poopkins
@poopkins@lemmy.world
- Comment on US Wants Judge to Break Up Google, Force Sale of Chrome: Here's What to Know 1 day ago:
It’s the same thing with the Linux kernel
It’s funny you should mention this, because Google has needed to adapt this for mobile and are already open source. If the opportunity existed for a “free” and open source version of Android to be embraced by consumers, there are many such options today, like GrapheneOS (or even forking AOSP, for that matter).
My concern is that if the major contributor to that steps out, the volunteer community will need to substantially step up.
Consumer devices ship with proprietary software which is licensed all the time
The reason I called out your example of Red Hat is to illustrate how enterprise is financing a free consumer experience.
With a very limited enterprise market, it’s not realistic to expect this to apply to an almost exclusively consumer product.
So there are two options. Either we don’t have an open source Android and in addition to the license cost of GMS, OEMs would have to license the OS itself. The alternative is that OEMs shoulder the development cost of their own fork of AOSP, which would simply be passed on to consumers. Either way, this would drive up the price of devices.
I’m not sure why you’re speaking in hypotheticals about what Android could be if it had license fees, as it’s readily available in open source under the Apache license today and, despite that, steadily losing market share.
- Comment on US Wants Judge to Break Up Google, Force Sale of Chrome: Here's What to Know 2 days ago:
Android is already largely open source. Yet it takes a massive investment from Google to continue developing it and curate the app store with it.
I’m genuinely struggling to envision how we move from the current situation to a somehow better but more fragmented ecosystem that doesn’t negatively affect consumer experiences. Whichever way I’ve approached it, it plays in the favor of one company in particular who already has a leading market share in the US, and I truly don’t see how that would be better.
- Comment on US Wants Judge to Break Up Google, Force Sale of Chrome: Here's What to Know 2 days ago:
If you’re referring to Google Play itself, it’s my interpretation that this is exactly what needs to be uncoupled that the proponents of separating Android from Google are arguing.
- Comment on US Wants Judge to Break Up Google, Force Sale of Chrome: Here's What to Know 2 days ago:
The primary ways in which the Mozilla Foundation earns money is through search partnerships, donations and grants. Guess who is the major contributor.
As for Red Hat, this comes down to subscriptions or enterprise offerings, neither which really apply to a consumer OS unless you’re willing to pay a subscription fee out of pocket. I doubt there will be much to be earned from offering consulting or training, either, unless they make Android exceedingly confusing to use.
The only companies that would pay for Android are OEMs who are already making thin margins, and effectively it’d drive the price of non-iPhones up. The alternative is that OEMs take the Huawei option and fork AAOS and develop it at their own expense.
- Comment on US Wants Judge to Break Up Google, Force Sale of Chrome: Here's What to Know 2 days ago:
What do you mean by “get”? Who will be funding the creation of all these OSes? The phone margins are already razor thin.
- Comment on US Wants Judge to Break Up Google, Force Sale of Chrome: Here's What to Know 2 days ago:
Android would be unprofitable and unsustainable in isolation. So that would leave each OEM to build their own thing, but to make a long story short, everybody would just get an iPhone. So then I wonder, if making such a ruling would create the void for a monopoly, what’s the sense?
- Comment on The Browser Wasn’t Enough, Google Wants To Control All Your Software 6 days ago:
Apple requires developers to go through a Notarization process, much in the same way that Google intends to introduce restrictions to sideloading on Android. How is this different?
- Comment on The Browser Wasn’t Enough, Google Wants To Control All Your Software 6 days ago:
Interesting perspective. So the suggestion is to redirect our blame away from our elected representatives or even from electing representatives that run in a campaign that aligns with our priorities.
- Comment on The Browser Wasn’t Enough, Google Wants To Control All Your Software 1 week ago:
Yet Apple has been able to profit from their walled garden for decades now. Doesn’t that set a precedent that it’s okay? I honestly don’t blame Google for going this route—it’s inaction from our policymakers that has created the space for abuse.
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 2 weeks ago:
What I meant with “things like this are awful for the web,” I meant that automation through AI is awful for the web. It takes away from the original content creators without any attribution and hits their bottom line.
My story was supposed to be one about responsible AI, but somehow I screwed that up in my summary.
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 2 weeks ago:
I’ve developed my own agent for assisting me with researching a topic I’m passionate about, and I ran into the exact same barrier: Cloudflare intercepts my request and is clearly checking if I’m a human using a web browser.
So I use that as a signal that the website doesn’t want automated tools scraping their data. That’s fine with me: my agent just tells me that there might be interesting content on the site and gives me a deep link. I can extract the data and carry on my research on my own.
- Comment on Intel Outside: Hacking every Intel employee and various internal websites 2 weeks ago:
That was an interesting read, thanks for sharing!
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
No doubt they are all overpriced, but I thoroughly researched my Škoda before buying it in 2020 and it was competitively priced, especially with its reliability score and relatively low maintenance cost. In my case of course anecdotal, but I’ve had no issues after 90,000 km with a lot of Autobahn.
- Comment on Why LLMs can't really build software 2 weeks ago:
Ah, my apologies. I had interpreted your message to suggest that pouring cement from a robotic arm fully replaced all of the construction work of framing and finishing all of the walls of the house, interior and exterior, plus attaching them and insulating them, with a single step.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
I understand your point, but have you driven a VW in the past decade? They are reliable, relatively easy to repair and have comfortable interiors that aren’t with “hard plastic.” Perhaps you’ve confused VW with Ford?
- Comment on Why LLMs can't really build software 2 weeks ago:
Spoken like a person who has never been involved in the construction of a home. It’s effectively doing the job of (poorly) pouring concrete which isn’t the difficult or time consuming part.
- Comment on Enough of the billionaires and their big tech. ‘Frugal tech’ will build us all a better world 4 weeks ago:
fediverse
- Comment on Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition 5 weeks ago:
Amex works outside the US. I use it in Europe.
- Comment on Windows 11 finally overtakes Windows 10 1 month ago:
No, they didn’t. This community read too much into a blog post that stated “over 1 billion,” compared it against an old blog post from several years ago that stated a more precise number of “1.4 billion” and came to the hasty conclusion that they must have lost 400 million users.
Microsoft has since updated their blog post to clarify that it’s still 1.4 billion.
- Comment on Google hit with $314m fine for collecting data from idle Android phones without permission 1 month ago:
Yes, indeed this was just a copy error. Thanks for pointing it out.
- Comment on Google hit with $314m fine for collecting data from idle Android phones without permission 1 month ago:
The linked Reuters article provides a bit more context:
The jury agreed with the plaintiffs that Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab was liable for sending and receiving information from the devices without permission while they were idle, causing what the lawsuit had called “mandatory and unavoidable burdens shouldered by Android device users for Google’s benefit.”
[…]
Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said in a statement that the company would appeal, and that the verdict “misunderstands services that are critical to the security, performance, and reliability of Android devices.”
- Comment on Windows seemingly lost 400 million users in the past three years — official Microsoft statements show hints of a shrinking user base 2 months ago:
I still have fond memories of using Ubuntu. At the time, it must have been 2009 or so, I was working at a company developing desktop software for Windows, OS X and Debian. It’d be so confusing to constantly switch between operating systems because it’d mess with my muscle memory, but Ubuntu was my favorite because of POSIX and the fantastic file manager.
For my purposes and from my experience, things have improved tremendously on Windows, despite it being popular to hate upon. I still frequently use Mac as well and it’s really hardly changed at all. I confess that I only ever use Fedora on a remote instance for very specific purposes and can’t really judge it fairly on day-to-day usage.
- Comment on Trump Team Has Full Meltdown Over CNN Story on ICE-Tracking App 2 months ago:
Push notifications though GMS don’t use the device ID; they use a generated GCM registration ID that occasionally rotates. Who knows what Google uses internally to associate GCM reg IDs to users, but to overly state that it uses device IDs is simply not correct.
I’m not suggesting push notifications are inherently secure because it’s impossible to make that determination from the outside. But their assessment is incorrect and the same privacy concerns apply to Apple.
- Comment on Windows seemingly lost 400 million users in the past three years — official Microsoft statements show hints of a shrinking user base 2 months ago:
I distinctly recall a version of Ubuntu that not only showed search results, but Amazon shopping links.
- Comment on Windows seemingly lost 400 million users in the past three years — official Microsoft statements show hints of a shrinking user base 2 months ago:
The topic is windows losing customers.
To a degree yes (ignoring the fact that assumption proved to be incorrect, but who comes here for facts), however the comments mostly don’t focus on that topic; much of the discussion here is about how evil Microsoft is and malicious Windows is as a product. The individual I replied to before you was the one who immediately sidestepped into a debate about laws that should restrict Microsoft’s ability to operate as a company.
People here are outliers in ideas and passion.
Ha, this genuinely made me laugh out loud! An amusingly and refreshingly optimistic position! I’d have chosen the words “circlejerk of pessimisme, hate and nativity” but it’s certainly accurate to call the community exceptionally passionate among each other.
- Comment on Windows seemingly lost 400 million users in the past three years — official Microsoft statements show hints of a shrinking user base 2 months ago:
It’s ironic that the only comment in this thread suggesting government action is your response. Lemmy is an echo chamber no better than the internet communities that predate it. The only thing Lemmy truly hates, is a nuanced opinion.
- Comment on Windows seemingly lost 400 million users in the past three years — official Microsoft statements show hints of a shrinking user base 2 months ago:
I wonder if consumers would choose to pay more to opt out of this. Surely corporations have done their research, because none of them have chosen to offer a buy-out option. To be perfectly frank, I wouldn’t pay more for a laptop for a guarantee that I’m not prompted for any up-sells, and it’d only make the consumer offerings more confusing if such an option existed.
All these companies are forcing themselves into the corner of offering the one-time fee to be as low as possible, preferably free, and find other revue channels after the purchase. I hold them all equally guilty of this: why pay $100 for Windows when there’s no such fee for a Chromebook or MacBook? Microsoft is forced by competition to reduce the fee and recoup it elsewhere, and they’re in my opinion not even the worst among those examples.
It’s odd that Lemmy directs its anger at an individual company, while they’re all guilty of the same practices, instead of towards their government representatives who are actually able to take action against it.
- Comment on Windows seemingly lost 400 million users in the past three years — official Microsoft statements show hints of a shrinking user base 2 months ago:
Kindly reference the sections where I’ve provided misinformation and I will add a correction.
- Comment on Windows seemingly lost 400 million users in the past three years — official Microsoft statements show hints of a shrinking user base 2 months ago:
You’re right that Edge routinely attempts to make its return—that’s annoying alright. Microsoft is skirting a fine line here since they were found guilty of antitrust practices for this very thing. (Tangentially, I wonder if iPhone users have the same complaints about Safari.) In Europe, at least, those updates prompt you whether to make the switch, and the user remains in control. It’s been many years since Microsoft changed my defaults.
You’re also absolutely right about the attempted upsells for Office 365 or OneDrive or whatever. I agree they’re ads and that they’re annoying, but not more so than how my MacBook constantly nags me about iCloud or how iPhone consumes it with app data, or how Google leverages its surfaces for Photos, Drive, Workspace and Gemini upsells.
In the end all these companies arrive at the same challenge: converting a one-time purchase into regular payments through subscription models. I had honestly forgotten about these prompts until you reminded me of them, and so long as they’re irregular and easy to ignore, I feel like Microsoft isn’t doing anything outright awful.
I often think communities like Lemmy choose to disproportionately hate on things. In this case it’s Windows, which I really don’t think is warranted.
- Comment on Windows seemingly lost 400 million users in the past three years — official Microsoft statements show hints of a shrinking user base 2 months ago:
I reviewed the community rules and didn’t see anything about Europe, so I’m left confused about what I’ve done wrong.
