331–340 of 388 posts
When an area of engineering is new we make products better than the market will eventually pay for. Over time, we learn how to make them just good enough to reach an equilibrium in a market. This is an idea that is explored in _The World Without Us_ by Alan Wiesman. The Roman Colosseum still stands, but buildings today don't need to be that durable. It would cost significantly more to make them that way, so we don't.…
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Thanks, I'll be in the market soon and this is exactly the sort of info I was looking for. Since you mention "the few times we need to print", is it safe to assume that their kit is fine with very very infrequent use? Inkjets really didn't like this, and I don't know much about lasers.
Inkjets use liquid ink, and if the ink dries on the spray nozzle, it's dead. This process takes about a month. If you're lucky, the nozzle is part of the cartridge and you need to spend $100 (or more) on new cartridges. Otherwise you need to buy a new printer. Some printers have a mode where they'll spray a little bit though the nozzle if you haven't used the printer in ~2 weeks, but they need to be plugged in. Laser…
As for your B&W laser, it used to be that color lasers were horribly expensive so only companies had them. These days, color lasers have gotten pretty cheap, and aren't that much more than the B&W lasers. My Brother was about $200 IIRC. Of course, you can get a small B&W for under $100 now, but still, $200-300 is not budget-breaker for anyone in the IT industry. So even if you don't really need color that much, if you're in the market for a printer, I'd advise just spending the extra money and getting the color model, unless you really want your printer to be small (the color models are usually a lot larger, because of the separate toner cartridges).
I would never advise using an inkjet unless you really need to. They're a terrible deal financially; the only thing they're better at is costing less initially, but the consumables are very expensive and don't last long. They do make sense for some high-end high-volume applications, but those use more industrial-sized printers with continuous-flow ink, not small consumer printers with overpriced ink carts. Honestly, consumer inkjets are probably the biggest scam in all of computing history.
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Then you got the wrong printer. Some manufacturers do a good job of supporting Linux (HP is probably the best actually; their drivers all ship standard in most distros), others don't bother.
> Then you got the wrong printer. And so did your mom. Many printers can plug-n-play on windows.
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> so I've noticed that I do want a map that works like a map - something I can explore and annotate. I don't doubt that there are use cases for a map that works this way. Even if Google Maps covers 80-90% of the use-cases for mapping, mapping is an absolutely massive domain. 10-20% of use-cases still represents a huge volume. But it doesn't have to be Google Maps. It actually seems worse to be for one "maps" app try…
pretty much all games in the early 80's had [so called] pixel perfect scrolling. Each frame showed exactly what was required. Today it is entirely acceptable for a map to be a jerky stuttering pile of crap. The same goes for the infinite scroll implementations. Its preposterous to start loading things after they are needed. There is a good analogy with making things in the physical world. The professional doesn't sta…
> Today it is entirely acceptable for a map to be a jerky stuttering pile of crap. The same goes for the infinite scroll implementations. Its preposterous to start loading things after they are needed.
This doesn't make any sense to me. In which game from the early 80's could I view accurate map data for any region on the earth, and quickly scroll across the planet without any loading artifacts?
Of course you can manage pixel-perfect scrolling if all of your data is local and fits in memory. That's not anywhere close to the same domain as maps.
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I've been working on Google Maps for close to five years now. I somehow missed the previous postings of this thread, but a little hyperbole never hurt anyone :) Your larger point about the inability in our profession to take a step back and consider the overall situation is spot-on. The mindset I most commonly encounter among other engineers when discussing any kind of systemic problems in our practices is a kind of…
hey did you ever use the old Verizon map app that came with their pre-Android phones? That was really, really good.
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> There is too much stuff in the world to present on a map without absolutely overwhelming people Nevertheless, I think that Google Maps et al. typically show far too little on the screen. My Dad tells me that he still prefers paper maps because he doesn't have to fiddle around with the zoom level to get things to show up. While I'm sure that Google has more data on most places than it could fit in a small window, wh…
In a world where you can plot a pin of yourself via gps on the map the need for street names, building names e.t.c. at higher zoom levels just doesn't matter because you don't need it to figure out where you actually are, with paper maps you did. If adding that information to the map serves no need anymore but clutters it up, why do it?
I fired Google Maps and now use Apple Maps unless I'm looking for a business by name that I think is not mainstream enough to be on Apple Maps.
I am just stepping away from web topic as it is irelevant. Slow VM, huge text files, lasignas of code stacked one on another. Comparison here just isnt fair, I do understand that people who never expirienced MFC 6 application cant compare it to browser. As they know only browser/electron/... But just last weekend I have installed Windows 7 on modern i7 computer (with SSD). Sure, half of drivers didnt work etc. but it…
I think if something is possible to do given better hardware, no matter how bloated or useless, developers at large will end up doing it. I don't think RAM usage or performance are concerns for the people that go straight to Electron because in the present it's easy develop for and nobody has the right to force them to chose otherwise. Electron isn't going away; the only ways it improves are Chrome getting more perfo…
On the other side, android sdk/framework/whatever looks like bunch of academics pouring their frustrations into one library - if you want to learn all patterns just dig in. MFC 6 in 1998 was more organized (https://t1.daumcdn.net/cfile/tistory/11781B244C45903F42 please try to draw this one for android! No vision, just chaos. Oh you loose context with orientation? How nice...). Android development environment catched what Windows Mobile had in 2000 barely when they pulled in IntelliJ (which is copy of visual studio) while for machine code they still lack behind. Please, DONT believe any of this, DO check VS 6.0 and Windows Mobile. Everyone is reinventing everything without/ignoring past and its mistakes, repeating them over and over again. Loosing 20 years for the sake of another corporation gaining monopoly is so crazy that you need to see it with your own eyes.
Cloud. We had mainframes. Enough said. We are moving to those again, for short term profit for users and long term profit for providers. I wonder when affordable server hardware will dissapear from market.
While I think that hardware industry is moving forward, the development is racing backwards or barely catching what we had 20 years back. Drowning itself in lasignas and stacks of different overheads, from overdesigned interfaces to VMs. IoT is still sane (due to lack of resources to waste) but the common software development just went crazy.
I do suspect that at some point, hardware will stop supporting bloating due to physics limitations and optimized code will come back, but I wonder who will still remember how to write it? Ah, we will reinvent it again?!
But nevermind the rant of an old fart. He just doesn't understand waiting on cpu 1000 times faster than what we had at 50% while loading megabytes of web based software doing what he would implement in 100kb. With 0.0015% of cpu load. It is just him. He doesn't understand the hype.
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Try running Google Maps on your 133Mhz Pentium.
I am sure that Microsoft Autoroute was available for that era. It probably was also faster then Google Maps is today.
It didn't actually work that well. The internet is the only real way you can get a Google-maps like autoroute feature with reasonable update times. Constantly buying new CDs and DVDs on a subscription basis is a no-go for sure. I don't think anyone's 56kb modem was fast enough to update the map data.
Even if you bought the CDs for the updated map data, it only was updated every year IIRC. So there was plenty of roads that simply were wrong. Its been a long time since I used it, but Google Maps is better at the actual core feature: having up to date maps, and an up-to-date route information.
Hint: Microsoft wasn't sending around Google cars to build up its database of maps in the 90s. Nor were there public satellite images released by the government to serve as a starting point for map data. (Satellite imagery was pure spycraft. We knew governments could do it, but normal people did NOT have access to that data yet). The maps were simply not as accurate as what we have today, not by a long shot.
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Has anyone here criticizing new software actually live in the 90s? Like, there's a reason that typical people didn't use Microsoft Autoroute and other map programs. Not only was it super expensive, it required some computer know-how that wasn't really common yet. And even when you got everything lined up just right, it still had warts.
The only thing from the 90s that was unambiguously better than today's stuff was like... Microsoft Encarta, Chips Challenge and Space Cadet Pinball. Almost everything else is better today.
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> Most computers weren't that bad, but there was a time when Windows 95/98 and the mainstream hardware it ran on weren't a good match. That's what you remember. That's been the issue with every Windows OS. The cheap consumer hardware available at the time of the release was not enough to provide a snappy OS experience. Unfortunately, hardware frequencies have sort of stalled, so now we're back to square 1 again, wher…
In my experience Windows 10 runs well enough on even the shittiest of hardware as long as it has an SSD. I can't tell you how many people (both personally and professionally) have asked me to troubleshoot slow Windows installs, and almost invariably they are running Windows on an HDD. Many times they got it because "well it was the bigger storage size, so that must mean it's better, right?" - In the premium segment t…
But the 2nd half of your comment, I disagree with. To me, Windows 10 has the perception of being faster than Windows 7 was with the same hardware - most of my machines have been on Windows 10 for ages, but I actually finally upgraded one of my work laptops just today, and this still holds true for me.
With great support for multiple monitors, great high-DPI support, a better command line, Hyper-V, WSL and more, I actually love Windows 10 - it's a fantastic OS.