This reminds me of something I made once in "Macromedia" Flash back when I was 16 in like 2001ish or so.
It wasn't really an actual OS, but I managed to get a working desktop with a file browser, fake non functional web browser, and a task bar and start menu.
My flash application didn't accomplish anything, but I felt immensely proud of having been able to create a mock up of a UI, even though it was extremely kludgy and wasn't even able to read or write files in the fake applications.
...No offense to the creator though. I don't mean to compare my high school project to this one. This project is indeed very cool!
I too dream of one day inventing my own kind of spreadsheet and terminal hackery OS, so I salute this person for creating a proof of concept that looks good.
The founder was Chinese military, the early funding came from government sources, and several official gov white papers state Huawei as a national security priority.
I don't know what you accomplish by denying something so basic and provable.
As was pretty much every other male adult of his generation. I don't see what this supposedly proves.
> the early funding came from government sources
Something which isn't all too uncommon, both in China and across the world. Silicon Valley itself was built on DoD money. Again, this is grasping straws.
> and several official gov white papers state Huawei as a national security priority.
That can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. For one, Trump made the exact same statement about the US coal and steel industry. Is the rest of the world supposed to ban US coal and steel now because of that? Again, this doesn't prove anything at all. It's just interpretative fear-mongering.
I'll tell you what we have: Numerous backdoors in Cisco equipment and official government documents that the NSA used Cisco for spying operations. This is a fact.
On Huawei's side, all we have are comments from the US government. The very organization with a decades long track record of global mass surveillance, among other things. There is no proof of backdoors, despite GCHQ having inspected their hard- and software for the past 8 years. In fact, there isn't any evidence at all that the Chinese government has used Huawei for their spying operations in any capacity. They most certainly could force them to, but the exact same thing can be said about the US government, who also has a track record of having done exactly that already.
Show me actual proof and I'll revise my opinion, but until then I'll call this out for what it is: Just another US-gov-led witch hunt.
It appears your knowledge on the matter doesn't transcend beyond repeating US propaganda. Ignorance of facts, making up strawman arguments, repeating words of a notoriously lying organization without any thinking about it whatsoever. There is no discussion to be had here.
I used to see geometric shapes upon waking up if I woke up abruptly in the middle of a very visual dream, but only if the first thing I saw was a sudden bright light (as in having my sleep mask abruptly removed). Hasn't happened to me in a while, but usually the bright light of the real world looks "pixelated" in very weird geometric patterns that for me were morphing, chromatically abberated and animated. These flashes of shapes only lasted 1 second at most but were very trippy to experience.
There is a program for windows that does this if I recall correctly. It records every file and registry entry created during installation and allows you to compare snapshots of "before" and "after" installation.
Back in the day, I used to work at General Electric in the warehouse unloading and re-building pallets of GE lightbulbs for 8 hours straight.
One of my coworkers there was this guy who liked to play ska music really loud. His buddy that he talked to used to be really violent with the boxes- chucking some of them hard on purpose, trying to get some of the product to break.
I wholeheartedly agree with this comment. I recently had my facebook account "accidentally reactivated" against my will after I had deactivated it on facebook. I deactivated it a second time, and am currently hoping that it doesn't "come back to life" again for one reason or another. The last time it happened, it was because I was right in the middle of a big california fire and I think facebook was trying to be "helpful" or something by giving me the option of alerting family members that I was okay.
I wouldn't mind deleting everything, loading up facebook onto a VPN-facing VM and selling it for cash and watching it burn. Maybe my old account would become so cluttered with garbage, that they'll be forced to finally let me open up a blank new account with nothing on it that I'll park and forget the password to one day. Only then will the illusion of privacy finally be complete.
That raises an interesting question: who owns a conversation?
I'm not at all sure how data protection laws, such as GDPR, do or should interact with online messaging systems. For instance, if you ask Google to remove all data they have on you on gmail, do they have to reach into the mailboxes of any other gmail users who have received mail from you and delete those messages?
Or do the recipients count as the ones who are storing that data, so if you want your data out of my mailbox you would have to ask me, not Google?
>Is it just me or has the mobile web taken a nosedive in recent years?
It's because "desktop" web is difficult for newbies.
People like you and I love the "desktop" web because we grew up using desktop computers. We don't mind firing up our web browser, typing in a URL and poking around for tiny menu items using CSS that's optimized for big HD desktop monitors. That's what we're used to and that's what we think is normal.
Nowadays, everybody- even your grandma- is on the inernet. Everybody's using an iPhone with a tiny screen and large fonts. Opening up a web browser to browse a website is just something people no longer do.
Grandma would much rather have an app on her home screen that connects her to the world rather than a bookmark in Google Chrome.
Not everybody is a nerd like you and me. The internet has exploded in ways we never imagined, and now we're going to have to deal with everything being optimized for the average user.
I don't know, I seem to hear now and then complaints from relatively non-nerdy people about websites are bugging them about apps or don't work or force them to use their computer because the mobile page doesn't have some necessary feature. Besides, even if everyone is using, say, Reddit, from a dedicated reddit app, links they click will still open in a web view. A link to a medium.com article will still bug you about getting the app; you're there from a dedicated app, but not from _their_ app. Similarly, if an image happens to open in an imgur.com web view instead of a dedicated image viewer, there will be "Get the app" buttons hovering over the image - again, you're visiting their content from a dedicated app, but not _their_ app.
If mobile web pages did just enough to make it obvious to their users that there are apps which the user can download, I'd believe you that it's just corporations being altruistic and wanting the best user experience for their users. They don't though. They intentionally break their mobile pages by removing important functionality, they have modals which reappear for every load trying to trick you by making the big orange "Continue" button take you to the app store, while having a tiny link which is easy to miss-click taking you to the page you're actually trying to visit, they put "get the app"-buttons _over_ the content, sometimes even with no close button, they try to distract you from the content you're trying to read by making their "Get the app" buttons fucking animate around.
This is not just corporations being altruistic and keeping their users' well-being at heart. This is corporations wanting to optimize for user interaction and data collection, and the best way to do that is to make their users use a dedicated app for just their content, where the user will always be reminded that they should check Imgur whenever they unlock their phones, they can send their users a notification about what's trending on /r/AskReddit if they detect their users haven't used their app for a while, they can make sure their users won't leave for a competitor as easily.
I only visit reddit when friends link off to it - I rather not be giving reddit any traffic at all if I could help it, so downloading an app just doesn't make sense for me.
The web isn't what it was back in the 90s and early 2000s though. Back then, you wanted a website to last because there wasn't much on the web to begin with. Those of us who were online owned a reasonable amount of web bookmarks that led us to nice solid pages that were designed to load nice and fast over slower connections.
Nowadays, the landscape is way different. There are just so many "normal folk" on the internet now that content is being consumed at an alarming rate. There is so much stuff on the internet now, that even Youtube videos have become disposable. Most of the stuff that people read and watch now is consumed once and then never visited again because there's just not enough time to revisit the insane amount of content we're exposed to.
Nowadays, why does it matter if a website is made "brittle" if the content isn't going to matter in a few months anyways? And if you do want to archive something for later, shouldn't the words on the page matter more than the code behind it? After all, if a user 12 years from now wants to read your article, all they're going to want is your words and pictures. Code is always brittle because new technology makes everything obsolete.
Having been a web developer in that era, performance was definitely a big concern. People were more willing to wait but there were still limits and you had the same tendencies for developers to work on fast systems and forget the experience on slow ones.
AMP is also a worse experience than that was because in the 90s you were usually waiting on images to render and progressive display was usually possible so you could start seeing that fuzzy JPEG fairly quickly and read the rest of an article, whereas AMP by design prevents anything from displaying until it’s loaded and executed correctly so you often have to reload the page to see anything at all when it fails.
This matters because most of where AMP was marketed to are competitive fields and that means it’s training users that they’ll get what they want faster and more reliably somewhere else.
I remember browsing the web on my old Nokia N900 phone and watching everything get progressively slower as javascript started getting more and more memory intensive. Eventually I stopped receiving updates, and the entire web became unusable because lots and lots of websites break without javascript now.
> Nowadays, why does it matter if a website is made "brittle" if the content isn't going to matter in a few months anyways?
One reason is brand perception. If your website is significantly slower and/or brokener than a competitor's then eventually people will stop coming back. Presumably you want your brand to last more than a few months.
It wasn't really an actual OS, but I managed to get a working desktop with a file browser, fake non functional web browser, and a task bar and start menu.
My flash application didn't accomplish anything, but I felt immensely proud of having been able to create a mock up of a UI, even though it was extremely kludgy and wasn't even able to read or write files in the fake applications.
...No offense to the creator though. I don't mean to compare my high school project to this one. This project is indeed very cool!
I too dream of one day inventing my own kind of spreadsheet and terminal hackery OS, so I salute this person for creating a proof of concept that looks good.