Huh? Cashback cards on VISA/Mastercard have all but disappeared, I think Lloyds still do one but it has a promo of 1% for the first year then drops to 0.25% after. American Express will give you 0.75% on first 10k spend then 1.25%. 2% is unheard of (unless it's promo or heavily capped).
It's not just the WebKit bit, basically the entire app implementation is actually shipped as a "Private Framework" which lives outside the .app bundle. e.g. on macOS
% otool -L /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari
/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari:
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Safari.framework/Versions/A/Safari (compatibility version 528.0.0, current version 623.1.14)
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1356.0.0)
There's a bunch of other private frameworks (SafariCore.framework, SafariFoundation.framework, SafariPlatformSupport.framework, SafariShared.framework, SafariSharedUI.framework, SafariSwift.framework) as well. I haven't checked but I assume it's similar on iOS.
Barely supported by Apple these days - in addition to needing to disable SIP which is a pain, it was broken causing system freezes for several major macOS releases.
QuickTime for Windows existed long before then, and Apple ported a bunch of the old Classic Mac Toolbox to Windows as part of that.
IIRC it was actually this Windows port of Toolbox that in some ways laid the foundation for Carbon - i.e. a port of the Toolbox API to what became Mac OS X.
I wouldn’t hold not being on the Mac App Store against it. The MAS is sort of a failed ecosystem with very low usage/engagement, and all the downsides of the iOS store like potentially lengthy review times (can be a lot longer than the iOS store since it seems to play second fiddle) and arbitrary capricious rejections when you’re just trying to ship innocuous bug fixes to users.
The only reason Chinese companies can even get away with these big projects is because of state backing and state objectives. By itself, the market doesn't support a new general-purpose OS at this point.
Technically you are correct but the commenter you’re responding to means that with the amount of Western Governments spend on MS products and services, the are a d facto (if not de jure) state backed enterprise.
US government spending is (for now) easy to track, and you can get totals for spending by corporate entity.
In total across the entire US federal government, $518.8 million was paid to Microsoft for products and services in 2024. That is approximately 0.21% of their total annual revenue.
I assert that the threshold for "state sponsored" is well in excess of 0.21% of annual revenue.
How much money have states and local governments spent on Microsoft products and services? How much money has Microsoft collected from companies that are providing products and services to US governmental agencies?
Government spending is not easy to track. This doesn't even begin to touch on non-monetary benefits Microsoft receives with government influence.
I'm mostly adding context to the statistic that Microsoft makes 0.21% of its revenue from the federal government, and arguing against the sub-claim that government spending is easy to track.
MS has deep ties into the state department and intelligence apparatus that few other companies do. Just as deep as the defense contractors who have a near monopoly-monopsony relationship with the federal government. You can argue about how exclusive they are in particular qualities but the scale and depth they operate at makes their relationship approximate the relationship Huawei does with the Chinese government. They're just what state-backed enterprises look like under liberal-ish capitalism.
Besides, the statement's completely nonsensical - there were multiple OSes developed by for-profit corporations in the West (Microsoft, Apple, Nintendo, QNX, Be, etc.).
It's kind of an extraordinary statement that an OS couldn't be developed by a for-profit organization, especially if the hardware's somewhat fixed and you don't need to support every piece of equipment under the sun.
Actually the “market” won’t prioritize anything that won’t give returns as soon as possible (except for the weird situation of VC money being poured in).
It is a lot less if you are aiming to support a small set of platforms, don't need general driver support for everything possible accessory and peripheral under the sun, and if your file system usage is limited.
If you are building for a single abstraction, code gets much simpler, instead of building a platform that multiple abstractions can then be built on top of.
If you are China, the vendors are you and money is treated differently than in the west. Balance sheet will accommodate a project like that easily, especially if it decouples them from the US. They’ve already got their own software ecosystem which most people don’t hear about or heard once or twice, and it’s running their tech scene.
Geopolitical reasons for making your own OS are actually reasonable and understandable. Not saying they are good, because I would much prefer a planet where we collaborate on these things… but they’re not dumb. They make sense in a similar way the space race made sense.
Ugh what a waste of her talent. I don't know this guy but his YouTube channel is so clickbaity. Every video title has some exaggerated screamy headline. I would never bother even looking at one.
I suspect the Youtube algorithm means you have to use clickbait thumbnails. Nevertheless the quality of his analysis is usually excellent (and so is Kyla Dempsey's).
And yet the quality of that channel is absolutely excellent, and the polar opposite of what the thumbnail clickbait suggests. I'd say it's on the same level of the Admiral Cloudberg blog actually.
And to be clear I completely agree with your reaction to the clickbait. If I didn't already know the channel I would probably avoid the videos too. And I've seen this happen with other channels. It seems to be an unfortunate effect of the current youtube "meta".
Yep. Watched a few videos, was overall impressed. Subscribed. A week later blocked the channel because the value of the videos was less than the annoyance of seeing the thumbnails and titles in my feed. No great loss.
Hm ok, I've never seen it. It has appeared for me before but the clickbaity titles and images put me off. Perhaps it works to game the youtube system but it certainly doesn't to get my interest.
But I don't have much patience for videos anyway. I prefer long reads.
Ah to be honest I really hate watching videos anyway. I prefer the long reads she does. I just don't have the patience for video.
I sometimes use youtube for things where you really need video, like for a review where you have to see the product. But even for things like repair instructions I don't like videos. I much prefer the iFixit writeups.
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