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I think Google has a bigger problem than puny Googlebombs.

Why would geeks want to kill their brains with alcohol?

This should answer your question.

I can't imagine somebody who doesn't love Ramen

It's horrid, foul stuff with no nutritional value whatsoever.

This sums it up about right.

I was target shooting with my satellite game. Nothing to worry about.

WTF is up with this web reversioning trend?

That's going to be a fairly expensive upgrade.

Haven't you heard that Web 3.0 is being released soon?

> hopefully Zune 2.0 ditches DRM, plays all formats and breaks all of the rules iPods live by

And perhaps Vista 2.0 will be open-source. :)

That aside, what with "Zune" allegedly sounding like a Hebrew four-letter word (someone claimed this was based on fact, though I'm not sure), the error screen showing what looks like an orgasm, and now "squirts", I'm beginning to suspect that someone in the marketing deparment thinks he is being funny.

Here is the specification detailing those machines.

Given a 16 year old web, what's the oldest continous content? Dr. Fun ceased, User Friendly "only" goes back to 1997 (a mere 9 years), I know of a monthly column that's come out each month since 1996 (RPGnet Soapbox, 10 years), but I'm out of examples.

Sites like photo.net date back to 1993 (13 years), but that's not the same as a single person chugging steadily for all 16. Anyone know of a creator who has hit their deadlines on the web for all 16 years?

Jeez people, it's a line from userfriendly.org

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20060909

If they give up their common carrier status by deciding what is and isn't appropriate, they can now be held responsible for all the inappropriate (and illegal) material that goes through their network. That includes p2p, spam, etc.

To repeat the brilliant Illiad - where do I sign up ?. Don't panic it is only beta.

Jokes aside, it is a company sitting on american soil, why would it be wrong if they actually had a partnership with NSA or CIA. It is their patriotic duty, No ?

To repeat the brilliant Illiad - where do I sign up ?. Don't panic it is only beta.

Jokes aside, it is a company sitting on american soil, why would it be wrong if they actually had a partnership with NSA or CIA. It is their patriotic duty, No ?

The Borg, she grows - resistance is futile.

No, jokes aside - I'm starting to have serious doubts about google's internal innovation engine. As someone recently pointed out, the reason startups are innovative are because they aren't constrained. From what I hear, google has retained a bit of the humility required to keep their startup ethos (to be a company of a hundred startups) for the last five years. To do this, they've had to do more subtle PR tricks than there is in the book and I can truly admire the way they haven't got themselves cutdown in the tall poppy meets rake approach, we techies apply to the big monoliths (AOL, MS etc...). But this recent trend of acquiring technology instead of building it in-house is a definite sign that the culture is starting to fade, at least in the management layers of the company. Instead of looking in-wards for innovation, they are going out & buying technology.

Anyway, I see the same sort of let startups experiment, let our business follow the successes (and $$$) attitudes elsewhere - and that leads into a different sort of hell altogether.

PS:Consider me even more scared if there was a master plan to all this than mere acquisitions.

The Borg, she grows - resistance is futile.

No, jokes aside - I'm starting to have serious doubts about google's internal innovation engine. As someone recently pointed out, the reason startups are innovative are because they aren't constrained. From what I hear, google has retained a bit of the humility required to keep their startup ethos (to be a company of a hundred startups) for the last five years. To do this, they've had to do more subtle PR tricks than there is in the book and I can truly admire the way they haven't got themselves cutdown in the tall poppy meets rake approach, we techies apply to the big monoliths (AOL, MS etc...). But this recent trend of acquiring technology instead of building it in-house is a definite sign that the culture is starting to fade, at least in the management layers of the company. Instead of looking in-wards for innovation, they are going out & buying technology.

Anyway, I see the same sort of let startups experiment, let our business follow the successes (and $$$) attitudes elsewhere - and that leads into a different sort of hell altogether.

PS:Consider me even more scared if there was a master plan to all this than mere acquisitions.

The kids are using their own resources.
Spamming is like phoning with reverse charges. It costs you!

guys said it best.

Here's the problem but the fix is easier than fixing IE!

Open Directory still exists, but it's kind of fallen by the wayside

See UserFriendly's comic strip from Monday, 10/16/2006. :)

To modify the GPs coffee analogy so it fits better, substitute Senseo or Flavia coffee "systems" for the Gevalia coffee of the month club. There is no reason other than "creating hype and desire" for someone to do that to coffee. Fleecing the trendy, or just those who think they are, is a time honored tradition in marketing and retail.

p.s. Since I was mentioning coffee, here's a gratuitous link to my second favorite UF... http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20060925

Heh... JD "Iliad" Frazer, eat yer hat...

You don't know about tubes? Dude, User Friendly covered this a few weeks ago. Get your head out of the sand.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20060909 Give the babies their bottle. Just when they are in the middle of jumping and hooting for joy, that's when you tell them they just lost common carrier status.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030922

Stef, is that you?

Right to Read explains the problem with the associated moral dillemas and pulls at the heartstrings. But it is serving as a sort of Animal Farm for DRM advocates, who seem to point out how much they can gain in the short term by enforcing these schemes to make people more money.

Basically, you have to ask the guy about whether he'd be allowed to own anything. DRM is taking America (and a few other countries) into a dark age where there is really nothing you can buy - you can only rent it or lease it,with the owner living downstairs and always prying into your life. Somewhat like Three's Company Too, but except Mr Roper isn't really one person, but a composite of the company director board.

But let me put my example up - I never bought new textbooks. In my college, it is customary to buy the books off your seniors, with the associated writings on the margin, underlined points and the odd love letter hidden in it. But as Right to Read illustrates, information when it loses its physical form becomes a commodity which can be sold over and over again to the same induvidual - for different uses. Meaning that, if I had an ebook DRM based textbook, all of them would have expired by now - while I still retain some of the CS books which have changed the way I think about computers. OR playing quake1 on my new Radeon box, I don't know if I'll ever be able to play Doom3 legally once the Steam servers go offline.

DRM exploits the transience of information in the digital world to squeeze water from a stone, without adding any extra value to the customer (other than the carrots required for them to bite).

Raman noodles are mostly carbohydrates and sodium.

Read the ingredients

Userfriendly is years ahead of you :) http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19990404

Now, while it was funny when Iliad did the initial joke in UserFriendly, it's not so funny now...

What WON'T they computerize these days?

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20000718& mode=classic

it's pretty much any of creative's devices, except with microsoft's name on it.

bOOOring.

my g/f has a creative zen 30Gb, it's alot slicker than this - has pretty much exactly the same interface - including the whole 'scroll & get the letter of the alphabet', except it's not nearly as obnoxious as that screenshot.

I used it for a long busride recently and found that I liked it alot - i find the whole 'scrolling' ipod interface annoying - going up and down menus by scrolling a wheel around makes no sense.

the zen however has an up-down scroll pad, which i found to be very slick.

dunno, guess it's a matter of taste, but anything microsoft is pretty much a no-go for alot of people.

the wifi is a non-seller, unless it lets you do anything you would normally do with a wifi - if i run into a person with another zune (however unlikely), can i send them an mp3? or just a windows-media DRM protected file? if it's the second (DRM only) then it's a non-feature.

this whole 'giving the consumer more choice' marketing slogan is so much bullshit it's unbelievable. how about, create a device that does what consumers want and otherwise just GETS OUT OF OUR WAY?

syncing wifi to an xbox360? isn't the xbox supposed to be the 'center of the living room'? shouldn't it be the other way around? Oh right, no harddrive by default...so much for that concept.

non-sell, non-feature...dead in the water.

illiad, as usual, has the best commentary on this:

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20060725

"Why's everybody whispering?"

It's a series of tubes.

You got it all wrong about the tubes, my friend. :P

Please, get your terminology right. Halfway through your post you switch from Macrovision, the company that provides DVD encryption, to Macromedia, the company that provides Flash. I doubt the latter has a care one way or the other in DVD protection.

It's the DMCA, not the DCMA. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Not "Copyright Millennium". And, young man, it doesn't fit the music as well. "It's fun to violate the D-M-C-A!"

Finally, he didn't "give all source code to Macrovision." Ignoring the grammatical ambiguity therein, he gave rights to the code, and unfortunately had not previously licensed it under a perpetual redistribution license. If he had simply GPL'd it (or CC-SA or anything), Macrovision would've had all the source code they wanted and couldn't've done a thing about it.

Nope. Hubris Pachyderm.

This, maybe? :P

I think this guy might have something to say about the name. :-)

Hey Stef, your post seems familiar.

Some people will never learn:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030823& mode=classic

Gates leaving will be put back 2 years .. http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20060618

I think userfriendly says it all.
Two year transition? Come on. Am I the only one that thinks this means the moment they try to do things differently he's going to step right back in and send them packing?

Illiad said it best today.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19980308

If you really want to read some code, print it with a good old fashioned chain printer on green bar paper formatted with "pr" for page numbers, and get a set of colored highlighters to mark useful things.

For code you want to browse through, hack up a little perl script that gives you page number references for each symbol and subroutine/function/method, and print that out on a separate stack.

Go sit somewhere nice where you can relax, flip through your stack of green bar and sip your favorite caffiene, and life is good.

This one hangs on my door, UF: Sid and Percussive Maintenance.

I see it too. It's still chops my name down to "Darkmeerka" in the user menu, though...
It seems more "plasticy" to me, I guess. I kind of like it. Reminds me of this comic.

here

It cant be *that* hard to restore backups from paper....right?

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19971127