I'd probably flip the order, but to a certain extent I don't disagree.
In theory, if there's a truely competitive market (has such a thijg evwr actually existed for anything?) it shouldn't matter what a particular store charges as any other store could come in and charge a lower percentage and provide a 'better' service.
That can't happen without very open access to alternative app stores though.
In an idealized enviornment whoever could provide the best app store for the least amount of overhead and fees would be successful.
That said there's something about defaults and the many year headstart Apple has had with their own app store which makes me skeptical that even in a completely open environment that there could ever realistically be a mass alternative for everyone and expecting the average user to care about developer fees they don't understand is a hard sell.
Even if Apple manages to keep 99% of all transactions, simply having open competition will open the door to all sorts of improvements.
You could decouple distribution from payment processing. Have an "app store" with only free apps, but they can have in-app purchases if they handle their own payment processing. This is basically just a CDN. We already have a very mature and open market for CDNs, and they're very cheap.
We also already have a mature, slightly less open market for payment processors. Stripe charges about 3% and provides almost all the features the App Store provides for 10x bigger fees. The one feature most people would probably miss is centralized subscription management, but there would be nothing stopping Stripe (or someone else) from offering the exact same basic feature, charging way less than Apple, and still making a huge profit for themselves
It's clear that you do not own your device. It comes with limitations that tbf were agreed to upfront. For mobile, there is no real choice. Devil 1 is apple, devil 2 is google.
Imo, Apple should be allowed to charge what they want - I'm ok with that as long as I can sidestep their thrall and sideload whatever I choose at no cost. If I get burned, that's on me.
I think their costs in running the AppStore are the cost of doing business. They need this for their product. Without it, the product is nothing. And they get to suck 30% out of everything. Got to admire that.
Better would be a replacement OS but is that even possible?
Android mobile devices aren't that bad. I'm using an android phone without a Google account for a few years now, works pretty good for me. I have multiple non-google app stores (one of them, Samsung, came pre-installed), using a third party web browser, and I can install software from APK files bypassing any stores at all. The only downside is lack of offline maps/navigation apps I had previously on windows phone. Web apps work but they require internet, just GPS doesn't cut it.
> 2) You should be allowed to install other app stores on the device you own, over which Apple has no control.
How would apple recoup the costs associated with allowing third party app stores? Even ignoring the direct costs, they will probably get derivative costs such as extra support requests that they can’t do anything about but have to burn man-hours telling people that.
How would Samsung/Google/etc recoup the costs associated with allowing third party app stores on Android?
How would Microsoft recoup the costs associated with allowing third party app stores on Windows?
How would Valve recoup the costs associated with allowing third party app stores on Steam Deck?
How would Apple recoup the costs associated with allowing third party app stores on macOS?
Have you really lived in such a closed iOS bubble for so long that you forgot that literally the entire rest of the industry handles it just fine?
You’re almost there. Let me finish your train of thought:
In order to recoup the costs they would have to increase prices elsewhere. Having third party access from the start as part of the value proposition would mean they had already priced that in like the others, but they didn’t, so they haven’t.
While there are rare situations where locking differentials are meaningful, having been in many hair raising off-road situations, including a real life or death one, I'd much rather have AWD and clearance, than 4WD and no clearance.
That is to say, I'm not convinced by the article's hypothesis about locking diffs. It's extremely rare to need to deploy those: beached, or slow starts up vertical surfaces like boulders. An AWD vehicle with good tires and good clearance is really quite good. Bonus points if you don't care about wrecking it.
I think I've only really seen this as a Honda Element - otherwise I'm not sure it meaningfully exists. The reality with most AWD cars is that their important guts are hanging lower compared to 4WD trucks even when the paper ground clearance is similar.
My previous car was AWD and I have a 4WD SUV now largely for off road performance, and there's no question 4WD (particularly 4LO) is much better at getting unstuck in trail conditions. The AWD is definitely superior for icy pavement in the cold months though.
> Bonus points if you don't care about wrecking it
This was actually what mainly pushed me over to the 4WD side instead of something like the Forester. The crossovers can actually get you to a lot of places but they do get thrashed if you do it enough. They are still more geared for pavement use but, if you're wrecking your suspension off road, the on road performance isn't gonna be great either.
> I think I've only really seen this as a Honda Element - otherwise I'm not sure it meaningfully exists.
Maybe it's not meaningful, but vans in the 80s and 90s were often offered with optional 4x4, sometimes with a locking differential. An unmodified Astro or Aerostar doesn't have a whole lot of ground clearance, but could fit the definition of 4wd if properly optioned and probably wouldn't be suitable for these trails unless it gets some aftermarket help.
Of course, few of these are running anymore. 4x4 kei vans can get pretty serious too, but not a lot running on US national park fire roads.
I'm working from memory here, but I believe early 90s Audi "quattro"s (like the 100) had the feature. That said, I think we are very much in "the exception that proves the rule" territory.
Most stock pickups, actually. You'd be surprised how low the clearance is on a stock f150 without the various off-road packages. I.e. you can easily have a pickup with basic 4wd but only 8 inches of ground clearance. That's technically "high clearance", but not by much, and the poor approach, departure, and break over angles make it tough too.
Depending on your definition of "good," probably most of them. While I have been guilty of taking questionable AWD rentals on questionable roads in places like Death Valley when younger, you really want properly-equipped Jeep Rubicons and the like that you're not going to get from the average car rental place.
> That is to say, I'm not convinced by the article's hypothesis about locking diffs.
I'm not an offroader, but I did own a vehicle without a locking diff, that I later upgraded to having a locking diff (slapped a G80 on the rear of an 80's GMC Sierra) and that made a huge difference even on pavement in inclement weather. Granted, that was a RWD pickup with very little weight (typically) over the drive wheels. I'd honestly be shocked if the impact was minimal in truly offroad conditions. Granted, that's RWD which is even less than AWD or 4WD, so by no means apples to apples comparison there, just my 2 cents.
That said, this isn't a binary thing (locking vs open). There's a wide variety of AWD technology out there, and I could nerd out on the specifics, but at the end of the day, some are very limited in their ability to send power to one set of wheels vs the other, and may not have locking/limited slip diffs at all, and just use brakes to prevent wheel spin. I will say, Subaru (especially the higher/sportier trims like WRX/STi) can often hang and even shame some 4WD vehicles in some conditions. There's no shortage of videos of Subarus helping a 4WD out of a jam, or completing a course they could not, but how much of that is a function of their specific AWD tech and limited slip diffs vs proper tires and lighter weight and any number of things is a matter of debate that I'm not qualified to weigh in on. Again, am a gearhead, but not an offroader.
So I suspect it's not so much the Park saying "Subaru/AWD can't cut it" but rather, keeping track of which years, brands, models, trims, and/or potential optional equipment does cut it is a much more massive headache to keep track of and verify than just saying "4WD yes, everything else no", and I can't really fault them for that.
I am not an off-roader by any stretch of imagination, but I figure the AWD works like single axle drive with a simple diff on each axle i.e. if one wheel has no traction then all torque goes to that wheel and zero goes to the opposite one. I once got stuck on pretty solid pavement in a RWD car when one rear wheel hanged off a curb and lost traction, after that the car could not move as the only wheel getting torque was the one hanging off the ground. I figure the other axle would still get torque on an AWD as they usually have some kind of limited slip mid diff effect from whatever scheme they use to distribute torque between axles, but if you hanged out a wheel on each axle then an AWD vehicle would become stuck too?
Many will do what you’re describing—getting a front and rear wheel off the ground at the same time will leave it stranded. A limited slip center differential will ensure if one axle loses traction the power goes to the other, but many vehicles cheap out and have open differentials on each axle, meaning when one on each axle loses traction it’s just spinning wheels.
Some vehicles have limited slip front/rear/front+rear differentials that avoid this issue. Many newer vehicles simply use the traction control and brakes to avoid it—if a wheel is spinning, it applies the brakes to provide resistance and redirect some torque back to the other wheel.
Like many others are saying, “AWD” is such a broad term as to be basically meaningless.
>Intel also expects to benefit from a U.S. Treasury Department Investment Tax Credit (ITC) of up to 25% on more than $100 billion in qualified investments and eligibility for federal loans up to $11 billion.
>Intel’s investments are expected to create more than 10,000 company jobs and nearly 20,000 construction jobs, and to support more than 50,000 indirect jobs with suppliers and supporting industries.
I've recently moved my laptop over to openSUSE MicroOS (specifically Kalpa, the KDE variant). It shares a bit of philosophy with Vanilla OS. However, in many ways it's almost unrecognizable as a Linux/Unix system.
The way it works (in my incomplete understanding) is that the root filesystem (running on Btfrs), specifically /usr and /var, are actually a read-only image. You can write changes to it, but each time you do, you have to rewrite the image. Each time you boot, you boot that immutable image.
This allows for easy automatic updates. And if it fails to boot after an update, it merely rolls back to the previous working image (crowdstrike take note). This seems to work well provided you don't have to modify the image too much. I installed fprintd, kdeconnect, and wine, and it's still doing OK.
The user applications are almost all Flatpaks. This works well most of the time, but not always. I was a heavy flatpak user before, and I will say that a number of Flatpsk bugs I've run into on other systems, I've not had on Kalpa, so perhaps its Flatpak implementation is better. The biggest issues I have are Flatpaks not being able to communicate with each other as easily as native binaries can.
If you don't have a Flatpak, you can always try to run it in DistroBox. This works..... OK....provided it's a userspace app. But if it's a userspace app, why not run the binary directly? Where distrobox really shines is for running .debs or .rpms on a non-native system. But those are gradually going away thanks to Flatpak anyways. Distrobox does have a fake root mode. I consistently run into boubdary issues with it on Kalpa. I was able to run software in distrobox that required root, and it technically ran, but it couldn't use any audio devices.
Overall, I find Kalpa (and MicroOS) very interesting. There are still edge cases where they break, but I was easily able to work around everything.
I have also a laptop on silverblue, which is the immutable version of fedora. Most of the time usage is identical but once in a while you encounter an edge case that is easily solved on regular fedora workstation where you have to find extra weird workarounds to simple stuff.
Also while flatpak applications are usually sandboxed, they very often need access to your files to be useful. You are either limited to a small subset of flatpaks on fedora flatpak repo, or the whole uncurated flathub shithole where quality and security is totally random.
Also running a flatpak from the command line using `flatpak run tld.organizationname.appname` is a bit annoying. Toolbox, distrobox and containers solve some of the stuff but are also clunky way to do stuff that you would just do normally on a regular linux system.
All in all I will keep it on one of my laptops as I am curious about how it will evolve in the future and it is a decent OS for non tech / family use where your typical usage is to open a browser and a handful of gui apps so I can easily lend it to my kids and partner without worry.
Fedora Kinoite (like Silverblue, but with KDE in place of Gnome) user here. I agree with most of your points, though I've actually grown to appreciate the Distrobox/Flatpak workflow once I grew accustomed to them, to the point where I have no interest in returning to a traditional distro.
I've even started using Fedora CoreOS VMs as the basis for containerized service installs on my home network (Pihole, etc.).
To be fair, I do have quite a few packages layered on top of the base distro, as well. From memory: many admin tools that require "real" root, KVM virtualization support, RPM Fusion packages to enable hardware video decode, Mullvad's VPN client, tmux, vim-default-editor, a few font packages, Emacs, and a few basic development tools like cmake and make for the benefit of Emacs package installs.
The only problem I've ever had with layering is that once in a while I have to wait a bit and retry an update because newer package versions from the base image haven't yet made it out to the main RPM mirrors.
Oh, and Flatpak automatically symlinks "flatpak run" wrapper scripts to /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin, so, assuming ~/.local/bin is in your PATH,
I use a docker image as my whole development environment and the experience is similar. I can do whatever I want inside the container, and all will gone after I restart it. For the changes I like it, I edit the dockerfile and build a new image. When I get a new machine, I just install docker and pull the image and start coding.
Also found MicroOS interesting. At first I felt limited but more and more I started to like the flow of doing things and being more pragmatic about my system.
In the end though, some of the cons of such a system started being too much and I went back to Leap. It was close to winning over me however.
> The way it works (in my incomplete understanding) is that the root filesystem (running on Btfrs), specifically /usr and /var, are actually a read-only image. You can write changes to it, but each time you do, you have to rewrite the image. Each time you boot, you boot that immutable image.
Sounds like a glorified LiveCD distro. (In fact, it's almost exactly a LiveCD with 'persistence' once you account for other parts of the filesystem that are not 'immutable', such as /home/ .) Not sure what's supposed to be so innovative about this.
The things don't stay the same outside of the US, therefore you can't expect that doing the same thing will always result in the way.
There are very few technologies where the US or EU has an edge over China. Embargoes helped a lot with that.
In fact it becomes absurd, for example the EU/US/UK wants to make the world a better place by replacing ICE cars with electric ones. China builds great cars for cheap in huge amounts and the EU/US/UK act like Gavin Belson saying "I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do". There you lose the environment claims, even if EU/US/UK have a point.
The west lost the technological edge, the Americans like to claim that EU regulated too much but in the American case it appears that not regulated billionaires didn't invest in tech but resorted into rent seeking and now they expect the politicians to protect them from the Chinese companies who allegedly received unfair support from their governments but nonetheless they made better products.
I don't know I'm not a clairvoyant or expert analyst in this stuff, I'm just pessimistic on the near future of humanity and the west will be the bigger losers because they lost the plot.
> In fact it becomes absurd, for example the EU/US/UK wants to make the world a better place by replacing ICE cars with electric ones. China builds great cars for cheap in huge amounts and the EU/US/UK act like Gavin Belson saying "I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do".
You have to think about this like a country that has the ability to globally project power or take part in regional war.
The US (and Europe) doesn’t want to lose its domestic auto manufacturing industry because it can be easily retooled to pump out war machines when required. [0]
You don’t let a foreign nation (especially an adversarial nation like China) destroy an industry that is critical during total war if you’re the global hegemon, or more realistically, a country that may go to war in the future (see Volvo in Sweden, Renault in France, etc)
Here’s GM Defense, Ford and Chrysler have similar histories during the World Wars, as do auto manufacturers in various European countries.
> World War 1: Over 90 percent of GM’s truck production was redirected to war manufacturing during the First World War.
> World War 2: GM began delivering war materiel as early as 1940 with all U.S. manufacturing plants – over 100 in total – eventually being converted to produce defense goods. Between February 10, 1942 and September 9, 1945, not a single passenger car for civilian use left the assembly line at any GM plant.
I understand the motives and I agree, however it still means that China makes batter cheaper EVs that supposedly can save the planet and suddenly saving the planet is not THAT important and it can wait when we play politics, meanwhile why don't you eat less meat and use paper straws?
Why are you giving a free hand to China to do as it likes and then blame the west for following its interest? Why do you give China a pass at forcing any western business to always enter a joint enterprise with chinese firms if it wants to do business in China? Seeing a lot of critique about the blunders of the west for trying to have more leverage and no critique for chinese practices.
I'm not giving China a free pass for anything. The stuff you are talking about paved the way for Chinese catching up and eventually surpassing the west but that doesn't change the outcome.
I'm not a China fan at all, in fact I'm very concerned that the west will imitate China and in fact banning TikTok was a sign of it. Banning is the Chinese way.
The Chinese don’t support free trade. Why should the US support free trade with China? Why not embargo them until such time as China opens up? This isn’t a hypocritical contradiction. The US supports free trade with those who support free trade. They suppose power imbalances with those who support power imbalances.
The US becomes a China with crazy politics and poor infrastructure then. A shitty world where the citizens are a commodity that can be pushed around to consume from companies who such at R&D but good at lobbying.
Remember when the US was pro-free speech and criticised dictatorships for blocking social media? Kiss good bye to that, now it's US that blocks it. Chinese citizen experience, imported into the west.
If Trump wins, there's Project 2025 where they plan to replace every government position with party loyalists - Just like China.
> Remember when the US was pro-free speech and criticised dictatorships for blocking social media?
Outside congresspeople pushing for re-election I feel like I haven't heard this at all. Not since the Snowden leaks has the US been so happy-go-lucky with their denouncement of surveillance.
The article doesn't list much in the way of tech. LLMs, social media, and advertising hegemons leaving Europe is hardly a tech flight. In fact, it sounds like a best case scenario. Someone call me when Zeiss moves out because they can't compete in Europe, and I'll be concerned Europe is actually losing something of value.
We need more local expertise is really the only answer. Any organization that just outsources everything is prone to this. Not that organizations that don't outsource aren't prone to other things, but at least their failures will be asynchronous.
Funny thing is that for decades there were predictions about how there was a need for millions of more IT workers. It was assumed one needed local knowledge in companies. Instead what we got was more and more outsourced systems and centralized services. This today is one of the many downsides.
The problem here would be that there's not enough people who can provide the level of protection a third-party vendor claims to provide, and a person (or persons) with comparable level of expertise would be much more expensive likely. So companies who do their own IT would be routinely outcompeted by ones that outsource, only for the latter to get into trouble when the black swan swoops in. The problem is all other kinds of companies are mostly extinct by then unless their investors had some super-human foresight and discipline to invest for years into something that year after year looks like losing money.
> The problem here would be that there's not enough people who can provide the level of protection a third-party vendor claims to provide, and a person (or persons) with comparable level of expertise would be much more expensive likely.
Is that because of economies of scale or because the vendor is just cutting costs while hiding their negligence?
I don't understand how a single vendor was able to deploy an update to all of these systems virtually simultaneously, and _that_ wasn't identified as a risk. This smells of mindless box checking rather than sincere risk assessment and security auditing.
Kinda both I think, with an addition of principal agent problem. If you found a formula that provides the client with an acceptable CYA picture it is very scalable. And the model of "IT person knowledgeable in both security, modern threats and company's business" is not very scalable. The former, as we now know, is prone to catastrophic failures, but those are rare enough for a particular decision-maker to not be bothered by it.
Depressing thought that this phenomena is some kind of Nash equilibrium. That in the space of competition between firms, the equilibrium is for companies to outsource IT labor, saving on IT costs and passing that cost savings onto whatever service they are providing. -> Firms that outsource, out-compete their competition + expose their services to black swan catastrophic risk.
Is regulation that only way out of this, from a game theory perspective?
The whole market in which crowdstrike can exist is a result of regulation, albeit bad regulation.
And since the returns of selling endpoint protection are increasing with volume, the market can, over time, only be an oligopoly or monopoly.
It is a screwed market with artificially increased demand.
Also the outsourcing is not only about cost and compliance. There is at least a third force. In a situation like this, no CTO who bought crowdstrike products will be blamed. He did what was considered best industry practice (box ticking approach to security). From their perspective it is risk mitigation.
In theory, since most of the security incidents (not this one) involve the loss of personal customer data, if end customers would be willing to a pay a premium for proper handling of their data, AND if firms that don’t outsource and instead pay for competent administrators within their hierarchy had a means of signaling that, the equilibrium could be pushed to where you would like it to be.
Those are two very questionable ifs.
Also how do you recognise a competent administrator (even IT companies have problems with that), and how many are available in your area (you want them to live in the vicinity) even if you are willing to pay them like the most senior devs?
If you want to regulate the problem away, a lot of influencing factors have to be considered.
How much of it is trying to maintain a standard of living they've had their whole life in the face of rampant inflation and insane housing costs?