to afford it are proud of it.
I regularly use Linux, Windows and macOS. I think nowadays they are all solid choices. And the differences stem from personal preferences. What I don't think has place nowadays is to speak in absolutes: "macOS is the superior usability experience", "Linux can not compete in even the most basic use case", "Windows is the only solution for enterprise users" we hear so often.
I see what you mean. And this is the problems with this subject and why most of the times these discussions end up nowhere.
We end up discussing on what this hypothetical "regular user" does with biased examples from our own experience. The ones who really have a basic idea of what regular users do are the big players like Apple, Google and Microsoft; from all the telemetry they collect.
I'm certainly not condescending "regular users", on the contrary; I understand why a lot of people don't want to deal with technology and I defend the fact that systems should be easy to use. From your comments I think you're trying to portray us as if we think that regular users are stupid. Which is certainly not the case.
My point is that most people don't base their purchase decisions on technical grounds. Mostly because of money and sometimes status factors.
Again, all these coming from my personal experience; I haven't taken the time to search for an actual statistical study on user preferences. I know I've installed Linux on a lot of people's home/personal computer without them knowing what happened and are happy to this day.
Condescension doesn't mean you think they're stupid (though it is clear that many do), it means you look down on them, which is what it sounds like whenever anyone says "they just need this and that and they don't care about the other things". The implication being that they are not sophisticated individuals who may actually aspire to use their computer as more than a web kiosk if it wasn't treating them like a child. Many of them probably won't, and that's fine, but doesn't mean we should be designing things only for them.
> The regular users I know don't even know what syncing is, what the cloud is, what integration is.
And that's fine! That's exactly my point, this stuff should have a low barrier to entry so that all users can enjoy these great features. I think it's wrong to look at users who only know email/search and relegate them to that for eternity when they might be very happy sharing family photos through some service that Linux doesn't integrate with.
> Linux Desktop can't compete even in that easiest of user segments.
This is amusing, because I had to use a MBP for work a year ago, and I still have flashbacks of how painful it was to use in general usage. I mean, for heaven's sake, copy and paste was always, constantly broken. I'm not actually sure how you manage to break something that's been a mainstay of the computer UI for 37 years, but they managed it. And that's not to talk about the window focusing problems, and all of the other crap I experienced. Have you ever seen a (very skilled) senior developer lose all of their windows? I have. It was a regular occurrence because the MBP was unable to cope properly with a second monitor of varying sizes.
I've never heard of these complaints? This sounds much more like typical Linux Desktop issues in my mind.
Though at this point Windows 10 constantly loses windows on monitors that no longer exist...sometimes even the password prompt on my work laptop lock screen ceases to exist but I found plugging it into an external monitor brings it back on the laptop monitor...
I'm not going to discount your anecdotal experience, but this is literally the first time I've ever heard of issues like that on a Mac. The only copy/paste problems I ever run in to is copy/paste from a VMWare VM to the host OS.
I also switched my personal phone from ~8 years of android to the iPhone after getting an iPhone 6s for work. What a wake up call.
> I still use the google bang over 80% of the time, but hopefully that goes down over time
I've been using DDG since ~2011 and have found myself using the google bang more today than years ago. Maybe my searches today are harder for DDG? For sure though, DDG has changed. It used to respect weirder search terms much more than Google which made it more appealing to me as a programmer, but now it over zealously corrects keywords, and completely common keywords get left out. Doesn't seem to care as much about keyword order/distance in the results either. It's like they amped the fuzziness beyond what is helpful. I'm proactively quoting half of my search terms today.
> google maps, truly a superior product
I tried a few times to switch to Apple maps over the last 3 years and each time was disappointed. But about a month ago I tried again and have decided that they are really neck and neck. I don't know if it got better but my partner uses Google still and we compare options and sometimes Apple finds something better sometimes Google does but for the most part they get the same results. Some traffic data exists, including construction/accidents (I have no idea how). You lose streetview and I think the dependence on Yelp is annoying but makes sense. After using it consistently for a month I find the UI/UX is actually a lot better too. It has quirks but so does Google Maps. All that said, it's only getting better and the network effect will help! Give it another try!
Ehhhh... I don't know if it's the marketing doing its job or what but sifting through DDG and startpage meta pages I just get a better feeling from DDG. It's a little more modern, seems a little more transparent, I like the total break from Google, I like that DDG has other projects and a living community behind it. Frankly even the name DDG, while kind of dorky, is a lot easier to sell friends/family on than some generic term. Somehow I just don't trust them?
If I had to guess why startpage hasn't felt the ban-hammer yet, I would say it simply isn't big enough for Google to care.
That was a lot of hand waving.
Anyway, I will continue to use !g over !s because personally I'm not _that_ paranoid (yet?) and between 1) not being signed into Google, 2) uBlock/privacy badger/decentraleyes I'm not at all concerned about them doing a good job of tracking me. My trust for Google is still greater than startpage.
What do you think of choices like aggregating GPS tracks from Apple Maps to augment their map data like Google but with the key difference of removing the start and end points client side? Really going for the "we want the capability without the liability" angle here. Doesn't seem too phony to me.
Incredible technical work mechanically, electronically, photographically. Amazing artistic talent and personal drive.
3:19 and 4:22 remind me a lot of a tumblr page with animations like these. It's exciting how trippy they are. His direction and animation is beautiful, knowing that it's real light is something else.
I'm excited about this direction! I do minor contributions and poking around my area I'm surprised by how much of it is done by very few people. How useful it is yet how lacking it is. There's a neighboring town that is absurdly well documented, it seems a group of people got together over a month and mapped the place out meticulously, including drawing all buildings etc. This town would work very well for these vector maps, my town probably not so much.
I wonder how to get more people involved, and excited, about OSM? How do we make it the Wikipedia of digital maps?
And does Strava/Mapbox give back? When Strava identifies common bike routes, or perhaps trails, and when Mapbox determines that roads have changed is that given back to OSM in some capacity?
> I wonder how to get more people involved, and excited, about OSM? How do we make it the Wikipedia of digital maps?
This seems to be the general sentiment of the OSM community, without evidence that merely adding more people will yield better results.
I personally was turned off from contributing due to the emphasis on "community", even at the expense of map quality. I blogged about this 7 years ago.
As with Wikipedia, and perhaps much more so, the community can be very fragmented (both online and, obviously, geographically), and the portion holding the real power is usually very insular.
This essay https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm recently popped up on HN in reference to Valve and "flat" or non-hierarchical companies like Valve, often with a caveat to ignore its focus on the feminist movement. However, in the case of another all-volunteer project, it may apply better without that caveat.
Before their privacy apocalypse, Strava made their traces available for use in OSM. Mapbox actually had a project where they added information that Strava reported as missing:
Did I misunderstand, or was that not the entire thrust of the article?
That vector tiles enable the representation of a subset of the data that a particular group care about (e.g. playgrounds) in order to encourage and enable contribution from a wider and more diverse community?
Seems to me like that's more of a new defining feature of OSM, which may incidentally attract more contributors, but that in and of itself is not lowering the barrier to entry for prospective contributors.
Are you imparting trust on checksums downloaded from the same source page?
Not implying you are but there is plenty of software where that is how they expect users to verify the integrity of the download. Useful for checking bit errors, but in the event that someone has replaced the binary then they could probably also replace the checksum...
I didnt think about that, but there's not always a reputable alternative checksum source.
I was thinking about all the times I had to download a windows ISO. And how microsoft had openly published what the checksum values were so I could verify this after downloading from a 3rd party
I would need to do more research here you make a good point
Rather unfortunate that "putty.org" is the first result in searches and looks a lot more legit than "chiark.greenend.org.uk" even if it (currently) links there.
I've had discussions with coworkers on why they shouldn't look up "free online json beautifier" and dump thousands of lines of crown jewels into them (http too). Meanwhile we're doing web dev and JSON responses are autoformatted in Firefox dev tools so there's an amazingly convenient and perfectly safe alternative right there...
It's putty's own fault. They used to (and perhaps still do) have a section on how they don't want your donated domain - they like their current one.
From their FAQ:
> No, thank you. Even if you can find one (most of them seem to have been registered already, by people who didn't ask whether we actually wanted it before they applied), we're happy with the PuTTY web site being exactly where it is. It's not hard to find (just type ‘putty’ into google.com and we're the first link returned), and we don't believe the administrative hassle of moving the site would be worth the benefit.
edit: apparently the exit _menu option_ cleanly closes all windows...woops.
I only use this to restart the browser cleanly when I have multiple windows open.
I use the "restore tabs/windows from last time" option and I don't see how else to close/restart ALL windows natively within FF. Guess I'll go back to killing it.
Funny, I used to have an extension for restarting the browser, but those all broke when they left XUL behind. I care enough about it that I'm patching and building myself to get a restart button (and some other stuff).
I was in my office (my geoIP was still US) where dozens, maybe hundreds, of Germans work. I wonder if that had anything to do with it but I'm not sure how.