Semiofftopic but somehow I took offense at the Vista comparison. Aero Glass was peak UI design to me, and I'd certainly prefer it to modern paradigms like flat controls, or to stretch it even further, Corporate Memphis etc.
Curse you, Apple and Jony Ive. You only needed to tone skeuomorphism down not kill it.
Never thought of the fake variant as gasoline-like but it sure has that strange, very heavy 'chemical' aftertaste that lingers in your palate. Also never tried the real thing, I wonder if i'd like it or not.
> Every time a manufacturer says vague descriptions like "security" or "performance" fixes, be wary - they probably removing perfectly working functionality for "reasons"
I have a pair of WF-1000XM3s and this is painfully true. ANC was brilliant on these until I naively updated, and whoosh - instantly and grossly degraded ANC, to the point I previously almost didn't hear people talking at distance, keyboard chatter, city traffic etc. and now I do, no matter the app settings.
I wanted to upgrade to the in-ear XM4s, but after this? NEVER again Sony. At least for portable audio. I got instead a pair of cheap QCY HT07s (then $28, now ~$20) and got quite surprised with ANC performance on these: easily beats the crap of the XM3s-on-latest-firmware, and gets close to the previous one in audio quality. Which is a lot to say about Sony "updates".
Not to defend Google, but they end up saying much the same:
> The next challenge for the field is to demonstrate a first "useful, beyond-classical" computation on today's quantum chips that is relevant to a real-world application. We’re optimistic that the Willow generation of chips can help us achieve this goal. So far, there have been two separate types of experiments. On the one hand, we’ve run the RCS benchmark, which measures performance against classical computers but has no known real-world applications. On the other hand, we’ve done scientifically interesting simulations of quantum systems, which have led to new scientific discoveries but are still within the reach of classical computers. Our goal is to do both at the same time — to step into the realm of algorithms that are beyond the reach of classical computers and that are useful for real-world, commercially relevant problems.
Up to that point, most Windows iterations didn't require (for the time) big upgrades to run fine. Many PCs designed for a given version could run the next, maybe with a little elbow grease, but the bottom line is: the out-of-the-box experience on new AND upgraded PCs was mostly okay.
Then it came Vista. An OS designed for at least 1Gb RAM, preinstalled on machines who stubbornly refused to sell with more than 512Mb (even 384Mb, the horror!) for a looong time. I remember that, at least where I live, RAM prices sky rocketed just months afther Vista came out, because almost all people irremediably needed the upgrade.
It also didn't help that vendors were happy to fill new systems with their auto-installing crapware. While this wasn't Microsoft fault, it certainly helped to cement Vista's reputation as a very heavy-weight OS.
Having said that. I concede the point that Vista was pretty alright, provided your PC had the grunt to run it.
Oh wow. Count me in on the I didn't know I had that! camp.
When younger I struggled horribly with ALL things math, and to this day still do. OTOH I've always had a knack for DIY involving measurements: lenghts, rythms, quantities, sizes, you name it. I just invoke my own "dynamic mind ruler" for the task at hand and usually get it right 1st try. Cooking something new? I intuitively know the proper amount of ingredients and spices. Doing work in a friend's car? That nut looks like a 3/4 and that one a 11/16, and who the heck put a 11mm in place of a 7/16??
Incidentally, the whole concept of Time always flows from right-to-left to me. 1000BC is waaay to the right, and 2030AC is just a stone throw away to the left. Now I wonder if it's something only I perceive that way, or everyone does.
My course of action was to run Memmaker, and let it take care of (almost) everything. It usually worked fine. Sometimes I had to fine-tune config.sys/autoexec.bat to make a bit more room or disable EMS, but those were edge cases.
Now that I think about it, it'd be fun to know how Memmaker works internally, but I can't seem to find info on that. Maybe no one has done such analysis... yet.
Out of curiosity, did you needed some particular feature in such an app? I've found that Google Lens is pretty darn good at identifying plants, insects, fungi and whatnot (assuming your camera has a decent macro mode).
You cannot market nature, but you CAN market everything around it: Tourism, clothing/footwear, camping gear, even technology (cameras, GPS etc). All of them to give you the "upper hand" over your peers - And of course, you can buy that from us!
I'm still looking for an open ECU focused only on old, carbureted cars. Projects like Speeduino, rusEFI, MegaSquirt, etc. are wonderful, but I have no use for them because they're more geared towards fuel-injected engines (though some do have ways to run injector-less).
Case in point: I have a Renault R5 GTL with a Renix pseudo-ECU module [1] taken from a Renault R11 TX, along with its camshaft, head, double barrel carb and other bits. It has inputs only for manifold vacuum & crankshaft sensor (some support a knock sensor, mine does not). A crude ROM map is applied to the advance curve from just those two parameters. It works really well, but that's it, no way to change or fine-tune anything.
> while testing showed it produced more power and better emissions
A customizable "ECU" similar to the Renix approach that does EXACTLY this, would be a godsend to me (and also my local old Fiat/Lada/you-name-it heads). At these small displacements, we just don't care how the engine sounds: every HP gained is a win.
As someone who could've developed an IT/programming career, but didn't because I felt things were already bloating back in the '00s, I agree with the majority: "harvesting your own food" can be rewarding but also a tedious and thankless job. It's certainly not for everyone, but if it works for some people then it is (let's put efficiency aside for a moment) perfectly valid. In fact, being more of a H/W guy I find myself gravitating towards this approach more often than not. Leanness and reproducibility is key for my workflow (I went the RF-world path), I can't afford different end results when a dependency changes/breaks something.
IMHO, keeping up with the modern paradigms for S/W development looks like a never-ending nightmare. Yes it's the modern way, yeah it's the state of the art. Still, I didn't feel it was a wise investment of my time to learn all those "modern dev" ropes, and I still feel that 20 years later. I'm nowhere near antiquated and I'm on top of all things tech (wouldn't read HN otherwise), it's just...
I see former friends/classmates that went this way, and they're in a constant cat-and-mouse game where 50% of time they're learning/setting up something dev-chain related, the rest 50% doing actual work, and 98% of it feeling way too stressed. I see modern Android devices with their multi-MB apps, bloated to hell and beyond for a simple UI that takes ages to open on multi-core, multi-GHZ SOCs. I see people advocating unused RAM is wasted RAM, never satisfied until every byte is put to good use, reluctant to admit that said good use is just leaving the machine there "ready" to do something, but not doing anything _productive_ actually.
And yet.
Without that bloat, without the convienience of pre-made libraries and assist tools for almost every function one could desire, we wouldn't be where we are now. Imagine for a moment doing AI-work, 3D movie rendering, data science etc. with a DBless approach on single-core machines with every resource micro-managed to eke out the most performance. It's simply not feasible, we would still be on the 90s... just a bit more hipster.
This article resonates so well with me. And at the same time, it feels so distant.
I wouldn't have a problem with that, if only they were in better taste... that graphic looks like something out of XKCD, and the scrolling userlist almost gave me a seizure. Looks like it was done by a teenager or someone with more commercial rather than technical background, and this isn't a praising.
Curse you, Apple and Jony Ive. You only needed to tone skeuomorphism down not kill it.