Please. The X/Gnome/KDE trinity that passes for the GUI solution on Linux these days is a joke. OSX's Graphics APIs blow them away. And I'm not even a Mac fanatic.
I'd really like to see more experimentation with Unix/Linux graphics than sticking with X because it's proven (aka, it's the only system available). Apple has shown that it's possible to build a top-of-the-line Graphics subsystem that satisfies even professionals _on Unix_, and they did it without using X. If that's not a hint that X is probably the wrong path, I don't know what is.
Google doesn't have a monopoly on OSes - it has a minuscule share of the market in mobile, which is the only OS market where it sells a product. It has a large (85%+) market share in Web Search, but Bing these days is pretty good (yes, shock, horror, I said something nice about Microsoft) so if Google's share bothers you, use Bing instead. Or Yahoo. Or anything else, really.
As for web mail (Gmail etc), Google's 3rd behind Yahoo and Hotmail. And importantly, Google haven't used their monopoly in search to squeeze out competitors in other markets (which is illegal), they've gained market share in things like webmail by offering a superior product -- you have to recognise that Gmail with its 1GB storage really set people thinking about "the cloud" in a whole new way.
We don't yet know if Google will use/support X or not. Give them a chance to ship some code. That said, imho they'd be better off without X -- it's not the best choice for a netbook. OTOH, they'd have to reinvent less with X, so maybe a tweaked, optimised X isn't out of the question.
> An OS cannot claim to support standards when it does not support the X Window System standard
Lots of OSes have shipped without X support - the original OSX and Windows come to mind. You can get X servers as add-ons for both. Even if Google chooses to ship Chrome OS without X, the fact that it's open-source and built on a Linux kernel means that someone will probably come up with X for it.
Google doesn't actually index email or show ads on Google Apps Premier Edition, unless the paying organisation (typically an ISP) consents.
Also, since this'll be open source it'd be trivial for you to remove any problematic bits from the code. That said, a company would have to be very very stupid to sneakily grab sensitive data. And Google's not stupid - even when their apps have stored private user data, they've been very up-front about it (Google Toolbar, Google Desktop) and the privacy-unfriendly features had to be consciously turned on by the user -- it was not the default.
Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple -- Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.
This is excellent news, because a commercial vendor with *lots* of clout will - finally! - push Linux to OEMs. Like Android, they really want to go after the OEM market with this one. Don't be fooled by the "it's mainly for web browsing" spin - You might not run AutoCAD or Photoshop yet (or ever) on it, but apps (especially HTML5 enabled apps) for home users will follow, targeting the XP/Vista Home Edition user types. And this would be sweet for corporate desktop deployments -- no virus hassles, little to update, most stuff stored on the server (assuming they get offline support sorted out well, of course).
Fingers crossed that Google's "Linux" will have more polish than what's there in distros so far. Microsoft "love our licensing or leave" and Linux distros "we're open source so live with the flaws" will then both be on notice.
Interestingly, Chrome OS is apparently a bare-bones Linux + a "new windowing system" + the Chrome browser.
I can't wait to see what the new windowing system is. I'd really like to see some innovation there, much like OSX created an amazing GUI layer on top what is essentially Mach/BSD. The challenge to Microsoft aside, this will be a wake-up call to Gnome/KDE. The good news is, because this ought to be open source, the OSS community can really get behind this and improve other products.
And oh, anyone else notice the irony that the Chrome _browser_ for Linux seems largely like an afterthought right now? Still, way to go, Google.
Of course. But Reuters core businesses are news syndication, foreign reporting (which it can do because of the economies of scale generated by news syndication) and financial data (which probably contributes more to the bottom line than news syndication).
The Goldman Sachs case was just the sort of thing the "city" papers claim they're set up for - investigative journalism, asking the hard questions, yada yada. Except it didn't happen. Why didn't the (NY) Times ask the hard questions when NYSE stopped reporting GS trades? A blog (ZeroHedge) actually covered that way better than the Times.
Sure, maybe I'm being too hard on them by picking this particular case. But these days, the "scoop" often doesn't come from newspapers anymore.
These days I read the Times for the arts/books and feature sections. News, not so much. The problem with that is that arts and features isn't enough of a market for several newspapers to thrive. In 10 years we'll see what happens in every other struggling business -- consolidation. There'll probably be a handful of major regional newspapers left in America, all based around major population centres. Everything else will move to the web.
I find this extremely ironic because today a columnist from _Reuters_ broke the big news story about the Goldman Sachs arrest. And Reuters has a very informative web site. While NY and Chicago papers (who should have broken the story because it happened in their cities) were snoozing.
Controlling the aggregator won't making papers profitable. Delivering a service people _want to pay for_ (like Flickr, or WSJ, or the Economist) will make them profitable. And so far, local papers (even in bigger cities like Boston) are just not doing that.
I don't think the spammers got his email address from Google. I mean, to do that they'd have to send a fairly narrow query to Google -- something like 'chibi jesus' -- and then scrape the results... just scraping the cached page wouldn't help -- that contains JS, not the email address. Plus, I imagine Google would notice if a bot started sending lots of search queries its way.
It's far more likely that spammer bots are now actively processing JS. As others on this thread have pointed out, it ain't hard to do.
Actually, you didn't. You _could_ have simply said "IITs are overrated, I prefer Chinese and European schools" (and god knows I'd even have agreed with you for some disciplines). But what you _did_ say was: "I find most Indians incompetent" (title of your post) and that "Chinese and Europeans are the folks I move to the top of the interview list" (*not* Chinese-educated or European-educated)
If you're going to tar billions of people with a broad brush, don't be surprised when people question your motives. And frankly, if you find most people of a particular country (or 'culture') are "incompetent", I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the problem is within your bigoted mind, not the country itself.
So... you see no problem in extrapolating your very limited experience of people of other races into (paraphrasing here) "Europeans are more likely to rock"?
Do tell us how European talent manages *not* to organize itself on a Bell curve. Do tell how, in terms of absolute numbers, there shouldn't be *more* super-talented Chinese or Indian engineers (again, because of the bell curve distribution and the total population of those countries) than European ones.
I referred to the caste system because the GP in his wisdom said it was the legacy of the caste system that Indian programmers can't think for themselves? Now, I know it's been illegal for 50 years, but I'll take your word that it isn't. Even so, how does it affect Indians' thinking skills? Is it because they've been taught to defer to us shudra furriners, or is there some other very subtle and nuanced logic at work here?
You're right, this *is* the internet, where one can dismiss 1 bn people in a couple of lines, complete with pseudo-sociological explanations that would be laughed at by anyone who's actually tried to understand different cultures. Do you really not see the arrogance in that?
... you have fully understood what someone is saying before accusing them of being racist, especially in real life. You may regret it otherwise.
I'm pretty sure I've understood what you are saying. You basically said an entire nation of people won't (or can't -- the original post isn't clear, although the posts since seem to suggest "won't") think for themselves because of their "management culture" and "the legacy of the caste system". (Top notch analysis, there). So yeah, I call you a bigot. And an ass.
Why do I have a duty to be equitable in my criticism? I was replying to a particularly egregious/. post. If I thought the CEO read Slashdot, I'd probably let him have a piece of my mind too (probably as a top-level reply). He was not only racist (towards Americans) but also unfair and stupid (rule 1 of business: don't trash-talk your customers).
Oh cut it out. I took your words at face value and showed absurd your generalizations were. (They are absurd whether one takes the "aversion" or the "unable" meaning.) At this, you and your closet-racist friends realize there are people out there who're willing to call you out on your bullshit, and then you accuse me of stupidity and of lacking reading skills to decode your oh-so-subtle diatribes?
Please. Go keep your nuance to yourself, and think twice about your reasoning next time you attempt your glib two-line analyses of ~3 bn people.
So according to you, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are unable to think for themselves because of the culture of their countries (specifically their management culture and the legacy of the caste system). Also, at least in the narrow matter of thinking for themselves, Eastern Europeans, Australians and South Africans are culturally superior because their culture encourages more freethinking?
Wow. Just, wow. In a few short sentences you have passed sweeping generalizations about approximately 2.8 *billion* people. Of course, you qualify it by just being your personal experiences, but I've got to wonder at the wisdom of taking your knowledge of say 2 or 3 hundred people (max) from all over the world and then extrapolating it...
I have to say, sir, that I am sorry for thinking that you were a racist, or bigoted, or prejudiced. Upon further thought, it is clear that you are merely lacking in reasoning skills.
PS. Did you know there are no fish in the ocean? It's true! I've picked up buckets of sea water at lots of beaches, never found a single fish in one.
Aaah, that explains so much. So I can go about saying "indians are smelly curry-eating pagans" or "black people are stupid" or "white people are ass-loving sodomisers" and that would not actually be racist because I haven't burnt crosses or lynched anybody. It would just make me, um, _prejudiced_.
No wonder real, red-blooded racists are so hard to find nowadays.
*end snark*
Racial prejudice is a lesser evil han racial hatred (the cross-burning, lynching kind). But it is still evil, and any person who excuses racial prejudice ought to examine himself to see where the closet racism comes from.
About this thread: Discriminating on the basis of ethnicity on job applications (which the parent poster proudly admits to) is not only illegal, but very evil indeed because it pushes whole communities down. A hundred years ago it was "No Irish Need Apply", now it mainly affects black people, but it's wrong when done against *anyone*.
And given that the parent poster proudly trumpeted his MO of floating chinese/european sounding names to the top for job applications, I'd suggest this: if he's *really* that confident that what he's saying isn't breaking the law, he ought to put his (real) name to it. I'd be very happy to see the EEOC lawsuits that follow.
Nope, never said that. I've worked with idiot Americans and idiot Chinese and idiot Indians, and idiot Europeans for that matter. I just don't think any country (or race) has an exclusive monopoly on idiocy.
Sorry, making sweeping statements about people based on their ethnicity or color of their skin *is* racist, no matter how you dress it up.
Oh, and instead of making sweeping statements about "the legacy of the caste system" (a system which has been illegal in India for 50+ years, and certainly one about whose complexities we know very little), maybe you ought to consider that many Indians in the US are H1-Bs and are effectively indentured employees... the last thing they need to do is to rock the boat, and it's simply the smart thing to do for them to get along with their bosses.
In short, people have rational reasons for behaving the way they do. But you'd need to get over the color of their skin and their accent to see that.
> We have all this dvd regionalized shit, and protected trade zones, and other restrictions on free trade.
Indian drug companies would be very happy to sell you their 10c drugs, I imagine. You are aware that the only reason they can't is that the WTO forbids them to? And guess who the main pusher of the WTO is? Yep, US.gov.
> The Chinese and Europeans are the folks I move to the top of the interview list....trust a story about outsourcing to get the racist bastards to come crawling about the woodwork.
I don't really expect it to become a meme because of the general economic illiteracy on/., but this really is on par with "There is a world market for maybe 5 computers" and "640k ought to be enough for everybody". Thanks for the giggles.
Seconded, for the sheer usability for NOD32. It stays out of your way and you don't even realise it's there (I used McAfee at work before and NOD32 was a breath of fresh air). And of course it regularly tops the league tables for detection rates.
This is an alpha release, as others have pointed out. It's not even part of the default browser install - it's a separate download. Treat it as a proof-of-concept and kick the tyres.
Also, this is 2009, not 1995. We know a lot more about developing more secure software, having secure development lifecycles, and reacting to vulnerabilities and updating software.
Fractional horsepower web servers are not a new idea, but baking them into the browser is, and assuming the feature is off by default, it's a great idea. It makes the web a bit more equal and opens up new avenues for collaboration.
Slashdot Mirror
Please. The X/Gnome/KDE trinity that passes for the GUI solution on Linux these days is a joke. OSX's Graphics APIs blow them away. And I'm not even a Mac fanatic.
I'd really like to see more experimentation with Unix/Linux graphics than sticking with X because it's proven (aka, it's the only system available). Apple has shown that it's possible to build a top-of-the-line Graphics subsystem that satisfies even professionals _on Unix_, and they did it without using X. If that's not a hint that X is probably the wrong path, I don't know what is.
Google doesn't have a monopoly on OSes - it has a minuscule share of the market in mobile, which is the only OS market where it sells a product. It has a large (85%+) market share in Web Search, but Bing these days is pretty good (yes, shock, horror, I said something nice about Microsoft) so if Google's share bothers you, use Bing instead. Or Yahoo. Or anything else, really.
As for web mail (Gmail etc), Google's 3rd behind Yahoo and Hotmail. And importantly, Google haven't used their monopoly in search to squeeze out competitors in other markets (which is illegal), they've gained market share in things like webmail by offering a superior product -- you have to recognise that Gmail with its 1GB storage really set people thinking about "the cloud" in a whole new way.
We don't yet know if Google will use/support X or not. Give them a chance to ship some code. That said, imho they'd be better off without X -- it's not the best choice for a netbook. OTOH, they'd have to reinvent less with X, so maybe a tweaked, optimised X isn't out of the question.
> An OS cannot claim to support standards when it does not support the X Window System standard
Lots of OSes have shipped without X support - the original OSX and Windows come to mind. You can get X servers as add-ons for both. Even if Google chooses to ship Chrome OS without X, the fact that it's open-source and built on a Linux kernel means that someone will probably come up with X for it.
Google doesn't actually index email or show ads on Google Apps Premier Edition, unless the paying organisation (typically an ISP) consents.
Also, since this'll be open source it'd be trivial for you to remove any problematic bits from the code. That said, a company would have to be very very stupid to sneakily grab sensitive data. And Google's not stupid - even when their apps have stored private user data, they've been very up-front about it (Google Toolbar, Google Desktop) and the privacy-unfriendly features had to be consciously turned on by the user -- it was not the default.
From the horse's mouth:
This is excellent news, because a commercial vendor with *lots* of clout will - finally! - push Linux to OEMs. Like Android, they really want to go after the OEM market with this one. Don't be fooled by the "it's mainly for web browsing" spin - You might not run AutoCAD or Photoshop yet (or ever) on it, but apps (especially HTML5 enabled apps) for home users will follow, targeting the XP/Vista Home Edition user types. And this would be sweet for corporate desktop deployments -- no virus hassles, little to update, most stuff stored on the server (assuming they get offline support sorted out well, of course).
Fingers crossed that Google's "Linux" will have more polish than what's there in distros so far. Microsoft "love our licensing or leave" and Linux distros "we're open source so live with the flaws" will then both be on notice.
Interestingly, Chrome OS is apparently a bare-bones Linux + a "new windowing system" + the Chrome browser.
I can't wait to see what the new windowing system is. I'd really like to see some innovation there, much like OSX created an amazing GUI layer on top what is essentially Mach/BSD. The challenge to Microsoft aside, this will be a wake-up call to Gnome/KDE. The good news is, because this ought to be open source, the OSS community can really get behind this and improve other products.
And oh, anyone else notice the irony that the Chrome _browser_ for Linux seems largely like an afterthought right now? Still, way to go, Google.
This isn't a promise in the sense of "I promise not to cheat". It's a promise in the legally binding sense of promissory estoppel.
> Reuters has several thousand journalists.
Of course. But Reuters core businesses are news syndication, foreign reporting (which it can do because of the economies of scale generated by news syndication) and financial data (which probably contributes more to the bottom line than news syndication).
The Goldman Sachs case was just the sort of thing the "city" papers claim they're set up for - investigative journalism, asking the hard questions, yada yada. Except it didn't happen. Why didn't the (NY) Times ask the hard questions when NYSE stopped reporting GS trades? A blog (ZeroHedge) actually covered that way better than the Times.
Sure, maybe I'm being too hard on them by picking this particular case. But these days, the "scoop" often doesn't come from newspapers anymore.
These days I read the Times for the arts/books and feature sections. News, not so much. The problem with that is that arts and features isn't enough of a market for several newspapers to thrive. In 10 years we'll see what happens in every other struggling business -- consolidation. There'll probably be a handful of major regional newspapers left in America, all based around major population centres. Everything else will move to the web.
I find this extremely ironic because today a columnist from _Reuters_ broke the big news story about the Goldman Sachs arrest. And Reuters has a very informative web site. While NY and Chicago papers (who should have broken the story because it happened in their cities) were snoozing.
Controlling the aggregator won't making papers profitable. Delivering a service people _want to pay for_ (like Flickr, or WSJ, or the Economist) will make them profitable. And so far, local papers (even in bigger cities like Boston) are just not doing that.
I don't think the spammers got his email address from Google. I mean, to do that they'd have to send a fairly narrow query to Google -- something like 'chibi jesus' -- and then scrape the results ... just scraping the cached page wouldn't help -- that contains JS, not the email address. Plus, I imagine Google would notice if a bot started sending lots of search queries its way.
It's far more likely that spammer bots are now actively processing JS. As others on this thread have pointed out, it ain't hard to do.
> I said I have an educational prejudice.
Actually, you didn't. You _could_ have simply said "IITs are overrated, I prefer Chinese and European schools" (and god knows I'd even have agreed with you for some disciplines). But what you _did_ say was: "I find most Indians incompetent" (title of your post) and that "Chinese and Europeans are the folks I move to the top of the interview list" (*not* Chinese-educated or European-educated)
If you're going to tar billions of people with a broad brush, don't be surprised when people question your motives. And frankly, if you find most people of a particular country (or 'culture') are "incompetent", I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the problem is within your bigoted mind, not the country itself.
So... you see no problem in extrapolating your very limited experience of people of other races into (paraphrasing here) "Europeans are more likely to rock"?
Do tell us how European talent manages *not* to organize itself on a Bell curve. Do tell how, in terms of absolute numbers, there shouldn't be *more* super-talented Chinese or Indian engineers (again, because of the bell curve distribution and the total population of those countries) than European ones.
I referred to the caste system because the GP in his wisdom said it was the legacy of the caste system that Indian programmers can't think for themselves? Now, I know it's been illegal for 50 years, but I'll take your word that it isn't. Even so, how does it affect Indians' thinking skills? Is it because they've been taught to defer to us shudra furriners, or is there some other very subtle and nuanced logic at work here?
You're right, this *is* the internet, where one can dismiss 1 bn people in a couple of lines, complete with pseudo-sociological explanations that would be laughed at by anyone who's actually tried to understand different cultures. Do you really not see the arrogance in that?
I'm pretty sure I've understood what you are saying. You basically said an entire nation of people won't (or can't -- the original post isn't clear, although the posts since seem to suggest "won't") think for themselves because of their "management culture" and "the legacy of the caste system". (Top notch analysis, there). So yeah, I call you a bigot. And an ass.
Why do I have a duty to be equitable in my criticism? I was replying to a particularly egregious /. post. If I thought the CEO read Slashdot, I'd probably let him have a piece of my mind too (probably as a top-level reply). He was not only racist (towards Americans) but also unfair and stupid (rule 1 of business: don't trash-talk your customers).
Oh cut it out. I took your words at face value and showed absurd your generalizations were. (They are absurd whether one takes the "aversion" or the "unable" meaning.) At this, you and your closet-racist friends realize there are people out there who're willing to call you out on your bullshit, and then you accuse me of stupidity and of lacking reading skills to decode your oh-so-subtle diatribes?
Please. Go keep your nuance to yourself, and think twice about your reasoning next time you attempt your glib two-line analyses of ~3 bn people.
So according to you, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are unable to think for themselves because of the culture of their countries (specifically their management culture and the legacy of the caste system). Also, at least in the narrow matter of thinking for themselves, Eastern Europeans, Australians and South Africans are culturally superior because their culture encourages more freethinking?
Wow. Just, wow. In a few short sentences you have passed sweeping generalizations about approximately 2.8 *billion* people. Of course, you qualify it by just being your personal experiences, but I've got to wonder at the wisdom of taking your knowledge of say 2 or 3 hundred people (max) from all over the world and then extrapolating it...
I have to say, sir, that I am sorry for thinking that you were a racist, or bigoted, or prejudiced. Upon further thought, it is clear that you are merely lacking in reasoning skills.
PS. Did you know there are no fish in the ocean? It's true! I've picked up buckets of sea water at lots of beaches, never found a single fish in one.
> Racist implies racial hatred, not prejudiced.
Aaah, that explains so much. So I can go about saying "indians are smelly curry-eating pagans" or "black people are stupid" or "white people are ass-loving sodomisers" and that would not actually be racist because I haven't burnt crosses or lynched anybody. It would just make me, um, _prejudiced_.
No wonder real, red-blooded racists are so hard to find nowadays.
*end snark*
Racial prejudice is a lesser evil han racial hatred (the cross-burning, lynching kind). But it is still evil, and any person who excuses racial prejudice ought to examine himself to see where the closet racism comes from.
About this thread: Discriminating on the basis of ethnicity on job applications (which the parent poster proudly admits to) is not only illegal, but very evil indeed because it pushes whole communities down. A hundred years ago it was "No Irish Need Apply", now it mainly affects black people, but it's wrong when done against *anyone*.
And given that the parent poster proudly trumpeted his MO of floating chinese/european sounding names to the top for job applications, I'd suggest this: if he's *really* that confident that what he's saying isn't breaking the law, he ought to put his (real) name to it. I'd be very happy to see the EEOC lawsuits that follow.
> BHEER:
>Sounds about right...
Nope, never said that. I've worked with idiot Americans and idiot Chinese and idiot Indians, and idiot Europeans for that matter. I just don't think any country (or race) has an exclusive monopoly on idiocy.
Sorry, making sweeping statements about people based on their ethnicity or color of their skin *is* racist, no matter how you dress it up.
Oh, and instead of making sweeping statements about "the legacy of the caste system" (a system which has been illegal in India for 50+ years, and certainly one about whose complexities we know very little), maybe you ought to consider that many Indians in the US are H1-Bs and are effectively indentured employees ... the last thing they need to do is to rock the boat, and it's simply the smart thing to do for them to get along with their bosses.
In short, people have rational reasons for behaving the way they do. But you'd need to get over the color of their skin and their accent to see that.
> We have all this dvd regionalized shit, and protected trade zones, and other restrictions on free trade.
Indian drug companies would be very happy to sell you their 10c drugs, I imagine. You are aware that the only reason they can't is that the WTO forbids them to? And guess who the main pusher of the WTO is? Yep, US.gov.
> The Chinese and Europeans are the folks I move to the top of the interview list. ...trust a story about outsourcing to get the racist bastards to come crawling about the woodwork.
> Free trade is not worth it.
I don't really expect it to become a meme because of the general economic illiteracy on /., but this really is on par with "There is a world market for maybe 5 computers" and "640k ought to be enough for everybody". Thanks for the giggles.
Seconded, for the sheer usability for NOD32. It stays out of your way and you don't even realise it's there (I used McAfee at work before and NOD32 was a breath of fresh air). And of course it regularly tops the league tables for detection rates.
This is an alpha release, as others have pointed out. It's not even part of the default browser install - it's a separate download. Treat it as a proof-of-concept and kick the tyres.
Also, this is 2009, not 1995. We know a lot more about developing more secure software, having secure development lifecycles, and reacting to vulnerabilities and updating software.
Fractional horsepower web servers are not a new idea, but baking them into the browser is, and assuming the feature is off by default, it's a great idea. It makes the web a bit more equal and opens up new avenues for collaboration.