Ahh, I see. So it's just a performance improvement? That's excellent, of course. I was being too limited by thinking of compositing as being, basically, all that transparency stuff, which I hate. Compositing is good, but not compelling for me, though. My performance with it disabled is perfectly acceptable. Perhaps in other use cases it becomes more important.
That just makes me hate tablets. The correct design for phones, tablets, and desktops are each different. This "grand unification" idea is a terrible one from the start.
The latter choice still allows you to benefit from the compositing desktop which isn't just for eyecandy.
Wait, it isn't??
I'm serious in this question. I've been putting up with compositing for a while now under KDE & Win 7, and finally turned it off on both OS's. This has improved my happiness with both desktops immeasurably. I don't see what I'm missing by turning it off.
I STILL don't understand the almost universal hatred for the cashew.. seriously..
I hate it because it's forever getting in my way, and does absolutely nothing that is important to me (activities are not something that gives me any value. The virtual desktops are more convenient and do 100% of what I want). It's worse than a useless bit of chrome because it's intrusive.
I dislike all the corner actions for the same reason, too, but the cashew is the worst. I remember the day when I could park my mouse cursor in a corner to get it out of the way. Now, I have to pay attention to exactly where the cursor is going to and be careful not to bump my mouse.
The thing is, for being so configurable, I don't understand why we can't have an option to eliminate the cashew.
Try KDE. It is perfectly usable and is making perfectly sensible decisions
I could not disagree more with this. I've been using KDE for a lot of years, but the recent changes to it are making it increasingly painful to use. Such that I'm now shopping around for a new window manager (that's why I'm reading a Gnome post even though I've never used Gnome).
I recognize a lot of the complaints about Gnome here in the newer KDE versions. I don't know what this new DE trend is all about, why these redesigns to a clumsier and counterintuitive way of doing things is needed, or why the developers seem to be taking such a self-righteous "you're a stupid user if you don't adapt to what we want" attitude about it all. But the trend does not appear to be getting better, and I don't think KDE (or, it sounds like, Gnome) will ever return to being a DE that works for me.
but most people don't care if they have a sticker on their car or not, and I doubt you do either
I can't speak for him, but why would you assume he doesn't care? Lots of people, including myself, do care about things like that, there's no reason to think he isn't one of them. I, too, don't like being an advertisement and avoid it when at all possible.
How much are we comfortable with our machines knowing about us?
I am extremely comfortable with my machines knowing everything there is to know about me. I am absolutely not comfortable with other people's machines (be they Google's servers, my supermarkets servers, or even my friend's laptop) knowing any more about me than is absolutely necessary.
For me, the issue is communications. I trust my machines, but only insofar as I can ensure that they aren't talking to anyone else without me specifically telling them to, and what to say. It's why I don't, and won't use most third party services such as cloud services, email servers, etc. Fortunately I'm a geek as so I can run these things on my own servers and don't have to do without.
I don't think the argument that corporations threaten free speech holds water.
We disagree. I think that corporations present a greater threat than the government. With the government, we at least have the constitution and some sort of influence over how it behaves. Not enough, but some. With corporations we have none. And nearly everything we do is in a corporation's control at some point or another.
I have an iPhone. It comes with a user agreement that specifics how I can use the phone. If I don't like it, I can get another phone and/or another provider.
I don't have to have an iPhone. I don't have to use AT&T.
In the US, your choices of providers is extremely limited -- is it three nowadays? The smaller ones simply resell the service of the larger ones so they don't count. You can get another phone, sure, but when they are all behaving in the same fashion -- as they do -- then this choice is illusory.
And you do have to use AT&T. If you use the internet or telephone service of any sort, the odds are overwhelming that AT&T is handling your communication as some point in its travels, even if you aren't their direct customer.
Using tools to get around restrictions set up by the government (as in China, etc) is NOT the same thing as getting around restrictions placed on a device by the manufacture.
I think they're exactly the same thing.
I think I see where we differ. You see a difference between corporations and government. I think that they have effectively merged and there is little functional difference, except that corporations operate with far fewer safeguards. Corporations do the things that are illegal for the government, and vice versa, but they work hand in hand. The end result is the loss of liberty overall.
Not risk isn't just (or even primarily) censorship by the government directly. It's corporations.
However, I think that you're simply wrong about motivations. The desire to pirate isn't even in the top 5 reasons for most people who are paying attention to this stuff, and not in the top 10 for the toolmakers he's talking about.
That said, I wouldn't be shocked if it was a common reason for people to actually use the tools. All the more reason to find a solution to the "piracy problem" that doesn't involve destroying our freedoms and driving pirates even deeper underground.
I suppose another option for you is to use multiple Google accounts.
That's what I've settled on doing for the two services that I can't stop using Google for. I am locked into Google until the end of my cellphone contract, and I use a third-party web service that requires the use of Google's login system. I now have two Google accounts, one for each of these things.
As for the rest of it, Google doesn't actually offer anything so compelling that I can't either replace it with something at least equally good or just do without it.
Actually, the terms of service for the iPhone make it clear that it is the greater of two evils in terms of privacy.
Android users can do what I've now done -- have a special Android-only google account that you never actually use. This, at least, compartmentalizes things so your non-Android activities aren't connected with your Android ones. And I don't use Google's other services for Android at all -- no cloud, no email, none of that. I use other service providers instead.
So, just the "creepiness factor" of being reminded of what Google is doing, meaning your objection to the cross-product data exchange is the increased opportunities for being reminded of that Google is collecting data across products.
No, no. You're conflating two different things. I was responding to your question about why I dislike targeted advertising. My objection to information-sharing between Google products has nothing to do with that.
My objection to cross-contamination is that there are many cases where I want to keep separate parts of my life separate. When I started using Google products, there was no such information sharing. If there had been, I wouldn't have started using them.
In short, I don't want to have information about me pushed to others without my agreeing to it. Google's new policy is to do just that. It's a dealbreaker for me. I actively don't want to use Google as a social network. If I wanted Facebook, I'd use Facebook.
Really, my objection is a superficial one. Advertising of any sort is not useful to me, so in a practical sense it doesn't matter if it's targeted or not. I'm going to ignore it either way. However, when I see ads that are targeted, they remind me that I'm being watched. They creep me out, annoy me, and make me feel a bit resentful.
As a recent example of what I mean, my wife uses gmail as her primary email. She recently had a cold, and when checking her mail noticed that she was suddenly getting ads for cold remedies. She asked me how google could know she was sick, and we looked through the emails she'd received recently. We found two from me mentioning her illness.
Even she, who is not normally sensitive to this type of thing, found this incredibly creepy. Not that she didn't know that her emails were monitored, but rather that she is normally able to ignore that fact. To have it brought to her attention like that disturbed her and made it impossible to ignore. It bothered her to the point where she's probably going to ditch gmail (without any encouragement from me, by the way -- I really don't care if anyone uses google's services or not.)
Hasn't it always been that way? I really think that is just a reiteration of the status quo, not a change. But I have to admit that I haven't read all of the old privacy policies carefully.
In addition, we may replace past names associated with your Google Account so that you are represented consistently across all our services. If other users already have your email, or other information that identifies you, we may show them your publicly visible Google Profile information, such as your name and photo.
Yes, it's a little thing, but this sort of thing bothers me primarily because of the loss of control. Sure, it reveals nothing that people couldn't suss out for themselves -- but it greases those skids, and turns google into something that requires more work from me and is a hassle because now I have to consider the impact of using one google service on the other google services I may use. It restricts my use of google. I solve this by no longer using google services (outside of my cell phone, alas), but it's terrible that I have to go to such an extreme. Why can't google provide an opt-out for this kind of cross-contamination?
I understand that google wants to become facebook. I had hoped, though, that they'd do this in such a way that those of us who actively don't want to use a facebook-like system can just ignore it. That this isn't possible dramatically reduces google's value to me.
But, then, I don't mind targeted ads. In fact, I like them. I'd rather not have ads at all, but if they have to be there (and I'd rather they were than to have to pay for all these services directly), then I prefer they be for things that I might actually be interested in buying.
Well, we just represent two different opinions on this point. If I have to see ads, I definitely don't want them to be targeted.
I'd say that depends on what Google does with the data, whether it serves to benefit or harm the users.
In the short term at least, I see no harm and some potential benefit.
I agree this depends on what google does with the data. I disagree that there's no short term harm. I am harmed by the new policies and they present exactly no benefit to me. Not to overstate this, as the "harm" is slight enough to be merely annoying for me -- although there are likely others who will be harmed to a greater degree. But it's harm nonetheless. You may feel differently, and that's entirely fair. You are not harmed, I am. We are different people.
This is why the whole deal should be opt-out. My only opt-out option is to stop using google entirely, so this is what I'm doing to the extent that's possible. It's just too bad that their policy change renders their products unacceptable to me.
"This isn't a change in Google's policy, or practice. Google has long collected information about all of its users, and used that information for targeted advertising."
But there is, in fact, a change of policy. I'm not worried about targeted advertising (well, I am, but that horse has long left the barn), but rather that Google is now talking about trading information between products with no opt-out possible. This is a HUGE change, and although some people may see it as desirable, a lot -- including myself -- do not.
I have just finished removing my use of all google products, save one. Sadly, this is my android phone -- something I actually paid for, so to counter those people who say "it's free, so you can't complain" -- it wasn't free at all. But I'm still forced to make myself vulnerable to Google.
Overall, this is Google being evil. A small evil, perhaps, but evil nonetheless.
PDFs are not "an easily searchable format". In my opinion, supplying the information in PDF form was a pretty huge dick move on Facebook's part. Of course, it's Facebook. Dick moves are second nature to them.
Just to provide counterpoint, my opinion is precisely the opposite of yours. iPhones are only OK. Androids (most of the ones I've tried, anyway) are Great. That Android sucked in the beginning is irrelevant (the first iPhone sucked, too). It's now that counts.
Yes, really. 9/11 was a small threat and directly caused relatively little damage to this country. Our overreaction, however, was a huge threat and caused enormous damage. It's a very good thing that we didn't have a nationwide EAS at the time or that damage may have been magnified even more.
I do have a FB account, but I do not, and never will, use it as a unified login service. I keep it as disconnected from my activities as possible (blocking FB servers when I don't want to talk with them, etc.) Facebook is not to be trusted.
If a site goes purely to using FB login, that will be the end of my use of the site as well.
Native Linux apps are all I use. I don't do use SaaS stuff at all, and don't intend to start. I simply don't trust any third party enough to make myself so vulnerable to and dependent on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, I see. So it's just a performance improvement? That's excellent, of course. I was being too limited by thinking of compositing as being, basically, all that transparency stuff, which I hate. Compositing is good, but not compelling for me, though. My performance with it disabled is perfectly acceptable. Perhaps in other use cases it becomes more important.
That just makes me hate tablets. The correct design for phones, tablets, and desktops are each different. This "grand unification" idea is a terrible one from the start.
The latter choice still allows you to benefit from the compositing desktop which isn't just for eyecandy.
Wait, it isn't??
I'm serious in this question. I've been putting up with compositing for a while now under KDE & Win 7, and finally turned it off on both OS's. This has improved my happiness with both desktops immeasurably. I don't see what I'm missing by turning it off.
What is compositing good for besides eye candy?
Not to mention that if I wanted the Apple UI, I'd be using an Apple computer.
I STILL don't understand the almost universal hatred for the cashew.. seriously..
I hate it because it's forever getting in my way, and does absolutely nothing that is important to me (activities are not something that gives me any value. The virtual desktops are more convenient and do 100% of what I want). It's worse than a useless bit of chrome because it's intrusive.
I dislike all the corner actions for the same reason, too, but the cashew is the worst. I remember the day when I could park my mouse cursor in a corner to get it out of the way. Now, I have to pay attention to exactly where the cursor is going to and be careful not to bump my mouse.
The thing is, for being so configurable, I don't understand why we can't have an option to eliminate the cashew.
Try KDE. It is perfectly usable and is making perfectly sensible decisions
I could not disagree more with this. I've been using KDE for a lot of years, but the recent changes to it are making it increasingly painful to use. Such that I'm now shopping around for a new window manager (that's why I'm reading a Gnome post even though I've never used Gnome).
I recognize a lot of the complaints about Gnome here in the newer KDE versions. I don't know what this new DE trend is all about, why these redesigns to a clumsier and counterintuitive way of doing things is needed, or why the developers seem to be taking such a self-righteous "you're a stupid user if you don't adapt to what we want" attitude about it all. But the trend does not appear to be getting better, and I don't think KDE (or, it sounds like, Gnome) will ever return to being a DE that works for me.
but most people don't care if they have a sticker on their car or not, and I doubt you do either
I can't speak for him, but why would you assume he doesn't care? Lots of people, including myself, do care about things like that, there's no reason to think he isn't one of them. I, too, don't like being an advertisement and avoid it when at all possible.
And that's part of why I don't use Facebook.
I am extremely comfortable with my machines knowing everything there is to know about me. I am absolutely not comfortable with other people's machines (be they Google's servers, my supermarkets servers, or even my friend's laptop) knowing any more about me than is absolutely necessary.
For me, the issue is communications. I trust my machines, but only insofar as I can ensure that they aren't talking to anyone else without me specifically telling them to, and what to say. It's why I don't, and won't use most third party services such as cloud services, email servers, etc. Fortunately I'm a geek as so I can run these things on my own servers and don't have to do without.
I don't think the argument that corporations threaten free speech holds water.
We disagree. I think that corporations present a greater threat than the government. With the government, we at least have the constitution and some sort of influence over how it behaves. Not enough, but some. With corporations we have none. And nearly everything we do is in a corporation's control at some point or another.
I have an iPhone. It comes with a user agreement that specifics how I can use the phone. If I don't like it, I can get another phone and/or another provider.
I don't have to have an iPhone. I don't have to use AT&T.
In the US, your choices of providers is extremely limited -- is it three nowadays? The smaller ones simply resell the service of the larger ones so they don't count. You can get another phone, sure, but when they are all behaving in the same fashion -- as they do -- then this choice is illusory.
And you do have to use AT&T. If you use the internet or telephone service of any sort, the odds are overwhelming that AT&T is handling your communication as some point in its travels, even if you aren't their direct customer.
Using tools to get around restrictions set up by the government (as in China, etc) is NOT the same thing as getting around restrictions placed on a device by the manufacture.
I think they're exactly the same thing.
I think I see where we differ. You see a difference between corporations and government. I think that they have effectively merged and there is little functional difference, except that corporations operate with far fewer safeguards. Corporations do the things that are illegal for the government, and vice versa, but they work hand in hand. The end result is the loss of liberty overall.
Ahh, I misunderstood.
Wait, the internet is useless if you can't commercialize it? Baloney.
Not risk isn't just (or even primarily) censorship by the government directly. It's corporations.
However, I think that you're simply wrong about motivations. The desire to pirate isn't even in the top 5 reasons for most people who are paying attention to this stuff, and not in the top 10 for the toolmakers he's talking about.
That said, I wouldn't be shocked if it was a common reason for people to actually use the tools. All the more reason to find a solution to the "piracy problem" that doesn't involve destroying our freedoms and driving pirates even deeper underground.
I suppose another option for you is to use multiple Google accounts.
That's what I've settled on doing for the two services that I can't stop using Google for. I am locked into Google until the end of my cellphone contract, and I use a third-party web service that requires the use of Google's login system. I now have two Google accounts, one for each of these things.
As for the rest of it, Google doesn't actually offer anything so compelling that I can't either replace it with something at least equally good or just do without it.
Actually, the terms of service for the iPhone make it clear that it is the greater of two evils in terms of privacy.
Android users can do what I've now done -- have a special Android-only google account that you never actually use. This, at least, compartmentalizes things so your non-Android activities aren't connected with your Android ones. And I don't use Google's other services for Android at all -- no cloud, no email, none of that. I use other service providers instead.
So, just the "creepiness factor" of being reminded of what Google is doing, meaning your objection to the cross-product data exchange is the increased opportunities for being reminded of that Google is collecting data across products.
No, no. You're conflating two different things. I was responding to your question about why I dislike targeted advertising. My objection to information-sharing between Google products has nothing to do with that.
My objection to cross-contamination is that there are many cases where I want to keep separate parts of my life separate. When I started using Google products, there was no such information sharing. If there had been, I wouldn't have started using them.
In short, I don't want to have information about me pushed to others without my agreeing to it. Google's new policy is to do just that. It's a dealbreaker for me. I actively don't want to use Google as a social network. If I wanted Facebook, I'd use Facebook.
Really, my objection is a superficial one. Advertising of any sort is not useful to me, so in a practical sense it doesn't matter if it's targeted or not. I'm going to ignore it either way. However, when I see ads that are targeted, they remind me that I'm being watched. They creep me out, annoy me, and make me feel a bit resentful.
As a recent example of what I mean, my wife uses gmail as her primary email. She recently had a cold, and when checking her mail noticed that she was suddenly getting ads for cold remedies. She asked me how google could know she was sick, and we looked through the emails she'd received recently. We found two from me mentioning her illness.
Even she, who is not normally sensitive to this type of thing, found this incredibly creepy. Not that she didn't know that her emails were monitored, but rather that she is normally able to ignore that fact. To have it brought to her attention like that disturbed her and made it impossible to ignore. It bothered her to the point where she's probably going to ditch gmail (without any encouragement from me, by the way -- I really don't care if anyone uses google's services or not.)
Hasn't it always been that way? I really think that is just a reiteration of the status quo, not a change. But I have to admit that I haven't read all of the old privacy policies carefully.
No, it hasn't always been that way. For example (not the only one), this is new (from https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/preview/):
In addition, we may replace past names associated with your Google Account so that you are represented consistently across all our services. If other users already have your email, or other information that identifies you, we may show them your publicly visible Google Profile information, such as your name and photo.
Yes, it's a little thing, but this sort of thing bothers me primarily because of the loss of control. Sure, it reveals nothing that people couldn't suss out for themselves -- but it greases those skids, and turns google into something that requires more work from me and is a hassle because now I have to consider the impact of using one google service on the other google services I may use. It restricts my use of google. I solve this by no longer using google services (outside of my cell phone, alas), but it's terrible that I have to go to such an extreme. Why can't google provide an opt-out for this kind of cross-contamination?
I understand that google wants to become facebook. I had hoped, though, that they'd do this in such a way that those of us who actively don't want to use a facebook-like system can just ignore it. That this isn't possible dramatically reduces google's value to me.
But, then, I don't mind targeted ads. In fact, I like them. I'd rather not have ads at all, but if they have to be there (and I'd rather they were than to have to pay for all these services directly), then I prefer they be for things that I might actually be interested in buying.
Well, we just represent two different opinions on this point. If I have to see ads, I definitely don't want them to be targeted.
I'd say that depends on what Google does with the data, whether it serves to benefit or harm the users.
In the short term at least, I see no harm and some potential benefit.
I agree this depends on what google does with the data. I disagree that there's no short term harm. I am harmed by the new policies and they present exactly no benefit to me. Not to overstate this, as the "harm" is slight enough to be merely annoying for me -- although there are likely others who will be harmed to a greater degree. But it's harm nonetheless. You may feel differently, and that's entirely fair. You are not harmed, I am. We are different people.
This is why the whole deal should be opt-out. My only opt-out option is to stop using google entirely, so this is what I'm doing to the extent that's possible. It's just too bad that their policy change renders their products unacceptable to me.
"This isn't a change in Google's policy, or practice. Google has long collected information about all of its users, and used that information for targeted advertising."
But there is, in fact, a change of policy. I'm not worried about targeted advertising (well, I am, but that horse has long left the barn), but rather that Google is now talking about trading information between products with no opt-out possible. This is a HUGE change, and although some people may see it as desirable, a lot -- including myself -- do not.
I have just finished removing my use of all google products, save one. Sadly, this is my android phone -- something I actually paid for, so to counter those people who say "it's free, so you can't complain" -- it wasn't free at all. But I'm still forced to make myself vulnerable to Google.
Overall, this is Google being evil. A small evil, perhaps, but evil nonetheless.
PDFs are not "an easily searchable format". In my opinion, supplying the information in PDF form was a pretty huge dick move on Facebook's part. Of course, it's Facebook. Dick moves are second nature to them.
Just to provide counterpoint, my opinion is precisely the opposite of yours. iPhones are only OK. Androids (most of the ones I've tried, anyway) are Great. That Android sucked in the beginning is irrelevant (the first iPhone sucked, too). It's now that counts.
It's anecdotal, but of the people I see daily & in passing with phones, only about 20-25% of them have smartphones.
Yes, really. 9/11 was a small threat and directly caused relatively little damage to this country. Our overreaction, however, was a huge threat and caused enormous damage. It's a very good thing that we didn't have a nationwide EAS at the time or that damage may have been magnified even more.
I do have a FB account, but I do not, and never will, use it as a unified login service. I keep it as disconnected from my activities as possible (blocking FB servers when I don't want to talk with them, etc.) Facebook is not to be trusted.
If a site goes purely to using FB login, that will be the end of my use of the site as well.
I believe the rest of the world is going down the browser GUI path
Oh, god, I hope not. I've yet to see a browser-based anything that doesn't suck more than a natively-implemented version of the same thing.
Native Linux apps are all I use. I don't do use SaaS stuff at all, and don't intend to start. I simply don't trust any third party enough to make myself so vulnerable to and dependent on them.