Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Which Tech Company Do You Respect Most?
dryriver writes: On Slashdot, we often discuss the missteps and non consumer-friendly behavior of various tech companies. This company forced people into a subscription payment model. That tech company doesn't respect people's privacy. Yet another tech company failed to fix a dangerous exploit quickly, protect people's cloud data properly, or innovate and improve where innovation and improvement was badly needed.
Here's a question to the contrary: Of all the tech companies you know well and follow -- small, medium, or large -- which are the ones that you respect the most, and why? Which are the companies that still -- or newly -- create great tech in a landscape dotted with profiteers? Also, what is your personal criteria for judging whether a tech company is "good," "neutral," or "bad?"
Here's a question to the contrary: Of all the tech companies you know well and follow -- small, medium, or large -- which are the ones that you respect the most, and why? Which are the companies that still -- or newly -- create great tech in a landscape dotted with profiteers? Also, what is your personal criteria for judging whether a tech company is "good," "neutral," or "bad?"
trump university.
Whoever it was that decided to shutdown their secure email service instead of hand over info to the feds.
The only truly ethical tech company I can even really think of.
Apple, in 2010. Year of Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
It's been downhill ever since:
No Mac mini update since 2012, downgraded in 2014.
No real update for the MacBook Air since 2015.
No more iPod shuffle.
Unreliable keyboards with almost no travel in $1000+ computers.
Either no RAM slots, or insanely hard to access RAM slots except in their $1800+ iMacs, iMac Pro not included.
Ask Slashdot: What Tech Company Do You Respect Most?
*Which* Tech Company Do You Respect Most?
Respect? duh! None! why should we?
;)
Just my 2 cents
The only source for news.
... since they are all in bed with the entertainment industry and are hell bent on a war against computing and people owning and controlling their own software.
The coming war on General computing and software freedom
Qwest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Yeah, the Mr. Robot promotion was a huge mistake, and they've finally admitted that and pledged to do better.
But I think that mistake only garnered so much attention because Mozilla has been so transparent and aggressive in protecting privacy and advancing the state of browser technology. If somebody like Goog or MSFT pulled that crap, nobody would blink an eye.
Seems like real innovation.
None of them. The age of heroes in tech (as in many ither areas) died with the insertion of millennials. It's all an ungodly and ethically bankrupt mess at this point. Nothing left to do but watch it burn and try not to say, 'We told you so.'.
PS - $$$ are indicative of nothing but the fact that the right people were sufficiently hoodwinked, so spare us the profit-margins.
GNU
Do No Evil.
It's all been down hill since then.
They are the only ones that are going to get us off this rock stuck in a gravity well.
I used to respect Google but becoming a public company turned them evil just like every company that goes public. Now DuckDuckGo has come along and they are great because they respect your privacy and don't collect data on people. They are small with a mere 40-some employees which is enough to keep the site going and few enough for them to pay without exploiting users. If that wasn't enough, all their stuff is open source and on github.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I think Mozilla is doing wonderful things and a single mistake doesn't change that.
DuckDuckGo is the other one...
Enercon ...
Beyerdynamic
Wiha
Wera
Ok, the last two are just Toolmakers, but I still count them in.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
They're probably the most successful open source company, and their tech is pretty good too.
While perhaps more of a car manufacturer than tech company, I'd say that they still qualify at least partially as the latter.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Me Inc.
Table-ized A.I.
Canonical Ltd...
Tried hard, always worrried about next year, not next quarter, and got punished for it.
davecb@spamcop.net
I agree, the head of security/IT should have made sure everything was in line for the main boss. He/she inspected nothing and didn't check to see that she had sufficient security training, etc. The CEO is supposed to focus on the domain, NOT routine infrastructure.
I can understand how a low-level employee may slip through the inspection cracks, but not the main boss. If the head IT/security person is too scared to approach her, the problem is them. If somebody with more rank won't let them do their job, such as blocking access to the boss, then document it, and they become the real problem.
Table-ized A.I.
I despise Apple. I consider them fashion that uses tech, rather than tech
Intel is tech, and they have accomplished great things. Of course, they are also stuck with a really bad problem at the moment
Atmel and Microchip make useful, but un-glamorous, embedded processors. Their merger has caused us(embedded system programmers) a bit of pain, but on balance, they deserve respect
Fairchild, NXP, Panasonic, AVX, Kemet, Bourns, Vishay and others make the essential tiny bits.. resistors, capacitors, small logic that the rest of the tech world couldn't live without
At one time, Sony was amazing, then they shifted their focus from tech to fashion
LG and Samsung deserve a lot of respect
Possibly my favorite is Texas Instruments
I've never heard anything bad, only good.
I have been a long time paying customer of Fastmail and I am quite happy with them.
Yes, they take my money ($32/year if I renew for 5 years for a legacy plan), but in exchange I get services that I can rely on and prompt support when I need it.
Carbonite! Fought back & won against the patent trolls! https://www.thisamericanlife.o...
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
[1] Well, several in fact, but my experience is that heaping praise upon a good company often leads to them being swallowed by an evil behemoth.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
It was bought and absorbed into Ansys. But when it was around Ansoft was pretty good. It made electronics design analysis tools.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If you sold real estate like you sold tech, you would go to prison. If you sold used cars like you sold tech, you would go to prison.
If a daughter came to me wanting to pursue a career in tech, I would try to talk her into a rewarding and ethical career in prostitution. (Hey... maybe that explains why fewer woman are in tech...)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Mine
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Companies have no soul. Their respectable behavior can change overnight if key people change. Hence they deserve no respect. People running companies do,on the other hand.
A long long time ago, in a far, far away galaxy, I had a lot of respect for HP, and also Tektronix (for scopes only, not the rest).
This time is over, although I have the feeling that Rohde and Schwarz is slightly less evil than the other lab equipment companies (their spectrum analyzers are great).
What tech companies respect you most?
If you pick any one, I guarantee they're a milkshake duck.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
A person mght be deserving of respect, if they earn it. Companies aren't people.
Log in or piss off.
IBM's forgotten history and impact is what rules them out for me.
HE.net offers nice services to their biz clients, as well as some really nice freebies for enthuasaists. (BGP Toolkit, TunnelBroker, and DNS to name a few)
I took a look around the room before answering. Thermaltake ranks high for having made good on a hassle-free warranty. Sanwa ranks high for offering ergonomic input peripherals at non-ergonomic prices. Sharp and Fujitsu both rank high for having produced computers that refuse to die.
Looking beyond these walls, I respect companies that offer new products unencumbered by preconceived notions about what something "should" be. That sounds like trite marketing bullshit, but so damn few of them actually do it--and none of the big companies are capable of doing it. A small operation called Keebio recently unleashed a line of keyboards with non-standard layouts, for example. Big companies are dinosaurs. They die at the hands of rodents too small to even bother eating.
Before the turned to the dark side.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
KolabNow is doing a good job. It's a Switzerland-based email provider that charges about $3/month for basic service, respects my privacy, and contributes to open source software. They've also always been quite transparent, they e.g. immediately notified me when they discovered they were vulnerable to HeartBleed and had patched their system, and the only time I've had trouble accessing them, they sent me an email explaining that they were being DDOS-attacked.
Not sure if it counts as a "tech firm", but I've also always respected the EFF for their tech-related work.
Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://www.eff.org/
Enough said.
NearlyFreeSpeech web hosting: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.n...
They defend net nuetrality. Their pricing structure is clearly laid out with no hidden fees, and emphasis on efficiency, and they do well when you do well. They are run by highly competent individuals.
DuckDuckGo web search: https://duckduckgo.com/html/
Great search that doesn't track you. Fuck yes.
PaleMoon web browser: https://www.palemoon.org/
A modern, FOSS, secure, fast, lean, extensible, and highly configurable browser that took over where FireFox left off. It's run by individuals who have ethics, and stick to them.
Proton Mail web mail: https://protonmail.com/
FOSS end-to-end encrypted e-mail. The only issue I see here is that it is free, so you're likely not the customer... There is another end-to-end encrypted web-mail solution that is $5/mo. or so but I've forgotten the name. Anyone?
I love Pepsi's caffeine delivery technology.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Given the stunts most of the big tech companies have pulled, "respect" is not the word I'd use. Amazon is becoming Cyberdyne, Microsoft is doubling down on being Big Brother, Facebook sells ad space to the Russians and then has the nerve to act like they didn't know. Can we just nuke them ALL from orbit?
The two companies I respect the most are NuScale whose new reactor has been certified by the NRC as being passively safe(ie meltdown proof). These reactors can be factory built and shipped on truck. The second is Bill Gates' company TerraPower who are building their first reactor in China.
These companies along with 50+ others will save the world and reduce energy poverty
RedHat is for sure on the list, alongside Canonical. They have done more for Linux and FOSS adoption by corporatizing than countless other projects combined. The profit motive is powerful and it gets products into the hands of willing consumers. RedHat and Canonical are the great heroes of FOSS.
Open Whisper Systems deserves great praise, though it is financed by some large donors and thus isn't really a company.
Ixquick, DuckDuckGo and ProtonMail all also deserve great thanks.
McMaster-Carr isn't exactly at the top of the list when people are asked to name 'technology' companies, but they sell pretty much any parts or tools you could want for a build project, they deliver overnight, and their website should be required reading for any e-commerce developer -- frankly, Amazon included: http://mcmaster.com/
Cloudflare gets a lot of props for protecting websites against DDoS attacks and for affirmatively disclaiming from themselves the power of censorship. (They did drop the Daily Stormer over their content, but I'll give them one mulligan.)
I've used Firefox nearly since version 1, and I still concur that what they did to Eich was ridiculous. They have no problem taking money from George Soros and being very public about politics, so to say they had no control over Eich is false.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
HAHAHAHAHAA!
HAHAHAH!
Oh boy :(
My, how things have changed. Honestly I think I like Microsoft more than Google now.
They can do whatever they want and get away with it. They are the NFL of tech.
ôó
oh sorry, read the question in reverse
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Seems like they're doing pretty well these days.
Are you trying to say "hardware", that only hardware is technology? Because Google / Alphabet creates a lot of new technology - new speech to text technology, self-driving car tech, etc mostly created in software.
> My standard is how they get their revenues. Making tech - like chips (Intel) makes them a tech company. Using tech to say get revenues from say advertising (Google, Yahoo! & facebook) makes them not tech.
Advertising is a *payment method*. You can pay for YouTube by watching ads or by Visa. What generates the revenue is the cool stuff Google provides such as YouTube videos and Google maps. Slashdot and Google maps aren't in the same business, just because they both offer the same payment method. Ads are just the method of payment for the maps and videos, or articles and discussion.
Sun. They developed some truly pivotal tech and I haven't heard of them fucking anything up in years. AMD also worth a mention for fighting the good fight. Buffer.io for their transparency. Google for making available oodles of value for free.
Really influential in improving the world. It is well possible that they will be eclipsed by traditional car brands that are more comfortable with big production runs, but Tesla surely was a big push towards EVs in general use. Also their roof solar panels etc. I have respect.
I will add that Apple might return to my high respect level if they can one day solve the challenges (both technical and regulatory) for comprehensive sensors (like blood sugar etc) in an off the shelf watch or similat product, thst could improve the life quality of many people, not only diabetics. They hired a number of specialists in this area but it is a formidable challenge.
Fuck all of you haters jerking off over Meltdown and how that shows how evil Intel is...Without Intel, our entire industry would not exist as it is. Yes, Microsoft also played their huge part, but let us never forget the tech revolution that they spawned, leading us from 4.77MHz processors to 4.7GHz processors in a super-short timeframe at a reduced price-performance ratio that is unmatched in history. Credit where it's due, mofos!!
Good tech, good software, amazing future. Also good: Apple, Amazon, Illumina, TMobile.
If anything, respect should be an attitude towards people who make certan decisions in corporations, not for the corporations themselves.
The American personification of the corporation bewilders me.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
Red Hat continues to buy good software companies and turn their products into Free Software. Most recent good example: Ansible Tower.
Red Hat does Free Software right, and does right by Free Software.
I'm not sure Microsoft gets respect for that. They acted entirely in their own self interest. they wanted to sell an OS and make the hardware a commodity so that they could be the suppliers of the only non-interchangeable component. They aggressively locked out competitors in this space (e.g. intentionally breaking MS Windows on DR-DOS). It just happened that there was a beneficial side effect to their anti-competitive behaviour.
Modern Microsoft has a few more things that might deserve respect. They've been much better at engaging with open source projects, for example contributing to LLVM and Clang, open sourcing their .NET runtime (MIT license + patent grant), contributing Linux and FreeBSD patches for Hyper-V, and so on.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's how I like companies - extremely good quality at a fair price, no bullshit spending half of their revenue on marketing, locally manufactured, and they ship internationally.
Unfortunately, these companies are getting rarer and rarer. Quality has a hard time surviving among the sharks.
Lavabit was a mixed bag, they had their pros and cons.
Pros:
* Provided free email service
* Simple
* Most of the features you expect from an email service
* Spam and virus filters were customizable and much easier than most other services.
* They shut down their servers instead of giving up Edward Snowden.
Cons:
* Buggy, bugs were never fixed, bug reports were never acknowledged
* Poor communication skills from the developers, both free and paid accounts
* Actively lied when they shut the service down. For about 2 days they insisted that it was just an upgrade, would be back up soon, and that our emails were not being lost. If they couldn't tell the truth for legal reasons they should have said nothing instead, there was no excuse for the lies.
* For about 2 days after the shutdown they continued to accept emails sent to users, instead of just rejecting them so the senders would know that the emails had not been delivered.
Lavabit is back up but I don't use them anymore because of their behavior the first time. They are just not trustworthy.
the company I respect the less is ORACLE. Incontestably the worst company.
Sure scammers and other bad actors have exposed many flaws in their original system, but CL has adapted and it, more than any other company I can name, has done more to usefully connect people, without being intrusive or getting in the way. Even today it still functions without javascript or unnecessary personal data collection.
Besides most open source foundations, but i don't think that is what the question is about.
I respect Red Hat the most. Other then that, I need to think really really hard (maybe Valve).
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I worked with a Ubiquiti mPCIe board for a product we were building.
The hardware radio kill line, not supported, no software flight mode system, no way to stop the thing blasting out RF other than to switch off the power rails.
We had bought hundreds of the things, I tried contacting our distributor, technical support, public forums, public email addresses. The silence was deafening.
Needless to say, Ubiquiti is no longer on my Christmas card list.
Agreed, most people are idiots and/or under informed.
Uber or Lyft I think you could get support for being non tech companies and personally I could probably be convinced on Facebook as a company which only utilizes technology and the Internet for business. Suggesting that Google and similar companies are not tech companies however is a bit of an overreach. Intel is indeed a tech company since they physically make it, but this is only 1 of the definitions of the word technology. (Let's not forget that Google isn't just a search engine or research company, they actually invent real things too) It would be like saying most mobile phone companies are not tech companies because Foxconn actually builds them. Having and applying the knowledge is just as much tech as the physical chips themselves; or would you prefer hardware without software?
Adafruit and Sparkfun are two companies that design and sell electronics components for makers, hardware hackers, and developers. Want to tinker with an arduino and some servos? Need a breakout board for some tiny surface-mount component? Want to augment your clothes with LEDs and sensors? Heard about this Raspberry Pi thing, but don't know the first thing about Linux? These the places to go not only for the easy-to-connect hardware, but also a large amount of information to help you figure it out.
Both companies are committed to open hardware - publishing their designs for all to see and understand. They often publish software libraries for this or that component, too. Most every kit they publish has an introductory video or tutorial to go along with it. Both companies are based in the U.S. ( lot of Adafruit's boards are fabricated and populated at their NYC headquarters.)
They are running a profitable business while keeping to the spirit of the GPL. If you don't want to pay them for support you are free to use CentOS and get the benefit of their contributions to the Open Source community.
TemplsteMoster https://www.templatemonster.co... is tech company I respect and trust, when it comes to web design. I've already use tons of their templates for my projects.
Digg FTW ;-)
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Yeah, I know this will be moderated trollbait, but IMO systemd is close to unforgiveable.
Nonaggression works!
IBM for IBM PC
Thanks for standing up against that giant of influence, SpaceX, in favour of those poor powerless upstarts, Boeing and Lockheed.
How come things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?
Google used to be, but they have shown that it is easy to turn evil and stupid.
So, at this time, it is musk who is making changes to the world and forcing companies to respond.
Tesla is forcing Western car makers to switch to EVs. Even now, sales in the west for ICE vehicles have dropped solely due to Tesla.
Then u have SpaceX which is currently the lowest cost launcher and about to drop it further with FH. Then unlike other companies and nations, SX continues to invest into a massive reusable rocket that will put 3-5x the FH into LEO.
His next 2 ventures is to put up a massive constellation of SATs, as well as build a high speed train system. The SATs will actually get a manufacturing line that is supposed to allow for other satellites to be built. Whereas SATs normally cost $100-500M, his line will produce a sat for under $10M. This will change space economics all around.
Add in the hyperloop and boring, and we see a small number of tech companies that are forcing massive changes in space, and land transportation.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
IBM is pretty much dead. For the last decade they have been being killed by firing top ppl and lazy ppl alike, while hiring loads of cheap inept.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Exactly. Ibm in the 50-70 was a power House. But from 80-90, they were a monopoly that got in the way, and now, they are nothing as told by no real innovations or profits.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The GOP has controlled Congress for over a decade and they HATE anything musk does. they have tried to kill NASA funding to them, while keeping it flowing to Russia.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Considering that much of OSS was originally developed on Minix, I would argue against that. Heck, dos got it's start by emulating cp/m, and then xenix commands were added to move to xenix/Unix.
As such, Unix, and even cp/m deserve more credit that dos/windows.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Newegg doesn't fuck with patent trolls, they take them to court and win.
I know all about their business model, that's why I love them.
The model appeared in 3 episodes of Baywatch and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Their products look interesting, not I didn't buy any yet. Please review.
Damn. I hate being the dick in Lavabit discussions because he meant well and basically did the right when when he was attacked, but Lavabit was horribly flawed and the fact that the attack could have worked is why.
Email is a problem where web browsers are simply the wrong tool for the job, and how it worked is that they sent code from the web page to browser to decrypt keys in the browsers. Send different code and you can make the browser leak the key. There are so many ways to MitM that, it ain't funny. Had the government, or anyone else, used more subterfuge instead of a NSL, a bunch of people could have easily gotten compromised.
Think about how many stories there have been since the Lavabit shutdown, where CAs were caught being sloppy and browser makers eventually had to stop including them in their list of fully-trusted introducers. That shit happened, happens, and will always happen. HTTPS is never something that normal users will be able to rely on. Any Lavabit user who was really protecting something truly sensitive, would have had to check the signer on every single fucking page they loaded (no, not just pages but especially the replies to the requests for the code to handle the PGP decryption) and make sure they knew who that signer was, instead of it ending up being someone operated by, or coerced by, the government.
And even then, you don't know what the Lavabit guy might have done if someone literally pointed a gun at his head. The US government exercised commendable restraint when you think of the full spectrum of thuggery that could have happened, and that real users might actually face.
If you want security, you have to Just Say Fuck No to webmail. You shouldn't be routinely downloading and re-downloading decryption code like that, especially where there are hundreds of entities, most of whom you don't know anything about, who can sign it and make that reassuring lock icon appear.
Lavabit shouldn't have even been doing that or offering that service. Stop trying to legitimize webmail. It's never going to be ok, and Lavabit did the wrong thing by trying.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I don't respect any companies. They are businesses not people, regardless of how US law wants to treat them. I respect a number of artists and programmers, many of whom I follow online or can chat with through apps like discord. One in particular, Minionsart, is an up and coming artist who has been using patreon to help fund their work by sharing tutorials on shaders and modeling techniques.
Tektronics once made the gold standard in 'scopes but that was a long time ago. I once respected HP, then went to work there. Now I'm now convinced they couldn't find their @ss with both hands, a map and a flashlight.
Organization? You must be joking..
These letters have been on my payroll checks for decades, my respect has been "earned".
While there is that too, I'm not thinking their history after the 50s-70s, I'm thinking their history before.
Why the hell is this modded at "0?"
It should be, "(Score:+Elebenty,Fuddyy).
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.