I think the GP is talking about long before IE6 was a thing. Even back in the IE4 days there were web based games, HTML chat rooms, etc. I remember writing vast interactive 3D landscapes in VRML which were embedded into home page even as early as the late 90s (~4 years before IE6 was released).
But aside VRML and other browser plugins the web was ostensibly just a network of hyperlinked documents. You'd make an action and get a fresh page. Make another action and get another fresh page. Sure it was primitive by today's standards but it wasn't possibly to do half the "evil" things we complain about today (user tracking, browser mining, etc) and there were still big social hubs like the Yahoo! portal too. What's more, because the barrier for entry as well as people's own expectations were that much lower it meant you saw a hell of a lot more individuality in the content posted. People would literally put a website up about their favourite designs of bridges, the shapes of snail shells, cartoon trivia no normal person should care about, or some local landmark. There were sites dedicated to the most mundane of things yet they were strangely fascinating topics because you get drawn into the topic through the obsession and wonder that drove the sites author to dedicate his on little piece of the web to it.
These days the signal to noise ratio is so far tilted the other way with people obsessing too much about contributing what they think people want read or boasting about stuff they feel is boast-worthy that it almost completely drains out the purist content from people who just post stuff that genuinely interests themselves. This is compounded by the fact that the web has been gamified by some big names to encourage the kind of boastful content I described earlier because that feedback loop of posting content then waiting for "likes" and/or means more screen time which, in turn, means more eyeballs on adverts. The fact that everything is so bite-sized hardly helps either; Facebook statuses, Twitter "tweets", Instagram posts - they're all short, direct, "shots" of information. Fewer people engage in the longer process of having a page dedicated to a subject. Which means we lose a lot of detail, creativity and personality.
The only good thing about the modern web is that while the barrier for entry writing a website has gone up, inversely the barrier for entry publishing content has gone down dramatically.
>What's more, because the barrier for entry as well as people's own expectations were that much lower it meant you saw a hell of a lot more individuality in the content posted. People would literally put a website up about their favourite designs of bridges, the shapes of snail shells, cartoon trivia no normal person should care about, or some local landmark
You can still find those types of sites if you want.
>These days the signal to noise ratio is so far tilted the other way with people obsessing too much about contributing what they think people want read or boasting about stuff they feel is boast-worthy that it almost completely drains out the purist content from people who just post stuff that genuinely interests themselves.
With more people joining the web, that will be a side effect of it. On the flip side, there has been so much massive positive change on the web too. Online transactions, many government services becoming online (many times reducing corruption), email and IM connecting people around the world in a way never before, and many many more things. Just focussing on the negatives by commenting a few types of sites like fb, insta, twitter etc is fainting a very one-dimensional picture.
>The only good thing about the modern web is that while the barrier for entry writing a website has gone up, inversely the barrier for entry publishing content has gone down dramatically
I actually think that is a bad thing, not good. What made the web the web was the low barrier to entry. Also, if you think that is the only good thing about the modern web, then I really don't think you truly realize the scale in which most people take the web for granted nowadays in their everyday lives, which affects them in a positive way.
> You can still find those types of sites if you want.
You can. And I made that point myself. The issue is the signal to noise ratio and the way search engines rank sites. Finding those gems I described above have become harder than it used to (in my personal opinion)
> less corruption
I very much disagree that there’s less corruption now the web has taken off. Or at least if there is, I disagree it’s directly related to stuff getting published on the web.
> email and IM connecting people around the world like never before
Email and IM have existed long before the web (decades before in emails case), nevermind being available around the period of the early web that we were talking about.
> just focusing on negatives like fab, Twitter, etc creates a very one dimensional picture
I totally agree.
The reason it was written that as was because I wanted to offer a counterbalance to the previous post rather than a balanced and impartial commentary. However you’re right that the reality is somewhere between the two arguments.
> I actually thing that’s a bad thing
I think you’ve completely misunderstood my point because you’re arguing the same point I made with using language that suggests I was opposed to those points you’re making.
Also you seem to be confusing “web” with “internet” in some of your previous remarks and also suggesting I’m totally against the web in its entirety; neither of those points are true (in fact I’m very much pro-web)
> And now, random websites can grab control of my radios? With JavaScript?
No. Only the user allows it.
>FFS. This is like the battery api. Too much time spent on "can we", too little time spent on "should we".
The battery API can be tremendously useful on mobile if used effectively. For example, disabling certain animations and high end GPU intensive effects if the battery is less.
I disagree. You have games like The Last of Us, The Uncharted Series, Yakuza 0, and even the latest Wolfenstein game having very well made and engaging stories which I think can translate well on film.
I thought that The Last of Us was an absolutely fantastic game. Honestly, its one of the few games I've managed to stay engaged with all the way to the end. It works as a game. It's wonderful within its medium. A movie can't give you moral choices (did you guys kill the doctors at the end??), nor the time required to really get aquainted with the characters.
The narrative works best in the medium it was designed around. As a movie, I Dunno, what would the medium bring to the table? I suspect it'd just be another throw away zombie movie
At the end of the day I think therein lies the difficulty. The entire point of a movie based on a video game in my opinion would be to allow fans to explore the world further in another medium. It's to enhance immersion, not replace it. A great video game movie probably wouldn't be very good for someone who hasn't played the game.
I think a good example of this is the Warcraft movie. Pretty terrible reception overall. But as a Warcraft fan I really enjoyed it and would love another.
There are definitely games that I wish I could get the "cliff notes" experience. GTA comes to mind - 4 had an interesting enough (if generic) story, but just took forever to finish because of its million mostly copy-paste go-here-shoot-things quests. Same goes for Final Fantasy & most other JRPGs - there are some interesting themes and story in there, but it's padded out so much by turn based combat that I usually burn out half way through.
I can imagine something similar for games like The Last Of Us, although I haven't played it personally. Sometimes you just can't be bothered to deal with the not-plot parts of the game for 25 out of 40 hours.
All of the repetitive missions in games would work well in a series. I mean most TV shows follow that formula, you know at a certain time in a cop show they will figure out whodunnit and proceed to the thematic close of events.
There's a yakuza movie, as it happens! It's directed by Takashi Miike, at one point you could find it on Netflix under the title Like a Dragon. The Japanese title is "Ryu Ga Gotoku: Gekijoban.
I've watched it, it's a fun flick. The yakuza series is essentially a soap opera at heart anyways, but the film did a really good job of capturing what's weird and crazy about Kamurocho.
Uncharted are some of the most cinematic games I’ve played, only topped by horizon zero dawn, but I think their storylines are just a little too flat to translate into an interesting movie. It would be like an indiana jones knockoff.
Horizon on the other hand... The opening sequences you could translate scene for scene. It would make a great movie.
Uncharted and last if us are really poorly written imo. They are full of the clichés, they just cover it up with good voice acting. Uncharted makes Indian Jones look like citizen kane by comparison.
Think more from the inference angle. There are a lot of use cases for ML and many are using native apps or desktop apps. This allows you to run it on the browser on the web, which significantly broadens the amount of people who can use it.
So can you think of use cases for using ML in an app (native or desktop?) Many of those would be good to have in the browser as part of a web app too.
With the growing use of Whatsapp in India, SMS is actually quickly dying as a medium of communication between humans here. Poeple who have whatsapp (there's a lot of them in india) seem to use that to communicate instead of SMS (which is then used mostly for messages from companies, or stuff like 2-factor authentication etc).
Also, I see a lot of people use Whatapp to send/share actual hindi (written in devnagari) instead of hindi written in roman alphabet. I would say the latter is still more popular, but the former growing quite a lot.
Another thing I see is people use whatsapp to bypass typing altogether. Since you can share pretty much any media easily on whatsapp and other messaging serivices, I've seen some people leave short voice messages instead of typing text.
During Nasscom Product Conclave this year someone mentioned that more than 60% of WhatsApp messages are in local language (Phonetic or Native typing mode).
Opera does still contribute quite a lot to blink/chromium (check out https://operasoftware.github.io/upstreamtools/ which lists them), though the gist of what you've said still stands.
In Opera, you can right click on any tab in the tab menu, and click 'save tabs as speed dial folder'. All open tabs will be saved in a folder on your speed dial. If you wan to open them again, you can right-click the speed dial folder and select to open them all at once.
If you haven't, I would recommend you look into m-Pesa. In some countries (not all countries), M-Pesa uses USSD (like Tanzania I think).
Overall, some of the solutions for payments and banking being implemented in some developing countries is quite different than what most people in the west are used to. M-Pesa is one of them, but in countries like India, online wallets are starting to gain traction too.
Most people in developing countries don't have credit cards, let alone being comfortable using them online. So a lot of people in India still use the 'Cash on Delivery' model, which isn't very much prevelant in the west, and other solutions like 'Netbanking' (in which the shopping site redirects you to your bank provider's site, you log in, and through the bank provider's site you do the payment, and then it redirects to the shopping site's payment confirmation page ; In other words, you haven't used a card, you've just paid directly through the bank) are also there.
It's a leadership development platform, aimed at new managers who want to do it right. I'm solo bootstrapping it.
It has a combination of learning resources (courses, research paper insights etc) and tools.
While the learning resources are for helping you with knowledge, the tooling aspect is for developing the right habits for staying a good leader.