141–150 of 156 posts
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Streetlights in Berlin (at least on my street) are completely autonomous. It's a lot of fun to watch them start sequentially (with the light dimming down).
We have those too. One in a park near my house appears to have been programmed to perform a disco inferno sequence at twilight.
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Eish, that's still going on? I'm half South African and grew up in SA but left in 2007, mainly because of the crime, but also the Telkom monopoly and rolling blackouts ("load shedding") were not so conducive to starting an internet business. It's kinda amazing to me that any techies stay there. Cape Town is beautiful yes, but so is New Zealand (where many Saffers such as my family emigrated to).
It's worse than ever. I am having a lot of trouble keeping to my deadlines for work and have to work around all the blackouts which frustratingly disrupts my life and thousands of other businesses. Just a couple more years until my degree is done, then I am GTFO of here.
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gatvol?
Speaking as a South African, still living here. gatvol = "fed up" It disappoints me that so many fellow South Africans are seemingly oblivious to the audience they are interacting with and casually use local slang regardless.
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Many products from Google die because is a bottom up company: many ideas that make it into products come from Engineering directly, (guys who wants o solve challenging problems), to later find out that the business analysis was poor...and an internal performance system that advocates for launches
So, extremely poor governance?
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gatvol?
Speaking as a South African, still living here. gatvol = "fed up" It disappoints me that so many fellow South Africans are seemingly oblivious to the audience they are interacting with and casually use local slang regardless.
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> Google operated city-wide public WiFi in Mountain View for many years. So, it's not like they didn't have any experience. Google has been operating free WiFi in India at 400+ locations since 2016 and claim they've got a 8 million userbase [0]. > ...but I would bet the issue was not as simple as "they found out that street lights turn off". I'd be very surprised if this was true. It seems more plausible to me that n…
> It seems more plausible to me that news.yc has anti-Google bias. It's surprising that you first speak about claims with very little proof and then continue to blatantly make one yourself.
I don't really know why Google, a company, is doing what should be done by the government with no clear benefit to the bottom line. This is not to say they shouldn’t do this, but if you look at it that way, it shouldn't be surprising at all. If they really wanted to help they probably should have teamed up with the government to ensure that there is government buy in to the program.
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Speaking as a South African, still living here. gatvol = "fed up" It disappoints me that so many fellow South Africans are seemingly oblivious to the audience they are interacting with and casually use local slang regardless.
Reading South African as a Dutch person is always great. I understand most of the words, but it’s still clearly a completely different language/context. Gatvol = hole is full
I told many an executive at KPN that I was opgewonde to work on their project. :)
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Unfortunately, this is the downward spiral of having bad actors. I kinda wish we lived in a world where communities could self-regulate and expel bad actors to let the ones who want to work together to achieve something can thrive.
When you see the inequality in South Africa, when even people working good jobs still get paid only in single digits (which in Rands comes to /nothing/), where things cost so damn much — you might have a slightly more sympathetic take on why people do what they do to survive.
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Well, they may not exactly sjut it down in th same abrupt way if it's paid, but if you look at their recent changes to the costs if using their maps API, they're certainly willing to rewrite the terms of use for paid tiers that result in apps that were paying nominal fees to suddenly being charged onerous, crippling costs order of magnitude more expensive that require shutting down the service built on Google's tech.…
The pricing changes to Maps were 2 years ago, that's hardly a pattern. Microsoft also ends support for products every year, often with replacements, but there's still migration costs: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4470235/products-en... Apple also deprecates core APIs, not always with a replacement: https://stackoverflow.com/a/53285999 Google does turn down lots of (smaller) free consumer services, but the…
In my experience Apple is more considerate in such matters. They tend to API end of life with more lead time, barring some issue that has to be changed more abruptly either due to abuse, security, or bugs, which is not unreasonable. But even they don't approach the level of support guaranteed for traditional Enterpris software though, and Microsoft mostly fits that category. Sure they end support, but it's telegraphed years in advance. In large scale enterprise systems like ERP, a 10 year roadmap of product support and 3 year roadmap of features is pretty much standard. Albeit the products themselves are hardly best of breed, but there is a lot to be said for guaranteed stability of infrastructure, capabilities, and support, especially when you can bolt on your own custom needs (of course at additional expenses though.) Enterprise has these benefits, but you pay an extraordinarily high premium for that.
Also, special agreements with them (provided you're willing to pay even more) are often available to continue support even beyond the EOL of those Enterprise offerings. (My workplace had to do so for a major system for 3 years (it was a 40 year old system) due to delays in upgrades to the newer offering.
Sure it's unfair to expect Google to keep money losing products, but I think if they ate the cost to keep these sorts of things going a little longer for more graceful exits, they'd engender more consumer confidence and gain more in the long term.