"You seem to have this belief that whererever one does business, one must first overthrow the existing system and establish pure democracy, modeled off of the US Constitution."
No, but when a company markets themselves onthe premise of 1) don't be evil, and 2) making ALL the world's information available, and then do this kind of thing, they are full of shit.
I'm sorry, but it but it doesn't get much worse than China in terms of "evil". While I don't like the idea of buying shit made in China, I still do it, but **I** don't have a policy stamped on my t-shirt that says, "Do No Evil". Google does. Google is breaking their own rules. I'm calling them on it.
Fine, they are a public company, and they have to fulfil the deal they made with the devli by doing that. But Page and Brin have more money than they could possibly spend personally now. They are teh ones that cam eup with the motto of "Don't Be Evil" or "Do no evil". Why are they not standing up, saying "this is wrong, and I refuse to be a part of it" and walk out?
Because apparently their bullshit motto was nothign more than a bumper sticker.
And there is a HUGE difference between consumption of cheap plastic shit made in China by the US and the rest of the world, and making money by withholding the information that your other motto says is your whole fucking point for being there!
Google is violating it's two core values and then rationalizing it.
"They simply do NOT have the option of providing an uncensored search engine in Chine at this time"
That's fucking bullshit! you're telling me that Google, with it's (apparently worthless) motto of "don't Be Evil" and armies of PhD's could not spend the time and money to get their search results crammed through the Great Firewall via some technical breakthrough?
Bullshit!
And it's not just Google, of course. Yahoo, MSN, are all just as bad.
Seriously, if you take a simple formula like how evil a government is as evidenced by oppression of people, and multiply it by the population of people they oppress, and maybe throw in a few points for things like nukes, how is Chine not the most evil place on earth?
Google should have said fuck you, we'll pay the fines, we'll loose shareholders, we don't give a shit because we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for our original ideals. we are waging a war to force, cram, stuff, smuggle information and more importantly, truthiness to the people of China.
People that are making excuses for Google, or buying this PR bullshit are moronic sheep that would have been the same type of people that pre US involvement in WWII would have looked on Germany as great example of a people pulling themselves up by the jack-boot straps after a hard time of it in WWI.
Pull your heads out of your asses and realize that if Google really wanted to, they could have solved this issue of getting information to China through sheer force of will, piles of cash, and maybe a PhD or two that actually gave a shit.
Hypocritical assholes.
I'm still looking for a blog of ANY Google employee that quit Google because of this travesty.
Shame on you. Shame on you. Shame on you. You will look back on this one day and realize that you did in fact, very much so, do evil.
Google users in China today struggle with a service that, to be blunt, isn't very good, and therefore Google is not making enough money with it. Google.com appears to be down around 10% of the time which makes us lose money. Even when users can reach it, the website is slow, and sometimes produces results that when clicked on, stall out the user's browser thus reducing the amount of ad revenue we can generate. Our Google News service is never available; Google Images is accessible only half the time which is really bad for ad revenue. At Google we work hard to create a great experience for our users, and the level of service we've been able to provide in China is not something we're proud of, and not a good way for us to make money.
This problem could only be resolved by creating a local presence, and this week we did so, by launching Google.cn, our website for the People's Republic of China so that we can make more money. In order to do so, we have agreed to remove certain sensitive information from our search results, but not our sweet, sweet advertising. We know that many people are upset about this decision, and frankly, we understand their point of view but because we get to make a shit load of money, we don't really give a fuck what they think. This wasn't an easy choice, but in the end, we believe the course of action we've chosen will prove to be the right one, especially when I think about the extra mansion I can build with all the extra money we are going to be raking in on the backs of these oppressed people.
Launching a Google domain that restricts information in any way isn't a step we took lightly, but when we consider how much money all those Chinese represent for Adwords, heck it became REALLY easy. For several years, we've debated whether entering the Chinese market at this point in history could be consistent with our mission and values, but then we got filthy stinking rich and realized that the "Do No Evil" thing was pretty fucking stupid when we are talking about THIS kind of money. Our executives have spent a lot of time in recent months talking with many people, ranging from those who applaud the Chinese government for its embrace of a market economy and its lifting of 400 million people out of poverty to those who disagree with many of the Chinese government's policies, but who wish the best for China and its people. More time with the corrupt government sympathizers of course, as they are the ones we need to pay off to get this to happen. We ultimately reached our decision by asking ourselves which course would most effectively further Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible as well as make ass-loads of money! Or, put simply: how can we provide the greatest access to information to the greatest number of people, while making an obscene amount of money?
Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission, but we don't give a shit since we're all really rich now, and what the hell, it's not like we live in China. Fuck em! Just make sure they pay the bill. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world's population, however, does so far more severely, and that's a shit load of ad impressions and clicks we'd be missing out on. Whether our critics agree with our decision or not, due to the severe quality problems faced by users trying to access Google.com from within China, this is precisely the choice we believe we faced. So if you don't like it, tough shit! We're getting RICH! By launching Google.cn and making a major ongoing investment in people and infrastructure within China, we intend to change that and make shit loads of money by sleeping with the enemy, ignoring our #1 core value, and helping an oppressive, evil government keep it's sheep in line.
No, we're not going to offer some Google products, such as Gmail or Blogger, on Google.cn until we're comfortable that we can do so in a manner that respects our users' interests in the privacy of their personal communications. Besides, it's
Companies like Ford and ITT were doing business with Nazi Germany before US involvement in WWII, but when we knew that the Nazi's were "bad guys" and there's considerable proof that those companies KEPT doing business with Germany DURING WWII, especially ITT.
Sure, we're not at war with China (yet), but Mao et all at PRC Inc. have killed more of their own people than Hitler or Stalin by some estimates. I suggest a few Google.COM searches on that. I don't think you'll find it on Google.CN.
The HUGE difference is that Google is a company that has this lame ass slogan of "Do No Evil" that by this act makes it look even more shallow and hypocritical than any other company could. They have finally hung themselves with their own rope. Not that it's a surprise that it would happen after going public.
As for all you/.'ers that are so up in arms about it, did you sell your GOOG shares in protest? If not, you're as bad as they are.
If you wouldn't mind answering a quick question about your setup and HTPC in general. How do you get progressive scan video out of a PC's DVD to your TV? I've not seen anyone address that.
Thanks!
I love you naive people talking about bitching to Visa or Mastercard and having them loose their credit card account. The only people MORE slimy than these "discount camera" stores are the credit card processing companies. After talking to a typical processing card salesman makes you want to take a long hot shower... Pond scum looks down on them.
I wish I had mod points... There's no thinly veiled accusation of piracy, I'd suggest an OVERT accusation of it appears warranted.
I AM a professional graphic artist, and there's no way someone would dump money into both Lightwave AND Maya without knowing at least one of them. And, if this guy is a "coder" and the requirements are as indicated, such as icons, etc. WTF is he going to use Lightwave and Maya for? Photoshop, yes, you can stumble by to create something with a few books and a few weeks of time, but thinking that either of those powerful, general purpose 3D design and animation packages would be useful for program related artwork is foolish if you don't know them ahead of time. If time is money, and it is, then this guy wuld have to "spend" 10X to 100X in time to learn EITHER of those apps to get to a point to be able to use them for the indicated purposes what he would spend to just hire an artist to begin with.
Perhaps he's not that bright? Well, I'd argue that anyone that is smart enough and talented enough to make enough money to afford both Lightwave and Maya, should be smart enough to do the basic business equation of make vs. buy. Not that smart, not that much money, back to square one this guy is using pirated software that is causing it to be more expensive for people like me that actually NEED it and actually PAY for it! Pisses me off.
Now, if this guy had tons of $$$, then perhaps he can afford to buy those packages as shelfware for the "someday I'll get time" type thing, and write them off on his tax returns. However we have a self admission that he has no $$$ so that theory don't hold water.
I'd love to see some "event" come up where the CO$ and the IOC's lawyers were forced to do battle. Can you imagine the fallout of two of the largest abusers of the legal systems in countries all over the world colliding? It would be one intimidation lawsuit after another... Back and forth, back and forth, over and over again...
That would be worth some broadcast rights!
>>How many farmers shut down the business because it was cheaper to import the same products from another country?
This shows your complete ignorance...
Michigan apple producers are getting killed by apples from places like China. That's right... China.
California is getting killed in citrus, etc. etc. etc.
OMG... Not again... (VRML-Chrome-Web3D-???)
on
Metaverse Launched?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I worked at SGI, then Cosmo, back in the day when VRML was going to revolutionize the web. Cosmo Player was going to be the 3D equivalent to Mosaic for the 3DWeb... BAH!
We bought a small Russian company called Paragraph for some ungodly high amount that had some 3D chat environments. We had clients like Sony, we had $20MM from SGI to make the company stand on its own (it was after all a spin off of OpenGL technology that SGI had developed, except it was SGI's attempt at testing the waters of PC software), and it died a miserable death. granted part of the issues back then were related to the fact that no one had the computer horse power to spin 30MM filtered, lit, and textured triangles, Cosmo was built on OpenGL which M$ was doing it's best to kill with D3D/Farenheight, and the plug in was like 14MB to download, oh, and no one had broadband. Other than those few things, I'm SURE that VRML would have been a raging hit...
There has been so many attempts at this stupid idea that's it's not even funny.
If chat is the application, there's no need for 3D AT ALL. Period. The people that are drawn to chat are generally clueless about how to navigate a 3D world. I've done the focus groups. It funny as hell to watch Joe Six Pack staring at his avatars feet all day because he can't figure out how to navigate a general 3D environment with a 2D input device.
If 3D is what people want, fucking buy Quake x, Half-life, etc.
I never understood the stupidity of people that were willing to shovel buckets of money into this crap when if 3D chat was truly compelling, then all you have to do is whip out a Quake mod!
At least under a Quake Mod then we could get a little closer to the idea of the Metaverse where people are free to develop their own reality.
At least then you can shove a rocket up some lame ass looser when he pisses you off.
Maybe I can find some suckers to give me a few MM to hire some Quake hackers to do just this. Any takers? Apparently this idea has not died, maybe we can get some for us!
Last month I think Computer Graphics Magazine did a thing on 3D web stuff. Total example of someone who did not know or understand history and is doomed to repeat it.
This alone is why Linux is never going to be a mainstream OS... WHO WANTS TO DO ALL THAT SHOT JUST TO WATCH A QUICKTIME!!!!???
Mod me, I don't care... Keep Linux on servers and development environments...
Check out THIS And check out the X-tend tablet. Looks cool to me.
I'll say it again... Not sure why no one seems to be interested in pointing it out as a cover story here on/. I guess people would rather talk about M$ stuff?
I mean here is a really cool looking tool that seems to embrace open development, etc. etc. etc. and I've never seen any mention of it here.
Kick ass vehicles with blowers, armor, guns...
on
New Mad Max Film
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately this time around, Max's vehicle in question is a wheelchair...
Maybe The Stones can do the theme song and complete the image?
...grousing about how they make so much less money than they were making at their previous jobs and they can't wait for the recession to be over so they can go find 'real jobs'. Don't they understand that there is a reason the dot-bombs they worked for went out of business?
The problem however, especially here in the bay area, is that over the past 4-5 years that the.bomb bubble was building, that the cost of living kept going up to represent those pay-rates. I know in other areas like the PacNorWest have the same problem. So while pay may be going down to a "normal" level, cost of living is still totally f'd up. I'm sure over time an equilibrium point will be met, but I'm beginning to think it's not going to happen in time to save once hot areas like the Silicon Valley.
I'm sure a bunch of you will say, "tough shit, just move...". Unfortunately some people have ties to an area that go beyond their jobs.
Looks a lot like this Linux based device HERE .
I've submitted this X-tend to/. for a story a number of times, but I guess/. would rather pay attention to Windows based stuff now.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not flamebait, this is the truth. So you can't handle it, whatever.
"You seem to have this belief that whererever one does business, one must first overthrow the existing system and establish pure democracy, modeled off of the US Constitution."
No, but when a company markets themselves onthe premise of 1) don't be evil, and 2) making ALL the world's information available, and then do this kind of thing, they are full of shit.
I'm sorry, but it but it doesn't get much worse than China in terms of "evil". While I don't like the idea of buying shit made in China, I still do it, but **I** don't have a policy stamped on my t-shirt that says, "Do No Evil". Google does. Google is breaking their own rules. I'm calling them on it.
Fine, they are a public company, and they have to fulfil the deal they made with the devli by doing that. But Page and Brin have more money than they could possibly spend personally now. They are teh ones that cam eup with the motto of "Don't Be Evil" or "Do no evil". Why are they not standing up, saying "this is wrong, and I refuse to be a part of it" and walk out?
Because apparently their bullshit motto was nothign more than a bumper sticker.
And there is a HUGE difference between consumption of cheap plastic shit made in China by the US and the rest of the world, and making money by withholding the information that your other motto says is your whole fucking point for being there!
Google is violating it's two core values and then rationalizing it.
"They simply do NOT have the option of providing an uncensored search engine in Chine at this time"
That's fucking bullshit! you're telling me that Google, with it's (apparently worthless) motto of "don't Be Evil" and armies of PhD's could not spend the time and money to get their search results crammed through the Great Firewall via some technical breakthrough?
Bullshit!
And it's not just Google, of course. Yahoo, MSN, are all just as bad.
Seriously, if you take a simple formula like how evil a government is as evidenced by oppression of people, and multiply it by the population of people they oppress, and maybe throw in a few points for things like nukes, how is Chine not the most evil place on earth?
Google should have said fuck you, we'll pay the fines, we'll loose shareholders, we don't give a shit because we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for our original ideals. we are waging a war to force, cram, stuff, smuggle information and more importantly, truthiness to the people of China.
People that are making excuses for Google, or buying this PR bullshit are moronic sheep that would have been the same type of people that pre US involvement in WWII would have looked on Germany as great example of a people pulling themselves up by the jack-boot straps after a hard time of it in WWI.
Pull your heads out of your asses and realize that if Google really wanted to, they could have solved this issue of getting information to China through sheer force of will, piles of cash, and maybe a PhD or two that actually gave a shit.
Hypocritical assholes.
I'm still looking for a blog of ANY Google employee that quit Google because of this travesty.
Shame on you. Shame on you. Shame on you. You will look back on this one day and realize that you did in fact, very much so, do evil.
Google users in China today struggle with a service that, to be blunt, isn't very good, and therefore Google is not making enough money with it. Google.com appears to be down around 10% of the time which makes us lose money. Even when users can reach it, the website is slow, and sometimes produces results that when clicked on, stall out the user's browser thus reducing the amount of ad revenue we can generate. Our Google News service is never available; Google Images is accessible only half the time which is really bad for ad revenue. At Google we work hard to create a great experience for our users, and the level of service we've been able to provide in China is not something we're proud of, and not a good way for us to make money.
This problem could only be resolved by creating a local presence, and this week we did so, by launching Google.cn, our website for the People's Republic of China so that we can make more money. In order to do so, we have agreed to remove certain sensitive information from our search results, but not our sweet, sweet advertising. We know that many people are upset about this decision, and frankly, we understand their point of view but because we get to make a shit load of money, we don't really give a fuck what they think. This wasn't an easy choice, but in the end, we believe the course of action we've chosen will prove to be the right one, especially when I think about the extra mansion I can build with all the extra money we are going to be raking in on the backs of these oppressed people.
Launching a Google domain that restricts information in any way isn't a step we took lightly, but when we consider how much money all those Chinese represent for Adwords, heck it became REALLY easy. For several years, we've debated whether entering the Chinese market at this point in history could be consistent with our mission and values, but then we got filthy stinking rich and realized that the "Do No Evil" thing was pretty fucking stupid when we are talking about THIS kind of money. Our executives have spent a lot of time in recent months talking with many people, ranging from those who applaud the Chinese government for its embrace of a market economy and its lifting of 400 million people out of poverty to those who disagree with many of the Chinese government's policies, but who wish the best for China and its people. More time with the corrupt government sympathizers of course, as they are the ones we need to pay off to get this to happen. We ultimately reached our decision by asking ourselves which course would most effectively further Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible as well as make ass-loads of money! Or, put simply: how can we provide the greatest access to information to the greatest number of people, while making an obscene amount of money?
Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission, but we don't give a shit since we're all really rich now, and what the hell, it's not like we live in China. Fuck em! Just make sure they pay the bill. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world's population, however, does so far more severely, and that's a shit load of ad impressions and clicks we'd be missing out on. Whether our critics agree with our decision or not, due to the severe quality problems faced by users trying to access Google.com from within China, this is precisely the choice we believe we faced. So if you don't like it, tough shit! We're getting RICH! By launching Google.cn and making a major ongoing investment in people and infrastructure within China, we intend to change that and make shit loads of money by sleeping with the enemy, ignoring our #1 core value, and helping an oppressive, evil government keep it's sheep in line.
No, we're not going to offer some Google products, such as Gmail or Blogger, on Google.cn until we're comfortable that we can do so in a manner that respects our users' interests in the privacy of their personal communications. Besides, it's
Companies like Ford and ITT were doing business with Nazi Germany before US involvement in WWII, but when we knew that the Nazi's were "bad guys" and there's considerable proof that those companies KEPT doing business with Germany DURING WWII, especially ITT.
/.'ers that are so up in arms about it, did you sell your GOOG shares in protest? If not, you're as bad as they are.
Sure, we're not at war with China (yet), but Mao et all at PRC Inc. have killed more of their own people than Hitler or Stalin by some estimates. I suggest a few Google.COM searches on that. I don't think you'll find it on Google.CN.
The HUGE difference is that Google is a company that has this lame ass slogan of "Do No Evil" that by this act makes it look even more shallow and hypocritical than any other company could. They have finally hung themselves with their own rope. Not that it's a surprise that it would happen after going public.
As for all you
Right... And ITT, IBM and Ford were trying to further the cause of Democracy in Nazi Germany when they kept doing business with them during WWII?
How is this different? China is, and will surely be more so in the not to distant future, AN ENEMY of the West.
Shame on Google.
If you wouldn't mind answering a quick question about your setup and HTPC in general. How do you get progressive scan video out of a PC's DVD to your TV? I've not seen anyone address that. Thanks!
F-secure mentions these as bad URLS:
"And finally, you might want to start to filter these domains at your corporate firewalls too. Do not visit them.
toolbarbiz[dot]biz toolbarsite[dot]biz toolbartraff[dot]biz toolbarurl[dot]biz buytoolbar[dot]biz buytraff[dot]biz iframebiz[dot]biz iframecash[dot]biz iframesite[dot]biz iframetraff[dot]biz iframeurl[dot]biz"
Why not just put them into a HOSTS file as a 127.0.0.1 and avoid it?
"Hell, we can't even find a way to feed everyone"
Not true. It's not a problem of production, it's a problem of distribution and corruption.
I love you naive people talking about bitching to Visa or Mastercard and having them loose their credit card account. The only people MORE slimy than these "discount camera" stores are the credit card processing companies. After talking to a typical processing card salesman makes you want to take a long hot shower... Pond scum looks down on them.
I wish I had mod points... There's no thinly veiled accusation of piracy, I'd suggest an OVERT accusation of it appears warranted.
I AM a professional graphic artist, and there's no way someone would dump money into both Lightwave AND Maya without knowing at least one of them. And, if this guy is a "coder" and the requirements are as indicated, such as icons, etc. WTF is he going to use Lightwave and Maya for? Photoshop, yes, you can stumble by to create something with a few books and a few weeks of time, but thinking that either of those powerful, general purpose 3D design and animation packages would be useful for program related artwork is foolish if you don't know them ahead of time. If time is money, and it is, then this guy wuld have to "spend" 10X to 100X in time to learn EITHER of those apps to get to a point to be able to use them for the indicated purposes what he would spend to just hire an artist to begin with.
Perhaps he's not that bright? Well, I'd argue that anyone that is smart enough and talented enough to make enough money to afford both Lightwave and Maya, should be smart enough to do the basic business equation of make vs. buy. Not that smart, not that much money, back to square one this guy is using pirated software that is causing it to be more expensive for people like me that actually NEED it and actually PAY for it! Pisses me off.
Now, if this guy had tons of $$$, then perhaps he can afford to buy those packages as shelfware for the "someday I'll get time" type thing, and write them off on his tax returns. However we have a self admission that he has no $$$ so that theory don't hold water.
I'd love to see some "event" come up where the CO$ and the IOC's lawyers were forced to do battle. Can you imagine the fallout of two of the largest abusers of the legal systems in countries all over the world colliding? It would be one intimidation lawsuit after another... Back and forth, back and forth, over and over again... That would be worth some broadcast rights!
All your SEGA belong to us!
>>How many farmers shut down the business because it was cheaper to import the same products from another country?
This shows your complete ignorance...
Michigan apple producers are getting killed by apples from places like China. That's right... China.
California is getting killed in citrus, etc. etc. etc.
I worked at SGI, then Cosmo, back in the day when VRML was going to revolutionize the web. Cosmo Player was going to be the 3D equivalent to Mosaic for the 3DWeb... BAH!
We bought a small Russian company called Paragraph for some ungodly high amount that had some 3D chat environments. We had clients like Sony, we had $20MM from SGI to make the company stand on its own (it was after all a spin off of OpenGL technology that SGI had developed, except it was SGI's attempt at testing the waters of PC software), and it died a miserable death. granted part of the issues back then were related to the fact that no one had the computer horse power to spin 30MM filtered, lit, and textured triangles, Cosmo was built on OpenGL which M$ was doing it's best to kill with D3D/Farenheight, and the plug in was like 14MB to download, oh, and no one had broadband. Other than those few things, I'm SURE that VRML would have been a raging hit...
There has been so many attempts at this stupid idea that's it's not even funny.
If chat is the application, there's no need for 3D AT ALL. Period. The people that are drawn to chat are generally clueless about how to navigate a 3D world. I've done the focus groups. It funny as hell to watch Joe Six Pack staring at his avatars feet all day because he can't figure out how to navigate a general 3D environment with a 2D input device.
If 3D is what people want, fucking buy Quake x, Half-life, etc.
I never understood the stupidity of people that were willing to shovel buckets of money into this crap when if 3D chat was truly compelling, then all you have to do is whip out a Quake mod!
At least under a Quake Mod then we could get a little closer to the idea of the Metaverse where people are free to develop their own reality.
At least then you can shove a rocket up some lame ass looser when he pisses you off.
Maybe I can find some suckers to give me a few MM to hire some Quake hackers to do just this. Any takers? Apparently this idea has not died, maybe we can get some for us!
Last month I think Computer Graphics Magazine did a thing on 3D web stuff. Total example of someone who did not know or understand history and is doomed to repeat it.
This is another stupid idea that will die.
This alone is why Linux is never going to be a mainstream OS... WHO WANTS TO DO ALL THAT SHOT JUST TO WATCH A QUICKTIME!!!!??? Mod me, I don't care... Keep Linux on servers and development environments...
Check out THIS And check out the X-tend tablet. Looks cool to me. I'll say it again... Not sure why no one seems to be interested in pointing it out as a cover story here on /. I guess people would rather talk about M$ stuff?
I mean here is a really cool looking tool that seems to embrace open development, etc. etc. etc. and I've never seen any mention of it here.
Unfortunately this time around, Max's vehicle in question is a wheelchair... Maybe The Stones can do the theme song and complete the image?
...grousing about how they make so much less money than they were making at their previous jobs and they can't wait for the recession to be over so they can go find 'real jobs'. Don't they understand that there is a reason the dot-bombs they worked for went out of business?
.bomb bubble was building, that the cost of living kept going up to represent those pay-rates. I know in other areas like the PacNorWest have the same problem. So while pay may be going down to a "normal" level, cost of living is still totally f'd up. I'm sure over time an equilibrium point will be met, but I'm beginning to think it's not going to happen in time to save once hot areas like the Silicon Valley.
I'm sure a bunch of you will say, "tough shit, just move...". Unfortunately some people have ties to an area that go beyond their jobs.
The problem however, especially here in the bay area, is that over the past 4-5 years that the
Looks a lot like this Linux based device HERE . I've submitted this X-tend to /. for a story a number of times, but I guess /. would rather pay attention to Windows based stuff now.