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Live tiles are nearly universally praised in retrospect, but it might be a case of hindsight bias [1]. The video [2] brings up some problems of the concept and why no other company copied the concept.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

[2] https://youtu.be/OgXlNaYXRu4


I think if Microsoft had made an easier bridge, faster from Win32 to things like Live Tiles (and the Charms, too) there would have been a lot more people praising the Live Tiles today (and maybe even the Charms). Live Tiles really made their case on Windows Phone 8 where nearly every app supported them (relatively well), that was the only "Notification Center" for missed notifications, and its glanceability became very obvious.

Charms are somewhat similar, too. On iPhone almost every app needs a Share button somewhere and almost every app still has it in a different place today. On Windows Phone 8 it was much more obvious why a dedicated OS-level Share button accessible just about anywhere in any app was pretty great. On Desktop it wasn't seen as helpful as almost no apps supported it (either as shareable things or as apps that could be shared to) because there was no easy Win32 bridge and Microsoft also didn't think to try to integrate with clipboard operations until too late in Windows 8.1 (and then never quite delivered it because most everyone had already written off the Charms by then), as what could have been a potentially easy path to use the existing Windows "share paradigm" to bootstrap.

(You can make cases for the other 4 Charms as well beyond the Share charm, but the Share charm is the most obvious where Windows Phone proved it was a good idea but the Desktop didn't have enough supporting apps to also prove it there.)


Are live tiles universally praised? I see them mentioned positively occasionally, but I suspect they are getting some benefit… like, they are the Windows 8 feature that isn’t immediately obnoxious. Windows 8’s UI just didn’t have any redeeming features, so the element that is merely bad gets brought up as a sort of “see I’m not a relentlessly negative hater, I’m objective” thing, I bet. Is there a name for this trope?

The way I see live tiles is that it was MS abandoning widgets that existed since vista (although they were removed later for security reasons) and coming up with a new thing to start all over with, and didn't backporting it so the only way you'd get them is on the (less popular) new version of the OS. Also they were tied into the start screen/menu, you couldn't drop on on your desktop.

I'm sure there was some meeting where at the end of the pitch deck was some one said:

"...and after people acclimate to them, we'll put ads there! Advertising Directly in the UI!"


The patent expired, but the minifigs is also a EU 3D trademark. This is not possible for the brick which (only) serves a technical function, namely to hold on each other. Trademarks do not expire while in use. Another example for a 3D trademark, also in this US, is the Coca Cola bottle.

[1] https://www.chaillot.com/ip-news/validity-of-3d-trademarks-f...


What is your alternative explanation for why people rent public storage space? Urban growth and growth in suburbs are not mutually exclusive.


> What is your alternative explanation for why people rent public storage space?

People buying a lot more stuff. The mutually exclusive part is saying that home sizes decreased when they actually decreased.


Changing execution behaviour based on filename is common in Linux environments too. Some examples:

1. BusyBox is a single executable that executes different commands based on which symlink was used to call it

2. Bash puts itself into compatibility mode if invoked as "sh"

3. "ping" can be invoked as "ping4" or "ping6"

4. Some of git's subcommands are symlinks back to the main executable

5. Clang switches to C++ mode if invoked as "clang++"

6. AppArmor profiles activate on file paths


Your examples are interested, but not comparable.

In your list these are executables that change their own behaviour based on how they are called, whereas in the OP it's the OS changing code based on the name of an application.


But 1-5 is the executable making decisions based on it's command name, not the OS changing behavior.


In all but the last example these are the programs themselves having multiple names. There are literally multiple names on the file system that point to the same executable. So `ping`, `ping4`, and `ping6` are all the same program but it checks $0 to see which name it was invoked as in order to change it’s own behavior.

This is entirely different than when DirectX behaves differently for a program named foo.exe and another one called bar.exe.

AppArmor (and for that matter SELinux) are a different thing yet again. Here the goal is not to fix bugs or incompatibilities, but to add extra security. Similar perhaps, but not nearly as intrusive. Neither involve runtime patching, which is the most salient feature of this crash report.


From the GitHub issue it becomes clear that blocking happens by the EasyPrivacy blocklist. The blocked URL youtube.com/api/stats/atr is/can also be used for tracking users, this is why some are arguing that it legitimately on that blocklist.

The tracking not malicious. YouTube has a legitimate interest to verify views, e.g. to recommend popular videos to others. If a view counter was increased by just invoking an API, view counts could be manipulated easily. Also see the video [1] from ... 13 years ago ... so it might be slighly outdated. Just slightly.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI


Please don't downvote comments only because you don't like their opinion (reply to them instead). It cannot be that the same opinion is valueable when someone famous write it [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962529


Sounds like feature creep. Zip is not a database, at best its just slow. Use a archive utility to handle archives.


Sounds like an optional module that lets you avoid needing to clobber something with python/node/perl and bash to turn zipped files into sqlite data, or vice versa.


Is it just me or does the talk actually confirm all its Python "myths and fairy tales"?


Well, the fairy tale was that Python was fast, or "fast enough" or "fast if we could compile it and get rid of the GIL".


It confirms that Python indeed has poor executional performance.


They absolutely do have that infrastructure. They implemented every country's content rating system, such as PEGI, ESRB, ... . Games are regionally banned, such as in Germany [1]. Games can also have regionally censored games, typically for violence/gore in Germany [2]. With the strange effect that if you change your account's region, it re-downloads some of the games.

The legal situation with VPNs and traveling between regions is the same as with any internet service.

[1] https://steamcommunity.com/groups/foruncut/discussions/17/41... [2] https://steamcommunity.com/groups/foruncut/discussions/17/39...


GMail (and Fastmail) are rendering the email. It just happens that the email and we webbrowser are both HTML. In no case should they just literally forward the email HTML to the browser. They scrub JavaScript, non-whitelisted HTML elements, rewrite links/external resources including tracking pixels.

You can see the raw email with "show original" in the options


> They scrub ... non-whitelisted HTML elements

Any documenation on that list?


https://help.zapier.com/hc/en-us/articles/8496101927181-What...

I don't think there is an official list. It is security-related and changes over time


Thanks.

> It is security-related and changes over time

That would explain why new prints of an old message don't match old.


Meh, macOS’s Mail.app approach of everything-but-the-JavaScript is great and I wish outlook & Gmail did it too


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