What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client • Hacker News Board

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#91

Post by brown9-2 » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 10:15 PM UTC

rprospero wrote: post #88

brown9-2 wrote: post #79

"in particular, it lacks the elegance necessary to lend credence that this was ever a research project" How does one judge this subjectively?

As a researcher, I was surprised that the author assumed that any of my work was ever elegant. Research projects are ugly and messy because you know that they'll never need to scale. If you can actually make it work, that's when you start on elegance.

This is exactly what I had always assumed, but felt like I couldn't rely on much of conventional wisdom in an argument like this.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#92

Post by dgreensp » Thu, Dec 08, 2011, 12:21 AM UTC

Gives Google too much credit, on the one hand, by saying they will create an elegant OS that unifies desktop, web, and mobile (a sort of "holy grail" actually)... then says this is a bad thing.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#93

Post by einhverfr » Thu, Dec 08, 2011, 10:33 AM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #85

einhverfr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they certainly have become the world's largest adware vendor, and that is hard to deny. The problem is that they want to aggregate more and more information from each of us in order to sell more ads. This makes them the world's largest spyware vendor too. So I think that comment is just a little over the top, it's not that far beyond what the undisputed reality is.

Can you really call ad-supported SaaS "adware"?

But via things like Android, they tend to lock tou into their SaaS offerings. The goal is the same adware/spyware system that has long plagued Windows. Maybe not to the same extent or with the same OS implications, but I wouldn't discount the problems that this can cause in the future as Google expands into more areas.

For example it recently occurred to me: Google Voice transcribes your voice mail to text. I wonder to what extent they index that and use this as a sample of your telephone conversations as a way of better targetting ads to you. That strikes me as very scary because at that point I have no control over the retention of this information and then it becomes something the government can easily subpoena via something like the Stored Communications Act.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#94

Post by drivebyacct2 » Fri, Dec 09, 2011, 2:42 PM UTC

einhverfr wrote: post #93

freehunter wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you really call ad-supported SaaS "adware"?

But via things like Android, they tend to lock tou into their SaaS offerings. The goal is the same adware/spyware system that has long plagued Windows. Maybe not to the same extent or with the same OS implications, but I wouldn't discount the problems that this can cause in the future as Google expands into more areas. For example it recently occurred to me: Google Voice transcribes your voice mail to text. I wonder…

This is more paranoid gibberish. Nothing you say is unique to Google's SaaS and appears to be a nearly incoherent rant about SaaS in general.