Of course, they'll only be used to transport children and impoverished people. Until they get approval and a network in place. Then they'll be converted to luxury use, because the market demands it.
And then that will be abandoned in favor of some sort of self-driving electric vehicle you can purchase.
The last time I went to WWDC, I managed to scrounge together a set of technical presentations to go to. I distinctly remember sitting through a Grand Central Dispatch presentation where the presenter really was dumbing things down for the audience. Which was probably fair, because even the "real developers" audience these days contains a huge proportion of people who are only functional when you equip them with a few hundred third-party libraries to do important work like "trim whitespace from the ends of a string". When tech enthusiasts fight hard to get tickets to your developer conference, it waters down the technical chops of your audience, and it also attracts sales and marketing and product-management types, and that's just not what a good developer conference needs.
Same basic thing happened to Google Developer Day and Google I/O. And a bunch of the "conferences" other companies put on weren't even anything more than sales and marketing product-release events to begin with.
There are companies that set up a storefront, collect orders and forward the order to another company, pure arbitrage play. The seller is busy making and selling product. This arbitrage guy comes in lists the same product at multiple price points and advertisement and marketing scenarios.
Chinese counterfeit products are known all over the world and people are wary of them. America is so insulated and well protected in the past by good law enforcement from fake products and infringements. So in some sense most American consumers are naive, unfamiliar to such scammers. Amazon is the big enabler and the race to the bottom will be very fast. Soon most Americans will learn not to be so trustful of the vendors.
Amazon is selling products which are listed as made by the original manufacturer and shipped and sold by Amazon.com, with a picture of the original product, but what you receive looks materially different from the picture, and is either counterfeit or the brand trying to destroy themselves. They sure do have arbitrageurs shipping me knockoff crap from China, and I do intentionally order from them when I don't want to wait a month for something to get to me via packet post. But that case is a far cry from Amazon itself mis-representing the product.
[I understand that the case in the article in question is clearly faking it. But the case I describe above happened to me in January, and Amazon was basically "Thank you for your feedback! Let us know when you want to order another one."]
Calling Uber in this kind of situation puts the driver and other passengers at risk of having to help you or something. Instead, if you're passing out or having a heart attack or something like that, you should drive yourself to the hospital.
This may not be a freedom of speech issue but it is still a dick move by Google. One that I hope comes back and bites them in the ass.
Why?
See point 3: https://medium.com/@yonatanzun... Google did not start this, but they needed to end it, rather than spending months and months bleeding into the water. You might think I'm over-hyping that, but we're out here talking about it almost a year later! A company can't afford to let that kind of thing burn out of control internally.
I can see how putting my info on a blockchain provides verification that I put my info on the blockchain. I can see how you could use encryption techniques to allow me to encode on the blockchain who can access my info. But I don't see how this causes those accessing my info to use appropriate security protocols to protect my info. At some point, they'll want access to my actual information, and once they have that, what prevents them from storing a copy for their convenient, or simply forwarding it to some third party that's paying them for information? Also, how does this help at all with apps asking for access to personal information that they have no need for?
People who write apps could already ask for minimal information, and they could already encrypt the info with something only I can provide to minimize their contact surface, they already could use best practices like salting their hashed password storage. For the most part, the problem isn't that they are trying really hard to do these things, and failing for technical reasons, the problem is that they aren't bothering to even try.
The google Maps when was released was impressive, as it used the newer features in the browser, where other vendors were a bit wary to implement. During this time, including Javascript as only for form validations, and was coded to be expected not to be used. However these new features in the browser have became commonplace. But other then using the new standard browser features, Google didn't do too much that was crazy, Like having a plug in, using a MS or Firefox only feature. They followed the HTML 4 Standards. By actually following the standards it allowed for easier forward compatibility, as features are removed and deprecated much slower from a standard then they are in some crazy hack.
The value in having a reasonable and stable API from the beginning would be that the tech used to build the client would be irrelevant. If you design your API around the specific capabilities of a specific browser, then in two or three years it's going to be painful to continue supporting that browser while also supporting whatever new API you created to conform to the specifics of newer browsers.
[That said, I think the OP on this thread overplays it. I doubt the first choice was having a reasonable API, the first choice was to commit to supporting things for a long time, at which point there are incentives to have an appropriate API. As opposed to the standard approach of "Who cares, just throw the shit against the wall and see what sticks", where you promote cutting corners to a valuable attribute of your project.]
And taxes here with AMT are around 50%, so 400K -> 200K
Cost of living is crushing along with abusive confiscatory taxation and the tech companies are ALWAYS trying to flood the market with H1B and scabs to lower your "rate"
How're those leftist policies workin' out for you over there in Commiefornia? Not so good?
Aw, that's a shame. Now we just need to figure out how to quarantine Commiefornia and prevent the infection from spreading. Then we can all sit back and have our kids learn the object lesson that the Commifornians are setting as an example.
It's getting so bad here that people are leaving, driving housing prices up and making traffic worse.
Google itself will rocket through development like an adderall fueled college developer mainlining 4 loko's (blue raspberry old school of course) roll it out with maybe 60% of it done, get a few publisher's on board with sweet deals and throw tons of money at them, and users login for their Beta (it's always BETA) service.
Then the adrenaline haze wears off, Google actually has to support clients, wrangle in contracts from publisher's to put more games on the system, figure out how to get around bandwidth caps that your lovely ISP's enforce on you, roll out development updates while slashing the team and budget until 18 months later Google walks away for the next OOOHHH SHINEY! thing and we are left with a stillborn service that makes the Phantom console look like Steve Jobs christened it from Heaven.
You forgot to mention that the next "OOOHHH SHINEY" thing will be a video game console capable of streaming. It just won't share any APIs or code or anything with the current one.
That said... I'm honestly not sure I see the point of this. If you remove the battery and screen from an Android device, what you're left with is maybe $50 worth of stuff. Add controllers (or allow phones as controllers) and it feels like streaming is irrelevant.
That could have worrying implications for America's long-term economic prospects.
This is a result of changes to America's economy, not a cause of it. A startup like Apple or Microsoft needed to get that IPO money to help fund continued growth. Factories are EXPENSIVE. This continued into the 90's, because people are EXPENSIVE. But today, you can create a billion dollar company without high capital or personnel expenses, because the point where you can get to scale-out is much earlier. The first case where I really noticed this was YouTube, which was bought for $1.65B, with something like 70 employees, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that half of those employees were only hired because they had to do _something_ with their revenue. These days, you don't even need your own servers in datacenters, so you could probably get there with a dozen employees.
So, basically, if you can fund scale-out without going to the markets, why in the world would you go to the markets? For many things, overfunding scale-out is a sure route to failure, not increased success!
A current counter-example to the above is Uber. I really have no idea why anyone backing them is willing to pony up billions of dollars to pay for drivers to ferry customers around. That kind of thing made sense to me when your marginal costs of doing business were high per unit because of quantum issues (you can't write half a backend service or half of a UI), but Uber is miles past the point where they can realistically expect to grow past their expenses. So as best I can figure, they're going to go public into a market desperate for IPOs, and the results aren't going to be pleasant for IPO investors.
First of all, the headline on this article is silly. What are Silicon Valley manufacturers supposed to do - intentionally make their products less attractive to consumers?
As someone who worked at one of those companies, IMHO the problem is not that they need to go against capitalism, the problem is that the people within the company often quite literally believe they are helping users with this stuff. If someone thinks they are taking advantage of people, you can plausibly reason with them to change their behavior. If someone believes they are helping, then it is REALLY HARD to work with them to fix what they're doing wrong.
The linked article focuses on 'tech addiction' as being the problem, and we have been here before. I have been around long enough to remember when tech addiction was phrased in the press as "teenagers" talking for hours on the old black plug-in wall telephone. Young people were offered this new mechanism for keeping in touch when they were not physically together, and they embraced it. Over time, telephony was integrated into the general culture and became part of the human background.
Then there was the time when television was going to make zombies of us all, with nobody stepping outside ever again, and the rise of cars not just as competition for public transit, but as a place for "teenagers" to Have Sex. Note the theme developing here?
So now that "teenagers" have discovered the smartphone this time, it has enabled a fad for social media. Though the idea that we would all drop everything to become addicted to Facebook is already dated, pearls are still being clutched over the possibility that some social medium will become mental Fentanyl. But now that Markey is involved, I know that can't happen.
Maybe, maybe not. At this point, we have the computing power to analyse and influence individual users in real time. It might be just another distraction we learn to live with, but it might be something which destroys a lot of social value. And while you're poo-pooing past things like television as resolved issues, they aren't done, they're evolving over time, sources like Fox News use tremendous amounts of computing power to figure out what works and what doesn't, giving specific answers to questions that 40 years ago were answered with executives making guesses.
Orson Scott Card actually dug into this a bit in the later part of the Ender's series with the philotic twining and aiuas as the fundamental core of the universe, that particles essentially willed themselves into existence in an increasingly hierarchical way, and that they could be called into existence by others. Base matter was a certain kind of aiua possessed of a will that could bond and bind energy into a material form, while consciousness was an aiua that could govern and rule over other aiuas. That theory always seemed to resonate a bit well as a universal kind of spirituality intertwined with physics. In any case, it made for great reading.
I think you're speaking of a mythical fourth book in the Ender's series, which was never written because Card lost his mind. Same kind of thing as the Matrix sequels and the Star Wars Christmas Special, the universe acts to prevent certain outcomes from occurring.
They were like 640x480 or something, and the windows had title bars. Now I consider my 27" monitor to be pretty modest, given what I see others using, and the title bars are literally irrelevant.
Maybe instead we should just have the title bars disappear when you aren't near them, like all the other UI controls! In fact, why don't we have the entire window operate that way, with only the things you hover over being visible? Everything else can fade to light gray on dark white (and in the Linux case, semi-transparent so you can see through to the low-context stuff behind), like the UI equivalent of brutalist architecture.
Netflix seems a bit of a special case. I've already payed for the service, so when they release anything that looks remotely appealing, I watch it. That doesn't make it a good movie, it just makes it the best thing on at the moment. Bright was a decent movie (better than 30% for sure), but it wasn't mindblowing. I probably wouldn't have bought a movie ticket. That said, I've been using moviepass, so theater-going has become more like Netflix for me. It doesn't have to be some anticipated summer blockbuster, just the best thing in theaters at the moment.
Netflix is chock full of crap, so saying that something is the best thing to watch on Netflix right now should not be interpreted to mean that it's amazing. I haven't seen Bright, but there's no reason why the choice between the critics being right and the audience being right has to be mutually exclusive.
Also, a movie which is not good isn't necessarily bad. BvS was bad, but something like Waterworld just wasn't good.
For as much truth or insight as his post may contain, he still really doesn't get Google at all. Google's customers aren't the people who use Android, Google+, Google Voice, etc. Google's customers are advertisers that want to have eyeballs and ear holes to blast their ads at and they don't care about innovation, they just want something that works and Google wants to make sure that they keep those real customers of theirs by offering a rival to anything else that is being used to sell ads online. They didn't make Google+ because they wanted a better social network, they made Google+ so that if social networks became the new center of online advertising instead of web search that Google wouldn't end up out in the rain.
So, if I said of a television network that they were going to fail because they weren't delivering programming that their customers wanted to watch, you'd go off quibbling about how their customers are actually advertisers? If that's the case, do you realize that you're entirely missing the point of the statement because you're focussing on possible flaws in one bit of the presentation? Because in the television-network case, it really doesn't matter how we pedantically define "customer", because if they aren't delivering programming that people want to watch, they will fail.
So, yes, they made Google+ because they didn't want to miss out if social networks became the new center of online advertising (one customer), true, but I think the article's point was that Google+ has not succeeded because they weren't serving the needs of the user (also a customer). The fact that their goal was to support advertisers doesn't excuse their lack of attention to the user, regardless of which one you want to call "the customer", and that serves the goals of neither the advertiser nor the user. I would expect perceptive readers to be able to figure that out without getting lost in the weeds.
Some companies will just take whatever code they find, use it without attribution and F.U. Admittedly, most of those companies aren't particularly successful, but it happens a lot, because it's easy. Those bad actors can just do it without worry, and that's pretty cheap.
Unfortunately, many companies refuse to use open source AT ALL, because they believe it is infectious to ownership of their IP. Whether that is true or not of a particular license, there is a notable subset of the open source world who thinks infection is a feature which should be encouraged, so it can be hard to get legal departments past that hurdle.
When I was working at Google, they had a department tasked with reviewing things and deciding on which were usable. It was actually pretty nice, because at Google's scale, they could have experienced people who could make decisions with confidence rather than fear. But even there, there were licenses which were "Don't even install these packages on your system".
I get GNU's position on this, I just think it's a dumb position which ignores reality. Sure, it _would_ be nice if all software was checked into github for free sharing by everyone. But that's just not how people work, sometimes you need to put in time getting them used to the idea of sharing before they get to a point where they can successfully share the stuff they're writing.
Consumers tend to like apps as the solution to get to 911 services. Sure, they can get advanced services (like a real GPS location), and other nice things, but it relies on a bunch of technologies that are designed to work "at best effort". If you don't have data service and you launch the app, it won't work. If you call 911 and don't have phone service, your phone will actually roam to anybody and everybody's network you have a radio for and place the call.
The app could whistle like a modem over the voice channel. Or use morse code. Or some clever steganographic solution to weave the data into the audio stream, interleaved to pass the highest bits first.
Yeah, public opinion will change. All of our phones will require full real-time uploads, because the government will be all like "We're sure their phone has contact information for other people, even though we didn't figure out which phone we wanted until a few weeks after the event. Unfortunately, the phone was destroyed in the event so we think in the future we should receive the information in advance."
It is bovine scat that Congress-critters are wasting time about this. There really are more important issues than a stinking smartphone charge IMHO.
Maybe it's time to constitute a convention to change the rules to add a branch of government in charge of executing specific actions, rather than making broad decisions. Then Congress could step back and say things like "You people over there who work for us, we think it's bad the companies rip people off, please make sure companies don't rip people off", and they could provide money to fund enforcement.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, they'll only be used to transport children and impoverished people. Until they get approval and a network in place. Then they'll be converted to luxury use, because the market demands it.
And then that will be abandoned in favor of some sort of self-driving electric vehicle you can purchase.
... since everyone will need to double their system's memory to send their co-workers a morning "Yo."
I'm guessing it's something about roasting people, as in "Aw, Snap"? Or is it iot fasteners for your pants?
Mine sure won't need any OS upgrades anymore, since it can't even boot.
The last time I went to WWDC, I managed to scrounge together a set of technical presentations to go to. I distinctly remember sitting through a Grand Central Dispatch presentation where the presenter really was dumbing things down for the audience. Which was probably fair, because even the "real developers" audience these days contains a huge proportion of people who are only functional when you equip them with a few hundred third-party libraries to do important work like "trim whitespace from the ends of a string". When tech enthusiasts fight hard to get tickets to your developer conference, it waters down the technical chops of your audience, and it also attracts sales and marketing and product-management types, and that's just not what a good developer conference needs.
Same basic thing happened to Google Developer Day and Google I/O. And a bunch of the "conferences" other companies put on weren't even anything more than sales and marketing product-release events to begin with.
There are companies that set up a storefront, collect orders and forward the order to another company, pure arbitrage play. The seller is busy making and selling product. This arbitrage guy comes in lists the same product at multiple price points and advertisement and marketing scenarios.
Chinese counterfeit products are known all over the world and people are wary of them. America is so insulated and well protected in the past by good law enforcement from fake products and infringements. So in some sense most American consumers are naive, unfamiliar to such scammers. Amazon is the big enabler and the race to the bottom will be very fast. Soon most Americans will learn not to be so trustful of the vendors.
Amazon is selling products which are listed as made by the original manufacturer and shipped and sold by Amazon.com, with a picture of the original product, but what you receive looks materially different from the picture, and is either counterfeit or the brand trying to destroy themselves. They sure do have arbitrageurs shipping me knockoff crap from China, and I do intentionally order from them when I don't want to wait a month for something to get to me via packet post. But that case is a far cry from Amazon itself mis-representing the product.
[I understand that the case in the article in question is clearly faking it. But the case I describe above happened to me in January, and Amazon was basically "Thank you for your feedback! Let us know when you want to order another one."]
Calling Uber in this kind of situation puts the driver and other passengers at risk of having to help you or something. Instead, if you're passing out or having a heart attack or something like that, you should drive yourself to the hospital.
I suggest B. Dalton or Waldenbooks. I hear Borders is alright, too.
This may not be a freedom of speech issue but it is still a dick move by Google. One that I hope comes back and bites them in the ass.
Why?
See point 3:
https://medium.com/@yonatanzun...
Google did not start this, but they needed to end it, rather than spending months and months bleeding into the water. You might think I'm over-hyping that, but we're out here talking about it almost a year later! A company can't afford to let that kind of thing burn out of control internally.
...since a lot of the people in control of these places didn't graduate.
I can see how putting my info on a blockchain provides verification that I put my info on the blockchain. I can see how you could use encryption techniques to allow me to encode on the blockchain who can access my info. But I don't see how this causes those accessing my info to use appropriate security protocols to protect my info. At some point, they'll want access to my actual information, and once they have that, what prevents them from storing a copy for their convenient, or simply forwarding it to some third party that's paying them for information? Also, how does this help at all with apps asking for access to personal information that they have no need for?
People who write apps could already ask for minimal information, and they could already encrypt the info with something only I can provide to minimize their contact surface, they already could use best practices like salting their hashed password storage. For the most part, the problem isn't that they are trying really hard to do these things, and failing for technical reasons, the problem is that they aren't bothering to even try.
The google Maps when was released was impressive, as it used the newer features in the browser, where other vendors were a bit wary to implement. During this time, including Javascript as only for form validations, and was coded to be expected not to be used. However these new features in the browser have became commonplace. But other then using the new standard browser features, Google didn't do too much that was crazy, Like having a plug in, using a MS or Firefox only feature. They followed the HTML 4 Standards. By actually following the standards it allowed for easier forward compatibility, as features are removed and deprecated much slower from a standard then they are in some crazy hack.
The value in having a reasonable and stable API from the beginning would be that the tech used to build the client would be irrelevant. If you design your API around the specific capabilities of a specific browser, then in two or three years it's going to be painful to continue supporting that browser while also supporting whatever new API you created to conform to the specifics of newer browsers.
[That said, I think the OP on this thread overplays it. I doubt the first choice was having a reasonable API, the first choice was to commit to supporting things for a long time, at which point there are incentives to have an appropriate API. As opposed to the standard approach of "Who cares, just throw the shit against the wall and see what sticks", where you promote cutting corners to a valuable attribute of your project.]
And taxes here with AMT are around 50%, so 400K -> 200K
Cost of living is crushing along with abusive confiscatory taxation and the tech companies are ALWAYS trying to flood the market with H1B and scabs to lower your "rate"
How're those leftist policies workin' out for you over there in Commiefornia? Not so good?
Aw, that's a shame. Now we just need to figure out how to quarantine Commiefornia and prevent the infection from spreading. Then we can all sit back and have our kids learn the object lesson that the Commifornians are setting as an example.
It's getting so bad here that people are leaving, driving housing prices up and making traffic worse.
Google itself will rocket through development like an adderall fueled college developer mainlining 4 loko's (blue raspberry old school of course) roll it out with maybe 60% of it done, get a few publisher's on board with sweet deals and throw tons of money at them, and users login for their Beta (it's always BETA) service.
Then the adrenaline haze wears off, Google actually has to support clients, wrangle in contracts from publisher's to put more games on the system, figure out how to get around bandwidth caps that your lovely ISP's enforce on you, roll out development updates while slashing the team and budget until 18 months later Google walks away for the next OOOHHH SHINEY! thing and we are left with a stillborn service that makes the Phantom console look like Steve Jobs christened it from Heaven.
You forgot to mention that the next "OOOHHH SHINEY" thing will be a video game console capable of streaming. It just won't share any APIs or code or anything with the current one.
That said ... I'm honestly not sure I see the point of this. If you remove the battery and screen from an Android device, what you're left with is maybe $50 worth of stuff. Add controllers (or allow phones as controllers) and it feels like streaming is irrelevant.
That could have worrying implications for America's long-term economic prospects.
This is a result of changes to America's economy, not a cause of it. A startup like Apple or Microsoft needed to get that IPO money to help fund continued growth. Factories are EXPENSIVE. This continued into the 90's, because people are EXPENSIVE. But today, you can create a billion dollar company without high capital or personnel expenses, because the point where you can get to scale-out is much earlier. The first case where I really noticed this was YouTube, which was bought for $1.65B, with something like 70 employees, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that half of those employees were only hired because they had to do _something_ with their revenue. These days, you don't even need your own servers in datacenters, so you could probably get there with a dozen employees.
So, basically, if you can fund scale-out without going to the markets, why in the world would you go to the markets? For many things, overfunding scale-out is a sure route to failure, not increased success!
A current counter-example to the above is Uber. I really have no idea why anyone backing them is willing to pony up billions of dollars to pay for drivers to ferry customers around. That kind of thing made sense to me when your marginal costs of doing business were high per unit because of quantum issues (you can't write half a backend service or half of a UI), but Uber is miles past the point where they can realistically expect to grow past their expenses. So as best I can figure, they're going to go public into a market desperate for IPOs, and the results aren't going to be pleasant for IPO investors.
First of all, the headline on this article is silly. What are Silicon Valley manufacturers supposed to do - intentionally make their products less attractive to consumers?
As someone who worked at one of those companies, IMHO the problem is not that they need to go against capitalism, the problem is that the people within the company often quite literally believe they are helping users with this stuff. If someone thinks they are taking advantage of people, you can plausibly reason with them to change their behavior. If someone believes they are helping, then it is REALLY HARD to work with them to fix what they're doing wrong.
The linked article focuses on 'tech addiction' as being the problem, and we have been here before. I have been around long enough to remember when tech addiction was phrased in the press as "teenagers" talking for hours on the old black plug-in wall telephone. Young people were offered this new mechanism for keeping in touch when they were not physically together, and they embraced it. Over time, telephony was integrated into the general culture and became part of the human background.
Then there was the time when television was going to make zombies of us all, with nobody stepping outside ever again, and the rise of cars not just as competition for public transit, but as a place for "teenagers" to Have Sex. Note the theme developing here?
So now that "teenagers" have discovered the smartphone this time, it has enabled a fad for social media. Though the idea that we would all drop everything to become addicted to Facebook is already dated, pearls are still being clutched over the possibility that some social medium will become mental Fentanyl. But now that Markey is involved, I know that can't happen.
Maybe, maybe not. At this point, we have the computing power to analyse and influence individual users in real time. It might be just another distraction we learn to live with, but it might be something which destroys a lot of social value. And while you're poo-pooing past things like television as resolved issues, they aren't done, they're evolving over time, sources like Fox News use tremendous amounts of computing power to figure out what works and what doesn't, giving specific answers to questions that 40 years ago were answered with executives making guesses.
I saw something earlier today about a "GOP train wreck". Is this connected to that story, or does it just refer to the Republicans more generally?
I think it was a GOP trainwreck which happened when they hit a garbage truck. I'm not aware if the garbage truck was on fire at the time.
Orson Scott Card actually dug into this a bit in the later part of the Ender's series with the philotic twining and aiuas as the fundamental core of the universe, that particles essentially willed themselves into existence in an increasingly hierarchical way, and that they could be called into existence by others. Base matter was a certain kind of aiua possessed of a will that could bond and bind energy into a material form, while consciousness was an aiua that could govern and rule over other aiuas. That theory always seemed to resonate a bit well as a universal kind of spirituality intertwined with physics. In any case, it made for great reading.
I think you're speaking of a mythical fourth book in the Ender's series, which was never written because Card lost his mind. Same kind of thing as the Matrix sequels and the Star Wars Christmas Special, the universe acts to prevent certain outcomes from occurring.
They were like 640x480 or something, and the windows had title bars. Now I consider my 27" monitor to be pretty modest, given what I see others using, and the title bars are literally irrelevant.
Maybe instead we should just have the title bars disappear when you aren't near them, like all the other UI controls! In fact, why don't we have the entire window operate that way, with only the things you hover over being visible? Everything else can fade to light gray on dark white (and in the Linux case, semi-transparent so you can see through to the low-context stuff behind), like the UI equivalent of brutalist architecture.
Netflix seems a bit of a special case. I've already payed for the service, so when they release anything that looks remotely appealing, I watch it. That doesn't make it a good movie, it just makes it the best thing on at the moment. Bright was a decent movie (better than 30% for sure), but it wasn't mindblowing. I probably wouldn't have bought a movie ticket.
That said, I've been using moviepass, so theater-going has become more like Netflix for me. It doesn't have to be some anticipated summer blockbuster, just the best thing in theaters at the moment.
Netflix is chock full of crap, so saying that something is the best thing to watch on Netflix right now should not be interpreted to mean that it's amazing. I haven't seen Bright, but there's no reason why the choice between the critics being right and the audience being right has to be mutually exclusive.
Also, a movie which is not good isn't necessarily bad. BvS was bad, but something like Waterworld just wasn't good.
For as much truth or insight as his post may contain, he still really doesn't get Google at all. Google's customers aren't the people who use Android, Google+, Google Voice, etc. Google's customers are advertisers that want to have eyeballs and ear holes to blast their ads at and they don't care about innovation, they just want something that works and Google wants to make sure that they keep those real customers of theirs by offering a rival to anything else that is being used to sell ads online. They didn't make Google+ because they wanted a better social network, they made Google+ so that if social networks became the new center of online advertising instead of web search that Google wouldn't end up out in the rain.
So, if I said of a television network that they were going to fail because they weren't delivering programming that their customers wanted to watch, you'd go off quibbling about how their customers are actually advertisers? If that's the case, do you realize that you're entirely missing the point of the statement because you're focussing on possible flaws in one bit of the presentation? Because in the television-network case, it really doesn't matter how we pedantically define "customer", because if they aren't delivering programming that people want to watch, they will fail.
So, yes, they made Google+ because they didn't want to miss out if social networks became the new center of online advertising (one customer), true, but I think the article's point was that Google+ has not succeeded because they weren't serving the needs of the user (also a customer). The fact that their goal was to support advertisers doesn't excuse their lack of attention to the user, regardless of which one you want to call "the customer", and that serves the goals of neither the advertiser nor the user. I would expect perceptive readers to be able to figure that out without getting lost in the weeds.
Some companies will just take whatever code they find, use it without attribution and F.U. Admittedly, most of those companies aren't particularly successful, but it happens a lot, because it's easy. Those bad actors can just do it without worry, and that's pretty cheap.
Unfortunately, many companies refuse to use open source AT ALL, because they believe it is infectious to ownership of their IP. Whether that is true or not of a particular license, there is a notable subset of the open source world who thinks infection is a feature which should be encouraged, so it can be hard to get legal departments past that hurdle.
When I was working at Google, they had a department tasked with reviewing things and deciding on which were usable. It was actually pretty nice, because at Google's scale, they could have experienced people who could make decisions with confidence rather than fear. But even there, there were licenses which were "Don't even install these packages on your system".
I get GNU's position on this, I just think it's a dumb position which ignores reality. Sure, it _would_ be nice if all software was checked into github for free sharing by everyone. But that's just not how people work, sometimes you need to put in time getting them used to the idea of sharing before they get to a point where they can successfully share the stuff they're writing.
Consumers tend to like apps as the solution to get to 911 services. Sure, they can get advanced services (like a real GPS location), and other nice things, but it relies on a bunch of technologies that are designed to work "at best effort". If you don't have data service and you launch the app, it won't work. If you call 911 and don't have phone service, your phone will actually roam to anybody and everybody's network you have a radio for and place the call.
The app could whistle like a modem over the voice channel. Or use morse code. Or some clever steganographic solution to weave the data into the audio stream, interleaved to pass the highest bits first.
"Might"? Remember 9/11?
Yeah, public opinion will change. All of our phones will require full real-time uploads, because the government will be all like "We're sure their phone has contact information for other people, even though we didn't figure out which phone we wanted until a few weeks after the event. Unfortunately, the phone was destroyed in the event so we think in the future we should receive the information in advance."
It is bovine scat that Congress-critters are wasting time about this. There really are more important issues than a stinking smartphone charge IMHO.
Maybe it's time to constitute a convention to change the rules to add a branch of government in charge of executing specific actions, rather than making broad decisions. Then Congress could step back and say things like "You people over there who work for us, we think it's bad the companies rip people off, please make sure companies don't rip people off", and they could provide money to fund enforcement.
Someday, I guess.