Announcing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative
@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.
@JimmyBigSausage I'm not sure if you're replying to the right comment here?
@HobbitFoot I'm not yet, but if there's a good one then I'd be happy to add it...
@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-Qps1R7xOyG1EfRjRVSyX7FsVdhNkpng.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-rwgQ1PSRo4GIplmxRZscxnF-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.
@ColeSloth "Your entire population has no city over 100,000 people that doesn’t live near the coast"
Canberra's population is 456,692, but it's only the national capital.
Ballarat's population is 117,240.
Bendigo's population is 103,818.
Albury-Wodonga is around 100,000 and growing.
"and almost all of those are in the southeast and east side of the country."
Perth, Adelaide, Mandurah, and Darwin say hi.
"All you need to get around by train there is essentially one track shaped in a funny looking circle."
You mean to reach all the major coastal capital cities?
You do realise Australia is roughly the same size as the continental US, right?
And it would have to be a bloody funny looking circle to have Melbourne, Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, and Albury-Wodonga.
All with over 100,000 people or more (in the case of Melbourne and Geelong, much more).
All have a direct rail line with regular passenger services to Melbourne, as does Gippsland and Shepparton.
By the way, Dubbo has a population of 43,516. It's inland, and 392 km (244 mi) NW of Sydney. You know what else it has?
Trains: https://transportnsw.info/regional/book-sydney-to-dubbo-by-train
Bonus fact. You know what Alice Springs, in the middle of the continent with a population of 25,912 and nothing but desert for miles around has?
Trains: https://www.journeybeyondrail.com.au/journeys/the-ghan/
C'mon son, you can do better...
@exocrinous @Longmactoppedup In a number of key industries — supermarkets, telcos, banks, airlines, electricity — Australia doesn't have genuine competition.
Instead, we have two to four big companies that own the industry and basically act as a cartel.
They saw the supply shortages and skills shortages, and jacked up their prices.
Then when those shortages cleared, instead of lowering prices, they kept raising them and raked in record profits.
All this led to skyrocketing inflation.
Here's where the Reserve Bank comes into play.
Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, there was a number of years where there was a wages spiral.
Basically, this was where prices were rising, so unions demanded and received higher wages, which led to companies putting up prices, which led to higher wage demands...
The thing that eventually ended that cycle was the Reserve Bank lifting interest rates to 17% and causing a recession.
At its simplest, this caused people to lose jobs and stop demanding wage increases and businesses to stop raising prices.
The Reserve Bank acted like a wage spiral was happening again, and put up interest rates.
But this time, it didn't work particularly well, because in most industries, wages weren't rising.
And because housing prices were one of the root causes of the inflation, and higher interest rates made it more expensive to borrow to build houses, it actually made the problem worse.
Instead, people just cut their spending right back.
Which brings us to the almighty catastrofuck of an economic mess Australia's in right now.
At the same time, the same sorts of issues are happening across the world.
There's global skills shortages. Housing prices are skyrocketing across the world. Inflation is surging, even as supply shortages clear. Wage growth is stagnant and isn't keeping pace with the economy.
So in the US Federal Reserve is raising interest rates, and house prices in — say — New York are hitting record highs. Inflation there is surging, but wages are stagnant.
And that's the simple version — there's even more to it, but I'm already on the second post.
It's basically the end product of 30 or 40 years of short-sighted economic policy.
We simultaneously need more skilled migration to fix this mess, but it will also make the problem worse.
The Reserve Bank is lifting interest rates to slow inflation but it's also making the problem worse.
Consumer spending has fallen off a cliff and simultaneously inflation is running rampant.
Households are in a recession while the overall economy is overheating.
And the same things are happening in China, in Europe, in the US, in Canada.
So even if we can solve some of these issues domestically, some of these issues have a global dimension.
In short, it's a mess. (2/2)
@exocrinous @Longmactoppedup I think there's a few big pieces of this puzzle that you guys are missing.
Housing is too expensive.
Why? Australia doesn't have enough housing.
To build more housing, we need skilled tradies, structural engineers, etc.
But there's a problem.
Australia has skills shortages in those areas.
Okay, so we'll bring in more skilled migrants to fill those skills shortages to build more housing.
Those skilled migrants need somewhere to live.
But there's a problem.
Australia doesn't have enough housing.
So we need more houses for the skilled migrants we need to build more houses to fix the problem of not enough houses.
It gets worse.
For around two years during the pandemic, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade needed more staff for things like hotel quarantine and border pass applications.
So DFAT basically took all staff off examining skilled migrant visa applications.
The problem is that when the borders reopened, there was a roughly two-year backlog of skilled migrant applications.
Also, Vlad decided to invade Ukraine, which meant most Western countries blocked Russian exports.
The problem is that a lot of — for example — the timber for the formwork used in concrete came from Russia. So the countries that had domestic supplies were hoarding them, while the rest of the world was scrambling to find alternative supplies.
So developers were waiting weeks or months to hire tradies, the tradies would show up on site, the parts they needed still hadn't shown up because of the supply shortage, so they'd go home. A few weeks later, the parts would show up, but the developer would then need to book the tradies again...
Russia is also a big oil and gas supplier, so as it was shut off from the world market, energy prices surged.
So building projects were being delayed, costs were increasing, new housing supply was delayed.
But wait — what about our higher education system? Why are there skills shortages to begin with? Why aren't our TAFEs and unis producing enough skilled workers?
Well, starting with the Keating government and accelerating under John Howard, the federal government discovered that full fee paying international students are a great way to fund higher education without raising taxes.
So higher education went from primarily training students to fill local skills gaps to exporting education.
Student migration dried up during the pandemic, but it kicked off again just as border restrictions were lifted.
Those students need housing.
At the same time, delays in processing skilled migration visas meant there were massive skills shortages in construction. And supply shortages.
It still gets worse. (1/2)
@ColeSloth @epistatacadam I noticed you didn't respond to @LovesTha after they mentioned they're from Australia.
Yeah, Australia is "built different" to the US in that we have less than 1/10th the population in a land mass roughly the size of the continental US.
Yet despite that we still somehow manage to have better public transport than most of the US.
Long commutes? One of my colleagues at my current job travels from Bendigo to Melbourne at least two days a week. That's a 186 mile (300 km) round trip.
In a previous job, one of my colleagues commuted from Katoomba to Sydney. You wouldn't have heard of it, but it's a town of around 8,268 people in the mountains. A 126 mile/102km round trip.
And in my previous job I semi-regularly had to commute from Sydney to Newcastle. That's 324km (202 miles).
The difference is that all those commutes are by train.
Yes, we have towns like Katoomba in the mountains with less than 10,000 people that have a half-hourly peak and hourly off-peak train service: https://transportnsw.info/documents/timetables/93-BMT-Blue-Mountains-Line-20230708.pdf
Why not drive? Well, because the (by world standards) slow trains from Bendigo to Melbourne travel at 160 kp/h, compared to 110 kp/h at best for driving: https://vicsig.net/index.php?page=passenger§ion=rollingstock&subs=railmotors&rmtype=VLocity
(Of course, you won't consistently get those speeds driving, because of traffic jams.)
So how can Australia do it while America can't?
Because the US federal government has literally spent trillions of dollars subsidising roads, subsidising the auto industry, and subsidising fossil fuels.
Because governments mandate that business owners subsidise drivers by imposing minimum parking requirements.
Because zoning codes explicitly outlaw mixed use development and higher density developments in many parts of the US.
Because US governments at all levels have imposed this on its citizens for the past 70 years, while hardly investing in public transport infrastructure.
@joannaholman @degoogle Good point.
If it were run as a private company, I think the solution might be just to pay actual humans as employees.
If it's a community-run project, the challenge would be to come up with a robust moderation system...
@bsammon And this Archive.org capture of Lycos.com from 1998 contradicts your memory: https://web.archive.org/web/19980109165410/http://lycos.com/
See those links under "WEB GUIDES: Pick a guide, then explore the Web!"?
See the links below that say Autos/Business/Money/Careers/News/Computers/People/Education /Shopping/Entertainment /Space/Sci-Fi/Fashion /Sports/Games/Government/Travel/Health/Kids
That's exactly what I'm referring to.
Here's the page where you submitted your website to Lycos: https://web.archive.org/web/19980131124504/http://lycos.com/addasite.html
As far as the early search engines went, some were more sophisticated than others, and they improved over time. Some simply crawled the webpages on the sites in the directory, others
But yes, Lycos definitely was definitely an example of the type of web directory I described.
@pendulum @Zagorath Clearly you didn't read the article.
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp wanted a law that says Facebook and Google have to pay News Corp for the privilege of allowing links to News Corp websites.
So Google has to pay News Corp for the links to News Corp in Google search results.
So Facebook has to pay News Corp for the links to News Corp sites that appear on Facebook.
The previous Australian federal government, under the previous Prime Minister Scott Morrison, gave him that law in 2021.
Google and Facebook struck deals to pay News Corp and other Australian media companies.
Facebook says it won't renew those agreements.
Yes, it is a stupid law. News Corp and other media companies profit from the traffic they get from Google and Facebook.
Look, here's the relevant part of the article right here:
"The Australian government wanted local publishers to benefit when links to their news content appeared on sites like Facebook and Google.
"It argued that there was significant advertising revenue being generated from this "premium content" and media organisations were missing out on their cut.
"So in 2021, the Morrison government introduced the News Media Bargaining Code, which aimed to address "bargaining power imbalances" by requiring tech giants to pay for displaying news on their platforms.
"Under the code, the government can "designate" digital platforms like Facebook and Google and force them into mediation to set terms for a revenue-sharing deal.
...
"Instead, Meta and Google struck a flurry of independent deals with news companies, all of which are due to expire in the next few months.
"The deals, with organisations including the ABC, Nine and News Corp, have brought around $200 million to the sector, according to the government.
"Now Meta says it's not renewing the agreements because news isn't a priority for Facebook users and it wants to invest its money elsewhere."
@owen @heatofignition @mondoman712 I think we're broadly on the same page. It's definitely not a hard line in the sand at my end.
I tend to view transport and urban planning policy as being deeply connected. There's a number of tools in that policy toolkit that should ideally be used together to reduce car dependency. And pricing is one of them.
And I get the impression that for a number of pragmatic reasons, there might be some differences in what good policy looks like in the US versus Australia.
As an aside, country areas are an interesting side case. I think in many country areas, it is possible to get much better services than currently exist, but that's a different discussion.
@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?