So what have you done with the laptop? I love the build quality and lightness of the pixelbooks but spending so much for something to brick in 5 years is an issue.
There are javascript+html+css apps that could use the Chrome API ( https://developer.chrome.com/apps/api_index ) which allow them to do more than regular javascript+html+css web pages.
"back then Google was still admired by the tech people"
"Losing our support"
why do you generalize 'tech people' as 'we' ?
I'm in tech and I've been for 30+ years. I still admire Google.
Sure some tech people don't like Google anymore or even never have.
But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours.
And it's not all or nothing: I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to not treat Google as a single block, hate everything they do or love everything they do. There are nuances and shades of gray in life, as we all learn when we grow up.
In the end, what matters is the silent majority not the chatty loud ones that have a personal grudge against some big corporation.
That "Google is evil" is highly overrated and over hyped. I always question the agenda of people promoting this.
> But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours.
The way I read statements that you replied to is with a silent prefix "based on the experience of folks I work/talk with". If one disagrees (i.e., sees different views prevalent), chime in and say so. There must be a way to express opinions that are between "that's my personal view" and "statistically significant, peer reviewed validation at this link".
As a personal data point, I see the same thing (around me) as the parent: opinions of Google tanked. 10 years ago an employee leaving for Google would be discussed with "wow" and "best of luck" feeling, while today it is mostly "well, at least he will be well paid" and " I am not yet ready to sell my soul". Just my 2c.
I want to jump in to underline your point in a couple of ways. One has to be able to make by-and-large generalizations from experiences and guesstimations. We should already know when we read that kind of thing that by-and-large means there are going to be one-off exceptions. So we don't need to hear about those exceptions unless they're intended to dispute the bigger point.
Every time I hear the contrarian anecdote in the form of: "well, I personally don't include myself in that generalization" my first question is whether that's intended merely as a report of a one-off experience, or if it's intended to be treated as evidence in favor of a different generalization. Virtually every time I see this type of Contrarian Comment, it's mute on this most important question and just confuses everybody.
But secondly I think the assessment of Google's reputation going negative is, by and large, a valid one. Though I might say the seeds of that started with the closure of Google Reader and the turn away from supporting RSS, which signaled turning away from open protocols more generally.
That's exactly how you have to read things to take posts in good faith, which is one of the few rules 'round these parts.
Similarly, I'm trying to eliminate the "I think" prefix from writing. It shouldn't be necessary to write "I think Google is evil". Of course the writer thinks that. They wouldn't have written it if they didn't. They can very safely just write "Google is evil".
If I write "I think Google is evil", I mean: "I think Google is evil, but I acknowledge that it's possible for other fairly reasonable people to have a different opinion."
If I write "Google is evil", I mean: "I think Google is evil, and I consider this an established fact that reasonable people shouldn't be disputing."
These are different propositions, and I might want to say either of them.
A policy of not using qualifiers like "I think" because of-course-it's-my-opinion makes it harder to make that distinction. I don't think the advantage of punchier prose is worth that loss.
(Note the "I don't think" at the end; other people might reasonably see the tradeoffs differently. Note the absence of "I think" elsewhere; I don't see much doubt that there is such a tradeoff being made.)
A reasonable lesson should already think it's possible for other reasonable people to hold different opinions, and not feel threatened by them. It's only in this bullshit really of the internet that we decided to start interpreting the things other people say as "potential facts in need of disputing" rather than just "the utterances of peers". The former mode implies a level of deference that we don't take on in public, face-to-face conversations.
I was more concerned about his usage of 'the tech people' terms.
Like you, I think when someone saying 'Google is evil' he implies 'I think Google is evil'.
But someone saying 'back then Google was still admired by the tech people" or "Losing our support" is more ambiguous. Like if all 'tech people' or a majority of them think like him which or he represents the majority.
tl;dr: I'm fine with him saying 'Google is evil' but not with him saying 'the tech people think Google is evil'.
Yes, the implicit "I think" still applies. "I think the tech people think Google is evil".
I don't know how to say this lightly, but
taking personal affront to statements of opinion is not a sign of the insult of the opinion of the speaker, but a sign of the insecurity the listener has in their own opinions.
People who think carefully then call Google 'evil' may as well be the same people who used to call it 'good'. Corporations aren't good or evil. They are powerful.
Being good is many things, but a key part of that is restraining the self from acting improperly. Corporations can't do that, they will sooner or later do whatever makes money. Or they get replaced sooner or later by a corporation that will. At best, there are stylistic differences around the edges that are simultaneously important but minor in the grand scheme of things. Sooner or later a corporation will be thinking primarily in terms of 'profitable' and 'not profitable'.
Calling Google 'evil' is trying to articulate something else - Google are powerful and dangerous. Any entity harvesting and directing the flow of information at that scale is. They have an unprecedented capability to cause harm; and sooner or later it will get used by someone to do exactly that.
But Google ten years ago seemed good, full stop. All of their behaviour seemed to be a net positive for the rest of the world, even when done in self interest.
Now, it's easy to see some behaviour which are not.
Even assuming there is a slide toward evil for corporations, and I'm not sure there is, it still seems correct to say that a company is at a given state of "goodness" in a certain time.
How about insidious? It's the banal sort of evil that doesn't realize the harm it's causing, or doesn't see a way to survive without causing that harm.
Well, maybe, but that's the human condition also. All of our actions — even the most well intentioned ones — can have unexpected and even disastrous consequences.
> Corporations aren't good or evil. They are powerful
That meant to imply that google is neutral? The strong nuclear force is powerful that doesn’t mean anything on its own. It can be harvested for good electricity or bad bombs. Of course the consensus on this is almost universal, the consensus on google is much more ambivalent. Corporations may well be good or evil
Yes, Google is not neutral, it definitely have a clear, intentional agenda. But it's non-moral (not imoral, or evil) as are all corporations. It just uses it's power as a way to complete it's objectives. This is way different from being neutral.
In a republic, the government - representing the people - is supposed to have the biggest stick. Huge companies with their own agendas are throwing a spanner in the works. And they basically only care about money. So the bigger they are, the more inherently evil they are. And it becomes even worse with transnational companies whose headquarters are basically out of reach.
The thing about Google is they have a monopoly on search. The risk for them doing good at the expense of additional profit is much lower than almost any other business. They won't be easily replaced. They could choose to be good but they don't.
> DDG/Bing/Yandex will list the exact same pages that Google gives as a search result most of the time, and sometimes better ones.
I've switched to DDG about a year ago, and this just doesn't match my experience. Results are frequently worse. It's worth it to me but makes it hard to recommend to everyone still.
There's probably a wide range of how people use search; works for you doesn't mean works for everyone. As an example, your recommendation to use stackoverflow directly for programming queries works for you and is nonsense to me -- I basically never land on stackoverflow from my programming searches. The most privacy-conscious person I know continues to use google news search to his own dismay because he doesn't find anything else comes close for keeping tabs on what people are saying about products he works on. And my wife claims DDG is basically non-functional for her search needs, which have very little overlap with mine.
"Losing our support" means a process, it doesn't mean everybody hates Google now, of course it's not the case.
> I always question the agenda of people promoting this.
My only agenda is my growing frustration with using Google Search and the lack of competition. Web pages can be excluded now for not using any of Google's plugins for example. I see how Search is increasingly becoming a tool for plain old profit maximization. It is generally up to Google to do whatever they desire with their own products, however the belief that Search is fair and "democratic" is lost now. No matter how technically competent, Google is lost for me as a company I can trust.
So, where is my fair, convenient and comprehensive search of information on the Web? There's none on the horizon. This is very worrying.
As an anecdote, I installed Vivaldi on a new laptop recently. It uses Bing as the default search engine. Previously I would always change this to Google, but this time I thought, "Hah, Google has been shit for a while now, why not give Bing a try?"
Comprehensive means centralized. This provably cannot be fair. We can’t have everything. I use bing for difficult searches (google can only understand 1 or 2 words it seems) and yandex for image search. Not bad
> I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to not treat Google as a single block, hate everything they do or love everything they do.
Unfortunately, as long as it is a single economic entity, it is a single block. All of its parts strengthen and finance the same entity.
If the different parts want to be treated separately, they must become separated.
I consider it basic logic that if you do not want something to be under a control of a single entity, you shouldn't continue fuelling an entity whose growing power will ensure exactly that. Isn't this far less judging and more nuanced than "Google is evil"? The motto is basically just a catchy shorthand for that.
> I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to not treat Google as a single block, hate everything they do or love everything they do.
They weren't mature enough to do that for Microsoft or IBM back in their days of dominance, why would you expect that level of maturity now?
"1. for the money, 2. for the..." is how i understand the "no evil" thing. just like people used to write micro$oft. it's funny i have not seen that one in a while. but yea, the most important factor is perhaps money.
Google has attempted to build products suiting a regime that murders people for organs and operates concentration camps for over a million people. Evil enough? They have barely, supposedly, engaged in a very small climbdown thanks to the laudable efforts of some insiders, clearly against the leadership's desires.
Imagine if they scrubbed search results for child immigrant detention camps, or My Lai, etc. in the US
The issue is PHP-FPM (FastCGI) only and it's vulnerable from outside only with nginx.
The vast majority of PHP 7.0 installations don't use FastGCI and don't use nginx but Apache simply because people used 'apt install php' (or 'yum install php') to install it.
Common approach is to serve static files with nginx and use apache / php_mod to process.
Why are you running php-fpm?
Do you need to separate request's processes? The speed benefits of php-fpm are part of php 7 so using php_mod is faster now.
> Common approach is to serve static files with nginx and use apache / php_mod to process.
Not sure how common that really is, I've personally never set things up like that and just use nginx + php-fpm and don't know anyone that still uses apache with mod_php.
Plenty of stuff still uses it, unfortunately. Performance is pretty janky, I just moved a Mediawiki install from Apache+mod_php to Nginx+php-fpm as part of getting the site(s) on kubernetes and it’s tremendously better to work with and uses less memory due to not needing mpm_prefork.
That's true for us as well with our legacy applications.
Our newer applications are using litespeed instead, and we've found it to be significantly better. You basically get the features of a nginx + apache + varnish stack in a single easily managed service and with better performance too.
Because running just nginx is more convenient than nginx + Apache, where Apache is only used for mod_php. For me anyway. (I only use nginx + php-fpm for a Wordpress instance; I have tons of stuff in other languages running on top of nginx too.)
Can you elaborate? I've yet to see Apache + mod_php to be capable of coming even close to <anything> + PHP-FPM so I'm really interested in what you guys are doing.
Mod_php was always faster at executing scripts. There is less overhead as you don't have to communicate like you have to with fpm.
For light scripts this is far superior to fpm. On the other hand, always loading php does have it's downsides too as memory consumption can get quite high depending on the number of threads.
This is was also the reason for the fpm hype a long time ago: don't waste memory on php when php isn't needed. It had nothing to do with it running php faster.
I've never, ever witnessed that mod_php came close to be fast, let alone faster than PHP-FPM. There's more work to be done in order to prepare everything needed for Apache to pass the data to PHP executable once it embeds it within its own process. Once opcache is up and running, PHP-FPM blows mod_php away (and there are tools to warm up the cache prior to letting the php-fpm node go live).
> This is was also the reason for the fpm hype a long time ago: don't waste memory on php when php isn't needed
I've been present when the "hype" as you called it hit. It had nothing to do with memory as much as it did with scaling. Added benefit was the ability to have PHP-FPM act as a multiplexer towards certain services (database to name one).
Today, there's no reason to use Apache and mod_php. It's slower and worse by definition. It can't be faster. If you receive results that show it is faster, you're either testing it wrong or your PHP-FPM runs on a raspberry pi.
> Mod_php was always faster at executing scripts. There is less overhead as you don't have to communicate like you have to with fpm.
The "overhead" of communicating via CGI to a PHP process has nothing to do with the speed of execution of the script itself.
> For light scripts this is far superior to fpm. On the other hand, always loading php does have it's downsides too as memory consumption can get quite high depending on the number of threads.
It's not far superior as the "overhead" of CGI is negligible in the real world. Plus you can pool processes for better scaling. Also, if you are using prefork with mod_php (which is the most probable scenario) it means you are forking an entirely new Apache process and not just "loading PHP" with each request.
> This is was also the reason for the fpm hype a long time ago: don't waste memory on php when php isn't needed. It had nothing to do with it running php faster.
It's not hype, because for a long time, mod_php required prefork because it was not thread-safe (even now it's still a pain to manage re-compiling PHP to be thread-safe for mod_php + Apache)...which means you could not take advantage of mpm_event or mpm_worker.
I was under the impression that a properly tuned mpm_event and fpm has very little difference to mpm_prefork and mod_php. What sort of machines are you running this on and what sort of child proc numbers are you running?
so the App Mafia is supposed to host your app for free? provide the bandwidth to download it for free ? give visibility to your app thru search in the store for free ?
at some point someone gonna pay for the datacenters, the wires and all these stuff needed for software distribution.
Try running your own site on your own servers and paying for the data traffic and then do the math.
First we're talking about the free app for a good cause, so you're already providing an app for free, so you've assumed some sacrifice for others for whatever reason, and setting up a website for it may be comparatively negligible part of the whole cost to you in terms of time.
In my case I would have already had an infrastructure and knowledge how to host things, so it might take a few minutes to put some new files up on a machine used for other projects. Additional costs being pretty much 0.
And there may be benefits (even if I didn't have the knowledge and infra) like learning something new, or now having an infrastructure and knowledge that helps you save expenses or time in the future. So that would offset the costs. You can't just look at costs alone.
Android is worth sh*t without any apps. I consider providing a market for apps and managing the quality of the market is their responsibility, business expense not developers.
If they don't like free apps, then they should stop hosting free apps if they want that 30% tax so much.
Google should be thankful in the first place that developers are making apps on their ecosystem (doubly so for open source apps), because without them, Android and the Google Play Store itself isn't worth much. It's their part of the deal to stay relevant.
which Chrome App(s) do you use that will cease to work in 2021 ?