It's the chicken and the egg issue. People would purchase desktop apps if they were offered. But since they are not there is no support for them. As developers, it enthusiasts, etc ... we need to bring them to the forefront again.
> However, for some reason, many consumers will happily subscribe to SaaS apps.
Because consumers value not having to install, not having to backup, and not having to sync devices. They want immediate access to the thing they want, when they want it, on the device they want to access it on, with zero friction.
Apparently, broadband internet is sufficiently reliable (at least download bandwidth), that consumers do not value local redundancy, and they have not experienced sufficient losses by not having their data restricted to local devices, or are not cognizant of any losses.
One of the main reasons we abandoned Pinta (https://github.com/PintaProject/Pinta) is we had to rewrite a significant portion of the app if we wanted to move to GTK3, as we had many custom UI needs.
See also:
GIMP, still on GTK2.
Inkscape released on GTK3 just within the past year or 2
Many comments (probably correctly) point out that SQL can't be displaced because it is ubiquitous and "good enough".
I wonder if there is room for a "TypeScript" of SQL that would allow developers to opt-in to whatever new language features or paradigms we feel SQL is missing.
It would then transpile down to regular SQL to be executed.
I was wondering the same thing. Why not rather than build a new database engine, write a library like an ORM that transpiles a language - like EdgeQL - to SQL, so you can attempt to use it, without switching underlying database engine, and still use your old SQL code?
My Mac app, Strukt, does a bit of this. The main problem is that the basics of the various databases don't align very well. The functionality that's common to all databases is quite weak. Even such things as case sensitivity are drastically different. And for many of the differences, there's simply no way to emulate the other's functionality, correctly and efficiently.
C compiles to assembly or machine code, and TypeScript compiles to JavaScript, and in both cases you have the full power of the level you're targeting, so it's fine. An RDBMS has very specific fast-paths that you really need to hit, or the whole exercise becomes pointless. It's like trying to write a 3D game in JavaScript without any way to access the GPU or even SIMD ops. We can do 3D games in JS today, but that's really only feasible because the browser vendors went and exposed the basic fast paths.
Isn't this what an ORM is? Or at least an ORM covers some new features that users can opt-in to without losing the ability to write raw SQL. I guess it's not the perfect analogy to TypeScript, but I think it's a pretty good comparison. The other thing I can think of are things like GraphQL which can be used as an abstraction on top of a SQL DB.
From a man who knew, what he's talking about, George F. Kennan:
"Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy."
" There are certain sad appreciations we have to come to about human nature on the basis of these recent wars. One of them is that suffering does not always make men better. Another is that people are not always more reasonable than governments; that public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war. But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities — politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent. These people take refuge in the pat and chauvinistic slogans because they are incapable of understanding any others, because these slogans are safer from the standpoint of short-term gain, because the truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas — complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemma, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse. The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to explain. And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the shadow of a great doubt over the validity of democratic institutions. And until people learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of bitterness, suspicion, and intolerance as crimes in themselves — as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government — this sort of thing will continue to occur."
So here’s what I remember from American and World History classes.
World War II is joined by the US. Shortly after we start selling war bonds to raise tons of operating capital. We commandeer Detroit and have them build airplanes. No new cars are made for something like four years.
The draft starts, women start making the airplanes, and any raw material that goes into equipment or feeding the army gets rationed.
After the war “we need to be prepared” morphs from maintaining a strong industrial complex into a special case: the MIC. Maybe because we felt that World War III would be fought in weeks and not years.
I don’t think we know that to be the case anymore. Wouldn’t it be better for the peace time welfare of Americans to spend this volume of money on all of the constituent pieces needed to build a war machine but in plowshare form.
Domestic production of steel, aluminum, titanium, rocket motor parts. High explosives. High output robust turbofans. Transsonic passenger jets. Sensor arrays, predictive systems, generators, high torque motors (IC and electric), rifles, tents, ruggedized integrated circuits.
Only a few of those are strictly wartime products.
Churchill saw that the defeat of Britain was inevitable without allied help so through the Tizard Mission they transferred their military technology knowledge to the US in exchange for help. That included the cavity magnetron radar technology, one of the first mobile radars as well as other important innovations.
The US engaged the Germans on land but that went very poorly, so they kept doing strategic airstrikes, notably taking down the German synthetic fuel production capabilities. This forced Germans to advance east. Meanwhile America supplied the Soviets with trucks and boots, helping the Soviets fight the Germans, a successful plan that resulted in heavy Soviet casualties.
I'll just address the inaccuracies in your second paragraph.
By the time the US was engaging the Germans on land (Operation Torch in Nov. 1942), the Germans were already stuck in Stalingrad and had been defeated in their attempt to capture Moscow. They would never pose a serious threat in the East again. By spring they would be retreating as the Soviets unleashed their rebuilt armies on the weary Wehrmacht.
Operation Torch didn't go "poorly," though the green US troops didn't perform as well as seasoned British or German troops would have. Nor did US troops perform poorly during Operation Husky. By the time the Allies landed in Normandy, the US was performing extremely well.
Strategic airstrikes by the US (and British) never had a significant impact on the German industrial output. Nor did they have a damaging effect on German morale.
For the hardware at the pointy end where battles are won or lost, no.
For example, the 737 uses high bypass turbofans optimized around fuel burn, the fighter has a low bypass afterburning turbofan optimized around weight. Huge divergence. (And by the way, on both the civilian and military sides, engine development programs are yuuuge and very long. There's a reason for that that isn't simply due to greed.) The 737 has a standard weather radar, the fighter is able to focus megawatts in a narrow arc across less than a square centimeter of its nosecone and employs all sorts of trickery to resist (and possibly inflict) jamming, while detecting small targets that are trying to evade by blending into ground clutter or disappearing into something called the Doppler notch. Another huge divergence. Meanwhile the entire aircraft has been designed with stealth in mind, and that's a skill set with no civilian counterpart -- when was the last time you heard of an electrical engineer calling the shots on airframe design? Even designing for high supersonic aerodynamic performance (maneuvering, not just cruising) is pretty much a military-only skill, and supersonic analysis is wildly different from its subsonic equivalent. It just goes on and on -- I haven't even brought up guided missiles, which result from substantial development programs of their own and benefit little from civilian technology.
Now, there might be some subset of military products for which there aren't as many valuable differentiators -- I'm thinking of things like logistics assets, vehicles and infrastructure designed to move war materiel where it's needed. And there's precedent for that, where for example civilian airliners are converted into tankers. But on the whole, you can't take what you've learned building a 737 and apply that to building a competitive jet fighter inside of any reasonable time scale.
So, could you go to war with a 737 and a bunch of bombs hanging off it? Against insurgents, probably, yeah. But it's going to cost a lot more than, say, an A-10, the ground troops won't get any guns passes from you, and a single Su-27 is still going to ruin your whole day.
Another attractive option might be to skip a generation of hardware. But an important thing to remember is that every time a wise head retires from military aerospace, valuable skills and knowledge are lost. Sure, things are documented, but you can't easily replace human know how. So what happens when you go 20 years without a major fighter program? Experienced hands get thin on the ground and you spend a good amount of time and money climbing out of that hole. The upshot is that even if you'd like to get off the military upgrade treadmill for a while, you're going to pay some significant fraction of that savings down the road, whether in increased cost, schedule and/or reduced product performance.
Having said all this, I believe there are better ways to do what we're doing, and I think the F-35 was a foundationally ill-conceived program. But hand-picking a few basic military technologies to nurse while leaving the rest to whatever the civilian market will support is not the way to fix it.
SpaceX developed their tickets from blank paper without old hands from the conventional space industry guiding them.
As a result they have massively cut costs and are routinely doing what old space tells us was impossible.
The F-35 fills the same role as the Senate Launch System. It has accidental gains in terms of new technology and advanced airframes.
The military expertise of the USA could be maintained just as well if the USA would take simple measures like lifting the bans on supersonic planes put in place to kill Concorde ;)
I recall a post-mortem for the Superconducting Super Collider that pointed out a painful dichotomy: to build political support the contracts and suppliers had to be spread across many districts and states, but because it was a high tech project it was much, much, much more sensitive to component delays and quality issues.
The big takeaway: with non-challenging, small fry, projects you can play all the politics you want and still land them; challenging projects have a much stronger need to be guided by actual practical project concerns & engineering or you substantially increase the risk of failure.
The Manhattan project, and the incredible post-WW2 military engineering, worked because the brains got money and control so they build to the challenge at hand. When Porky Pig has first dibs the merely 'insanely hard' becomes impossible... Alan Kay said something to the same effect about the golden age of innovation at Xerox Parc: (brains + money) - BS = profitableSurprises.
The Manhattan project was distributed all around the country. From the pile under bleachers in Chicago, to the Hanford site in WA, the testing in the New Mexico desert, and Oak Ridge in Tennessee.
If engineering concerns dictate project planning, structure, and execution you're at least playing the game. Compromise is the nature of the beast, and practical realities dictate decisions.
If political financing, back scratching, and pocket filling dictate the projects planning, structure, and execution: you've increased complexity and risk substantially, and the likelihood that you've made the project nigh impossible to complete rises accordingly.
Fermi et al were not working in Chicago to balance the distribution of pork, IoW... Hard projects do not have the margins to allow those kinds of inefficiencies. And not to dis the military industrial complex, but that distinction is fundamental to all R&D projects. Everyone involved should have known better when this boondoggle started.
This is the same reason the SLS wont get cancelled, I believe it funds suppliers/contractors in all 50 states. It will never get voted to be cancelled.
> But the media's attention surrounding that recent increase was focused on Stormy Daniels and/or some other alleged Trump admin gaffe.
I'm a bit of a cynic, so I would readily cast a negative eye to the entire corporate media machine and assume they're void of integrity and merely interested in what grabs eyeballs and money ('if it bleeds, it leads')...
In that vein I don't think the media has attention. "Media" throws anything it can to the wall in hopes of making money, and find a public who cares very little about either insane deficit increases. Point of fact, even the Stormy Daniels sex scandal barely registers in terms of meaningful public reaction... Time was a President would be out the door for a hint of something like this.
I blame the people who have removed civics, and civic history, from childhood education. The same people who have eliminated previously sacred media segregation laws, and also eased campaign finance laws to the point of shadowy billionaires openly bankrolling national candidates and extremist agendas...
I sit corrected. The MSM has attention...to profits. They'd show a pig taking a shit if it would increase ratings.
You're not a cynic. You're spot on from my pov. It's the majority of semi-intelligent / semi-reasonable ppl who have lost their critical thinking minds.
What's going on is obvious, __if__ you're not constantly whipped up in some emotional frenzy. But that's a big if at this point.
Good one. It reminds me of Hitler's infamous Tiger II tank. Amazing, nearly unstoppable technology; when it didn't break down driving off the factory floor.
Ultimately there is very little consumer grade software anymore because modern consumers won't pay for software.
The only people who pay for software are enterprises and they aren't going to skimp a few hundred dollars on software that makes their $X0,000 creative workers X% less productive.
In this space there is basically Pixelmator and Affinity trying to eke out enough sales to keep their developers paid.
"Without proof of a lower rate, default processing is 2.9% + $0.30 for VISA/Mastercard/ Discover, 3.5% + $0.30 for AMEX, and $20 for any chargeback dispute not covered."
All of our clients (typically larger businesses) provide proof of lower rates with their existing processors and get those rates 100% matched. We do not negotiate processing, we just match the industry.
And if you provide us a quote for that rate, we'll 100% match it. We can go as low as anyone else, and are trying to avoid the insanity of negotiating processing rates.
I didn't start with a complaint, just an observation.
The CEO made it clear those rates are essentially a tax paid by unsavvy engineers that haven't shopped for rates because they aren't actually interested in setting competitive rates.
The real market rate for interchange is FAR lower than those described here, and from the replies you'll see that even here on HN there are a lot of tech smart, finance dumb engineers that didn't know that they're throwing away a big chunk of their revenue by taking the shelf rate for payment processing.
Exactly :-) We're here to compete on revenue lift + value-add. If we do not generate significantly more revenue than we charge, our customers turn us off.
2.0% blended pricing wouldn't cover the interchange for Amex, VISA Signature Cards or Mastercard World Elite. 0.9% wouldn't cover anything except durbin debit cards.
If you're big enough you do interchange plus pricing where the interchange is passed through and small processing fee is added. Blended rates are for small companies.
Smallco can do interchange plus too. It's more daunting, but almost always a better option.
2.0% blended does actually cover premium segment cards on a per transaction basis even at the top-end shelf rate depending on how you've structured your payment processing pipeline. Fully international transfers on high-end cards often cost less than intra-jurisdictional premium card purchases. Shelf rate, you're looking at 2.7 in the worst case without negotiation or any work on the part of the merchant.
But even if didn't - premium card penetration isn't very high.
So why are you paying for the full premium card interchange on every transaction?
Your merchant agreement restricts how you can do it, but you can provide incentives to use different payment venues. You don't have an incentive to push people towards low-interchange channels if you're getting fleeced on every channel.
Given the difference for a 10% margin product purchase between a 1.0 and 3.0 blended rate processor is literally a 28% difference to your bottom line, getting on top of the minutiae of your agreement is tremendously important.
Can you share a few companies that are that low? Stripe and Paypal would be my go-tos for adding any online purchasing to a site, so I thought the 2.9% was unavoidable (for small revenue sites).
I was going to guess that there are lower fraud rates in the EU compared to the US; based on what my former partner said, their company reports all EU fraud, but only fraud in the US over 2k USD. In addition to that, people in the US treat (abuse) consumer protections like a "get a free purchase/built-in scam protection", and try buying iphones for $260 on p2p apps from a complete stranger.
To be most accurate, those aren't the payment processing fees either. They are the blended rate, which include interchange, the payment processor's cut, the assessment fee, etc.
Most people don't know what a blended rate even means, though, so why bother using that terminology when I'm trying to save some smallco engineers on HN a few points on their startup's margin?
Feel free to replace my use of interchange with 'blended rate' if that helps.
However, for some reason, many consumers will happily subscribe to SaaS apps. So developers go where the customers are.