Not suggesting an alternative model here, but I think that Google et. al (based on my own time working on Chrome) don't take that responsibility quite as seriously as they should. Being responsible may be an accident, but being dominant in any given area is not. The forces inside Google which take over parts of the world do so without really caring about the long term commitment.
It is so possible to preserve XSLT and other web features e.g. by wrapping them in built-in (potentially even standardized) polyfills, but that kind of work isn't incentivized over new features and big flashy refactors.
Completely agree. Among the reasons I no longer work for Google is that I could not escape the perception that they were the 800-lb gorilla in the room and deeply uncomfortable with taking on any responsibiliy given that circumstance.
When you are the biggest organization in a space, it's your space whether you feel qualified to lead or not. The right course of action is "get qualified, fast." The top-level leadership did not strike me as willing to shoulder that responsibility.
My personal preferred outcome to address the security concerns with XSLT would probably be to replace the native implementation with a JavaScript-sandboxed implementation in-browser. This wouldn't solve all issues (such an implementation would almost certainly be operating in a privileged state, so there would still be security concerns), but it would take all the "this library is living at a layer that does direct unchecked memory manipulation, with all the consequences therein" off the table. There is, still, a case to be made perhaps that if you're already doing that, the next logical step is to make the whole feature optional by jettisoning the sandboxed implementation into a JavaScript library.
Generally speaking yes, they are different. One pattern is that you do something to create a source of audio, and the layer below you starts handing you buffers to fill. With each buffer you send back you can indicate if you want to keep getting called with fresh buffers — if not, the calls stop until you poke something to resume them.
Another pattern is that you push buffers to the layer below you and there’s backpressure to keep you sending at the same rate they’re being played out. In that case you can just stop sending buffers when you have nothing to play.
Your reasons are correct. There are so many layers between an app (or web page) and the physical layer of sound which all burn power; phones and earbuds owe quite a bit of their battery life to shutting down bits of hardware when unused.
EDIT: this reminds me of a WWDC many years ago — Apple got really excited about timer coalescing and added parameters to all the low level timer APIs which let you indicate how much slop you want to allow for each individual timer. Ideally then the OS can keep the CPU asleep for longer and wake it up to do work in batches. Code that deals with real time sound has tight timing requirements and can’t be delayed as easily, so in a timer-coalesced world distinguishing between playing silence and playing nothing has an even bigger power impact.
I've had an issue with my phone for the past few months that could be solved by erasing it and restoring from backup, but I use Signal a bunch and I'm not currently feeling risky or motivated enough to migrate my whole Signal state to a spare phone and do it.
Lack of backups is not a retention/deletion policy. Signal chats can, in fact, have a deletion policy set. Instead it directly ties retention to "how long can I last without losing or erasing my phone", which is not a useful proxy.
Anyone sufficiently motivated to keep messages forever can (a) set up the desktop client and back up its data store or (b) set up signal-cli and save everything that comes out of it.
No backups doesn't defeat this, it just makes life harder for everyone who relies on scrollback. Imagine if email worked this way.
Indeed they do, as I just learned today. That really doesn't make any sense then – I vaguely remember Moxie stating that the lack of backups was intentional, but now having them on Android but not iOS makes no sense at all.
Plus, successful couples are great advocates for the website that introduced them. You lose two customers in the immediate term but gain more as time goes on. (Also OkCupid, 2012-2015.)
A PDF doesn’t represent a responsive/resizable version of the page so it will look awkward on most screen sizes even if the original would have handled it.
A PDF doesn’t capture scrolling behavior, so a nested scrolling element will lose most of its content, and a page with a chat prompt or cookie notice might have part of its content covered.
A PDF won’t capture even simple interactive elements like image carousels, lightboxes, and collapsible sections, so content may be lost (“oops, I saved it on the second slide of the image carousel, but I really wanted the first one”).
As far as I know, a PDF won’t include embedded audio/video.
Many PDF exporters chunk the document into paper-sized pages (but, to be fair, some don’t).
Not sure if this tool nails all of those cases, but those are reasons why I’ve saved local copies of pages in the past.
The top-level comment you replied to doesn’t mention malware.
In any case, both hardware and software keyloggers exist which would be thwarted by an onscreen keyboard. If I recall correctly, mouse keyboards became popular when keyloggers started being more known, and the following generation of malware took screenshots every time you clicked.
It’s a very obsolete security measure but did make sense briefly.
It is so possible to preserve XSLT and other web features e.g. by wrapping them in built-in (potentially even standardized) polyfills, but that kind of work isn't incentivized over new features and big flashy refactors.