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So it's no longer a map application, because it's producing weird non-standard projections, tiles that can't be stitched/georeferenced properly etc.

Will Google support and maintain an actual maps application? Or will they merge google earth and google maps together in an even less capable tool purely for consumers to wow at? Castrating Google Earth with the webgl version and locking it into Chrome was bad enough. I wish this stops here.


Perspective projection is not weird or non-standard. In some sense you could consider it the least weird projection, since it's what your eyes actually see when looking at a globe. But if you just can't get enough of Mercator, the option is still there in the hamburger menu (labeled "Globe").


Google Earth desktop edition is still available. And it's still approximately ten thousand times better than the browser edition.

https://www.google.com/earth/download/gep/agree.html


It's gradually phased out. Right now it's essentially abandonware. At some point in the future they'll just kill it out of the blue. Things that provide value to advanced users don't matter to most of these "data-based" companies.


This will be very controversial, especially in HN, but market cap doesn't mean shit.

Apple has roughly $50B in revenue and $120B in equity. Most of it's products could be replaced in less than 5 years by a competitor. Market cap is a measure of public trust among other things but not actual worth or value to society.


Your numbers are completely wrong...apple just had $50B in revenue for its weakest quarter...last quarter they had $60B and in their strongest quarter Q4 they had $89B pre trump tax cuts. If their current growth rate stays the same Apple will hit $280B revenue and $65B in profits.

I’m not sure how you are calculating equity but they have $240B in plain cash. They have so much in IP, and extremely low interest loans.

Market cap does mean something, it’s literally the most meaningful value the world puts on a company


> Most of it's products could be replaced in less than 5 years by a competitor.

I wish this was true, but I think you’re severely overestimating Apple’s competitors... In the last 5 years, noone has even approached them, neither in hardware nor in software, even though the formula is painfully obvious (high quality hardware that keeps working/updating, and non-annoying easy-to-use software that’s friendly to powerusers).


On top of the holes in your financial argument, you've overlooked something in your competitor argument.

A competitor could replace most of Apple's current products in 5 years, but where will Apple be in 5 years? They'll be five years ahead.


Replacing means that Apple doesn't innovate further.

This always happens with big companies, Nokia, Ericsson, Yahoo, they are replaced by new companies.

5 years ahead for the big company means no progress.

Apple is where it was 5 years ago in terms of innovation. They havent done anything new that was meaningful and only reap the benefits of what jobs invented 15y ago.


>This will be very controversial

It is, and not only just on HN. Because Apple has $220B in revenue, not $50.


Equity is not a measure of actual worth, it's a product of accounting conventions (which are increasingly incorrect)

A company's value is the free cash flow available to owners from now to kingdom come discounted back to the present.


I just finished Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull who was one of the founders of Pixar and current president. Highly recommend the book for anyone on HN.

In the book Ed Catmull wrote that Steve Jobs would say regularly "as brilliant as Apple products were, eventually they all ended up in landfills."

Gives you some pause to realize how quickly Apple's business could be relegated to the trashbin with no new products to pick up the baton.


You're downvoted a lot because you didn't substantiate your claim, but I assume many people, myself included, agree with the sentiment.

Up until now Lubuntu had a clear goal: Create a usable Ubuntu-compatible distribution that runs on old hardware.

Now the goals are so vague and subjective that they lead to nowhere. Sure, this won't matter in the short term, but sooner or later the project will get completely derailed because of different interpretations of this dumb statement.

They can still make a good lightweight OS that runs on 10 year old hardware. There's no reason to change the goal.

Sure, it's no longer a massive challenge, but it doesn't have to be. If the developers want to try new things they can fork it.


Now, organizations do change over time, as the people behind them change. But I honestly cannot believe such a retarded move can be justified by the ignorance of management and design. How can such a decision not be turned down immediately? Erasing the iconic Firefox logo? The only brand asset they have?

Is the Mozilla organization infiltrated by saboteurs? I imagine a lot of governments and corporations will be much happier when the last trully free browser dies. Please fire those people.


I'm from a Mediterranean country and it's customary to be 30 min to an hour late to parties. Distant acquintances and people that don't really feel like going will arrive close to 2 hours late. I thought this was the norm in the Western world. Is it not? Do folks in the English-speaking world arrive on the minute?


Not to the minute, but yes, most people usually show up within a fifteen minutes in either direction.


Don't do this in France. It's considered "polite" to arrive ~30minute late if you're invited, however, if you arrive early, you will be asked to help while the host/hostess take his/her last minute shower. I don't mind and i like being early, because the most meaningfull discussion are made there, but non-Latin foreigners can have some troubles to adjust.


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