willywanker

hace 4 mesesdiscuss

This article is just the biggest justification for using an adblocker. Just imagine none of this nonsense affecting your system resources and user experience, just uninterrupted content. It's how I've been surfing since 1999. I get viscerally disgusted if I ever have to look at another person's laptop or phone screen.

willywanker

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

What exactly is the threat model here of preventing Joe Nobody Famous or Important Poweruser from rooting the hardware they bought and paid for?

If someone has physical access to your phone, you have a lot more to worry about than mere root exploits. And given those who root their devices are far out of the profile of ordinary users, so a specially targeted hack like this is pointless as compared to the regular kind of exploits in apps that can target a wider base.

willywanker

hace 7 mesesdiscuss

People are overreacting to Clippy's intrusiveness - firstly you could replace Clippy with other characters like the red ball Dot, or a dog and cat (the latter would curl up and snooze on the screen). And being introduced in Office '97, later versions allowed you to turn off the Agent feature altogether.

So it's a case of looking back with shit tinted glasses. The current environment is far more user hostile. Arrogant devs deciding they know best what the user should be allowed to do (starting with Firefox post version 4 and Windows post version 8). Design solely for mobile and then stretch it to the desktop. Or create a gigantic bloated mess of an Electron app which is just the webpage bundled with a Chrome instance and call it a day. Any day far worse in terms of resource consumption to end up offering less capabilities and worse UX than similar software running on a much slower computer from 25 years ago.

willywanker

hace 8 mesesdiscuss

What passes for a desktop app these anyway is just some variation of Electron - bundle the website along with a Chrome instance and serve up the resulting 300-400 MB bundle as a 'desktop' app. Who gives a crap about keyboard and mouse focused platform UI/UX conventions. Visually and functionally there's no difference between opening Whatsapp Web and installing this - both the earlier version and now.

willywanker

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

They always could be local. Thunderbird, MS Outlook and other email clients have supported it for years. Plus there's dedicated desktop feed readers like the Qt based QuiteRSS, which I use.

On Android there's the open source Feeder from F-droid.

There's no rule that says a feed reader HAS to be a webapp.

willywanker

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

>An OS should be mandated to come with a browser than supports some locked down functionality

What for? Online banking worked perfectly fine on standard web browsers over HTTPS for years before smartphones became popular, why should that change now?

willywanker

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

They have a pre-emptive defense of Electron linked to, that others have refered to here. The criticism of Electron apps isn't merely RAM or sluggishness - it's the modern tendency to completely shit on mature, established, efficient and muscle memory based desktop UI/UX conventions that have been around for decades.

I don't see what this offers over Clementine on Linux - it offers complete local music collection (remember that?) management as well as adding streaming sources & Last.fm integration in a sane, desktop focused UI like there once existed.

No gigantic fonts and icons and wasted space that's more served for a mobile UI, and all that before the idiocy of using Javascript as a hammer for every damn thing instead of what it originally was as a means to add some interactivity to a webpage.

Then again, modern devs don't seem to care about the actual end user experience, this person essentially claims Electron is superior because Javascript and frameworks based on it are all he knows or cares to learn.

willywanker

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

IBM in Nazi Germany was no different from other German owned companies in being conscripted to do what the Third Reich ordered them to; the headquarters in the US obviously had no control over them during WW2.

Plus it's ridiculous to apply collective guilt in any form by blaming later IBM management, given that anyone involved with 1940s German IBM is long dead by now.

willywanker

el año pasadodiscuss

Wrong. Every company exists to be profitable; how ethically they go about it is a different topic. Companies aren't charities.

willywanker

el año pasadodiscuss

Bought a Pebble in 2018 and used it with Rebble. Loved the OS and interface - but the device was far from robust. The rubberized buttons eventually cracked and it became unusable because I could no longer press them.

A new version needs to have better buttons and please, please offer the option of a steel wrist strap. I've had Fitbits rendered useless because the plastic/silicone strap cracked and there was no way to replace it.

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