thinking001001

Good point! Taiwan is a political anomaly, an accidental offshoot that came about as a result of the rise of the CCP in China (people moved to Taiwan for refuge), and Taiwan has become enormously successful in an organic, unplanned way.

That was fascinating, thank you.

Simple: Chrome captured the market with a good product, at the right time.

I remember when Chrome was new, and it was fast, and Google had other game-changing products (like email with enormous storage). I was just an average consumer back then, and I went for Chrome.

Then, once you capture enough market share (due to poor competition), people start targeting Chrome as the de facto standard. Throw in Android and you have a browser that the world now depends on. Even Microsoft gave in (with a built in ad-blocker, cause they're bitter about it, too).

Should we all be running a C++ based Javascript interpreter? Absolutely not. But try explaining why to the masses...

Computer Science is, on a evolutionary level, a whole new field, something between a branch off of Mathematics and physical engineering so... no, it won't stop changing anytime soon. If you wanted something more timeless, perhaps you should've gone into the engineering of buildings, transport etc.

There are only 24^3 possible combinations of 3-letter file extensions, 34^3 if we start mixing in numbers. And they potentially will need to be constantly available for decades to come... We should probably use more sparingly to prevent a repeat of the IPv4 situation.

The Runescape 2 economy is quite a fascinating semi-simulation/semi-reality case study. It was originally a free market economy - players traded freely and advertised wares in public places, such as the incredibly busy server World 2 in Varrock. There was a backing of bots doing repetitive work, which was seemingly unofficially permitted (e.g. any player can disable their public chat, making a non-communicative player plausible) but not officially allowed. Virtual gold was also traded online for real cash. Then Jagex decided to go socialist, and brought in the grand exchange, which centralized and controlled prices.

Big surprise, a state-funded (kinda) organisation doesn't know how to sell. Economics is all about sales, guys...

But the UK is getting a triple whammy from the financial fallout of Covid-19, Ukraine invasion & fossil fuel prices, and Brexit.

But maybe there isn't much to 'improve'...? I suspect this is the feeling shared by those who appreciate it.

Would somewhat agree/disagree. Debian installer is kind of a monster, but Ubuntu's changes to the installer broke compatibility with tried-and-tested PXE install software (i.e. Cobbler).

Ubuntu's packaging of Firefox as a Snap (outside of apt) though is very much a surprise at first, and makes it easy to mistake your system/browser as being up-to-date... And that Firefox Snap container is not sandboxed like OpenBSD, and has full filesystem access.

Depends if you're running Python or not (or an equivalent scripting language with OS dependencies i.e. Ruby, PHP, Perl)

Given the privilege escalations in sudo and the bajillion untestable features built-in, arguably the Linux community should've moved on from it many years ago, following OpenBSD's lead...

Just want to add that you can also create a full Alpine Linux filesystem with Alpine's official "apk-static" (statically compiled version of apk) and then run it as a container, with automatic network configuration, using systemd-nspawn. There is a guide someone online, I believe. This would be stateful like a chroot, but with a bit more sandboxing features, which may be desirable.

"Being smart is important, but knowing how to sell it also important. Americans know how to sell." - South African guy I met, who went to Yale on a scholarship

The reality is the technology industry has become heavily privatised, and privatisation means sales, and good engineers aren't interested in sales, but funding is required to build things... So, you need companies or governments with a long-term mindset, which isn't easy to come by. So instead you get entrepreneurs with borderline-capable engineering abilities, and typically businesses who think of short-term profits, and the end result is gimmicky 'products' rather than breakthrough inventions.

Note however, that there is greater room for complacency in the public sector, given the endless pool of money (via taxes, inflation), whereas the private sector is more touch-and-go and can be more competitive.

So I guess it is about balancing the public/private sectors optimally, which is ambiguous as to how to do. By the way I didn't read the article.