Luckily the FAQ already mentions why this is a bad idea.
> Please note that due of the hardware of the raspberry pi, harmonics ARE generated on 3x, 5x, 7x and 9x the desired frequency. Those harmonics are polluting important services like emergency services a d others.
Please do not use the GPIO of a Raspberry Pi to generate a high frequency to emit radio waves. Putting square waves on the air is always asking for trouble. A simple filter is not a proper solution if the source is so dirty.
For a project as well built of this seems, it seems odd that they would advice people to use such a hacky way. Syncing networked clients to play audio at exactly the same time is a solved problem.
> Syncing networked clients to play audio at exactly the same time is a solved problem.
I was going to point out that with the variance in FM demodulation chips, using a pile of FM receivers probably wouldn't get you perfectly synced audio these days at all, even more so if it's going through usb/software/audio stacks.
Then I re-read the Ops comment and this actually seems to be a network of _transmitters_. I'm not sure what problem they're trying to solve, but I can't believe multiple PiFMs is ever the answer.
Commercial DAB radio does use single frequency networks (with tight timings and clever calculated offsets), and I am somewhat curious how analogue FM responds with regard to offset destructive interference, but this isn't that.
Please don't do this. For context, a car FM transmitter is limited to 250nW (in many jurisdictions). A Pi GPIO pin with the right bit of wire is potentially capable of 10mW or more. 40,000 times more powerful and a lot more noisy. One could be causing problems for people surprisingly far away.
WebRTC makes it possible by timing is still limited to NTP who has is far above one sample, you couldn’t possibly get sample accurate playback but you could get it to within a mS or so.
Depending on how far away your sources are that might be fine, for instance two speakers in two rooms where you won’t get significant phase issues this is trivial to do(well trivial is an understatement but you can do it purely with web technologies).
I personally have no issue with having to log-in to use the hosted Jitsi and have it store that I created a room. That's a small price to pay for the longevity of the service.
If logging in is an issue, you're still able to selfhost Jitsi just fine.
The dedicated Streetview app was finally killed because streetview is already integrated in regular google maps. To me, that seems like a good reason to discontinue the dedicated app.
I don't get the reasoning behind this article. Half of this list is side projects which didn't work out, which is understandable to a certain degree. The article feels like blogspam riding on the hypetrain of people disliking when google discontinues products like Stadia.
> Half of this list is side projects which didn't work out, which is understandable to a certain degree
What happens to the people who bet on them? Do they even have a point of contact if e.g. an integration breaks? That’s the point. They’re half-baked products being put out and pulled with no care in the world. That’s the brand.
Which means when a Stadia comes out, a product that could have worked if people trusted it, nobody budges. Because half the crap Google ships are “side projects which didn’t work out,” a list which apparently now includes its cloud.
They really just need clear branding between "This is a side project, we might take it away with just a months notice" and "This is a product we will give you many years notice and a migration path if we decide to get rid of it".
I think they should label everything in the former category "experimental". Put the label right in the logo so it is really obvious.
They used to have “google labs” but stopped it (haha) with some stupid explanation that it wasn’t needed any more because everything is a lab, or something like that.
I honestly think that a lot of these side projects should be released under a different brand name. Kind of like how GM has different brands for their luxury cars, or Disney had Touchstone Pictures for their less-child-friendly movies. If a project is one employee's 20% time or one manager's promotion project, it should be released under a different brand name. It can always be rebranded if it becomes an actual business priority.
They could just use some google name that clearly implies it's not a "main" (long-term) product, eg. "Google Labs", "Google Beta", etc. too, so you clearly know that it's a "toy" that might not exist anymore very soon. If they use eg. "Aviato" brand for some new product, people will expect more... and then get burned.. again.
Thing is... imagine they had announced "Thanks for being part of the gmail beta. We learnt a lot, but have now decided to close GMail. You have 3 days to download your emails and find a new email provider".
A lot of people would have been very pissed off, even though it said 'beta'.
As I remember, it would have been very odd for them to do that in 2008 or 2009 when it was so immensley popular. But that was 4 or 5 year into it's life, well beyond the typical lifetime of Googles products.
Them shutting it down in 2005 or 2006 would have been annoying or disappointing like the shutdown of Google Wave but understandable.
It's all about brand expectations. Google is synonymous with unreliability because they don't have another brand to shoulder that association. It used to be "Beta" but no longer.
The point is that their "release stage" marking was always fantasy land. Yes, I would be pissed if they had shut down GMail after 4 years, regardless of whether it was marked "Beta", because by that point it had a ton of users and clearly a ton of investment.
A big problem is that nobody believes their designations anyway. GMail was in beta for years when it was obviously a mature product, while "Of course we're investing a ton in Stadia..." only to shut it down a couple months later.
It’s impossible to go back in time and tell, but I bet lots of companies were opting for Microsoft Exchange/Web Outlook around 2007-2008, because Gmail was advertised as beta.
If they had removed the beta label sooner, they might have attracted businesses to GSuite sooner?
It’s a fine line to walk: you want to iterate quickly on one hand but some users need stability on the other.
When was Gmail ever sold as unlimited? When it came out the big deal was that it offered 1GB, which absolutely destroyed the 5-10MB most free providers were offering at the time.
I recall a time where they were raising the limit constantly and even advertised that fact, that for most users your available space was going to increase faster than you could use it, but there was always a limit somewhere.
No, 1GB was the starting point and was considered insane at the time. Then they eventually added a counter where the storage space grew all the time. They finally capped that out—maybe that's what you're thinking of?
When Gmail finally left beta after 4+ years it had well over 100m users. Some argued that the beta label slowed early adoption, while others felt that it allowed more leniency with regards to problems and downtime. I could see members of the first group have a lingering desire to avoid new products getting stuck in beta.
> "This is a product we will give you many years notice and a migration path if we decide to get rid of it".
Is that even the standard procedure at google though? There are plenty of projects where they’ve unceremoniously pulled the plug with little notice, stadia is a glaring example (though to googles credit, they did provide some refunds)
They did something nice, instead of leaving the users with a brick, they refunded all users who bought Stadia products through official channels.
(sadly, to get official distribution, you need to be part of the "worldwide deployment" of Google products, and it's often a lie that actually menas "we deployed in many large countries except yours")
That won’t help. How is the general audience suppose to know the difference between “experimental” and “beta”?
Maybe it’s important that they act like a grown up company and have some focus instead of throwing random shit up against the wall like apes in a zoo on a crack.
Google really messed up their roll outs of new products so often that it is almost a meme.
You'd be hard pressed to pick a 'worst', between Google Glass, Google Plus, Google Wave and so on the list is long and getting longer all the time. It would be a lot smarter if they launched these separately so that they do not impact the trust relationship people have with their main brand. I don't know any other company besides Yahoo that has managed this in such a terrible way.
Ironically, it's now actually called "Google Chat". I still use it with plenty of people since it allows me to chat via browser, iOS, or Android without any device/brand restrictions.
But in just about every way, it is the same or worse than their previous offerings (the older "Talk" and the later "Hangouts"). They ditched the option to do SMS fallback in the same app instead of improving on integration. Can't just hit the little camera icon in a group chat to instantly start a group video call anymore. Individual and group chats are in separate tabs. Photo and video handling are worse (but at least not downgraded as badly as MMS between Android and iOS).
Honestly I only use it because it sucks to message with iOS users if you can't use iMessage and I/some of my friends don't use Facebook products like FB or Whatsapp.
That might have been Google Buzz? Which automatically followed people it thought you knew. Like automatically linking someone to an abusive spouse they'd run from, and exposing all their chats to them.
I think that's the whole point though. A lot of the products, if they can even be called that, listed in this article are not even possible to "bet on". I mean, Code Jam?? I think it sucks they shut it down, but annual events and conferences come and go, it's not like people had a right to expect it would go on indefinitely.
I only think about half the items in this list are even possible to invest much time on as an outsider, either a customer or a partner: Stadia (obviously a ton has already been written about that), OnHub (classic "I bought an IoT device that isn't much better than a paperweight after they stopped support), and Google Currents (though that one is marginal - I don't know anyone who used it, also I don't know how seamless the transition to Spaces was).
I think the biggest issue with Google products is that nobody trusts them because they won't stand by any roadmaps. If they had clear, discrete classes of products that they actually stood behind (e.g. "these we'll only guarantee to support for the next 18 months" vs. "these are mature products we stand by"), I think folks would be more OK going into things with eyes wide open. But Google has time and again bullshitted ("Of course we're investing in Stadia..."), or even had things been in beta for years and years when they were obviously mature products, like GMail. And since it's clear Google only really cares about ad revenue, when shit hits the fan and they need to "streamline", like now, anything that doesn't directly support ads like Search, Android, GMail, Chrome, etc. feels like an afterthought.
> What happens to the people who bet on them? Do they even have a point of contact if e.g. an integration breaks? That’s the point. They’re half-baked products being put out and pulled with no care in the world. That’s the brand.
So on one hand Google doesn't innovate anymore and is too shy to release anything new, and on the other hand Google can't just get things out and experiment because it would let down people who bet on these experiments.
There is probably an in-between.
> a list which apparently now includes its cloud.
Two years ago Google Cloud was 37k employees[1], which is about 20% of the company. Even if the 12k layoffs were on Cloud that would still be 10-12% of the company.
Calling it a side project and comparing it to a "smart tag embedded in clothing" or even Stadia is just FUD.
> So on one hand Google doesn't innovate anymore and is too shy to release anything new
From everything I've read here, the problem is that only innovation is rewarded with promotions. Once a product is released, the people in charge get promoted, and move on to another new project, leaving everything to die.
It's something I've heard and read many times, inside and outside of the company, but it's something I haven't really witnessed in my 4 years here.
There are many ways to be promoted and launching something new is definitely not the easiest way.
I understand that it's common to see people leave a team or product once they shipped a promo project, but products don't just die because one or two senior people leave a team.
wasn't there an HN thread a couple years ago where Google announced Cloud had a couple years to make money (but without specifying what would happen if it didn't) and now here we are? I'm worried I'm forgetting exactly the dates here since I never keep track of Google Cloud, but I remember a bunch of people announcing they weren't going to use Google cloud because obviously it would be shut down in a few years?
From what I can remember, this is a rumor, not something Google "announced".
From the beginning of the article:
> The Google unit, (...) is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
I'm sure that there are discussions about the strategy, the expected growth and revenue and what to do if these targets aren't met. It totally makes sense to reduce the rate of investments to mitigate risks if the results aren't what was expected, but this doesn't mean "shutting down" Cloud.
From the article:
> The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely,
Seriously, Google could even decide to leave the Cloud business eventually, branching it off the rest of the company. But "shutting it down" wouldn't suddenly happen because a spreadsheet shows that Azure has more market shares than Google.
No. That link is not Google announcing what you claim they did. It's some anonymous person - not Google - claiming they saw some confidential slides to that effect, which Google then denied.
Right up to the point where Google top management decides to pull the plug. Their messaging on this has been most unfortunate, if there is one thing that you can't do as a cloud services provider it is to threaten to pull the plug on the whole division if the numbers don't get into some arbitrary range for their definition of success. That pretty much guarantees that you won't make it that far.
Google Cloud “is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding” [1].
Because Google no longer knows how to do customer/developer engagement just as it goes into things that require it more?
It doesn't help that it allows others to push opinion pieces in media that build up memes against its products (I honestly believe it's non-trivial part of what killed Google+ - at some point someone believed at Google about it being "ghost town" and started making it more FB-like and pushing "new people to observe" at you, making it less and less usable).
The infamous "will kill your account on basis of unaccountable algorithm and you can't do anything about it" is another big issue when trying to get clients on GCP. I honestly find GCP to be the best cloud I can use when not going full hog on things like AWS-specific services, yet there's always the fear that Google will just kill the account, possibly shuttering the business.
Presumably because the article linked above says that the rumoured deadline for gaining sufficient market share is this year? Also, yes revenues have been growing, but is GCP profitable after all this time? As you point out, it's been 4 years since that article was published.
There’s a bias here for AWS because they were the early adopter product and have traction with startups.
I think Google is more creative on the business side with GCP and is doing well in the market in a lot of ways. AWS does the circa 1985 “Hi, we’re IBM, fuck you” thing.
Azure doesn’t get the grief GCP does because MS service growth is driven by really complicated deals. Few of the types of people who post here understand it.
Lol. Those account managers these days get purged pretty quickly. MS isn’t Oracle, but it isn’t 2003 either.
“It would be a shame if those O365 E5 went up 30%. How about you buy 50% of your spend on these credits that fell off the truck, and we can forget about that?”
I'd love to know your breakdown of which 3 are "side projects." the 2 I can imagine you are referring to, jacquard and onhub, had 3rd party hardware manufacturers implementing them.
These are all projects that google wanted developers to engage with their ecosystem. Routinely inviting devs over to work with you, then kicking them out in the cold, will obviously have consequences.
I remember participating in CodeJam 2003 twenty years ago, and it was such a positive experience that Google was the first company I applied to out of college.
Right now I'm working on a project using a gcp API, and now I'm considering finding an alternative because arbitrarily doing the same work twice is never the most efficient way.
I mostly used the Street View app to capture 360° spherical panoramas, offline, on-device.
Now that Google has killed the app, I can’t capture those photos! The app worked fine a month ago, why not let me use it, as it worked offline‽
No one seems to be talking about this issue.
I haven’t found suitable replacement apps to capture photospheres on a (i)Phone. The suggested Street View Studio doesn’t let you capture Photo Spheres!
This is kind of your answer right? It’s not the issue to others that it is to you. If Google sunsetted Search, for example, I think people would talk about that issue.
Stadia is a big deal. And OnHub must really suck if you have it as your router.
I think it’s probably 90% blogspam and reinforces that anyone sane should very carefully evaluate whether they rely on anything google releases.
Personally, I’ve looked at google phones and networking and home stuff and won’t touch it with a ten foot pole because I don’t want to switch out my router because google decides to kill it.
I agree on the side projects or conferences being shut down and thought the same thing of “why is this even a stand alone app, wouldn’t people just use maps?”
Very peculiar to link to a comment that criticizes TFA as blogspam, though, right? Unless perhaps the comment wasn't so critical at time of linking and was later edited...
Google Earth presents the same data in a very different way - Google Maps is mostly about navigation and discovering businesses and other locations in an area, Google Earth is more about exploration and discovering cool places. Sort of like how paper maps and atlases both had reasons to exist.
Google has never been great at integrating their acquisitions. Even their own video search still can't seem to match YouTube's search for things on YouTube even with exact titles. Google Earth started as Keyhole. It's the K in KML. It gained notoriety pre-acquisition for being used in reporting on the invasion of Iraq. Maps was a different company.
You can export and import KML in Maps, but it's in a separate custom map interface under Saved->Maps. It's not integrated with the main interface like in Earth as far as I can tell. If there's a way to load them like overlays in Earth, that would be useful.
this should really be the article link instead of that proprietary writeup by a company taking advantage of OSS
edit: just because someone puts up an "easy" ""free"" service, does not mean they are kind. GitHub is not your friend for git issues. I woul dhope this site would support true FOSS
No it shouldn't, an hour in this submission might have barely 7 points, not 177, and probably a comment or two bemoaning the readability and pointing out the clearer write-up(s) available for people not already keeping up with the mailing list.
If you don't believe me, have a look, this was probably submitted too, and is languishing somewhere off the front page while this one is at the top, by virtue of people voting for it and not the other.
lack of accessibility/discoverability and meager focus on looks has been a staple of FOSS for decades, but HN should be a site that helped with this, not one that supported proprietary uses of FOSS software to the benefit of an anti-competitive behemoth such as MS
> You're saying that vegan people have to use milk alternatives like almond milk. Which is certainly not the case.
For vegans it certainly is the case. Vegans don't eat food that comes from animals. Milk is one such product. So vegans will definitely use milk alternatives.
Or... that almond milk is generally not great (IMO), and there are alternatives like oat milk which are really amazing. Oat milk also doesn't go rancid like cow milk... I've never had oat milk "go bad" before using it up, even after 10+ day vacations, so the waste can only be much less than cow milk, I imagine.
Also if you spill some somewhere your house doesn't smell like rotting bodily fluids (ok, probably getting a little extreme here but who likes the smell of rotting milk?)
Only downsides to plant milks, is they are harder to steam for lattes, they don't make cheese like we expect from animal milk (tho this has changed a lot and we're just about there now with some amazing brands), and they do have a unique flavor profile that is sometimes desired (for stuff like homemade egg nog for example).
I find it hard to believe that not showing video previews from links is a breaking issue for a lot of users. But I get your point that Matrix is kind of complex in some ways. Federation surely doesn't help to combat complexity.
By no means is it a breaking issue, but it's one of quite a few issues which make it very difficult, at least in my experience, to convince anyone from services that do have them (typically Discord) to use it.
It's hard to speak in earnest about the benefits of Matrix when you know the people you're talking to will immediately view it as a downgrade, and from the user's perspective in many ways won't even be wrong.
It is quite normal that things break on the Windows Insider Preview builds from time to time right?
I'm pro Free Software, and therefore anti-Microsoft, but isn't it possible that, because of the changes to URL requests, they just haven't implemented support for having a difference standard browser? And that it may come in the upcoming weeks?
This would be an all-time low for Microsoft. It would give them a lot of hate. I find that hard to believe to be honest.
No, this is not an Insider build issue. Blocking apps from sneakily changing the default browser without user content is one thing. But in Windows 11 RTM, they specifically went out of their way to make it a lot harder to change your default browser (or any default app), by forcing you do to it separately for each protocol and file extension. This led to non-malicious apps (e.g. Firefox) pursuing an alternative method to avoid users having to jump through hoops.
It's quite interesting that if it's such a big security vulnerability Microsoft hasn't patched it in all these years, but when suddenly a browser maker wants to act in the users' best interests it's a "critical security vulnerability" that must be patched immediately.
Yes, malware could theoretically abuse the same loophole. But they simply cannot lie to our faces and say this is being blocked only to prevent malware when they've intentionally made it harder for users themselves to change the setting as well.
The entire reason that the edge protocol exists in the first place is to bypass the user's desired default browser and open the URL in Edge instead. The fact that you could ever override that and make it open in your desired browser was pretty clearly a bug that accidentally made the feature less user hostile than intended.
> It is quite normal that things break on the Windows Insider Preview builds from time to time right?
I run the Dev channel [1] (most frequent releases). And I don't think I've ever had anything actually break.
Mostly it just makes my computer unusable every time they push an update, because it uses 100% disk capacity trying to background install while system is live. The background updates usually take 4-6 hours.
I also run Edge Dev and I HAVE had features break entirely on Edge, twice. Usually fixed within 1-5 days.
[1]: DON'T DO THIS! You cannot downgrade to Beta/RC from Dev, and it's the only channel that's like this!
Read the fine print. I receive updates sometimes multiple times a week and it's terrible.
I have no problems believing it. They've been quietly turning the screws for twenty years now (beginning with Windows XP activation). And whenever they're called out for it, they double down. Where else have I seen that strategy lately?
> I've heard that around 130k people are delivered from poverty each day lately. That's due to markets and such, not the good intentions of people like Pol Pot.
Wild claim? How is it wild? It is well established that China’s economy was stagnant for decades until free market reforms. Same with India. There is absolutely nothing wild about this claim as it is common knowledge to anyone who’s followed economic reforms in developing countries.
> Please note that due of the hardware of the raspberry pi, harmonics ARE generated on 3x, 5x, 7x and 9x the desired frequency. Those harmonics are polluting important services like emergency services a d others.
Please do not use the GPIO of a Raspberry Pi to generate a high frequency to emit radio waves. Putting square waves on the air is always asking for trouble. A simple filter is not a proper solution if the source is so dirty.
For a project as well built of this seems, it seems odd that they would advice people to use such a hacky way. Syncing networked clients to play audio at exactly the same time is a solved problem.