It was a terrible car in some (many) respects, but it definitely is not "the worst car ever built". The Trabi has a lot of things going on for it.
1. It is very light. The motor is tiny, the whole thing is like 600 kilos (not absolutely sure, but I know for a fact that 4 normal men can pick it up to move it to the side a bit).
2. Given its size, there is quite a bit of space inside
3. Since it is so small and light, it is very easy to drive. You literally don't need the clutch: there is a clutch pedal, but you don't need it -- you can switch gears as long as you are not pressing the gas pedal. (The gears, btw, are very light, and the "stick" is not a stick, it is on the wheel -- you can operate it with one finger without taking your hands off the wheel.)
4. With electronic ignition (it can be installed easily on top of the stock model) the motor behaves quite well.
5. It is cheap, not only because it is bad, but also because it is just cheap. Not many moving parts, nothing fancy in it, you get the point. I don't know how accessible spare parts are nowadays of course (this was the problem back in the day as well; finding spare parts was a bitch).
It isn't a "good" car, given what we expect from cars these days, but for a city car it is quite OK. Still not as dirty as a diesel ;-)
PS: there is an old Trabant joke that goes like this: a car collector from the US hears about it and wants to have one. He orders it and has it shipped over. On arrival, he looks at it in confusion, then writes back to the sender: "I wanted the car, not the toy model!"
In my far younger days I had the great good fortune to own a Morris Mini - the original doghouse, not the modern pastiche. That car did weigh 600 kg, and I happen to know for a fact that six men could easily pick it up and carry it a distance. I also know that it had a length of very close to 3 meters, and that the basement ramp where those six men put it was 3.10 meters wide.
As they said when they fetched me, "You may wish to grab something to drink".
Besides its similarly light weight, the 3-cylinder Geo Metro was short enough to fit sideways inside a typical American parking space. Thus college kids would often lift and turn it, between two other occupied spots.
Also you can do everything by yourself. No need for a mechanic. The motto goes "Hammer, Zange, Draht, kommste bis nach Leningrad". ('hammer, pliers, wire: it'll get you all the way to Leningrad').
And you have to consider, that this car basically never got an update (P 50 and P60 are pretty much the same car, just a different motor. The P 601 was built from 1964 til the end of Socialism. The 1.1 doesn't really count).
Given the other applications you chose to look at, I'm surprised you didn't also look at Audacity. It uses wxWidgets, which is a nice C++ cross-platform GUI framework. It wraps native controls on each platform it supports, and also has a "Generic" variant where it draws its own. It's not very heavy as these things go, and has a nice python binding called wxPython.
By personal experience, wxWindows is "OK", but it's not a panacea. There are a ton of little quirks that will burn you when doing cross-platform development simply because native controls do not behave in the same way. HiDpi is a major pain with wxWindows (but then again, the way HiDpi is managed is a pain irrespective of the toolkit).
But if you do some forms and basic UI controls, wxWindows does the job egregiously. Looks the way it should be on all platforms.
It's funny an article from 2016 mentions issues about text rendering, because certainly we've been regressing in this area.
I can spot QML and Electron apps by the broken text rendering alone. FF60+ with quantum has incorrect subpixel hinting and does not correctly hint at all sometimes.
Many of the mentioned apps int the article are "broken" in my eyes: I don't have perfect vision, and I do expect apps to follow the system text scaling (and they don't). For a "broken by design" example, see Darktable, which is awesome, and should do this by default, but the authors hard-coded a theme where literally every widget is styled for looks and not for function.
Nobody speaks about how the widgets should feel and interact, but that's exactly what feels off about "GTK" on windows or macos. QML, Electron and partly GTK3 brings that feeling to all platforms. My biggest letdown is QML, as many QT developers see it as the future so it has a larger adoption than it should have.
It breaks just about any rule in the book: poor behavior on any platform, noticeably slower, style not consistent with the platform, broken scrolling, broken text editing, broken text rendering...
> But if you do some forms and basic UI controls, wxWindows does the job egregiously. Looks the way it should be on all platforms.
Word choice? "Egregiously" means "Conspicuously bad or offensive." [0] The context suggests you intended to say "adequate for the purpose," for which "competently" is the correct term.[1]
I though he was being clever; "egregiously" means "in a manner consistent with being out of the herd". Bad or offensive for the goat-herd maybe, but perhaps not for the goat.
I also did. Given the Latin root (ēgregius, outstanding), I feel the pejorative connotation is out of place. The Italian term egregio definitely has a positive meaning, as it's also used to address people in letters.
I have filed numerous bug reports about Chrome's broken text rendering and hinting and had them closed as won't fix because they're too difficult to fix (note: not too difficult to reproduce, just too difficult to fix). I can't believe how low priority the correct displaying of the most important content in the window is to web browser developers.
Why does electron have broken text rendering? Surely the Chrome browser’s tendering does a good job? Or do you mean something like “it doesn’t match system defaults”?
Visual Studio Code on macOS right now has broken font rendering, since it uses Skia via Electron instead of macOS' native font rendering.
It's fixed in upstream Electron but until a fixed version is integrated into VSCode I have to live with (months of) broken font rendering.
It even makes me want to use Xcode somewhat. For all its flaws, its font rendering is just the system (working) one, and scrolling in Xcode is actually smooth 60fps instead of the laggy mess that is VSCode.
This. It's a bug to use a different text renderer than the system, because it will never look the same and with text this is very noticeable and irritating even to some people. You do _not_ want your core visual to be irritating.
Since many years I made a few application using wxWidgets, and the macOS part can have issues. While it's ok regarding the size of the app (in term of MB) you still drag and extensive library.
Only the BBC's deliberately emotive headline to this story suggests that 'penguin chicks have died'. The facts behind it are that BAS scientists have reported that one colony site has been abandoned and that another nearby has increased in size. The probability is that the abandoned site had become vulnerable to storm damage and the colony moved to a less risky location. No panic, no disaster.
From the article’s first paragraph, which was in bold:
“Thousands of emperor penguin chicks drowned when the sea-ice on which they were being raised was destroyed in severe weather.”
And for some context on what ‘thousands’ means relative to the global population of emperor penguins :
“But the Brunt population, which had sustained an average of 14,000 to 25,000 breeding pairs for several decades (5-9% of the global population), essentially disappeared overnight.”
“Research suggests the species might lose anywhere between 50% and 70% of its global population by the end of this century, if sea-ice is reduced to the extent that computer models envisage.”
So I take issue with the GP's assertion that is overly "emotive", the implication being that the BBC is biased about blowing things out of proportion that suits its agenda. The article seems quite factual to me.
But I do take issue with the claim that we "might lose between 50% and 70% of the global population" because of reduced sea ice as overly simplistic extrapolation [1].
As much as birds (like many animals) seem to return to the same place (typically where they themselves were born)--and, on a side note, I would love to know how they do this--they also seem capable of adapting. It seems relatively likely that a good number of them have moved to the nearby colony mentioned just based on numbers.
So even if sea ice does reduce dramatically by the end of the century, it doesn't automatically follow that penguin populations will similarly decline. Stability of ice (April-December) is important but declining sea ice just moves that further south (to a point). Proximity to food sources is also key.
I actually kind of wish we'd just stop with "computer modeling". Part of the reason we have so many climate change deniers (IMHO) is just how bad climate model predictions have been.
> Part of the reason we have so many climate change deniers (IMHO) is just how bad climate model predictions have been.
Sources? You seem to have read the number and automatically assumed it's a straight line extrapolation.
As far as I'm aware the climate models have been fine and - corrected, but not majorly disproven; it's the reporting on them that looks at the most extreme extrapolations to whip up hysteria (and so it gets ignored and so the extreme cases become more likely).
On page 7, they have a bunch of scenarios based on various GHG emissions. From what I can tell, we're above all of them on the GHG emissions front, and under all of them on the actual temperature changes. Yet this carbon brief site says it matches exactly what has happened, so don't know what they're going off of.
> But I do take issue with the claim that we "might lose between 50% and 70% of the global population" because of reduced sea ice as overly simplistic extrapolation [1].
I’m sorry, are you familiar with their computer models? How do you know they are overly simplistic?
Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
This is a useful rule, but sometimes the best response to a comment is to point out that that an assertion is refuted by the linked content. That's especially true when the comment being responded to is a commentary on the rhetoric and content of the linked article.
I find Wikipedia tremendously useful and have made modest acknowledgement of that financially. That said, I tried to get them to correct/augment something they had based on a thesis from the 1970's at a top US school. The matter could have been verified but instead it was rejected out of hand and so the content on Wikipedia is less than it might have been. I had a sense the matter was handled with great dispatch and finality.
That's not too surprising. Early MacOS didn't provide much more than MS-DOS under the hood (non-hierarchical file system, manual multitasking), and the graphics were all 1bpp.
I didn't realise it didn't have a proper file system. Games were more glorified as far as user interface was concerned, e.g. the 2000 planet system with 3D graphics of the BBC Micro's Elite, running on an 8 bit 6502 machine with 32K usable RAM.
You can see the Mac OS as an expensive 'game' with the objective to write a letter, running on dedicated hardware.
Good article. The land tax is probably the preferred tax of libertarians, and it does make sense in many cases. But in the case of cities with vastly higher municipal costs than its neighboring jurisdictions, the land tax would still be high enough to ward off new residents, which would just work to keep rents too low, etc. The city will have to see where its costs are, get them under control if possible, and grow its "brand." There are a lot of things that are attractive to a city as opposed to the suburbs, but the negatives would need to be dealt with, too.
A land tax with the same total revenue of a property tax benefits those with houses that are expensive w.r.t. the landvot sits on. This means some people would be worse of, and some better of.
In general, it drives high density and quality development. I might speculate that this will increase demand for housing, which would push up land value.
Check out the pop culture classic, RoboCop, which besides being a popcorn chewing action film, contains a rather cynical, but prescient, view on the future of corporations and privatization of public interests.
For those unfamiliar or don't recall, in the film, the mayor signs a deal with the mega-corporation Omni Consumer Products (OCP) will be allowed to turn the run-down sections of Detroit into a high-end utopia called Delta City. Much fun, crime and corruption ensues.
Sidewalk Labs wants to make a better world for us. Ha. "I'll buy that for a dollar."
I disagree with the sentiment around space exploration. Having government involved to support the science is very valuable, but private enterprise has driven exploration for a long time and hopefully could open frontiers more quickly.
I vastly agree with the sentiment on prisons and hospitals, however. Prisons in particular make me so angry I could explode. Feels like a fundamental violation of the moral imperative upon which our society exists.
1. It is very light. The motor is tiny, the whole thing is like 600 kilos (not absolutely sure, but I know for a fact that 4 normal men can pick it up to move it to the side a bit).
2. Given its size, there is quite a bit of space inside
3. Since it is so small and light, it is very easy to drive. You literally don't need the clutch: there is a clutch pedal, but you don't need it -- you can switch gears as long as you are not pressing the gas pedal. (The gears, btw, are very light, and the "stick" is not a stick, it is on the wheel -- you can operate it with one finger without taking your hands off the wheel.)
4. With electronic ignition (it can be installed easily on top of the stock model) the motor behaves quite well.
5. It is cheap, not only because it is bad, but also because it is just cheap. Not many moving parts, nothing fancy in it, you get the point. I don't know how accessible spare parts are nowadays of course (this was the problem back in the day as well; finding spare parts was a bitch).
It isn't a "good" car, given what we expect from cars these days, but for a city car it is quite OK. Still not as dirty as a diesel ;-)
PS: there is an old Trabant joke that goes like this: a car collector from the US hears about it and wants to have one. He orders it and has it shipped over. On arrival, he looks at it in confusion, then writes back to the sender: "I wanted the car, not the toy model!"