> Famously, the first iPhone was actually expensive trash: no apps, no 3G, couldn't even cut and paste text.
Also famously, while the tech elitists complained about all of its shortcomings, the broader consumer market fully embraced it and it single-handedly drove an entirely new generation of consumer electronics.
For the record, it let you read the same web pages as a desktop computer over WiFi. It had a usable mapping app and good music app.
The rest of the experience, stuff like alarms, calculator, address book, etc. also worked nicely.
Those turned out to be things no one else was offering. I had a Nokia N95 at the time and the original iPhone was a big improvement on everything except the camera.
Yes, as I wrote initially: the iPhone is a behemoth today, but its first version was underwhelming to say the least.
My point, which you seem to have overlooked, is that parent poster complaining that a "european iphone" doesn't exist is not realistic, considering how it went for Apple.
The consumer market embraced it despite its shortcomings because it looked nice and was easy to use; the alternatives were not. Yeah, it didn't do that much, but it did more than a flip phone. The alternatives wanted you to use a stylus just to use your phone, and tried to basically recreate the MS Windows UI on a tiny screen; their UI was terrible.
What's the fastest way to get promoted to a manager at a fast food chain -- show up on time and do your job. If anything, the managers are workers who cared enough to do a decent job.
> I understand what the author means, but I think that in any human-2-human interaction, we are all entitled to at least basic courtesy.
This only holds up for the "small" number of human interactions the average person gets. If my neighbor comes and rings my doorbell to say hello, I'm fine answering and shooting the shit, maybe invite them in for a quick coffee.
If every 5 minutes a strange comes in and rings my doorbell, I'm not getting up and answering it. And some people visiting will get angry and start pounding on the door and coming to my window and pounding on it glaring at me inside. And say, hey, I drove all the way from hours away to come visit you, the least you could do is open the door and say hello.
For them, it's their first human-2-human interaction that day, with someone they slightly admire even, and they're expecting basic human courtesy. To me, they're just the 42nd doorbell ringer today.
Ah the dehumanizing nature of affluence… a right of passage for those fortunate enough to experience.
The challenge is in how to manage and and maintain the interest, less one falls back into the realm of obscurity or worse be tarnished reputationally so as to never recover.
The term is 漢字. It's written the same in both Japanese and Chinese, with the Japanese pronunciation being "kanji" and the Chinese pronunciation being "hànzì".
It can be written this way in Chinese (in those variants using traditional rather than simplified characters).
Whether that makes it the "same word" is a philosophical question. But writing "hànzì" is proper when referring to the use of the characters to write Chinese. If one is using it to mean a set of characters (rather than the general concept of characters that come from that writing tradition), they're different sets; and there are typically different expectations for typesetting etc. The decision to produce "CJK Unified Ideographs" in Unicode was not without controversy, and quite a few words have been spent by standards committees on explaining why these characters should share code points while there are completely separate Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts (despite shared history and many at-least-seemingly overlapping glyphs).
That difference in pronunciation is why “kanji”, in English, is almost exclusively used to talk about the Japanese script.
The word “hanzi” in English is much less commonly used — people studying or discussing Chinese are more likely to call them “Chinese characters” or just “characters”.
> 7.css is a CSS framework for building interface components that look like Windows 7. It is built on top of the GUI backbone of XP.css, which is an extension of 98.css.
Sort of mimics Windows itself - you famously have to do some archeology every time you want to change an important setting, and will work your way through many iterations of windows ui components as you do
Other countries have just been doing this by hand. For example, in Japan, they will open up bags of trash from the dumpster, find your address from a discarded envelope, sort out what you should have recycled, then bag it and leave it at your door, with a stern warning and instructions on how to properly sort your trash next time.
"For example, in Japan, they will open up bags of trash from the dumpster, find your address from a discarded envelope..."
Not near as prevalent as implied.
"Currently, more than half of 62 core Japanese cities are conducting garbage bag opening inspections but Fukushima's local government is the first one to disclose the names of the violators."
The waste collectors in Christchurch, New Zealand do occasional spot checks of home recycling bins and leave a little note (checklist, actually) letting you know what shouldn't have been put in the bin. They take it away regardless in the first instance; not sure what happens in the second.
Where does your intuition for how long actions take in a cockpit come from?
I'm not a pilot, so i have no idea. But from watching vasaviation on youtube, it always seems to take like 5-10 minutes between when they first radio the control tower there is an emergency, then they go through their checklists and stabilize things, and then they're ready to talk to the tower for the next step. Now add more back and forth and the time to actually fly to get back to a regular path, and 15 minutes might even seem too short a period of time before you've finished resolving everything and can now kick back and tell the passengers the end result.
Also famously, while the tech elitists complained about all of its shortcomings, the broader consumer market fully embraced it and it single-handedly drove an entirely new generation of consumer electronics.
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