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It is official; Netcraft confirms: Google is dying.

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Google community when IDC confirmed that Google market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all web searches. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Google has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Google is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by Yahoo's failure to renew its exclusive deal with Google.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Google's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Google faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Google because Google is dying. Things are looking very bad for Google. As many of us are already aware, Google continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Google search is the most endangered of them all, having lost most of its core affiliates. The sudden and unpleasant departures of Yahoo and AOL only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Google is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Google.com founder Sergey Brin states that there are 7000 users of Google. How many users of Verity are there? Let's see. The number of Google versus Verity posts on USENET is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Verity users. AskJeeves posts on USENET are about half of the volume of Verity posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Inktomi. A recent article put Teoma at about 80 percent of the search engine market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Google users. This is consistent with the number of Google USENET posts.

Due to the troubles of Google News, abysmal sales and so on, Google is going out of business and will probably be taken over by idealab! who operate another troubled search engine. Now Inktomi is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Google has steadily declined in market share. Google is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Google is to survive at all it will be among search engine dilettante dabblers. Google continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Google is dead.

Fact: Google is dying

http://msn.com.com/2100-1106-981177.html Apparently there is an upcoming conference at...MIT? Unfortunately there is not too much info in this article.

Republicans spam, too.

Computerworld

Cnet

Internetnews

Infoworld

And, of course, Microsoft Watch.

> The first Microsoft government customer to buy
> access to the Windows source code is Russia...

Wait a minute. I thought way back when Microsoft's internal network was thoroughly compromised, they traced some part of the hack back to a Russian address.

Why on earth would they bother with Microsoft?

Maybe someone took the 1-800-RU Legit too literally?

There are Flash players for various models of cellphones and PDAs already, and more in the works.

The devices that Flash is deployed upon (e.g. Nokia's 9210 Communicator, soon) are much more hefty than the ones SVGt is being optimized for (e.g. Nokia's 3650 and 7650). Furthermore, SVG is being sold with the platform, such as TI's OMAP chipset platform. That chipset has a huge percentage of the cell phone market.

And Flash MX supports what Macromedia calls "assistive technologies functionality."

Nevertheless, SVG's markup-based, HTML-integrated syntax is much better optimized for accessibility.

Flash's licensing model is inherently anti-accessibility because it does not allow the creation of competitive "viewers" including viewers optimized for blind people. SVG is not so-encumbered.

Seems to me a Web page designer who can embed alternate XHTML code would find it trivial to implement a Javascript or other server-side check for the presence of the Flash client, then "degrade" to static pages as needed.

Those are the kinds of hacks that make the Web much less easy to index, download and otherwise manipulate. Scripting is a fallback, to be reserved for exceptional tasks.

Even if SVG becomes a widespread standard, I could imagine a lot of pages checking for Flash first, then "degrading" to SVG -- because Flash files are compressed binaries, far smaller than the equivalent SVG.

SVG files can also be compressed binaries. GZIP compression is a required part of the specification. That's the better way to do binary compression because almost every language and platform has a gzip implementation.And because they use mathematical animation rather than frame-based animations, they will often be smaller than Flash files. Try again!

To me, the issues are clear. Flash has a much better existing toolbase and a much larger deployed audience. SVG has a much stronger technical architecture and is achieving rapid uptake in all sorts of verticals. It will take years for SVG to seriously challenge Flash. But when it does, SVG will win because its technology is so much stronger and it is a true standard which already has literally hundreds of cooperating tool implementations for every language, platform and application and will have thousands in the not-too-distant future.

Speaking of articles:
Is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Unconstitutional under Eldred v. Ashcroft?

Mail Chauvinism:The Magicians,the Snarkand the Camel-Ted Nelson

Flying in the Face of Infertility


Dancing around Web services

2002 Worst Manual Contest Winners

CNN has an article on the original case.

If I remember correctly the case was more about Newsbooster stealing content from the news sites than them linking to them. If I remember correctly, what they where doing was pretty much the same thing as news.googl.com is doing (took the headline and a bit of the article and then linked to the original article).

But the sentence still doesn't make much sense...

Speaking of which. Spammers are getting more sophisticated.

----Stories you'll not see on "/."
Spain uncovers hi-tech cashpoint fraud

First-ever dividend for Microsoft shares

Microsoft's privacy officer resigns

GameSpy could let crackers mount network DDoS attacks

Your talk seems to conflict with the "new agenda" at face value... notice this paragraph from the CNET story.

"Lindows spokeswoman Cheryl Schwartzman said the company wanted to concentrate on desktop Linux for customers who'll use it, not for programmers who'll develop it. "If you want to talk about the Linux kernel, this is not the conference for you," she said. "

There's no way he's going to be able to build a user-centered convention like MacWorld around his operating system at this stage in the game. The object of this whole charade was to get Open Source supporters to book their tickets with the bait of a vendor-neutral conference on his dime, then switch it to a pro-Lindows circus instead.

This sounds like some of the things Microsoft has been kicking around for a while...

Wonder if they're somehow making it WMA based on top of the whole layering thing... crazy old Microsoft.

Someoone should point out to the New York State Attorney General that if the UCITA gets passed in New York, it could make this rulling moot. The ruling is based on the fact that the gag clause is unenforcable while the UCITA would (among other things) add teeth to the click-through agreement, and might make the gag clause enforcable. At that point, the ruling would disappear in a puff of logic.

• Same old song, different meaning for P2P
• Norway piracy case brings activists hope
• $1 films spook Hollywood
• Copyright laws around the world

JohnA, An American Citizen

• Same old song, different meaning for P2P
• Norway piracy case brings activists hope
• $1 films spook Hollywood
• Copyright laws around the world

JohnA, An American Citizen

• Same old song, different meaning for P2P
• Norway piracy case brings activists hope
• $1 films spook Hollywood
• Copyright laws around the world

JohnA, An American Citizen

The paper, published in the June issue of the science journal Differentiation, says that repeated exposure to mobile phone radiation acts as a repetitive stress, leading to continuous manufacture of heat shock proteins within cells.

Heat shock proteins are always present in cells at a low level, but are manufactured in larger amounts when the cell is stressed by heat or other environmental factors. They repair other proteins that are adversely affected by the conditions, and are part of the cell's normal reaction to stress. However, if they are produced too often or for too long, they are known to initiate cancer and increase resistance to anti-cancer drugs.

Also, as many have mentioned, despite losing world marketshare their American marketshare has been creeping up. Also the recent powerbooks are clearly aimed at the Japanese market. Don't get me wrong, it would be nice to have a larger world marketshare. But given a lot of the economies and politics of the world market, I doubt that will happen. The important figures are for the US, Canada, Japan and some of the European countries. That sounds a little ethnocentric, but it is good business sense. I predict that within 10 years even MS will have lost a lot of world marketshare due to the nature of opensource being so attractive to 3rd world and 2cd world economies and political situations.

In that more useful (and meaningfully measurable) barometer Apple is doing quite well. For instance in America Apple's share increased from 2.9% to 3.0%. Report That's quite amazing when you realize that they did this with machines that are heavily overpriced and woefully underpowered and did it at a time when most PC manufactures were doing quite poorly.

That's the real issue. Right now any switching is being done on more emotional decisions. You want an alternative to Microsoft. You like the "look" of OSX. However once Apple weathers this recession and its chip problems there will be far more rational reasons for switching. The 970 will provide a huge performance boost for Apple. In terms of SMP it will be at least on the AMD level. (Albeit not in performance - at least for the initial 970 run) I don't know what prices will look like, but it may well be that Apple gets well within the PC's price/performance range.

At that point when you add in all the benefits of a Unix based OS (especailly with Apple's recent X11 app), the aesthetics of OSX and (IMO) its better multitastking to XP, it will be very attractive for switchers. Right now Apple is spreading the word, preparing folks for what is ahead this fall.

Mark my words. This fall is going to be very exciting. The Iraq situation will be over. I think the recession and slowdown will be over. And I think Apple will be the computer manufacturer to watch.

Their worldwide marketshare is now 1.93%.

Also according to IDC: "Apple Computer, the fifth-largest manufacturer in the United States, saw its U.S. market share rise from 2.9 percent to 3 percent in the fourth quarter."

Lies, damn lies, and statistics, I suppose.

I don't know. It really seems like IDC has a bone to pick with apple. Read this cnet article and see. I'm not trusting IDC numbers when they seem that biased in interviews.

Also, that same IDC guy is predicting tablets to replace ultraportables in general, which will not happen.

As a very longtime Mac user and technician, I'd have to agree. Apple was very late in finding alternative speed for their boxes when Motorola's problems appeared, and now they're paying for their dawdling.

Take a look at the new desktops. These systems have everything going for them in terms of speed EXCEPT the processors. A two-processor system should go like a bat out of hell, but the current crop matches, not excels, in speed tests with single-processor Macs of a comparable speed. The processors are bottlenecked. These new desktops were designed with faster or more efficient processors in mind, and they didn't come.

Apple is also experiencing the same problem that has plagued PC makers: Customers realize they DON'T have to upgrade to a whole new system. There's not a big reason to move to a new computer unless your Mac is beige. Also, unlike previous Macs, all Macs produced since the Blue & White have stronger upgrade options, so you could toss in a cheaper processor upgrade rather than buy a new box.

Apple is backed in a corner again. This time, its the economy and customer buying trends. Remember when Apple backed itself in a corner with mismanagement in the 1990s? I wouldn't count Apple out, especially since now a new processor with much stronger specfications may arrive later this year that will bring the Power Mac line back to comparable performance terms to its PC counterparts.

Humm, seems that the editor got it wrong...

From CNet News they are actually going to release it FASTER that the previous schedule.

The double core itanium deadline is now 2005 instead of 2007 and adding a new chip for 2004.

Maybe the confusion arise fromthe fact that "Originally, Montecito, due in 2004, wasn't a dual-core chip, but it was morphed after engineering and manufacturing teams concurred that a dual-processor chip could be mass-manufactured at Intel by 2005."

It would be a good idea to change the headline!

Besides, if you read the fucking article, you'd learn that MS and Sun had an agreement where MS would ship Java.

"The fucking article", being the one at the top of this story, says no such thing.

Perhaps this has absolutely nothing to do with anything, but the PCI-SIG Board of Directors is chaired by Tony Pierce of . . . Microsoft! According to this CNet story he is (or was) technical evangelist for Microsoft's Hardware Strategy Group. Good strategy.

Whitfield Diffie, who has probably has forgotten more about crypto than 99.9% of us will ever know, explains why secrecy does not equal security.

And he would tell us all about it if he had a mouth

Microsoft opens winows source to governments.... Link here

Pii said, "Wow, great response..." thus giving me cause to smile.

I forgot to add that the courts have, in the past, interpreted the Oklahoma Computer Crimes Act of 1984 in a very strict manner. For example, Ryan Breding was running a warez site at OU in 1997 and was prosecuted not only for the copyright violations, but also for violation of the OCCA because the popularity of his site affected bandwidth at the school. Another words, under the 1984 OCCA, simply having a site that is more popular than your provider anticipated can be a crime in Oklahoma if that impacts the bandwidth of your provider.

How is that germane to the current topic? Well, I suspect - remember IANAL, and this is only opinion - that the same courts that decided slowing a school's connections is a violation of the law would also consider interrupting the function of a webserver by causing a reboot to be a similar violation. Further suppose that the target system is a) in Oklahoma, and b) running NT...

Cnet has this article on the news, here's the author's summation:

In other words, the RIAA and its allies at the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and the Computer Systems Policy Project (CSPP) are happy enough with the legal status quo, or at least don't wish to risk a clash on Capitol Hill with an uncertain outcome. The movie industry, CEA and consumer groups, on the other hand, are willing to risk that confrontation.

As noted in both articles, not everyone was at the table. And the Consumer Electronics Association supports Rep. Boucher's bill.

Cnet has this article on the news, here's the author's summation:

In other words, the RIAA and its allies at the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and the Computer Systems Policy Project (CSPP) are happy enough with the legal status quo, or at least don't wish to risk a clash on Capitol Hill with an uncertain outcome. The movie industry, CEA and consumer groups, on the other hand, are willing to risk that confrontation.

As noted in both articles, not everyone was at the table. And the Consumer Electronics Association supports Rep. Boucher's bill.

I believe you are refering to this article. I didn't read it as Microsoft admitting to having a backdoor. And what would be the point of having a backdoor to Windows when there are multiple front doors that are practically wide open. If you wanted security, you are not going to only use the security provided by the OS alone. If you do...then it's your own fault.

here

Found here. Governments will be able to see some source to 2000, XP, .net, and CE.

tar zxvf win32xp-i386.tar.gz
cd win32xp
./configure --prefix=/opt/windows
make
make install

- grunby

Just saw this on cnet. They're calling it a hoax.

- grunby

Google does 90% of the non-msn queries, and that's pretty close to controlling the flow of information on the Internet, something that certainly scare the hell out of many folks out there.

To see other companies truly trying to compete with Google is really very good, good news.

Darn, whey Hemos had to abbreviated KHTML to KH? It's not like the headline was too long or something.

Anyhow, the same article appeared at C|Net. Is it normal?

Posting from Safari...

I love Bust-a-Move. I play bust-a-move-3 on my GBC when I travel. They messed up version 4 and you just can't tell two of the colors apart. Very sad.

Funny, the slashdotted Snood website points to download.com, so I did a search there and the second result is a "Bust a Move Clone".

Declan McCullagh has a column on this on CNet. How long will it take Poindexter to merge this database with the supermarkets' databases of purchases, so you can be tracked electronically, all the time?

According to Nicola Hemming, the president of Sharmen Networks (which owns Kazaa) [CNet] "Just for reference, we elected with the user terms to regulate our affairs by Australian law." Maybe her attempt to "move file-swapping out of a commercial--and legal gray" by setting up lobbyists, pushing for global (legislated?) media access fees, and talking to artist groups and British telecom companies has caused alarm in some media companies. (see interview link for details.)

I think the top one of these would be a better brand symbol.

I'm willing to bet that if Apple and Mac users would turn down their Anti PC/Windows rhetoric, the PC/Windows crowd would probably react a little less to articles like these.

However, when I see commercials telling me my digital camera won't work with Windows and articles stating that if I had a Mac I'd be smarter and make more money, it becomes almost impossible not to at least mention comparisons like this.

Here.

--naked

More info here. God it's early.

I thought I heard that HP was being sued to take the electronic sensors off their ink cartridges for deskjets so third parties could make replacements. Anyone have info on that or was it all just a wonderful dream?

Yep, but now that is irrevelent. Microsoft has combined their code bases for home and business OS's into XP (or so they claim). The Windows95 track is dead, NT is dead. The hybrid OS that would serve both business server needs and home user gaming needs that was promised to us in MS timelines in 1993 is finally here with XP. Or so they say. Apparently not?

You got that right! :)

The problem is, although Windows 95/98 and Windows NT (as an add-in for NT 3.51, and integral in NT 4) share a similar UI, the Win32 API that each platform supported was markedly different. Windows 9x lacked the security APIs and (for a long time) OpenGL, whilst NT did not have the direct hardware access that Windows 9x could fall back on. Also, the hardware driver architechture was completely different between the two.

This was one of the problems that caused the release of what would become Windows 2000 to be pushed back - the new Windows needed to support the features and idiocyncrasies of both platforms, in order to support the *applications* that were being used on either platform. This was the crucial part - it didn't matter how technically superior the new Windows was, if the customer's existing applications wouldn't run properly then it would sink, and quite possibly take Microsoft with it. (Remember, Windows 2000 was the *only* option at this point, there was no Plan B waiting in the wings).

Some links for your further enlightenment :

Microsoft Windows History
Another potted history of Windows (warning - pop-ups lurking here!)
The official word on the name-change to Windows 2000, from Microsoft PressPass
An article on the historical links between Windows NT and VMS (They're more related than you think!)
'Why Windows NT 5.0 Will Make the World a Better Place', written in September 1997(!) by Jesse Berst for ZDNet Anchordesk. Gives a run-down of the feature list at that time, and also gives a figure of how long NT 5.0 had been in development at that point.
'New Windows could solve age-old puzzle', courtesy of News.com - a write-up of the (in)famous Cairo project, and where it fits into the Windows story.

Food for thought, I thing you'll agree.

Even if the case came to court and the judge ruled in favour of the media companies, would Sharman Networks have to pay?

There is a precedent for cases like this. Yahoo! did not have to comply with the French order because Yahoo! has their servers in the US and they are a US company.

How is this any different?

So what if millions of Californians use Kazaa? There are many times that number of Kazaa users who are not Californians. Millions of French people could access the US yahoo.com site - the ruling says:

Although France has the sovereign right to regulate what speech is permissible in France, this court may not enforce a foreign order that violates the protections of the United States Constitution by chilling protected speech that occurs simultaneously within our borders

What laws are the MPAA and RIAA using to sue Sharman Networks? Are they applicable in Australia or Vanuatu

• It's for Windows 95 and Windows 98.
• It seems to be focused on business licensees.
• It's unclear whether the vouchers are really unrestricted; the formulation "Microsoft or other products" sounds like marketing speak for "selected products by Microsoft and a few other companies".
• It appears that for anything that isn't redeemed, Microsoft gets to keep 1/3, give 1/3 in cash, and give 1/3 in Microsoft software to schools.

The kicker is, however, $1bn is about as much as Toshiba had to pay for shipping supposedly defective floppy disk drives on their laptops.

I think this is absolutely evil. Even if Microsoft had to pay everything in cash, it would be peanuts. Instead, they'll be able to further contaminate schools with their proprietary software, something they have already volunteered to do as a "donation"--a tax sheltered marketing ploy.

First off...there is a better, more in depth News.com story available which clears some things up.

Second...two thirds of the unclaimed money will go directly to California schools (1/2 in cash, 1/2 in MS software and cash grants).

Your though sounds kind of interesting, but wouldn't it really boil down to a voluntary California tax via Microsoft? Of course, California residents never had to wait for a Microsoft settlement to be nice to the school system, they always could have donated cash, or their tax return monies to the Cali school system. I really doubt that many if any has ever done that. Yea it sounds like a novel thing for consumers to do, but I have a sneaking feeling the people who will actually try to cash in on the settlement will be companies and small businesses who may have bough tens to hundreds of Microsoft products during the suit time period. Most consumers will either 1) not be bothered to file a claim to get their $5-30 bux back, 2) never file a claim because they have no idea about the settlement.

Definintely. Microsoft could find a way to write it off as a tax donation, and they could actually cash in profit in the long run in future licensing/upgrading deals.

However, this is not the worst part of this settlement. Apple's big stake in the educational market could be jeopardized by Microsoft pouring in millions of dollars of free software.. The sounds crazy, the settlement is doing exactly the thing that Micosoft was being sued for.

Where is justice?

Methinks the developer program died because it probably wasn't a big hit with developers. As is pointed out in this article, TiVo has figured out that nobody wants their DVR to be the hub of their home entertainment network. A TiVo senior VP was quoted as saying, "The PC has won as the center of digital content." Once they figured that out, it probably made very little sense to do too much development on the TiVo itself, especially if nobody else was interested.

Under the plan, licensees would pay 25 cents each for MPEG-4 products such as decoders and encoders, with fees capped at $1 million a year for each licensee. It also suggests charging a per-minute rate, with no cap.

Anger meets MPEG-4 licensing scheme

Companies fear costly MPEG-4 licenses

Apple backs MPEG-4 despite fee dispute

MPEG LA claim that Microsoft is blocking progress? As my dear old grandmother used to say, bitch please.

Under the plan, licensees would pay 25 cents each for MPEG-4 products such as decoders and encoders, with fees capped at $1 million a year for each licensee. It also suggests charging a per-minute rate, with no cap.

Anger meets MPEG-4 licensing scheme

Companies fear costly MPEG-4 licenses

Apple backs MPEG-4 despite fee dispute

MPEG LA claim that Microsoft is blocking progress? As my dear old grandmother used to say, bitch please.