Before or after he bit the bullet?

60% of the internet will disappear if the same would happen in Russia.

US would probably have a large impact as well, of course because lots of internet-users are from the US, but also because the US likes to astroturf as well.

tiny example: https://web.archive.org/web/20160406094911/http://www.reddit..., Most addicted city (over 100k visits total) Eglin Air Force Base, FL

let's not lose ourselves in cold-war propaganda too much and act like russians and chinese are the only ones astroturfing online.

During the Prigozhin uprising / coup attempt, internet was cut off in parts of Russia, and there was a noticeable slowdown in comments on multiple popular subreddits. I don't know if any studies have been done to evaluate this empirically though

Russia is a waning superpower with a low GDP but a powerful enough internal economy to wage a conventional invasion of a large European country. The US is a much richer country, the leading superpower, and an IT powerhouse. But for some reason the first thing that pops into people’s mind when they hear propaganda bots is “Russia”.

(I would buy China, too. A huge country with a powerful economy.)

That in itself looks like a programmed response.

Of course Russia uses bots and propaganda. But the focus on Russia seems completely out of proportion.

It was amazing. Ran circles around Android on weaker hardware, but because duopoly duo didn’t want to accept competitor it was artificially hamstrung and subsequently killed.

No, the death of Windows Phone was 95% the fault of MS/Nokia.

Pre-announcing that they were leaving all Winphone 7 customers behind for Winphone 8 meant that every retailer/distributor was left with unsellable stock (because they hadn't gained enough traction to sell out initial shipments).

If this was because Nokia made bad/cheap phones that were un-upgradeable or MS being arrogant isn't something I'm remembering anymore but the end-result was pissed retailers and nobody selling WP8.

The spec for wp8 was a lot higher than wp7. There was a bit change from WinCE kernel to WinNT kernel, etc. Without much confidence, I think wp8 was dual core or higher and wp7 was single core... and maybe there was a ram upgrade too.

All that said, WP8 did a lot better than WM10, where the WP8 phones were promised to be upgradable, and then the promise was walked back for low mem phones, and the experience was poor for qualifying phones anyway.

The final build of WM10 was actually ok on my Lumia 640; but that was way after everything was canceled and mobile Edge (this was the first non Chrome Edge) was still less usable than mobile IE, even though the renderer was better.

The really poor rollout of wm10, plus the tradition of forcing developers to make split builds to support multiple versions of windows phone/mobile made things pretty bad at the end. Calling the build for WM10 only 'universal' was icing on the cake. Android has all sorts of problems, but you can have a single APK that works on lots of versions, with some amount of new features get pushed to old OS with libraries and some new features have to be detected at runtime and use alternate flows. On the other hand, Microsoft kept making new features require using new foundation libraries that were unavailable on old phones. WinCE -> WP7 -> WP8 -> WP8.1 -> WM10 was too many step changes and developers bailed at each one. Meanwhile on the desktop, a 32-bit win32s application targeting windows 3.1 has a good chance of running on windows 11.

Also, they managed to make upgrade from wp8 to wm10 break installed apps sometimes. That wasn't great.

#notbitter

On Android, if you try to make an APK that is compatible with both old versions and new versions of Android, you get a ton of scary warnings when you attempt to install it.

Retailers couldn't sell what the carriers didn't want on their networks. The carriers had momentum from consumer demand to keep selling iPhones. The carriers were given a lot of the "keys to the car" by Android and carriers were really happy with the ability to modify Android and/or micro-manage it, so they had a lot of incentive to focus on Android.

In the US, Windows Phone tried for the "iPhone experience", which made carriers unhappy and less likely to want to sell it, which ultimately left it the case in the US at a point where only one US carrier at a time was even "exclusively" selling the latest Windows Phone hardware, and only through its dedicated retailers. It took too long for Microsoft to also realize that part of the iPhone plan in the first place was direct to consumer sales and pressuring the phone carriers to provide SIMs rather than making "exclusive" hardware deals with carriers and hoping other carriers would try to compete for buying your hardware as well.

> In the US, Windows Phone tried for the "iPhone experience", which made carriers unhappy

Carriers were especially unhappy that Microsoft bought Skype at the time and tried to run it as a loss-making business to undermine carrier voice and messaging revenues.

That was the final nail in the coffin. The reason why they didn't hit adoption in the first place is because Google prohibited their application on MS devices. Mobile YouTube already wasn't good enough, and without the rest of the GSuite (Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Calendar, Translate) it was dead in the water. And no, HERE maps and third-party clients were not good enough to tip the scale.

Google Mail and Calendar was fine; Google had an exchange connector at the time which worked well. (or well enough)

But maybe Google would have updated their WinCE apps to WP7 if Microsoft didn't make them throw all their work away.

This wasn't (only) about Google refusing to make apps for the WP, it was Google actively preventing WP apps from accessing their services where they could. Microsoft made a very nice YouTube client, for example, and Google simply denied YT access if they detected you were using it.

Google had said they were killing the exchange connector and only changed their mind at the very end after Microsoft had written the workaround.

I put the blame squarely on Microsoft, how they released a turd with WP7 (a shiny one with responsive UI, but nonetheless a turd).

About phone OS upgrades, remember the HTC HD2 which originally released with WM6.5 but could be upgraded to WP7 and then to WP8 through after-market community ROMs. It was also Microsoft's decision to not officially allow that.

Add to that the fact that the 8 to 8.1 was also a mess, devices that were promised as 8.1 compatible were dropped from the upgrade.

The XDA and Compaqs etc were WAY ahead of what anyone else had (even better than Sony’s PDAs) and yet they totally fumbled their lead

Win 8 UI was way ahead of its time.

I still prefer the time of Win 2K (or max Win 7)

Windows 2000 was peak usability. Windows XP was also good, especially with the Classic or Standard themes.

Windows 2000... I loved it so much...

Windows 8's UI was not new by any means. Shareware with that style already existed in early 2000's.

the time that's never came lol

They’ve abducted president of another country in broad daylight, what soft power are you talking about?

I’m talking about what soft power Apple or Google could hypothetically leverage.

They’re right. Try making a living using pottery compared to programming. These days (prior to LLMs, at least) you could get 6 figure job by completing a bootcamp.

Type systems are orthogonal topic. I’d argue that the biggest hypers of AI are in the static types camp, because it allows them to iterate quickly and more safely than using dynamic types.

And then you’re back to React!

Oh boy, here we go. Now they even adopted Russia's playbook word by word.

> The US officially took over greenland after denmark *allied* with nazi germany during ww2. People forget that the danes were nazi collaborators.

Was occupied, comrade, is the word you're looking for. They've forgot to put it in your metodichka.

Denmark is within spitting distance of Hamburg, one of Germany's few major ports at the time. Easy for them to come in.

The UK grabbed Iceland and the Faroe Islands.

> Read about the german "invasion" of denmark if you want a good laugh.

Your comments are more than enough, don't need to go there.

> why would anyone trust any treaty or other agreement with the US ever again?

Nobody would, but 1 trillion defense (scratch that) war budget says you have to agree.

The 1 trillion budget says the US can flex its muscles, but once sovereignty is at stake, the US army becomes an ineffective money sinkhole only good at committing war crimes, as the last century has clearly shown.

If the other side have sufficient nuclear warheads it does not really matter the size of the war budget.

You have to be willing to use them though and suffer the consequences. Having them isn’t enough on its own.

Exactly, and that isn't in the billionaires interest so it's not going to happen. They'd rather all their consumers attention be available to them than dealing with nuclear fallout.