I started posting on G+ on July 3rd 2011 and stopped on January 19th 2019. That is 2757 days.
In that time I posted 2747 posts (not counting private posts) which received 17494 +1, 10357 comments and 2469 reshares.
As all good things tend to, this too had to end. In this case it is not entirely voluntary but Google was forcing my hands. I do not stay at pubs till the innkeeper throws me out, so I was leaving there too at a time of my choosing.
This would usually also be the place where I would thank Google for giving us the opportunity of this social media. But currently my feelings are rather "f*ck you" for how the closure is handled. They burnt more trust than most companies ever get from me in a lifetime. I do not appreciate getting lied to and shunned. As mentioned elsewhere, one of my plans in 2019 is to move every possible service of mine away from Google.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack threads on fire off the shoulder of Brexit. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Gamer Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to quit.
The "ghost town" discussion was based on false premises outside and within Google.
The service never rivaled Facebook and nobody on G+ ever wanted the service to become Facebook.
The users there came to G+ because they did not like Facebook. So we were just a few million people who were happy with what they had. So were no billions, but it was far from being a ghost town.
My stream had about 400+ posts per day. I can't remember my last post that did not get any reaction.
I started posting on G+ on July 3rd 2011. That is 2757 days ago.
In that time I posted 2747 posts (not counting private posts) which received 17494 +1, 10357 comments and 2469 reshares.
They kill all that. So my anger has multiple angles:
1) I pay for G+ as part of my GSuite. So I expect it to work roughly in the way I am used to. But Google kicks off 90+% of the users and says something like "Yeah, we promised you a car but not a motor." So I feel cheated by Google. How can I trust them to not discard the IMAP access to GMail or remove files from my GDrive because of some obscure policy decision?
2) The shutdown is handled in an unprofessional way. It starts by giving us bogus reasons. If the API is the problem, fix it or disable it and the problem is solved. But the shutdown is not even close to a logical conclusion. They have other reasons but decide to give us just PR bullsh*t. All the information about the shutdown is handed out as if letters were in short supply. You can still create a G+ account and you have no idea that you are heading for a cliff. There are dozens of questions surrounding the shutdown. People have tried very hard to get them answered but Google even refuses to acknowledge them. I have seen services run by a single person who outperformed Google by 2 orders of magnitude concerning the communication.
3) The shutdown is done in an unseemly haste. This can be considered to be a part of 2) but it is an insult of it's own. My own leaving is faster than I like, but I want to be on the safe side with my backups before Google messes with things.
4) Google refuses all communication with users. Either you have someone like the ex-boyfriend of the sister of your best buddy that has cousin who works at Google or you will get no information. The ONLY way left to communicate with Google for me is to put all my services elsewhere. Lauren Weinstein has diagnosed similar problems with his request for an ombudsman already some time ago.
I do not hate Google. My anger is born of disappointment, very deep disappointment.
Though I am sad that he didn't finish the game, I rather feel more sorry for Josh Parnell than for me or my money.
He gave everything he got and it was not enough. Things like this happen. As far as I can see it, he did not spend money for things outside the project. Rather the contrary: my impression is that he poured is own resources and health into it beyond any reasonable expectation.
Other projects (e.g. Clang from Neal Stephenson) spent less effort for more money and tried to sell the sorry result (the game was less finished than Limit Theory by several orders of magnitude) as success.
As a result I am neither angry nor mad and wish Josh Parnell all the best.
There IMHO some important facts missing in the description:
a) He did not have a Office license, so he downloaded a key generator.
b) The Kaspersky software would not let him run that generator because it considered it harmful
c) He disabled Kaspersky, ran the key generator and got his PC infected
d) He re-enabled Kaspersky, the software detected an infection and began looking for malicious files
e) The software found the NSA written malware and did exactly what it was supposed to do: it was configured to upload new suspicious files to Kaspersky.
f) The upload server was under surveillance by the Israeli secret service.
It is good that he started reflecting. But he still has a long way to go. He got a friendly journalist for this article and that is OK, since he also got a lot of the other kind lately.
But even this author cannot help noticing, that he has been cherry-picking and using studies where even their authors say, that his conclusion are not supported by the studies. It is not presenting (disputed) facts that drew the fire to him, but putting them into an invalid context to (badly) veil his misogynistic undertones.
In my impression his (not well written) memo was mainly a whiny complaint about brilliant men like him having to put up with diversity issues. It is rather that attitude that will make him hard to employ because companies (like Google did) will judge him to be a risk for their image. And I do not see him working on this issue yet.
His bad luck was that this memo drew a lot of attention. But he did everything to get this attention and to his own demise he succeeded with it.
I hope he will not end up as a pariah in the tech industry. But two things need to happen for that: He has to fully understand what he did and others need to give him a second chance. The chances for either do not seem good at the moment.
If this web site was the worst site that needs to be shut down, Germany would be a happy country;-). It was in the large part only a forum with anonymous usage. The name associated it with the left and the moderators surely had their sympathies rather on the left end on the spectrum.
The site was used by extremists to announce their deeds and to blurp their justifications. On the other hands, they were constantly taking a beating by the far bigger majorities of lefties. It was always clearly visible, how isolated the extremists were.
Tactically the police robbed themselves of one of the best intelligence sources they had on the extreme left.
In a commercial environment, polymaths are highly sought talents. Especially if you have a knack for communication too. On the academic side, you might not find great acclaim though.
Company makes "A" company policy. Company is under legal threats for not being sufficiently "A". Employee posts rant against "A" and gets fired. Surprise?
P.S. Also let's try a thought experiment: a medium level wall street banker calls on his employer to be "less hostile on socialism". How would that go?
If I buy something does not solely depend on the price. It also depends on the value I get from the item.
So when asking the question, you should ask "Are those features worth X".
I haven't seen the final list for the next iPhone yet. So I cannot say yet if it will be worth Y dollars.
In the past, the iPhones I bought were worth every penny I paid. But be aware: the value may depend on your needs. So what may be true for me, must not be true for everyone else.
I have no problems with paying for a news source. I'ld rather pay myself than having some advertiser pay it for me.
But there is one point I am no longer willing to compromise: any news source I pay for must offer me a full text RSS feed.
I read about 400 news items per day. With several sources I get a decent balancing. But this is only possible if I get full text RSS feeds. Otherwise the workflow kills me.
In 2013 I bought my wife an iPhone 5s. It still gets updates and patches and works decently with the current OS. I am currently upgrading her to an iPhone 7, the old iPhone still fetches a decent price. Migration to the new phone is painless.
I use Feedly too due to it's good cross platform support.
Also I appreciate how people like Randall Munroe handle the streams compared to someone like Scott Adams. I try to keep that in mind, when I put down money somewhere...
Looking at their web-site they sound more like weapon dealers to me: "The team employs exclusive in-house techniques to create a working exploit tool for the vulnerability" and "We design our offerings such that our clients can digest the information regardless of their intended implementation."
The bandwidth requirements of modern monitor cables are insane. We have up to nearly 40gbps between a PC and a 4K monitor with 60Hz.
The strange thing is: it is already been proven that 50mbps are more than enough (with compression). There are three orders of magnitude in between.
IMHO the next monitor cable should be something like CAT6A and the GPU and the monitor should speak over an IP connection. This would greatly simplify a lot of things.
"Why do you think Twitter hasn't enforced their own Terms of Service rules when it comes to Donald Trump?"
Well: Trump equals attention, attention equals visitors, visitors equal ad impressions, ad impressions equal money.
In case someone didn't notice:
Attention (not regard or esteem) has become a de facto currency in the last years.
How do you think people like Limbaugh, Beck or Trump can make a living? From honest work? Please don't make me laugh. They use their hate and bully-ness to create attention which they monetize.
You find the mechanisms at work in Gamergate or Puppygate or whatever the attention whores come up with:-(.ï
Slashdot Mirror
I started posting on G+ on July 3rd 2011 and stopped on January 19th 2019. That is 2757 days.
In that time I posted 2747 posts (not counting private posts) which received 17494 +1, 10357 comments and 2469 reshares.
As all good things tend to, this too had to end. In this case it is not entirely voluntary but Google was forcing my hands. I do not stay at pubs till the innkeeper throws me out, so I was leaving there too at a time of my choosing.
This would usually also be the place where I would thank Google for giving us the opportunity of this social media. But currently my feelings are rather "f*ck you" for how the closure is handled. They burnt more trust than most companies ever get from me in a lifetime. I do not appreciate getting lied to and shunned. As mentioned elsewhere, one of my plans in 2019 is to move every possible service of mine away from Google.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack threads on fire off the shoulder of Brexit. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Gamer Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to quit.
Nope, I don't throw any love at Google and am currently moving all my services away from Google.
What I cherished is the community we had built. Now we have to rebuild it somewhere else.
If you're interested, here is my farewell letter on G+: https://plus.google.com/+Marti...
Nope
The "ghost town" discussion was based on false premises outside and within Google.
The service never rivaled Facebook and nobody on G+ ever wanted the service to become Facebook.
The users there came to G+ because they did not like Facebook. So we were just a few million people who were happy with what they had. So were no billions, but it was far from being a ghost town.
My stream had about 400+ posts per day. I can't remember my last post that did not get any reaction.
I started posting on G+ on July 3rd 2011. That is 2757 days ago.
In that time I posted 2747 posts (not counting private posts) which received 17494 +1, 10357 comments and 2469 reshares.
They kill all that. So my anger has multiple angles:
1) I pay for G+ as part of my GSuite. So I expect it to work roughly in the way I am used to. But Google kicks off 90+% of the users and says something like "Yeah, we promised you a car but not a motor." So I feel cheated by Google. How can I trust them to not discard the IMAP access to GMail or remove files from my GDrive because of some obscure policy decision?
2) The shutdown is handled in an unprofessional way. It starts by giving us bogus reasons. If the API is the problem, fix it or disable it and the problem is solved. But the shutdown is not even close to a logical conclusion. They have other reasons but decide to give us just PR bullsh*t. All the information about the shutdown is handed out as if letters were in short supply. You can still create a G+ account and you have no idea that you are heading for a cliff. There are dozens of questions surrounding the shutdown. People have tried very hard to get them answered but Google even refuses to acknowledge them. I have seen services run by a single person who outperformed Google by 2 orders of magnitude concerning the communication.
3) The shutdown is done in an unseemly haste. This can be considered to be a part of 2) but it is an insult of it's own. My own leaving is faster than I like, but I want to be on the safe side with my backups before Google messes with things.
4) Google refuses all communication with users. Either you have someone like the ex-boyfriend of the sister of your best buddy that has cousin who works at Google or you will get no information. The ONLY way left to communicate with Google for me is to put all my services elsewhere. Lauren Weinstein has diagnosed similar problems with his request for an ombudsman already some time ago.
I do not hate Google. My anger is born of disappointment, very deep disappointment.
Though I am sad that he didn't finish the game, I rather feel more sorry for Josh Parnell than for me or my money.
He gave everything he got and it was not enough. Things like this happen. As far as I can see it, he did not spend money for things outside the project. Rather the contrary: my impression is that he poured is own resources and health into it beyond any reasonable expectation.
Other projects (e.g. Clang from Neal Stephenson) spent less effort for more money and tried to sell the sorry result (the game was less finished than Limit Theory by several orders of magnitude) as success.
As a result I am neither angry nor mad and wish Josh Parnell all the best.
There IMHO some important facts missing in the description:
a) He did not have a Office license, so he downloaded a key generator.
b) The Kaspersky software would not let him run that generator because it considered it harmful
c) He disabled Kaspersky, ran the key generator and got his PC infected
d) He re-enabled Kaspersky, the software detected an infection and began looking for malicious files
e) The software found the NSA written malware and did exactly what it was supposed to do: it was configured to upload new suspicious files to Kaspersky.
f) The upload server was under surveillance by the Israeli secret service.
It is good that he started reflecting. But he still has a long way to go. He got a friendly journalist for this article and that is OK, since he also got a lot of the other kind lately.
But even this author cannot help noticing, that he has been cherry-picking and using studies where even their authors say, that his conclusion are not supported by the studies. It is not presenting (disputed) facts that drew the fire to him, but putting them into an invalid context to (badly) veil his misogynistic undertones.
In my impression his (not well written) memo was mainly a whiny complaint about brilliant men like him having to put up with diversity issues. It is rather that attitude that will make him hard to employ because companies (like Google did) will judge him to be a risk for their image. And I do not see him working on this issue yet.
His bad luck was that this memo drew a lot of attention. But he did everything to get this attention and to his own demise he succeeded with it.
I hope he will not end up as a pariah in the tech industry. But two things need to happen for that: He has to fully understand what he did and others need to give him a second chance. The chances for either do not seem good at the moment.
This post comes too early. First find the damn thing, then boast about how this or that method helped finding it.
Previous experience shows that does not work like that.
If this web site was the worst site that needs to be shut down, Germany would be a happy country ;-). It was in the large part only a forum with anonymous usage. The name associated it with the left and the moderators surely had their sympathies rather on the left end on the spectrum.
The site was used by extremists to announce their deeds and to blurp their justifications. On the other hands, they were constantly taking a beating by the far bigger majorities of lefties. It was always clearly visible, how isolated the extremists were.
Tactically the police robbed themselves of one of the best intelligence sources they had on the extreme left.
In a commercial environment, polymaths are highly sought talents. Especially if you have a knack for communication too. On the academic side, you might not find great acclaim though.
Company makes "A" company policy. Company is under legal threats for not being sufficiently "A". Employee posts rant against "A" and gets fired. Surprise?
P.S. Also let's try a thought experiment: a medium level wall street banker calls on his employer to be "less hostile on socialism". How would that go?
If I buy something does not solely depend on the price. It also depends on the value I get from the item.
So when asking the question, you should ask "Are those features worth X".
I haven't seen the final list for the next iPhone yet. So I cannot say yet if it will be worth Y dollars.
In the past, the iPhones I bought were worth every penny I paid. But be aware: the value may depend on your needs. So what may be true for me, must not be true for everyone else.
I have no problems with paying for a news source. I'ld rather pay myself than having some advertiser pay it for me.
But there is one point I am no longer willing to compromise: any news source I pay for must offer me a full text RSS feed.
I read about 400 news items per day. With several sources I get a decent balancing. But this is only possible if I get full text RSS feeds. Otherwise the workflow kills me.
Let's take the following example:
In 2013 I bought my wife an iPhone 5s. It still gets updates and patches and works decently with the current OS. I am currently upgrading her to an iPhone 7, the old iPhone still fetches a decent price. Migration to the new phone is painless.
Agreed, it got worse. Still there is nothing better by a long way :-(.
I use Feedly too due to it's good cross platform support.
Also I appreciate how people like Randall Munroe handle the streams compared to someone like Scott Adams. I try to keep that in mind, when I put down money somewhere...
I still use RSS for about 50 feeds with about 400 articles a day. The problem are the sources.
The quality is declining. Some feeds only deliver the teaser and a link to the article on the web site.
Even when I offer money, nearly no newspaper is able to deliver a full RSS stream :-(.
If you sell to them, you're a weapon dealer of the shadier kind. You'll help oppressive regimes to jail dissidents.
Looking at their web-site they sound more like weapon dealers to me: "The team employs exclusive in-house techniques to create a working exploit tool for the vulnerability" and "We design our offerings such that our clients can digest the information regardless of their intended implementation."
I use a Homematic CCU2. It works perfectly without any cloud.
This is a very small step in the right direction.
The bandwidth requirements of modern monitor cables are insane. We have up to nearly 40gbps between a PC and a 4K monitor with 60Hz.
The strange thing is: it is already been proven that 50mbps are more than enough (with compression). There are three orders of magnitude in between.
IMHO the next monitor cable should be something like CAT6A and the GPU and the monitor should speak over an IP connection. This would greatly simplify a lot of things.
"Why do you think Twitter hasn't enforced their own Terms of Service rules when it comes to Donald Trump?"
Well: Trump equals attention, attention equals visitors, visitors equal ad impressions, ad impressions equal money.
In case someone didn't notice:
Attention (not regard or esteem) has become a de facto currency in the last years.
How do you think people like Limbaugh, Beck or Trump can make a living? From honest work? Please don't make me laugh. They use their hate and bully-ness to create attention which they monetize.
You find the mechanisms at work in Gamergate or Puppygate or whatever the attention whores come up with :-(.ï
Court verdicts are not easy to read, but they managed to garble it further.
The verdict is not about sharing your purchases but the unsolicited sharing of offers from marketplace vendors.
The German Pocket Battleships (Graf Spee, Admiral Sheer, Lützow) of World War II were slightly smaller than this "destroyer" ;-).
The HMS Dreadnought (which gave it's name to complete class of super-battleships) was only about 1/3 larger.
The Gearing-class destroyer (WW II too) about a 1/4th of the size of the Zumwalt.