The quality of Apple maps is highly dependent on where you live. Every time I check their release notes, I see “we’ve added a custom 3d model for this one landmark in a random US city”, which has zero impact on me or 99.99% of their users. Meanwhile, in my home city it took more than 3 months for a newly opened gym to appear of Apple maps, way way slower than on Google or OSM maps.
Of the big tech companies, Apple is definitely the one that has embraced America First the most. If you live outside the US, you get features later (if at all) and have to pay more for that privilege.
The US is the only market where Apple's blue bubble iMessage empire exists, so its makes sense that they'd try to make Apple Maps tolerable to use for users there.
>Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago…
…and yet SMB support in macOS remains slow and buggy to this day. I tried all combinations of server-side settings and obscure plist tweaks to make SMB navigation and search work as fast as they do on my Linux machine out of box before giving up. It is very obviously not a priority for their services revenue, so there’s no incentive for fixing any of the long standing problems.
> SMB support in macOS remains slow and buggy to this day. I tried all combinations of server-side settings and obscure plist tweaks to make SMB navigation and search work as fast as they do on my Linux machine out of box before giving up. It is very obviously not a priority for their services revenue
That's where my thoughts went, too. I can make SMB "better" but not "great" usually, but it's annoying to have to look up and apply, and still have things not optimal. Just in case, IIRC I find this the most useful:
I found something fun last week--- Apparently if you use Adobe tools, there is a sync plugin they install for finder that can cause big issues with SMB shares. Might help you if you have that!
Apple has their own implementation of SMB in macOS and it's one of the worst out there. Dropping connections, can't re-establish connections automatically after sleep, and performance issues.
Why they didn't keep Samba (licensing, probably) is beyond me.
Yeah, can't remember the last time I even bothered with SMB because it's so buggy. Usually I don't need filesystem behavior, I'll just push/pull files over SSH.
I used to do that a lot in some old versions of OS X, but then MacFUSE got abandoned and picked up as osxfuse, then that broke then got fixed repeatedly with several Mac updates, and I gave up.
NFS works way better than SMB, but the Finder is not without its troubles. Sometimes it will take 10 minutes to display a folder for reasons, mostly.
The Finder is really an horrible piece of sh*t of software, slow as hell, doesn't provide the most basic information[1], and, of course, doesn't work properly when browsing network shares either SMB or NFS.
[1]virtually all common file browsers (Windows Explorer, Gnome Nautilus, KDE dolphin) displays at all times : the number of files in the current folder, their size, the number of files selected, their size; also all but the Finder have a "recent files" section that actually contains the latest files used, while the Finder displays a completely random selection of recent files, but never the most recently used ones.
With the exception of summed size of selected items, the Finder has all of that. Help yourself to the "View->Show Status Bar" menu option. Also, "View->Show View Options->Calculate All Sizes" to show storage size for directories.
Also, with hardware being now more expensive, just being able to swap parts for upgrades or repairs is way more appealing than before.
Not to mention they don't spend time with marketing fluff about AI, which in the current market is winning them some clients.
But I also think the fact that they have been here for a long time now, and they got the pro backward compatible with the old 13 means people trust them now. They delivered.
Interesting how different both the tone and the structure of the articles are compared to the modern texts.
Take the article about Copenhagen as an example: https://britannica11.org/article/07-0111-copenhagen/copenhag...
The geography and key points of interest are described very accurately, but the authors aren’t shy about inserting emotionally charged adjectives and personal options on what they consider interesting or curious. Also, the huge portion about the Battle of Copenhagen in the bottom is a complete departure and shifts the genre from a geographical description to the shot-per-shot narration of a naval battle.
Yes, that’s one of the things I like most about it. The articles have a personal tone and are less homogenized.
You get that mix of geography, history, and sometimes quite opinionated description all in one place, which makes them much more readable, in my view. My introduction to this version discusses this and other related matters: https://britannica11.org/about.html
Looking at Victor Hugo's entry I immediately spotted this
> After yet another three years’ space the author of La Légende des siècles reappeared as the author of Les Misérables, the greatest epic and dramatic work of fiction ever created or conceived: the epic of a soul transfigured and redeemed, purified by heroism and glorified through suffering; the tragedy and the comedy of life at its darkest and its brightest, of humanity at its best and at its worst.
One of the worst cases happens immediately after logging into a fresh Mac, or after upgrading one. You’re instantly hit with a barrage of requests from all the installed apps and their various permissions. It makes for such a terrible initial user experience, it’s utterly baffling someone at Apple has signed it off. They used to poke fun at Windows in their ads, but UAC has never been that terrible in my experience.
iOS stores the previously displayed notifications in an internal database, which was used to access the data. It’s outside of Signal’s control, they recommend disabling showing notification content in their settings to prevent this attack vector
They do control the content on the notification. It's a bit odd to put the sensitive text in the notification only to recommend disabling it at the system level.
Signal does NOT send encrypted notification, they send a blank notification that act like a ping, the actual encrypted data is then fetched by the app itself.
Sorry, the “recommended” was a bad wording on my part. The recommendation comes from the 404 Media article who did the expose on this incident, not Signal itself.
Partition Magic was among the first utilities recommended to me by my more experienced water I got my first PC. It served me well for many years since!
With the widespread move to OLED across the TV and monitor manufacturers, this might not be the case for much longer. They look and perform great, but are ultimately a consumable product.
I have experienced the same privacy culture shock in Denmark. Generally, I think the people’s trust in their government is the greatest social asset of the danish society, as well as their biggest blind spot.
Last year, I think, I saw someone talk about trust in Danish society and how it works. As a Dane it's not something I really think about, but I their conclusions where at least interesting. In Denmark you're given implicit trust, that's the default. Trust is given, not earned. That poses a problem for people coming from the outside, because trust can be lost, but because it's something that was given to you, there's not really any way to earn it back. If you don't understand that social contract, you can mess up your life pretty quickly, with no means of recovery.
This is a topic that frequently comes up in our multicultural Danish company. In many countries people have adversarial relationship with their government, which is completely unlike Denmark. This mindset requires time and effort to change for the newcomers, and is also difficult to understand for people who haven’t lived outside of Denmark.
Is the trust naive? Have there been instances of a government violating that trust? Were they held accountable?
The US was a much higher trust society before repeated governments from opposing parties violated that trust with little or no consequences. This left people with no realistic competitive party that was trustworthy, and first past the poles elections ensures they only have to be slightly less despicable than their opponent. This also drives polarization.
Having a multiple party system with something approximating proportional representation, an independent press and judiciary, and a smaller population and land area all make a large difference. The US was the last nation to use first past the poles for something besides a house of commons that was ranked a democracy by vdem I think? Definitely the last one to be ranked a full democracy. The largest remaining population ranked as a full democracy is Japan, it doesn't look too likely to change from the outside. Germany is next in size and we'll see how that goes. SK was next and they passed a rough test so lets hope. Large populations are easier to polarize apparently? I wonder if that will hold true with social media eroding the rural urban ideological divide.
