The official blog post is almost entirely content free, except for "expanding the role in OIN", not sure why this is newsworthy exactly, except for Google to make PR noises about being open while locking out FOSS from the real things like Chat, Hangouts, Docs, Android forking, and forcing Google+ on everyone etc.
How many of the thousands of Google patents are they actually pledging to OIN? 50%? 80%? 1%?
Huh? Just check recoiledsnake's comment history. You don't need my name for that.
Dissing anonymous comments just for the sake of dissing them is very hacker newsy. Welcome to slashdot where things work a little differently and people judge comments by their merit instead of whether they are made by anonymous perosnas . Also you have a handle. Not a name. So you are as anonymous as I am.
So why not apply that to my post as well instead of judging it by looking at my previous posts? If you think someone gets paid to post on this dying site, you are completely mistaken, at least in my case.
Anonymous users calling registered handles paid shills is exactly like pot calling the kettle black. I dared to put a handle on my post and I am taking the karma hit, while you're just taking potshots while being too cowardly to even register or use your real handle. How can you call into question my comment history while making sure yours is not visible? You're probably a paid Google or Apple shill trying to hide their many postiive comments about them !!!
My intent wasn't to post something anti-Google, it's to show that people move all the time, and it's not particularly newsworthy. For example here's an article from a few years ago which showed some people moving from Google to Microsoft.
Google Exec Joins Microsoft, Trashes Google Google's focus on social and advertising is killing entrepreneurship and innovation, insists former engineering director James Whittaker.
Slideshow: 10 Essential Google+ Tips (click image for larger view and for slideshow)
James Whittaker resigned his engineering director position at Google last month and took a job at Microsoft, where he had worked previously. Then on Tuesday, in a Microsoft Developer Network blog post, he explained his reason for leaving Google: The company has lost its way by blindly trying to compete with Facebook.
"The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate," Whittaker wrote. "The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus."
Whittaker's lament recalls the so-called Peanut Butter Manifesto published in 2006 by then-Yahoo SVP Brad Garlinghouse. There's a difference however: Garlinghouse proposed reforms for Yahoo; Whittaker's criticism merely burns a bridge.
It also echoes a post made by Tim Bray, who upon joining Google in 2010 as an Android developer advocate, took the opportunity to slam Apple's lack of openness (though Bray did not work at Apple).
And then there's a website devoted to the problems with Windows 8, presented by Mike Bibik, a former Microsoft program manager now at Amazon.
"Why I Left" is also now playing outside the tech community. Departing Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith offered a comparable condemnation of his former employer in a New York Times op-ed on Wednesday.
Perhaps this particular literary form should be known as a "Whine-I-Left" letter.
[ Not everyone believes Google has lost its way. Read DARPA Director Leaving For Google. ]
Whittaker draws a contrast between Google under former CEO Eric Schmidt and Google under current CEO Larry Page. The Schmidt regime, he asserts, "was run like an innovation factory, empowering employees to be entrepreneurial through founder's awards, peer bonuses and 20% time." Ads, the company's primary source of revenue remained in the background.
Whittaker appears to believe that ads, like a parent at a teen's party, should remain out of sight, to avoid the embarrassment of exposing who's really in charge.
Under Page, Whittaker says, Google has devoted itself to making its products social, at the expense of innovation and entrepreneurship. And to make matters worse, Whittaker believes Google's social focus is a failure.
Google was wrong to claim that sharing on the Web is broken, Whittaker argues. "As it turned out, sharing was not broken," he said. "Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn't part of it.... Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn't invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google's party became the elephant in the room."
Whittaker's pique appears to be tailor made for Microsoft. He acknowledges that he doesn't enjoy the invasiveness of Google's social integration or the company's ads. Microsoft has been talking up Google's disinterest in privacy for years and many people nowadays, particularly legislators, are listening.
Current and former Google employees have been quick to question Whittaker's motives. In a Google+ pos
Shoddy software because they don't give free updates till the end of time? Maybe you should've tried buying Macs between 2001 and 2006.Maybe they have better software.
he questions for me are "WTF does it do?", "Why does it have to walk this tree, and what is so bloody CPU intensive about it?" followed by, "Why does an update have to care what patches are superseded? As long as you're up to the latest patch level, it should be all good".
I think the whole thing is fundamentally broken. You have your current version of $Thing, it depends on N other things which must be of a given version. When you upgrade $Thing you just check to make sure the things it depends on are there and if they aren't, then you get them. The old stuff? You just check to see what depends on it, and if there is no longer anything depending on it you can quarantine it. If anything tries to access a quarantined dependancy, then your dependencies are broken and you need to patch the app that tried to do that.
I know I'm glossing over some things, and package management is not trivial; but there's no excuse I can see for exponentially growing scan algorithms.
Why? People paid good money for working supported product. Just because Microsoft wants to bait and switch doesn't make it right. I hope some deep pockets corporation sues the bejesus out of them to force this issue.
I don't see a bait and switch. People knew(or could find out if they wanted) the EOL dates before they purchased it with their "good money", and MS has been extending them since many many years even though they didn't have to. That sounds exactly like the opposite of a bait and switch.
>Devs can issue patches for free! (looking at you Microsoft)
You can stop looking. In typical Slashdot fashion, any bad news about MS gets blared and good news buried, and the posters and mods continue propagating ignorance.
> Microsoft is the worst enemy to the PC as a gaming platform and that's only going to get worse.
What? Games run perfectly on Windows 8, including Steam client.
I think as my children get older and I start teaching my kids how to code and how to work with computers at a deeper level than launching netflix and playing plants vs. zombies that it'll be primarily with some sort of *nix based system (not Mac OS X though, they've just become overpriced PC's with specialized software). As a matter of fact, my goal is by the time my kids are over 10 they'll know how to write basic C programs and use make along with gcc, and they'll feel as comfortable using terminal as they will using a GUI.
There are lots of perfectly good(and free) compilers, programming languages and IDEs that run very nicely on Windows 8, so I don't know what you're saying except that over the years I've seen thousands of your kind of posts get modded up, so good job on saying what Slashdot likes to hear.
As far as Steam is concerned, "Linux" games are "Linux" games, and run on Ubuntu, SteamOS or any other platform that runs the "Steam runtime", a basic compatibility layer so games can assume the existence of certain things.
So 'Linux' games will require the Steam runtime now? That sounds good for Steam, not so much for Linux gaming to become reliant on a DRM game store that takes 30% of all game revenue. Atleast hopefully the runtime is FOSS, say it is so.
The end users don't have to pay for an upgrade and in many cases avoid costs of new hardware as well. That's how they're benefiting, with extra money in their pocket. How were Android users served by different layouts of buttons on each device? You seem overly sensitive to criticism of Android while ignoring my overall point. Windows may have its own useless "fragmentation", for example jerking around network settings during XP to Vista. This isn't Team A vs. Team B. It's about a case of NIH syndrome and lack of consistency. There is no need to get defensive about your preferred platform while peddling criticism of others.
You got my OP wrong. I was pointing out about needless fragmentation of things that are just conventions. Having the buttons in any one config would be better than different configs even if it weren't optimal, consistency is important. Is any one of those configs better than the others? How easy it is to fix? Hope you can see how this is different from Windows fragmentation of XP vs. 7.
What stops set-top PC manufacturers from shipping Debian? We aren't talking about console users here. We're talking about people who (are supposed to) know enough to load and troubleshoot SteamOS onto the machines.
By the same metric, Windows never had any flaws ever and is above criticism because it's still running on 90%+ of PCs, yet you regularly heap crap over it. Funny how that works.
The simple explanation is that the Nokia acquisition is not complete yet, and in the interim Nokia legally needs to act like the acquisition may not happen. This is a project that can take fruit if, for some reason the MS acquisition fails. It will be killed off if the takeover goes through, as simple as that.
At long last, Robert Kearns's battles with the world's automotive giants have come to an end. Kearns, who died Feb. 9, devoted decades of his life to fighting Ford Motor Co., Chrysler Corp. and other carmakers in court, trying to gain the credit he thought he deserved as the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper.
From a basement in Detroit, where he devised his invention, to Gaithersburg, where he moved in the 1970s, Kearns carried his lonely fight all the way to the Supreme Court, one man against the might of the industrial world and a patent system he believed had let him down.
Robert Kearns fought for years to be credited as inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. (The Washington Post) By the time he died at 77 at Copper Ridge nursing home in Sykesville, Md., of brain cancer complicated by Alzheimer's disease, Kearns had gained some vindication in the form of $30 million in settlements from Ford and Chrysler, but he never got what he had sought from the beginning.
"I need the money, but that's not what this is about," he told Regardie's magazine in 1990. "I've spent a lifetime on this. This case isn't just a trial. It's about the meaning of Bob Kearns's life."
All he wanted, he often said, was the chance to run a factory with his six children and build his wiper motors, along with a later invention for a windshield wiper that was activated automatically by rainfall. In the end, his courtroom battles cost him his job, his marriage and, at times, his mental health.
Kearns, who had a doctorate in engineering from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and had taught engineering for 11 years at Wayne State University in Detroit, was no weekend tinkerer. A native of Gary, Ind., he grew up near the giant Ford plant in River Rouge, Mich., and always thought of the auto company as a place that welcomed someone with ingenuity.
He got his idea on his wedding night in 1953, when a champagne cork struck him in the left eye, which eventually became blind. The blinking of his eye led him to wonder if he could make windshield wipers that worked the same way -- that would move at intervals instead of in a constant back-and-forth motion.
After years of experiments at home and on his cars -- "If it ever rained," his former wife, Phyllis Hall, recalled yesterday, "I had to drop everything and go out with him in the car" -- Kearns believed his invention was ready.
He applied for patents, mounted his wipers on his 1962 Ford Galaxie and drove to Ford's headquarters. Engineers swarmed over his car, at one point sending him out of the workroom, convinced he was activating the wipers with a button in his pocket.
Ford's engineers had been experimenting with vacuum-operated wipers, but Kearns was the first to invent an intermittent wiper with an electric motor. After a while, however, Ford stopped answering his calls, and Kearns was left on his own.
In 1967, he received the first of more than 30 patents for his wipers. In 1969, Ford came out with the first intermittent wiper system in the United States, followed within a few years by the other major manufacturers.
After working as Detroit's commissioner of buildings and safety engineering, Kearns moved to Gaithersburg in 1971 to become principal investigator for highway skid resistance at the old National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
In 1976, Kearns's son bought an electric circuit for a Mercedes-Benz intermittent wiper, which Kearns took apart, only to discover it was almost identical to what he'd invented. He had a nervous breakdown soon after.
He boarded a bus, with delusions of riding to Australia and being commissioned by former President Richard M. Nixon to build an electric car. Police picked him up in Tennessee, and his family checked him into the psychiatric ward at Montgomery
Slashdot Mirror
The official blog post is almost entirely content free, except for "expanding the role in OIN", not sure why this is newsworthy exactly, except for Google to make PR noises about being open while locking out FOSS from the real things like Chat, Hangouts, Docs, Android forking, and forcing Google+ on everyone etc.
How many of the thousands of Google patents are they actually pledging to OIN? 50%? 80%? 1%?
If you want to read a more interesting take on patents and Google, there is this article. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/521946/googles-growing-patent-stockpile/
Today I learned, 100 million copies in ~6 months is DOA, according to Slashdot.
Huh? Just check recoiledsnake's comment history. You don't need my name for that.
Dissing anonymous comments just for the sake of dissing them is very hacker newsy. Welcome to slashdot where things work a little differently and people judge comments by their merit instead of whether they are made by anonymous perosnas . Also you have a handle. Not a name. So you are as anonymous as I am.
So why not apply that to my post as well instead of judging it by looking at my previous posts? If you think someone gets paid to post on this dying site, you are completely mistaken, at least in my case.
Anonymous users calling registered handles paid shills is exactly like pot calling the kettle black. I dared to put a handle on my post and I am taking the karma hit, while you're just taking potshots while being too cowardly to even register or use your real handle. How can you call into question my comment history while making sure yours is not visible? You're probably a paid Google or Apple shill trying to hide their many postiive comments about them !!!
My intent wasn't to post something anti-Google, it's to show that people move all the time, and it's not particularly newsworthy. For example here's an article from a few years ago which showed some people moving from Google to Microsoft.
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/06/29/TheGOOGMSFTExodusWorkingAtGoogleVsWorkingAtMicrosoft.aspx
Funnily, Slashdot doesn't usually report things when it's the other way around(guess why??!!)
This employee could see the Google+ disaster coming from a mile(which actually made some real people cry, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs )
http://www.informationweek.com/team-building-and-staffing/google-exec-joins-microsoft-trashes-google/d/d-id/1103367?
Google Exec Joins Microsoft, Trashes Google
Google's focus on social and advertising is killing entrepreneurship and innovation, insists former engineering director James Whittaker.
Slideshow: 10 Essential Google+ Tips
(click image for larger view and for slideshow)
James Whittaker resigned his engineering director position at Google last month and took a job at Microsoft, where he had worked previously. Then on Tuesday, in a Microsoft Developer Network blog post, he explained his reason for leaving Google: The company has lost its way by blindly trying to compete with Facebook.
"The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate," Whittaker wrote. "The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus."
Whittaker's lament recalls the so-called Peanut Butter Manifesto published in 2006 by then-Yahoo SVP Brad Garlinghouse. There's a difference however: Garlinghouse proposed reforms for Yahoo; Whittaker's criticism merely burns a bridge.
It also echoes a post made by Tim Bray, who upon joining Google in 2010 as an Android developer advocate, took the opportunity to slam Apple's lack of openness (though Bray did not work at Apple).
And then there's a website devoted to the problems with Windows 8, presented by Mike Bibik, a former Microsoft program manager now at Amazon.
"Why I Left" is also now playing outside the tech community. Departing Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith offered a comparable condemnation of his former employer in a New York Times op-ed on Wednesday.
Perhaps this particular literary form should be known as a "Whine-I-Left" letter.
[ Not everyone believes Google has lost its way. Read DARPA Director Leaving For Google. ]
Whittaker draws a contrast between Google under former CEO Eric Schmidt and Google under current CEO Larry Page. The Schmidt regime, he asserts, "was run like an innovation factory, empowering employees to be entrepreneurial through founder's awards, peer bonuses and 20% time." Ads, the company's primary source of revenue remained in the background.
Whittaker appears to believe that ads, like a parent at a teen's party, should remain out of sight, to avoid the embarrassment of exposing who's really in charge.
Under Page, Whittaker says, Google has devoted itself to making its products social, at the expense of innovation and entrepreneurship. And to make matters worse, Whittaker believes Google's social focus is a failure.
Google was wrong to claim that sharing on the Web is broken, Whittaker argues. "As it turned out, sharing was not broken," he said. "Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn't part of it. ... Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn't invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google's party became the elephant in the room."
Whittaker's pique appears to be tailor made for Microsoft. He acknowledges that he doesn't enjoy the invasiveness of Google's social integration or the company's ads. Microsoft has been talking up Google's disinterest in privacy for years and many people nowadays, particularly legislators, are listening.
Current and former Google employees have been quick to question Whittaker's motives. In a Google+ pos
A good argument and post ruined by the last line. Sigh, Slashdot, you never change.
Shoddy software because they don't give free updates till the end of time? Maybe you should've tried buying Macs between 2001 and 2006.Maybe they have better software.
http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/blog/entry/package-management-sudoku/
http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/blog/entry/package-management-sudoku-2/
he questions for me are "WTF does it do?", "Why does it have to walk this tree, and what is so bloody CPU intensive about it?" followed by, "Why does an update have to care what patches are superseded? As long as you're up to the latest patch level, it should be all good".
I think the whole thing is fundamentally broken. You have your current version of $Thing, it depends on N other things which must be of a given version. When you upgrade $Thing you just check to make sure the things it depends on are there and if they aren't, then you get them. The old stuff? You just check to see what depends on it, and if there is no longer anything depending on it you can quarantine it. If anything tries to access a quarantined dependancy, then your dependencies are broken and you need to patch the app that tried to do that.
I know I'm glossing over some things, and package management is not trivial; but there's no excuse I can see for exponentially growing scan algorithms.
Tell that to the apt-get folks.
http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/blog/entry/package-management-sudoku/
http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/blog/entry/package-management-sudoku-2/
How exactly does someone on Slashdot think dependencies are trivial to calculate and resolve?
http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/blog/entry/package-management-sudoku/
http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/blog/entry/package-management-sudoku-2/
Oh, I know the answer, it's all about the MS bashing.
Why? People paid good money for working supported product. Just because Microsoft wants to bait and switch doesn't make it right. I hope some deep pockets corporation sues the bejesus out of them to force this issue.
I don't see a bait and switch. People knew(or could find out if they wanted) the EOL dates before they purchased it with their "good money", and MS has been extending them since many many years even though they didn't have to. That sounds exactly like the opposite of a bait and switch.
Want to check the EOL for Windows 8 before purchasing? Here it is http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/lifecycle
Many of XP users are people in 3rd world countries who knowingly or unknowingly have a pirated OS, but they would pay for each fix, right?
>Devs can issue patches for free! (looking at you Microsoft)
You can stop looking. In typical Slashdot fashion, any bad news about MS gets blared and good news buried, and the posters and mods continue propagating ignorance.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-06-26-microsoft-no-longer-charges-developers-to-patch-their-xbox-360-games
> Microsoft is the worst enemy to the PC as a gaming platform and that's only going to get worse.
What? Games run perfectly on Windows 8, including Steam client.
I think as my children get older and I start teaching my kids how to code and how to work with computers at a deeper level than launching netflix and playing plants vs. zombies that it'll be primarily with some sort of *nix based system (not Mac OS X though, they've just become overpriced PC's with specialized software). As a matter of fact, my goal is by the time my kids are over 10 they'll know how to write basic C programs and use make along with gcc, and they'll feel as comfortable using terminal as they will using a GUI.
There are lots of perfectly good(and free) compilers, programming languages and IDEs that run very nicely on Windows 8, so I don't know what you're saying except that over the years I've seen thousands of your kind of posts get modded up, so good job on saying what Slashdot likes to hear.
As far as Steam is concerned, "Linux" games are "Linux" games, and run on Ubuntu, SteamOS or any other platform that runs the "Steam runtime", a basic compatibility layer so games can assume the existence of certain things.
So 'Linux' games will require the Steam runtime now? That sounds good for Steam, not so much for Linux gaming to become reliant on a DRM game store that takes 30% of all game revenue. Atleast hopefully the runtime is FOSS, say it is so.
The end users don't have to pay for an upgrade and in many cases avoid costs of new hardware as well. That's how they're benefiting, with extra money in their pocket. How were Android users served by different layouts of buttons on each device? You seem overly sensitive to criticism of Android while ignoring my overall point. Windows may have its own useless "fragmentation", for example jerking around network settings during XP to Vista. This isn't Team A vs. Team B. It's about a case of NIH syndrome and lack of consistency. There is no need to get defensive about your preferred platform while peddling criticism of others.
Is that why you post AC, to launch silly attacks while not being man enough to put even a userid on your posts?
You got my OP wrong. I was pointing out about needless fragmentation of things that are just conventions. Having the buttons in any one config would be better than different configs even if it weren't optimal, consistency is important. Is any one of those configs better than the others? How easy it is to fix? Hope you can see how this is different from Windows fragmentation of XP vs. 7.
What stops set-top PC manufacturers from shipping Debian? We aren't talking about console users here. We're talking about people who (are supposed to) know enough to load and troubleshoot SteamOS onto the machines.
Do you really want someone that's unable to find and unselect an option in a GUI, attempt to install a complete new Linux distro on their machine?
By the same metric, Windows never had any flaws ever and is above criticism because it's still running on 90%+ of PCs, yet you regularly heap crap over it. Funny how that works.
Forking/Fragmenting is good when it solves a problem. Not when the differences are between using different conventions.
For a hilarious example, see this Android:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/07/visualized-the-real-android-fragmentation/
LSB came a long way, more work needs to be done.
The simple explanation is that the Nokia acquisition is not complete yet, and in the interim Nokia legally needs to act like the acquisition may not happen. This is a project that can take fruit if, for some reason the MS acquisition fails. It will be killed off if the takeover goes through, as simple as that.
From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54564-2005Feb25.html
At long last, Robert Kearns's battles with the world's automotive giants have come to an end. Kearns, who died Feb. 9, devoted decades of his life to fighting Ford Motor Co., Chrysler Corp. and other carmakers in court, trying to gain the credit he thought he deserved as the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper.
From a basement in Detroit, where he devised his invention, to Gaithersburg, where he moved in the 1970s, Kearns carried his lonely fight all the way to the Supreme Court, one man against the might of the industrial world and a patent system he believed had let him down.
Robert Kearns fought for years to be credited as inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. (The Washington Post)
By the time he died at 77 at Copper Ridge nursing home in Sykesville, Md., of brain cancer complicated by Alzheimer's disease, Kearns had gained some vindication in the form of $30 million in settlements from Ford and Chrysler, but he never got what he had sought from the beginning.
"I need the money, but that's not what this is about," he told Regardie's magazine in 1990. "I've spent a lifetime on this. This case isn't just a trial. It's about the meaning of Bob Kearns's life."
All he wanted, he often said, was the chance to run a factory with his six children and build his wiper motors, along with a later invention for a windshield wiper that was activated automatically by rainfall. In the end, his courtroom battles cost him his job, his marriage and, at times, his mental health.
Kearns, who had a doctorate in engineering from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and had taught engineering for 11 years at Wayne State University in Detroit, was no weekend tinkerer. A native of Gary, Ind., he grew up near the giant Ford plant in River Rouge, Mich., and always thought of the auto company as a place that welcomed someone with ingenuity.
He got his idea on his wedding night in 1953, when a champagne cork struck him in the left eye, which eventually became blind. The blinking of his eye led him to wonder if he could make windshield wipers that worked the same way -- that would move at intervals instead of in a constant back-and-forth motion.
After years of experiments at home and on his cars -- "If it ever rained," his former wife, Phyllis Hall, recalled yesterday, "I had to drop everything and go out with him in the car" -- Kearns believed his invention was ready.
He applied for patents, mounted his wipers on his 1962 Ford Galaxie and drove to Ford's headquarters. Engineers swarmed over his car, at one point sending him out of the workroom, convinced he was activating the wipers with a button in his pocket.
Ford's engineers had been experimenting with vacuum-operated wipers, but Kearns was the first to invent an intermittent wiper with an electric motor. After a while, however, Ford stopped answering his calls, and Kearns was left on his own.
In 1967, he received the first of more than 30 patents for his wipers. In 1969, Ford came out with the first intermittent wiper system in the United States, followed within a few years by the other major manufacturers.
After working as Detroit's commissioner of buildings and safety engineering, Kearns moved to Gaithersburg in 1971 to become principal investigator for highway skid resistance at the old National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
In 1976, Kearns's son bought an electric circuit for a Mercedes-Benz intermittent wiper, which Kearns took apart, only to discover it was almost identical to what he'd invented. He had a nervous breakdown soon after.
He boarded a bus, with delusions of riding to Australia and being commissioned by former President Richard M. Nixon to build an electric car. Police picked him up in Tennessee, and his family checked him into the psychiatric ward at Montgomery
But does it run Linux.