One interesting detail is that the Chinese have been improving their photography lens production and quality in rapid pace and cheap price.
The legendary Zeiss is producing the lithography lenses for ASML, so it looks like China is pouring lots of effort to photography lenses to bootstrap their lithography lens capabilities.
I don’t know about the other parts needed for chip fabbing but I kinda expect then to encourage and subsidize other technological fields related to it as well.
Best practices and such shouldn't be obeyed as "laws" but guidelines for general work. Once in a while there's good reason to avoid / skip them for whatever reason.
The bigger issue is that developers (me included) are usually making the decisions in their own heads. Usually the reasons are quite ok but they are not really said out loud or documented.
I've been stumbled upon this as both developer trying to get their code approved and when doing a code review.
For the developer it feels super annoying that somebody nitpicks about things which the developer has probably gone through in their heads already and ended up with the resulting solution. Just like Martin in the post complains and reacts passive aggressively towards reviewers mentioning these things.
For the code reviewer it feels like the developer is being sloppy or doesn't care about our common way of doing things thus increasing the need to nitpick and explain so that the developer understands how it should be done.
The solution for this is actually quite easy: document in the comments and in the Pull Request _why_ you're breaking team's / company's guidelines and why you think it's warranted for solution for this case. This seems to remove quite a lot of friction.
Oh and of course it doesn't mean that the guidelines should be broken all the time just because one thinks this kind of stuff is for "idiots|assholes". When working as a team, we need to adhere to common way of working for most of the time.
Haven't used any Linux Distribution on Desktop so cannot comment that side or the installer but my home server has been running Ubuntu LTSes for over a decade. Last night I upgraded it to 24.04 LTS and I was really surprised how well and easy it was to upgrade. Couple of previous upgrades were a lot more hairier things breaking in surprisingly ways after upgrade but this time everything worked perfectly from the first reboot.
That experience actually aligns pretty well with the op, because my experience and the general consensus among Linux users that I've seen is that canonicals focusing almost all of its effort on making Ubuntu an excellent server experience because that's where the actual business is, and is letting the desktop sort of bit rot into oblivion.
Happened to upgrade my PowerMac G4 Digital Audio model with OWC's PATA SSD (actually was SATA SSD with PATA adapter), It wasn't a slouch with the probably original PATA HDD but SSD made things even faster and I don't have to worry about 20+ years old HDD dying out that much. That SSD saturates the Ultra ATA/66 IDE Bus completely which feels awesome.
Of course when used with Mac OS Classic, the OS is the biggest bottle neck because of it's bad multi-tasking capabilities. That OS reminds me of things we take granted these days, like computer not locking almost completely when decompressing zip package.
The N95 was super awkward to use. It had all the bells and whistles that you could cram into a phone at that point and it all was in small menus under menus under menus etc.
N95 being a best seller was one of the reasons why Nokia was so sure that iPhone would fail. It lulled them into false security and proved to them that things were going great.
I happened to review the N95 and it felt horrible after seeing Jobs demoing the iPhone prototype. Couldn't believe for a second that the Nokia's way would work out with S60 series and was super surprised to hear N95 was selling really well.
Of course iPhone would gather steam for a couple of years before getting good enough but still.
I think that was largely a Symbian thing - having used the Symbian phones before the N95, it felt sensible (and more akin to a desktop OS, with context menus etc)
For Symbian phones Nokia was designing different icons for every phone model. When times started to go bad for them, they introduced common icons for new models and hailed that as a big design innovation.
The 3310 was the culmination of Nokia's really good UX work. Symbian convoluted all that and made it a big mess. The manuals for symbian phones were thick and heavy and mostly no one except the engineer-natured people could actually use most of the features.
At least in Finland just having the more expensive phones was seen as a status symbol and usually people were using them for calling, smses and perhaps for emails.
It was super nice to use at the time but it was also completely unsealed against weather so if a bit of snow or water got beneath the wheel, you would get unusable phone quite fast. Happened to mine even though I was super careful, luckily bought it used super cheap. It was also too expensive just because it has WAP and nothing otherwise spectacular.
Ooh, Tintin is one of the first comics I was introduced after Donald Duck (the Carl Barks stories are still as good as then!)
Luckily the Franco-Belgian comics have been readily available in Finland and usually with good translations as well although not all jokes can be translated.
From what I've heard, Asterix is notorious on the French wordplays that cannot be translated.
There's so much more ideas and humanity in those compared to Marvel/DC stuff (which I happen to read occasionally as well but they are repeating the same stuff from decade to decade). The Franco-Belgian comics are the reason why I'm contemplating on learning French enough to be able read them in the original language.
And don't forget that the Metal Hurlant comics anthology affected quite a lot of English comics as well.
> (the Carl Barks stories are still as good as then!)
>.. with good translations as well although not all jokes can be translated.
Funnily enough I prefer reading the Barks and Rosa comics in german translations. One of the original translators put some wordplay and literary allusions into her translations – making them slightly different, but, I think, better:
I've always thought Carls Barks and Don Rosa stories became much more important in Europe than in the US because they struck the same chords as do Tintin.
I don't know in what format people read them overseas but in France I was subscribed to two things :
"Le journal de Mickey" (Mickey's newspaper) Which was a weekly 30-35 pages book with two Disney comics and some articles.
"Mickey Parade Géant" (don't know a good translation sorry) which was a monthly ~200 pages pocket-sized Book aimed more at 15+ children, it had the best stories imo with reccuring ones.
Both of these contained a lot of translated comics from Italy, Spain, etc...
But Mickey Parade Géant always had a page before a story which indicated where it was from and a couple of facts about it's authors, sometimes even small interviews !
These stories remind me of all the multiverse stuff going on in movies nowadays, because each time it was the same characters (Mickey, Donald, Goofy...) With (often) the same personalities but in different roles and times !
I remember one where they were all superheroes (Ultra heroes I think), another where Mickey was a reporter in a big city, or one where he was a doctor ( and a bit unfriendly) in a parody of Dr House.
I should re-read them all in the correct order someday !
In germany as well, mainly in "Lustiges Taschenbuch" which still exists (new issues being released, still mainly translated from italian i believe).
When my family moved to the US when i was 10, i was shocked that no equivalent existed! And hugely disappointed by the US comic book culture because, although 10 year old me really liked the images, it felt impossible to know what was going on without access to all the volumes.
… and from Denmark. Those pocket books were huge in my childhood in the 80s and findable in multiple european countries so I was surprises to learn later that they weren’t really a thing in the Duck’s origin country.
You can just get the name puns translated, they're not very far fetched (child level). The bard is Assurance-tout-risque = insures all risks, which is funny cause he gets beat up all the time.
It's not, but it was a fantastic stepping stone to learning other languages. You already had the story from your own so then you could learn to read in some other language and see if you got the jokes and if you could understand the story.
Oh wow, before this I haven't used old System versions than 6.0.8 or so and it's just super amazing how ready and well thought even the System 1.0 feels usability-wise! Compare to any Windows before Windows 95, which finally caught on enough of the System/Mac OS classic desktop metaphor and made things feel not too clunky.
I've probably said it before and I say it once again: the old Mac OS windowing and spatial Finder feels even today better and more usable than any of the current DEs, macOS included. They managed to cram bunch of windows and widgets in the paltry 512x384 resolution when nowadays we manage to have max 2 windows in one screen or one window per display. (and yes, there are tiling WMs etc but that's a different story...)
On my personal mac there’s a couple of folders that I only ever use in a specific workflow that I have spatial mode flipped on for. It’s nice to know that a folder’s window will always open at a specific on-screen location with a specific size every time… might sound silly but the removed friction is significant.
Mac's are nice. As for Windows the best version IMO was NT 3.5.1 which is a different flavor beast than Mac/Win95 but did it's job exceedingly well, with the one exception of the nested MDI (multiple-document-interface) windows like in Program Manager. Fortunately I rarely opened more than one document per app.
I remember going to a computer store and watching somebody demo System 1.0. But by the time my dad brought home a Mac 128 for the family they were already on System 1.1. So that was my first Mac OS version.
The legendary Zeiss is producing the lithography lenses for ASML, so it looks like China is pouring lots of effort to photography lenses to bootstrap their lithography lens capabilities.
I don’t know about the other parts needed for chip fabbing but I kinda expect then to encourage and subsidize other technological fields related to it as well.