Switzerland is 1/6 the size of Michigan and has 90 percent as many people as Michigan (9M vs 10M). With a higher population density I'd expect better rollout of things like internet service. And that's just ONE average size US state - there are 50, some of which are larger with even fewer people. It's not really a fair comparison regardless of which business or political factors are in play.
City: just take a walk through manhattan and in a block or two look at the giant open-pit excavation with a 200-year-old morass of undocumented infrastructure under the street. This is before you even try to run fiber up to units in buildings which were built before electricity was standard. I am hardly saying it can't be done, simply that it is not as easy as density makes it seem.
State: the exact opposite problem -- just drive two hours north of NYC and (if you're not still in manhattan) you'll be in some fantastic areas of the state, but, the exact opposite problem exists.
Of note, I do think both of these problems are solvable and we should fundamentally solve them. Just anybody who thinks it's easy or cheap to do so is being myopic. If spent wisely, could be a very useful investment of our money, however.
Do you think the wilds two hours north of NYC are more or less difficult for laying fibre lines than between homes literally in the alps? 60% of switzerland is alps. Not exactly a cake walk for infrastructure development.
And why would they need open pit excavation for FTTH in NYC? Are there not existing trenches and under-street ducting for cables already in most of the city? Surely there are going to be some tricky areas but how to the other utilities like phones and electric work on their cabling?
I was wondering why there wasn't yet a comment dismissing any change or progress in the US citing its land size, forgetting that the US has hundreds of large, dense cities where this "argument" does no hold.
> forgetting that the US has hundreds of large, dense cities
Those large US cities really aren't anywhere near as dense though once you're comparing the actual MSA (US) or FUA (EU). The population densities of those actual whole areas are nowhere near the same.
For comparison relevant to this article, only 25% of the Swiss population live in single family detached houses. About 60% of US households live in single-family detached housing.
Zurich and Milwaukee both have ~1.5M people in their Functional Urban Area/Metropolitan Statistical Area. One has a density of ~750/km^2 and the other is ~418. Guess which is which. Or compare Lausanne to Modesto CA. Both have ~550k populations. One 637/km^2, one is 144/km^2.
Such big and dense cities we have here in the US!
Either way though, I do think its often less to do with population densities and more about political will of the local populace and regulatory capture.
I have family that lives in a pretty newly developed area in the middle of an already well-developed area with tons of homes having fiber-to-the-home. The local cable company managed to convince the builder to let only them install coax services to these homes. Now it will cost the fiber company a lot more if they want to eventually go into that neighborhood, so they haven't bothered.
You see the same thing with pole attachment rights in our cities. Incumbents shut down competition and prevent those who push for change.
How about a different take: This isn't really about two open source organizations fighting. It's a psyop from the powers that want to stop the digital sovereignty initiatives going on around the world by amplifying some friction that already existed. People won't want to use products with so much drama and uncertainty.
TDF needs to eject the members who pulled the strings hardest on this - they are plants.
Damn I didn't know I had that much of a tinfoil hat.
Most of his blogs are about how awful OOXML (Microsoft Office's open standard) formats are, and that everyone needs to switch to ODF (his preferred open standard).
What people don't want to use is products which don't work with everyone else's. LibreOffice works with Microsoft Office files really well, but for some reason Italo doesn't want you to know that. He wants the entire world to switch formats to LibreOffice's formats, but really that's just telling potential business users LibreOffice can't meet their needs... interacting with the existing monopoly of Microsoft Office users.
This is a self-sabotaging marketing approach. LibreOffice needs to be promoting itself as an excellent drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office which will easily interoperate with every other organization's office applications, regardless of format.
He's using this approach because the EU requires documents to be in an open format, and by him advocating that OOXML is only open by name, he can advance a legal argument that OpenDocument is the only acceptable format.
Office supports OpenDocument.l, it just doesn't use it by default.
I understand his approach but it's a dumb approach. OOXML is plenty open, proven by the fact LibreOffice works with it fine. The push to force Europe switch to ODF only serves to suggest LibreOffice isn't capable of replacing Microsoft Office (in a world where most other organizations use Office). This is a conversation I have at work, where people laugh when LibreOffice is mentioned and suggest it's incompatible and we can't consider it.
A far better marketing strategy would be to loudly announce, continually, that LibreOffice is the best software for handling Office files and ODF alike! And as people switch to LibreOffice and it defaults to ODF, that naturally grows.
Meanwhile, LibreOffice's current marketing strategy may succeed in getting governments to offer ODF files and simultaneously sabotage anyone from ever switching to LibreOffice because LibreOffice's own marketing claims it won't work well with Word and Excel files.
> The push to force Europe switch to ODF only serves to suggest
No, it doesn't only do that. It also suggests the open xml MS Office format is a mess.*
> This is a conversation I have at work, where people laugh when LibreOffice is mentioned and suggest it's incompatible and we can't consider it.
This is evidence your coworkers are misinformed and you can't correct them. It is not proof that the only thing this blog post does is communicate LibreOffice can't handle Microsoft Office docs.
* this is a tale as old as time, I'm 37, remembering reading about this over and over again on /. when I was a young teen. It was part and parcel with Microsoft's antitrust era. The idea was the open format would help avoid antitrust claims, the complaint was the open format was so byzantine as to be effectively closed.
OOXML is a terrible format, significantly overcomplicated and implemented by MS Office in such a way as to make alternative implementations fully compatible with it impossible. It's "open" in the name only, burying it would be the only logical step if wide interoperability and using truly open formats is your real goal.
I don't think GP is talking about average users; they seem to be talking about decision-makers in organizations, e.g., a town board that wants to achieve digital independence, but is made unsure by apparent turmoil in the governance in open source orgs...
After looking at some videos of what this even is, I'd say it can do it but will likely fail on the boolean operation where the two spirals intersect. It might work fine but it's an operation likely to trigger a bug, and it would be sensitive to the exact placement/pitch of everything. Having said that, using the "force to triangle mesh" option solvespace will probably work fine. That should be sufficient for the home 3D printing crowd to make some fun stuff, but you won't be able to save a STEP file then. Just my guess as to how this might go.
>> Anyhow, salutes to the author of this web port, very slick
That credit goes to whitequark, who quit solvespace maintainership in 2020. The branch lingered and suffered some bit-rot. Then a couple people brought it up to date and fixed a few issues. It seemed like a good idea to merge it to prevent it falling behind even though its not quite up to par with desktop. With the newest release we also opted to put this right on the site (even merged a PR today as a result).
Anyway we owe whitequark most the credit for this one even though we havent heard from her in several years.
Even the desktop version sometimes. If I open on one monitor and move to another with different scale factor. It seems Windows lies about window resolution.
Dune3D is more like Solvespace with a few improvements and bug fixes vs being anywhere near FreeCAD in terms of capability. Improvements include using STEP files in assemblies and having some ability to make Fillets or Chamfers. Bugs fixes would be due to using OCCT for NURBS surfaces - solvespace frequently fails with NURBS boolean operations.
As for overall capability, FreeCAD does everything these others do but also supports lofting and other modeling options, BIM for architecture, I think it does pre- and post- processing for FEA, and maybe some other "big tool" things.
reply