Microsoft is opening their codebase because they've been crushed by the enormous efforts of open source. This concession was hard won over the course of decades.
Apple and Google do not contribute code freely, nor do they contribute a significant amount of their code. The contributions are limited to areas in which an advantage exists. One only has to look at the machinations present in other development platforms to realize the threat. Consider what's happened with Java in recent years. Or look to Swift. Or to the entire Microsoft ecosystem which was built in part on a foundation of open source. BSD licensed code permeates the Windows environment; to ask "what's the concern" belies a rather stunning ignorance of Microsoft's behavior over the three prior decades.
"because they've been crushed by the enormous efforts of open source"
As opposed to their own ineptitude (e.g. Vista and Windows 8) or the changing of the guard from original founders?
I'm certain open source played a role, but I suspect a secondary one. Heck, if post XP Windows didn't suck so much, I and my parents (who nowadays run what I build them) would be using it instead of Linux for our desktops.
Vista and Windows 8 aren't the problem. Lack of presence on servers and mobile devices is the problem -- those are the two key spaces where OSS platforms have won out.
Linux is still not a significant player on desktops. Microsoft is still completely dominating that space.
Nobody in a ten mile radius of me gives a crap about what is running on servers or phones. Most of them do not recognize an Android smartphone as a legitimate computer. They do not know what a CPU is, they do not know what a hard drive is, and they think their monitor on the desk is the computer and the tower in the closet is the "CPU".
Windows has the mindshare of the masses. When many upper-middle class white Americans want to write a document, they can only fathom word. When they want to do a spreadsheet, they can only fathom Excel. When they want to draw, they can only fathom Photoshop.
It isn't about options or features or anything, I'm talking about the super majority of people who cannot any longer comprehend the existence of anything but what they know - where being presented with Linux destroys their world view. They talk about OSX like its an easy bake oven rather than another computer, or as if its another desktop UI for Windows that also runs Office.
Which is why Microsofts open source efforts are pretty much all on the developer end. They know their userbase is completely ignorant to everything just the way they intended, and it would take years of retraining to push the public conscience away from the mindset that Microsoft Windows is the personal computer, and everything else is some gadget.
Mobile devices I firmly ascribe to ineptitude, and can supply some 2nd and 3rd hand details I've read about.
Servers are more complicated. In the mid-90s Windows NT started dropping in quality, and the much older decision to have mandatory file locking resulted in situations where creating a server with a major MS server application could require ~ 20 reboots. And many more bug and security fixes require reboots than they do on UNIX(TM) based/inspired platforms.
Then one could argue ineptitude in marketing when Microsoft didn't cut deals that could have made their software competitive for mass installations. I really wonder about that, because so many of these need source, but it's "a path not traveled", except internally with Azure.
"Apple and Google do not contribute code freely, nor do they contribute a significant amount of their code. The contributions are limited to areas in which an advantage exists."
This is simply false, actually. But of course, you have no evidence of this, only rhetoric, while i actually see literally every code contribution google makes.
That's not what you claimed. You claimed they do not contribute code freely; they certainly do. It might not be a very significant percentage if their code written, but it's a fact that they contribute code to open source projects, and they do not charge for it.
I see the misunderstanding. When I say "contribute code freely" I mean "without restriction."
You are certainly aware that the vast majority of code is under strict restrictions and will be leveraged for competitive/controlling purposes rather than being shared. Employees wishing to freely contribute code in these domains will have their requests denied.
We've both been employed by large SV companies; we both know how this works. The majority of software will be used in an attempt to control the market.
"You are certainly aware that the vast majority of code is under strict restrictions and will be leveraged for competitive/controlling purposes rather than being shared. Employees wishing to freely contribute code in these domains will have their requests denied.
"
??????
None of this is true.
I mean, literally none of this.
I don't even know where to begin.
Because it's an incredibly vague statement that is open to many interpretations?
As written, actually, i don't agree with it.
Google has open sourced > 100 million lines of source code, depending on how you count.
I can't tell you what percent this is, but it is quite significant
It is the vast majority of a number of products, and not the vast majority of a number of other products.
In fact, for some subsidiaries, all of the code is open source. For some, it isn't.
So your statement depends on a lot - who are you counting, what is "their code" (Code we've written, code we've modified, or code we use), etc
If you make a detailed enough statement, i'd probably agree.
But as written, there are plenty of cases where google open sources the vast majority of it's code.
> Consider what's happened with Java in recent years.
What has happened with Java in recent years?
One thing i can think of is that the 'official' Sun/Oracle JDK has gone from being closed source, to having a second-class GPL'd derivative, to being built on a GPL'd core. The amount of proprietary closed-source code has gone from 4% to 1% to nothing that doesn't have a free replacement today.
"with goals beyond pure financial gains and rock-bottom self-interest."
This doesn't paint an accurate picture. Google isn't deploying Fiber out of any notion of selflessness. This is a competitive play, and a very good one at that.
You say selfless ideals, I say this is exactly how "the market" and "competition" are commonly understood to function -- in the absence of corruption, regulatory capture and state granted monopolies.
And you're ascribing purity of motivation based on nothing more than apparent religious belief in your savior Larry. Hardly a more convincing argument.
"Sad that we still don't have any kind of common libraries or whatever"
We do have those. In this case the common library is called "libc." In this case (and in a few others) the Go team decided to intentionally avoid providing an interface to this function.
The good news is it would take just a few minutes to add support for go to call strftime directly from libc.
" A brand new Android flagship for the price of a months' rent. An utterly imaginably spectacular device."
But this isn't an utterly imaginably spectacular device. It's merely a run of the mill consumer-grade portable computer according to modern standards.
Your rent would be insignificant compared to, for example, the cost of a truly spectacular computer by modern standards, such as a modern search engine cluster with a price tag of perhaps a half billion dollars not counting ongoing opex.
That's not true. Working 40 hours in a week is not a problem. A contractor can put in an unlimited number of hours if they wish. 20, 40, 80 - it doesn't matter.
The differentiator you're probably thinking of is whether the worker chooses which hours they work. If the worker decides independently how much they will work and at what times then the IRS doesn't tend to consider the relationship employment -- regardless of how much time is put in. This is precisely how these driving services operate.
If the employer is scheduling a fixed schedule, say 9-5 M-F, then the IRS considers it an employment arrangement. Regardless of the number of hours worked. But that is not at all how these services operate.
One of the defining features of Uber is that the drivers set their own hours, too. That's how surge pricing is supposed to work--it's supposed to incentivize part-time drivers to get off their butts and drive during peak times.
Sometimes it backfires; Uber sent warning emails about surge pricing New Years Eve to drivers and to riders, and the cumulative effect of the warnings resulted in a glut of drivers and relatively little surge pricing in Seattle, at least according to a driver I talked to. In this case, leaving it as a contract arrangement even works for Uber because it lets them leverage market forces where a traditional employment model would make it impossible.
Well I live a lot further away than Oakland. I commute from along the 680 corridor which is further than may are willing to endure, I think. Luckily there's still quite a lot of affordable housing in safe neighborhoods in San Leandro, Hayward and El Cerrito (to name a few), all of which are much shorter commutes than mine.
But the more general answer to your question: When supply outstrips demand the only reasonable response is to build more housing.
Complaining that driving jobs have low value isn't constructive. The value of those jobs will approach zero soon due to technology. Instead, address the economic imbalance and let supply meet the demand.
Most of the Lyft drivers I've spoken to recently lived in Walnut Creek or further out. I only occasionally seem to get someone from Oakland, let alone SF.
The whole point of the original comment is that these are LEO satellites, rather than the geosynchronous satellites in use for previous internet service. These won't be traditional; they'll be about a thirtieth as far away.
There were mentions of both technologies and I was replying to devindotcom who was talking about how high latency satellites are still useful. Here's a link to that comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8920059
That is why I was careful to specify traditional satellite internet services. It appears the distinction was lost.
For geostationary orbit, yeah it's high latency. That's like >22k miles up. Low-earth orbit is a few hundred miles. The difference in latency is huge.
The highest cost is that you will lose sync with the satellite, since they will be rotating over the horizon frequently. If you can launch enough satellites, then you can have multiple in view at any given time and thus keep a continuous link.
That article is about satellite internet using geostationary satellites. Those satellites are as much as 200 times farther away than satellites in LEO.
22,236 miles up, opposed to LEO which starts at about 100 miles up.
That's because geostationary orbit is at 22,000 miles. These will be more like Irridium, which is at 485 miles. You can go lower, but it's more expensive because of extra fuel costs.
I think you might be confusing "fires low performers" with "fires people who have occasional misses." There's a world of difference between the two.
I have a few friends who I worked with at a large company, the kind with a large bureaucratic, broken management system that shuffles around incompetence without ever purging it. They went on to work at Netflix and they tell me how much they love it. They no longer have to deal with terminally incompetent divisions. They're top performers; there's no fear. If Netflix were stupid enough to fire them they'd instantly be buried in new opportunity. Of course, Netflix isn't that stupid.
Consider the economic incentives: A strong will-fire policy is a great negative incentive to prevent incompetent hires in the first place. It's not so scary if you're competent and capable -- and that's precisely the kind of people a company will want to hire..
I could see having that perception if you were coming from a large company that never fires anyone.
I can say that for some people, it is absolutely scary, even if you are competent and capable. For example:
- You suffer from imposter syndrome. Not that uncommon.
- The companies you work for have fired people regularly (read: startups). You notice these people are not always incompetent, but more often bad at politics or unlucky.
- You have others to support where the risk of being fired just isn't worth it.
Or, put it another way. Incoming netflix hires already have this expectation, so you'd expect the incompetent to self-select, as you've suggested. Yet netflix is reportably still firing often, which suggests one of the following is happening:
1) people who are so incompetent that they don't know they are incompetent are getting through netflix's hiring process
2) something else is happening and incoming netflix hires should absolutely be worried about being fired.
It's #1. Hiring is hard; everyone makes mistakes. Or sometimes people simply don't perform well in certain roles. Their deck goes into detail on this point IIRC. Try to fix it and if you fail, acknowledge the failure and move on.
Acknowledging that you will need to fire some portion of those you hire is an adult approach to the issue. Likewise from an employee's perspective. It's not a big deal to plan for things possibly not working out.
Kyllo was about thermal imaging but the opinion is quite clear. There's a much, much stronger case for thermal imaging equipment than there is for a device which probes via radio waves.
FLIR is a special camera that detects infra-red light. IR is electromagnetic radiation that is emitted from objects with heat.
RADAR emits a more "traditional" radio wave, and then detects objects when the radio wave reflects back. Unlike FLIR (which is passive), I would consider RADAR to be active.
I would think (rather naively so) that the case against using RADAR without a warrant would be stronger, given that the government would have to actively affect your house. To play devil's advocate, the pot grower was emitting a signal in the FLIR case...
Anyone more educated than I able to cast light (haha) on this?
One nice thing about the Supreme Court is that every ruling comes with at least one (or two if the ruling is not unanimous) experts explaining the situation. And if any of the remaining Justices disagree, or feel that something was left out, of those two opinions, they can add their own.
In this case, the dissent wrote:
Unlike an x-ray scan, or other possible "through-the-wall" techniques, the detection of infrared radiation emanating from the home did not accomplish "an unauthorized physical penetration into the premises,"
and:
While the Court "take[s] the long view" and decides this case based largely on the potential of yet-to-be-developed technology that might allow "through-the-wall surveillance," ante, at 38-40; see ante, at 36, n. 3, this case involves nothing more than off-the-wall surveillance by law enforcement officers to gather information exposed to the general public from the outside of petitioner's home. All that the infrared camera did in this case was passively measure heat emitted.
Indeed. The ruling is quite clear that penetrating radio waves into the residence is presumed to be unacceptable. Even the dissent in Kyllo (FLIR) agrees on this point in regard to x-ray.
Your house is constantly saturated with radio waves from TV stations, radio stations, wifi etc.
What if I were to design a device that passively received reflections of these signals rather then generating it's own to achieve the same function as the device in this post.
So I now have the same result, but I am "merely" receiving reflections, rather then making my own.
There is no difference in the function, this is rules lawyering at its best.
I am willing to let police observe emissions on visible wavelengths ONLY because that is a slippery slope to not being allowed to look into windows.
Anything you need a device to view is not ok to view without a warrant, no matter the technique.
If you look at Gizmo's quotes, I think it's pretty clear they considered these kinds of technology tricks in deciding Kyllo, and 'taking the long view' that high tech collection of passively emitted information requires a warrant. I think the general approach is it's the result that matters, not the specific approach, e.g. 'expectation of privacy'.
Apple and Google do not contribute code freely, nor do they contribute a significant amount of their code. The contributions are limited to areas in which an advantage exists. One only has to look at the machinations present in other development platforms to realize the threat. Consider what's happened with Java in recent years. Or look to Swift. Or to the entire Microsoft ecosystem which was built in part on a foundation of open source. BSD licensed code permeates the Windows environment; to ask "what's the concern" belies a rather stunning ignorance of Microsoft's behavior over the three prior decades.