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posted by
martyb
on Thursday March 14 2019, @12:00AM
from the how-many-programmers-does-it-take-to-change-a-light-bulb? dept.
from the how-many-programmers-does-it-take-to-change-a-light-bulb? dept.
A report from Business Insider claims that Google has axed "dozens" of employees from its laptop and tablet division. BI's sources describe the move as causing "roadmap cutbacks" and that Google will likely "pare down the portfolio" in the future.
[...] Google's Hardware division is run by Rick Osterloh and is expected to launch a game streaming console later this month. The division is responsible for the Pixel phones, Google Home speakers, the Chromecast, Google Wi-Fi, and lately, the Nest smart home division.
Why is Google having a hard time cracking the hardware market?
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Google Hardware Makes Cuts to Laptop and Tablet Development, Cancels Products
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You have a strong appeal for members of your own sex.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday March 14 2019, @12:10AM (12 children)
Same reason that while I signed up for Google+, I never actually used it:
I do not want just one company in control of my life. For hardware, we have apple, we have samsung, we have acer. But for 24/7 surveillance, we have google.
Everyone who works for social change needs a manifesto. My much older and admittedly far-wiser mentor Stefan Pietrzak Youngs advised me not to publish the Soggy Manifesto until _after_ the close of its Indiegogo, so I won't, but I will tell you the TL;DR:
- In much the same way as that the recycling industry mantra asserts that "A big enough pile of anything is worth something", then if curated lists become widespread and popular, the significance of web search would wither away to the point that it will be merely useful again, in the way that altavista was, rather than a central core of our every waking moment.
In discussing this with my business partner and fellow Institute Alumnus Rod Schmidt, as we were at the time dining in a restaurant I suggested the example of used restaurant supplies - five gallon stainless steel soup pots and the like. Whenever a restaurant closes up as they so often do, they generally sell their cooking utensils and such fixtures as tables and chairs to a used restaurant supply shop. Newly opened restaurants in turn equip themselves by purchasing these used supplies.
After all: stainless steel soup pots last until the end of Time.
However, as this is a very traditional brick and mortar business, it is uncommon for such shops to be online at all, and exceedingly rare for them to be actual eCommerce sites. It's impractical to ship such large items that are purchased in quantity, rather what you want is a delivery truck or cargo van.
Thus, your mission should you decide to accept it is to compile a curated list of all the world's used restaurant supply stores.
It's a beautiful day, so I'm going back to bed as the sunshine, she burns.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:03AM
"A big enough pile of anything is worth something"
Not always. For example a horder house.
A big pile of curated items though.... For example 10k in video games.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:07AM
Sent from my iPhone.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:30AM (8 children)
"IF". We already had that battle with Yahoo, which had a bunch of nice curated lists. That battle was lost almost twenty years ago.
A good search engine can crank out on the fly a list of those that is adequate enough without requiring someone's life to be consumed by that task.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:38AM (7 children)
Yahoo Ate The Seed Corn when it accepted venture capital. This our curated lists must be compiled entirely by amateurs, for purposes of at most drawing organic links. In my own case, Soggy Jobs results in client inquiries to Portland Custom Software Development as the two sites are highly interlinked.
Consider IMDB; that was Just Some Guy's Hobby in the beginning, as evidenced by Wayback.
In the specific case of soggy jobs, I am _uncorruptible_, in that there is no amount of money - not even one billion - that could possibly convince me to favor any one company over the others. No sponsored links, no image links, not even such enhanced links as boldface.
Now I do not expect others to do without, however with respect to _tech_ recruitment to be a Saint is crucial due to the endemic corruption of the body shops.
I'll need to stop posting for a while as I just now polished off a Hershey's Cocoa-Laced Plate Of Pancakes:
The Theobromine is coming on. This is just gonna have to rock.
But for the case of restaurant supplies, that would work well for, say, a young culinary school graduate, to help them find work by placing their resume and some samples of their own original recipes on the same site.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:05AM (4 children)
While true, the curated lists were already obsoleted by Google search. Sorry, but automation of web search remains a vast improvement over what humans could do even if we threw armies of volunteers at the problem.
It's not merely web search, but provides a lot of data beyond that. And it works great with all of the common search engines.
An even better example is Wikipedia.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @03:12AM (3 children)
Absolutely this.
A person can not keep up with a machine that makes 'ok' lists.
When I first used yahoo. It was amazing. But the web was smallish and the high points were readily visible with or without yahoo. It got wildly larger and the 'good stuff' was not as easy to find. The spiders showed up. They did ok. Then google showed up. It blew everyone away.
Curated would fill a nice niche. But it will never compete in any meaningful way with a spider bot the size of google. A blended thing could be interesting though.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Thursday March 14 2019, @04:55AM
I don't know. I preferred AltaVista for a long time after most people were saying that Google was the right approach. But then I like to search by complex boolean expressions.
Unfortunately, AltaVista didn't grow with the web, and Google did. So eventually I was forced to change over. But AltaVista returned results that were more precisely what I was looking for...if they found anything.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday March 14 2019, @11:47AM (1 child)
The problem with Yahoo was that while categorized - soggy jobs is categorized geographically - it was not _curated_.
What's more, it was general purpose. That's what you wanted at the time but no longer, hence soggy jobs is specifically for employment and my hypothetical restaurant supply list is specifically for the hospitality industry.
Such curation must therefore be performed by experts; for the most part, serious hobbyists would do fine, or those who actually work in the industry. Again in the case of yahoo, even if it were not a general purpose list it was prepared by regular computer industry employees and not by application-area specialists.
Thus I expect IMDB's uncommon success is due to it having remained in control of entertainment industry insiders: it's not a sight for stars, it's a site for my friends Ted Arabian, Tammy Troglin (Tammy Klein) and Darryl Ferrucci.
If you do an image search for Darryl you'll turn up his deadly-serious photo holding a big pistol that looks rather like Dirty Harry's Magnum. That photo had me puzzled as I had not been previously aware that he had ever been an actor: he only did so as a very young man, now he's a photographer and graphic artists. While for reasons I am as yet not privy to my old friend is bitter, disappointed and depressed, when he and I first met during the Dot-Com Boom he was the most happy, friendly helpful guy.
But a Magnum?
Hollywood!
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 14 2019, @05:08PM
I disagree. Yahoo's approach checks off the boxes.
Don't buy it. Expert knowledge would not be that useful in the case of Yahoo's lists. It's not going to make you more likely to know of obscure websites or add that much in evaluating the quality of known websites. And the kinds of expert knowledge that would apply, said computer industry employees could obtain just as well.
As to your examples, Soggy Jobs sounds like it might be useful as a curated target for a search engine to index, but not the case of the restaurant supply list (one doesn't need to be much of an expert to understand when people are selling restaurant supplies and there's a fair bit of turnover, particularly from businesses that occasionally sell such things, but not on a regular basis).
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:34AM (1 child)
Is that a typo or do you have a meaning for that word that sets it apart from the usual incorruptible?
Ummm... really? How about some modicum amount of $$$$$ pussy [soylentnews.org]?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday March 14 2019, @04:01AM
Despite my great passion for writing, I do have an odd problem with spelling:
It's easy for me to become completely convinced that an incorrect spelling is actually the correct one, thereby leading to for example my K5 and Reddit nick of "RepeatibleHairstyle".
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @03:58AM
"I do not want just one company in control of my life."
if only that applied to government...