Most of my software development career was spent working at a small company that sold a product that emulated the operating system developed and sold by a much, much larger company. The work was interesting and when you had a breakthrough or a small victory, it sure felt good. The challenge of keeping up was exhilarating and kept folks motivated to keep pressing forward.
But eventually it wears you down. It's nearly impossible to keep up in the long-term. Normal product evolution, the sheer size of the behemoth and sometimes even malice on their part to thwart the little guy make it really tough to stay current.
Think of Wine vis-a-vis Windows. They will never catch up.
Except they did with Wine, in a way. They got to the point where sufficient number of third party software developers target the common base between Wine and Windows (Steam/Proton), electing to have broader compatibility rather than catching all the newest Windows-only APIs.
I wonder how much similar behavior influence other buying choices. I’ve been eyeing an upgrade from M1 for a while - so far punting on it, mostly because of Asahi.
I guess I wasn't aware that Wine pivoted from trying to be a general purpose, drop-in replacement for Windows to being a platform for games that only supports a subset of Windows functionality.
It's much more difficult to keep current and support the full functionality of a much larger competitor's offering when you have to support everything. In my experience it was an all or nothing proposition. Either you emulated it 100% or you had nothing. I think Asahi is more in this realm maybe than Wine. It really needs to support all the hardware, 100%, or it's value is greatly diminished.
> I guess I wasn't aware that Wine pivoted from trying to be a general purpose, drop-in replacement for Windows to being a platform for games that only supports a subset of Windows functionality.
Or „just enough” for the subset of users that is „enough” to ensure product viability. The absolutism of „all or nothing” is rooted in the strictly-better mentality for replacing something.
For Wine/Proton, the core demographic is essentially gamers, who tend to overlap heavily with engineering population later on, and thus core population for Microsoft to capture and retain. Once Steam removed that vendor lock-in, the corporate discussion became more flexible.
For Asahi (proud Asahi user for 4y now), the added value of „most powerful Linux/Arm64 laptop on the market” outweighs the few things that don’t work on Asahi (HDMI out is probably the only one that occasionally matters for me, but screencasting works well enough). Yes, there are gaps, but they are smaller than things from Linux that are missing on OSX or Windows for me.
There was a PR for Adobe products a few weeks ago (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/pull/310), though it seems like they're redirecting it to the main Wine repo now since it makes more sense there
I really don't mind boilerplate nearly as much as most people here on HN seem to. To me it's really no biggie if it helps structure things and make them explicit. I think it kind of goes along with the idea that typing code is not what takes the largest amount of time when you're doing software development. But the fact that I prefer explicit over implicit is another area where I think I diverge from the HN herd.
The ad was deceptively inlined in the article IMO. I read most of the ad before I realized it was an ad. I don’t begrudge anyone who wants to monetize with ads but I do think it should be clear what is sponsored. I felt fooled and I stopped reading right now.
The Volkswagen Transporter has a towing capacity of 750kg for an unbraked trailer and a maximum towing capacity of 2800kg for a braked trailer. That's 6000 pounds.
Good question. I don't usually think of towing stuff because that's seldom been a part of my life.
3500 pounds is what Honda lists for towing capacity (same as a 2WD Honda Pilot, even though an AWD Honda Pilot with exactly the same engine and transmission is more like 5000).
If towing capacity is defined as "what people can expect a thing to reliably do for many thousands of miles, in a row, over and over again" then I think a bone-stock Odyssey would roll over and die with 6000 pounds behind it.
Slow trip to the dump that's right over there across flat terrain? Sure, probably OK if it's rather heavy. Through the Appalachians? No; that's sounding like a bad day.
And the usual variables can be wiggled: A better transmission cooler can be added without too much difficulty (and Honda used to sell kits for this, themselves). There's seemingly-reputable companies that sell air suspension (read: adjustable) helper-springs for many years of Odyssey, and reports are that they're not particularly hard to install (as a DIY, in the driveway). Weight-distributing hitches help a ton (literally), but IIRC Honda doesn't list a separate capacity for that.
There's other vans with similar interior volume and features that are stated on the door sill sticker to tow trailers better.
And there's certainly some things that trucks like an F150 can get very right. Towing is one of them.
If a person wants to occasionally haul a decent-sized camper around or something, then owning a pickup truck may be exactly the right solution.
Transmission coolers and suspension kits are great but one of the things that’s really even more important is the ability to stop it comfortably. I think it’s prudent to build in a safety margin of at least 25%. More is better here.
And ideally, the trailer should have its own brakes and (mostly!) stop itself.
I've never found the brakes on an Odyssey to be particularly lacking on their own, even when loaded heavy in mountains. They're fine. 2-pistol calipers, decent-sized rotors. Nothing fancy, but also nothing lacking. The ABS behaves sanely.
The only thing I see people complain about is warping, but the causes of that are very varied (and may have nothing to do with anything actually being warped).
Like many vehicles, they get a lot better with good rotors that have cooling improvements, and well-selected not-ceramic pads.
It goes from "yeah, those are fine" to "Holy Toledo. My sunglasses just flew off of my face, and I think the seatbelt hurt my shoulder (but there was no crash, so it's fine)"
>> This is not true for most so-called Engineers in the US.
>> Anyone can declare themselves an engineer with no exam,
>> no sponsor, no assermentation and no real legal ties
>> to their shoddy work.
I don't think that's correct. While there are exemptions, each state requires anyone offering engineering services to the public to be licensed.
Just don’t minimize the window. Removing a window from the alt-Tab list is basically the only reason to minimize it in the first place on Mac. (Not reflexively minimizing windows does take some time to get used to if you’re coming from Windows, admittedly.)
you can use workspaces for that. for comparison, gnome on linux doesn't even support minimizing windows any more. you move windows/apps that you don't want to use right now to a different workspace.
On Windows there are applications that minimize to the tray instead of remaining on the task bar. That’s my most common reason to minimize, so that it disappears from the task bar when not in use.
i have used WindowMaker but also the original NeXTstep for years, and WindowMaker's integration with GNUstep apps and its emulation of the NeXTstep interface always felt incomplete.
But eventually it wears you down. It's nearly impossible to keep up in the long-term. Normal product evolution, the sheer size of the behemoth and sometimes even malice on their part to thwart the little guy make it really tough to stay current.
Think of Wine vis-a-vis Windows. They will never catch up.
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