Posts by RyokuMas 1913 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Oct 2009
"GOOGLE INVENTED KUBERNETES"
Um, yeah. Here's something else for you: Microsoft "invented" Windows - they also "invented" Internet Explorer. And then they got into a lot of trouble by using the fact that the vast majority of desktop PCs run Windows to push people into using Internet Explorer. It's called anti-competitive behaviour, and it's illegal in a lot of places...
"... the Google-spawned cloud orchestration system has gained major traction in the past year."
Any system can gain traction when the company behind it has wide-scale control of web search results. Try sticking "docker container orchestration" into Google's search vs other engines: unsurprisingly, "Kubernetes" is plastered all over Google's top results.
"Googler saves Grammarly nazis from hacker invasion"
... with a four-day turn round from reporting to patch release. Am I the only one concerned by the speed of this, and whether or not it has been properly tested?
With that in mind, it's probably a bit premature to say "Google saved" anyone from anything.
I got into programming as a kid in the 8-bit days. It was a lot of fun: making the computer tell rude jokes, make noises at random intervals, or appear to crash upon pressing a key (got kicked out of my local computer store for putting that one on their display machines). Then I discovered game development - which at that time was still some way off becoming the 3D-fully-orchestrated-days-to-play-online-DLC-fest that it is now... yeah, I had to pick up some art and design skills, but I was still writing a lot of code.
Fast forward 25 years to now - "developers" are expect to be "full stack" - back-end, front-end, this JS framework, that ORM, these server architectures, those cloud infrastructures, agile methodology, continuous integration and deployment... the list goes on. And - here's the real kicker - nine times out of ten, we're expected to learn this all on our own time; either because promised training has never materialised, or time to train simply doesn't make enough profit.
Sure, I've learned enough to keep my head above water. Some of it I've continued to enjoy. But this expectation that all "developers" want to spend the entirety of their waking lives trying to keep on the bleeding edge of everything is a blight on the art of creating software.
"You clearly don't get it. Opensource OS tends to draw Opensource apps and drags in closed source free apps"
Okay, let's have some links to ratios of open to closed source apps on both major platforms please. Because the funny thing is, from my experience, the vast majority of app developers - regardless of OS - are more concerned about making enough to keep a roof over their heads that contributing to the open source community.
Also, the vast majority of mobile apps are games. Is Unity3D open source? Is Unreal Engine?
And you have clearly missed my point that the vast majority of mobile users are average people who don't care whether their app is open or closed source. They don't give a rat's backside about the enrichment of the developer community. However, they do care about the contents of their wallets and bank accounts and - again, regardless of what OS they use - they will generally go for a free application as opposed to a paid one unless they are looking for something highly specialised, or the paid app has a reputation of being vastly superior to any free app offering the same functionality.
So no, I don't think that Android owners are plebs - nor iOS owners. I do however think that people are easily lured by the promise of "free" stuff, be it apps, TV channels, online services, membership to organisations, whatever. I also believe that most people are still not very savvy when it comes to online privacy, and because of their far greater reach, I believe Google is a far more dangerous entity than Apple in this regard.
At the end of the day, "nobody wanted my apps" (on Android and iOS) because I did not market them very well; I fully admit that I underestimated just how saturated the mobile market - again on both major platforms - has become. My decision to jump out of developing for mobile - and indeed, developing on mobile for profit - was largely fuelled by the number of people trying to sell me "user acquisition" at a B2B conference I was exhibiting at - "Only 50c per install, you'll probably need a minimum of 10-20,000 installs to get some traction".
But then this is not really about market success or failure, is it...?
" it's clear your favorite platform is fruity."
It's about the fact that I have dared to criticise Android - made abundantly clear by the knee-jerk "you prefer iOS and think that Android owners are idiots" remark. In fact, my mobile platform of choice is the Nokia 1100 - no spyware (either fruity or robot-y) and a removable battery with a life of around 10 days. Alas, I need a smartphone for my day-job (not writing mobile apps, incidentally).
But this is just knocking my head on a wall, isn't it? By disregarding my comment about "all mobile markets" (drawn largely from the aforementioned UA agents, whose offerings were for both iOS and Android) and deciding to tar me with the "iOS" brush, you have clearly placed yourself in the opposite camp, singing the song I have heard from many of its faithful about open source, and ignoring how the current marketing model is hurting devs, regardless of platform.
... and let's have some links to those apps while you're at it.
"Whilst you can sell any old shite on Apple's marketplace and braindead plebs will buy it, as 99p is nothing to someone thank has spunked a grand on a phone."
Having spent a significant chunk of 2011-2015 making games for mobile - both paid and ad supported, on iOS, Android and Windows Phone - I can assure you that all mobile marketplaces are equally shite.
"Android will have free alternatives to your tat. The free version might ever be better than your tat...
It's not that users aren't willing..."
"it's that opensource OS has lots of opensource apps, and a generally free culture, and your tat isn't worth paying for not unless you put some real effort in."
Next time there's a big football match on the telly, go into your local pub and ask a random selection of those watching it how they feel about Android being open source and having open source apps. I would be very surprised if a single soul cared - heck, I'd be surprised if more that a handful even knew what being open source meant.
Basically, you are trying to justify the worst offender in what is a ridiculously over-saturated sector by assuming that the average person has a developer's viewpoint towards open source, and by assuming that Android buyers behaviour is driven by market-savvyness and not greed. But Google's entire public- facing offering is built on the premise of everyone going after the "free" option - gmail, web search, google docs, youtube, google drive... the average person does not give a crap that they are giving away their privacy, all they care about is that they do not have to pay money for it.
I sincerely hope that if you ever consider releasing any software, you get someone else to do your market research.
@Tigra07 - stop and think for a moment: when was the last time you installed a "paid" app?
The sad fact is that the undercutting mentality has led to a culture in which a lot of people are unwilling to pay for apps, especially on Android (I have had Android owners openly and unashamedly admit that if they find an app they want has a price tag associated, they will look for a free alternative rather than pay). Ultimately, this has put us in a position where most apps rely on adverts to generate any kind of return.
Now factor in that above all else, Google's business model is based on selling advertising space on anything they control, and in recent times they have demonstrated time and again that all they care about is their profit margin: long gone are the days of "don't be evil"
So yes, they could put such a restriction in place. Similarly, they could put some better form of curation on their store. But they won't.
"They should properly test their patches before they deploy them en-mass
Bit difficult when you've got the self-appointed owners of the internet threatening to air your dirty laundry based on their own timescales...
"Thing is, virtually everyone uses Windows, which is why so many people get upset by its data collection."
"Virtually everyone" uses Google (either for web search or via Android) in some capacity and, judging by the activity I have seen on these forums over the years, the amount of people who even give a shit is a fraction of those howling over Microsoft's telemetry, so this is hardly an argument.
This is just another step in the lifecycle of the IT mega-corporation: they've hit the stage where they are now driven by greed as opposed to any desire to innovate, and projects that are not making money are sidelined or dropped. At the same time, it becomes harder and harder to kick off anything new or innovative because the board/shareholders need proof that the new project is going to be profitable to a desired level within a given timeframe.
Next up will be that opportunities get missed, simply because they are perceived as "not profitable enough" (Ballmer and the internet, anyone?), and someone else will get the landgrab. And round we'll go again.
"And it opens up really complex application development to people who never could have done this before."
I've seen what happens when you do this: when Unity3D, Unreal Engine et al were made free, it abruptly opened the floodgates to people who previously had been unable to make games - in the first instance this was due to the technical knowledge barrier, which put off the people who could not be bothered to learn, and in the second instance, it then removed the financial barrier ie: people had to be willing to pay for these engines.
The result was a flood of shiteware into the marketplaces, resulting in a lot of good games that had had a lot of time and effort poured into them vanishing beneath this deluge of crap.
"The Register hopes that the next time the City needs a software developer it does so with a BASIC program."
The average BASIC programmer of yesteryear is miles ahead of some of the stack-overflow-copy-pastas I have heard calling themselves "developers" in more recent times. Especially in game development.
Guess it's not so easy to push a proprietary protocol as it is proprietary markup...
"It's Google's that keeps coming up repeatedly"
They're also a victim of their own success - regardless of how they managed it, Chrome is currently the most popular browser, and thus the biggest target. The same for Android on mobile, and Windows on desktop - if Google manage to raise Chrome OS's market share above a rounding error to something with a bit more presence, I'd wager that will be targeted too.
But right now, the spotlight is very much on Google as more and more people are starting to realise just how far they have descended from their "Don't be evil" ivory tower into the pit of money-grubbing corporate greed, and just how much control they potentially have over the information we can access.
Having seen my other half wrangling with this site on a monthly basis (until recently, when we pulled the kids out of childcare), and as a web developer by trade, I can fully confirm that the bunch of galloping cockwombles who built this have plumbed new depths of fuckwittery. Virtually every month resulted in our having to send an email of apology to the nursery about why our payment was late, and my poor long-sufferring other half was frequently reduced to outbursts of rage at whole evenings wasted attempting to get the site to cooperate.
So I would humbly suggest that whoever came up with that 2% stat is talking utter bollocks.
The "cesspool" as you call it has been around for around 30 years, give or take, and a lot of businesses have invested a lot of time and money in developing systems based on it. Moreover, the staff of said businesses, especially the older ones who tend to be in positions of management, are used to Windows - "the devil you know" and all that.
Now, if you have a magic wand that you can wave that can make an entire board of directors suddenly decide "Hey! Let's dump years worth of time, money and training and re-develop everything we use to run on something other than Windows because it's more secure" - please, do let me know. I can think of more than a couple of places where I would use it...
But in the real world, we have to accept that Windows - for all it's flaws - is very much a part of what we are likely to face in the working environment. Cope.
"Ubl wrote that Google hopes to implement its work in the second half of 2018, by adding some new bits to the WebKit browser engine and helpingforcing other browser-makers to adopt it"
TFTFY
Once again, Google leading the web down the proprietary, good-for-google path under the claim that it makes things "better for everyone".
"This time it looks like somebody jumped the gun and information was leaked before a software fix was ready for distribution."
Google have got form for disclosing security flaws before fixes are ready.
I can't help wondering if they have some new AMD-powered Chromebook waiting in the wings to hit the market in a couple of weeks time...
"... and would be a shot in the arm for in-app advertising..."
Well, when this sort of attitude is so prevalent, it is only to be expected.
If people had not been so suckered by the lure of "free" stuff at the beginning, we would not be in this mess.
"That "milk is for babies" one is pissing me off."
The irony of that is that in my various research forays, I have yet to find a formula for human babies that does not depend on cow's milk.
In short, if a vegan mother cannot breast-feed her child for whatever reason, her choices are to either compromise her belief and feed her child a product derived from cow's milk, or damage said child's development through various nutrient deficiencies.
Of course, if anyone can show me that this is not the case, I will gracefully yield on the point...
So the ASA will keelhaul Captain Morgan "because there is a chance that under-18s might see it", but are perfectly happy with adverts all over the tube from the vegan society proclaiming how the dairy industry "butchers the young" of cattle, regardless of how this might make young children feel...
In my first role, the network was so shaky that it was often quicker to save the required file on a floppy disk (this predates USB) and chuck it across the room, frisbee style. We called it TDP - "Thrown Disk Protocol".
Most of us were usually pretty good shots, managing most of the time to land the disk on the desk of the requester. However, occasionally someone would take a direct hit, earning them the acronym of TDP-IP ("Thrown Disk Protocol Injury Prone").
Needless to say, in the late 90s/early 2000s, this provided some great material for messing with networking salesdroids in true BOFH drunken exhibition/spinal tap style: "TCP? Nah, mate, we're all about TDP - it's one better!" and so on...
The stupid thing is that nine times out of ten I have found that these so-called "anti adblocker" measures can be thwarted with a little bit of web know-how: a quick "display: none" on the whinge message and black-out overlays, usually with an "overflow: auto" on the body in your browser's dev tools and you're back to full functionality.
Of course, there are some that do some funky javascripty page corruption, but they just get added to my "do not allow javascript" list.
The stupid thing is, I am not anti-adverts - I appreciate web pages have to make some kind of return somehow. But until the size, positioning, total on-page space and allowed content are severely restricted, my blockers will stay on.
"... conform to our strict standards, and we'll give your devices two years of monthly patches and updates."
What's the betting that in the not-too-distant future, we start seeing blanket advertising of Android One devices all over any pages that Google has control over (search landing/results pages, I'm looking at you), plus other aggressive marketing strategies, all based off the back of claims of altruism...
Next step - Google starts subsidising manufacturers who subscribe, so that they can lower prices and undercut their non-Android-One competition, thus leading to an eventual dominance of devices indirectly controlled by Google via these "strict standards"
And because the device manufacturers are not direct subsidies of Google or Alphabet, no risk of any anti-trust action...
"clearly to young to remember a time when Windows was vulnerable"
... and are too stupid to undestand sarcasm...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
