Like Pascal's wager that absurdity is an appeal to stupidity. I expect the people running these companies are more interested in a different type of wager. One where they risk the future of the company to pump shares and make a quick profit.
This is a question of priorities. Identify a problem, decide to fix it, then execute. It isn't about the particular solutions. Australia's gun control would not translate to a country like the USA and perhaps neither would its health care. First decide to put a person on the moon. Then execute. Only one country did that. It isn't that they can't solve problems like school shootings or affordable healthcare. There is no real will to do so. Not sure why exactly. It is a very strange place that defies expectations of how a developed country would behave.
That would be weird and uncomfortable traveling with a kid. Is it geographic or is this madness taking over the world? Seems like something that would get a place destroyed in reviews and lose them business.
Probably requires something that is almost there then a sponsor(s) to throw in developers or funding to get the rest of the way. On the EDA side CERN did a lot to lift Kicad to the point of being a credible alternative that could breakthrough like Blender. Both those projects are over 30 years old and for a lot of that time were dismissed as too difficult to use or lacking in features. FreeCAD is only 23 years old. I don't know what the code base is like but if a large org put a couple of good devs into it for a few years who knows.
It must be difficult when so much management is short sighted and focused on delivering short term profits for shareholders. Even academia is run like a business now.
Unless a privately held rogue company like Valve got interested its probably going to have to wait for a government/ngo/scientific. Industry, particularly the tech industry, is notorious for leaching of free and open source software and in some cases building entire businesses on it and not giving back.
> It must be difficult when so much management is short sighted and focused on delivering short term profits for shareholders. Even academia is run like a business now.
Management just reacts to environments created by governments. When ZIRP was around money was very easy to get hold of - too easy. Now it's really hard because businesses have to beat government bond interest rates, which are guaranteed, to get debt/investment.
> Unless a privately held rogue company like Valve
Valve is not a rogue company.
> Industry, particularly the tech industry, is notorious for leaching of free and open source software and in some cases building entire businesses on it and not giving back
Your premise is wrong. It's impossible to leach off something that is freely given. This is like being angry because people don't all tip a street performer. The deal is it's free.
And your facts are wrong. Businesses fund a giant amount of OSS work.
Valve is rogue as in it does whatever its founder-owner wants it to do. It's neither beholden to what public shareholders want nor to what private investors want. Founder-CEOs are laughably powerless in comparison. When the company is publicly traded, even founder-CEOs who are still majority owners are powerless in comparison, because when their minority co-owners want out their net worth goes down considerably and they tend to really not want that.
IMO the primary limiting factor in FreeCAD at this point is OpenCascade, the CAD kernel, and that is owned by a large org: CapGemini, which has 350,000 employees.
OCC is the domain where FreeCAD's biggest limitations (fillets, chamfers, draft, thickness) are found, and the design of its API is part of why the topological naming problem was so difficult to mitigate.
You need more than a couple of good devs to solve this, or CapGemini would have. CAD kernels are one of the hardest possible things to write in a way that is bug-free, which is why there are so few of them.
I think it is possible that OpenCascade will get more attention because of EDF (french multinational power company) and the French atomic energy commission's involvement in SALOME. Things do seem to be slightly improving.
Making money and complying with the law. They are obligated to do both. In many countries laws are still enforced.
Protecting their app store revenues from competition exposes them to scrutiny from competition regulators and might be counter productive.
Many governments are moving towards requiring tech companies to enforce verification of users and limit access to some types of software and services or impose conditions requiring software to limit certain features such as end to end encryption. Some prominent people in big tech believe very strongly in a surveillance state and we are seeing a lot of buy in across the political spectrum, possibly due to industry lobbying efforts. Allowing people to install unapproved software limits the effectiveness of surveillance technologies and the revenues of those selling them. If legal compliance risks are pushing this then it is a job for voters, not Google to fix.
Complying with the law is just another way of protecting your money. I have no doubt if they would break laws if they judged it better for the bottom line --- in fact I have little doubt they're already doing so. On the flip side, if there were ruinous penalties for their anticompetitive behaviors (i.e., in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars) they might change course.
Certainly voters need to have their say, but often their message is muffled by the layers of political and administrative material it passes through.
It could have been. The platform got taken over by a very different culture and has tended to serve different purposes.
The web solves problems that are almost impossible to properly solve with a terminal, particularly with rendering of more complicated languages and display and interaction with sophisticated visualisations.
Pushing the terminal further while maintaining compatibility, performance and avoiding a terminal war with incompatible protocols is going to be a struggle.
pushing the terminal further while maintaining compatibility, performance and avoiding a terminal war with incompatible protocols is going to be a struggle.
Unless someone creates a cross-platform, open source, modern and standards compliant terminal engine [1].
Yep. Years ago I got sick of listening to people who don't believe in climate change and emission reductions due to tribalism crowing about the solar pv on their holiday house and their incredibly low electricity bills while cost of living keeps going up for lower income families. Everywhere you look anything good is twisted into a wealth transfer. If you are left behind you are never catching up now. Between the housing market and everything else the myth of a classless society has been completely obliterated in a generation.
Meanwhile also in part of Australia where the states public electricity utility was sold in a fire sale to foreign investors. The owners gold plate the network so they can get away with charging some of the highest electricity prices in the world despite generation prices often going negative thanks to renewables.
I would bet over time the supply charge and non-free hours will increase in price to compensate and overall bills will be the same. It will shift some load to the middle of the day with people setting timers on appliance and it will take pressure off generation which will be politically convenient when another poorly maintained coal plant falls over but I will be shocked if it will be a win for consumers.
Poorer home owners and rentals that don't have solar pv and can't afford to buy new appliances that might be able to take advantage of being set to run during the cheap hours are going to be left further behind.
The country is full of monopolies, duopolies and price gouging and the regulators are useless.
Terminal emulators are caught between emulating terminals and teletypes of the past and implementing new features and unicode is one of the struggles. The way most terminals and wcwidth handle the width of characters sometimes is not correct but preserving behavior is important for compatibility. It is possible that its just not worth trying to handle all unicode perfectly in a terminal. Its pretty good for legacy stuff and sysadmin. We have other ways of doing things remotely like html that might be more appropriate for ZWJ emoji and languages with complicated text shaping/rendering.
For glyph width, there are codepoints classified as ambiguous width. These are mostly narrow pre-emoji symbols that have been extended with an alternate emoji representation. There's no way to predict what their width will be, even with explicit variation selectors which might just be ignored.
> These are mostly narrow pre-emoji symbols that have been extended with an alternate emoji representation.
Nitpick: this is incorrect. Easy counter-examples would be arrow symbols like →. UAX #11 helpfully explains what is "ambiguous" about those characters:
Ambiguous characters occur in East Asian legacy character sets as wide characters, but as narrow (i.e., normal-width) characters in non–East Asian usage. (Examples are the basic Greek and Cyrillic alphabet found in East Asian character sets, but also some of the mathematical symbols.) Private-use characters are considered ambiguous by default, because additional information is required to know whether they should be treated as wide or narrow.
In the other words, these characters have been commonly available in both Asian and non-Asian character sets and assigned different widths by them.
There are preexisting narrow symbols that were given a new emoji presentation in later standards rather than assigning a new codepoint. Text rendering engines vary on which form is the default. VTE had an option to set the preference. This can be very annoying when some arrows get the new emoji form but others in their cohort stay as narrow glyphs.
The terminal application doesn't know the font. The best you can do is discover ambiguous widths by printing codepoints and checking the change in cursor position. That's a suboptimal experience.
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