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Amazon Chime

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Re: Amazon Chime

#331

Post by peatmoss »

Diederich wrote: post #321
peatmoss wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect they do a good job at a technical level, but they have interests in advertising that are at odds with my privacy interests. I also have no way to know if they are doing Dark Nefarious Things.

I totally agree with you. From your initial comment, I got the impression that you were claiming that closed source software could not be excellent..meaning secure. By the way, I'm a big GPL/free software nut. However, I understand the place of closed source software, and under the right circumstances, it can indeed be excellent.

This is where I've come around to appreciating the FSF's moral argument for Free software a bit more than the instrumental-utility argument of the Open Source movement.

Open Source can be bad, in terms of quality. Closed source can be good, in terms of quality.

Security is an interesting case where I don't believe that you can be trustworthy and closed. Could the code be good? Yes. Can I validate in any meaningful sense that it doesn't violate my expectations? No.

Of course it's possible to have obfuscated malicious behavior in Free/Open Source software. But, there is at least the possibility of descovery of such defects. With closed source, there isn't.

Re: Amazon Chime

#332

Post by tenpoundhammer »

aanm1988 wrote: post #329
tenpoundhammer wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for over a year writing software for video conferencing systems. It turns out the market has a lot of very strong solutions, but no one is willing to pay for them. The cost of building great video conferencing solutions begins to sky rocket as you reach the higher echelons of quality. The first 75% of good video conferencing is super cheap and easy to make and as you approach the 100% mark things go up expon…

I simply don't believe this. The cost to develop a system that isn't a horribly complex, unintuitive UX disaster is that much more expensive? We aren't talking about amazing AV quality with lag, we're talking about a system that doesn't take 15 minutes out of a meeting to get working.

Gimme your specs, I'm curious to know what meeting infrastructure you're using. I can start a vidyo meeting in about 15 seconds.

Re: Amazon Chime

#333

Post by tenpoundhammer »

aanm1988 wrote: post #329
tenpoundhammer wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for over a year writing software for video conferencing systems. It turns out the market has a lot of very strong solutions, but no one is willing to pay for them. The cost of building great video conferencing solutions begins to sky rocket as you reach the higher echelons of quality. The first 75% of good video conferencing is super cheap and easy to make and as you approach the 100% mark things go up expon…

I simply don't believe this. The cost to develop a system that isn't a horribly complex, unintuitive UX disaster is that much more expensive? We aren't talking about amazing AV quality with lag, we're talking about a system that doesn't take 15 minutes out of a meeting to get working.

There are a lot of reasons for horrible complexity.... 1. There are many ways to roll out a video conferencing system because the hardware is all commodity. Many companies will have their IT department buy all the hardware and try to deploy it using the built in methodologies for connecting conference rooms. This is usually when everyone is given a 16 digit pin number to dial into a room, this causes the dial in nightmares. There are also 3rd parties that will basically sell the same solution as the "custom IT solution" as a service. 2. If you want a decent UI experience you move from snapping commodity hardware together to building a software engineering team, software release pipeline, software updates, and all the stuff that comes along with it. This is usually done by a third party but it still costs more than the commodity solution which it is priced against 3. Once you get a software engineering team involved they have to support the different types of hardware out in production. Most companies have generations of conferencing hardware installed with different configurations throughout the company and do not want to pay for all new hardware. Now your software has to be able to implement screen sharing with 5 different codecs and all those codecs have different bugs and different communication protocols. 4. HP tried to solve this by building their own codecs and forcing all rooms to deploy with the same configurations, but this ended up being the most expensive video conferencing system in the world. It also had the best quality and best reliability.

So yes the cost to building a good ui and less complex system can be way more expensive.

Re: Amazon Chime

#334

Post by avip »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #303
therein wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My pet peeve about Slack as of late is -- is turned into a single, long-dash. Even when you're inside ` or ```. Which leaves me juggling there on my keyboard, trying to delete one, move my cursor and add a second dash before submitting.

On OS X just disable the dumb quotes and dashes: System Preferences / Keyboard / Text / Use smart quotes and dashes = off

Thanks! I seriously now owe you ~3h of my life, yearly aggregated.

Re: Amazon Chime

#335

Post by pmarreck »

therein wrote: post #282
jedahan wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are on OSX, that is a feature of OSX, not Slack. You can turn it off in Keyboard settings IIRC.

My pet peeve about Slack as of late is -- is turned into a single, long-dash. Even when you're inside ` or ```. Which leaves me juggling there on my keyboard, trying to delete one, move my cursor and add a second dash before submitting.

That's called an em-dash and it's done in the OS usually.

Source: I was a teen during the Desktop Publishing craze

Re: Amazon Chime

#336

Post by pmarreck »

StreamBright wrote: post #273
niyazpk wrote: post #253

The first (and personally the only) requirement I have with any chat system is that it should _not_ modify the text I enter in any way - especially if I am pasting something. Sometimes I have to paste a line or two of code, or a few lines of a stack trace. Sometimes I have to paste a string which contains some particular set of characters. Microsoft Lync absolutely destroys the pasted text. It subtly converts the dou…

Microsoft had a much better chat before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

Not sure how the heck I am just learning about Comic Chat and thus the creation of Comic Sans

Re: Amazon Chime

#337

Post by newscracker »

JacobDotVI wrote: post #217
newscracker wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal, but our company uses SfB and it has been anything but good. We always have problems in voice calls (which forms the majority of use) - doesn't matter if we're all sitting on the same LAN with wired connections or on very good Internet connections away from the office. The number of disconnects, breaking audio, unable to hear someone, and of course, SfB deciding to crash sometimes after some updates - it's…

Having been on the other side of a Skype for Business installation I can tell you that it is extremely variable and can scale anywhere from a self-contained single server set-up[1] to a multi-region, multi-fail-over-cluster, highly available, extremely complicated set-up[2]. We had a few issues post initial install but spent the time to track them down to the point where our system was reliable and more usable than w…

Well, we're on MS Office 365 and all that it provides, including Skype. I have no idea how things could be so bad even with that (it used to be bad before with an on-premise installation too).

Re: Amazon Chime

#339

Post by Diederich »

peatmoss wrote: post #331
Diederich wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree with you. From your initial comment, I got the impression that you were claiming that closed source software could not be excellent..meaning secure. By the way, I'm a big GPL/free software nut. However, I understand the place of closed source software, and under the right circumstances, it can indeed be excellent.

This is where I've come around to appreciating the FSF's moral argument for Free software a bit more than the instrumental-utility argument of the Open Source movement. Open Source can be bad, in terms of quality. Closed source can be good, in terms of quality. Security is an interesting case where I don't believe that you can be trustworthy and closed. Could the code be good? Yes. Can I validate in any meaningful se…

We'll have to diverge a little, then, but not too much.

In some cases, such as the security sensitive code written at Google, there are far more eyes on the code than there are with all too much of the critical, security sensitive open source code.

In my mind, it's a matter of alignment of interests.

For the cases of 'run of the mill' security questions, such as buffer overflows, password leaks and the like, Google, Facebook and I have fully aligned interests. None of us want those things in anybody's code.

Things get harder for other security questions, such as data collection, and cooperation with surveillance, legal and otherwise.

In the latter case, state surveillance, Google (and other like entities) have interests that are mostly aligned with mine, but not entirely. They're pushing back on warrant-less, Patriot Act type crap, while efficiently complying with traditional directed warrant disclosures. (As far as we know!)

Fully open source and free software will almost always have full alignment with my interests, and so is better in that regard.

As far as code-level bugs, I think the general rule is that closed source code is pretty poor at companies, with a few notable exceptions, where I think things are a heck of a lot better.

Finally: Wow, I just reminded myself that this thread talking about a new Amazon product. Crazy. (:

Re: Amazon Chime

#340

Post by deong »

joelx wrote: post #315
deong wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google desperately needs an "Executive Vice President of People Actually Using Shit". Someone who's entire job is to go to demos of products that are about to ship and cancel them until they at least work well enough to pass the laugh test. Nearly everything Google makes is just some version or another of Google Home telling your Android phone not to handle that voice prompt to add a calendar entry (which your phone…

Why all the hate for Hangouts? I have used it for five years to build and run my company. There is never an issue with Hangouts unless someone in the meeting has a hardware problem (meanwhile everyone else can handle the meeting). It's fast and easy for anyone to use screenshots or video. If you use YouTube Live Events, you can even have a company meeting with every person joining. We have done these once a week for…

Hangouts was (is?) pretty good. But it hasn't been immune to Google's inability to figure out how to make a thing people want.

Initially it was IP only. Then it added SMS support. Then it added merged conversations between SMS and IP. Then it unmerged those conversations. All the while only really working well on the desktop inside a weird Chrome extension that burned through battery like kindling because there was no hardware support for encoding and decoding the video.

I still use it on my phone, but again, the only actual feature anyone really wants from a text/chat/IM program is the one that enables "I just want to send a message to Alice. You figure out how to get it to her appropriately" -- a.k.a. iMessage. If you put stickers and crap in there, sure, people will use them I guess, but the one absolute core feature anyone should expect for at least five years now is still the one Google can't figure out how to do.

And they were actually close with Hangouts at one point. Close enough, in my opinion. It lacked the automatic routing of iMessage, but just showing any message I've received from my wife in one conversation and giving me the ability to toggle how I send a reply right there in the conversation view was fine.

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