SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Moonchild, the lead developer of the Pale Moon browser writes:
"Dear Web Developer(s),
While, as a software developer ourselves, we understand very well that new features are exciting to use and integrate into your work, we ask that you please consider not adopting Google WebComponents in your designs. This is especially important if you are a web developer creating frameworks for websites to use.
With Google WebComponents here we mean the use of CustomElements and Shadow DOM, especially when used in combination, and in dynamically created document structures (e.g. using module loading/unloading and/or slotted elements).Why is this important?
For several reasons, but primarily because it completely goes against the traditional structure of the web being an open and accessible place that isn't inherently locked down to opaque structures or a single client. WebComponents used "in full" (i.e. dynamically) inherently creates complex web page structures that cannot be saved, archived or even displayed outside of the designated targeted browsers (primarily Google Chrome).
One could even say that this is setting the web up for becoming fully content-controlled."
https://about.google/: "Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"
Useful to... whom?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday March 20 2020, @09:41PM (16 children)
I remember back when Microsoft was a good company with fun products, prior to the IBM PC. Microsoft FORTRAN. Microsoft Adventure (eg, colossal cave) Other fun products. Of course, Microsoft BASIC in early personal computers (pre IBM PC).
Then I remember back when Microsoft was evil and Apple was the good guy.
Then I remember back when Microsoft was evil and Google was the good guy.
Now Apple and Google are evil and everyone seems to have forgotten about how Evil Microsoft was.
Oracle was always evil.
When the Sun went dark, Oracle bought Java.
IBM was evil (mainframes, monopoly). Then good (IBM PC). Then evil (intolerance of clones). Then more evil (PS/2). Then irrelevant. Then good again (support of Linux). Now??
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @10:11PM (1 child)
Now Google's evil. What's so hard about this?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 23 2020, @04:03PM
I think I said Google was evil. And didn't change my mind.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @10:23PM (2 children)
Are Apple evil these days? I consider them indifferent.
They tend to stick to their walled gardens, and don't go fucking up other peoples' shit.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by toddestan on Saturday March 21 2020, @04:41AM
Apple is evil. Look at how they fight against the right to repair, how they squeeze indie artists, how they conspire to fix e-book prices, how they treat the Chinese workers that make their products despite the obscene amount they charge for them, and the list goes on. Don't get distracted by the shiny.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 23 2020, @04:04PM
As someone who once was a loyal card carrying Mac fanboy back in the 80's and 90's I can assure you that in the last decade Apple is most definitely evil, and more so every day.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @11:58PM
They're all evil. They differ over time in their power to inflict their evil on everyone else.
Right now, Google's evil waxes while Microsoft's evil wanes. In a few years, it might be the other way around. Again.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday March 21 2020, @12:03AM (2 children)
Any sufficiently large corporation will eventually get taken over by MBA types who know how to juggle numbers, wear a nice suit, and lie to people, and basically nothing else. Because they don't know anything else, e.g. anything at all about the underlying products, the quality of the organization's output will drop steadily, and they will attempt to compensate by steadily becoming more and more evil.
It's not even limited to tech companies like ActivisionBlizzard or HewlettPackard, it can happen to manufacturers like Ben & Jerry's.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @11:10PM
But this isn't about quality. Apple and Google still make high quality products, that doesn't change the bad things they're doing.
I would say instead that any sufficiently large corporation will switch away from its initial mission towards profit at any cost. That doesn't necessarily sacrifice quality, because quality can win customer loyalty. But DRM, privacy violations, FUD, altering standards to support your business model, abusing your workers and your suppliers, union-busting, tax evasion... Once your company gets big enough, if the people in charge aren't doing those things they will be bought out or otherwise kicked out by people that will. There are no heroes, the top of any capitalist industry is occupied by companies in a race to see who can be the least moral and get away with it.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 23 2020, @04:10PM
In about 1989 I heard it this way. (not adjusted for inflation...)
When you get to $50 Million the bean counters take over everything.
When you get to $500 Million the lawyers take over.
Now, I would add something about the MBAs after that.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @08:49AM (5 children)
I never felt like Apple was the good guy. Their stuff was always more expensive and proprietary, even back in the klunky 8-bit era.
That seemed to encourage their users to be jerks because everybody knew you had to have more money to own Apple stuff. It was an extension of the attitudes surrounding cars, stereos, etc.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday March 21 2020, @12:10PM (4 children)
ALL the old 8 bit PCs were largely proprietary in design. There weren't many existing standards that could be followed.
Old Apple, Woz and Jobs Apple, had a balance. A yin and a yang. A technical genius and an evil genius, together they made a healthy company.
Woz left a long time ago though, and the technical legacy was slowly spent to increase profits.
At this point they're just another brand being squeezed just as hard as possible to make rich people richer.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday March 21 2020, @12:42PM (2 children)
Apple does have some undeniable technical wins, like regularly having the industry's fastest ARM SoCs.
https://www.androidauthority.com/why-are-apples-chips-faster-than-qualcomms-gary-explains-802738/ [androidauthority.com]
They are making a swipe at x86 laptops with iPad Pro (i.e. the ARM performance can rival x86 chips). Time will tell if they adopt ARM in other product lines, like Mac Pro. We could see a future in which Apple licenses from or acquires the companies needed to make monolithic 3D ARM chips, and manages to make ARM chips that perform 10x better than whatever Threadripper/Epyc/Xeon chips are available at the time. They could also pick up the x86 emulation [theregister.co.uk] torch and run with it, fighting the lawsuits they would get hit with.
Still, the squeeze is real. Nice new $350 tablet keyboards. See also Louis Rossmann [wikipedia.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday March 21 2020, @12:59PM
They'd need to quit spending their money to subvert democracy as well though. Neither seems likely to happen, at all.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 23 2020, @04:17PM
Apple definitely has always had technical wins.
Back in my youth, I recognized that Apple hired very good people. In the early 1980s during development of Lisa / Mac, I had heard it said that Apple employed the top 150 computer science well known giants. Over time I slightly drank the kool aid and had a sense that it was because Apple was somehow magical and better than ignorant people working on IBM PC clones. But then Mac users did have a few things to actually be smug about in those days.
When Apple moved in a different direction, and I moved on to Linux, over time I recognized that there was nothing magical about Apple. They had lost the magic. Of course, everyone thought they got it back when they bought NeVR NeXT and brought back Steve Jobs the messiah from exile.
Microsoft hired lots of good people.
Then Google started hiring the best of the best. Microsoft experienced a brain drain of people going to the younger, hipper, cooler company.
It became clear that a company with management that had some vision could hire bright people and make amazing things happen.
But I observed that true Apple fanboys (a few of which personally known to me) did not believe this. Apple had some kind of magical engineering. Their software was somehow better. (Even when it because obvious that it was not.) Their hardware was "better", etc.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday March 23 2020, @03:53PM
MSX [wikipedia.org] was a standardized Z80 microcomputer architecture maintained by ASCII and Microsoft. It used the same AY-3-8910 audio chip as Intellivision, ZX Spectrum 128, and Amstrad CPC (which is not a doorbell [youtube.com]) and the same TMS9918 video chip as TI-99/4A and ColecoVision. However, it was proprietary in the GNU sense because building an MSX computer required licensing Microsoft BASIC, which was not free software.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @02:16PM
There was that time a few years ago that Microsoft [deepfreeze.it] was caught trying to train up and insert a Hamas spy ring [ukmediawatch.org] into the US Army's "Serious Games" program for making training materials from video games, which Microsoft's PR rep Susan Bohle was overseeing. Saudi Arabia was running the world's counter-terror operations [globenewswire.com] and police forces [sott.net] at the time, so they were able to have everyone who talked about it fired from their jobs, banned from the internet, and put on a global terrorist blacklist of violent white supremacists.