I don't see the pure tablet play working, not from JooJoo, not even from apple
Apple already has a tablet, it's called the iPhone. The only thing that distinguishes it from what people normally imagine when they think of "tablet computer" is the size. It would be a tablet PC all the way, if only it had some decent software.
Without more detail, the conference you started sounds suspiciously like every other "professional" conference I've ever heard of. You know, the ones middle managers dream up and attend to make it look and sound like they're busier and more important than they really are.
You don't say who your target audience is exactly, but if you're looking to attract the Slashdot crowd, you have to have:
1. A solid set of speakers and panels. Geeks justify their time and money spent at a conference by what they'll be able to learn.
Lots to do that is cheap or free. One of the more popular cons around here has free beer on tap from 8PM throughout the night and snacks all weekend long. I've personally never attended a con with a ticket price over $75.
Fun. Related to #2, you need something (or more likely, many somethings) to guarantee that the attendees will have fun. This means interactive panels, workshops, competitions, and so on.
Sponsors. Most cons expect to barely break even where funds are concerned. If your conference is any good, you almost certainly need at least one major sponsor and a few minor ones.
Running a con is hard. I was on a conference committee once and while my job was comparatively easy, many other organizers (especially the conchair) spent an entire year of their free time all for the sake of one great weekend. If you really want to figure out what makes a con tick, get involved with another con before diving into one of your own, no matter how great you think your event planning skills are. There are a few cons with a relatively open planning process, one in particular that I can recommend is Penguicon.
Sorry, no. The function I want is PERMANENCE. That cannot be built into an e-reader.
Neither Amazon nor B&N are targeting you with their e-readers.
They're after the Oprah Book Club followers, the people who read all the latest best sellers, the serial crime/romance readers, the science fiction buffs. The people who buy their weekly or monthly book, read it, then sell it for $0.10 in a yard sale five years later. This demographic has always been the cash cow of the book selling industry. Books were never permanent things to them. A book is read, then forgotten. This is the audience that Amazon and B&N hope to capture because if they succeed, they'll be able to maintain their profits while cutting their merchandise distribution costs drastically.
Also, physical books will continue to be printed and sold no matter how popular e-readers get, so relax.
TFA basically says that the Nook is by and large equivalent to the Kindle, with both a few pluses as well as a few minuses. It provides competition to the Kindle, but doesn't up the ante any. (The reviewer noted that the color touchscreen, the Nook's most notable advantage, was plagued by a particularly slow, buggy, and poorly-designed UI.)
Over selling isn't wrong, it is necessary for services like this.
You and the other poster have different definitions of "overselling." Everybody knows full well that an ISPs upstream bandwidth is much smaller than their aggregate downstream bandwidth. That's not what broadband consumers complain about. What they complain about is the oversell ratio being too small. Once the threshold is crossed and a pipe connecting a neighborhood to the datacenter gets saturated, latency skyrockets and customers connections perform worse than dialup. That's what oversold means. It's a condition to be remedied by investing in infrastructure, not by wagging your finger at your customers for being naughty bittorrent users.
Bittorrent is not normal traffic pattern.
Too many broadband companies (mostly cable and telcos) fail to realize that Internet usage never going to plateau or decrease. I'm sorry, but the days of 95% of your customers using their $60/month high-speed broadband for email, IM, and the occasional trip to cnn.com are over. There are plenty of ways to abuse a network connection, but utilizing it at it's stated capacity isn't one of them. If an ISP can't provide the service, then they shouldn't. Or they should at least be up-front and honest about how poorly their network was designed.
I'm not against filesharing, I'm against idiots who cause congestion because they don't know how to configure Bittorrent client to be "reasonable".
I currently work at a web hosting company and have worked at ISPs before and I still don't understand this mentality. The ISP business is the only one that I know of where companies threaten their customers for demanding more product than the company can currently deliver. Every other business in the world sees such a situation as an opportunity to sell more product and out-perform their competitors. Oh, right, most ISPs don't have competitors.
Listen. This was discussed ad nauseum in the previous Slashdot article. That which you rant about might be applicable to all of Google's services except DNS.
RTFM. But since you can't be bothered, I'll spoon-feed you the details. In a nutshell, the only thing that could identify you to Google's resolvers is your IP address. Which, by the way, is neither private or personal. Google has no way of knowing whether there is one person behind hundreds of IPs or hundreds of people behind a single IP. Nevertheless, the IP-based logs are used only for performance and abuse monitoring and are deleted after 24-48 hours.
Of course, you could get all tinfoil hat and say that Google is simply flat-out lying about their privacy policy. Or that they'll change their tune in a few years after everyone's using the service. But it's always your option to just use your ISP's resolvers, or OpenDNS, or set up your own damn resolver. It's hard to replace Google, The Search Engine, but it's trivial to replace Google, The DNS Resolver and I think they know that.
The encryption technology used to prevent eavesdropping in GSM (Global System for Mobile communications), the world's most widely used cellphone system, has more security holes than Swiss cheese, according to an expert who plans to poke a big hole of his own.
I hope I am not the first to say: "giggity."
Each GSM phone has its own secret key, which is known by the network. Every time a call is initiated, a new session key for that particular call is derived from the secret key and used to encrypt the call. Nohl aims to crack the session key.
This actually doesn't sound like a bad encryption scheme.
To speed up computing time, the project relies on some components not always found in your standard PC, such as Nvidia Corp.'s CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) graphics cards and Xilinx Virtex field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).
So, are those of us without fancy video cards or FPGAs allowed to help? Even if we can't compute keys as quickly?
That's the point Nohl hopes to drive home: The A5/1 algorithm is a broken 64-bit encryption technology, a relic of the Cold War era, when laws prohibited the export of strong encryption technology from the United States. It needs to be replaced--ideally by the much stronger, 128-bit A5/3 system
So GSM itself isn't that insecure, it's that they're using a short key length. This is rather old news then. All they are doing is brute-forcing the whole key space rather than breaking the algorithm. This is basically what brought down RC5-56 and DES (although DES had other flaws as well).
Any source code that is built with it (not by it) must be open.
Any why is that not fair? If someone writes and releases a library under a particular set of terms, that pretty much spells out how they want that library to be used and distributed. If you can't agree to those terms, find a different one. If you don't like the software's terms of use, take issue with the copyright holder, not the license itself.
Stallman went as far as to say that code that assumed a GNU interface should be open source and GPL-compatible, or some such nonsense.
Well, Stallman is a raving lunatic even to people who think the concept of free software is a pretty good idea. His rantings thankfully have no legal bearing.
and the GPL licenses give your software away only to people who agree to also give their software away for free,
Incorrect. The GPL does not say who you can give your software to or what they can do with "their" software. The GPL only says that you cannot impose any practical restrictions on the redistribution of GPL-licensed code.
For example, you can download GCC and do anything you like to it, including nothing at all. But if you want to sell or otherwise redistribute it, you have to make the source code available under the same terms which you received it.
How would you be able to find 10 balloons scattered about the entire country at random in 9 hours with naught but a 35mm camera and faux wood-panelled station wagon?
However, there are people out there who make it their goal to understand the inner workings of all sorts of interesting technology, including mainstream video game consoles. The best way to understand a system is to re-implement it, even if only in software. For example, there's really no good reason one would one to implement an NES on a FPGA, but someone has done it anyhow. It's simply the hacker mentality at work.
TFA says their main goal is to make the web faster. There's a lot of room for improvement in how DNS is implemented. Right now, Google's resolver service mainly experimental but in the future, they will probably offer it to ISPs and wifi hotspot operators.
They're not doing any datamining with the resolvers, beyond keeping an eye out for performance and abuse issues. From their privacy page:
Google Public DNS stores two sets of logs: temporary and permanent. The temporary logs store the full IP address of the machine you're using. We have to do this so that we can spot potentially bad things like DDoS attacks and so we can fix problems, such as particular domains not showing up for specific users.
We delete these temporary logs within 24 to 48 hours.
In the permanent logs, we don't keep personally identifiable information or IP information. We do keep some location information (at the city/metro level) so that we can conduct debugging, analyze abuse phenomena and improve the Google Public DNS prefetching feature. We don't correlate or combine your information from these logs with any other log data that Google might have about your use of other services, such as data from Web Search and data from advertising on the Google content network. After keeping this data for two weeks, we randomly sample a small subset for permanent storage.
It seems they're actually playing relatively nice here and aren't adding the DNS queries to your "Google profile" like they do with search engine queries and other Google activity. They can already track the majority of your movements online through their advertising and stats programs and can gather even more detailed information if you use their web browser. Adding DNS profiling into the mix is probably a bit redundant.
Assuming they're telling the truth, Google's goal with their public resolvers is just to make DNS faster and more efficient.
Mod parent up. Many CLECs are operating on VoIP behind the scenes. My phone service is attached to my house via POTS, but once it hits the CO, the line is plugged directly into an FXS to turn it into VoIP. The COs are connected to the company's datacenter via fiber, and the whole telecommunications infrastructure is managed by a $10K Metaswitch. At the datacenter, they peer with AT&T and (I think) Sprint for access to the switched telephone network.
Some incumbents are doing VoIP totally wrong, though. Most of my family only has CenturyTel available for their phone service and every time I call one of their numbers, the latency and voice quality are horrendous. If I can a non-CenturyTel number, the call is perfectly fine every single time.
If the FCC mandated that all telcos move to VoIP, there would be a lot of situations like CenturyTel's. A lot of these companies can barely manage their existing systems, let alone a complete overhaul to new technology. I can't really see what the advantage would be.
'But [the engineer] stopped me and said: "These people are actually important to have outside of Google. They're very Google people that have the right philosophies around these things, and it's important that we not hire these guys. It's better for the ecosystem to have an honest industry, as opposed to aggregating all this talent at Google."'
Translation: "They already work for us. *wink wink*"
The thing that has always bugged me about SETI is that after decades of scientifically-rigorous research, nothing has been found yet to even hint at the existence of extraterrestrial life as we define it. If we never find E.T., it may be because our definition of "life" is too narrow, or because there's really nothing else out there other than stars, black holes, and other mundane phenomena. It doesn't matter. Putting your own personal time and resources into SETI is like playing an intergalactic lottery: the payoff is mind-bogglingly huge, but the chance is winning is mind-bogglingly small. (I could expound upon the lottery analogy to further discuss why SETI is so attractive from a psychological perspective, but I think you get the point.)
If SETI@Home were the only thing out there that I could put my unused cycles towards processing, I might go for it. But the fact is that there are plenty of other distributed computing projects that are generating data which is useful to scientists (and by extension, everyone) right now.
They're just not quite as glamorous as finding E.T.
Well, there is still a problem. I can't speak for any of the other social networking sites, but Facebook in particular puts fairly strong emphasis on the concept of publishing information publicly (viewable by anyone) versus publishing information privately (viewable only by "friends", ostensibly). 90% of their users don't grok the concept that putting anything online at all by definition means that the information they post is now beyond their control. Sure, their terms of service say that they can do this but the public has been trained by corporations to not take such contracts seriously, let alone read them.
Sites like Facebook should not be allowed to use the word "private," because their definition of the word actually means, "viewable by your friends, every Facebook employee, law enforcement and investigative agencies, and other undisclosed entities that we sell, lease, or give your information to."
I'm not saying Facebook is doing anything illegal or underhanded, nor am I saying that users shouldn't be bound to the contracts that they agree to no matter how small the print. Just that Facebook and most other online services are seriously misrepresenting their use of the word "private."
they're almost certainly as aware as every other game company that emulation is legal.
That has not stopped them from threatening emulator authors with lawsuits, or from flat-out stating that "Emulators are illegal." I'd have to dig a bit to confirm, but all console video game companies including Nintendo have also maintained that (contrary to the actual word of U.S. copyright law) making backups of your legitimately-purchased games is illegal.
"The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered. It would be very difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust.""
I mentally translated it to:
Hey wait, if artificial meat ever replaces real meat, we won't have anything to fight against!
People like this really don't care as much what their cause is, as long as they're perceived as fighting against something. They need to keep that underdog image at all costs. In order to retain their support, they have to put forth the illusion that they are making progress, but that the end goal is always far away. If a solution comes along that would help them significantly achieve that goal, they actively work to subvert it. Because if their goal is achieved, the game is over. These people don't want to win, they just want to keep playing the game. And stay employed, basically.
A surprising number of charities and non-profits work this way too, albeit generally to a lesser (or at least less obvious) degree.
I don't care whether your software is open source or not, Linux is a support nightmare. It's the dozens of distributions.
This is a very, very old argument, I hope you know. And it's quite wrong.
For all your ranting, you're really just demanding that the open source software ecosystem behave in the same manner as the proprietary software ecosystem that you're used to. I'm surprised that this still needs repeating (especially here on Slashdot), but here it is anyway: Open source software and proprietary software are not the same thing.
In the proprietary software world, all players take responsibility only for their own products. (And often, not even then.) When there's a problem that looks like it might be the fault of some other company's product, the user is directed to the other company for support. Sometimes, the situation reaches a stalemate where one company blames the other and you can't get them to budge from that position. Since the code is closed, you don't even have the option of fixing the problem yourself, even if you have the skills to do so or the money to hire someone. If you want anything besides a base OS install (which generally isn't very useful), you have to go out and buy software, and then go through an often non-trivial installation process involving physical media, registration, CD keys, and reboots.
In the Linux world, the distributions try to take responsibility for the entirety of the end-user's computing experience. On Linux, the onus is on the distribution to provide a stable and usable base system, hardware drivers, desktop environment, and thousands upon thousands of free third-party programs. End-user support is largely community-based, but there are commercial support options as well. To install new software, you just open up your package manager, click a button or two, and your new software (plus any dependencies) is installed automatically. Most hardware devices are completely plug-and-play right out of the box, with no device drivers to manually install or some endless series of reboots.
"Fragmentation," as many people put it, is part of the Linux ecosystem by design. It gives the distributions the freedom to innovate, try new features, new designs, new subsystems, and so on. It gives the end user choice. If they don't like one Linux distribution for whatever reason, there are several others to download and take for a spin. If all distributions were forced into a single unyielding design or set of libraries all for the sake of a few proprietary apps, then there would no longer be any point to having multiple distributions. All distros would essentially be indistinguishable and we'd be stuck with the same interface, bugs, and security problems for decades on end. (Remind you of anyone?)
It would be one thing if they could leave it up to the distros to port, build, and test the software. But they can't. As soon as subscription fees are involved, users expect all kinds of unreasonable levels of support. Google can't JUST support Fedora or Ubuntu. Imagine the uproar over them playing favorites.
Google certainly can leave it up the distros to port and build, that's the way the Linux software ecosystem is meant to work. All Google has to do is release the source and the distros will do the rest. Subscription fees don't even enter into it. You can't please everyone and there will always get people who get mad at the world because they don't know how to operate their own computer, but if the software is good enough, there will be few support problems. Even in the worst-case scenario, it would even be within Google's right to say, "here's a port of our software to Linux, you're free to use it, but don't come crying to us for support." This is exactly how Skype has always handled it and they seem to be doing just fine.
I'm a chip designer, and so I use Xilinx tools. When I do, I use the Windows versions. No
Slashdot Mirror
Apple already has a tablet, it's called the iPhone. The only thing that distinguishes it from what people normally imagine when they think of "tablet computer" is the size. It would be a tablet PC all the way, if only it had some decent software.
Without more detail, the conference you started sounds suspiciously like every other "professional" conference I've ever heard of. You know, the ones middle managers dream up and attend to make it look and sound like they're busier and more important than they really are.
You don't say who your target audience is exactly, but if you're looking to attract the Slashdot crowd, you have to have:
Running a con is hard. I was on a conference committee once and while my job was comparatively easy, many other organizers (especially the conchair) spent an entire year of their free time all for the sake of one great weekend. If you really want to figure out what makes a con tick, get involved with another con before diving into one of your own, no matter how great you think your event planning skills are. There are a few cons with a relatively open planning process, one in particular that I can recommend is Penguicon.
This is unlikely, unless you've only played said records a few times in 44 years. The very act of playing a record damages it.
Neither Amazon nor B&N are targeting you with their e-readers.
They're after the Oprah Book Club followers, the people who read all the latest best sellers, the serial crime/romance readers, the science fiction buffs. The people who buy their weekly or monthly book, read it, then sell it for $0.10 in a yard sale five years later. This demographic has always been the cash cow of the book selling industry. Books were never permanent things to them. A book is read, then forgotten. This is the audience that Amazon and B&N hope to capture because if they succeed, they'll be able to maintain their profits while cutting their merchandise distribution costs drastically.
Also, physical books will continue to be printed and sold no matter how popular e-readers get, so relax.
TFA basically says that the Nook is by and large equivalent to the Kindle, with both a few pluses as well as a few minuses. It provides competition to the Kindle, but doesn't up the ante any. (The reviewer noted that the color touchscreen, the Nook's most notable advantage, was plagued by a particularly slow, buggy, and poorly-designed UI.)
I'll bet you a million dollars we won't be having town hall meetings over it, though.
You and the other poster have different definitions of "overselling." Everybody knows full well that an ISPs upstream bandwidth is much smaller than their aggregate downstream bandwidth. That's not what broadband consumers complain about. What they complain about is the oversell ratio being too small. Once the threshold is crossed and a pipe connecting a neighborhood to the datacenter gets saturated, latency skyrockets and customers connections perform worse than dialup. That's what oversold means. It's a condition to be remedied by investing in infrastructure, not by wagging your finger at your customers for being naughty bittorrent users.
Too many broadband companies (mostly cable and telcos) fail to realize that Internet usage never going to plateau or decrease. I'm sorry, but the days of 95% of your customers using their $60/month high-speed broadband for email, IM, and the occasional trip to cnn.com are over. There are plenty of ways to abuse a network connection, but utilizing it at it's stated capacity isn't one of them. If an ISP can't provide the service, then they shouldn't. Or they should at least be up-front and honest about how poorly their network was designed.
I currently work at a web hosting company and have worked at ISPs before and I still don't understand this mentality. The ISP business is the only one that I know of where companies threaten their customers for demanding more product than the company can currently deliver. Every other business in the world sees such a situation as an opportunity to sell more product and out-perform their competitors. Oh, right, most ISPs don't have competitors.
Listen. This was discussed ad nauseum in the previous Slashdot article. That which you rant about might be applicable to all of Google's services except DNS.
RTFM. But since you can't be bothered, I'll spoon-feed you the details. In a nutshell, the only thing that could identify you to Google's resolvers is your IP address. Which, by the way, is neither private or personal. Google has no way of knowing whether there is one person behind hundreds of IPs or hundreds of people behind a single IP. Nevertheless, the IP-based logs are used only for performance and abuse monitoring and are deleted after 24-48 hours.
Of course, you could get all tinfoil hat and say that Google is simply flat-out lying about their privacy policy. Or that they'll change their tune in a few years after everyone's using the service. But it's always your option to just use your ISP's resolvers, or OpenDNS, or set up your own damn resolver. It's hard to replace Google, The Search Engine, but it's trivial to replace Google, The DNS Resolver and I think they know that.
I hope I am not the first to say: "giggity."
This actually doesn't sound like a bad encryption scheme.
So, are those of us without fancy video cards or FPGAs allowed to help? Even if we can't compute keys as quickly?
So GSM itself isn't that insecure, it's that they're using a short key length. This is rather old news then. All they are doing is brute-forcing the whole key space rather than breaking the algorithm. This is basically what brought down RC5-56 and DES (although DES had other flaws as well).
Hmm. You moved all of your data to a brand-new file system, with no backups, and were surprised at the results?
Any why is that not fair? If someone writes and releases a library under a particular set of terms, that pretty much spells out how they want that library to be used and distributed. If you can't agree to those terms, find a different one. If you don't like the software's terms of use, take issue with the copyright holder, not the license itself.
Well, Stallman is a raving lunatic even to people who think the concept of free software is a pretty good idea. His rantings thankfully have no legal bearing.
Incorrect. The GPL does not say who you can give your software to or what they can do with "their" software. The GPL only says that you cannot impose any practical restrictions on the redistribution of GPL-licensed code.
For example, you can download GCC and do anything you like to it, including nothing at all. But if you want to sell or otherwise redistribute it, you have to make the source code available under the same terms which you received it.
How would you be able to find 10 balloons scattered about the entire country at random in 9 hours with naught but a 35mm camera and faux wood-panelled station wagon?
You obviously wouldn't.
However, there are people out there who make it their goal to understand the inner workings of all sorts of interesting technology, including mainstream video game consoles. The best way to understand a system is to re-implement it, even if only in software. For example, there's really no good reason one would one to implement an NES on a FPGA, but someone has done it anyhow. It's simply the hacker mentality at work.
I used FVWM for awhile too, so let's be fair here: you don't "configure" FVWM as much as you flat-out program it.
TFA says their main goal is to make the web faster. There's a lot of room for improvement in how DNS is implemented. Right now, Google's resolver service mainly experimental but in the future, they will probably offer it to ISPs and wifi hotspot operators.
Rate limiting effectively curbs certain kinds of DoS and amplification attacks. It's hardly their only line of defense. RTFM for more info.
They're not doing any datamining with the resolvers, beyond keeping an eye out for performance and abuse issues. From their privacy page:
It seems they're actually playing relatively nice here and aren't adding the DNS queries to your "Google profile" like they do with search engine queries and other Google activity. They can already track the majority of your movements online through their advertising and stats programs and can gather even more detailed information if you use their web browser. Adding DNS profiling into the mix is probably a bit redundant.
Assuming they're telling the truth, Google's goal with their public resolvers is just to make DNS faster and more efficient.
Mod parent up. Many CLECs are operating on VoIP behind the scenes. My phone service is attached to my house via POTS, but once it hits the CO, the line is plugged directly into an FXS to turn it into VoIP. The COs are connected to the company's datacenter via fiber, and the whole telecommunications infrastructure is managed by a $10K Metaswitch. At the datacenter, they peer with AT&T and (I think) Sprint for access to the switched telephone network.
Some incumbents are doing VoIP totally wrong, though. Most of my family only has CenturyTel available for their phone service and every time I call one of their numbers, the latency and voice quality are horrendous. If I can a non-CenturyTel number, the call is perfectly fine every single time.
If the FCC mandated that all telcos move to VoIP, there would be a lot of situations like CenturyTel's. A lot of these companies can barely manage their existing systems, let alone a complete overhaul to new technology. I can't really see what the advantage would be.
Translation: "They already work for us. *wink wink*"
The thing that has always bugged me about SETI is that after decades of scientifically-rigorous research, nothing has been found yet to even hint at the existence of extraterrestrial life as we define it. If we never find E.T., it may be because our definition of "life" is too narrow, or because there's really nothing else out there other than stars, black holes, and other mundane phenomena. It doesn't matter. Putting your own personal time and resources into SETI is like playing an intergalactic lottery: the payoff is mind-bogglingly huge, but the chance is winning is mind-bogglingly small. (I could expound upon the lottery analogy to further discuss why SETI is so attractive from a psychological perspective, but I think you get the point.)
If SETI@Home were the only thing out there that I could put my unused cycles towards processing, I might go for it. But the fact is that there are plenty of other distributed computing projects that are generating data which is useful to scientists (and by extension, everyone) right now.
They're just not quite as glamorous as finding E.T.
Well, there is still a problem. I can't speak for any of the other social networking sites, but Facebook in particular puts fairly strong emphasis on the concept of publishing information publicly (viewable by anyone) versus publishing information privately (viewable only by "friends", ostensibly). 90% of their users don't grok the concept that putting anything online at all by definition means that the information they post is now beyond their control. Sure, their terms of service say that they can do this but the public has been trained by corporations to not take such contracts seriously, let alone read them.
Sites like Facebook should not be allowed to use the word "private," because their definition of the word actually means, "viewable by your friends, every Facebook employee, law enforcement and investigative agencies, and other undisclosed entities that we sell, lease, or give your information to."
I'm not saying Facebook is doing anything illegal or underhanded, nor am I saying that users shouldn't be bound to the contracts that they agree to no matter how small the print. Just that Facebook and most other online services are seriously misrepresenting their use of the word "private."
That has not stopped them from threatening emulator authors with lawsuits, or from flat-out stating that "Emulators are illegal." I'd have to dig a bit to confirm, but all console video game companies including Nintendo have also maintained that (contrary to the actual word of U.S. copyright law) making backups of your legitimately-purchased games is illegal.
I thought the same thing. When I read this:
I mentally translated it to:
People like this really don't care as much what their cause is, as long as they're perceived as fighting against something. They need to keep that underdog image at all costs. In order to retain their support, they have to put forth the illusion that they are making progress, but that the end goal is always far away. If a solution comes along that would help them significantly achieve that goal, they actively work to subvert it. Because if their goal is achieved, the game is over. These people don't want to win, they just want to keep playing the game. And stay employed, basically.
A surprising number of charities and non-profits work this way too, albeit generally to a lesser (or at least less obvious) degree.
This is a very, very old argument, I hope you know. And it's quite wrong.
For all your ranting, you're really just demanding that the open source software ecosystem behave in the same manner as the proprietary software ecosystem that you're used to. I'm surprised that this still needs repeating (especially here on Slashdot), but here it is anyway: Open source software and proprietary software are not the same thing.
In the proprietary software world, all players take responsibility only for their own products. (And often, not even then.) When there's a problem that looks like it might be the fault of some other company's product, the user is directed to the other company for support. Sometimes, the situation reaches a stalemate where one company blames the other and you can't get them to budge from that position. Since the code is closed, you don't even have the option of fixing the problem yourself, even if you have the skills to do so or the money to hire someone. If you want anything besides a base OS install (which generally isn't very useful), you have to go out and buy software, and then go through an often non-trivial installation process involving physical media, registration, CD keys, and reboots.
In the Linux world, the distributions try to take responsibility for the entirety of the end-user's computing experience. On Linux, the onus is on the distribution to provide a stable and usable base system, hardware drivers, desktop environment, and thousands upon thousands of free third-party programs. End-user support is largely community-based, but there are commercial support options as well. To install new software, you just open up your package manager, click a button or two, and your new software (plus any dependencies) is installed automatically. Most hardware devices are completely plug-and-play right out of the box, with no device drivers to manually install or some endless series of reboots.
"Fragmentation," as many people put it, is part of the Linux ecosystem by design. It gives the distributions the freedom to innovate, try new features, new designs, new subsystems, and so on. It gives the end user choice. If they don't like one Linux distribution for whatever reason, there are several others to download and take for a spin. If all distributions were forced into a single unyielding design or set of libraries all for the sake of a few proprietary apps, then there would no longer be any point to having multiple distributions. All distros would essentially be indistinguishable and we'd be stuck with the same interface, bugs, and security problems for decades on end. (Remind you of anyone?)
Google certainly can leave it up the distros to port and build, that's the way the Linux software ecosystem is meant to work. All Google has to do is release the source and the distros will do the rest. Subscription fees don't even enter into it. You can't please everyone and there will always get people who get mad at the world because they don't know how to operate their own computer, but if the software is good enough, there will be few support problems. Even in the worst-case scenario, it would even be within Google's right to say, "here's a port of our software to Linux, you're free to use it, but don't come crying to us for support." This is exactly how Skype has always handled it and they seem to be doing just fine.