They will be hated simply because all public companies have a tendency to move from good to evil over time. It's kind of an inflexible rule of capitalism, and it may take a long time but it has to happen.
A public company has exactly 1 consistent goal--to make money for its shareholders. When it is making money the company generally is given some leeway and tends to do good things, but when it stops making money (every market turns a little now and then) the money must be extracted elsewhere.
What are the first things to go? Public programs, customer service, innovative free services, employee benefits, employee bonuses, etc. Basically anything "Good" goes. The "Evil" profit making stuff stays.
So it's not so much that the companies will be perceived as evil later (although there is some of that), it's much more likely that the companies will become more evil over time.
And honestly I think that is what most people who are anti-Google fear. I love all things google--I think they are the best thing since ethernet, but I can understand some trepidation at the concept of blindly trusting them with everything.
On the other hand, I think it's a crime not to reward the most "Good" company to come out in ages with at least some goodwill, so I do get a little annoyed at the anti-googlites, but I can't blame them.
Umm, although I absolutely felt that way about Yahoo's bar, googles rocks. I have installed it on every browser I've used in the past few years (few of which were IE) and have never had a problem.
You see, it has this little "Bookmarks" pulldown which gives you the same bookmarks across any different browsers or computers you might have. This alone makes the google toolbar invaluable.
Often I just install the toolbar, move the bookmarks button into the normal toolbar, hide the google toolbar and never look at it again (because the rest of the stuff is of questionable value and who needs the browser header taking up that much real estate.
Sorry if you find that IE crashes if you really want to help your users you might try moving them to firefox.
So are you saying that a significant portion of vista is written in.net? Microsoft has always been into the virtual machine thing, Excel was written in bytecode long before Java came around (Just in order to save space).
I suppose if MS were moving the OS to.net and it was found to be beneficial, Linux could soon start converting portions of the OS to Java, but in this kind of stuff I'd rather be a follower than a leader.
I do love the bytecode idea--even for OS level stuff. I figure eventually there will be a bytecode CPU that engineers put as much effort into as they do the current CPU. Bytecode is more compressed/compact, there should be more stuff that can be optimized and it will just come down to bytecode having less ram hits.
I'm curious about what you mean by the off-take of.net and managed software.
One of the things that has really impressed me about Ubuntu is the fact that 90% of the software I deal with is "Managed". You bring up add/remove, click a few boxes and the system takes care of installs, upgrades and even related library installs. Entire OS upgrades are performed through this mechanism--all GUI based.
I'd love to see Mac/PC go that way, but then you run into the problem with paid software--It's unlikely that Apple will allow itunes to be installed through a microsoft controlled update center; and just as unlikely that Microsoft will allow 3rd party update centers. Also, the only way it would really work would be if hundreds of the apps that could be installed were free--to get people used to using it.
How is the.net comment related? (I haven't used Vista, and haven't used XP much for the last year or so for that matter, so I'm a little behind).
Today the military, in an effort to bolster it's defensive capabilities, has begun to upgrade to BB Guns. As quoted from the general "Although rubber-bands shot from the thumb has served us well in the past, we must employ newer more powerful technologies to keep up with an ever-changing and resourceful enemy".
The new BB Guns will shoot much farther than the rubber-bands did, and they sting a lot more, deterring enemy intrusion.
There were talks of using "guns"--a powerful device popular among those we are trying to combat. These guns are aparently more powerful than ruber-bands or bb-guns, but they require maintenance--regular cleanings and we would have to train soldiers to properly maintain them, a feat the military considers too difficult--apparently these complicated devices can only be understood by our enemies.
We are also considering an upgrade offered by our current vendor called "Sling Shots". These are said to be better than the BB Guns offered by their competitor, but a design flaw causes a soldier to be vulnerable during a critical period--when you go to release your payload, the sling-shot asks "You look like you are trying to defend your country, would you like some help with this?"
The story was referring to compilation CDs which are by different artists.
It would be easy to pull together such a CD, they don't want to because for each good song they sell, they want to promote a couple of their crappy artists of the week.
Ever notice the top 100 for everything since the early 1990s has been full of shit some record company pushed down our collective throat?
Lately I just listen to Coverville (http://coverville.com/) . Give it a month, if you're not hooked, I'll personally give you your money back.
If not, what's the issue. If I follow a link to an article and it goes over my head or is really long, I don't read it. That doesn't mean that it's existence disturbs me at some fundamental level that will make me stop using wikipedia altogether.
I really like Wikipedia too--but it seems to be becoming a bit of a religion for some people out there.
Yes, the best way to migrate your settings is to learn to be more adaptable/a little less anal. Get over your problems with overwrite mode, if you accidently go into overwrite mode, hit undo a couple times and go out. Avoid hotkeys and custom settings unless they are pre-programmed into an app you use daily or up to 3 absolute must-have settings that you learn to quickly add.
No matter how much typing your job requires, it's probably not a significant portion of work. As a human, most of your time is spent thinking, or should be. Don't stress over a few extra keystrokes.
I know this is heresy to many people, don't get all bent out of shape, but seriously, consider how much easier your life could be if you just adapted instead of stressing when you were at a new computer, or someone elses' computer, or a new editor,...
In VI, I know i, o,:wq, d, dd and . I type a few extra keystrokes now and then because I don't know how to swap to words, or change a word (probably cw, but who needs the stress of remembering).
I keep hearing rumors that Ruby is going to start requiring parentheses for function arguments because, I assume, it's too confusing otherwise.
Clutter is just what you are used to--it's objective. Where Java can it uses a single, consistent methodology at the cost of a few extra characters.
It's clearer for many people to read and not harder for anyone I've ever met except perhaps for people trying to prove that their language of the day is "Better" somehow than some other language.
Just out of curiosity, anyone have any idea how you can choose to deliberately share a wireless connection in England?
The whole assumption that anyone supplying an open wireless access point is simply ignorant really seems bizarre to me.
Or is there some arbitrary law written into all service agreements that connections cannot be used by anyone outside the physical walls of your home by anyone who does not reside inside said walls?
I really dislike the idea of securing my wireless until I see a problem. I do, however, wish it was possible for common WAPs to allow public access and secured access on the same device but place the users on different subnets, firewalled. As is the best bet is probably to set up 2 WAPs...
There is also rythmbox. It's open source and acts a lot like iTunes. I haven't tried the iPod support they claim exists, but I've noticed it is much better with mounted media.
I mount a SSHFS drive from home and when it's there, the songs appear in rythmbox, when it's not there, the songs go away and only the local music is shown. All the music is still in the library and will reappear the next time the drive is connected.
When a drive is gone from iTunes, it tends to lock up for a while so it can mark all the songs as gone (!), a state that I cannot find an easy way to recover from. This makes it almost unusable (a pity since I kinda like iTunes). Also large imports on mounted drives are much more difficult with iTunes--I had to import mine in pretty small chunks (a few gig at a time) so that iTunes wouldn't crash in the middle and not import anything.
It handles large libraries (including searching/sorting) about as well as iTunes and does podcasts (although I'm really happier with non-integrated podcatchers.
Most people I know that use iTunes used it long before the iPod or the iTunes/QT bundle (which pisses me of--I HATE bundles and would prefer not to download QT, but it's required by iTunes now.)
I used to regularly use winamp to play music. The problem is that once you start dealing with a 40+gig repository it quickly becomes obvious that winamp is completely incapable of coping.
So I looked around at every other player out there--NONE could handle a 40gig repository without barfing, and searching was just a silly concept--if it didn't lock up the app completely, it would take 10-20 seconds to return a result.
Then came iTunes. Not the fastest or the slowest alone, iTunes was the only app that scaled perfectly--no matter how many songs I dumped on it, the filtering and playing response was identical to a freshly installed system.
On top of that, mp3 tag handling and smart playlists gave you abilities that previously required additional programs (and those additional programs never quite worked right anyway)
Is there anyone out there who had a large library when iTunes came out and didn't choose iTunes? I have trouble imagining it.
Also, if it was installed with quicktime and you didn't delete it, I suppose you're saying it was STILL the best choice (if not, you would have deleted it, right?)
Umm, if you drop your toothbrush and it bounces off the toilet seat and lands on the floor below, as far as I'm concerned, you might as well have dropped it into the bowl. Throw it away and get on with your life.
At the time there was no concept that this could happen. A little social engineering would have unlocked the door in seconds--or it would have been propped open, or they would have waited for someone to come out and take a leak.
If they had simply started shooting passengers, I'm guessing most pilots at the time would have opened the door--unable to conceive of the fact that this could cost even more lives than those on the plane.
Most "Programmers" don't really understand their system. The typical level of understanding goes from memorizing single lines of code that fit in certain places and cutting/pasting groups of lines to a more advanced ability to understand the piece you are working on, refactor, significant design of clearly defined parts of a system and some level of planning and debugging skills.
nearly all programmers fall into that range somewhere, and most teams consist exclusively of these programmers.
The things that are outside that range are accurate up-front design, accurate up-front planning, good fully-factored object-model design and comprehension across a large system and more advanced topics like threading. It's my opinion that you are no more likely to hit this level simply because you program than you are to become a rockstar simply because you have a garage band. In fact, I'm fairly sure it's an innate talent that you can't improve much. If I set out to learn to paint and become an artist, I can't assume that I can challenge the great artists simply because I want it and I study a lot.
For difficult programming tasks you absolutely need the ability to manipulate the entire job (Object model, gui,...) in your head. You need complete understanding of the entire model, then you need to twirl it around and reshape it, add to it and refactor it and you need to notice voids and inconsistencies while doing so.
In 20 years I've met very few people with this ability--one or two, and a quite a few who more are pretty close.
Yeah, threading is hard, so is writing a #1 hit. Hard stuff is the most rewarding and fun. Who wants to play the Aramada Room at the Holiday Inn for the rest of their lives IF they have the ability to do more?
The really funny part I've noticed is that until you have passed a certain stage as a programmer you have minimal ability to understand the levels above you--so nearly all programmers think they are at or near the top. As they learn more they start to recognize the levels they have passed through, but rarely recognize those they have not seen in action.
I really despise it when people talk that way about Google's policy to try to avoid being "Evil". It seems like the act of Google creating a policy designed to remind their employees that it is important to avoid doing things that hurt others or society causes them to be a target for some people.
It's not like they mean "We never do any evil", what they are doing is telling their employees "Please do no evil". HUGE difference. The only thing I can imagine is that some people see it as the former--them declaring to the world that they are better than all other companies.
To see people constantly bring up such a goal as a negative makes me ill.
That said, I have to agree with the parent. Publicly traded companies have a tendency to move towards "Evil" with every stockholder decision. The entire free-market system moves thousands of entities just a little bit closer to the darkside with every vote.
I've heard some pretty extreme statements about plug-in hybrids--stuff like when running of electric only the cost is the equivalent of cents per gallon, and that under "daily" short trip conditions they never use any gas. Anyone have real experience with this stuff?
I realize batteries are the current issue, but like everything else, as soon as you sell a few, the manufacturing cost will plummet and the efficiency will rise.
Nope, they were all good suggestions. No one suggestion was a showstopper, but together these could probably change 50% of the "Maybes" that go no to go yes--and that's a lot of people.
I'm not supposed to install features into Ubuntu unless they are in a trusted repository, and this isn't.
I've been told on Slashdot that we shouldn't be installing software from just anywhere.. then we would have to look into the background of every author of every project we install. By trusting a repository we only have to trust the owners of that repository I guess.
Hmph, I don't know what to do.
ps. I'm being sarcastic. This is a carryover from another thread where my complaint that "apt-get" was always preceded by "sudo" (meaning that linux security is overridden about as often as Vista's) where I was told that all linux security resided in using only trusted repositories and never trusting a project (which seemed really impractical--epically in light of articles like this about great looking packages already at the 2.x level that are not available in the standard repositories)
This kind of makes me sad. Not that I ever really trusted them, but as a user the ONLY thing I really really need is a continuity of service.
It would just be nice to know that if I happen to forget about the service for a year or two and then happen to need it, it's there--ready to serve those pictures that you uploaded years ago.
Paid services are worse because any accidental lapse in payments and your photos all drop into the bit bucket. I know that sounds like a silly worry, but when you are talking about long-term continuity (across generations, possibly), at some point there is going to be a payment screwup of some sort.
Doing it yourself is probably the worst case. Eventually a server crashes or screws up and you don't reload it, also--what a waste to leave a server running 24/7 for years just in case you need to review a picture!
This is most significant with pictures. Many people consider the pictures of their family among their most treasured possessions. You could just spam all the services with all your pictures, but that has a bunch of problems. They all use different upload methods and most take a huge amount of manual labor--Also many have limits so you can't really just blindly upload all your pictures anyway.
Of course, I'm complaining about a "Free" service that I'd use rarely, so I realize I have not right to demand, but to see a site that thousands of people have trusted to hold memories--people that my not even check back before the site closes--makes me a little sad.
What I mean is, they think that just because you can do something means it's a solved problem. It is NOT. Saying you can fix something is useless to ALL the people we're talking about when we're talking about getting unix into the hands of average windows customers.
Most people don't want to figure stuff out, they want their OS to work well, out of the box.
And I stand by what I said--the thing holding Linux back from general acceptance is just that--the concept that the user can change it if he doesn't like it.
Why not just make it so most of the users will like the defaults rather than a few techies? That's the direction Ubuntu is going in, hence my previous praise.
Allowing too much configuration change is a negative in other ways as well. Configuration differences tend to make upgrades more challenging and, if the OS is well made, most configuration changes should actually hurt usability. You must be somewhat young, after a while you come to realize that re-applying that cool kernel patch every time you upgrade just becomes annoying after a few years.
Believe me, I know where you are coming from, but after 30 years of watching computers evolve, I'll take a good unchangeable default configuration over an okay but changeable configuration any day.
ps: >Actually my meaning was not "fix it yourself". My meaning was "there is a way to do what you're asking, you just need to look". Asking is also a good way to figure these things out. The more vocal of our community spend a lot of time complaining about missing features and usability, and every so often the people who are able to add/change those things do so.
That's not very scalable. You really think it's appropriate for a million new users to each, individually, to come to the Linux community and ask the same, exact question (and trust me, for these users, any sort of FAQ is useless--heck unless you are willing to put your phone number into the default wallpaper of every linux distro, I don't expect the flexibility will ever be of any help to 99% of the new users, yet it's still used as an excuse when someone complains about poor usability--"you can just change it!"
>As I said, have you tried "Applications" -> "Add / Remove" ?
Wow, excuse me for reading too fast earlier. I assumed it would be the same thing as Synaptic. I'll have to play with it, but it looks like a significant improvement! Thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
They will be hated simply because all public companies have a tendency to move from good to evil over time. It's kind of an inflexible rule of capitalism, and it may take a long time but it has to happen.
A public company has exactly 1 consistent goal--to make money for its shareholders. When it is making money the company generally is given some leeway and tends to do good things, but when it stops making money (every market turns a little now and then) the money must be extracted elsewhere.
What are the first things to go? Public programs, customer service, innovative free services, employee benefits, employee bonuses, etc. Basically anything "Good" goes. The "Evil" profit making stuff stays.
So it's not so much that the companies will be perceived as evil later (although there is some of that), it's much more likely that the companies will become more evil over time.
And honestly I think that is what most people who are anti-Google fear. I love all things google--I think they are the best thing since ethernet, but I can understand some trepidation at the concept of blindly trusting them with everything.
On the other hand, I think it's a crime not to reward the most "Good" company to come out in ages with at least some goodwill, so I do get a little annoyed at the anti-googlites, but I can't blame them.
Umm, although I absolutely felt that way about Yahoo's bar, googles rocks. I have installed it on every browser I've used in the past few years (few of which were IE) and have never had a problem.
You see, it has this little "Bookmarks" pulldown which gives you the same bookmarks across any different browsers or computers you might have. This alone makes the google toolbar invaluable.
Often I just install the toolbar, move the bookmarks button into the normal toolbar, hide the google toolbar and never look at it again (because the rest of the stuff is of questionable value and who needs the browser header taking up that much real estate.
Sorry if you find that IE crashes if you really want to help your users you might try moving them to firefox.
So are you saying that a significant portion of vista is written in .net? Microsoft has always been into the virtual machine thing, Excel was written in bytecode long before Java came around (Just in order to save space).
.net and it was found to be beneficial, Linux could soon start converting portions of the OS to Java, but in this kind of stuff I'd rather be a follower than a leader.
I suppose if MS were moving the OS to
I do love the bytecode idea--even for OS level stuff. I figure eventually there will be a bytecode CPU that engineers put as much effort into as they do the current CPU. Bytecode is more compressed/compact, there should be more stuff that can be optimized and it will just come down to bytecode having less ram hits.
I'm curious about what you mean by the off-take of .net and managed software.
.net comment related? (I haven't used Vista, and haven't used XP much for the last year or so for that matter, so I'm a little behind).
One of the things that has really impressed me about Ubuntu is the fact that 90% of the software I deal with is "Managed". You bring up add/remove, click a few boxes and the system takes care of installs, upgrades and even related library installs. Entire OS upgrades are performed through this mechanism--all GUI based.
I'd love to see Mac/PC go that way, but then you run into the problem with paid software--It's unlikely that Apple will allow itunes to be installed through a microsoft controlled update center; and just as unlikely that Microsoft will allow 3rd party update centers. Also, the only way it would really work would be if hundreds of the apps that could be installed were free--to get people used to using it.
How is the
Today the military, in an effort to bolster it's defensive capabilities, has begun to upgrade to BB Guns. As quoted from the general "Although rubber-bands shot from the thumb has served us well in the past, we must employ newer more powerful technologies to keep up with an ever-changing and resourceful enemy".
The new BB Guns will shoot much farther than the rubber-bands did, and they sting a lot more, deterring enemy intrusion.
There were talks of using "guns"--a powerful device popular among those we are trying to combat. These guns are aparently more powerful than ruber-bands or bb-guns, but they require maintenance--regular cleanings and we would have to train soldiers to properly maintain them, a feat the military considers too difficult--apparently these complicated devices can only be understood by our enemies.
We are also considering an upgrade offered by our current vendor called "Sling Shots". These are said to be better than the BB Guns offered by their competitor, but a design flaw causes a soldier to be vulnerable during a critical period--when you go to release your payload, the sling-shot asks "You look like you are trying to defend your country, would you like some help with this?"
The story was referring to compilation CDs which are by different artists.
It would be easy to pull together such a CD, they don't want to because for each good song they sell, they want to promote a couple of their crappy artists of the week.
Ever notice the top 100 for everything since the early 1990s has been full of shit some record company pushed down our collective throat?
Lately I just listen to Coverville (http://coverville.com/) . Give it a month, if you're not hooked, I'll personally give you your money back.
If not, what's the issue. If I follow a link to an article and it goes over my head or is really long, I don't read it. That doesn't mean that it's existence disturbs me at some fundamental level that will make me stop using wikipedia altogether.
I really like Wikipedia too--but it seems to be becoming a bit of a religion for some people out there.
Yes, the best way to migrate your settings is to learn to be more adaptable/a little less anal. Get over your problems with overwrite mode, if you accidently go into overwrite mode, hit undo a couple times and go out. Avoid hotkeys and custom settings unless they are pre-programmed into an app you use daily or up to 3 absolute must-have settings that you learn to quickly add.
...
:wq, d, dd and . I type a few extra keystrokes now and then because I don't know how to swap to words, or change a word (probably cw, but who needs the stress of remembering).
No matter how much typing your job requires, it's probably not a significant portion of work. As a human, most of your time is spent thinking, or should be. Don't stress over a few extra keystrokes.
I know this is heresy to many people, don't get all bent out of shape, but seriously, consider how much easier your life could be if you just adapted instead of stressing when you were at a new computer, or someone elses' computer, or a new editor,
In VI, I know i, o,
I keep hearing rumors that Ruby is going to start requiring parentheses for function arguments because, I assume, it's too confusing otherwise.
Clutter is just what you are used to--it's objective. Where Java can it uses a single, consistent methodology at the cost of a few extra characters.
It's clearer for many people to read and not harder for anyone I've ever met except perhaps for people trying to prove that their language of the day is "Better" somehow than some other language.
Just out of curiosity, anyone have any idea how you can choose to deliberately share a wireless connection in England?
The whole assumption that anyone supplying an open wireless access point is simply ignorant really seems bizarre to me.
Or is there some arbitrary law written into all service agreements that connections cannot be used by anyone outside the physical walls of your home by anyone who does not reside inside said walls?
I really dislike the idea of securing my wireless until I see a problem. I do, however, wish it was possible for common WAPs to allow public access and secured access on the same device but place the users on different subnets, firewalled. As is the best bet is probably to set up 2 WAPs...
No really, I welcome them! Hurry it up, guys, take over!
Actually, a swing app should have no more threads than a non-swing app (except where the size of the app might be bigger).
Your heavily threaded apps might even tend to be headless (think web servers).
Swing itself is restricted to using exactly 1 thread, if you call swing from more than one thread, you're doing it wrong.
-1 offtopic -1 pedantic
Are you talking about the player or the casino?
There is also rythmbox. It's open source and acts a lot like iTunes. I haven't tried the iPod support they claim exists, but I've noticed it is much better with mounted media.
I mount a SSHFS drive from home and when it's there, the songs appear in rythmbox, when it's not there, the songs go away and only the local music is shown. All the music is still in the library and will reappear the next time the drive is connected.
When a drive is gone from iTunes, it tends to lock up for a while so it can mark all the songs as gone (!), a state that I cannot find an easy way to recover from. This makes it almost unusable (a pity since I kinda like iTunes). Also large imports on mounted drives are much more difficult with iTunes--I had to import mine in pretty small chunks (a few gig at a time) so that iTunes wouldn't crash in the middle and not import anything.
It handles large libraries (including searching/sorting) about as well as iTunes and does podcasts (although I'm really happier with non-integrated podcatchers.
Most people I know that use iTunes used it long before the iPod or the iTunes/QT bundle (which pisses me of--I HATE bundles and would prefer not to download QT, but it's required by iTunes now.)
I used to regularly use winamp to play music. The problem is that once you start dealing with a 40+gig repository it quickly becomes obvious that winamp is completely incapable of coping.
So I looked around at every other player out there--NONE could handle a 40gig repository without barfing, and searching was just a silly concept--if it didn't lock up the app completely, it would take 10-20 seconds to return a result.
Then came iTunes. Not the fastest or the slowest alone, iTunes was the only app that scaled perfectly--no matter how many songs I dumped on it, the filtering and playing response was identical to a freshly installed system.
On top of that, mp3 tag handling and smart playlists gave you abilities that previously required additional programs (and those additional programs never quite worked right anyway)
Is there anyone out there who had a large library when iTunes came out and didn't choose iTunes? I have trouble imagining it.
Also, if it was installed with quicktime and you didn't delete it, I suppose you're saying it was STILL the best choice (if not, you would have deleted it, right?)
Umm, if you drop your toothbrush and it bounces off the toilet seat and lands on the floor below, as far as I'm concerned, you might as well have dropped it into the bowl. Throw it away and get on with your life.
At the time there was no concept that this could happen. A little social engineering would have unlocked the door in seconds--or it would have been propped open, or they would have waited for someone to come out and take a leak.
If they had simply started shooting passengers, I'm guessing most pilots at the time would have opened the door--unable to conceive of the fact that this could cost even more lives than those on the plane.
Most "Programmers" don't really understand their system. The typical level of understanding goes from memorizing single lines of code that fit in certain places and cutting/pasting groups of lines to a more advanced ability to understand the piece you are working on, refactor, significant design of clearly defined parts of a system and some level of planning and debugging skills.
...) in your head. You need complete understanding of the entire model, then you need to twirl it around and reshape it, add to it and refactor it and you need to notice voids and inconsistencies while doing so.
nearly all programmers fall into that range somewhere, and most teams consist exclusively of these programmers.
The things that are outside that range are accurate up-front design, accurate up-front planning, good fully-factored object-model design and comprehension across a large system and more advanced topics like threading. It's my opinion that you are no more likely to hit this level simply because you program than you are to become a rockstar simply because you have a garage band. In fact, I'm fairly sure it's an innate talent that you can't improve much. If I set out to learn to paint and become an artist, I can't assume that I can challenge the great artists simply because I want it and I study a lot.
For difficult programming tasks you absolutely need the ability to manipulate the entire job (Object model, gui,
In 20 years I've met very few people with this ability--one or two, and a quite a few who more are pretty close.
Yeah, threading is hard, so is writing a #1 hit. Hard stuff is the most rewarding and fun. Who wants to play the Aramada Room at the Holiday Inn for the rest of their lives IF they have the ability to do more?
The really funny part I've noticed is that until you have passed a certain stage as a programmer you have minimal ability to understand the levels above you--so nearly all programmers think they are at or near the top. As they learn more they start to recognize the levels they have passed through, but rarely recognize those they have not seen in action.
I really despise it when people talk that way about Google's policy to try to avoid being "Evil". It seems like the act of Google creating a policy designed to remind their employees that it is important to avoid doing things that hurt others or society causes them to be a target for some people.
It's not like they mean "We never do any evil", what they are doing is telling their employees "Please do no evil". HUGE difference. The only thing I can imagine is that some people see it as the former--them declaring to the world that they are better than all other companies.
To see people constantly bring up such a goal as a negative makes me ill.
That said, I have to agree with the parent. Publicly traded companies have a tendency to move towards "Evil" with every stockholder decision. The entire free-market system moves thousands of entities just a little bit closer to the darkside with every vote.
I've heard some pretty extreme statements about plug-in hybrids--stuff like when running of electric only the cost is the equivalent of cents per gallon, and that under "daily" short trip conditions they never use any gas. Anyone have real experience with this stuff?
I realize batteries are the current issue, but like everything else, as soon as you sell a few, the manufacturing cost will plummet and the efficiency will rise.
Nope, they were all good suggestions. No one suggestion was a showstopper, but together these could probably change 50% of the "Maybes" that go no to go yes--and that's a lot of people.
I'm not supposed to install features into Ubuntu unless they are in a trusted repository, and this isn't.
I've been told on Slashdot that we shouldn't be installing software from just anywhere.. then we would have to look into the background of every author of every project we install. By trusting a repository we only have to trust the owners of that repository I guess.
Hmph, I don't know what to do.
ps. I'm being sarcastic. This is a carryover from another thread where my complaint that "apt-get" was always preceded by "sudo" (meaning that linux security is overridden about as often as Vista's) where I was told that all linux security resided in using only trusted repositories and never trusting a project (which seemed really impractical--epically in light of articles like this about great looking packages already at the 2.x level that are not available in the standard repositories)
This kind of makes me sad. Not that I ever really trusted them, but as a user the ONLY thing I really really need is a continuity of service.
It would just be nice to know that if I happen to forget about the service for a year or two and then happen to need it, it's there--ready to serve those pictures that you uploaded years ago.
Paid services are worse because any accidental lapse in payments and your photos all drop into the bit bucket. I know that sounds like a silly worry, but when you are talking about long-term continuity (across generations, possibly), at some point there is going to be a payment screwup of some sort.
Doing it yourself is probably the worst case. Eventually a server crashes or screws up and you don't reload it, also--what a waste to leave a server running 24/7 for years just in case you need to review a picture!
This is most significant with pictures. Many people consider the pictures of their family among their most treasured possessions. You could just spam all the services with all your pictures, but that has a bunch of problems. They all use different upload methods and most take a huge amount of manual labor--Also many have limits so you can't really just blindly upload all your pictures anyway.
Of course, I'm complaining about a "Free" service that I'd use rarely, so I realize I have not right to demand, but to see a site that thousands of people have trusted to hold memories--people that my not even check back before the site closes--makes me a little sad.
What I mean is, they think that just because you can do something means it's a solved problem. It is NOT. Saying you can fix something is useless to ALL the people we're talking about when we're talking about getting unix into the hands of average windows customers.
Most people don't want to figure stuff out, they want their OS to work well, out of the box.
And I stand by what I said--the thing holding Linux back from general acceptance is just that--the concept that the user can change it if he doesn't like it.
Why not just make it so most of the users will like the defaults rather than a few techies? That's the direction Ubuntu is going in, hence my previous praise.
Allowing too much configuration change is a negative in other ways as well. Configuration differences tend to make upgrades more challenging and, if the OS is well made, most configuration changes should actually hurt usability. You must be somewhat young, after a while you come to realize that re-applying that cool kernel patch every time you upgrade just becomes annoying after a few years.
Believe me, I know where you are coming from, but after 30 years of watching computers evolve, I'll take a good unchangeable default configuration over an okay but changeable configuration any day.
ps:
>Actually my meaning was not "fix it yourself". My meaning was "there is a way to do what you're asking, you just need to look". Asking is also a good way to figure these things out. The more vocal of our community spend a lot of time complaining about missing features and usability, and every so often the people who are able to add/change those things do so.
That's not very scalable. You really think it's appropriate for a million new users to each, individually, to come to the Linux community and ask the same, exact question (and trust me, for these users, any sort of FAQ is useless--heck unless you are willing to put your phone number into the default wallpaper of every linux distro, I don't expect the flexibility will ever be of any help to 99% of the new users, yet it's still used as an excuse when someone complains about poor usability--"you can just change it!"
>As I said, have you tried "Applications" -> "Add / Remove" ?
Wow, excuse me for reading too fast earlier. I assumed it would be the same thing as Synaptic. I'll have to play with it, but it looks like a significant improvement! Thank you.