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I got an email from Google telling me that a photo I took "is making a difference."
They congratulated me on 5,000 views. The thing is, I don't even remember posting it to any Google properties.
Maybe as part of their "turn toward the Dark Side" they copied a FecesBook feature.
A while back my step mother got a notice that she was eligiable to join a class action lawsuit because her picture was one of thousands that FB had scraped from *private* containers and sold to advertising agencies without permission or compensation. Don't know how it turned out because she didn't want the hassle of joining the class action.
Hrm.. the only photos of mine that they post publically are the ones I've made for Google Maps, generally as a guide. I have some photos that have racked over 10,000 views for some reason.
But I haven't seen anything of mine that I didn't intend to be public show up in public, as far as I know.
Yeah, I'm thinking I probably answered a prompt somewhere and allowed it to get posted as a Guide or something.
My phone is out of support now so I'm probably going to root it and get all of the crapware off. Google used to be great about not having a lot of apps on the Nexus phones that can't be uninstalled. Nowadays they've gotten pretty bad about it.
Thu Dec 21 2017 09:51:57 AM EST from IGnatius T FoobarI got an email from Google telling me that a photo I took "is making a difference."
They congratulated me on 5,000 views. The thing is, I don't even remember posting it to any Google properties.
I have a vague memory of you saying you posted a picture of some place you visited.
To see your photos go to Google Maps--> Your contributions--> Photos.
I stopped posting pictures about the same time they changed their level structure. They said when I reached the higher levels I was going to get rewarded. They sent me a discount on a NY times subscription and I have a coupon for a Google Play Movie for 99¢.
I have posted 175 photos and received 3,145,112 views. Most of these pictures I would never expect to have that many views. They must appear on the bottom bar of google maps and count as a view. I don't think people are actually looking at pictures of the location.
I sometimes look at a set of pictures for a given location... and it is a set of pictures. I suspect if your picture lands in the set, it's considered a view, even if nobody actually clicked on it, but only saw it in a thumbnail.
Although, some of these pictures I've taken are pretty good.
*sigh*
I'm giving Firefox another go on my main computers. My phone is rooted so I can switch there too.
I really do think Google meant it when they said "don't be evil" but it was "don't be evil to the tech world in the way Microsoft was". Then they went ahead and created their own brand of evil, one that is much broader than just technology.
* FF still has the "confirm security exception" button, as it always has.
I like not having to bypass the certificate dialog EVERY single time I visit a site that has a self-signed certificate (a lot of internal sites)
* FF "new tab page" is customizable. Chrome requires an extension to send new tabs anywhere other than Google's site, and even then it doesn't always work right.
* FF is truly search engine neutral. Chrome, understandably, tries its hardest to steer you back to Google. Since I usually search with DuckDuckGo now, search engine neutrality in the browser is a win.
* Lower memory usage
* Sync bookmarks/logins/etc between devices - Chrome was the first to have this, but FF has it now too. Sync between desktop and mobile browsers seems to work well.
My phone is running better since I rooted it and removed Chrome, Google Drive, GMail, and Google Now. I use Nine for work email and K-9 for personal email, so I don't need the GMail client. What I found is that these programs tend to occupy background resources even if you disable them.
No, this is not a total purge of Google from my universe. I just want them out of my face except when I ask for something. And yes, I know the Apple ecosystem is mostly Google-free, but as previously indicated, I just don't *like* their stuff.
And of course Apple is as much of a corporate sponsor of communism as Google is.
Still Chrome-only because sandboxing is the right thing to do. I only run FF when I have to, ie something isn't working.
Yesterday I was asked to "close all browsers" while performing an installation of a third party program, and found that there were eight Chrome processes running ... and I had zero Chrome windows open.
2018-01-17 17:52 from IGnatius T Foobar
You said that ten years ago. I'm still just as stubborn and just as
cheap.
And of course Apple is as much of a corporate sponsor of communism as
Google is.
Didn't think you'd be using Windows on a daily basis either, but here you are.
It's an evolution.... You'll get there.
I had new messages in my gmail "spam" folder, I looked in the folder and it was a message from google. Google thinks google emails are spam.
Tue Jan 23 2018 07:49:39 PM EST from wizard of aahzI remember my first experience with OS/2.. I was thinking My First OS.. By Mattel.
I remember when we all thought OS/2 was going to challenge Microsoft. ... The television station I worked at the newscast software ran on an OS/2 machine.
Look. Google are scumbags. The "don't be evil" people have, inevitably, turned evil. But they were a key player in breaking Microsoft's stranglehold on computing, and credit is due for that.
Cult of the Rounded Corners and bring back Woz or Hertzfeld or
Don Hertzfeld! That'd be some seriously deranged GUIs for an operating system!
Yes, I'm certain that Andy Hertzfeld and Don Hertzfeldt are twins separated at birth. And they really need to work together on some new UI design. I'd like to see it take over the entire web. "Web 2.0" was a bit *too* shiny, and "flat design" was too much of a swing in the other direction. If we're not going to end up with something GOOD, then let's go with something WEIRD.