The interstate system only succeeded because the federal government took the very rare step of steamrolling all the states and individual landowners. It was done in service of putting people to work and stimulating the economy. But it was not a well-liked project.
Today, it is well-regarded, but when it was being done? No way.
Apple doesn't make regional variants of the phone, so all models have the technology built-in, even if it's disabled by default. Android phones outside of Japan lack Suica support.
The question to ask is "who owns the rail lines?". That matters for having a good rail system. It's basically the same problem for why the US doesn't have fiber internet available everywhere, too.
Good parallel. An article recently explained how Switzerland has the fastest fibre optical network: all companies share the same cabling. Dig once. No need to hook the property or do anything when switching provider.
For new rail at least, whoever wants to build them gets to own them, right?
I think what it comes down to is that if automobile companies had to build and maintain the roads, we certainly wouldn't have so many cars. But railway companies need to build the train lines, while competing with taxpayer funded automobile infrastructure. It's not impossible (see Japan) but also not easy.
It's rarely that simple. The question has to be asked "who owns the land?" because usually the rail lines get to belong to who owns the land, even if someone else builds them.
The interstate automobile road system got built through judicious use of eminent domain. That avoided all of these issues. Amtrak doesn't have the ability to do that.
China also has nationalized rail systems. The major reason for the failure in the US is that the rail lines are not publicly owned. The reason the rail systems never got upgraded and Amtrak couldn't deploy high speed rail everywhere (despite it being a national priority in the 70s, 80s, and 90s) is that outside of the northeast corridor, Amtrak doesn't own the lines and couldn't get the owners to allow Amtrak to upgrade them for passenger high speed rail.
> China also has nationalized rail systems. The major reason for the failure in the US is that the rail lines are not publicly owned.
The article we're discussing explains that Japan has the best passenger rail system in the world, and which happens to be privatized, along with privately owned track. So which one is it? Go figure.
While I agree with you, their system did not start privatised, and the Shinkansens predate privatisation by some time. I don't have the evidence to justify this, but I suspect that you need national buy-in - both financially and politically - to start a HSR build-out, which could then potentially be privatised at a later stage.
I believe the Japanese private rail companies also own the lines where their traffic is. This would explain a lot. There are other countries (including my native one) where the trains are run by one company and the lines are owned by another. This does.not.work. For what seems like obvious reasons. There's no economic gain for the owner of the infrastructure to spend money, quite the opposite in fact.
The interesting thing is how the EU railway policy just keeps plowing ahead trying to impose the "vertical separation" approach in the EU, despite the disastrous results from the UK experience (and some EU countries to a somewhat lesser extent, so far the UK seems to be the only example of going all-in on that approach).
Most EU countries have adopted the approach of putting the infrastructure company and the public train company under the same holding company, which is sort-of the minimum that EU regulations demand. In practice, in many countries the previous national rail company (under whatever conglomerate structure it may be operating under today) is fiercely protective of its own turf and tries to prevent new entrants, and digging their heels in implementing EU railway competition regulations. So complying with the letter of the law, but does everything in its powers to not comply with the spirit.
Then again, given the UK experience of going all-in on the "vertical separation" and privatization path, perhaps one shouldn't blame them.
Calling Japan Rail privatized is a "ehhh, kinda, in some places, if you squint" kinda thing.
Technically, yes, the JR's are private companies.
But track construction is generally done by a government construction company financed with Japanese sovereign debt. The completed tracks are then long-term leased to the JR's at favorable rates.
Is it really a private company if the key capital outlay is done by the government and given to you with a sweetheart deal? ehhhhhh.... you can call the operator company private, but you're being dishonest if you call the system privatized.
> Edit: Some comments mention Qt which could also work although how large is the runtime? Can it be compiled statically?
You need a commercial license for that, but yes you could. But since applications are typically distributed with install bundles that put into application-local program files directories, it's not super-important as long as you only cherry-pick the Qt libraries you need.
This is wrong. There's a misconception that you can't statically link your app when using the open-source LGPL version of Qt. From my reading of the LGPL license this doesn't appear to be the case[1]. The LGPL allows you to statically link your app as long as you provide the object files and allow users to relink your app with a different version of Qt.
I've observed many people spreading this misinformation about only being able to dynamically link with the LGPL version of Qt. Please stop this.
Yes, that is true, but in practice nobody has ever done that. And the material complexity of offering that mode is higher than just dynamically linking the library.
Also, modern compilers make this method much harder to use. It is much harder to stably relink object files like that than to just use the normal dynamic link method.
It's pretty much rpm-ostree. Nobody bothered to make those workflows performant, so if you need to apply updates separately, it's going to suck. The OSTree download can be fast if you have a fast connection to the Fedora server, but it's not mirrored and there's no mirror network support (so no geographically close downloads). To be fair, bootc has this problem too because container tooling in general can't support mirror networks currently.
I think it's also worth noting that the Dockerfile format is still driven by Docker, and there have been zero extensions to the format by Podman folks, so Containerfile==Dockerfile.
SUSE used Teams for years (particularly under Melissa Di Donato, who made everyone use it). I used to participate in some of the community project meetings that wound up being on Teams because it was the approved solution they could use. It was the reason why the openSUSE Project deployed a Jitsi instance.
They do not use Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Teams anymore. They use Google Workspace just like everyone else now (the mail headers tell you that). I don't know anything about their workflows, though.
Stallman wouldn't agree, but in a FOSS spectrum, I think MSFT sits in the middle between FOSS and SaaS, at least they release binaries. With Google it's all SaaS.
I hold no horse in the race, but it seems that Google Workspace is a step in the opposite direction, you don't even have access to binary executables, and you can't self host much stuff, but hey at least you can export your data and make backups! (You can right?)
Microsoft has effectively ended support for the self-hosted versions of the groupware stack. So between Microsoft and Google (since both are SaaS), I would pick Google. Especially as I've had to administer both solutions before, and I would never voluntarily choose Microsoft 365 ever again.
And yes, you can regularly export your data out of Google Workspace and there are tools that can process that data and use it easily enough.
Today, it is well-regarded, but when it was being done? No way.
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