@tokenwizard @asklemmy I'm thinking of eventually doing three websites.
One that's a '90s pastiche (that one), a minimalist personal website that takes some elements of the '90s web but tones them down a notch, and a blog.
ajsadauskas
joined 2 years ago
@moitoi @unionagainstdhmo It's a bit more complicated than that.
So Nokia sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft for around US$7.5 billion in 2013.
Microsoft licensed the rights to use the Nokia brand for 10 years (but eventually rebranded the phones to Microsoft Lumia).
The old Nokia continues to make commercial communications equipment: https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2014/04/25/nokia-completes-sale-of-substantially-all-of-its-devices-services-business-to-microsoft/
By 2015, Microsoft realised it screwed up and wrote down the entire value of the former Nokia/Lumia mobile phone business: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2945371/microsoft-writes-off-76b-admits-failure-of-nokia-acquisition.html
Meanwhile, a group of former Nokia employees, with financial backing from Nokia, set up a new company called HMD Global.
Then HMD Global bought most of the former Nokia/Lumia mobile phone business off Microsoft for $350 million (including the licence to use the Nokia brand).
Foxconn bought the manufacturing, distribution and sales divisions. Foxconn then signed an agreement with HMD to build phones for HMD using those assets: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/18/nokia-returns-phone-market-microsoft-sells-brand-hmd-foxconn
So when you buy a HMD phone, you're buying from a company that's partly owned by Nokia, managed by ex-Nokia people, designed by the former Nokia/Lumia mobile phone division, and built by the former Nokia/Lumia mobile phone division (through Foxconn).
It's pretty much a Nokia phone.
@Ilovethebomb @lordriffington There's a guy on the Fediverse named @tomiahonen who's a former Nokia executive.
The short version goes something like this: the first iPhone launched in the US as of 2007, the first Android by 2008.
Nokia responded by making its Symbian operating system touch enabled, and working longer-term on a next generation operating system called MeeGo.
By mid-2011, Nokia launched its first MeeGo phone, called the N9.
Nokia was actually outselling Apple in smartphones, and it had a faster growth rate.
It had great relations with most telcos around the world.
All it had to do was persuade existing Nokia featurephone owners to upgrade to a MeeGo phone and it was set.
Then Nokia hired an ex-Microsoft executive named Stephen Elop. He immediately signed Nokia up to go Windows Phone exclusive and called MeeGo a burning platform.
He openly said that even if N9 was a massive success, there'd be no more MeeGo phones ever.
The first Nokia Windows Phones came at the end of 2011, running Windows Phone 7. It was basically just Windows CE with a touch interface.
Microsoft's true response to iOS and Android was Windows Phone 8, and that didn't come until right at the end of 2012, nearly 2013.
(At this point, the iPhone had been on the market for five years, and Android for four years.)
Why Windows Phone screwed up is a whole 'nother story, but Nokia went all in on what turned out to be a sinking ship, and the rest is history.
@zurohki @notgold In some ways, it's also a tech standards war, a bit like VHS vs Betamax. Or HD-DVD vs BluRay. Or Windows Phone vs Android.
Right now, it looks like most of the auto industry is going in the direction of BEVs, just like most of the home electronics industry went with VHS in the '80s.
Meanwhile, Toyota is sticking with hydrogen.
The best technology doesn't always win a standards war. There are some benefits to green hydrogen cars over BEVs, just like Beta had some benefits over VHS.
The problem with one company supporting one standard when the rest of the industry goes the other way is that it can get expensive.
You have most of the economies of scale with the industry-leading technology. That tends to make it cheaper for consumers.
You have a bigger ecosystem of companies and more infrastructure supporting the industry standard.
That means a company that uses the non-standard technology typically has to do more work (and has more costs) to support it.
At this point, Tesla doesn't have to spend a lot of money to roll out its own EV charging stations, because there's a growing ecosystem.of companies doing it.
However, if hydrogen doesn't become the industry standard fuel for cars and Toyota wants to stick with it, then it might need to cover some of the costs of rolling out hydrogen refueling itself.
A company like Apple, which has a large and loyal customer base, can get away with charging customers more to use its own standards.
I'm not sure Toyota does.
None of that in itself means Toyota will go out of business. But it will be a lot more challenging.
@ColeSloth Here's how that problem was solved in a country called *checks notes* America in the early 1900s: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2Fbon-U7GpfU-Qps1R7xOyG1EfRjRVSyX7FsVdhN_kpng.png%3Fwidth%3D1080%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Df05295494056e3b1e6821c853aeb4aed61909ce8
Here's a map of just the Illinois Central Railroad:https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSm-rwgQ1PSRo4GIplmxRZscx_nF-betb5SMRbEo7juj5nxUP0lpUp-NXs&s=10
And Missouri: https://www.loc.gov/item/98688505/
This is what America used to have, albeit with a much smaller population.
Lots of hubs, lots of lines crossing each other. Lots of small towns served in between.
See, what the people in America knew was that trains are faster than automobiles, and they still are.
So you've effectively turned one-hour straight train journeys (with one or two transfers at most) into two hours stuck in traffic.
Because unlike cars, the more people use trains, the more frequently services run, so it gets faster the more people use it. Whereas the more people drive, the more traffic there is, and the slower it gets.
@vividspecter @M500 It's also important to note that there's a huge difference between a social critique and a personal insult.
The lack of viable transport alternatives is a systemic issue. It's not a personal moral failure.
It is not a personal moral fault to drive where no good alternatives exist.
The solution is not a different personal transport choice. The solution is systemic change to how transport, infrastructure, and planning are delivered.
The survey looks at how people have been socially conditioned to accept the systemic issues.
It involves a lot of blame shifting, and victim blaming.
It involves dropping or changing a number of socially accepted rights and wrongs as soon as a car is involved.
@ColeSloth "So you’re saying you have like 30 with populations at or over 100k? Ok. Wow. The US has over 330 like that."
So you should have many more pairs of cities that should support rail.
And once you have a pair of cities that support rail, you can have stations in each of the towns between them.
Even if they're only a couple of hundred people.
"A rail system doesn’t sustain when people are trying to get from one place to so many different destinations and you can’t claim it can, when it’s literally never been created on a scale of anything similar to the US."
The US already has an extensive rail network. As in, right now. Here's a map: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=96ec03e4fc8546bd8a864e39a2c3fc41
That's all the places where it's viable for a commercial operator to have railways based on freight.
So a decent starting point would be just to run passenger services along those existing freight corridors, as Brightline did in Florida.
And frankly, if the US had spent a fraction as much on rail as it has on propping up the auto and oil sectors, it'd be viable.
(By the way, before the World Wars, the US had even more railways with a smaller population. Many US towns are where they are because of the railways.)
"For everyone to get to their destinations..."
You have a hub where many lines converge, or lines that cross one another.
If trains are timetabled to arrive and leave at the same time, or arrive frequently, you transfer.
So think of multiple lines between pairs of big cities, serving many smaller towns in between.
Even if you're the only person travelling between one tiny town on one line to another tiny town on another line. And you're the only person making that particular journey in a given month.
If there's a station or hub you can transfer at, you can make that journey by rail.
"...without it taking many extra hours of travel time..."
Trains are significantly faster than cars, and don't get stuck in traffic.
"...and tons of them would be going places where they may only have a handful of passengers on board..."
If it's on a line between two larger cities, even small towns are viable for rail. If it isn't, you run a frequent feeder bus service to the nearest town with a train station.
"a train running with just a dozen passengers is a hell of a lot worse for the environment than a dozen cars. A lot worse."
You do realise electric-powered trains exist, right? And electricity can come from renewables? And renewable energy can be stored?
"That can’t happen in the US unless travel destinations limit themselves way down, which cuts a lot of people off from using them."
The problem is that the US has government-owned roads and not rail.
The problem is the US spent $597 bn (adjusted for inflation) building the interstate highway system, instead of investing in rail.
Half a trillion subsidy for the interstates alone.
The problem is that the US government mandated planning codes that make it illegal to build the types of developments that support rail.
@nutomic Looks like an interesting project!
Will there be a mobile-friendly version of the front end?
And will you be able to follow Ibis pages (or perhaps edit them?) from Mastodon? Or potentially even Lemmy?