gallinggalla | Entries tagged with lovely view from the ivory tower

[NB: I originally wrote this on October 7th, shortly after Occupy Philadelphia began. I had kept it private for a while.]

i did not know that

being beaten and spit on by cishetero bullies

egged on by cishetero adults in power suits

and somehow managing to claw my way

to some level of financial security

at the cost of my sanity

sacrificed to those same cishetero adults in power suits

then deciding to stop lying to my self

and come out

and watching my income drop by 60%

then being unemployed for 30 months

and losing my home

and losing my health insurance

and losing my sanity

and losing my health

then getting a glimmer of hope

(wow, i can buy food and gas this month

without dipping into my dwindling savings)

and having that hope dashed

by people wearing power suits

as my body hurts:

nerves in my leg freaking out

muscles in my back freaking out

(they don't deal well with a spine bent to one side)

shoulders freezing up

thyroid burnt out

mind patched up with drugs

that i cannot afford:

i did not know that being all that

and daring to be angry at those with the power suits

and daring to give public voice

to my anger

together with thousands of other people

daring to give public voice

to our anger

makes me a hipster

but if so

then so be it.

Google's proprietary Dart language.

I have to agree with Peter Bright's conclusion. Javascript is busted. Dart is not the way to fix Javascript problems.

So, Google? All those Javascript developers - those who developed jQuery, node.js, Firebug, YUI, all sorts of highly-interactive, highly dynamic Web apps, including your own frakkin' Google Apps developers? All of those people who poured blood, sweat, and tears into developing libraries, frameworks, developer tools, debuggers, and apps? All those people who worked 14-, 16-, 18- hour days, who put their lives aside, who amped themselves up on coffee, Jolt, Red Bull and G-d knows what else to get through it? Who sacrificed their relationships, families, friendships, and health to deal with Javascript's quirks and limitations, not to mention those of the DOM? Who spent countless years collaborating with each other on the often fractious, unwieldy ECMA design committees?

You're demanding that they just throw this all away - everything they've learned about large-scale software development with a language not originally designed for that, everything they've created, all the tools and glorious wonderful interactive dynamic Web 2.x sites, and all for a proprietary language that you developed in-house, with no input from the developer community or from vendors of browsers other than your own. You piss on the ECMA Technical Committee and on collaborative development in general. And you expect us (yes, I'm a burnt out former developer) to swallow your proprietary language and your arrogance without complaint.

What the fsck ever happened to "Don't be evil?" You're turning into another Microsoft; indeed, you're beating Microsoft at their own game. At least Microsoft is being dragged kicking and screaming towards greater support for open Web standards.

Page and Schmidt: You want to break the Web. You want to turn the Web into your proprietary playground. You want to own every bit of our personal information, every app that we use, every piece of data that we need to store someplace. You want to destroy any notion of personal privacy:

On December 2009, Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, declared after privacy concerns: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines – including Google – do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities." Privacy International ranked Google as "Hostile to Privacy", its lowest rating on its report, making Google the only company in the list to receive that ranking.

You actively collude with the Department of Homeland Insecurity, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Justice Department, and other Federal agencies in suppressing free speech and other Constitutional guarantees and in disrupting social justice movements.

Google, you have become the evil that you once sloganeered against. What happened? Or was "Don't be evil" just a marketing ploy?

Eric Schmidt and Larry Page, you are part of the 1%. Stop being evil. Stop trying to take over the web. Support Harmony in particular and the evolution of Javascript into a better development platform in general. Have some respect for the thousands of person-years expended by Javascript developers. Have some respect for Web standards and their development. Have some respect for privacy and stop enabling our government's shredding of our constitutional rights.

Collaborative development is slow, but maybe that's what we all need now. This never-ending push for features for the sake of features, churning for the sake of churning, change for the sake of change, all without consideration of the human cost has got to stop.

Developers, designers, testers, QA folks, doc writers, tech bloggers, game designers, please, please, join the Occupy movement happening in your city. Take control of software development away from the giants and put it into your hands.

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Child of Elros

un[en]titled ii

"Don't be evil" becomes evil: Rant of a burnt-out former tech geek

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August 2012

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