I gave quite a few statically-compilable language a try a few years back before settling on nim as my "fat binary" language of choice.
D was a contender, but ultimately the reason I dropped it was I was unable to compile a hello world on my laptop. Now, that machine is not fast, but it is actually pretty new, it's a very low end 2017 dell machine, and it turned out that bootstrapping a D environment requires a midspec machine or it literally cannot complete.
I donno man, D seems to have a "last 5%" problem. It looks good on the surface, but as you start looking into it you discover that the bootstrap tools are fat as hell, the core library has a weird split in GC styles, the doc is inconsistent. Everything you do in D is 5% harder than it needs to be, nothing is buttery smooth. Overall, all those 5% multiply together to make it a 20-30% worse experience overall, although I couldn't point at any one thing and say "that is what has killed D".
>It's that I, a user, cannot choose to sideload an app
That's only half the equation. I run android, but have no google account. I have always used a combination of aptoide, f-droid and manually downloaded apk's for my apps.
When all the covid apps were released and governments were encouraging people to download them, do you think they put the APK on a government website for people to download?
Nope, just links to the app store. Of course, most of those apps relied on google play services API's for a bunch of stuff, so it's not like they would have worked anyway.
It's not enough to merely allow sideloading. If the expectation isn't that mobile devices are a diverse ecosystem and that it's not good enough for developers to pick one store and bugger the rest, you've achieved very little. Most people could not be bothered going through what I do to keep my phone clean.
I've not yet found that to be the case, although I fear that one day it will.
I generally find that all you need to do is tell people their solution is not acceptable. All the banks in Iceland are trying really hard to convince people that phone based 2FA is the only option. However, I went to my bank and informed them that I don't take my phone with me when I travel overseas and I require another option. They tried a few other variations of "but you could use your phone this way", but once they realized I wasn't joking when I said "I often just don't have a phone with me, find me something else" it turns out that the physical 2FA tokens totally still work, they just don't like telling people.
Generally speaking, the people providing these things have a boss who expects them to make sure things run smoothly. They'll try to force you to use the app if that's the easiest path, but as soon as they realise that trying to force you to use the app will be much more painful for them than just giving you another option, they'll find another option.
I've been waiting for this to come out. Unfortunately, I tried to buy the pinetime late last year and discovered they only sell through paypal and you need an account to make the payment, you can't just pay by credit card.
If there's anyone from pine watching: Please, add a normal credit card option. Paypal is a horrid company. I'm prepared to pay directly with a credit card via them, but I _will not_ make an account with them just to buy your stuff. Please let me give you money without making a legal agreement with a third party :(
Interesting, it's enabled for me -- that's how I bought it -- without creating an account. Maybe this feature is perhaps region locked somehow? I'm in UK.
EDIT: it is indeed gated by some vague heuristics[1].
>Buyers don't always have the option to complete their purchases without using or creating a PayPal account. This option is presented based on several risk factors, including but not limited to the buyer's PayPal purchase history, PayPal cookies stored on the buyer's computer, the buyer's location, or a credit assessment.
That's probably why. I use addons that autodelete cookies as soon as I leave webpages because no one has the luxury of pretending they don't know how badly cookies are abused at this point.
I guess the inevitable next step was for companies that abuse cookies to start punishing people for refusing to take their shit.
I reiterate: paypal is a shit company. Pine, please provide an alternative.
>and it does further protect the users password from being harvested from passive MITM'd SSL like it is on some corporate networks.
It might protect the password if the user is reusing it elsewhere, but it doesn't protect the account the password is securing during the intercepted transmission.
That's the opposite of a smart appliance to be honest.
You can use minimodem[1] to scream a file across the room from one computers speakers to another computers modem.
It's a cute trick but requires very little in the way of computation, and is a far cry from the bluetooth infested dumpster fire that is found in the modern app-controlled smart appliance offering.
It's also not significantly an improvement from giving your products clearly labeled short model names and having a two digit code on a 10c LED screen, preferably with a corrosponding entry in the manual. I'd happily give it up in exchange for a washing machine with minimal electronics, so that it will last 20 years and can be fixed with duct tape and epoxy.
I have been habitually sending "I have finished using your service, could you please delete my account" emails since around 2008 or so.
Prior to GDPR, 9 replies in 10 would be polite but dismissive responses, basically telling me that I'm making an unreasonably burdensome request.
Post GDPR, everyone responds with a message stating they have followed my request in a timely fashion.
Am I disappointing that GDPR has not fined Facebook into oblivion? Yeah. I was hoping for global scale schadenfreude as much as the next person.
However, GDPR has fundamentally normalized the notion that peoples relationships with companies need not be permanent, and that submitting to eternal spam is not the accepted price of buying a flight online. GDPR has established in law that it's totally reasonable for people to not want to give their local gym an iris scan in order to enter the gym and work out, and it is indeed the gym owner who's the arsehole in that situation. This grants leverage against the arsehole.
In that respect, it's been a smashing success. There is much we could improve on, but on the statement "it only benefited the lawyers"...hard disagree.
It was partly that, but they also dropped the ball on their core demographic.
Things like pushing mandatory updates via "experiments", shoving pocket in everyone's faces, killing XUL.
I can't remember what it was they did that was the final straw for me, it was at least 4 years ago and not even that big a thing. What I remember is going "well, there goes my last shred of hope. Mozilla officially doesn't understand why their core advocates prefer them over alternatives. Might as well move to vivaldi and at least get all them sweet chrome addons".
Mozilla forgot about their "whole-of-product quality". Their brand was "secure, private, power-user oriented". They've been slowly cutting bits off for years that impact those aspects, and somewhere along the line they passed a threshold were they weren't sufficiently more secure, sufficiently more private or sufficiently more power-user oriented than competitors. No one change was at fault, but they've diluted themselves too much now. They're no longer the staunch defender of non-corporate internet ideals they used to be, and without that, they sorta...don't matter.
His experience was shit, total shit. Knowing his experience, I would avoid the site he chose like the plague. But now, let me ask you this, should I test each and every ebook retailer to try to find one that isn't shit, paying every time?
Should customers start maintaining their own index of which ebook providers are shit? Who pays to have someone go back and check them all once a week to see if they've changed their behavior since the last $7 purchase to check their DRM practices? Should customers pay a monthly subscription to some kind of digital mystery shopper service to find out who's webstores are just the fucking worst?
Your customers have _no_ reasonable path to control over shitty DRM practices. The only person in this entire conversation who has influence is Turukawa, because Turukawa is an author, and gets to choose who sells his books.
Bad news everyone: piracy exists, and provides a pretty great user flow. If authors want people to not pirate ebooks, they need to demand a not shit ebook option that /has a strong brand of being not shit/. Yeah, short term that might be really hard. Maybe authors need to form some kind of union and demand better from their publishers.
Because customers don't care. You can rant and rave about how they're immoral subhumans stealing from the mouths of authors children all you want, but piracy still exists and it's a much easier way of getting high quality ebooks that work on all platforms and devices. It's not the customers fault that zlib has a better reputation than your ebook retail partners, nor is it zlibs.
D was a contender, but ultimately the reason I dropped it was I was unable to compile a hello world on my laptop. Now, that machine is not fast, but it is actually pretty new, it's a very low end 2017 dell machine, and it turned out that bootstrapping a D environment requires a midspec machine or it literally cannot complete.
I donno man, D seems to have a "last 5%" problem. It looks good on the surface, but as you start looking into it you discover that the bootstrap tools are fat as hell, the core library has a weird split in GC styles, the doc is inconsistent. Everything you do in D is 5% harder than it needs to be, nothing is buttery smooth. Overall, all those 5% multiply together to make it a 20-30% worse experience overall, although I couldn't point at any one thing and say "that is what has killed D".