Your comments are great and I trust it more precisely because you didn't use AI ,and trust me, we can tell when one uses AI, as the sentence and grammar structures are way different.
> And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally. Only SAP is or has been featured somewhere below the bottom.
Much as people seem to dislike when I say this, but, Europe simply cannot compete anymore in technology and tries to legislate away its problems, which, while sometimes something good does come out of it like the DMA, it does not help long term when there are no good home grown big tech (or indeed, any sector in the top 100) companies of their own.
"Europe" is about 750,000,000 people in about 50 countries. There are huge differences in both culture and economics between one country and another and often even among different parts of the same country. It's probably not a great idea to generalise to "Europe simply cannot compete anymore in technology and tries to legislate away its problems".
One of the main reasons Europe doesn't have a lot of big tech companies is that a lot of its most innovative and successful companies get bought out by the giants in the US before they reach that scale themselves. I expect this is going to happen less in the future because of the recent shifts in opinions though.
Or maybe they leave voluntarily, because the EU is simply not a place to do business? Because the EU has been regulatory-captured by aging tech entities such as Siemens, IBM and SAP?
Mistral, Zendesk, Basecamp, etc. left Europe for the US early on. If we take into account European founders who started their companies in the US right away, the list is even longer.
The EU and Europe are different. 27/50ish (depending on who you ask) countries in Europe are EU member states and they collectively have about 3/5 of the European population.
My own country - the UK - is (in)famously not a part of the EU and I don't think anyone would seriously claim that we have no technological innovation or successful tech businesses here in Cambridge. The city is practically overflowing with tech startups either spun out directly from university research or keen to employ people from the local tech community.
But what tends to happen is that when one of those companies reaches a certain stage the founders will cash out. Not everyone needs to be the next Bezos or Musk. Not everyone needs to see their company of 20 or 50 or 100 people grow to 5000 with international divisions set up before an eventual IPO. Not everyone wants to go through multiple rounds of VC funding and then have to run their company under the influence of the VC's people on the board. There are a lot of founders who would be very happy to take an eight figure payday after 10 or 20 years of working on the business and then have no need to work any longer if they don't want to and the freedom to do almost anything they want for the rest of their lives. I've personally known a few of them. Some did effectively retire. Others later started something new. But one thing I don't recall a single one of them ever expressing is regret over the timing of their exit.
If anything I'd say what is missing here is a culture where people feel the need to carry on past that stage in their startup's growth. And so instead of that successful business continuing - perhaps after some other form of exit for the founders - as a local company that might eventually become big enough to buy up other successful startups we instead see them get taken over by companies ultimately run from the USA because they're the ones with enough resources for an acquisition at that scale. Of course there have been a few that did become much bigger before an eventual exit - ARM is probably the most obvious one locally and for all the tragedies in the Autonomy story it was another - but they are the exception and not the rule here.
To come back to the car business we were originally discussing today - I doubt very much that we will build the next Tesla or BYD or even Polestar here in Cambridge - but I could easily imagine a startup here developing the next generation of car control system and then selling the IP to one of those companies as the exit strategy.
When European Union tries to regulate the influence of US companies in Europe and establish some European digital sovereignty, US government comes to help and applies pressure on European Union.
" “To start a direct confrontation with USA right now is probably not the smartest way to react,” said Christel Schaldemose, the Danish social-democrat lawmaker who led the drafting of the Digital Services Act."
What car do you have? Usually lower end cars have resistive touchscreens which yours sounds like an example of, but higher end ones have capacitive touchscreens and those don't generally work with gloves, but of course gloves that work with capacitive touchscreens exist and have for many years now.
Those kind of gloves are too thin to be of any use when it's -10°F out (early mornings are frequently at least this cold in my area). In the winter I'm normally wearing thick leather gloves treated with Sno Seal (a waxy, oily substance derived from beeswax) with wool liner gloves. Even if I could prevent them leaving a residue on any screen they touch, and even if they had some substance in them (that wouldn't wear off) that made them work with a capacitive screen, the reduced finger dexterity from all that material would make actually using that screen very difficult. Practically, what I actually have to do to use a touchscreen is take the gloves off.
Or have a static type system and something like BEAM. I'm not sure why this is a one or other approach, both are useful and unfortunately it doesn't seem like any languages include both. Gleam exists but doesn't really integrate with BEAM, it seems to have its own way of doing things that are more akin to Haskell, given its origins.
I'd love to have some of these cars in my local market, but at 3:15 this guy explicitly makes the comparison and says they're not up to Mercedes-Benz level.
If you watch the entire video you see that this remark is just a minor nitpick on one of the dozens of cars in that video. They could very easily replace that piece of plastic wood by real wood to fix it.
The fact that it'd be easy to replace strengthens the negative signal. If they're cutting corners in a highly visible portion of the car which would have required no additional engineering to do right, they're probably cutting more corners in ways that are harder or impossible to see. No review video will reveal, for example, whether they used a poor quality adhesive or the button labels show visible wear within months.
If you review 10 cars and 1 turns out to make a questionable choice for some minor aspect, then suddenly the car is bad, and not only that, all of them are bad? Sorry but if the German car industry thinks like this it is just grasping at straws.
That's pretty weird and indicates your phone or its touchscreen might be defective, you should get it looked at, because other than with old resistive touchscreen phones I've never had capacitive touchscreen phones need multiple presses.
I have Raynaud's which causes loss of circulation in my fingertips even when the weather isn't that cold (so even in a car with the heat on). Then this happens, touch screens do not register correctly, and I end up having to use a knuckle or do what my sister does and use the tip of the nose
Not just young people; young people who have lived in a high tech bubble their entire lives. Most designers are completely out of touch with their users these days.
I worked on a (desktop) telephone for the hard of hearing. It had a touch screen. Our customer base tended toward older people. We had problems with them being able to register a touch on the screen. We called it "cadaver fingers" (not in front of the customer). Yeah, it's a real problem.
IME, Apple is (as usual) the worst. A Samsung I could even use with work gloves on. A Pixel not quite as well, but it still works great with gloves off as did LG and Sony and whatever else I've used over the years.
I have a cold, but all in all I'm doing very well. Thanks for asking!
My portable electronics devices are Apple. But there are other touchscreen products I have, like the thermostat and the one in the car. Sometimes they work, sometimes not.
Of course, buttons wear out. The membrane cracks or the conductive material rubs off. It happens with my computer keyboard. Fortunately, the keyboards are cheap and I replace them regularly. For my car with the touch screen, the service manager at the dealership told me that if the touch screen went out, the car would be totaled (!).
> I often have to make repeated presses on my iphone until it registers.
This makes me really curious.
And you seem to have a problem with all your Apple devices. That’s why I wondered whether you’re experiencing that only with Apple or whether it happens with Android devices as well. Perhaps you could borrow a friend’s, or try using a demo phone at a store etc.
Also have other people use your problematic devices and see if they experience a problem.
I’d love to dig into this further with you (because, curiosity), but alas we live in different universes.
Thank you for the kind words. I haven't had a cold in several years, and this one seems to be a bit persistent. It's annoying, but not a particular problem.
I do have a samsung tablet, and have not had issues with the touch screen.
The swipe up thing on my iphone is particularly irritating in its unreliability.
Touchscreens need to be used in a specific way. Most people does it already instinctively, but it is very easy to do it wrong. E.g. if you try tap on a button, but you move your finger 2mm on the screen, that tap becomes a swipe, and nothing happens.
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