I like this, and it feels "Google-y". Worried that a handful of us will use it, lean on it heavily, and then Google will do what Google does and pull the plug on it.
Well in all honesty if you end up leaning on it heavily in spite of the warning you kind of deserve whatever you get...
>This is a Beta release of Cloud Shell. This feature is not covered by any SLA or deprecation policy and may be subject to backward-incompatible changes.
I wasn't explicit with my earlier comment, you're right about the beta period. I was referring to after when they exit beta and are a good, useful service for a year or two.
Which would be understandable if they ever shut down any cloud service offering of this level before (which they have not).
This whole "Google loves to shut stuff down" is really tired and overplayed.
Go ahead and compare Google's track record with Apple's or Microsoft's, or any other company. They are about on par, yet Google almost always gives 6+ months notice (often over a year), provides one-click alternatives, allows you to export your data in one of many formats, and more often than not has an in-house alternative that you can use automatically.
Take a look at the wiki page of google's products [1]. I'd be surprised if you even knew about 10% of those, let alone used more 1 or 2 significantly.
On that list that I've used: Buzz, Pack, Desktop, Reader, iGoogle.
To Be Discontinued: Google Drive Hosting, Google Code.
I don't think it's tired and overplayed. It's a consequence of how Google works; try lots of things and don't be afraid to pull the plug. That strategy is great, and it works.
It's just sometimes the services that are on the edge of being worth Google's time to maintain cause the most backlash because a fair number of people used those services.
Google refused to allow you to pay for them? Each of those services could trivally have had some combination of ads and paid services but Google's management made strategic decisions to put resources elsewhere.
Only using paid services up front might seem to help but one look at the way Google Apps has been in maintenance mode for years suggests that even that offers only limited protection.
Realistically, how many people would have paid for something like Google Reader after getting it for free for so many years? I think it would be a tough sell and you would have witnessed a lot of complaining...
On the other hand, the negative PR they have gotten from Reader (it's pretty much the poster child for the "Google cancels products" meme) - they probably should have kept it around, even if it was not strategic.
I'm pretty sure anyone working at Google knows how to put ads on a free service but in any case, I saw a lot of people calling for a paid option in the period between the de-featuring for the botched Google+ roll-out and actually closing the service down. That would have been a natural approach: free version has ads with some sort of “Pro” option to remove them.
Any other company? You've named three. Truth is enterprise grade companies that serve the business market and don't give their products away for free or participate in a race to the bottom typically don't do this type of thing to the degree that google does. Perhaps the companies that do (including parts of msft) are those that deal with developers or consumers which apparently are more likely to not complain to much (other than to whine online) when they get the shaft. The stereotype, unfortunately, is true. At least that is what I have found.
Also, and this is important, there is the benign neglect phase where they simply keep the product minimally working but don't spend any time to improve it (like google voice).
To the best of my recollection, I don't believe we've ever shutdown a product. Was there one in particular that hit you? (Reader, Wave, etc are totally different divisions.)
Google Code was first turned into a graveyard, then deprecated, and soon will shut down altogether. Reader was not strictly a development tool (which is what I guess you refer to as "your division"), but was heavily used by developers, so it significantly disrupted people's workflow. Same for Wave and any web API (there's quite a few of them which were unceremoniously dumped).
It is not really Google's fault that Code was not a successful product, other than that they simply didn't have the energy/budget/will to actually make it a competitive product with Github.
Saying Google "doesn't have the budget" to do something is fairly preposterous, tbh. I can understand that they were wrong-footed by the rise of Github; Code was built to compete with Sourceforge, when GH didn't even exist. From day 1 though, it was clear that Code wasn't even "better enough" to actually kill SF for good; further development was incredibly slow. When Github hit their stride, Google reacted by just giving up. They didn't even attempt a comeback.
well, google isn't a small business, where "the budget" can be synonymous with "the bank account(s)". like many (all?) large businesss, things are organizationally regimented into units (and sub-units, etc), and budgets are allocated toward each unit.
so while "google" might have funds, the "google code development team" may have a very tiny allocation.
Of course, but budget allocation does not descend from Heaven fully formed, so to speak. Google directors (i.e. Google) decided Code was not a priority, so in the end it's Google-the-company's fault that it had to close.
I think there was no reason for them to keep Google Code as a going concern with the rise of Github. They were not going to do as good a job as Github, and it wasn't something they were making any money off of.
Even if they had been trying.
But yes, like many Google products, it was basically released and abandoned. They weren't trying. (If they had been, maybe we never would have had a github...)
I do think as a public service, they could have left all the code (and wiki documentation) accessible read-only virtually perpetually. Surely they can afford that.
Instead, we get tarball download only, and only until late 2016, after which it's all gone forever, if it hasn't been migrated elsewhere by code owners or third parties.
Google Drive hosting, to be fair it still works and you guys gave plenty of heads up (August 31, 2016). Just because they are in different divisions doesn't mean Google hasn't shut things down.
Oh brother. I guess if you're using the strict definition that a product is only something people pay for, then you may be right, but in the more generally accepted meaning that a Google product is something Google makes that people outside of Google use, you're just flat out wrong.
I am so tired of this meme. Every business shuts down products and services. To re-iterate this meme every time Google announces something is tired. I'm guessing you still hold Google accountable for shutting down Reader - a service you probably never used but go to the well each and every time they announce a service or product.
Multiple people (now three!) have downvoted this, but the idea that everyone who talks about Google service closures is complaining about one specific service--Google Reader--is the "meme" that we should all be quite tired of, as it is trotted out like a broken record every single time anyone points out reservations about Google's track record: no matter the context, no matter how many services have been shut down or cut down since, no matter what announcements Google makes about limiting their policies, and no matter whether the person mentioned Google Reader or not... it is even used against people like myself, who had absolutely no specific interest in Google Reader in the first place :/.
It is nothing more than a knee-jerk way to dismiss a rather easily defended position (due to the large number of closures that have been documented, ones that are more extreme or would have been considered less likely than Google Reader) by stereotyping someone's argument down to not just a "strawman" (an argument that is easily defeated), but essentially a purposely broken and laughable version of their argument so as to purposely ill-inform other people (which I feel the need to separate from a "strawman", as the goal is not to defeat the argument but to belittle the opponent). It is frankly one of the more underhanded argumentation tactics that people seem to enjoy defending here.
The reality is that Reader is a non-issue for most people here, as it isn't something you likely built your business or infrastructure around (and to the ones who ended up indirectly relying on it, that is a stretch to blame them for), but when Google randomly shuts down, cuts down, or entirely reboots APIs and services--something they have done many times, at the extremely painful end with things like Checkout and Login, but also with things such as App Engine or Charts--the fact that people seem to seriously have just forgotten how recent these things have been is distressing, and is made all the worse by people who insist on perpetuating "you are just whining about Reader" lie :/.
He linked a TON of projects that have been shut down. The logic of your message seems to be "they only shut down things that aren't popular, therefore you should feel fine using this really niche product that will never expand beyond a small group of developers."
And for the record, I did use iGoogle. And there were plenty of people who used Wave, Reader, Code, and Labs.
Reader and Code are the only ones that had traction.
I object to the idea that it is, "a Google" when we could make the same argument of many tech companies. I object specifically here because it's been shown to be a talking point in a whole deck of talking points written for an MPAA smear campaign on Google.
And it's not particularly fair. They should call it, "Pulling a startup" given how often we fail at them.
AFAIK it's because they last a long time with very small amounts of reactants, are low maintenance, and are potentially very small. I mean, it kinda makes sense but RTGs are better for space applications because you really don't need massive amounts of power in space, plus the whole "power forever with no effort" aspect; they might as well be perpetual motion engines.
LFTR's produce 239Pu (among a mess of other stuff), that's the stuff that goes BOOM in nuclear bombes, not 238Pu that glows warmly to make power for spacecraft.
As Jobu points out from Wikipedia: he second proliferation resistant feature comes from the fact that LFTRs produce very little plutonium, around 15 kg per gigawatt-year of electricity ... This plutonium is also mostly Pu-238. According the article this seems like quite a bit more than is currently being produced, is it not viable for use in RTGs for some reason? Or is the cost of a LFTR over the course of a year less cost effective than the current method of Np to Pu?
I have very little knowledge of the science here, I'm just not sure what all I'm missing.
What a contentless article, "Work harder! Grumble grumble grumble." We all know that none of these VC "gurus" are actually cleverer than the rest of us, but yet we give them an audience for empty posts like this because their job is (hilariously) to maintain the VC guru image.
I just don't get why these "insightful advice" posts ever gain traction.
Though, he had a point, that magnetism is difficult, he explained thoroughly and clearly where's the problem.
I do not know how R. Feynman's university lectures sound like, but his popular lectures seem to follow a pattern, of giving casual situation and using that situation to pull a listener, as well as himself, into explaining something with an analogy.
I liked that R. Feynman explained knowledge as 'a framework that allows something to be true', and not everything can be explained by using 'common knowledge framework' and you need to understand some more details.
>I do not know how R. Feynman's university lectures sound like
Enjoy. You might also find the audio in mp3/ogg/etc format.
Video http://www.feynmanphysicslectures.com/
YT https://www.youtube.com/user/FeynmanVideoLectures
Another video source http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/
Text http://www.feynmanlectures.info/
Links to more stuff http://www.feynmanlectures.info/links.html
The lectures that were put together into the Feynman Lectures on Physics were fabulous. I believe they actually originally thought the audio was lost, but later someone found a bunch of tape reels in storage. The audio is heavily distorted, but a lot of work was done to restore them. I highly recommend anyone with an interest in physics listen to them while reading along in the book. It feels close to actually being in class. He was an exceptionally good teacher.
JPL also published a C coding standard, which details language constructs that one should and shouldn't use in a mission critical embedded system. Some of the rules make a reappearance there (the "Power of Ten" article is mentioned in the introduction).
I've lived in Korea, my experience was you gave out phone numbers when meeting new people, KakaoTalk automatically scans new contacts and adds them to your KakaoTalk contacts and all subsequent texting and photo sharing was through KakaoTalk.
I only texted one person regularly while I lived there, my boss; my boss had a KakaoTalk account but didn't use it (with me at least).
I still use it, it's a very good messaging application with some pretty well implemented features (and excellent custom emojis!).
KakaoTalk is very well realized and really fun to use; the privacy side leaves me queasy, though. KakaoTalk conversations are known to be under government surveillance, and the KCSC is a troublesome institution in general (cf. http://opennetkorea.org/en/wp/administrative-censorship).
Currently living in Japan, and I haven't given my phone number out to anyone yet. It's all exchanging LINE info (mostly using the QR functionality, sometimes just the ID). Almost everyone has a Facebook, but I don't think the messaging component is widely used. Almost all messaging, and even most voice calls, go through LINE.
I absolutely love the citybound dev blog, it's such a great exploration of problems that i would never think about otherwise.
However, I have no faith that the game itself will ever be finished. It's the epitome of "perfect is the enemy of good", they spend so much time getting little things absolutely perfect. At least it makes for an interesting blog.
I gotta say, that sim of three lanes of cars all merging into one lane to turn right really was painful to look at. Darn near had flashbacks to my morning commute. Really nice work.
One of my favourite 70's quotes is from the quite brilliant book "The Medieval Machine" by the Anglo-French historian Jean Gimpel, published in 1976 (which really is a very good history of Medieval technology):
"The economic depression that struck Europe in the fourteenth century was followed ultimately by economic and technological recovery. But the depression we have moved into will have no end. We can anticipate centuries of decline and exhaustion. There will be no further industrial revolution in the cycles of our Western civilization."
These words were written at the same time as Jobs, Wozniak, Gates and Allen were all hard at work. This smug bastard was just one voice amongst many telling the world that we were in the grip of a permanent, inexorable "malaise" that could at best be accepted passively, which there was no point in fighting, which had to be simply taken as given, unstoppable, forever.
At the same time people like me were being told by teachers that we would never be able to image the disk of extra-solar stars or discover extra-solar planets, and so on [1]. Gleeful murderers of hope were desperately trying to crush any spark of innovation, creativity or freedom. And it was happening the world over. A relentless, ruthless, assault on the Enlightenment, the rule of law, and the industrial revolution.
They failed.
A lot of it was funded, ultimately, by the Soviets, who generated an enormous amount of propaganda that was intended to make people believe these things. One of the notable things that happened after the collapse of the Soviet Empire was the stunning pall of silence that fell over the Left in the West. It was almost as if the lifeblood of the whole enterprise had been cut off.
Part of that was simple empiricism: it was hard for Leftists to hold up their pathologically insane ideas as "better" when their poster-child had just endured a complete and spectacular collapse, including the freeing of a large number of vassal states, all because some shipyard workers in Poland had laid down tools a decade before.
But part of it was also that funding for a bunch of stuff that Comintern paid for (mostly by indirect means, in the same way the US government funds stuff through NGOs today) vanished.
Today, hyper-capitalist brands like Naomi Klein are attempting to resurrect some of the old zombie Soviet ideas, but it's a pretty pathetic effort, full of contradictions and gibberish. They won't have a lot of influence, at the end of the day, and it is my firm belief that we are entering into a century of progress that will make the 19th century look staid and the 20th century look stupid. Having lived through the '70's, this is a good thing to see.
Where do people get the idea that everyone on the "Left" was, and apparently continues in some mysterious way to be, an undifferentiated mass totally in thrall to Soviet control?
Charlie Stross puts it quite nicely about the UK Labour party - who were the creators of that enduring socialist endeavour of the UK NHS:
The Conservatives hated and feared the threat of Soviet communism; the Labour Party leadership hated and feared the Soviets even more (as first cousins once removed in the family tree of left wing ideology, they were seen as class traitors by the first generation of Bolsheviks).
To simply equate socialism with Soviet control was always simplistic and a worldview that caused untold grief - possibly being a contributing factor to the start of the Vietnam War, as argued in A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan.
Edit: The ultimate expression of those on the left as an "undifferentiated mass" was probably the original SIOP which would have attacked all socialist countries even those that weren't on particularly good terms with the Soviets. And even that approach didn't last long - the head of US Marine Corp described attacking people you weren't actually fighting as "This is not the American way".
But there was an actual period in the US where you'd have Stalinists and Trotskyites arguing on coffee houses ( Dave van Ronk talks about this in that movie "No Direction Home"). The US has no tradition of something like Fabian Socialism. Prior to the Communists it was "bomb throwin' Anarchists" ( which is interesting considering that Stalin at least was anarchist before he was Communist - you can see the line from Anarchism to Communism in Europe as well). See the "Palmer Raids", "1919 bombings", the "Haymarket Riots". All were formative for J. Edgar Hoover.
IMO, and it's probably just me, the Bircher thing rose out of the central American tendency towards isolationism. Pearl Harbor ended that; the rest was secondary. The US simply wasn't prepared and hadn't really thought about it. Most of the things we find ... dissonant now are of design by Eisenhower, who was simply our best bet for dealing with it after having been the Supreme Commander in WWII. Thrown in with the brothers Dulles, most of those things were extremely messy. 1953 in particular was very sticky. We had living memory of the nationalization of the oil fields in Mexico.
Americans tend to believe against central planning. The idea is presented quite well in an otherwise flawed "Liberal Fascism".
To simply equate socialism with Soviet control was always simplistic and a worldview that caused untold grief
This idea allowed the CIA to overthrow democratically elected leftwing governments in South America while permitting and cooperating with rightwing nondemocratic murderous governments.
This screed is essentially pure-quill mental imbalance. I was in school in America in 1979, too. I subscribed to BYTE, Science 80, the whole nine yards. My teachers were ecstatic about my love for science, not even once trying to dissuade me from my eager pursuit of the future.
So right on the face of it, you're just flat wrong. And then you go right off the rails screeching about Communist influence as though this were anything but raving paranoia.
I'm a liberal Quaker (Quakerism far predates Communism) and - you know what? - I seem to have been left off the distribution list from Moscow.
Basically, all I can think when I read this is that you need to get back on your meds. "Pathologically insane ideas," my ass. How anybody can view liberalism as an attack on the Enlightenment - when it is the Enlightenment - is frankly flabbergasting.
Are you suggesting the Soviet Union founded covert propaganda to convince the west that exoplanets couldn't exist? Do you have any more information about this? Because on the face of it it sound like the craziest conspiracy theory I've ever heard.
To be fair I read it as meaning we would be incapable of discovering them, rather than that they didn't exist. But yes, taken as a whole the post is rather eccentric.
I wasn't around at the time, but from the science fiction of the era, it looks like nobody really thought about how to detect exoplanets from Earth, because everyone assumed the curve of technological progress in propulsion would keep going and you'd just send scout ships to other stars to survey them up close.
>At the same time people like me were being told by teachers that we would never be able to image the disk of extra-solar stars or discover extra-solar planets, and so on [1]
Wow, I never knew they were so pessimistic about that. I thought the science for visualizing extrasolar planets had always been there, they just needed the equipment built.
Now I wonder what ideas today's pessimists have that will be disproven. Maybe Interstellar travel is really possible?
You shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet, some people are just out for their own crazy agendas.
You're correct that the science has been there for quite some time and astronomers have been lobbying and popularizing the idea of building the necessary detection equipment for quite a while. There was even quite a good book written on the topic in 1966, a collaboration between a young American astronomer and an accomplished Soviet astronomer/astrophysicist [1]. It's a very interesting read, especially today now that we have accomplished some of the things they theorized about on the planets in our solar system and through observations of our stellar neighbourhood. I highly recommend it.
Well, in this case, though, the OP is right about extrasolar planet detection, at least as regards science teachers and popsci articles. I remember the general (popsci) consensus of the time being that there was no practical way to image planets of other stars because you'd need incredibly large telescopes in space, and by the time we could build optical space telescopes with mirrors that were hundreds of meters across, we'd have a generally spacefaring civilization that would likely have already started launching probes to the nearest candidates.
Also, the feeling of inevitable doom from resource depletion, pollution, technological stagnation, and political dystopia was quite palpable to many of us growing up in the time. By the mid-80s when I was a teen, it seemed like the way to bet was that no human would leave LEO for many decades, if ever.
There was something surreal about playing Missile Command during the Cold War, you always lost all your cities. The palpable feeling that at any time we could all be incinerated by nukes made everyone a bit jaded. The threat passed but the cynicism stayed on. Even today as progress ascends people insist on doom. Go figure.
