"Google does not care about their users". Well.. I am not sure about that, but there is always the option of not using Google products, or using as few as possible Google products.
- I've closed my G Suite legacy free edition (as opposed to transitioning to paid)
- I've moved away and stopped using Gmail, Drive, Photos and Keep
I am still using maps & youtube - these are a bit tricky to replace.
No hard-feelings, Google is no longer the company/innovator it used to be (remember back on 2005 got an invitation for gmail, and I was over the moon).
Obviously it's not a big deal if you're already intentionally moving away from Google, but one of the oddest things about the legacy free G Suite changes is that after months and months of upheaval and uncertainty, they just allowed personal-use users to keep it indefinitely anyway.
I half wonder if it was a purposeful scheme to knock out the biggest users and have them "voluntarily" migrate while ultimately not booting off those who waited around and were the most averse to change. But it really didn't feel like strategy, more like lurching between possible ways forward.
Google is definitely getting out of all those spaces where it just "generously" allowed free stuff all over the place: obviously the shuttering of many services, but the things like G Suite and Maps billing and the general crackdown on storage... I don't think the economics of the business really required such changes but it's more a philosophical change? Or preparing for leaner times ahead?
Ah crap so I’m going to be booted from gsuite in a year because I upgraded but won’t renew in a year while others will be fine? I barely use it too. Didn’t want to deal with moving the domain email yet.
They eventually gave just a "tell us you're doing personal use and we'll move you to a new free plan" option. That's what I ended up doing: I figured at least I'd wait until the end of their period to do anything.
I don't remember if they offered an option to go back if you'd already upgraded, though.
But yeah, this is the basic kind of weird and unfortunate scenario their muddled messaging led to.
It seems like maybe you can go back even if you affirmatively upgraded? Haven't tried obviously but the Google page about it seems to indicate as much.
"Google does not care about their users". Well.. I am not sure about that
Google cares about its customers, not its users. Google users and Google customers are two different entities.
but there is always the option of not using Google products, or using as few as possible Google products.
A New York Times columnist tried this maybe a year or two ago. With the help of an expert, tried to go completely Google-free, meaning no access to any Google API. It turned out to be impossible, since so many apps, programs, and services rely on Google behind the scenes for everything from flight data to CAPTCHA.
> Google users and Google customers are two different entities.
Google hardly cares about their customers as well, unless you are big enough to make a dent in their income, which you are not. The number of people paying for gsuite who never managed to get a hold of an actual human after a brutal and unwarranted termination of their online life is quite big, if you expect them to care about their customers.
I pay Google for phones, home devices, a YouTube subscription, extra cloud storage... if you are made uncomfortable by the deal of getting an amazing suite of products without paying for any of it then perhaps you can quell your unease by becoming a paying customer.
Even if you are too frugal to part with any of your cash, your statement, besides being worn and trite, is plainly false. Without users (even the free tier), Google goes out of business, which is decidedly an anti goal.
You are gleefully ignoring the nearly weekly posts here about people getting locked out of all their Google services for terms of service violations that make no sense. Google has no support mechanisms.
My personal experience with an anti-spam service that got bought by Google and was cancelled was awful, as the "replacement" service was missing features that the one I was paying for originally had. More recently I tried for months to report a widespread Google Maps software issue to no avail where Streetview data was inaccessible. I had to resort to getting someone that works at Google to report the issue internally after which is was fixed within a few weeks.
It really is true that Google treats their users like garbage. The pretty much follows when users are merely an expense to be minimized in the quest to sell more ads.
I've been using Office 365 Business Standard. Works quite well, works with all my devices (Windows natively, web with a very good web interface and iOS with the Outlook app and with Exchange syncing). Works nicely with a standard Microsoft account and can switch between them depending on what I need (e.g. Xbox/Rewards on personal account). Had to migrate stuff manually (using Google Takeout) to a 'normal' Google account which was pain - especially as they let you go from personal to Gsuite in one click - but once it's done it's done - thankfully Office 365 keeps the subscription & standard Microsoft account separate. Lost a YouTube account in the transfer but had to suck it up.
Can get a subscription for around £90 a year, usually with cashback through various retailers via the likes of Topcashback/Quidco (renewed last time with the BT online store and got cashback through TCB).
Spam filtering is second to none, nothing seems to get through it and doesn't have many false-positives either.
I've replaced it with purelymail.com (not affiliated) - and I'm happy with that. Been with the service for about 4 months now. Yes, there is occasional spam, but fine with that.
They offer calendar as well, works fine but I am not using it. Running my own self-hosted instance of NextCloud and using that for cal and contacts.
Not for me, but.. A honest question - now, when G suite legacy free edition is closing down, here's a chance to offer a service that's not "piggy-backing" on gmail (or any other provider).
You could "re-create Inbox" by providing email hosting with same/similar features - already lined up on your page.
Wouldn't that be a huge effort though, as you'd have to essentially implement deliverability and spam all from scratch, all while trying to convince gmail users to switch. I tried Hey and found that it just wasn't going to work for me as they wanted to 'own' my email.
Not an electronics engineer, but have enjoyed the read. If you can pull this off, more power to you.
With soldered storage and RAM onto the boards becoming nowadays fairly common, the author can probably open up a business and do this as a side-job or full time!
Add Chromebooks into the mix, and you'll probably have customers.
>> With soldered storage and RAM onto the boards becoming nowadays fairly common, the author can probably open up a business and do this as a side-job or full time!
Especially if they can figure out how to upgrade certain Mac models.
Could not agree more. They're big-corp specific and if you can avoid them - that would be a big plus for you. I can't. They lack value while being a complete waste of time. You may think it's no biggie - "but I'm getting paid for the meetig time".
True, however - they can wear you down in time, if three-four times a day... and you are still expected to deliver, regardless the time spent in meetings.
That's only my oppinion, I know some folks are fine with long meetings. My view on this is - I am not an entertainer (aka meetings "super-star"), I would like to keep it short & to the point.
Regarding the article, there is some good stuff in there, that may or may not apply to everyone (especially if you have kids).
There are also hidden costs to meetings in terms of lost time / productivity. If I have a half hour meeting at 1:30 then another one at 2:30, I can't do much with that half hour in between (except surf HN, of course.) If this happens a few times a day, most of the day is gone.
"Agile" and its "rituals" makes this even worse: standups, sprint planning, retros, on top of miscellaneous team status meetings. It's sickening how much time is wasted with this garbage.
Too many stupid meetings is the #1 reasons why I left and started something on my own. At my current company we have one official meeting per week, and it's unusual if it lasts more than 20 minutes. It's wonderful.
If I may, one suggestion regarding the plastic frame - maybe work a bit on the quality and feel of the frame (unless pictures are of a prototype). I know it may not sound like a big deal, but I think that a good product presentation goes a long way.
“You can download the STEP files from our Github repository to 3D print your own if you decide to go with the latter. Or even design your own!”
It would be really cool to mill the same design out of wood. An alternative design could be stackable layers of wood & plastic, similar to the RPi “zebra” cases.
I honestly think this is what I love in sci-fi, some space opera most notably: whereas most stories are usually told in terms of space and time, sci-fi sometimes speaks in terms of scale, of orders of magnitudes — because space (I mean the cosmos, not the dimensions) is a natural playground for that.
Sometimes, when I ponder the discrepancy between quantum, or whatever's smallest, perhaps strings 'below' (in scale) or 'within' (physically), and the largest relativistic objects like "dark attractors" and meta-galactic structures (streams of 'dark matter', light nodes, etc)...
It almost seems like scale is but another kind of dimension in and of itself.
Like you've got spacetime at our human-ish scale (roughly 10 orders of magnitude smaller to larger around our size), and that spacetime behaves in a certain way, that probably Einstein describes accurately. Then you've got spacetime at smaller scales, below "quantum uncertainty" if we must place a limit, and there spacetime behaves in a much different way, the picture is very, very different.
And so there could be yet another spacetime at a higher threshold of scale, and intuition tells me it may be at the galacatic level already, because dark matter, rotation discrepancy, and those weird supermassive blackholes; the flow of galaxies, the meta-structure we see. Dark energy, if it's real, also begins at that scale (doesn't break galaxies apart, but makes holes bigger between them, the non-correlated enough sets).
Going from this idea to postulating disjointed (1+3) spacetimes forming, in effect in this example, 3x4=12 dimensions to explore mathematically, let alone physically, is a stretch which I'm certainly not willing to make (although I think that's what some string theories must reduce to, somehow, maybe reduced to a single unified dimension of time maybe?); no really this doesn't make sense in my head. It's pretty but nonsensical, like art I guess. Worth the sci-fi, not the studies.
But the feeling, the intuition really is that, and conveyed by these extreme zooming animations: a different scale means totally different phenomena, and no macro-system can be reduced to its parts in that view, nor can it be deduced from its parts (I mean, we can't even solve the 3-body problem, that's harsh on "scaling continuity" or smoothness, on the "linearity" of scales so to speak). A "basic" intuition I guess is that the 4 fundamental interactions have ranges, and kick in or out depending on a particular scale of the system.
What struck me was the link to Hoag's Object which came up a couple days ago. And that even though it's a bazillion miles away there's another much more distant ring galaxy that you can make out way in the distance beyond it in the picture.
