True. But I think in this situation no one except Google will be happy (and I doubt they'll be happy too). Web analytics helps webmasters make their sites more attractive for end users. I use Google Analytics on most of my sites, but I don't like the way how Google tries to "encourage" others to do it.
Everyone assumes that SSL search will be ever turned on by default (seems unlikely). I think it would be most natural to make SSL search opt-in. Anyone who cares about his/her privacy will be able to turn it on and webmasters will still have most of the data they need.
To be honest, I don't understand how using HTTPS in Google search will help users to browse web more securely. I am not going to use this feature. The bad thing is that lots of non-technical users who care about security and privacy will use it, and they'll get an illusion that their web surfing has become more secure.
It's not an illusion. Your ISP can't see what you're searching for. The coffee shop wifi administrator can't see what you're searching for. Your boss can't find out what you're searching for from your mobile phone over your company's wifi network. The owners of the websites in the SERPs can't see what you searched for, and they can't give that information to anybody else (e.g. Facebook Connect).
(Well, they can all do traffic analysis. But, for Google searches, traffic analysis is too much work for almost any of them to do and the results would be so inconclusive that it's practically useless.)
I don't think ISP cannot see what I'm searching for if Google allows me to use HTTPS. When we use HTTPS, data is encrypted. But URLs I'm querying are still open for anyone. If someone knows that I queried, for example, http://www.google.co.uz/?q=google, it's pretty easy to understand what I've been searching for.
HTTPS doesn't send the URL unencrypted. The intermediary can tell that you access google.com from the DNS records and from the TLS certificate, and it can analyze the lengths and timings of the request and response, but that's it.
Our financialized economy causes bubbles. During many bubbles, the results of a massive, artificial credit infusion reach some sector(s) of the economy. This results in a lot of short-term economic waste, as well as some people getting rich far out of proportion to the wealth they have created. (More specifically, richer than they would've become under similar circumstances in a free market economy without government-backed financialization.)
You can see this when Wall Street traders blow $100,000 on a night of entertainment, and you can also see it on a smaller scale when excessive financing through a VC reaches a company which then sometimes wastes the excess money.
Coming back to this article, Matt seems like a nice, productive guy, so this wasn't really a good example of what I'm talking about. There are some people in the Bay Area, though, who are in the "startup scene" largely to party, socialize, spend lots of money in extravagant ways, and attempt to get rich quick -- this is the "bubble lifestyle" I referred to. I know there are at least a few others here on HN who have seen firsthand what I'm talking about, because it's been mentioned before.
So, when I saw the mention of dual 30" monitors, 2 laptops a year, prime SF real estate, eating out all the time, etc. I was reminded of the bubble lifestyle. Sometimes, for people who are used to being frugal, this kind of thing just jumps out at you. Many hackers are frugal people -- PG seems to be one of them, because I remember him saying something about being impressed that a Yahoo co-founder went poking around Viaweb servers to see if there was any unnecessary use of resources, even though Yahoo was already big and he was already rich.
Before someone downvotes this comment, I want to reiterate that I don't mean to denigrate Matt at all. In Matt's case, it could very well be that the expenditures are worthwhile and even necessary. But I was just reminded of others who are just in it for the lifestyle.
For me, there are two types of bugs: bugs that can teach you something and random bugs. I love the first type - these are bugs that make me read and learn something.
I think using Google Chart API is much better than using these plugins. Lots of chart types, easy to make, gives high-quality result, and support all browsers that can display images.
If you ask me (I maintain a fork of flot on github) there is no reason to use a client-side library for graphing unless the graphs are dynamic. Requesting/rendering/etc tons of images is painful, flot can add and remove data on the fly and re-render -- and that's not even getting into the potential for hovering effects and the like (flash-style).
Flot also supports all reasonable browsers (including some unreasonable ones, like IE6). If you find a bug in either the 'official' flot or my fork (or any of the forks of my fork :)) then you should be able to report it and have it fixed quickly enough (or, fix it yourself, the code isn't especially complicated).
A couple months ago I built a reporting tool for a client using Flot, only to have to switch over to Google Charts after users started complaining.
Flot, and all other Canvas-based JS charting solutions, are really impressive applications of Canvas, but until browsers start supporting Canvas copy/paste better I'm hesitant to use them for graphing apps. Image-rendering graphing solutions support most browsers and can be easily copy/pasted into other applications, with little additional overhead.
1. Development process is led by managers, not developers.
2. Developers frequently work under time / budget pressure.
3. Money is the only stimulus, so the developers try to make software good enough to get paid.
4. Big companies try to make something big.
1. In my experience, most managers in the software development world started out as developers themselves. In our organizations, most of us managers still do a fair amount of development as well.
2. This is true. But how can it be otherwise? Anywhere in this world we must make decisions based on how to allocate limited resources. This is true even for open source development. A project must finish at some point, else it's a failure to begin with. Thus, we cannot invest infinite resource, and must decide how much we can invest in each part of a system.
3. I have not found this to be true. Virtually everyone I have ever worked with takes pride in doing a good job. Can you cite evidence to the contrary?
4. I'm not sure what this means.
I think that much of the problem has to do with #2 and maybe #4 (depending what you meant). That is, many important enterprise projects are just as big as large "shrinkwrap" software. But the number of customers is smaller, so the cost of development must be amortized over a smaller set of buyers. This means that there must be some balance of higher prices and cost-cutting. I suspect that the economics works out so that cost-cutting pressures are stronger in the enterprise arena than for shrinkwrap products.
Enterprise applications also have a smaller number of users, so the feedback pool is smaller: you don't get the same number of bug reports feeding back into your development cycle as you would with a widely-used web or shrink-wrap application.
End-users who happen to be employees don't get to choose the software - just like developers who are forced to use Java at work but code at home in Haskell or Python, they are forced to use a system decreed by management and therefore will often have a negative bias to start with - "the new system" being both a focus of complaints in the coffee room and a catch all excuse to tell customers.
When we talk about software development, it's easy to spread the value created by the community to all people. What about other spheres of economy (agriculture, for example), it's much more difficult.
The nature was forming for millions of years, and I don't think humans are smart enough to hack it, sometimes we are not able to hack computers that we have invented. This climate change is because of attempts to hack the planet. I am not against the progress, but when we interfere in the nature, we should think more than twice.
