On the same computer, sure; I was somewhat imprecise in my language. When I referred to a different browser, I really meant a browser on a different computer. Transparency to the use of which is, I would think, one of the main reasons to want to use an internet-based application (game or otherwise) rather than something locally-installed.
However, with the advent of Flex (now Flashbuilder to confuse and confound more), there are many applications out there that legitimately store information on the client. There has been a large mention of games already, but to that mix, I would add business software. There are many RIA's out there that manage data and distribution using Flex, and hence, pull a large amount of information from servers. Yes, sure, you could reload the data every time that you navigate away from a particular flash harness page, or you could store data within the shared object and not need to spend the vendor's bandwidth, nor stuff the client's pipe with information that was just sent a few minutes ago.
Doesn't HTTP define a whole slew of metadata headers and specified caching behavior to specifically address this kind of thing? Why build "rich" web apps that don't leverage HTTP features that specifically address the need you are dealing with?
There are a number of flash based games which use the flash cookies to save info you might want around so you don't have to start from scratch each time.
If its a flash-based game on an account-based site, you could just save the state to a resource on the server linked to the user account and restore it from that the next time the user opened the game.
This also doesn't rely on the user using the same browser to continue the game.
I believe process and structures should be applied very very carefully, and more often than not, sparingly. I believe chaos, common sense and "yeh that works for us" can combine to come up with simple processes and structures that work best.
IME, places that reject formal processes citing that kind of reason tend have worse results than the worst of the "slavish adherence to inappropriate process" places. Any process should be flexibly applied (generally; there are probably some areas where there are good reasons to fairly rigidly apply particular processes), but not having a sound basic structure to start with and vary around as situations require tends to mean that every project starts out behind because you don't have a baseline to work from, and people either waste time reinventing how things are going to work at each stage of the process, or just go blindly charging off with conflicting assumptions that result in problems down the line.
That will tell you if they've decided that saying they are using Agile development is good PR/investor relations (does it resonate as a "good practice" on Wall Street that people will be more likely to buy our stock if we say we are using), but won't tell you whether or not they are actually pursuing the methodology.
I mean, everyone here has probably encountered shops that have completely broken processes that don't reflect any formal methodology or even any kind of unique but intelligently-planned structured approach, but I'm pretty sure that's not what any of those shops claimed to be doing.
Just because someone claims they are doing Agile development doesn't mean they are even trying to do anything like it.
Just because it's public doesn't mean it's ok to broadcast it.
Yes, actually, it does.
This blog gives a good example: If you're having an argument with your mate in public, you'd stop very fast if tv cameras show up.
Most people probably would, because the TV cameras are a vivid reminder that they are in the public eye, a fact that they probably weren't particularly cognizant of when the argument started. They'd probably also stop if a random stranger interjected themselves into the already-public argument, for the same reason--because they actually don't want to do it in public in the first place, and they made an error in even beginning the discussion in public.
This does not mean that anyone else is obliged to treat the fight in the public eye as private, however.
When people say "I don't have anything to hide", they mean that if you don't do anything wrong you have no need for privacy
Uh, no, when people say "I don't have anything to hide", they don't mean "if you don't do anything wrong you have no need for privacy".
Nor do they mean that when they say "If you don't have anything to hide, you have no need for privacy". There are people who have made the statement "If you aren't doing something wrong, you have no need for privacy", but that's a very different claim.
One of the nifty features of Buzz (and I expect Twitter to copy it soon if it hasn't already) is that you can subscribe to a blog through it.. then whenever someone posts something on their blog you get an update and can go check it out. Unfortunately, this feature was not adequately explained, so when little-miss-freaks-out-alot here decided to tick the "add my reader to my feed" button she assumed she had just broadcast its contents to everyone. That is, she confused the outgoing feed with the incoming feed.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that when you add Reader to Buzz, (which, when I signed on to Buzz which was before the recently-announced changes, was not automatic, you had to manually add it) it adds actions through Reader to the outgoing Buzz with the sharing settings set up for reader (which is why when you add Reader to Buzz, it shows whether its set to be shared publicly or privately and allows you to change that setting.)
Still, even with the autofollowing, it would have taken an active choice to add Reader to Buzz followed by ignoring the prominent display that the sharing settings for Reader are public to expose anything to an unwanted follower, so I am having trouble blaming Google for it rather than the user if, in fact, any such unwanted sharing occurred, rather than just a misunderstanding of what "following" means.
I found I had acquired a follower with the unlikely name of "Kleetman Nissanka." Our buddy Kleetman seems to have assembled a collection of people to follow--all of whom are women, and all of whom have the same first name as mine.
And...so what? Unless you expressly chose to share things either privately with this particular person or publicly, them "following" you doesn't provide them any information at all.
He may have found my public profile (which lists two websites, both business-related), but I certainly didn't give him permission to follow me.
All following does is set up what amounts to a persistent search for someone's publicly-posted Buzz -- all of which is searchable and will turn up for anyone who does a search whether or not they are a follower.
Following doesn't provide access to any information that the person couldn't get without following. If you want to keep random strangers from information, you share it privately, if at all. Which is trivial to do with Buzz.
I guess people at Google don't have to worry about stalkers, spammers, and other assorted gentry.
I'm guessing that they do. I'm also guessing that they understand the difference between "public" and "private", and thus aren't surprised that things that are expressly labelled as "public" are exposed to the public, and chose to send information that they don't want seen by the public through mechanisms identified as "private".
The trouble is, as the very first post described, we all do things in everyday life we don't want the world to know.
That's not the problem.
The problem is that some people think that doing these things via media that are expressly public and searchable is somehow "private", and get really riled up whenever someone makes it more convenient for the people who are intentionally posting things via such media to connect it with the people who would be interested (and, conversely, to find the publicly posted things they themselves are interested in.)
It shows more eloquently than any privacy advocate ever could why privacy is so important when "you don't have anything to hide."
No, it doesn't. Because it specifically deals with a case where someone does have something to hide. (Also, it doesn't make sense, since, even with the way Buzz was set up before these change, had to be manually added and prominently displayed its sharing settings. And, further, it seems to be based on faulty assumptions about what the meaning of someone being a "follower" are and what they could see, anyhow.)
Fibre is a noun -- and in the case, its the direct object of the action being described. The The verb is "deploy". The indirect object is "Britain". The subject is "Google". A sentence describing the hypothetical action as if in the present tense would be "Google deploying fiber in Britain".
A rephrasing of the question that is the title of the thread is "Is Google planning to deploy fiber in Britain?"
When you search on almost anything on Google, all you get is a listing of people who sell some item with your search term in the product name.
That's not what I get when I search Google. I'm more likely -- if a Wikipedia page exists at all -- to have most of the first page of results be the Wikipedia page and other sites that reproduce the Wikipedia page verbatim, than to have the results you suggest, but neither problem occurs that often.
The concept of "too big to fail" pertains only to those financial concerns that have been allowed to get so large that their failure would have catastrophic affects on the economy.
No, it doesn't apply only to businesses in the financial industry, that's just one of the two industries in which it was most recently applied (the other being the auto industry.) Its also, not long before that, been applied in the airline industry (and, farther back, in both the airline and auto industry previously.)
(Of course, the important thing to note about it is that the idea is fundamentally fallacious from the start, its just something that lobbyists for any firm that is big enough to sell the concept uses to justify getting bailouts at public expense. Any profit-maximizing business would want to put someone else on the hook for its risks while retaining all the upside, and those that have the resources to sell the idea that they are "too big to fail" are more likely to succeed in doing that. So Google will be "too big to fail" in the same sense that financial giants, domestic automakers, and domestic airlines have been at previous points in history if, and when, they successfully lobby the government to be treated that way. The phrase has no substance beyond that.)
I realize that there is an API, but that only means that Buzz is open to development of plugins/extensions and other web integration features.
"Only" plugins/extensions and other web integration features? What else is there?
The Buzz system is closed.
Wrong. If you actually read the page on the Buzz APIs, Buzz is an open system that can be fed to or read from using (among other means) the Atom and RSS syndication protcols, either by traditional polling or via real-time updates via the PubSubHubbub protocol.
And they have not announced plans to open Buzz as a protocol as they did with Wave.
PubSubHubbub is the real-time integration protocol for Buzz that serves essentially the same function as the Wave Federation Protocol does for Wave (its a simpler, HTTP-based protocol than the XMPP-based Wave protocol.) They haven't "announced plans to open" it, they already have opened it. (That is, the specification is open, there is a publicly available PubSubHubbub server running on AppSpot, and the Python source code for that PubSubHubbub server is open.)
Beyond that it looks like people can choose to follow me without my consent. Of course I can block them later, but not till they've rooted through my posts I assume.
Followers can only see your public posts, which anyone can see without following you; public posts are searchable (and if they are posted with location information--e.g., from the mobile app--can also be seen by anyone in the area that uses the "view nearby" function in the mobile app.
Public posts are just that--public.
If you want to post things that can only be seen by a particular group of your contacts, you can do that. And then only those people will get it.
Everything also seems to be public by default and I'm having trouble figuring out how to change these things and I'm worried Eric disabled them.
Its essentially a microblogging service. Yes, posts are public by default. Its trivially simple to post privately. What "things" do you think "Eric" disabled?
Google has to be aware that every good feature it has, FB will immediately replicate.
So, Facebook will immediately replicate the ability for external sites to both aggregate updates and supply them using open protocols that Buzz has now?
Buzz's approach is an anti-walled-garden approach that goes directly against Facebook's entire approach to business. To replicate Buzz's attractive features, Facebook would have to fundamentally change its entire approach. Which would be a win for Google of a different type.
Did anyone notice how it doesn't call friends 'friends', but 'followers' instead?
"Followers" is an accurate description of the relationship that is being identified -- they are people that are following your Buzz. They may or may not be your friends. They might be business associates. They might be business rivals following your public Buzz. Labeling the relationship for what it is, rather than something inaccurate designed to produce warm-fuzzy feelings, seems to me to be an intelligent choice.
This is distinct from, e.g., Facebook (but analogous to Twitter, which uses similar terminology), where the main type of relationship is a mutually agreed friendship, which by default implies mutual following of status updates posted with default visibility.
At http://www.google.com/profiles/<long string of digits>
if you are logged into your Google Account, and go to http://www.google.com/profiles/me it will redirect you to your actual profile. (If you haven't used a Google service that requires a public profile, like Buzz, you may not have one.)
in article: "This design choice places it between the public-by-default Twitter and the private-by-default Facebook"
Facebook is no way private
Facebook status updates are "private" by default (in fact, AFAIK there is no other option, so its more "exclusively" rather than "by default", the only option -- recently added -- is that you can make some visible only to a named subset of your Friends list) in the sense that they are only viewable by your friends, Twitter posts are "public" by default (and, again, I don't think this is merely a "default") in the sense that they are viewable by the world, not a group you specify.
Buzz posts are by-default public, but can easily be set to be private to a particular contact group, which (in terms of controlling who can see them) gives you functionality that encompasses both what Twitter can do and what Facebook can do, its not so much a compromise position between Facebook and Twitter so much as more general functionality that goes beyond either Facebook or Twitter, generalizing both.
I don't use my Gmail account much. If this takes off I won't use it at all.
Uh, why not? Even with Buzz linked to Gmail, you can use Gmail without following anyone on Buzz. Not using Gmail because of Buzz makes about as much as not using Gmail because its UI has integration with GTalk and GCalendar.
Buzz doesn't turn Gmail into Facebook, although it allows you the ability to do something like what you can do on Facebook through the Gmail interface instead, if you want to.
Slashdot Mirror
On the same computer, sure; I was somewhat imprecise in my language. When I referred to a different browser, I really meant a browser on a different computer. Transparency to the use of which is, I would think, one of the main reasons to want to use an internet-based application (game or otherwise) rather than something locally-installed.
Doesn't HTTP define a whole slew of metadata headers and specified caching behavior to specifically address this kind of thing? Why build "rich" web apps that don't leverage HTTP features that specifically address the need you are dealing with?
If its a flash-based game on an account-based site, you could just save the state to a resource on the server linked to the user account and restore it from that the next time the user opened the game.
This also doesn't rely on the user using the same browser to continue the game.
IME, places that reject formal processes citing that kind of reason tend have worse results than the worst of the "slavish adherence to inappropriate process" places. Any process should be flexibly applied (generally; there are probably some areas where there are good reasons to fairly rigidly apply particular processes), but not having a sound basic structure to start with and vary around as situations require tends to mean that every project starts out behind because you don't have a baseline to work from, and people either waste time reinventing how things are going to work at each stage of the process, or just go blindly charging off with conflicting assumptions that result in problems down the line.
That will tell you if they've decided that saying they are using Agile development is good PR/investor relations (does it resonate as a "good practice" on Wall Street that people will be more likely to buy our stock if we say we are using), but won't tell you whether or not they are actually pursuing the methodology.
I mean, everyone here has probably encountered shops that have completely broken processes that don't reflect any formal methodology or even any kind of unique but intelligently-planned structured approach, but I'm pretty sure that's not what any of those shops claimed to be doing.
Just because someone claims they are doing Agile development doesn't mean they are even trying to do anything like it.
Yes, actually, it does.
Most people probably would, because the TV cameras are a vivid reminder that they are in the public eye, a fact that they probably weren't particularly cognizant of when the argument started. They'd probably also stop if a random stranger interjected themselves into the already-public argument, for the same reason--because they actually don't want to do it in public in the first place, and they made an error in even beginning the discussion in public.
This does not mean that anyone else is obliged to treat the fight in the public eye as private, however.
No, its not.
Uh, no, when people say "I don't have anything to hide", they don't mean "if you don't do anything wrong you have no need for privacy".
Nor do they mean that when they say "If you don't have anything to hide, you have no need for privacy". There are people who have made the statement "If you aren't doing something wrong, you have no need for privacy", but that's a very different claim.
Neither one of which is Google Reader, and so neither one of which is something I said had to be manually added.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that when you add Reader to Buzz, (which, when I signed on to Buzz which was before the recently-announced changes, was not automatic, you had to manually add it) it adds actions through Reader to the outgoing Buzz with the sharing settings set up for reader (which is why when you add Reader to Buzz, it shows whether its set to be shared publicly or privately and allows you to change that setting.)
Still, even with the autofollowing, it would have taken an active choice to add Reader to Buzz followed by ignoring the prominent display that the sharing settings for Reader are public to expose anything to an unwanted follower, so I am having trouble blaming Google for it rather than the user if, in fact, any such unwanted sharing occurred, rather than just a misunderstanding of what "following" means.
And...so what? Unless you expressly chose to share things either privately with this particular person or publicly, them "following" you doesn't provide them any information at all.
All following does is set up what amounts to a persistent search for someone's publicly-posted Buzz -- all of which is searchable and will turn up for anyone who does a search whether or not they are a follower.
Following doesn't provide access to any information that the person couldn't get without following. If you want to keep random strangers from information, you share it privately, if at all. Which is trivial to do with Buzz.
I'm guessing that they do. I'm also guessing that they understand the difference between "public" and "private", and thus aren't surprised that things that are expressly labelled as "public" are exposed to the public, and chose to send information that they don't want seen by the public through mechanisms identified as "private".
That's not the problem.
The problem is that some people think that doing these things via media that are expressly public and searchable is somehow "private", and get really riled up whenever someone makes it more convenient for the people who are intentionally posting things via such media to connect it with the people who would be interested (and, conversely, to find the publicly posted things they themselves are interested in.)
No, it doesn't. Because it specifically deals with a case where someone does have something to hide. (Also, it doesn't make sense, since, even with the way Buzz was set up before these change, had to be manually added and prominently displayed its sharing settings. And, further, it seems to be based on faulty assumptions about what the meaning of someone being a "follower" are and what they could see, anyhow.)
And would have annoyed users that don't like to be treated like infants.
Fibre is a noun -- and in the case, its the direct object of the action being described. The The verb is "deploy". The indirect object is "Britain". The subject is "Google". A sentence describing the hypothetical action as if in the present tense would be "Google deploying fiber in Britain".
A rephrasing of the question that is the title of the thread is "Is Google planning to deploy fiber in Britain?"
That's not what I get when I search Google. I'm more likely -- if a Wikipedia page exists at all -- to have most of the first page of results be the Wikipedia page and other sites that reproduce the Wikipedia page verbatim, than to have the results you suggest, but neither problem occurs that often.
No, it doesn't apply only to businesses in the financial industry, that's just one of the two industries in which it was most recently applied (the other being the auto industry.) Its also, not long before that, been applied in the airline industry (and, farther back, in both the airline and auto industry previously.)
(Of course, the important thing to note about it is that the idea is fundamentally fallacious from the start, its just something that lobbyists for any firm that is big enough to sell the concept uses to justify getting bailouts at public expense. Any profit-maximizing business would want to put someone else on the hook for its risks while retaining all the upside, and those that have the resources to sell the idea that they are "too big to fail" are more likely to succeed in doing that. So Google will be "too big to fail" in the same sense that financial giants, domestic automakers, and domestic airlines have been at previous points in history if, and when, they successfully lobby the government to be treated that way. The phrase has no substance beyond that.)
Well, except they aren't; for example: Reader can be feed into Buzz, and Buzz can be read through Gmail.
"Only" plugins/extensions and other web integration features? What else is there?
Wrong. If you actually read the page on the Buzz APIs, Buzz is an open system that can be fed to or read from using (among other means) the Atom and RSS syndication protcols, either by traditional polling or via real-time updates via the PubSubHubbub protocol.
PubSubHubbub is the real-time integration protocol for Buzz that serves essentially the same function as the Wave Federation Protocol does for Wave (its a simpler, HTTP-based protocol than the XMPP-based Wave protocol.) They haven't "announced plans to open" it, they already have opened it. (That is, the specification is open, there is a publicly available PubSubHubbub server running on AppSpot, and the Python source code for that PubSubHubbub server is open.)
What is missing?
Followers can only see your public posts, which anyone can see without following you; public posts are searchable (and if they are posted with location information--e.g., from the mobile app--can also be seen by anyone in the area that uses the "view nearby" function in the mobile app.
Public posts are just that--public.
If you want to post things that can only be seen by a particular group of your contacts, you can do that. And then only those people will get it.
Its essentially a microblogging service. Yes, posts are public by default. Its trivially simple to post privately. What "things" do you think "Eric" disabled?
So, Facebook will immediately replicate the ability for external sites to both aggregate updates and supply them using open protocols that Buzz has now?
Buzz's approach is an anti-walled-garden approach that goes directly against Facebook's entire approach to business. To replicate Buzz's attractive features, Facebook would have to fundamentally change its entire approach. Which would be a win for Google of a different type.
"Followers" is an accurate description of the relationship that is being identified -- they are people that are following your Buzz. They may or may not be your friends. They might be business associates. They might be business rivals following your public Buzz. Labeling the relationship for what it is, rather than something inaccurate designed to produce warm-fuzzy feelings, seems to me to be an intelligent choice.
This is distinct from, e.g., Facebook (but analogous to Twitter, which uses similar terminology), where the main type of relationship is a mutually agreed friendship, which by default implies mutual following of status updates posted with default visibility.
At http://www.google.com/profiles/<long string of digits>
if you are logged into your Google Account, and go to http://www.google.com/profiles/me it will redirect you to your actual profile. (If you haven't used a Google service that requires a public profile, like Buzz, you may not have one.)
Ask, and ye shall receive. Everyone can play.
Facebook status updates are "private" by default (in fact, AFAIK there is no other option, so its more "exclusively" rather than "by default", the only option -- recently added -- is that you can make some visible only to a named subset of your Friends list) in the sense that they are only viewable by your friends, Twitter posts are "public" by default (and, again, I don't think this is merely a "default") in the sense that they are viewable by the world, not a group you specify.
Buzz posts are by-default public, but can easily be set to be private to a particular contact group, which (in terms of controlling who can see them) gives you functionality that encompasses both what Twitter can do and what Facebook can do, its not so much a compromise position between Facebook and Twitter so much as more general functionality that goes beyond either Facebook or Twitter, generalizing both.
Uh, why not? Even with Buzz linked to Gmail, you can use Gmail without following anyone on Buzz. Not using Gmail because of Buzz makes about as much as not using Gmail because its UI has integration with GTalk and GCalendar.
Buzz doesn't turn Gmail into Facebook, although it allows you the ability to do something like what you can do on Facebook through the Gmail interface instead, if you want to.