Ummm, no. Just because you can point to examples and say 'both sides are bad', that doesn't make them equally bad. Fox is biased and MSNBC is biased, but only one promotes disinformation along with their bias - and refuses to correct their mistakes (if they're even accidental at all). And yet, you will see it reported, oh, everywhere, that MSNBC is the 'liberal' Fox, and they're both the same. They're not.
If you think Google's business model is 'evil', you obviously don't want a Chromebook - if only because you don't want to support Google. But Chrome and Chromebooks are basically just a way to prevent Microsoft from re-monopolizing the web browser market. Chromebooks work by doing what the web does best, shake things up. They don't provide Google with any other benefits that they can't get by promoting the Chrome browser on Windows, OS/X or Linux.
The original browser wars started because Microsoft felt threatened by the web - and definitely didn't want to see the emergence of cross-platform software development. Their business model was based on tying all end-user software to Windows. Microsoft would like nothing more than to translate their (continues) desktop dominance into mobile dominance. Sure, Google wants to continue their search dominance - but Chromebooks don't really add much to that effort. They just attempt to make sure that Microsoft isn't able to claw back the web and lock them out.
Of course, the acceptable ads option is actually a good way of getting users to face the fact that they're using ad-supported content sites that wouldn't exist if everyone blocked the ads. There's such a thing as a middle ground. Freedom doesn't mean freedom to freeload.
Similar thing with YouTube videos. Somebody owns them (and it's not always Google). They were provided to you to view online. Downloading them was not offered. Just because you can, doesn't make it right (or your "right").
And I say this as a (conflicted) user of Adblock Plus (with acceptable ads enabled) and Video Download Helper (in Firefox).
Yeah, but that's kind of like the "look at all the different, incompatible versions of Windows" argument that gets made to defend Linux against charges of fragmentation. C certainly can have some magic happening under the covers, but it's an order of magnitude less than what goes on in C++. That said, I'm sure it's possible to know C++ well enough to have a good sense of what an arbitrary line of code generates under the covers. What's arguably harder is to pick up an arbitrary piece of C++ designed by another coder with a different sense of how to organize his abstractions and understand how those abstractions are organized and work within them.
With C, you can pretty much look at a set of functions and understand why they were built the way they were. Maybe that's because of the limitations of the language, but IMHO, that's a good thing.
And not just that. Even experienced coders need to understand the purpose of the particular abstractions that were built into a particular set of C++ code to avoid butting up against them - or throwing up their hands in frustration and working around them in standard C in the middle of all the C++ code because it was to hard to figure out how to implement what you wanted within the class structures that were handed to you along with the order to "go and make it do this".
C++ is great for well-documented libraries designed for a 'use but don't touch' mode. For all other uses, the less C++'y, the better - even if you're using the language to take advantage of those great libraries.
Maybe it's possible to make an existing win32 desktop app more 'touch-friendly', but Microsoft sure didn't go out of their way to help. And the press glommed on to some "desktop is legacy - metro is the future" line, as though everyone were going to automatically do rewrites. Maybe that's what Microsoft was hoping for, and maybe the press is just dumb. But that's certainly not what is happening. What's really happening is "desktop is legacy - web is the future', and any rewrites that are being done are targeting html5/javascript. Whether that's the best future or not, that's what's happening.
Perhaps if Microsoft had built a platform-independent API instead of just another me-too proprietary tablet API, they could've really started something.
Unfortunately, it's not easy to 'update the interface' of an existing Windows program to make it work on a touchscreen device as a Metro app. That's more or less a total rewrite - and that's where Microsoft went off the rails with Windows 8. They wanted a 'clean' touchscreen OS, so they essentially started from scratch with the application layer. But then they tried to sell it as 'the Windows you know and love'. But you need desktop mode for it to be that. Desktop mode stinks on tablets, tablet mode stinks on the Desktop, and they were too late to market to get their tablet API's established. So you're stuck with full Windows (tablet + desktop) on a 7" device where desktop will be more or less unusable, and tablet won't have any apps. But it's cheap.
1) I think Microsoft also required OEM's to not preload Netscape. Don't think Google does anything like that - though requiring the Google search box in launchers may come close... Plus, Android has not reached anything approaching monopoly status (yet).
2) You prove my point - nothing prevents you from loading alteratives.
3) This does not apply to the Gapps suite - all of which are now upgraded through the Play store.
Most of the bogus scientific breakthroughs are "amazing medical advances" and "promising cancer treatments" that have no business being in the popular media at all - given their untested status at the time they're released. This is largely a media problem (isn't everything these days), driven by an over-competitive media landscape in which consumers' attention is all that matters. But it's also a trap scientists themselves can fall into. There often are large financial involvements at stake, and the media are all too easily manipulated. None of which is to say that the scientific method and peer review don't win out in the end. Science pursues all kinds of dead ends - we're just not supposed to hear about them. And that's not any kind of cover-up; it's how the process works - and it does work.
No, that's the problem with a corrupted 'democratic' process. 51% votes for liars telling them what they want to hear on behalf of donors who want something unrelated. 49% votes for liars telling them what they want to hear on behalf of mostly the same donors. 99% have no choice and the other 1% get it all.
So what's your solution? Drop the pretense of democracy altogether or fix the corruption?
Where I work, we have a simple (some might say simplistic) platform implemented in C that's easy to code to, understand and, oh yeah, works well. At one point we had an academically minded guy who decided he was hurting his career by coding this way, and his manager let him run free with all kinds of theoretical abstractions and shitty use of C++ that he insisted would allow code reuse and the like. He's long gone, and his stuff works, but having had to support it on occasion, I cringe at all the gratuitous complexity he introduced. Nothing's easy, and of course, if you want to do something that doesn't fit nicely with the class structures he built, you're out of luck. And as far as code reuse goes, this stuff is used exactly once, so none of his structure accomplished the desired goals (except maybe to let him practice his formidable complexity-generating skills).
I guess my point is this. A lot of technology innovation is great when used appropriately. If you're building a cross-platform framework like, say, QT, you want to abstract away platform-specific internals, etc. And you have a lot of interrelated objects where inheritance and the like actually make things easier and work better. But for day to day application coding, other than using features of a framework like that (if you're building on top of one), these innovations tend not to be understood well enough to be used effectively for the task at hand. You end up hiding the stuff you need to get at for no good reason at all.
What you say is true, but the consequences of MSIE domination are quite different than Chrome's. MSIE's purpose was to defeat or delay the cross-platform nature of the web - until such time as MS figured out how to compete with it. Just as MS-Java's purpose was to defeat the cross-platform nature of Java, and C# was their attempt to render Java irrelevant - as if having 'the best' Windows-only language were the point in the first place. Chrome may want to absorb everything in it's path, but it's purpose in that is to keep the web cross-platform while improving its performance. A worthy goal, however conveniently it syncs up with Google's other priorities.
I don't know whether MS has actually dropped this 'Windows must dominate' business model, but I suspect not. Thankfully, Firefox and yes, now Chrome have won that battle - and IE is now much more 'just another browser' that it would've been had Firefox not done the heavy lifting. Microsoft's 'open' XML office formats have managed to fend off the threat of truly open formats much better. Say what you will, but the supposed superiority of MSOffice over the competition has nothing to do with it's native file formats. MSOffice's main superiority (thought there are others) is it's ability to use MSOffice's file formats, duh.
If anything is being preempted, it's the still present threat that developer resources will be diverted into application rewrites for Windows 8 Metro - locking users into Windows-only apps for another generation. Whatever qualms you may have about Google, Chrome is about the best supported large multi-platform app, and there's nothing about Chrome (the browser) itself that locks you into Google apps or services. It's primary purpose is to keep the open web open and available on all devices, living up to its full potential. That just happens to fit well with Google's business plan, but it also fits well with what most people use computers for these days.
I would imagine that this new "Android in Chrome" capability will end up most commonly used to play Candy Crush on Windows systems. And that's fine. The nicest thing about Chrome (the browser) is it's (largely realized) potential as a meta-platform that works on just about every device out there - except iOS. And if Apple would allow it, it'd be on iOS too. That was the initial promise of Netscape before Microsoft got scared and started with their dirty tricks. It was never the promise of IE, which was primarily built to prevent Netscape from realizing that potential.
Granted. But good enough to pay for - if all you want to do is stuff you can do on a Chromebook? If you need or want to run Windows apps, Windows is the best solution for you. If you don't, and don't want to keep paying for Windows, Office and their endless upgrades, a Chromebook is a great alternative. Cheap hardware that still performs well - and free applications. If they do what large numbers of people need them to do, why do you feel the need to insist they're wrong? And If they don't do what you need, well there are options for you too - including desktop Linux, which "works pretty good these days" too...
I agree that sharing a copy of a book in a library is fair use. But simultaneous sharing among multiple readers is not fair use. A library can stock multiple copies of a popular book and share them among thousands of users. But one reader per copy at a time. Otherwise your 'good trade off for society as a whole' becomes out and out appropriation. I agree that libraries would be great places if every book you wanted were always 'in the stacks', but you're not talking about a small loss of revenue any more.
You say this like it's a good thing. Sure, if you want to advance your career, you have no choice but to do a lot of job jumping (at least in the beginning). But it didn't used to be that way, and ultimately this dynamic is harmful to the products we work on. The fact that you're going to jump in 2 years just makes that worse. And, one of these days you're gonna hit 50 and find that next jump really hard to make. I'm 62 and have stuck around. Other than hating the way management views the company as it's toy for serial mergers and buyouts, I've had a pretty rewarding time of it. But I'm one of only two who survived the outsourcing push - and are doing all the work to cover the asses of the idiots that thought outsourcing would work. There's nobody in the pipeline to replace either of us, and the latest LBO guys think they're gonna go public in 2 years. Sheesh...
That's all true - until some manager fails to make his numbers and attempts to blame it on poor programmer productivity. The solution: outsource the whole damn thing to a 'major outsourcing firm' that can 'shift resources at will' to attain optimal productivity.
You end up out of a job, and the company ends up with poorly trained workers that have no depth of knowledge of the software they're supporting - and who are rotated out every 18 months so they're guaranteed never to have any depth. Plus nobody in the organization is acquiring the ability to replace the key people that weren't outsourced when they ultimately change jobs (or retire).
But that manager? He probably got a big bonus and found a new job before the shit hit.
Chromium under KDE on linux nags you to set up a kwallet for passwords - I assume Gnome has a similar facility. So I guess it takes the same approach as on Windows - i.e., use the password storage facility provided by the OS. Not a bad approach. Kwallet makes you provide a password to access it the first time (presumably each app that accesses your wallet will ask for this the first time you grant it access. That's not the same as giving your passwords to anything you run as the GP suggested (thought maybe it works that way on Windows...)
So then I guess Christianity has to be forever tarred as evil because of the genocides committed on its behalf.
Not all Marxism is bad, and not all Capitalism is good. Is that so hard to understand? Social Security and highways are Marxist - you'd have to be a pretty absolutist capitalist to find them 'bad' (social security may have some demographic issues, but it's certainly not evil). Enron and Countrywide Financial are Capitalist and far from 'good'.
Well, actually, if mobile, the cloud and chromebooks take enough of the market away from the traditional desktop, Microsoft has 2 choices. Either raise the price of Windows to make up for the declining market or lower the price of Windows to fend off the competition. If the price of Windows goes up - and the traditional desktop is only necessary for a limited kind of user, then Linux wins what's left of that market by virtue of the cheap price. If the price goes down, Microsoft may continue to dominate, but they're going to have to make up for it somewhere - in which case LibreOffice wins.
Of course, there's a major chicken-and-egg problem here. And if the first egg doesn't crack (the inability to buy an OEM desktop machine without paying for Windows), the others probably won't either...
I've run into another problem. What if you want to make changes and are willing to give them back, but they aren't accepted - and you still want to use the changed version? Years back, I added a --sparse option to gunzip so that when I zipped sparse files and unzipped them, they didn't grow to consume space for all the 0's that were not taking up space in the original sparse files. I submitted the change, but never heard back and assume it was not accepted. For all I know gzip/unzip does provide a way to preserve sparse files by now. Anyway, I'm still using my version - possibly in violation of the GPL. I suppose it's technically legal as long as I don't distribute it, but I do copy it to clients' systems for my use there...
Sounds like what you're describing is a digital wallet for storing passwords online. Purely optional - on a password by password basis, and nothing but a convenience if you choose to use it. 'Encrypted by Google with a password that only they have access to' sounds nefarious, but it's not as though Google is preventing you from writing your passwords down or storing them anywhere else. They're encrypting them on the server so as to make them useless if stolen - pure evil, I know...
Look folks, some paranoia about web companies is justified. 'Trust, but verify', y'know. But starting with a default assumption that all web services (or at least all provided by Google) are out to exploit you is silly. They're out to make money off of you, sure, but they're providing a service in return. And they don't make that money by giving your info to their customers (the advertisers - yes, I know). They make it by serving you ads that they think you're likely to click on. The horror. And they don't even prevent you from using ad blocking software to avoid the really annoying stuff.
Except that this time, those servers are being hired out super cheap. And they can be replicated and brought inhouse pretty cheaply too if you want. Plus, the 'terminal talking to a server' model makes perfect sense when the data by definition lives on the server. These are not the terminals of the '60s, and it's just dumb to argue against them on the basis that they're somehow reviving 60's tech. There will always be things PC's can do better than the new web terminal, but not everybody needs to do those things. And those that do don't lose access to the web-terminal applications. So why argue against them? Oh - because you have an emotional (and possibly actual) investment in the PC-centric application model. Ahhhh, religion strikes again.
No, it's the corrupted political system corrupting the market so that keeping all your investments in cash is a bad idea - at least until the bubble caused by that bogus market bursts.... Or that staying in the same home for a long period is a bad idea... just because (and in this case I think it's because the real estate speculators wanted the traditional one-time exception for homeowners to apply to all of their speculative deals, and didn't even consider the effect on long term home owners).
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm, no. Just because you can point to examples and say 'both sides are bad', that doesn't make them equally bad. Fox is biased and MSNBC is biased, but only one promotes disinformation along with their bias - and refuses to correct their mistakes (if they're even accidental at all). And yet, you will see it reported, oh, everywhere, that MSNBC is the 'liberal' Fox, and they're both the same. They're not.
If you think Google's business model is 'evil', you obviously don't want a Chromebook - if only because you don't want to support Google. But Chrome and Chromebooks are basically just a way to prevent Microsoft from re-monopolizing the web browser market. Chromebooks work by doing what the web does best, shake things up. They don't provide Google with any other benefits that they can't get by promoting the Chrome browser on Windows, OS/X or Linux.
The original browser wars started because Microsoft felt threatened by the web - and definitely didn't want to see the emergence of cross-platform software development. Their business model was based on tying all end-user software to Windows. Microsoft would like nothing more than to translate their (continues) desktop dominance into mobile dominance. Sure, Google wants to continue their search dominance - but Chromebooks don't really add much to that effort. They just attempt to make sure that Microsoft isn't able to claw back the web and lock them out.
Of course, the acceptable ads option is actually a good way of getting users to face the fact that they're using ad-supported content sites that wouldn't exist if everyone blocked the ads. There's such a thing as a middle ground. Freedom doesn't mean freedom to freeload.
Similar thing with YouTube videos. Somebody owns them (and it's not always Google). They were provided to you to view online. Downloading them was not offered. Just because you can, doesn't make it right (or your "right").
And I say this as a (conflicted) user of Adblock Plus (with acceptable ads enabled) and Video Download Helper (in Firefox).
Yeah, but that's kind of like the "look at all the different, incompatible versions of Windows" argument that gets made to defend Linux against charges of fragmentation. C certainly can have some magic happening under the covers, but it's an order of magnitude less than what goes on in C++. That said, I'm sure it's possible to know C++ well enough to have a good sense of what an arbitrary line of code generates under the covers. What's arguably harder is to pick up an arbitrary piece of C++ designed by another coder with a different sense of how to organize his abstractions and understand how those abstractions are organized and work within them.
With C, you can pretty much look at a set of functions and understand why they were built the way they were. Maybe that's because of the limitations of the language, but IMHO, that's a good thing.
And not just that. Even experienced coders need to understand the purpose of the particular abstractions that were built into a particular set of C++ code to avoid butting up against them - or throwing up their hands in frustration and working around them in standard C in the middle of all the C++ code because it was to hard to figure out how to implement what you wanted within the class structures that were handed to you along with the order to "go and make it do this".
C++ is great for well-documented libraries designed for a 'use but don't touch' mode. For all other uses, the less C++'y, the better - even if you're using the language to take advantage of those great libraries.
Maybe it's possible to make an existing win32 desktop app more 'touch-friendly', but Microsoft sure didn't go out of their way to help. And the press glommed on to some "desktop is legacy - metro is the future" line, as though everyone were going to automatically do rewrites. Maybe that's what Microsoft was hoping for, and maybe the press is just dumb. But that's certainly not what is happening. What's really happening is "desktop is legacy - web is the future', and any rewrites that are being done are targeting html5/javascript. Whether that's the best future or not, that's what's happening.
Perhaps if Microsoft had built a platform-independent API instead of just another me-too proprietary tablet API, they could've really started something.
Unfortunately, it's not easy to 'update the interface' of an existing Windows program to make it work on a touchscreen device as a Metro app. That's more or less a total rewrite - and that's where Microsoft went off the rails with Windows 8. They wanted a 'clean' touchscreen OS, so they essentially started from scratch with the application layer. But then they tried to sell it as 'the Windows you know and love'. But you need desktop mode for it to be that. Desktop mode stinks on tablets, tablet mode stinks on the Desktop, and they were too late to market to get their tablet API's established. So you're stuck with full Windows (tablet + desktop) on a 7" device where desktop will be more or less unusable, and tablet won't have any apps. But it's cheap.
1) I think Microsoft also required OEM's to not preload Netscape. Don't think Google does anything like that - though requiring the Google search box in launchers may come close... Plus, Android has not reached anything approaching monopoly status (yet).
2) You prove my point - nothing prevents you from loading alteratives.
3) This does not apply to the Gapps suite - all of which are now upgraded through the Play store.
Anything else?
Most of the bogus scientific breakthroughs are "amazing medical advances" and "promising cancer treatments" that have no business being in the popular media at all - given their untested status at the time they're released. This is largely a media problem (isn't everything these days), driven by an over-competitive media landscape in which consumers' attention is all that matters. But it's also a trap scientists themselves can fall into. There often are large financial involvements at stake, and the media are all too easily manipulated. None of which is to say that the scientific method and peer review don't win out in the end. Science pursues all kinds of dead ends - we're just not supposed to hear about them. And that's not any kind of cover-up; it's how the process works - and it does work.
No, that's the problem with a corrupted 'democratic' process. 51% votes for liars telling them what they want to hear on behalf of donors who want something unrelated. 49% votes for liars telling them what they want to hear on behalf of mostly the same donors. 99% have no choice and the other 1% get it all.
So what's your solution? Drop the pretense of democracy altogether or fix the corruption?
Thanks for saying this.
Where I work, we have a simple (some might say simplistic) platform implemented in C that's easy to code to, understand and, oh yeah, works well. At one point we had an academically minded guy who decided he was hurting his career by coding this way, and his manager let him run free with all kinds of theoretical abstractions and shitty use of C++ that he insisted would allow code reuse and the like. He's long gone, and his stuff works, but having had to support it on occasion, I cringe at all the gratuitous complexity he introduced. Nothing's easy, and of course, if you want to do something that doesn't fit nicely with the class structures he built, you're out of luck. And as far as code reuse goes, this stuff is used exactly once, so none of his structure accomplished the desired goals (except maybe to let him practice his formidable complexity-generating skills).
I guess my point is this. A lot of technology innovation is great when used appropriately. If you're building a cross-platform framework like, say, QT, you want to abstract away platform-specific internals, etc. And you have a lot of interrelated objects where inheritance and the like actually make things easier and work better. But for day to day application coding, other than using features of a framework like that (if you're building on top of one), these innovations tend not to be understood well enough to be used effectively for the task at hand. You end up hiding the stuff you need to get at for no good reason at all.
What you say is true, but the consequences of MSIE domination are quite different than Chrome's. MSIE's purpose was to defeat or delay the cross-platform nature of the web - until such time as MS figured out how to compete with it. Just as MS-Java's purpose was to defeat the cross-platform nature of Java, and C# was their attempt to render Java irrelevant - as if having 'the best' Windows-only language were the point in the first place. Chrome may want to absorb everything in it's path, but it's purpose in that is to keep the web cross-platform while improving its performance. A worthy goal, however conveniently it syncs up with Google's other priorities.
I don't know whether MS has actually dropped this 'Windows must dominate' business model, but I suspect not. Thankfully, Firefox and yes, now Chrome have won that battle - and IE is now much more 'just another browser' that it would've been had Firefox not done the heavy lifting. Microsoft's 'open' XML office formats have managed to fend off the threat of truly open formats much better. Say what you will, but the supposed superiority of MSOffice over the competition has nothing to do with it's native file formats. MSOffice's main superiority (thought there are others) is it's ability to use MSOffice's file formats, duh.
If anything is being preempted, it's the still present threat that developer resources will be diverted into application rewrites for Windows 8 Metro - locking users into Windows-only apps for another generation. Whatever qualms you may have about Google, Chrome is about the best supported large multi-platform app, and there's nothing about Chrome (the browser) itself that locks you into Google apps or services. It's primary purpose is to keep the open web open and available on all devices, living up to its full potential. That just happens to fit well with Google's business plan, but it also fits well with what most people use computers for these days.
I would imagine that this new "Android in Chrome" capability will end up most commonly used to play Candy Crush on Windows systems. And that's fine. The nicest thing about Chrome (the browser) is it's (largely realized) potential as a meta-platform that works on just about every device out there - except iOS. And if Apple would allow it, it'd be on iOS too. That was the initial promise of Netscape before Microsoft got scared and started with their dirty tricks. It was never the promise of IE, which was primarily built to prevent Netscape from realizing that potential.
Granted. But good enough to pay for - if all you want to do is stuff you can do on a Chromebook? If you need or want to run Windows apps, Windows is the best solution for you. If you don't, and don't want to keep paying for Windows, Office and their endless upgrades, a Chromebook is a great alternative. Cheap hardware that still performs well - and free applications. If they do what large numbers of people need them to do, why do you feel the need to insist they're wrong? And If they don't do what you need, well there are options for you too - including desktop Linux, which "works pretty good these days" too...
I agree that sharing a copy of a book in a library is fair use. But simultaneous sharing among multiple readers is not fair use. A library can stock multiple copies of a popular book and share them among thousands of users. But one reader per copy at a time. Otherwise your 'good trade off for society as a whole' becomes out and out appropriation. I agree that libraries would be great places if every book you wanted were always 'in the stacks', but you're not talking about a small loss of revenue any more.
You say this like it's a good thing. Sure, if you want to advance your career, you have no choice but to do a lot of job jumping (at least in the beginning). But it didn't used to be that way, and ultimately this dynamic is harmful to the products we work on. The fact that you're going to jump in 2 years just makes that worse. And, one of these days you're gonna hit 50 and find that next jump really hard to make. I'm 62 and have stuck around. Other than hating the way management views the company as it's toy for serial mergers and buyouts, I've had a pretty rewarding time of it. But I'm one of only two who survived the outsourcing push - and are doing all the work to cover the asses of the idiots that thought outsourcing would work. There's nobody in the pipeline to replace either of us, and the latest LBO guys think they're gonna go public in 2 years. Sheesh...
That's all true - until some manager fails to make his numbers and attempts to blame it on poor programmer productivity. The solution: outsource the whole damn thing to a 'major outsourcing firm' that can 'shift resources at will' to attain optimal productivity.
You end up out of a job, and the company ends up with poorly trained workers that have no depth of knowledge of the software they're supporting - and who are rotated out every 18 months so they're guaranteed never to have any depth. Plus nobody in the organization is acquiring the ability to replace the key people that weren't outsourced when they ultimately change jobs (or retire).
But that manager? He probably got a big bonus and found a new job before the shit hit.
Okay. Once and for all. Is it "Here here" or "Hear hear". (or "Hear here"...)
Chromium under KDE on linux nags you to set up a kwallet for passwords - I assume Gnome has a similar facility. So I guess it takes the same approach as on Windows - i.e., use the password storage facility provided by the OS. Not a bad approach. Kwallet makes you provide a password to access it the first time (presumably each app that accesses your wallet will ask for this the first time you grant it access. That's not the same as giving your passwords to anything you run as the GP suggested (thought maybe it works that way on Windows...)
So then I guess Christianity has to be forever tarred as evil because of the genocides committed on its behalf.
Not all Marxism is bad, and not all Capitalism is good. Is that so hard to understand? Social Security and highways are Marxist - you'd have to be a pretty absolutist capitalist to find them 'bad' (social security may have some demographic issues, but it's certainly not evil). Enron and Countrywide Financial are Capitalist and far from 'good'.
Well, actually, if mobile, the cloud and chromebooks take enough of the market away from the traditional desktop, Microsoft has 2 choices. Either raise the price of Windows to make up for the declining market or lower the price of Windows to fend off the competition. If the price of Windows goes up - and the traditional desktop is only necessary for a limited kind of user, then Linux wins what's left of that market by virtue of the cheap price. If the price goes down, Microsoft may continue to dominate, but they're going to have to make up for it somewhere - in which case LibreOffice wins.
Of course, there's a major chicken-and-egg problem here. And if the first egg doesn't crack (the inability to buy an OEM desktop machine without paying for Windows), the others probably won't either...
I've run into another problem. What if you want to make changes and are willing to give them back, but they aren't accepted - and you still want to use the changed version? Years back, I added a --sparse option to gunzip so that when I zipped sparse files and unzipped them, they didn't grow to consume space for all the 0's that were not taking up space in the original sparse files. I submitted the change, but never heard back and assume it was not accepted. For all I know gzip/unzip does provide a way to preserve sparse files by now. Anyway, I'm still using my version - possibly in violation of the GPL. I suppose it's technically legal as long as I don't distribute it, but I do copy it to clients' systems for my use there...
Sounds like what you're describing is a digital wallet for storing passwords online. Purely optional - on a password by password basis, and nothing but a convenience if you choose to use it. 'Encrypted by Google with a password that only they have access to' sounds nefarious, but it's not as though Google is preventing you from writing your passwords down or storing them anywhere else. They're encrypting them on the server so as to make them useless if stolen - pure evil, I know...
Look folks, some paranoia about web companies is justified. 'Trust, but verify', y'know. But starting with a default assumption that all web services (or at least all provided by Google) are out to exploit you is silly. They're out to make money off of you, sure, but they're providing a service in return. And they don't make that money by giving your info to their customers (the advertisers - yes, I know). They make it by serving you ads that they think you're likely to click on. The horror. And they don't even prevent you from using ad blocking software to avoid the really annoying stuff.
Except that this time, those servers are being hired out super cheap. And they can be replicated and brought inhouse pretty cheaply too if you want. Plus, the 'terminal talking to a server' model makes perfect sense when the data by definition lives on the server. These are not the terminals of the '60s, and it's just dumb to argue against them on the basis that they're somehow reviving 60's tech. There will always be things PC's can do better than the new web terminal, but not everybody needs to do those things. And those that do don't lose access to the web-terminal applications. So why argue against them? Oh - because you have an emotional (and possibly actual) investment in the PC-centric application model. Ahhhh, religion strikes again.
No, it's the corrupted political system corrupting the market so that keeping all your investments in cash is a bad idea - at least until the bubble caused by that bogus market bursts.... Or that staying in the same home for a long period is a bad idea... just because (and in this case I think it's because the real estate speculators wanted the traditional one-time exception for homeowners to apply to all of their speculative deals, and didn't even consider the effect on long term home owners).