OsmAnd actually works pretty well in my experience, at least in the UK. It's not always up to date or fully-detailed but it's far from useless and I appreciate that. It's my primary map program on my phone.
kbity
joined 2 years ago
Damn, that does look a lot better.
Meanwhile, it will insist on showing you awful recommendations from channels you have never watched no matter how long you ignore them or how many times you click "not interested".
Granted, I think there is an important distinction between the two. I'd call stuff like Discord and Snapchat "social media", in they're mediums with "Web 2.0" socialisation elements, but not Facebook/Twitter/Friends Reunited sorts of things like "social networks" tend to be.
I can definitely believe that. America's wartime production was incredibly well-standardised and every part was optimised to take as few man-hours as was feasible to produce. German production of everything from rifles to tanks to aircraft still involved a good amount of hand-fitting late into the war by contrast.
They really weren't, though.
Yeah, the Panzer III was better than a lot of the early-war British and French tanks, but that isn't really saying a whole lot and it didn't have any room left to grow after the long 50mm upgrade. It was arguably the best all-rounder tank in the world in 1939 with its torsion bar suspension and great ergonomics, and its chassis endured right to the end of the war in the form of derivatives like the StuG, but it wasn't exceptional in any way.
The Panzer IV became a pretty good medium tank around 1942-3, but by then the T-34 had overcome the worst of its early teething problems and received a less awful turret, and the M4 Sherman, which totally outmoded the Panzer IV was entering production. Plus it was still ultimately a 1930s design (if a rather forward-looking one) with crappy suspension.
The Tiger I was a pretty good heavy tank for 1942 but still, ultimately, just a heavy tank. It was never intended to be a mass-production vehicle making up the bulk of a fighting force. It was a specialised tool that did its job pretty well, not a battle-winning wunderwaffe.
The Panther was a 45-ton tank made out of parts designed for a 30-ton tank. Reasonably quick in a straight line, handled nicely when it worked, solid medium-calibre gun but it broke down frequently and was quite maintenance-intensive - this was less of a problem on the specialised Tiger I than on the Panther, a tank intended to replace the Panzer IV as the standard tank of the German army.
The Tiger II was frankly insanity. All the Tiger II really needed to be was a streamlined Tiger I with sloped armour, a longer gun and a redesigned turret. Instead, it became an immobile 70-ton brick that was never available where it was needed and was generally a total waste of resources. Let's not even talk about the Jagdtiger.
Sure, the Germans had some very effective guns - the L/70 and the 88s - but it's not like nobody else did. The British ended up with the very effective OQF 17-pounder, the Americans actually had the 76mm M1 and its derivatives pretty early on but didn't much use it because the 75mm was more than "good enough" until Panthers started appearing in large numbers, and the Soviets had their own very effective 85mm and 100mm guns.
The 128mm on the Jagdtiger was frankly absurd overkill considering the long 88 was already eminently capable of putting down the bulk of Allied armour at long ranges; the Jagdtiger really doesn't offer much advantage over a Jagdpanther in practical terms outside of hypothetically fighting Allied counters to the Jagdtiger like the Tortoise, IS-4 and the various American super-heavies (T28/T95, T29,30,34). At least the IS-2's 122mm cannon had the excuses of being an expedient use of surplus equipment and the larger shells being a better fit for infantry support since they could fit more HE filler.
Well, you're paying for all that performance, might as well get as much out of it as possible. God knows Snaps or Windows 11 can sometimes drag even the best hardware down to a crawl.
And yet they keep buying and killing their competition to try and funnel you into their godawful hellsite.
I can only imagine how thin the margins will be on laptops that are physically incapable of running their own operating system and basically don't qualify as general-purpose computers. The computer itself will be streamed to you over the internet and you'll just have an IPL that handles your keyboard and mouse, the display, the network connection and the encrypted memory buffer you use to send files to your cloud PC or receive them onto a Microsoft-authorised USB device for external transfer.
Will also be so much fun in 5-10 years when only enterprise customers are allowed the luxury of being sold a local version of Windows, so your whole laptop freezes up every time your connection is interrupted and trying to turn it on without an internet connection just takes you to a 404 page baked into the bootstrap ROM.
Thank God there's a less awful alternative frontend for Fandom. Absolute garbage website, unusable without an adblocker.
Because the last decade has shown the rather terrible consequences of private, proprietary and profit-driven networks like Twitter and Meta's various crap becoming de facto part of the common infrastructure of public life. A lot of public transit services publish service updates on Twitter. Most politicians have a Twitter presence. Many restaurants and small businesses don't even have websites anymore - just Facebook pages.
We want to stop exploitative for-profit entities from furthering their stranglehold on essential parts of everyday life. Nobody should be forced against their will to use crap like Facebook or Twitter, and that means advancing viable alternatives to those platforms that can fill the role they do in the internet era. If the "digital town square" idea is to live on, it should be as a commons like an actual town square, not a publicly-traded company or a billionaire's personal cult compound.
It's just Huffman, an Elon simp, deciding he wants IPO money and that the best way to make it is to blindly follow whatever Twitter does. Because, you know, Twitter's so hot and profitable right now.