Well, they’re also private, for-profit companies that legally own and sell the lines. So, there’s another political angle where people might vote against the regulations under theory that government shouldn’t dictate how you run your business or use your property, esp if it cost you money. Under theory of benefiting owners and shareholders, these companies are legal entities specifically created to generate as much profit from those lines as possible. If you don’t like it, build and sell your own lines. That’s what they’d say.

They don’t realize how hard it is to deploy an ISP on a shoe-string budget to areas where existing players already paid off the expensive part of the investment, can undercut you into bankruptcy, and (per people claiming to be ISP founders on Hacker News) will even cut competitors’ lines “accidentally” so their own customers leave them. In the last case, it’s hard to file and win a lawsuit if you just lost all your revenue and opponent has over a billion in the bank. They all just quit.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

I think this is too optimistic. I live in Chicago, the third biggest city in the country and arguably the tech hub of the midwest. In my building I get to choose between AT&T and Comcast. I’m considered lucky: most of my friends in the city get one option, period. If their ISP starts doing anything shady they don’t have an option to switch, because there’s nobody they can switch to.

Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal

Nobody says this. It’s being pushed because it prevents large corporations from locking out smaller players. The Internet is a great economic equalizer: I can start a business and put a website up and I’m just as visible and accessible as Microsoft.

We don’t want Microsoft to be able to pay AT&T to slow traffic to my website but not theirs. It breaks the free market by allowing collusion that can’t be easily overcome. It’s like the telephone network; I can’t go run wires to everyone’s house, but I want my customers to be able to call me. I don’t want my competitors to pay AT&T to make it harder to call me than to call them.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

That assumes people have a choice. They very often don’t. Internet service has a massively high barrier to entry, similar to a public utility. Most markets in the United States have at most two providers (both major corporations opposed to net neutrality). Very, very rarely is there a third.

More importantly, there are only five tier-1 networks in the United States. Five. It doesn’t matter how many local ISPs there are; without Net Neutrality, five corporations effectively control what can and can’t be transmitted. If those five decide something should be slowed down or forbidden, there is nothing I can do. Changing to a different provider won’t do a thing.

(And of those five, all of them donate significantly more to one major political party than the other, and the former Associate General Counsel of one of them is currently chairman of the FCC…)

I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs.

Net neutrality says nothing about how much it costs. It just says you can’t charge different amounts based on content. It would be like television stations charging more money to Republican candidates to run ads than to Democratic candidates. They’re free to charge whatever they want; they’re not free to charge different people different amounts based on the content of the message.

Democracy requires communication. It does no good to say “freedom!” if the major corporations can effectively silence whoever they want. “At least it’s not the government” is not a good defense of stifling public debate.

And there’s a difference between a newspaper and a television/radio station/internet service. I can buy a printing press and make a newspaper and refuse to carry whatever I want. There are no practical limits to the number of printing presses in the country.

There is a limited electromagnetic spectrum. Not just anyone can broadcast a TV signal. There is a limit to how many cables can be run on utility polls or buried underground. Therefore, discourse carried over those media are required to operate more in the public trust than others. As they become more essential to a healthy democracy, that only becomes more important. It’s silly to say “you still have freedom of speech” if you’re blocked from television, radio, the Internet, and so on. Those are the public forums of our day. That a corporation is doing the blocking doesn’t make it any better than if the government were to do it.

Side note, the reason you don’t see the protests against the “gatekeepers” is that most of the mainstream media isn’t accurately covering the reaction of the people to the censorship.

There’s a big difference between Twitter not wanting to carry Alex Jones and net neutrality. Jones is still free to go start up a website that carries his message; with Net Neutrality not only could he be blocked from Twitter, but the network itself could make his website inaccessible.

There is no alternative with Net Neutrality. You can’t build your own Internet. Without mandating equal treatment of traffic, we hand the Internet over solely to the big players. Preventing monopolistic and oligarchic control of public discourse is a valid use of government power. It’s not censorship, it’s the exact opposite.

Even though I’m favoring net neutrality, I appreciate you braving the conservative position on this here on Lobsters. I did listen to a lot of them. What I found is most had reasonable arguments but had no idea about what ISP’s did, are doing, are themselves paying Tier 1’s, etc. Their media sources’ bias (all have bias) favoring ISP’s for some reason didn’t tell them any of it. So, even if they’d have agreed with us (maybe, maybe not), they’d have never reached those conclusions since they were missing crucial information to reflect on when choosing to regulate or not regulate.

An example is one telling me companies like Netflix should pay more to Comcast per GB or whatever since they used more. The guy didn’t know Comcast refuses to do that when paying Tier 1’s negotiating transit agreements instead that worked entirely different. He didn’t know AT&T refused to give telephones or data lines to rural areas even if they were willing to pay what others did. He didn’t know they could roll out gigabit today for same prices but intentionally kept his service slow to increase profit knowing he couldn’t switch for speed. He wasn’t aware of most of the abuses they were doing. He still stayed with his position since that guy in particular went heavily with his favorite, media folks. However, he didn’t like any of that stuff which his outlets never even told him about. Even if he disagrees, I think he should disagree based on an informed decision if possible since there’s plenty smart conservatives out there who might even favor net neutrality if no better alternative. I gave him a chance to do that.

So, I’m going to give you this comment by @lorddimwit quickly showing how they ignored the demand to maximize profit, this comment by @dotmacro showing some abuses they do with their market control, and this article that gives nice history of what free market did with each communications medium with the damage that resulted. Also note that the Internet itself was an open, free-if-you-have-a-wire system that competed with the proprietary, charge-per-use, lock-them-in-forever-if-possible systems the private sector was offering. It smashed them so hard you might have even never heard of them or forgotten a lot about them depending on your age. It also democratized more goods than about anything other than maybe transportation. Probably should stick with the principles that made that happen to keep innovation rolling. Net neutrality was one of them that was practiced informally at first then put into law as the private sector got too much power and was abusing it. We should keep doing what worked instead of the practices ISP’s want that didn’t work but will increase their profits at our expense for nothing in return. That is what they want: give us less or as little improvement in every way over time while charging us more. It’s what they’re already doing.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

What obvious reasons? Because customers will switch providers if they don’t treat all traffic equally? That would require (a) users are able to tell if a provider prioritizes certain traffic, and (b) that there is a viable alternative to switch to. I have no confidence in either.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

Most customers have exceedingly limited options in their area, and they’re not going to switch houses because of their ISP. Especially in apartment complexes, you see cases where, say, Comcast has the lockdown on an entire population and there really isn’t a reasonable alternative.

In a truly free market, maybe I’d agree with you, but the regulatory environment and natural monopolistic characteristics of telecomm just don’t support the case.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

Awkward political jabs aside, most of your statements imply that you believe customers are free to choose who they get their internet from, which is just plain incorrect. Whatever arguments you want to make against net neutrality, there is one indisputable fact that you cannot just ignore or paper over:

ISPs do not operate in a free market.

In the vast majority of the US, cable and telephone companies are granted local monopolies in the areas they operate. That is why they must be regulated. As the Mozilla blog said, they have both the incentive and means to abuse their customers and they’ve already been caught doing it on multiple occasions.

All of that is gibberish. Net Neutrality is being pushed because it creates a more competitive marketplace. None of it has anything to do with professional liar Alex Jones.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

That’ s not how markets work. And it’s not how the technology or permit process for ISPs work. There is very little competition among ISPs in the US market.

Hey, here’s a great example from HN of the crap they pull without net neutrality. They advertised “unlimited,” throttled it secretly, admitted it, and forced them to pay extra to get actual unlimited.

@lorddimwit add this to your collection. Throttling and fake unlimited been going on long time but they couldve got people killed doing it to first responders. Id have not seen that coming just for PR reasons or avoiding local, govt regulation if nothing else.

I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs.

It’s not about how much internet costs, it’s about protecting freedom of access to information, and blocking things like zero-rated traffic that encourage monopolies and discourage competition. If I pay for a certain amount of traffic, ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to turn to Google and say “want me to prioritize YouTube traffic over Netflix traffic? Pay me!”

Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal (and they’re correct, except for the “fascist, nazi” bit).

Where on earth did you hear that? I sure hope you’re not making it up—you’ll find this site doesn’t take too kindly to that.

I think you misunderstand what I’m saying. My claim isn’t that Qt would solve every problem that people are looking to electron to solve if only it were more popular. My claim is merely that of the cross-platform native toolkits, Qt seems to be both the furthest along in terms of capability, and also seems to be one of the less recognized tools in that space (compared to Wx, GTK, Mono, Unity, heck I’ve seen seen more about TK and FLTK than Qt lately). I suspect that Qt could grow and support more of what people want if it got more attention, but for whatever reason of the cross-platform native toolkits it seems to be less discussed.

without Electron we would simply not have many of the Electron-powered cross-platform apps that are popular and used by many today.

I don’t really remember having a problem finding desktop applications before Electron. There seems to be relatively little evidence for this statement.

I’m not sure sure that it’s necessarily true that the existence of these apps is necessarily better than the alternative. For a technical audience, sure. I can choose to, grudgingly, use some bloated application that I know is going to affect my performance, and I’m technical enough to know the tradeoffs and how to mitigate the costs (close all electron apps when I’m running on battery, or doing something that will benefit from more available memory). The problem is for a non-technical audience who doesn’t understand these costs, or how to manage their resources, the net result is a degraded computing experience- and it affects the entire computing ecosystem. Resource hog applications are essentially replaying the tragedy of the commons on every single device they are running on, and even as the year-over-year gains in performance are slowing the underlying problem seems to be getting worse.

And when I say “we” should do better, I’m acknowledging that the onus to fix this mess is going to be in large part on those of us who have started to realize there’s a problem. I’m not sure we’ll succeed as javascript continues to eat the world, but I’ll take at least partial ownership over the lack of any viable contenders from the native application world.

“and without Electron we would simply not have many of the Electron-powered cross-platform apps that are popular and used by many today. “

What that’s actually saying is that people who envision and build cross-platform apps for their own satisfaction, fame, or fortune would stop doing that if Electron didnt exist. I think the evidence we have is they’d build one or more of a non-portable app (maybe your claim), cross-platform app natively, or a web app. That’s what most were doing before Electron when they had the motivations above. Usually web, too, instead of non-portable.

We didnt need Electron for these apps. Quite a few would even be portable either immediately or later with more use/funds. The developers just wanted to use it for whatever reasons which might vary considerably among them. Clearly, it’s something many from a web background find approachable, though. That’s plus development time savings is my theory.

I think the big caveat to this is that for a great many of the applications I see that have electron-based desktop apps, they are frontends for SAAS applications. They could make money off a GPL application just as easily as a proprietary one, especially since a lot of these services publish most of the APIs anyway.

Granted, I’d love to see a world where software moved away from unnecessary rent-seeking and back to actually selling deliverable applications, but as long as we’re in a SAAS-first world the decision to release a decent GPL-ed frontend doesn’t seem like it should be that hard.

I have been responsible for third party IP at a company that did exactly that with Qt; it’s fine.

I never claimed that it doesn’t make life easier for some developers, or even that every electron app would have been written with some other cross-platform toolkit. Clearly for anyone who uses Javascript as their primary (or, in many cases, only) language, and works with web technology day in and day out, something like electron is going to be the nearest to hand and the fastest thing for them to get started with.

The problem I see is that what’s near to hand for developers, and good for the individual applications, ends up polluting the ecosystem by proliferating grossly, irresponsibly inefficient applications. The problem of inefficiency and the subsequent negative affect it has on the entire computing ecosystem is compounded by the fact that most users aren’t savvy enough to understand the implications of the developers technology choices, or even capable of looking at the impact that a given application is having on their system. Additionally, software as an industry is woefully prone to adopting local maxima solutions- even if something better did come along, we’re starting to hit an inflection point of critical mass where electron will continue to gain popularity. Competitors might stand a chance if developers seemed to value efficiency, and respect the resources of their users devices, but if they did we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

“But that is not Electron’s fault.”

It happens by default with a lot of Electron apps. It doesnt so much with native ones. That might mean it’s a side effect of Electron’s design. Of course, Id like to see more data on different use-cases in case it happens dor some things but not others. In your case, did you have to really work hard at keeping the memory down?

Edit: The Github link has some good info. Thanks.

I’ve been using a trackball for pretty much my whole life (all 18 years of it). But I only use thumb balls (your thumb is the most dexterous finger on each hand), like the Logitech Trackman. What’s it like to use your pointer finger?

Edit: This is what I meant by Trackman, not what they currently call the Trackman.

42312911

whoa, I got 28,103,031 on chromium 61.0.3163.100! I wonder what the difference is - did you run depot-tools?

(which is orders of magnitude larger and more complex).

The point is that the browser is “magnitude larger and more complex” than a complete operating system. Electron is by no means fast to run, the memory usage is over the top and its not portable to systems they don’t support because of the enormous complexity.

The way how electron is designed makes it impossible to have a shared runtime, which would reduce the amount of work to add electron based programs to distributions package managers or ports systems.

Its not feasible to build a whole browser for each electron app.

Yeah, my point is that an entire OS* src tree is orders of magnitude smaller than the chromium source (which is included when you build electron apps!!)!

• acme client
• perl
• dns server
• http server
• dhcp server
• clang

the education given to film-makers and 3d artists is largely different and making mistakes with contrast in 3DCG isn’t anything new

But this is also a post focused on pictures, not on something I walk around in and have to get information from. Most games don’t even aim for photo-realism, for such reasons.

also the topic is rendering quality, which is really just tangential to playability tbqh

Sure, but playability is directly related to display techniques, especially when it comes to shooters.

I don’t disagree that there might be a problem, but the post takes a lazy route by not putting the pictures in context.

Well, those images aren’t heavily washed out by contrast, so I think the author would agree that you’re on to something.

If you take a look at Part 0 of the series, the issues are mostly about new rendering technology giving us new, exciting ways to make things look bad. Older games are, vacuously, immune to the issues of the new technology.

Well, I don’t think Jedi Academy would be loved that much if it were released in with the same graphics, today.

It has issues and I can only look past them by being introduced to the game when it came out. (I love JA very much)

Agreed. Reminds me of the old black and orange monochrome monitors

I kinda like how it looks the other way around: https://www.spinda.net/files/black-on-orange.png

I have near-perfect vision and I think the font size is fine as well. :)

Font looks fine. The header is far too tall though - takes up half the page on first load.

I’d suggest that the combination of the font serifs, the varying spacing of the letters, and the overall weight of the font make it seem a little smeared out–if you don’t want to bump the size slightly.

Then again, I’ve got terrible eyesight.

appears to block your CSS

Just curious, what do you mean by that? The client’s site is affecting my CSS?