Please write it with writing quill technology and send it to me using homing pigeon technology.
NeatNit
joined 10 months ago
you anarchist!
no, never has been. it's pronounced like pseudo.
This is how I see it: Facebook is essentially a government. (Replace Facebook with any other social media platform that's too big to compete with). It's where the people are, and like it or not, you have to be on Facebook to reach the masses.
I've never used Facebook in any real capacity, and at times it was to my detriment. At University, Facebook groups were (are?) how students communicate with each other, share information and knowledge, ask for help, etc. By not being on Facebook I missed out on all of that stuff. It's futile to try to get everyone else to move elsewhere - it just ain't happening.
So Facebook is a de-facto government: people HAVE to be on Facebook, and the company has the exclusive ability to police the platform and control how it can be used - e.g. through APIs and the website interface. Everyone else is at the whims of that.
But as a government, Facebook is obviously not a democracy. It's a dictatorship. Maybe an oligarchy. Look I know very little about political systems, but we can all probably agree that it's as far from a democracy as can be.
It is my opinion that governments need to wise up to this. Tech platforms that become nearly as powerful as governments are a direct threat to democracy when they don't have any of the checks and balances that democracies have. Not to mention when the governments themselves begin to rely on these platforms to publish announcements and stuff. The EU's Digital Markets Act is a big step in the right direction. I hope it's just the start.
I definitely expect this. And I expect the EU to tear both them and Apple a new one.
Adium... They named an app 'the element of advertisement'?
Not yet, if I'm reading this right! They will be, because the EU forced them to be I guess?
I am finding it as ridiculous as you are.
I've been looking for info about this for months, as it was obviously a part of the EU's anti-gatekeeping legislation from last year, but I couldn't find any info. Specifically I wanted to know which apps would be able to communicate with WhatsApp - Telegram? Signal? Something else?
And now that there's an article, it's behind a paywall...
Edit: managed to read it through Firefox's reader mode. Unfortunately they don't know, but not for lack of trying:
So far, it is unclear which companies, if any, are planning to connect their services to WhatsApp. WIRED asked 10 owners of messaging or chat services—including Google, Telegram, Viber, and Signal—whether they intend to look at interoperability or had worked with WhatsApp on its plans. The majority of companies didn’t respond to the request for comment. Those that did, Snap and Discord, said they had nothing to add.
The only service they mentioned that definitely will have chat interoperability is Facebook Messenger.... Yeah, no fucking thanks.
The post says as much. Don't discount the immense value of that eye candy, not to mention the crucial aspect of great usable defaults and a system that works excellently out of the box for a layman user. Debian alone does not pull that weight. Cinnamon is the easy to spot differential, sure, but LM does a lot more to maintain a really good user experience that you can just install and use painlessly.
An example that comes to mind of the extra effort LM goes to, is that they removed and blocked snap from their Ubuntu-based flavours (i.e. the main one). They point it out in the Release Notes for each release, and link to an explanation of the reasoning behind it (it's good reasons) and, if you still want to enable it for some reason, instructions to do so.
Mint also has its own tools that reduce or eliminate dependence on terminal interaction.
My interpretation is that Linux Mint does a lot under the surface to maintain an excellent general-purpose distro that anyone can pick up and use.
Edit: even in your meme post, the yacht provides all of the amenities that make the trip a tolerable and enjoyable experience, which the truck doesn't even try to compete with... So we might be in agreement!
- Adobe originally had a maximum page size of 45 inches square.
- In 2001 they increased that to 200 inches
- And in 2004 Adobe increased it to 15,000,000 inches (a bit larger than Germany) which is still kinda sucky if you want to show a map on a PDF
It's unclear why Acrobat has to have a limitation at all, since other PDF programs have no such limitation. More importantly, Acrobat only supports up to 200.00 x 200.00 in (5.08 x 5.08 m) using the standard MediaBox setting - any higher than that and you get a warning. The only way to push past that is to also set a UserUnit value, which essentially acts as a multiplier. This is all detailed in the article.
But Apple's Preview doesn't support UserUnit, meaning a PDF larger than 200 x 200 in can't be displayed correctly in both Acrobat and Preview. If you set it higher using just MediaBox, then Preview will show it fine but Acrobat will truncate it. If you set MediaBox to the highest values Acrobat accepts and use UserUnit as a multiplier, then Acrobat will show it fine but Preview would not (I don't know if it would truncate it or show it scaled down). So when it comes to PDFs larger than 200 x 200 in, you can choose either up to 15,000,000.00 x 15,000,000.00 in in Acrobat or as large as you like in Preview - you can't have both.
As for “Their Appleness’s consideration” they generally use floating point numbers for coordinates and sizes. Which is how, as it says in the OP’s article, it’s able to handle a PDF trillions of light years in size. A double precision floating point number can be really big.
More important though, it means you can process it with hardware accelerated floating point operations which are incredibly fast. And Apple’s PDF renderer needed to be fast because for years PDF was the data format used by the window manager for pretty much all screen drawing operations. They weren’t doing that on modern fast hardware either, they were doing it decades ago on slow hardware. With decent performance.
If there are features missing it’s probably because they would slow things down too much.
All interesting and some things I didn't know, but this is completely irrelevant. A PDF-reading app (i.e. Preview) does not have to use, and almost certainly does not use the same PDF rendering engine as the desktop rendering one you described. An obvious relevant example is pages - the desktop renderer doesn't need to know about or render pages at any point. It doesn't deal with the size of a page, the existence of multiple pages, or pages of different sizes. It has only one canvas to draw in. A PDF viewer app OTOH obviously has to be able to handle all of these things, and render them into a format that can be pushed to the system's graphics API.
See this StackExchange answer, which quotes this paragraph from Ars Technica (emphasis mine):
it is important to understand that Core Graphics Services deals with more or less "ready-to-display" data sent to it from higher layers in the graphics system. It is a pixel pusher, not a graphics creator
It doesn't deal with any features, whereas a reader app must deal with many features. So discussing it is irrelevant for the Preview app.
Edit: and I was only poking fun at Apple's policies in general. Their current crusade against anything that isn't 100% under their totalitarian control on iOS in Europe is most telling. I think in this case the only reason they don't support UserUnit is that it's basically never used in practice and they never realized it's missing.
this doesn't help at all
Edit to clarify: You're just explaining back-end stuff that should be completely invisible to users (and normally is). The parent comment specifically mentioned partitions, when you install a new Linux OS the installer asks you "how do you want your drive split up? where do you want the swap, and how much?" etc etc. which a newbie can't even begin to answer, it shouldn't even ASK that if the user didn't specifically choose to set this completely manually.