"As I see it, there are two main problems with this situation:"
Why do you consider [1] to be a problem?
Did you read TFA? The "revenue" in question here is royalties from advertisements. Many, many other people & companies get royalties from Google for advertisements. Do you claim that Google is likely to "influence" all of them, too?
It's advertising revenue. If it isn't Google, it's going to be someone else. And it doesn't give Google any "leverage".
No, you don't understand what is happening.
A default installation of Firefox contains a Google search box. This means that when people want to search for something they are most likely to use that search box, which dives traffic to Google, which greatly improves Google's chance of making money from the ads associated with search results.
In return for Mozilla putting a Google search box in Firefox, Google currently pays Mozilla $300 Million a year. That's just under a billion dollars over the course of their 3 year contract, which expires at the end of 2014.
This is why Do Not Track if off by default. This is why ad-blocking isn't built in to Firefox. If you think that Google giving Mozilla a billion dollars doesn't give them any influence, well, that's your problem.
You obviously do not use, nor rely on, extensions. Extensions for Chrome/Chromium pale in comparison to what extensions for Firefox can do.
Want tabs on the side? Good luck with Chrome. Good luck with alternate Webkit browsers with not enough marketshare to attract extensions.
You obviously haven't tried the new "Australis" version of Firefox. It's stupid and dumbed down and in a few months it will be your only choice unless you stay with an older version of Firefox forever...
The one thing that that has always made Firefox better than all the other browsers is the ability to do extensive customizing. But they are hard at work fixing that. The new "Australis" build removes an enormous amount of customizability and is nothing but one giant Fuck You to users.
Tabs On Top -- No thanks, I want my tabs below the URL bar, where God intended them to be. Well, Australis says Fuck You, you're getting Tabs On Top whether you like it or not. And just removing the menu item and burying the setting in about:config isn't good enough. Even if you go into about:config and change the setting, it does nothing. Don't like Tabs On Top? Australis says: Fuck You.
There are only 2 toolbars -- Menu bar and Bookmarks toolbar. No more Add-On Bar, which means the Status Bar Extension (among others) doesn't work because THERE'S NO FUCKING PLACE TO PUT IT. It's bad enough they removed a feature and forced people to rely on an extension, but now, Australis says: You want a Status Bar? Fuck You.
The Back and Forward buttons are now welded to the left side of the URL Bar and can't be moved. The Reload Button has been replaced with a swirly arrow that is welded to the far right side of the URL Bar and can't be moved. And the Stop Button is gone completely. Want to arrange your buttons the same way you've had for years? Australis says: Fuck you.
Want text labels with your buttons? Australis says: Fuck you.
I could go on and on but fuck it I give up. If I want a browser with a shitty UI that can't be changed I'll use Internet Explorer or Chrome.
Google Play has recently surpassed the one million mark when it comes to the apps it offers
There's the problem right there. It isn't possible to have 1 million apps that are actually useful. Not even close. Just that number alone tells you that there is a problem -- that you have an enormous number of apps that are simply duplicates of others or malicious or just plain useless.
Instagram, had it stayed an independent company, *COULD*could be worth between $5 billion and $15 billion today.
The important word here is "could". The truth is, Instagram pulled off an amazing scam and they were smart to just go for it.
-- Instagram takes $50 million from investors and gives them 50% ownership of the company -- 3 days later, Instagram, which has 13 employees and zero revenue, agrees to be bought by Facebook for $1 Billion -- Investors see their investment go from $50 Million to $500 Million overnight -- The founder of Instagram gets half a billion in the process. -- PROFIT!!
Attempts have been made in the past to automate programming, it's never worked very well (or at all in some cases)
Too many people think that programing is "just a lot of typing". Which leads people to believe that they should create a "new programming language" where you can just type "Make a new better version of Facebook" and be done with it.
Which leads to a lot of crap with "Visual" in its name. Hey look, you don't have to type. Just drag this widget from here to here. And we've seen how sell that turned out.
Even really smart people come up with stupid ideas.
Anything that is capable of doing complex things is complex itself. It's unavoidable. Even if every function by itself is extremely simple -- just press the green button -- what happens when there are a thousand buttons. And any one of them can interact with any other button.
What's really funny is how they completely failed to understand who their customers were. >
No, they know exactly who their customers are. their customers are the people who pay them to display ads and inject extra crap into downloads. That's where SourceForge's revenue comes from. Not from you.
I looked at the blog and all I saw was a bunch of petty complaints. Things that may technically be true, but are not anywhere near the horrendous scandal that the blog's author tries to claim.
For example, a couple of university press releases and documents from university board of trustees meetings refer to a person as "Dr. Henderson" 6 weeks before she officially received her PhD. Oh the horror!! And her resume fails to list the 4 months that she was demoted from Dean of Instruction to ordinary teaching faculty -- 11 years ago.
Seriously, these people need to get a hobby or something.
They use consumer hard drives not enterprise, They say themselves that this data probably does not really apply to ent drives. BB also uses a custom chassis that a lot of people would take issue with as far as potential vibration etc. That is a great deal different than a well engineered SAN or even server and affects wear and performance.
In other words, this is a typical Slashdot article with little or no meaningful information.
They have a lot of drives, but their data is only from 4 years. The article would be more meaningful if they had been gathering data for a longer time.rather than just resorting to crap like
"engineer, Brian Beach, speculates that the failure rate will probably stick to around 12% per year.
This is a proxy for what marketers call "reach". The more followers you have, the more people will read your posts..
I could see that on Facebook. Even though I have no use for Facebook it does allow anyone to essentially have their own personal website where they can post useful information. The fact that nobody actually uses Facebook to post useful information -- not even businesses -- is another matter entirely.
Twitter, on the other hand, is completely useless. It's impossible to convey any useful information, which makes your eleventy gazillion followers pointless.
This is a proxy for what marketers call "reach". The more followers you have, the more people will read your posts. Except here the followers are not real and so people buying this SEO snake oil are being ripped-off.
I noticed something similar on a photo-sharing website I use. I noticed that I had a lot of followers. WTF? Who are these people? When I started looking into it, my "followers" had posted no pictures or had a page of a couple of random generic pictures. And I noticed that my followers all had followers who had followers . . . . etc.
Well, at least we can celebrate the first years. Before the new versioning system and adding everything but your mom's dong instead of letting addons do the work.
It's worse than that. With every new version, useful features are changed or removed and people are being forced to use more and more extensions to regain functionality that has been ripped out. Which leads to the current ridiculous situation:
-- You have to depend on some random person to create the extensions you need -- You have to hope that the random person continues to update the extension so that it works with future versions of Firefox -- Or you can spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to write extensions yourself just so you can restore functionality that never should have been removed in the first place -- Installing too many extensions is well known to cause performance and/or stability problems with Firefox.
The problem isn't just that Firefox is bloated and full of unnecessary crap. Even worse, they keep changing or removing existing features that are actually useful. Every new version now brings more pointless changes that make Firefox just a little bit worse. And no matter how much users complain about all the constant pointless tinkering and the nonstop treadmill of unnecessary changes, the response from Mozilla is always the same. A thinly veiled Fuck You We Don't Care What You Think.
[Update 2: The change has been rolled back: you can now go to http://cloud.feedly.com/ and login using the old Google Authentication mechanism. The main lesson we learned here is that user should control how they want to login to login to their feedly. We will make sure not to forget this. Have a good week end].
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Until they try to figure out another way to force this on people.
Google's ultimate goal is simple. You can't just use only Gmail or only Youtube or whatever. If you want to use one service, you have to use them all.
If you think better, stronger encryption is the answer, then you don't understand the problem.
In 2011 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued a ruling that many of the NSA's activities were illegal and unconstitutional. You'll notice that this had no effect on the NSA's spying because (a) It was a secret order issued by a secret court and nobody knew about it until just recently and (b) There is essentially no oversight of the NSA which means they are free to do whatever they want.
So, even if you have some super-duper unbreakable encryption, which has been audited and you can guarantee that it contains no NSA backdoors, so what? If the NSA can't break your encryption they'll simply yell "National Security" and get a secret order from a secret court compelling to do decrypt your stuff or face prosecution -- prosecution which will be carried out in secret, making it impossible to defend yourself.
If you've been paying attention, you see what the real problem is.
The Linux Colonel stayed in the 2.x numbers for many years. I even remember a post by Linux Torvalds on the mailing list saying that there would never ever be a version 3.0. At the time I thought that was pretty weird. I mean, things are going to get a little strange when you get to version 2.99.99.99.99.99.
So,obviously he changed his mind and not only went to 3.0 but apparently he is bored with 3.x and wants to jump from 3.19 directly to 4.0.
Maybe he's jealous of Firefox and Chrome and is trying to catch up to them.
Bill Gates is right. Zuckerberg's plan is a joke and the Internet isn't all that important for solving the world's problems. Unfortunately, Gates isn't helping much either, due to his fake philanthropy that often does more harm than good.
The Gates Foundation has an endowment of $30 Billion making it the largest philanthropic organization in the world. But one third of that money is invested in companies whose practices run counter to the foundation’s supposed charitable goals and social mission.
In Africa, the Foundation has invested more than $400 million dollars in oil companies responsible for pollution that many blame for respiratory problems and other afflictions among the local population.
The Gates Foundation also has investments in sixty-nine of the worst polluting companies in the US and Canada.. It holds investments in pharmaceutical companies whose drugs cost far beyond what most patients around the world can afford and the Foundation often lobbies on behalf of those companies for "Intellectual Property" protections that make obtaining low cost medicines more difficult.
Other companies in the Foundation’s portfolio have been accused of forcing thousands of people to lose their homes, supporting child labor and defrauding and neglecting patients in need of medical care.
Dave Winer laments the lack of serious software reviews
I lament the lack of serious software.
It's all useless, poorly written crap. More and more I find myself being forced to stay with older software because all the newest stuff is a big steaming pile of shit.
I've always thought it odd that no other email provider ever adopted Gmails "search not sort" mentality.
Because it's stupid. If you have to constantly search for things it means you are a lazy disorganized slob. The number of times I've had to search for an email can be counted on one hand because I have things organized so that I know where they are.
Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at
on
The Case Against Gmail
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Ed Bott has been sucking the Microsoft tit for years and he loves it.
I've been using Gmail since the old days when you had to have an invitation, and I've always used a third party email client because Gmail's web-based interface is stupid and pointless. Ed Bott is an idiot and I don't understand how he ever got a job writing for any computer/tech related magazine or website.
It took $24.9 Billion to buy up all of Dell's outstanding shares. That money had to come somewhere. So, right from day one, the new private Dell is nearly 25 Billion in debt. There will have to be major layoffs and other changes, such as selling off parts of the business.
It amazes me that people still don't understand that social networks don't exist to provide services to users.... they exist to turn users into products that can be sold.
It amazes me even more that people think they need a LinkedIn app on their phone. Seriously. WTF.
If you think you need this app on your phone you get what you deserve.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what happens when you let a bunch of musicians run things.
"As I see it, there are two main problems with this situation:"
Why do you consider [1] to be a problem?
Did you read TFA? The "revenue" in question here is royalties from advertisements. Many, many other people & companies get royalties from Google for advertisements. Do you claim that Google is likely to "influence" all of them, too?
It's advertising revenue. If it isn't Google, it's going to be someone else. And it doesn't give Google any "leverage".
No, you don't understand what is happening.
A default installation of Firefox contains a Google search box. This means that when people want to search for something they are most likely to use that search box, which dives traffic to Google, which greatly improves Google's chance of making money from the ads associated with search results.
In return for Mozilla putting a Google search box in Firefox, Google currently pays Mozilla $300 Million a year. That's just under a billion dollars over the course of their 3 year contract, which expires at the end of 2014.
This is why Do Not Track if off by default. This is why ad-blocking isn't built in to Firefox. If you think that Google giving Mozilla a billion dollars doesn't give them any influence, well, that's your problem.
You obviously do not use, nor rely on, extensions. Extensions for Chrome/Chromium pale in comparison to what extensions for Firefox can do.
Want tabs on the side? Good luck with Chrome. Good luck with alternate Webkit browsers with not enough marketshare to attract extensions.
You obviously haven't tried the new "Australis" version of Firefox. It's stupid and dumbed down and in a few months it will be your only choice unless you stay with an older version of Firefox forever...
The one thing that that has always made Firefox better than all the other browsers is the ability to do extensive customizing. But they are hard at work fixing that. The new "Australis" build removes an enormous amount of customizability and is nothing but one giant Fuck You to users.
Tabs On Top -- No thanks, I want my tabs below the URL bar, where God intended them to be. Well, Australis says Fuck You, you're getting Tabs On Top whether you like it or not. And just removing the menu item and burying the setting in about:config isn't good enough. Even if you go into about:config and change the setting, it does nothing. Don't like Tabs On Top? Australis says: Fuck You.
There are only 2 toolbars -- Menu bar and Bookmarks toolbar. No more Add-On Bar, which means the Status Bar Extension (among others) doesn't work because THERE'S NO FUCKING PLACE TO PUT IT. It's bad enough they removed a feature and forced people to rely on an extension, but now, Australis says: You want a Status Bar? Fuck You.
The Back and Forward buttons are now welded to the left side of the URL Bar and can't be moved. The Reload Button has been replaced with a swirly arrow that is welded to the far right side of the URL Bar and can't be moved. And the Stop Button is gone completely. Want to arrange your buttons the same way you've had for years? Australis says: Fuck you.
Want text labels with your buttons? Australis says: Fuck you.
I could go on and on but fuck it I give up. If I want a browser with a shitty UI that can't be changed I'll use Internet Explorer or Chrome.
There's the problem right there. It isn't possible to have 1 million apps that are actually useful. Not even close. Just that number alone tells you that there is a problem -- that you have an enormous number of apps that are simply duplicates of others or malicious or just plain useless.
Instagram, had it stayed an independent company, *COULD*could be worth between $5 billion and $15 billion today.
The important word here is "could". The truth is, Instagram pulled off an amazing scam and they were smart to just go for it.
-- Instagram takes $50 million from investors and gives them 50% ownership of the company
-- 3 days later, Instagram, which has 13 employees and zero revenue, agrees to be bought by Facebook for $1 Billion
-- Investors see their investment go from $50 Million to $500 Million overnight
-- The founder of Instagram gets half a billion in the process.
-- PROFIT!!
What's not to love?
Hrm, another programming language...
Attempts have been made in the past to automate programming, it's never worked very well (or at all in some cases)
Too many people think that programing is "just a lot of typing". Which leads people to believe that they should create a "new programming language" where you can just type "Make a new better version of Facebook" and be done with it.
Which leads to a lot of crap with "Visual" in its name. Hey look, you don't have to type. Just drag this widget from here to here. And we've seen how sell that turned out.
Even really smart people come up with stupid ideas.
Anything that is capable of doing complex things is complex itself. It's unavoidable. Even if every function by itself is extremely simple -- just press the green button -- what happens when there are a thousand buttons. And any one of them can interact with any other button.
What's really funny is how they completely failed to understand who their customers were. >
No, they know exactly who their customers are. their customers are the people who pay them to display ads and inject extra crap into downloads. That's where SourceForge's revenue comes from. Not from you.
I looked at the blog and all I saw was a bunch of petty complaints. Things that may technically be true, but are not anywhere near the horrendous scandal that the blog's author tries to claim.
For example, a couple of university press releases and documents from university board of trustees meetings refer to a person as "Dr. Henderson" 6 weeks before she officially received her PhD. Oh the horror!! And her resume fails to list the 4 months that she was demoted from Dean of Instruction to ordinary teaching faculty -- 11 years ago.
Seriously, these people need to get a hobby or something.
They use consumer hard drives not enterprise, They say themselves that this data probably does not really apply to ent drives. BB also uses a custom chassis that a lot of people would take issue with as far as potential vibration etc. That is a great deal different than a well engineered SAN or even server and affects wear and performance.
In other words, this is a typical Slashdot article with little or no meaningful information.
They have a lot of drives, but their data is only from 4 years. The article would be more meaningful if they had been gathering data for a longer time.rather than just resorting to crap like
"engineer, Brian Beach, speculates that the failure rate will probably stick to around 12% per year.
This is a proxy for what marketers call "reach". The more followers you have, the more people will read your posts. .
I could see that on Facebook. Even though I have no use for Facebook it does allow anyone to essentially have their own personal website where they can post useful information. The fact that nobody actually uses Facebook to post useful information -- not even businesses -- is another matter entirely.
Twitter, on the other hand, is completely useless. It's impossible to convey any useful information, which makes your eleventy gazillion followers pointless.
This is a proxy for what marketers call "reach". The more followers you have, the more people will read your posts. Except here the followers are not real and so people buying this SEO snake oil are being ripped-off.
I noticed something similar on a photo-sharing website I use. I noticed that I had a lot of followers. WTF? Who are these people? When I started looking into it, my "followers" had posted no pictures or had a page of a couple of random generic pictures. And I noticed that my followers all had followers who had followers . . . . etc.
LOL.
Fake people following other fake people.
Well, at least we can celebrate the first years. Before the new versioning system and adding everything but your mom's dong instead of letting addons do the work.
It's worse than that. With every new version, useful features are changed or removed and people are being forced to use more and more extensions to regain functionality that has been ripped out. Which leads to the current ridiculous situation:
-- You have to depend on some random person to create the extensions you need
-- You have to hope that the random person continues to update the extension so that it works with future versions of Firefox
-- Or you can spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to write extensions yourself just so you can restore functionality that never should have been removed in the first place
-- Installing too many extensions is well known to cause performance and/or stability problems with Firefox.
to that 'lean' browser of yesteryear?
Exactly.
The problem isn't just that Firefox is bloated and full of unnecessary crap. Even worse, they keep changing or removing existing features that are actually useful. Every new version now brings more pointless changes that make Firefox just a little bit worse. And no matter how much users complain about all the constant pointless tinkering and the nonstop treadmill of unnecessary changes, the response from Mozilla is always the same. A thinly veiled Fuck You We Don't Care What You Think.
From TFA:
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Until they try to figure out another way to force this on people.
Google's ultimate goal is simple. You can't just use only Gmail or only Youtube or whatever. If you want to use one service, you have to use them all.
If you think better, stronger encryption is the answer, then you don't understand the problem.
In 2011 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued a ruling that many of the NSA's activities were illegal and unconstitutional. You'll notice that this had no effect on the NSA's spying because (a) It was a secret order issued by a secret court and nobody knew about it until just recently and (b) There is essentially no oversight of the NSA which means they are free to do whatever they want.
So, even if you have some super-duper unbreakable encryption, which has been audited and you can guarantee that it contains no NSA backdoors, so what? If the NSA can't break your encryption they'll simply yell "National Security" and get a secret order from a secret court compelling to do decrypt your stuff or face prosecution -- prosecution which will be carried out in secret, making it impossible to defend yourself.
If you've been paying attention, you see what the real problem is.
The Linux Colonel stayed in the 2.x numbers for many years. I even remember a post by Linux Torvalds on the mailing list saying that there would never ever be a version 3.0. At the time I thought that was pretty weird. I mean, things are going to get a little strange when you get to version 2.99.99.99.99.99.
So,obviously he changed his mind and not only went to 3.0 but apparently he is bored with 3.x and wants to jump from 3.19 directly to 4.0.
Maybe he's jealous of Firefox and Chrome and is trying to catch up to them.
Bill Gates is right. Zuckerberg's plan is a joke and the Internet isn't all that important for solving the world's problems. Unfortunately, Gates isn't helping much either, due to his fake philanthropy that often does more harm than good.
The Gates Foundation has an endowment of $30 Billion making it the largest philanthropic organization in the world. But one third of that money is invested in companies whose practices run counter to the foundation’s supposed charitable goals and social mission.
In Africa, the Foundation has invested more than $400 million dollars in oil companies responsible for pollution that many blame for respiratory problems and other afflictions among the local population.
The Gates Foundation also has investments in sixty-nine of the worst polluting companies in the US and Canada.. It holds investments in pharmaceutical companies whose drugs cost far beyond what most patients around the world can afford and the Foundation often lobbies on behalf of those companies for "Intellectual Property" protections that make obtaining low cost medicines more difficult.
Other companies in the Foundation’s portfolio have been accused of forcing thousands of people to lose their homes, supporting child labor and defrauding and neglecting patients in need of medical care.
I lament the lack of serious software.
It's all useless, poorly written crap. More and more I find myself being forced to stay with older software because all the newest stuff is a big steaming pile of shit.
When was Lenovo ever respected?
Because it's stupid. If you have to constantly search for things it means you are a lazy disorganized slob. The number of times I've had to search for an email can be counted on one hand because I have things organized so that I know where they are.
Ed Bott has been sucking the Microsoft tit for years and he loves it.
I've been using Gmail since the old days when you had to have an invitation, and I've always used a third party email client because Gmail's web-based interface is stupid and pointless. Ed Bott is an idiot and I don't understand how he ever got a job writing for any computer/tech related magazine or website.
It took $24.9 Billion to buy up all of Dell's outstanding shares. That money had to come somewhere. So, right from day one, the new private Dell is nearly 25 Billion in debt. There will have to be major layoffs and other changes, such as selling off parts of the business.
It amazes me that people still don't understand that social networks don't exist to provide services to users.... they exist to turn users into products that can be sold.
It amazes me even more that people think they need a LinkedIn app on their phone. Seriously. WTF.
If you think you need this app on your phone you get what you deserve.