391 karma · joined May 14, 2013
In terms of crashing and taking a long time to complete, these are problems that are very difficult to solve on the backend as well. Simply having the start event without the end event is not enough info to say for sure that there will _never_ be an end event. For low data volumes and simple use-cases this may not seem like a big deal, but it gets complex extremely quickly.
This is my favorite quote in the whole article. Sums up the pompousness of the company quite nicely I think. This is one of the largest companies in the world. The quote could easily have been “we go to great lengths to make sure that’s the case,” or “that’s the point, grandpa.” At least it wouldn’t have come across as dishonest and cowardly that way.
This is just like when you go to an electronics store and they put the super expensive tv (almost) nobody buys right next to the still very expensive but comparably more modest model. You are more likely to buy that second tv even if costs more than you initially budgeted because your brain tells you that this is the cheaper model with _almost_ the same features as the flagship tv.
For another example, many ecommerce sites will list the number available in stock if it is low, and sometimes will just say "few available" without specifying a number. This creates the same (sometimes false) sense of urgency.
edit: You may even want to think about using something like netlify. The free tier is easily generous for all but the most popular personal blogs and if you outgrow it you probably will be able to make enough revenue to pay for better hosting anyways.
> This is a solved problem. Use Flash. It's insanely customizable, has a huge ecosystem and now runs x% of the sites on the web.
This is argumentum ad populum. Lots of people used Java applets or Flash just a few short years ago, and I think we can all agree that the current HTML5/CSS3/JS ecosystem is much better.
That being said, ownCloud is a great open source alternative to Drive (I host mine on digitalocean which is just starting to introduce block storage but amazon is an equally good option and very cost effective), Duck Duck Go is a very good web search engine these days with privacy as a core value.
It really depends how you use Photos. The automatic face detection and searching for people/events/things in your history is just about unparalleled and is unlikely to be surpassed by a more privacy friendly option in the near future. The reason for this is that these algorithms rely heavily on data collection, which is diametrically opposed to privacy. If you are only using it to backup/store photos in the cloud, ownCloud has similar functionality.
I have heard good things about fastmail to replace gmail but I have not used it myself.
I know you didn't mention it but for chat Matrix is a fantastic option with multiple options for open source clients. I use https://vector.im/beta as a client to access matrix.org but you could easily host your own matrix and/or vector server.
1. google places near me 2. see google reviews for place 3. maybe read 1 review from whichever review company is highest on google's results 4. go back to step 1
Aside from the fact that this is iOS only (I have Android), requires Facebook, and violates the ToS of the services you are aggregating, I just don't see any compelling reason to change my habits from what they already are.