For instance, who gets elected president isn't up to popular opinion, but the mass media.
Talk about false dichotomies-- who gets elected is a result of popular opinion, even if popular opinion is caused by the media's coverage.
Anyway, that was just supposed to be an example of something: when someone answers a question, their answer may be wrong, but it might still have some meaning. It just might not have the meaning that the answerer intended it to have.
Now clearly the people answering these questions aren't giving correct answers, and obviously their opinions don't have a direct causal relationship with the failure of those companies. On the other hand, their answers still might have meaning. For example, you could just treat it as a measurement of public opinion of these companies. If lots of people think you're going to fail, it could perhaps be a sign that people aren't happy with your products, or else maybe that people just haven't heard your name lately. The companies' marketing departments might care about that sort of thing. A bystander might find that interesting.
Beyond that, general opinion of these companies can have an effect on these companies' future success. People are less likely to buy enterprise products of a company when that company's future is in doubt, since people generally want long-term support. Bad perception can cause funding to dry up, stock prices to drop, and business deals to fall through.
Now I wouldn't come close to claiming that being on this list will cause a company to fail. But just because the list doesn't have that particular meaning doesn't mean that it's meaningless.
Well what I was trying to say is that even if the subscribers are morons, that doesn't make the poll completely meaningless. This poll might not give you the slightest hint about the health of the companies it's talking about, but the public perception of these companies might be considered meaningful information.
After all, you could take a poll of morons asking, "who's would make the best president of the US?" and it might not give you any indication of who would make the best president. Depending on the year, however, it might give you a pretty good idea about who will be the next president.
I'm convinced that most software sucks because most people writing it have no idea what they're doing and shouldn't be allowed to touch a computer
I'm convinced that there's a sort of paradox when it comes to filling skilled jobs: the people doing the hiring are usually not in a position to evaluate whether the candidate can actually do the job.
It's not always the case, but often when you're hiring someone for their expertise, it means that there's no one on your staff who already has that expertise. That put a severe limitation on your ability to vett the candidate, since they may know the answers to your questions better than anyone you have on staff, and yet still be giving you bad answers. Often, with highly technical issues, there isn't simply a "right" and "wrong" answer, but there's grades of rightness, including some dissent among some people. You could have the right basic idea, but still be far enough off to cause trouble.
There's ultimately nothing on the resume that can tell you whether someone is a good candidate. There's no magic rule that can guarantee you that you find someone who knows what they're doing. This contributes to people getting into positions that they're not qualified to fill.
The Man-Moth is not mythical. I saw him only this morning, chewing on people's jackets.
Well that's why they're specifying the "Mythical Man-Moth" instead of the "Real Man-Moth." They're different, mainly in that the mythical one only exists in myth.
Still, if you're going to cluster, then you should at least use versioning (as you mentioned). Backups aren't just for the purpose of restoring in cases of hardware failure, but also so you can retrieve your documents as they existed at some point of time. Clusters don't necessarily protect against accidental deletions, data corruption, etc. Loss of data can get replicated the same way the data can.
But ultimately I think we're agreeing. Tapes do suck, and really so do hard drives, clustered filesystems, and most backup software. Unfortunately, we're stuck using the technology that's available. I just wasn't sure if you were saying, "Tapes suck, therefore no one should ever use them."
So this guy is insisting that Apple's providing an iPhone Nano in spite of having no evidence other than, "I think it would make sense for them to do it", and when there's evidence that AT&T doesn't know anything about it, he draws the conclusion that they'll launch it in China first?
Based on what? How many products have Apple launched in countries other than the US in the past few years?
I don't know... I guess it's somewhat interesting that lots of people believe these companies will fail. If nothing else, it says something about their PR challenges. People aren't as likely to purchase products from companies they feel have an uncertain future.
RAID isn't a backup, but both RAID and backups address the issue of data loss. They just address it at different points.
I agree. RAID and backups help address concerns about data loss. I was just saying that, if your backup sucks, having a good RAID doesn't really fix the issue at all. It helps to fix a different issue surrounding data loss. I wasn't sure what you were getting at by saying "tapes suck," but they're a pretty good solution for what they do.
But yes, you're right. Redundancy is key. Using version control, a rotation scheme, and multiple copies of tape sets will help prevent data loss.
I thought there was something for Google doing this, too. I'm not being coy or anything, I really don't remember very clearly.
Anyway, I still generally prefer not to trust other companies with my company's confidential data unless it's necessary. Nothing personal against Google.
I understand your frustration, and if it were me, I would probably have called the teacher (calmly) to explain that we simply don't have MS Office, and ask her not to punish my child for that reason. If she wasn't responsive, I would take it up with the principle.
On the other hand, it seems like things probably could have been handled better on your end. Did you know about this requirement ahead of time? You could have tried to contact the teacher at the time, or else sent your son in with a note explaining on the day he turned in the paper.
Also, Google Docs will export files as Word documents, so you easily could have complied with that portion of the teachers requirements. Also, you could have chosen a serif font instead of Verdana (which is sans-serif). So you should have been able to get pretty close to what was required with your existing tools.
No offense to you-- dealing with kids and homework and teachers isn't easy. It is a bit crappy that they're requiring a proprietary format, but on a practical level, it shouldn't be that hard to find a way to do that.
the operating system that is used is not as important, as long as an open standard is in use.
I definitely agree with this. People get so wrapped up in the question as to whether the source code is free/open (which admittedly can be an important issue) that they forget about the issue of "standards". If you use open standards and open protocols, then it gives everyone the freedom to use whatever software they want without fear of vendor lock-in. Even if some particular person or group is using software that's completely proprietary and secretive about its inner-workings, you'll still be able to communicate, interoperate, and share information.
At the very least, I agree with attempts to ensure that all government documents are disseminated in open formats. Insofar as the government distributes word documents, they're reenforcing a Microsoft monopoly, and I don't believe that is appropriate. The definition of what is "open" shouldn't just be "some body certified it as such," but rather the law should have specific conditions, including surrendering the right to ever sue for patent infringement for implementing the standard.
Saying, "You should trust Google with your company's confidential documents more than you trust Microsoft or Yahoo," isn't the same as saying, "You should trust Google with your company's confidential documents."
I don't have a citation for Google folding to law enforcement, but wasn't there some incident where they gave up Chinese dissidents to the Chinese government?
A favicon can be a.png with an alpha channel (at least in modern browsers)
Yeah, I don't remember which browser it was, but I was testing browsers-- probably about a year ago?-- and one of the browsers didn't support anything but GIFs. It may have been IE6, which you could say isn't a "modern browser", but there are still loads of people using it (unfortunately).
There's another problem in that calculation, too. Though the favicons are potentially limited to 256 colors, they don't have to be the same 256 colors from one icon to another. Since there are only 256 pixels in a 16x16 icon, you'd think that would be enough (it's enough for each pixel to be a different color).
The problem, rather, is the lack of an alpha channel. In order to make a logo that small look good, the logo either has to be pretty simple, or you have to use antialiasing. You don't really want to use antialiasing and transparency in your logo unless you know what the background is going to be, or else you run the definite risk of it looking crappy.
Yes, I agree that this whole thing seems a little nit-picky. It's pretty hard to design a good logo. Ask a designer, and many will say that they find it to be one of the hardest things to design, since they should usually be extremely simple designs, immediately identifiable, and wrap up a lot of meaning into a single impression.
It's even harder to create an logo that doesn't resemble any other logo. You can't really do it. Art in general takes from prior works, even if only stylistically, and nothing is entirely original. People are usually inspired by something, or draw an idea from someone else's work. Besides that, like I said, logos should usually be pretty simple, and if you make a million designs, all of them extremely simple, then every design will resemble at least a couple of the others.
Knowing all that, consider the form of the favicon. They're 16px by 16px, and IIRC some browsers only support 8-bit graphics (256 colors, no alpha channel). That's going to narrow your options a bit.
Also, using multiple primary colors are popular in logos. They stand out, and can be used to convey a childish simplicity (fun) or an elemental nature of the product. Using a single letter or only a couple letters is popular in logos-- I don't think I need to explain why. When you put this all together, it would be amazing if lots of favicons didn't resemble each other in various ways.
Good point. Or maybe just as much to the point, even if you were doing things online, if not for Google, someone else would be doing the same thing. If no one were doing it, then it would just mean it would take you much longer to find the things you were looking for, which would arguably lead to you using more of other resources.
The point of the article seems to be that Google is optimizing for performance instead of energy consumption. Seems like a valid complaint, except that if their engine performed badly, they'd be out of business completely. I'm sure Google is trying to be as energy efficient as is reasonable, since wasted energy means wasted money. It may also be that, if Google weren't so dominant, then there would be multiple providers each doing the same thing, being even less efficient.
It seems like a better tact might be to try to pressure Google into using alternative energy sources. On the other hand, it's not at all clear to me how much control Google has over where their electricity comes from. Another option would be to pressure Intel (or whoever produces the hardware Google runs on) to make their products more energy efficient. But again, I'm pretty sure they're doing the best they can. If Intel could realistically produce drastic cuts to the power consumption of their chips, they'd do it because it would be a big competitive advantage. It's just not quite that simple.
Even if I had the money and needed to setup a server I still would not get an Exchange server unless I absolutely had to
Yeah, I feel the same way, and it's really easy to say that. Unfortunately, when you have a job, and your company needs to get something done, avoiding vendor lock-in is only one consideration. Another is features. If only one piece of software has a certain set of feature set, and you need that feature set, you might just need to man up and use it.
Imagine you get called into your bosses office, and he says, "Why can't we do [whatever]? I know you can do it, because the last company I worked for could do it."
Are you seriously going to say, "Well, there's a software package that almost everyone uses, and it does that perfectly with very little trouble, but I won't use it because I'm afraid of vendor lock-in."
Good luck keeping that job.
Or even if you are the boss, there's some point at which you need to be practical. If using proprietary software saves you enough money, and you need to choose between doing that and closing your doors, you might just have to use proprietary software.
Now you may have found some little article that suggests that there's a perfectly good open source alternative to Exchange, and that's fine-- until you actually try them, and they don't work very well. And besides, the open source version is always missing a bunch of features, and you have to buy the proprietary version to get those features. Now you find yourself locked into an "open source" vendor, and while you know Microsoft is going to be around for the next couple years, you can't say the same about Zarafa.
Apple, on the other hand, is another company that you can be sure will exist for a few years more, but unlike Microsoft they tend to use open standards, which means the whole thing should be pretty interoperable. On top of that, a lot of Apple's software is open source software-- including the calendaring server, is what we're talking about here. There isn't a lot of lock-in to speak of
So I guess what I'm saying is, the sentiment of only wanting to use open source is all well and good, but whether it's practical depends on your situation. There's a lot of room for complexity, so you might not want to get too judgmental unless you know a lot about it.
Yeah, I understand that it's beneficial for the ego to try to hurt the other person's feelings once you've been proven wrong. Nothing wrong with that. I'm just glad we agree about the importance of building infrastructure.
Their explanation was that there was overwhelming demand, which... I don't know, but I find somehow suspicious. For as big as Microsoft is, that they didn't anticipate demand and it took them a full 24 hours to get the situation rectified seems to border on incompetent.
But that's not really my criticism here, because I suspect it's not the case. The way they hyped things up and delayed, explaining that they were overwhelmed by demand before they had really even made it available, it makes me very suspicious that this is all a sort of gimmick. They're trying to counter the perception that nobody was interested in Vista by making news stories about the Windows 7 demand being so enormous as to be unmanageable.
Ok, so fine, let's just pretend that you actually said that it makes sense to build infrastructure from the outset, and then we can agree. I'm fine with that.
Ok, but let's just presume for the sake of argument that no one has a picture of your naked wife, and it's just Google with a picture of the outside of your house, latitude and longitude, and address with those pictures. They can also go down the street and see pictures of your neighbors houses in the same way.
Is that an invasion of privacy, in and of itself? Maybe I am missing the point, but I don't see how having a GPS location and address mapped to a photo of the outside of my house is supposed to scare me. I'll start complaining when someone gets naked pictures of my wife and posts them on the Internet, whether there's GPS data attached or not.
If such a tool was used to narrow down a suspect in a crime or malfeasance, would constitutional guarantees against self-incrimination come into play?
No, the right against incriminating yourself basically amounts to "you have the right to remain silent". The police aren't allowed to punish you for not telling them about your crimes. However, anything you do tell them can (and will) be used against you.
What the law fails to capture is that putting a vast number of such photos together, correlating them with a geographical information system, yellow page listings, satellite imagery, internet search results, and offering it to the general public to use for free, without any restrictions of purpose, does massively violate privacy.
I don't know-- does it really? I can certainly understand why someone would be upset if they themselves were in one of the photos at a particular place on Google, but I'm not sure I understand why a picture of your house, taken from a public road, constitutes an invasion of privacy. Do you consider the outside of your house to be "private"?
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For instance, who gets elected president isn't up to popular opinion, but the mass media.
Talk about false dichotomies-- who gets elected is a result of popular opinion, even if popular opinion is caused by the media's coverage.
Anyway, that was just supposed to be an example of something: when someone answers a question, their answer may be wrong, but it might still have some meaning. It just might not have the meaning that the answerer intended it to have.
Now clearly the people answering these questions aren't giving correct answers, and obviously their opinions don't have a direct causal relationship with the failure of those companies. On the other hand, their answers still might have meaning. For example, you could just treat it as a measurement of public opinion of these companies. If lots of people think you're going to fail, it could perhaps be a sign that people aren't happy with your products, or else maybe that people just haven't heard your name lately. The companies' marketing departments might care about that sort of thing. A bystander might find that interesting.
Beyond that, general opinion of these companies can have an effect on these companies' future success. People are less likely to buy enterprise products of a company when that company's future is in doubt, since people generally want long-term support. Bad perception can cause funding to dry up, stock prices to drop, and business deals to fall through.
Now I wouldn't come close to claiming that being on this list will cause a company to fail. But just because the list doesn't have that particular meaning doesn't mean that it's meaningless.
Well what I was trying to say is that even if the subscribers are morons, that doesn't make the poll completely meaningless. This poll might not give you the slightest hint about the health of the companies it's talking about, but the public perception of these companies might be considered meaningful information.
After all, you could take a poll of morons asking, "who's would make the best president of the US?" and it might not give you any indication of who would make the best president. Depending on the year, however, it might give you a pretty good idea about who will be the next president.
I'm convinced that most software sucks because most people writing it have no idea what they're doing and shouldn't be allowed to touch a computer
I'm convinced that there's a sort of paradox when it comes to filling skilled jobs: the people doing the hiring are usually not in a position to evaluate whether the candidate can actually do the job.
It's not always the case, but often when you're hiring someone for their expertise, it means that there's no one on your staff who already has that expertise. That put a severe limitation on your ability to vett the candidate, since they may know the answers to your questions better than anyone you have on staff, and yet still be giving you bad answers. Often, with highly technical issues, there isn't simply a "right" and "wrong" answer, but there's grades of rightness, including some dissent among some people. You could have the right basic idea, but still be far enough off to cause trouble.
There's ultimately nothing on the resume that can tell you whether someone is a good candidate. There's no magic rule that can guarantee you that you find someone who knows what they're doing. This contributes to people getting into positions that they're not qualified to fill.
The Man-Moth is not mythical. I saw him only this morning, chewing on people's jackets.
Well that's why they're specifying the "Mythical Man-Moth" instead of the "Real Man-Moth." They're different, mainly in that the mythical one only exists in myth.
Still, if you're going to cluster, then you should at least use versioning (as you mentioned). Backups aren't just for the purpose of restoring in cases of hardware failure, but also so you can retrieve your documents as they existed at some point of time. Clusters don't necessarily protect against accidental deletions, data corruption, etc. Loss of data can get replicated the same way the data can.
But ultimately I think we're agreeing. Tapes do suck, and really so do hard drives, clustered filesystems, and most backup software. Unfortunately, we're stuck using the technology that's available. I just wasn't sure if you were saying, "Tapes suck, therefore no one should ever use them."
So this guy is insisting that Apple's providing an iPhone Nano in spite of having no evidence other than, "I think it would make sense for them to do it", and when there's evidence that AT&T doesn't know anything about it, he draws the conclusion that they'll launch it in China first?
Based on what? How many products have Apple launched in countries other than the US in the past few years?
I don't know... I guess it's somewhat interesting that lots of people believe these companies will fail. If nothing else, it says something about their PR challenges. People aren't as likely to purchase products from companies they feel have an uncertain future.
RAID isn't a backup, but both RAID and backups address the issue of data loss. They just address it at different points.
I agree. RAID and backups help address concerns about data loss. I was just saying that, if your backup sucks, having a good RAID doesn't really fix the issue at all. It helps to fix a different issue surrounding data loss. I wasn't sure what you were getting at by saying "tapes suck," but they're a pretty good solution for what they do.
But yes, you're right. Redundancy is key. Using version control, a rotation scheme, and multiple copies of tape sets will help prevent data loss.
I thought there was something for Google doing this, too. I'm not being coy or anything, I really don't remember very clearly.
Anyway, I still generally prefer not to trust other companies with my company's confidential data unless it's necessary. Nothing personal against Google.
I understand your frustration, and if it were me, I would probably have called the teacher (calmly) to explain that we simply don't have MS Office, and ask her not to punish my child for that reason. If she wasn't responsive, I would take it up with the principle.
On the other hand, it seems like things probably could have been handled better on your end. Did you know about this requirement ahead of time? You could have tried to contact the teacher at the time, or else sent your son in with a note explaining on the day he turned in the paper.
Also, Google Docs will export files as Word documents, so you easily could have complied with that portion of the teachers requirements. Also, you could have chosen a serif font instead of Verdana (which is sans-serif). So you should have been able to get pretty close to what was required with your existing tools.
No offense to you-- dealing with kids and homework and teachers isn't easy. It is a bit crappy that they're requiring a proprietary format, but on a practical level, it shouldn't be that hard to find a way to do that.
the operating system that is used is not as important, as long as an open standard is in use.
I definitely agree with this. People get so wrapped up in the question as to whether the source code is free/open (which admittedly can be an important issue) that they forget about the issue of "standards". If you use open standards and open protocols, then it gives everyone the freedom to use whatever software they want without fear of vendor lock-in. Even if some particular person or group is using software that's completely proprietary and secretive about its inner-workings, you'll still be able to communicate, interoperate, and share information.
At the very least, I agree with attempts to ensure that all government documents are disseminated in open formats. Insofar as the government distributes word documents, they're reenforcing a Microsoft monopoly, and I don't believe that is appropriate. The definition of what is "open" shouldn't just be "some body certified it as such," but rather the law should have specific conditions, including surrendering the right to ever sue for patent infringement for implementing the standard.
Saying, "You should trust Google with your company's confidential documents more than you trust Microsoft or Yahoo," isn't the same as saying, "You should trust Google with your company's confidential documents."
I don't have a citation for Google folding to law enforcement, but wasn't there some incident where they gave up Chinese dissidents to the Chinese government?
A favicon can be a .png with an alpha channel (at least in modern browsers)
Yeah, I don't remember which browser it was, but I was testing browsers-- probably about a year ago?-- and one of the browsers didn't support anything but GIFs. It may have been IE6, which you could say isn't a "modern browser", but there are still loads of people using it (unfortunately).
There's another problem in that calculation, too. Though the favicons are potentially limited to 256 colors, they don't have to be the same 256 colors from one icon to another. Since there are only 256 pixels in a 16x16 icon, you'd think that would be enough (it's enough for each pixel to be a different color).
The problem, rather, is the lack of an alpha channel. In order to make a logo that small look good, the logo either has to be pretty simple, or you have to use antialiasing. You don't really want to use antialiasing and transparency in your logo unless you know what the background is going to be, or else you run the definite risk of it looking crappy.
Yes, I agree that this whole thing seems a little nit-picky. It's pretty hard to design a good logo. Ask a designer, and many will say that they find it to be one of the hardest things to design, since they should usually be extremely simple designs, immediately identifiable, and wrap up a lot of meaning into a single impression.
It's even harder to create an logo that doesn't resemble any other logo. You can't really do it. Art in general takes from prior works, even if only stylistically, and nothing is entirely original. People are usually inspired by something, or draw an idea from someone else's work. Besides that, like I said, logos should usually be pretty simple, and if you make a million designs, all of them extremely simple, then every design will resemble at least a couple of the others.
Knowing all that, consider the form of the favicon. They're 16px by 16px, and IIRC some browsers only support 8-bit graphics (256 colors, no alpha channel). That's going to narrow your options a bit.
Also, using multiple primary colors are popular in logos. They stand out, and can be used to convey a childish simplicity (fun) or an elemental nature of the product. Using a single letter or only a couple letters is popular in logos-- I don't think I need to explain why. When you put this all together, it would be amazing if lots of favicons didn't resemble each other in various ways.
Good point. Or maybe just as much to the point, even if you were doing things online, if not for Google, someone else would be doing the same thing. If no one were doing it, then it would just mean it would take you much longer to find the things you were looking for, which would arguably lead to you using more of other resources.
The point of the article seems to be that Google is optimizing for performance instead of energy consumption. Seems like a valid complaint, except that if their engine performed badly, they'd be out of business completely. I'm sure Google is trying to be as energy efficient as is reasonable, since wasted energy means wasted money. It may also be that, if Google weren't so dominant, then there would be multiple providers each doing the same thing, being even less efficient.
It seems like a better tact might be to try to pressure Google into using alternative energy sources. On the other hand, it's not at all clear to me how much control Google has over where their electricity comes from. Another option would be to pressure Intel (or whoever produces the hardware Google runs on) to make their products more energy efficient. But again, I'm pretty sure they're doing the best they can. If Intel could realistically produce drastic cuts to the power consumption of their chips, they'd do it because it would be a big competitive advantage. It's just not quite that simple.
Even if I had the money and needed to setup a server I still would not get an Exchange server unless I absolutely had to
Yeah, I feel the same way, and it's really easy to say that. Unfortunately, when you have a job, and your company needs to get something done, avoiding vendor lock-in is only one consideration. Another is features. If only one piece of software has a certain set of feature set, and you need that feature set, you might just need to man up and use it.
Imagine you get called into your bosses office, and he says, "Why can't we do [whatever]? I know you can do it, because the last company I worked for could do it."
Are you seriously going to say, "Well, there's a software package that almost everyone uses, and it does that perfectly with very little trouble, but I won't use it because I'm afraid of vendor lock-in."
Good luck keeping that job.
Or even if you are the boss, there's some point at which you need to be practical. If using proprietary software saves you enough money, and you need to choose between doing that and closing your doors, you might just have to use proprietary software.
Now you may have found some little article that suggests that there's a perfectly good open source alternative to Exchange, and that's fine-- until you actually try them, and they don't work very well. And besides, the open source version is always missing a bunch of features, and you have to buy the proprietary version to get those features. Now you find yourself locked into an "open source" vendor, and while you know Microsoft is going to be around for the next couple years, you can't say the same about Zarafa.
Apple, on the other hand, is another company that you can be sure will exist for a few years more, but unlike Microsoft they tend to use open standards, which means the whole thing should be pretty interoperable. On top of that, a lot of Apple's software is open source software-- including the calendaring server, is what we're talking about here. There isn't a lot of lock-in to speak of
So I guess what I'm saying is, the sentiment of only wanting to use open source is all well and good, but whether it's practical depends on your situation. There's a lot of room for complexity, so you might not want to get too judgmental unless you know a lot about it.
Yeah, I understand that it's beneficial for the ego to try to hurt the other person's feelings once you've been proven wrong. Nothing wrong with that. I'm just glad we agree about the importance of building infrastructure.
Their explanation was that there was overwhelming demand, which... I don't know, but I find somehow suspicious. For as big as Microsoft is, that they didn't anticipate demand and it took them a full 24 hours to get the situation rectified seems to border on incompetent.
But that's not really my criticism here, because I suspect it's not the case. The way they hyped things up and delayed, explaining that they were overwhelmed by demand before they had really even made it available, it makes me very suspicious that this is all a sort of gimmick. They're trying to counter the perception that nobody was interested in Vista by making news stories about the Windows 7 demand being so enormous as to be unmanageable.
Then again, maybe I'm just paranoid.
Ok, so fine, let's just pretend that you actually said that it makes sense to build infrastructure from the outset, and then we can agree. I'm fine with that.
Or maybe I don't use false personas, and that was just one of my lies?
Finding where you're going? Isn't that the point of Google Maps in general? Some people navigate based on landmarks.
Ok, but let's just presume for the sake of argument that no one has a picture of your naked wife, and it's just Google with a picture of the outside of your house, latitude and longitude, and address with those pictures. They can also go down the street and see pictures of your neighbors houses in the same way.
Is that an invasion of privacy, in and of itself? Maybe I am missing the point, but I don't see how having a GPS location and address mapped to a photo of the outside of my house is supposed to scare me. I'll start complaining when someone gets naked pictures of my wife and posts them on the Internet, whether there's GPS data attached or not.
If such a tool was used to narrow down a suspect in a crime or malfeasance, would constitutional guarantees against self-incrimination come into play?
No, the right against incriminating yourself basically amounts to "you have the right to remain silent". The police aren't allowed to punish you for not telling them about your crimes. However, anything you do tell them can (and will) be used against you.
(IANAL, but I'm pretty sure I'm right)
What the law fails to capture is that putting a vast number of such photos together, correlating them with a geographical information system, yellow page listings, satellite imagery, internet search results, and offering it to the general public to use for free, without any restrictions of purpose, does massively violate privacy.
I don't know-- does it really? I can certainly understand why someone would be upset if they themselves were in one of the photos at a particular place on Google, but I'm not sure I understand why a picture of your house, taken from a public road, constitutes an invasion of privacy. Do you consider the outside of your house to be "private"?