41–50 of 151 posts
I'm one tinfoil hat away from believing this isn't just about discontinuing unprofitable products, but a concerted effort to kill off support for open standards (RSS, CalDAV, what's next?) and turning the Google universe into a Facebook/Apple style walled garden called Google+. Evil plan or not, the days of Google as the champion of the open web are over.
I'm one tinfoil hat away from believing this isn't just about discontinuing unprofitable products, but a concerted effort to kill off support for open standards (RSS, CalDAV, what's next?) and turning the Google universe into a Facebook/Apple style walled garden called Google+. Evil plan or not, the days of Google as the champion of the open web are over.
This is actually the final step for me. I've been an avid Google fan since the early days. I use all the Google services, I use Chrome religiously, I convince family/friends to switch to Chrome from IE, and I've always been convinced Google is the one we're supposed to look up to for how things should be done. Yeah they've made mistakes, and G+ is a clusterfuck of brilliant talent thrown down a horrible path of close…
I get that HN has this startup culture where creative people come up with "cool things" to sell, and are product oriented rather than profit oriented (though a lot of them seem to love the idea of selling the business off to a big business like Google, walking away with the pocket change, and watching it flounder into obscurity under corporate oversight...) but big business isn't run by people who have product vision, they have profit vision, and these companies are the amalgam of hundreds of managers and overseers that don't have collective vision and can thus only drive it towards what they can all agree on - making higher returns. It happens to the best of them.
I don't understand what people use to see new information from multiple websites at once if they aren't using RSS. Are they actually visiting 10 or 20 websites a day manually? Do "normal" users stick to just a few websites?
Some do. My brother, for example, has several dozen political or gun-related blogs that he reads religiously. He doesn't even keep a bookmark list--he just remembers all of them, and visits them one by one when it's time for reading, keeping track of which posts are new. I showed him Google Reader and suggested it would streamline things greatly, but he just grunted it off and said he liked doing things the way he liked doing things.
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This is actually the final step for me. I've been an avid Google fan since the early days. I use all the Google services, I use Chrome religiously, I convince family/friends to switch to Chrome from IE, and I've always been convinced Google is the one we're supposed to look up to for how things should be done. Yeah they've made mistakes, and G+ is a clusterfuck of brilliant talent thrown down a horrible path of close…
I don't get where this sentiment comes from. Ever. They are a publicly traded multi-billion dollar company. Even if they hold onto their startup-esque purism for a decade after their founding, they of course fall from grace into the profit motive pitfall because that is how the investor driven market capitalism system works . Never put blind faith in a corporate entity, because they all transition from consumer-drive…
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Developed communally, as part of the Chromium project. Not as a vendor-neutral working group or anything of the sort yet , mind you. But there's no reason it wouldn't move to become that if any other vendor was actually interested in coordinating on it--they're not hiding their cards inside Google's walled garden or anything.
You're incorrect, that's not how NaCl or Dart were developed. They were developed in secret years before released. They're alpha versions had all of the fundamentals established when finally presented to the public.
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> Google started their proprietary ... Dart project because they claimed you couldn't make JavaScript any faster than it currently is No, they didn't. Google started Dart because they had a bunch of Java programmers who were having good success building JavaScript web apps such as Gmail with Google Web Toolkit. They thought to formalize it with Dart instead of using a hacked up Java dev environment. I have a client w…
>The client doesn't even know I'm doing it in Dart. I'm shipping the minified js file which works on all modern browsers because the Dart team set out to bring jQuery up to a higher level. I would feel very uncomfortable about that unless it's the sort of client that doesn't really have the tech background to assume you're writing it in JS in the first place. I think if someone is paying to have software written for…
I'm one tinfoil hat away from believing this isn't just about discontinuing unprofitable products, but a concerted effort to kill off support for open standards (RSS, CalDAV, what's next?) and turning the Google universe into a Facebook/Apple style walled garden called Google+. Evil plan or not, the days of Google as the champion of the open web are over.
This is actually the final step for me. I've been an avid Google fan since the early days. I use all the Google services, I use Chrome religiously, I convince family/friends to switch to Chrome from IE, and I've always been convinced Google is the one we're supposed to look up to for how things should be done. Yeah they've made mistakes, and G+ is a clusterfuck of brilliant talent thrown down a horrible path of close…
I don't understand what people use to see new information from multiple websites at once if they aren't using RSS. Are they actually visiting 10 or 20 websites a day manually? Do "normal" users stick to just a few websites?
Twitter has disabled RSS this month too. Is RSS too open for the big players?
I guess it's even more obvious if you have ads on the website.
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You know, I keep seeing this "proprietary NaCl" statement around, and having played with it myself, I have a bit of a soapbox. There's nothing proprietary about NaCl: all the specs are open, and Google actively wants Mozilla and others to support them. To be charitable, though, I guess what most people mean by "NaCl is not open like Javascript" is that it's low-level --compiled binaries instead of readily-accessible…
NaCl and Dart were not created in the open. Both were secret projects within Google before their alpha versions were released; Dart was in development for at least 2 years before it was announced to the world. By that time there was no way a third party could have an affect on any of the fundamentals. Also, for the record, PNaCl doesn't have a spec. It only has a reference implementation.
It's not like NaCl is a market-dominating monopoly format like MS Word .doc now or anything. Going by usage, it's basically still a prototype. Anyone (e.g. Mozilla) who disagrees with the fundamentals of the design so thoroughly that they don't want to work with what Google came up with, could create a competitor to NaCl using the same basic idea (native-speed code execution using a pre-checked subset of machine instructions), and their version would have roughly 99% as good a chance of becoming dominant as if NaCl hadn't yet existed.
There are two alternatives when coming up with a standard: drag people through a committee forever to pin down every little feature--or just have one of the concerned parties throw together a working implementation that everyone else can then point at and say "well, this part is good, but that part is crap, I think I'll make a version of my own without that part", and shake thoroughly until a stable ecosystem settles out of it.
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As an aside--it seems like most of the good things in technology (e.g. HTML) come out of the latter process, and yet everyone somehow sees the former as fundamentally "fairer" or something. What's so wrong with making a bunch of incompatible forks, and then competing to merge all the best features of one-another so that your thing will be the "most compatible", and therefore see the greatest adoption? :)