Can you imagine the headlines on Slashdot and other media if Google tried to censor Wikipedia? It would destroy their reputation for "not being evil" utterly, and I know Google values that enormously, not only as a moral principle, but as part of their marketing.
I think you're overestimating the 'power' of Slashdot. Most people who use Google, or do business with Google, have never heard of Slashdot, or Wikipedia. Google could close Wikipedia down and no-one would bat an eyelid. All the sycophants on Slashdot would bitch and moan and announce the end of the world, but Google would still be rich.
1. Five years may not be long enough to design, implement and sell the idea. By the time it's on the shelf the patent could have expired, meaning all the research and development is for nothing. 2. Your non-transfer proposal means that small-time inventors who lack the means to actually implement their idea can't cash in and let a big manufacturing company make it instead. This takes away freedom from the inventor.
I don't think the problem with the patent system is that the inventors have too many rights and priveledges, the problem is that patents are being awarded to NON-INVENTORS, i.e. people who didn't actually invent anything, or slightly modified someone else's idea, or who patented something obvious. That's what needs fixing, not punishing people who actually DO invent things.
HTML Strict/CSS/etc be damned. At the end of the day, what really matters to users is compelling apps that let them get their work done quickly.
Funny, when most sites use non-standard html/css/javascript or flash etc., people criticise them for it, but when google do it, it's fine. This shameless google cock-sucking HAS to stop.
I can vouch for that. I have a relatively new toaster, and already my knob has fallen off. It's fucking ridiculous.
Also has anyone else noticed how toasters these days don't fit a full slice in? They only toast the bottom two-thirds of the slice so you have to turn the slice over mid-toast.
Who's with me? First product will be a refridgerator like the old ones. All mechanical, all reliable. Starting at $1500, but it'll last 10 years at least, guaranteed.
Eh? I've got a cheapo electric fridge and it's lasted at least twice that. For $1500 I'd expect at least 100 years of solid usage.
It gets me wondering why consumer is willing to pay $4999 for a Plasma TV that has a specific (say 20,000 hours) lifespan, but can't stand paying a $49 software that has an expiry date.
A Plasma TV wears out because that's just how it works. There's no reason why software shouldn't last forever, other than by deliberate sabotage by the creators. Your comparison would be more accurate if after 20,000 hours someone came in and smashed your TV in with a hammer to force you to buy another one. This of course would be acceptable, and so is MS's behaviour of forcing you to buy new software.
google isn't responsible for what people target their ads to
Actually, yes they are. If google sells company A an advert which triggers on company B's trademark, then A is trading under B's trademark, which is not allowed. Google voluntarily did this so they are at fault. If they don't want to get into trouble, then they should be more careful in who they sell adverts to, and if they get caught out they should cancel the advert when they realise it's illegal.
I find this highly unreasonable. Right now, it is permissible for Company A to advertise its products on a huge billboard right in front of Company B's building. Are you suggesting this practice be banned too?
No, because that would not be trading under someone else's trademark, as is the issue here. Can any of you people read?
The solution is pretty simple: if you don't like it, don't trade under other people's trademarks, stick to your own. I don't see what's so hard about this.
By the way, all these analogies about billboards and magazines are completely fucking stupid. Analogies are for idiots who can't argue the exact issue being discussed. On slashdot this usually leads to hundreds of posts arguing which analogy is most apropriate, forgetting the original issue altogether.
Also, how did Google ruin dejanews? DejaNews was shutting down, so google bought them and then put it back online without all the banner ads. Google not only saved them from ruin but actually improved the service.
Improved? Have you seen the latest version of google groups? They've completely ruined it. The only way to get to a remotely usable version is to go to groups.google.co.uk, and even then you can't reply to posts, and some pages come up completely blank. It's a complete load of shit. Also you can't alter your settings after you've made your account.
To say they hire so many 'geniuses', this really is fucking pathetic.
So then, a search engine with a lot of hardware and bandwidth. EVen then, they've had the search engine for years before they were hiring all these 'geniuses', and what have they come up with since? Absolutely fuck all.
For everyone getting ready to start hating the last giant non-evil corp left, you're going to have to wait a few more weeks.
Non-evil? A company who censors its employees and fires people, destroying their livelihoods, for daring to criticise them? A company that buys out decent services and ruins them (i.e. deja news)? I don't see why people still think google is not 'evil', they're as bad as any other large corporation. Take off the blinkers.
Re:One major thing missing from this story...
on
Google Fires Blogger?
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· Score: 2, Funny
i realized the root problem was that google's relocation process requires the employee to pay all the expenses up front and then get reimbursed for them later. that means you have to cover an apartment hunting trip, your final relocation, lease termination fees and temporary housing expenses all in advance. not to mention that they don't pay out your signing bonus and relocation money until your first paycheck
Oh boo hoo hoo, so you had the pay to move out of your own pocket? How outrageous. Seriously though, since when do employers pay you to move? For people in the real world rather than an dotcom-bubble, you have to pay it all up front and you DON'T get reimbursed afterwards. What a spoilt fucking baby.
which led me to thinking about the "benefits" package at google. as i thought about it, i realized that most of the "benefits" actually seem to be thinly veiled timesavers to keep you at work. take for example: free lunch and dinner. now this one is an awesome value proposition for google; i'm not exactly sure why other companies don't also recognize the value and join in. consider this: it probably costs google a maximum of $3 per employee for lunch and $5 per employee for dinner. so that's only $8 per day, but if you think about the fact that the employee now probably only takes a half hour lunch break and also stays late working, the company actually realizes far more than an $8 gain in employee output.
It gets even worse. You get FREE dinners and you're moaning? Where I work, I have to pay for everything, even a cup of tea, and the food's absolutely atrocious. Of course giving free meals keeps them at work. But what's the alternative? If they charged for them, people would still stay at work but they'd be paying instead. When you only have a half-hour lunch break it's not like you have time to go anywhere else either. And when you're working nights or weekends you bring in your own sandwiches anyway, so your point is completely invalid.
then look at all these other fringe "benefits": on-site doctor, on-site dentist, on-site car washes... the list goes on and on with one similarity: every "benefit" is on-site so you never leave work.
You put benefits in inverted commas? You're getting things for free (dentists, health care, on-side doctors, car-washing) that most people have to pay huge chunks of their wages towards, and you're STILL moaning?????? If you don't like it, then don't use it, pay for your own healthy care and dentists etc out of your own pocket.
lastly, google demands employees that are 90th percentile material, so what's with the 50th percentile compensation?
90th percentile? I'm not familiar with that terminology. It can't be anything to do with the quality of employees, as google's employees seem to be completely useless. I mean let's look at the facts: all those expensive highly-educated PHDs, massive benefits, big fancy 'campus' (god I hate that word) and what have they actually released (i.e. actually out of beta)? A search engine, and a couple of average web services. Woo-fucking-hoo. A few amateur nerds could probably do that in their basement in a few days.
Christ almighty, how can one company attract such spoilt and vain employees? Next you'll be complaining that your gold chair isn't polished regularly enough.
IMHO, I find perpetual beta status better than premature "official" releases (*coughwindowsmecough*): at least they are being honest.
It's not honest, it's anything but. Look at gmail for instance. It's been out for how long? At least a year, and it's still in beta. All those millions of dollars, all those genius PHDs, and in over a year they can't get a simple web-based email system out of beta? I don't buy that. It's not in beta, it's not a preliminary buggy version, they just don't have the gumption to say 'This is a final release'.
This way they don't have any responsibility for their services. They release them, stick a 'beta' logo in the corner, and if something goes wrong, just say 'well it's in beta!'.
Most people don't know what beta means. A normal person would assume that if a service was linked to on the front page, that it was a proper, finished service. Keeping something in perpetual beta whilst using it publicly is disgraceful behaviour.
Yeah, it is a very cool interface. Also, it loads incredibly fast,
The problem is it loads very very slowly. I think the Internet is too slow a medium, it makes the program feel like you're crawling through treacle. Perhaps it would be better if they released it on CD-Rom so it would be faster and easier to use.
If you care about you apps looking nice together, use Abiword or Openoffice (which is what a newbie will do, since KWord will not appear on the Gnome Applications menu).
How does using other apps make the original apps look right? Your solution to half the apps looking different to the other half is only to use one half? That's ridiculous. I can't think of any reason why there can't be a standard like on OSX where everything is congruent by default.
Or use a gtk theme that hooks into qt and applies the qt theme to your gtk applications.
What the hell are you talking about? You don't get this shit on OSX or Windows. Who the hell came up with the idea of having different incompatible toolkits? If OSX can manage to be functional and user-friendly with one, why does Linux need more?
Sure, the screenshots shown in the article look pretty snappy from a distance, because the fonts are large. But to get a lot of work done you want small, even tiny fonts. That's the whole point of high screen resolution, right?
No, the whole point of high resolutions is to the text is more defined, not smaller. Who wants tiny fonts that fuck your eyes up? There's a reason so many computer users need glasses. The screen is harsh enough on your eyes without making you squint to read the text.
Non-anti-aliased fonts look awful. Just look the the old X-Windows programs like xfig to see how great fonts on Linux can be. Admittedly fonts on Windows look OK non-anti-aliased, but on Linux the fonts are rendered so badly (apparently this is due to patent issues), that it looks like the fonts are made out of lego.
Although the fonts on that OSX screenshot look blurry, on my Linux system they look OK.
The irony is that font bitmaps are not even copyrightable! Heck, just steal them from NEXTStep! Or even Windows! (The bitmaps, that is.) Why doesn't anyone do this?
It's not that they fonts can't be stolen, it's that Linux can't render them very well as the way to render them is patented. That's why anti-aliasing is such a big deal on Linux: without them you get the lego effect.
You can press ctrl-L to get a cli for typing the path.
How obvious. What next, having the taskbar invisible, so you can type 'Ctrl-T' to bring it up? Everyone loves having to go through an extra step just to do what they used to be able to do in less steps. Personally I like the old feature of being able to type in part of the name and use tab-complete.
But like many OSS programs, the best file-dialogue features are spread out over different implementations, so you end up with say half the decent features in KDE, and the other half in Gnome, so whichever you use you're only getting a half-decent program.
"Assistive Technology" is technology to help the disabled use computers. Stuff like screen magnifiers, screen-readers, high-contrast colors and icons, etc.
Why the hell don't they just call it 'Disabled Access' or something? Assistive technology makes me think of dancing paperclips.
The multimedia systems selector allows you to select which multimedia systems, both audio and video, programs will use. What would you have called it?
But how the hell would a newbie know what the hell OSS, Alsa or ESD are? I've played with Linux for a few years, written config files, compiled kernels etc, and I still don't know what the difference between them is, or even what they actually do. Didn't OSS use to stand for open source software? Why do you need three different things which all do the same thing?
It's the same with gtk and qt etc. Say for instance you use gnome, you install the greatest theme ever and get all your fonts and colours right, then you open KWord, and it's all blocky and grey. What the hell's all that about?
It isn't just that. But a mac has style. With good design and style they can add to the user's own style - just like with systemadministration you learn to solve problem, search solutions more logically. In a mac it's the interface, it's the logic, the way things are organized. It could be a part of your culture.
Now try it the other way around. Has a win* ever brought you new (positive!) experiences? Could that be part of your culture? I'm trying hard not to exaggerate. Think about that.
Linux comes in the picture, beacuse you see real flexibility, transparency and logic. Macs with their style. The M$ way is to get dumb customers fit their needs. Keep them dumb. Feed them with junk food, let them watch kill-em-all action films, blind them with marketing. In all these mention areas, you have a choice. Consider that. Please.
This is perhaps the most pathetically pretentious post I've ever read on Slashdot. Something like that belongs on Kuroshin, not here! All it needs is a snide comment about people who drive SUVs or read a different newspaper to you.
I've run MS Office 97 fine on 16MB of RAM and a really slow processor. Yes it was a bit slow to get going, but it got the job done. I'm sure that it wouldn't be too hard to install a copy of Windows on it.
Not at all; I'm merely assuming the resentful employees who refuse to work well with others and cause problems are the lessor employees.
We are not talking about 'lesser' employees, we're talking about employees divided by divisive reward systems which destroy morale and wreck teamwork.
LOL, whatever you say, big guy. Do you have a college degree?
No, why?
I wouldn't have someone with your attitude on my payroll.
I doubt any company run by you would be worth working for. You'd probably pick a group of 'favourite' employees who sucked up to you the most and treat them better whilst criticising the rest for being 'resentful'.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you imagine the headlines on Slashdot and other media if Google tried to censor Wikipedia? It would destroy their reputation for "not being evil" utterly, and I know Google values that enormously, not only as a moral principle, but as part of their marketing.
I think you're overestimating the 'power' of Slashdot. Most people who use Google, or do business with Google, have never heard of Slashdot, or Wikipedia. Google could close Wikipedia down and no-one would bat an eyelid. All the sycophants on Slashdot would bitch and moan and announce the end of the world, but Google would still be rich.
A few problems with your proposals:
1. Five years may not be long enough to design, implement and sell the idea. By the time it's on the shelf the patent could have expired, meaning all the research and development is for nothing.
2. Your non-transfer proposal means that small-time inventors who lack the means to actually implement their idea can't cash in and let a big manufacturing company make it instead. This takes away freedom from the inventor.
I don't think the problem with the patent system is that the inventors have too many rights and priveledges, the problem is that patents are being awarded to NON-INVENTORS, i.e. people who didn't actually invent anything, or slightly modified someone else's idea, or who patented something obvious. That's what needs fixing, not punishing people who actually DO invent things.
HTML Strict/CSS/etc be damned. At the end of the day, what really matters to users is compelling apps that let them get their work done quickly.
Funny, when most sites use non-standard html/css/javascript or flash etc., people criticise them for it, but when google do it, it's fine. This shameless google cock-sucking HAS to stop.
I can vouch for that. I have a relatively new toaster, and already my knob has fallen off. It's fucking ridiculous.
Also has anyone else noticed how toasters these days don't fit a full slice in? They only toast the bottom two-thirds of the slice so you have to turn the slice over mid-toast.
Who's with me? First product will be a refridgerator like the old ones. All mechanical, all reliable. Starting at $1500, but it'll last 10 years at least, guaranteed.
Eh? I've got a cheapo electric fridge and it's lasted at least twice that. For $1500 I'd expect at least 100 years of solid usage.
It gets me wondering why consumer is willing to pay $4999 for a Plasma TV that has a specific (say 20,000 hours) lifespan, but can't stand paying a $49 software that has an expiry date.
A Plasma TV wears out because that's just how it works. There's no reason why software shouldn't last forever, other than by deliberate sabotage by the creators. Your comparison would be more accurate if after 20,000 hours someone came in and smashed your TV in with a hammer to force you to buy another one. This of course would be acceptable, and so is MS's behaviour of forcing you to buy new software.
google isn't responsible for what people target their ads to
Actually, yes they are. If google sells company A an advert which triggers on company B's trademark, then A is trading under B's trademark, which is not allowed. Google voluntarily did this so they are at fault. If they don't want to get into trouble, then they should be more careful in who they sell adverts to, and if they get caught out they should cancel the advert when they realise it's illegal.
I find this highly unreasonable. Right now, it is permissible for Company A to advertise its products on a huge billboard right in front of Company B's building. Are you suggesting this practice be banned too?
No, because that would not be trading under someone else's trademark, as is the issue here. Can any of you people read?
The solution is pretty simple: if you don't like it, don't trade under other people's trademarks, stick to your own. I don't see what's so hard about this.
By the way, all these analogies about billboards and magazines are completely fucking stupid. Analogies are for idiots who can't argue the exact issue being discussed. On slashdot this usually leads to hundreds of posts arguing which analogy is most apropriate, forgetting the original issue altogether.
Also, how did Google ruin dejanews? DejaNews was shutting down, so google bought them and then put it back online without all the banner ads. Google not only saved them from ruin but actually improved the service.
Improved? Have you seen the latest version of google groups? They've completely ruined it. The only way to get to a remotely usable version is to go to groups.google.co.uk, and even then you can't reply to posts, and some pages come up completely blank. It's a complete load of shit. Also you can't alter your settings after you've made your account.
To say they hire so many 'geniuses', this really is fucking pathetic.
So then, a search engine with a lot of hardware and bandwidth. EVen then, they've had the search engine for years before they were hiring all these 'geniuses', and what have they come up with since? Absolutely fuck all.
For everyone getting ready to start hating the last giant non-evil corp left, you're going to have to wait a few more weeks.
Non-evil? A company who censors its employees and fires people, destroying their livelihoods, for daring to criticise them? A company that buys out decent services and ruins them (i.e. deja news)? I don't see why people still think google is not 'evil', they're as bad as any other large corporation. Take off the blinkers.
i realized the root problem was that google's relocation process requires the employee to pay all the expenses up front and then get reimbursed for them later. that means you have to cover an apartment hunting trip, your final relocation, lease termination fees and temporary housing expenses all in advance. not to mention that they don't pay out your signing bonus and relocation money until your first paycheck
Oh boo hoo hoo, so you had the pay to move out of your own pocket? How outrageous. Seriously though, since when do employers pay you to move? For people in the real world rather than an dotcom-bubble, you have to pay it all up front and you DON'T get reimbursed afterwards. What a spoilt fucking baby.
which led me to thinking about the "benefits" package at google. as i thought about it, i realized that most of the "benefits" actually seem to be thinly veiled timesavers to keep you at work. take for example: free lunch and dinner. now this one is an awesome value proposition for google; i'm not exactly sure why other companies don't also recognize the value and join in. consider this: it probably costs google a maximum of $3 per employee for lunch and $5 per employee for dinner. so that's only $8 per day, but if you think about the fact that the employee now probably only takes a half hour lunch break and also stays late working, the company actually realizes far more than an $8 gain in employee output.
It gets even worse. You get FREE dinners and you're moaning? Where I work, I have to pay for everything, even a cup of tea, and the food's absolutely atrocious. Of course giving free meals keeps them at work. But what's the alternative? If they charged for them, people would still stay at work but they'd be paying instead. When you only have a half-hour lunch break it's not like you have time to go anywhere else either. And when you're working nights or weekends you bring in your own sandwiches anyway, so your point is completely invalid.
then look at all these other fringe "benefits": on-site doctor, on-site dentist, on-site car washes... the list goes on and on with one similarity: every "benefit" is on-site so you never leave work.
You put benefits in inverted commas? You're getting things for free (dentists, health care, on-side doctors, car-washing) that most people have to pay huge chunks of their wages towards, and you're STILL moaning?????? If you don't like it, then don't use it, pay for your own healthy care and dentists etc out of your own pocket.
lastly, google demands employees that are 90th percentile material, so what's with the 50th percentile compensation?
90th percentile? I'm not familiar with that terminology. It can't be anything to do with the quality of employees, as google's employees seem to be completely useless. I mean let's look at the facts: all those expensive highly-educated PHDs, massive benefits, big fancy 'campus' (god I hate that word) and what have they actually released (i.e. actually out of beta)? A search engine, and a couple of average web services. Woo-fucking-hoo. A few amateur nerds could probably do that in their basement in a few days.
Christ almighty, how can one company attract such spoilt and vain employees? Next you'll be complaining that your gold chair isn't polished regularly enough.
So google is selling adverts for a BETA service?
IMHO, I find perpetual beta status better than premature "official" releases (*coughwindowsmecough*): at least they are being honest.
It's not honest, it's anything but. Look at gmail for instance. It's been out for how long? At least a year, and it's still in beta. All those millions of dollars, all those genius PHDs, and in over a year they can't get a simple web-based email system out of beta? I don't buy that. It's not in beta, it's not a preliminary buggy version, they just don't have the gumption to say 'This is a final release'.
This way they don't have any responsibility for their services. They release them, stick a 'beta' logo in the corner, and if something goes wrong, just say 'well it's in beta!'.
Most people don't know what beta means. A normal person would assume that if a service was linked to on the front page, that it was a proper, finished service. Keeping something in perpetual beta whilst using it publicly is disgraceful behaviour.
Yeah, it is a very cool interface. Also, it loads incredibly fast,
The problem is it loads very very slowly. I think the Internet is too slow a medium, it makes the program feel like you're crawling through treacle. Perhaps it would be better if they released it on CD-Rom so it would be faster and easier to use.
If you care about you apps looking nice together, use Abiword or Openoffice (which is what a newbie will do, since KWord will not appear on the Gnome Applications menu).
How does using other apps make the original apps look right? Your solution to half the apps looking different to the other half is only to use one half? That's ridiculous. I can't think of any reason why there can't be a standard like on OSX where everything is congruent by default.
Or use a gtk theme that hooks into qt and applies the qt theme to your gtk applications.
What the hell are you talking about? You don't get this shit on OSX or Windows. Who the hell came up with the idea of having different incompatible toolkits? If OSX can manage to be functional and user-friendly with one, why does Linux need more?
Sure, the screenshots shown in the article look pretty snappy from a distance, because the fonts are large. But to get a lot of work done you want small, even tiny fonts. That's the whole point of high screen resolution, right?
No, the whole point of high resolutions is to the text is more defined, not smaller. Who wants tiny fonts that fuck your eyes up? There's a reason so many computer users need glasses. The screen is harsh enough on your eyes without making you squint to read the text.
Non-anti-aliased fonts look awful. Just look the the old X-Windows programs like xfig to see how great fonts on Linux can be. Admittedly fonts on Windows look OK non-anti-aliased, but on Linux the fonts are rendered so badly (apparently this is due to patent issues), that it looks like the fonts are made out of lego.
Although the fonts on that OSX screenshot look blurry, on my Linux system they look OK.
The irony is that font bitmaps are not even copyrightable! Heck, just steal them from NEXTStep! Or even Windows! (The bitmaps, that is.) Why doesn't anyone do this?
It's not that they fonts can't be stolen, it's that Linux can't render them very well as the way to render them is patented. That's why anti-aliasing is such a big deal on Linux: without them you get the lego effect.
You can press ctrl-L to get a cli for typing the path.
How obvious. What next, having the taskbar invisible, so you can type 'Ctrl-T' to bring it up? Everyone loves having to go through an extra step just to do what they used to be able to do in less steps. Personally I like the old feature of being able to type in part of the name and use tab-complete.
But like many OSS programs, the best file-dialogue features are spread out over different implementations, so you end up with say half the decent features in KDE, and the other half in Gnome, so whichever you use you're only getting a half-decent program.
"Assistive Technology" is technology to help the disabled use computers. Stuff like screen magnifiers, screen-readers, high-contrast colors and icons, etc.
Why the hell don't they just call it 'Disabled Access' or something? Assistive technology makes me think of dancing paperclips.
The multimedia systems selector allows you to select which multimedia systems, both audio and video, programs will use. What would you have called it?
But how the hell would a newbie know what the hell OSS, Alsa or ESD are? I've played with Linux for a few years, written config files, compiled kernels etc, and I still don't know what the difference between them is, or even what they actually do. Didn't OSS use to stand for open source software? Why do you need three different things which all do the same thing?
It's the same with gtk and qt etc. Say for instance you use gnome, you install the greatest theme ever and get all your fonts and colours right, then you open KWord, and it's all blocky and grey. What the hell's all that about?
Well done, now you've followed it up with the most incoherent post ever posted on slashdot.
It isn't just that. But a mac has style. With good design and style they can add to the user's own style - just like with systemadministration you learn to solve problem, search solutions more logically. In a mac it's the interface, it's the logic, the way things are organized. It could be a part of your culture.
Now try it the other way around. Has a win* ever brought you new (positive!) experiences? Could that be part of your culture? I'm trying hard not to exaggerate. Think about that.
Linux comes in the picture, beacuse you see real flexibility, transparency and logic. Macs with their style. The M$ way is to get dumb customers fit their needs. Keep them dumb. Feed them with junk food, let them watch kill-em-all action films, blind them with marketing. In all these mention areas, you have a choice. Consider that. Please.
This is perhaps the most pathetically pretentious post I've ever read on Slashdot. Something like that belongs on Kuroshin, not here! All it needs is a snide comment about people who drive SUVs or read a different newspaper to you.
I've run MS Office 97 fine on 16MB of RAM and a really slow processor. Yes it was a bit slow to get going, but it got the job done. I'm sure that it wouldn't be too hard to install a copy of Windows on it.
You missed the alternative steps:
*Offer money to wife in return for sex.
The wife agrees
*Give money to wife
*Fuck wife
*Take money back from wife
Not at all; I'm merely assuming the resentful employees who refuse to work well with others and cause problems are the lessor employees.
We are not talking about 'lesser' employees, we're talking about employees divided by divisive reward systems which destroy morale and wreck teamwork.
LOL, whatever you say, big guy. Do you have a college degree?
No, why?
I wouldn't have someone with your attitude on my payroll.
I doubt any company run by you would be worth working for. You'd probably pick a group of 'favourite' employees who sucked up to you the most and treat them better whilst criticising the rest for being 'resentful'.