You're going to have to download IE7 to use it before you get your hands on Vista. So I turn the question around on you.
Whats the motivation to download IE7 for features I already have with Firefox? Why would my mother or my mothers friends want to use IE7 when they already have the features of IE7 and then some (such as extensions) simply by sticking with Firefox?
IE7 is only going to get a massive user base if MS force it upon us through WindowsUpdate as a "critical update". Otherwise, I don't think we'll see many people bothering to install it. As a result, I would say that the adoption of IE7 won't truly start until the adoption of Vista begins.
So even if IE7 stays on target and gets released this year, most people are going to completely ignore it till next year anyway I suggest.
Whats wrong with multiple AV software packages installed?
I can understand your point with regards to multiple software based firewalls, thats redundant.;-) But multiple AV software is a good idea, and one that I subscribe to on my only Windows machine.
Having said that, the 2 I use are AVG and ClamWin. Not exactly bloated in the same way Symantec Norton Internet Security is.
There is no guarantee that a single AV package is going to get all viruses. Just the same that something like Ad-Aware isn't going to get all Malware on its own. So it often gets combined with something like Spybot S&D. In my opinion, it is far better to hedge your bets.
On the flipside, a software firewall is better than nothing, but I personally don't rely on them. Multiple firewalls are pointless and more likely to cause problems that provide a functioning service. So I understand your point in that regard.
Far better to get a machine that is specifically set up for the purpose of providing firewall services and only firewall services. Or, if people must use Windows, get the Windows version of Checkpoint FW-1 instead of Norton Internet Security and do things properly;-) But I'd still prefer to see it on something like a dedicated Nokia IPSO box thats been properly hardened.
ClamAV is just a scanner. A good scanner that I've found is often updated before many others, but its just a scanner.
Most common use for it is to scan email through an MTA or web traffic through Squid. I've also used it to run scans on network mounts via a cronjob in the middle of the night.
The Windows port of it is quite good. But again, its just a scanner and it doesn't offer Live/resident scanning for files opened/closed in the way most other AV packages do. Its only manual scanning. Where it comes in to its own on Windows is that there is a Firefox extension for the Windows port of ClamAV that will scan all downloaded files automatically. I'm not aware of AVG or others easily doing that with Firefox without being set up as a proxy.
Results with ClamAV have been pretty good. My experience has been that its at least as good as something like AVG as far as detection goes. At one of my client sites, mail goes through ClamAV and then f-prot. f-prot has never picked up anything, so I can only assume that ClamAV is performing at least as well as f-prot. For most of my client sites, I (and my clients) trust it enough to use ClamAV on its own.
None of my clients run Windows on their servers (all small companies with very simple infrastructure needs) so I can't personally compare it with something like Symantec or McAfee (or other) products when it comes to email filtering at the server.
As long as people remember ClamAV is just a scanner and will only scan what you explicitly tell it to, when you tell it to, I see no reason not to trust it as you might trust any other piece of AV software available.
I think what makes ClamAV stand out is that its very easy to integrate as a scanning solution for most software. Very simple to add to Squid filters, very simple to add to most MTAs such as Postfix, Sendmail and Qmail. If you're familiar with scripting, not difficult to add to anything thats scriptable.
You didn't keep your eye on the ball. Its already a law in the US that all federal websites must be accessible to all persons. Including those with some form of disability (such as blindness, hearing impairment and so on.)
Why shouldn't blind people be able to access a website just as easily as a sighted person? In the UK its as good as law that a site be accessible to persons with sight or hearing disabilities. I personally have no problem with it at all. I think its a good thing.
Sites I develop personally, I always make sure I can navigate easily within Lynx or Links. If I can't use the site easily and comprehensively using either of those then I consider the site a failure and either rework the design or restart it from scratch. The benefits far outweigh the disadvantages in my opinion.
Why are people so adverse to advertising in a game?
I pay a subscription to my satellite TV provider, yet I still get ads on the channels I like to watch. Even in the middle of sporting events. I had to pay for my decoder box and pay my monthly subscription.
Advertising in a game is acceptable to me as long as it is within context. I don't want to see an ad for CocaCola(tm) in the middle of Droknar's Forge in Guild Wars. Or an ad for Gillete Mach3 over the door to the Auction House of Orgrimmar in World of Warcraft.;-)
Running a MMORPG, or any persistant online gaming service, is not cheap. Why shouldn't companies offer advertising to help offset that cost? Especially if its within context. It allows them to ensure that the cost to the consumer is affordable.
I don't see people stop playing Anarchy Online because of the ads. In fact, by allowing advertising, Anarchy Online got a massive influx of players because the advertising allowed the basic game to be offered freely. This extended the life of a game that was starting to slow down.
Also consider that games like Gran Turismo, Project Gotham Racing and many other racing games have had non-dynamic ingame advertising for a long time. Billboards all around the race tracks that have fake or paid for static ads. Doesn't stop you playing the game does it? So what if the fake ads on the ingame billboards now become real advertising space?
Get used to it. Life is expensive. If advertising helps keep a game affordable, is that any worse than advertising keeping my subscription to a channel affordable? You either like the service or you don't.
If you don't want the advertising, offer to pay a premium for ad-free service. But consider how much that premium would have to be to offset the advertising.
Don't get me wrong. I didn't say Google wouldn't do what they can to maximise the value of the company. Its in their own best interests to do that no matter what. Even without the issue of being a publicly traded company.
However, my point was more that Google are less likely to follow the whims of Wallstreet just to make Wallstreet happy. They're going to do things their way as they have always done because that was, and remains, a profitable way for them to do things.
Google looks to its own skin first, Wallstreet can like it or lump it as they wish.
Wallstreet didn't like that Google paid out $90m in a click fraud case... Too bad. It had to be done anyway. And it was probably cheaper to settle that case than to spend all the money on litigating it. Even if they'd won in the end, would the win really have been worth the cost?
Google has some of the best minds in the world working for it. Wallstreet is all about dollars in the immediate future. The people at Google look to the long term I'd suggest.
Agreed. Also remember that Google didn't really want to go public, they were just at the point where they were making so much money that the Feds forced them to.
I think Google's attitude will probably remain that Wallstreet wants Google more than Google wants Wallstreet. They were quite successful and turning a profit, even with their massive expenses, long before the SEC said they had to become a public company.
Google Talk is a full Jabber app, but with voice added as well. XMPP alone should increase its rankings as a good app.
The interface is clean, simple, uncluttered and very straight forward and easy to use. The integration with Gmail is far and away the best Web conversion I have ever seen of any IM client. MSN Webmessenger and the web version of Yahoo! Messenger are no where near close to being as good as the Gmail Chat version of Google Talk.
Then consider that any Jabber network can chat with people using Google Talk. If you are connected via jabber.org (or any other Jabber network) you can chat with gtalk users just by adding them to your list. Don't need to use any extra protocols or plugins.
Then consider the future proofing of using XMPP over creating yet another IM protocol. XMPP is exceptionally modular and the clients talk to the servers in exactly the same language that the servers talk to each other in. So adding new services/features on the server side won't always require a client upgrade. Not to mention that XMPP is unburdened by patent issues and the license is pretty damn good by most people's opinion.
Also consider connecting with the other networks. Google will be able to easily implement the shared connection with AOL simply because all thats required is a plugin on the server side. The client wouldn't need to be upgraded. If in future MSN and Yahoo! decide to stop trying to hedge their share of the IM pie, communication with their networks would also be exceptionally easy.
Jabber has a huge following in the corporate environment. Businesses like it because they can control it to meet their own policies. This is also especially true of financial organisations. Now those organisations can extend their network to chat with Google Talk connected clients/partners/associates without having to give up that control internally.
Google Talk is a fantastic step in the right direction and the fact that Google even donated libjingle to the Jabber community as a whole means that everyone has gotten something beneficial out of it. I don't doubt Google will offer more in the future too.
And none of this mentions the fact that even though Google is very much an advertising company, there is no advertising at all in the Google Talk client. Not even Microsoft, AOL or Yahoo! can make that claim. They're not even primarily advertising companies in the way Google is.
Google Talk is more than just a simple or bland client. I gave up using all others when it was released simply because of how clean the interface is. I don't need graphical smilies or useless animations in my chats. They don't convey anything I cant achieve with old school text emoticons in the first place.
I logged in to MSN Messenger the other day for the first time in a long while. I wanted to send a message to my cousin in a different city who doesn't use Gmail. I was absolutely taken back by how cluttered the interface is. So many features of no value at all. Many of which can't even be turned off. Not to mention how bulky the interface just 'felt'. It was like going from a sports car back to a family sedan.
No thanks. I'll take Google Talk over any other vendor client on the market today. I even prefer it over the old favourites like GAIM and its like.
Yes, I'm very familiar with the history of the Mozilla Foundation, Netscape, AOL and TimeWarner. I owned a *small share* of that history at one point.
Now go back and re-read my original post and see if you can actually get the meaning this time round. Heres a hint, its about the poster's assertion that this will help promote Linux to AOL customers. Not about promoting Firefox or OpenOffice.org. They were just examples.
It will be good for everyone becuase even though more stupid people will be using Linux, such are the sacrifices we must make if we actually want a world not dominated by MS.
Sorry, but where the hell does Linux come from in this argument? Google uses Linux on their servers, but are in no way an evangelist for Linux in any way other than "Yeah, we use Linux" type statements.
You'd be far better off saying that this is good in that it might promote Mozilla Firefox and OpenOffice.org to AOL customers. 2 products that Google is actively promoting and helping with development on. Very little of what Google does with Linux is ever seen outside of Google.
This is not, was not and will not ever be about Linux. There is absolutely no justification for any such link or hypothesis.
--- The desktop is dead. Long live the browser!
Re:WebCore vs. Opera on mobile phones? Heh.
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Google to Buy Opera?
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DOM3? So not only do I have to now check for the different implementations of the XMLHttpRequest that each browser uniquely puts together, I also have to use DOM3 Load/Save to get the same functionality to work properly on Opera?
I'd rather they fixed their XMLHttpRequest object myself. Its bad enough fudging things to work properly on both IE and Firefox, but also Opera and Safari? Screw that. Gave up even trying. Haven't (and won't) even tried Konqueror given the state of Safari.
DOM3 Load/Save might be nice one day, but before implementing the cool new latest standards, it'd be nice if they fixed the defacto standards that most people are starting to use now. DOM3 is miles away from general adoption because at the moment its just not needed. On the flipside, the XMLHttpRequest object is in daily use. It may not be a W3C standard, but its becoming common enough now that Opera would really do well to fix it properly.
Even aside from that. The GUI just sucks anyway.;-)
On the other hand, Eclipse is predominantly developed by IBM and, as far as I know, doesn't have the restrictions that you spoke of in OOo. I don't really know that much about Eclipse, but it seems to be fairly successful despite the fact that there aren't a huge number of other companies developing it along with IBM. Would it still be classified as an open source project?
Sorry, but IBM only started out as the primary developer. The Eclipse Foundation is now substantially more than just IBM. There are a lot of other very big players involved with Eclipse including CA, Intel, BEA, Borland, Sybase, Zend among others.
Saying Eclipse is dominated by IBM is like saying Linux development is dominated by Redhat. Sure, they're big players when it comes to contributions, but they don't make up the majority on their own.
They do? Can't say I've ever noticed that. I see KOffice and Gnome Office (Abiword, Gnumeric and so on) getting more praise than OOo. In fact, most of what I read about OpenOffice.org is complaints about its speed (or lack there of) and its cluttered interface. From the OSS community, its about how gawdawful the code itself is. Bloated, difficult to follow, full of legacy crap thats so tangled that its difficult to decypher.
The only ones I seen praise OpenOffice.org are usually those with some sort of investment in the platform. Whether it be as a contributer or because they are relying on it in some way already.
Theres a simple solution to that. Its called bandwidth provisioning and using QoS/ToS to ensure that VoIP traffic has a guaranteed minimum bandwidth priority over other traffic. Its not Cisco's fault, its the network admins for not configuring their switches or edge routers properly.
Oh, and to my knowledge, google does no direct advertising themselves. A real product doesn't need to.
Strange... I get paid by Google to advertise their Google AdSense program and their Firefox toolbar. That seems like pretty direct advertising to me. There are graphical banners for it and all.
Google do advertise Google services. But they don't advertise their Google Search. Not much point in doing that given that most people (wrongly) know Google as "the" search engine. Tis why 'google' became a verb that nearly cost Google that specific trademark.
Google is an advertising and information company. It uses its search techology to improve and provide the fundamental services offered to its advertising clients. It also uses the information provided by its clients to improve its search technology, thus creating a positive feedback loop. Better information from the clients and the web means better advertising returns, which makes the clients happier to offer more information to Google which improves the information available for advertising campaigns. Continued better advertising revenue for both Google and clients is the result.
Google has its fingers in a lot of other pies, but its bread and butter income is advertising. Its using the the revenue from that to improve it services in other areas and to fund the improved search features.
Sure, there are a lot of other ways you could describe Google but first and foremost they are advertising. Everything else now comes second to that. Google Search is just a feeder for their advertising. Google AdSense allows Google to discover more pages to crawl and also to provide direct (and indirect) market advertising to its clients. Google Sitemaps allows Google to improve its search/crawler technologies which improves the relevance of its Google AdWords clients CPC ads. Look at Google Analytics. Its tightly integrated with Google AdWords for many reasons. Not only to provide companies more info about their campaigns and their site traffic, but also to help Google improve its information about sites, user habits, advertising targetting and so on.
In fact, the popularity of Google Analytics is frightening. Consider that Google is now in a position to be able to track a user across the web far more effectively than they ever could with their Google AdSense placements. I can't think of a single one of my clients that doesn't use Google Analytics in combination with their Google AdWords campaigns now. And most of them don't run Google AdSense on their sites. Combine those sites with Google AdSense with the sites with Google Analytics bugs and you've got a massive amount of information that Google can track to pretty much any and everything they could ever want to about almost every user as they travel across the web.
Yahoo!/Overture and MSN have nothing even remotely close to this sort of information gathering capability. Overture might have their advertising network, but they're picky about the sites they let run their ads and so are gathering a much smaller amount of data. MSN don't even offer an ad campaign like Google AdSense outside of their own network yet. That is coming in the near future, but its a day late as they say. Neither have anything close to Google Analytics that they offer. Even if they did, I don't think it would see the amount of interest that Google Analytics did. The response to Google Analytics was so overwhelming that not even Google expected it. It hadn't provisioned enough servers to handle the load they received and spent at least the first week trying to catch up to and meet demand.
Google has achieved a hell of a lot, and I'm definitely a big Google fan. I can't think of any of their services available to me in New Zealand that I don't use. From GMail to Google AdWords and Google AdSense to Google Base. But I think a lot of people completely miss the fact that Google is out to make money. Lots of money. A lot of geeks disagree with much of what Google has done as a Corporate lately,
As long as the information is true or labeled as opinion and not libelious in anyway, the companies can't shut down someone who is reviewing their product. Look at what happened with Computer Associates tried to put a clause in their EULA that said you weren't allowed to write/publish a bad review of their products.
All this software will allow companies to do is track the reaction of the public to something they do/release/say or any topic they're interested in. I think you'll find this will be used more as a marketing tool than as a way to sue people that voice their dislike of something.
Sorry, forgot my little;-) there. I was referring to his relationship with Melinda with the 'very interested' comment, but wasn't sure if he'd had any coding role on the project.
Bought CP/M for $25,000 then rebranded it and sold 'licenses' for a hell of a profit.:-)
Still, he was a master of BASIC. He developed many BASIC roms for a lot of different machines in the late 70s and early 80s. DOS's BASIC was actually a derivative of much of his early code.
He knew machine code and ASM pretty much inside out for much of the architectures he built a BASIC interpretter for. To be honest though, beyond some of the original BASIC interpretters, and the earliest versions of PC-DOS/MS-DOS, I really cannot think of anything he directly had a hand in. By the time Xenix and OS/2 were on the cards, they'd already hired a decent sized development pool. I don't think he had any hand in developing the Microsoft contributions to those code bases.
I vaguely recall him being very involved in Project Bob, but I can't remember if that was as a developer or just a very interested manager. Not that it matters. Project Bob was dumped in favour of Cairo.
So whats wrong with a local repository and doing network installs of Linux? The repository already has the software configured the way you want it and the net installer just grabs the packages and installs the system. Redhat call it Kickstart. I roll my own based on Ubuntu simply because its easy.
Managing users is simple too. OpenLDAP is a lot more capable than Active Directory in my opinion. Sure, its a bit of a learning curve, but anyone familiar with the fundamentals isn't going to have a problem. On the other hand, my personal preference is for eDirectory combined with dir-xml (Novell Identity Manager). This allows not only all the disparate operating systems but also a huge number of applications to all use a single authentication store (AD, eDirectory, OpenDirectory, OpenLDAP, SunOne... even use a database instead of a directory if you want.)
Sure, if you haven't done it before and aren't familiar with doing it, it might take a bit more time to set up initially than Ghost, but once its setup it is just as easy. And if you really want, why not build images and do an install in a similar vein to the way Gentoo does.
I'm not saying the way you do it now is bad, I'm just saying that it is completely possible to put together something with the same (or close to it) functionality with negligable costs. Any experienced Unix/Linux admin should be able to build the backend quickly and once thats built, any user in the world could start off an install by putting even a crafted floppy disc in a drive (or a CD or a USB stick or any other media the machine can boot from).
Alternatively, make it even faster and keep the OS images on the server and mount them locally. Reboot the machine and any changes by the user outside their home directory (or other intended directory) are wiped clean and fresh immediately. Not hard, done every day in Internet Cafe's and Kiosks.
There has been plenty of legal action taken by authors of code released under the GPL. The problem has been that until recently, no one has ever let it get to court. Its always been settled out of court. That has changed in Europe where German developers have successfully won cases in a court against people that have infringed the GPL. There has also been more popping up around the globe as time goes on. Probably the most obvious and 'in-your-face' case at the moment would be the SCOX vs IBM case.
In regards to SpecOps Labs, it has nothing to do with Linux. Its all about the WINE project. S.O.L tried to release a program called "David" off as their own, but when it was inspected it turned out to be nothing but a really poor obfuscation of Wine. Basically changing the strings in the code, but not much more. And yes, there were steps taking. Technically, S.O.L no longer has permission to access WINE as their license was revoked. Unfortunately I doubt they've actually taken any notice of it given they're in the Phillipines and probably think no "long haired hippy" is going to chase them down and enforce it. Unfortunately for them, they are alleged to have stolen code from CodeWeavers; so in this case there is a significant corporate entity willing to defend their business.
There are probably more details about it, but those two issues of the newsletter are definitely the best places to start. After that, search Google and you can see the massive slagfest of a word fight that was going on back in the middle of 2004. It got pretty heated and very ugly there for a while.
Indeed. I found humor in the fact that SpecOps Labs' acronym is S.O.L.?
Thanks, I needed that. First time I've snorted water out my nose since a family christmas many years back. Even choking like that I was still laughing.:-)
I've decided that in future I'll not read your posts while drinking anything... Just in case.;-)
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You're going to have to download IE7 to use it before you get your hands on Vista. So I turn the question around on you.
Whats the motivation to download IE7 for features I already have with Firefox? Why would my mother or my mothers friends want to use IE7 when they already have the features of IE7 and then some (such as extensions) simply by sticking with Firefox?
IE7 is only going to get a massive user base if MS force it upon us through WindowsUpdate as a "critical update". Otherwise, I don't think we'll see many people bothering to install it. As a result, I would say that the adoption of IE7 won't truly start until the adoption of Vista begins.
So even if IE7 stays on target and gets released this year, most people are going to completely ignore it till next year anyway I suggest.
Already a product from MS for you then. :-) Office Live ;-) Companion to Xbox^H^H^H^H errr Windows Live.
Whats wrong with multiple AV software packages installed?
;-) But multiple AV software is a good idea, and one that I subscribe to on my only Windows machine.
;-) But I'd still prefer to see it on something like a dedicated Nokia IPSO box thats been properly hardened.
I can understand your point with regards to multiple software based firewalls, thats redundant.
Having said that, the 2 I use are AVG and ClamWin. Not exactly bloated in the same way Symantec Norton Internet Security is.
There is no guarantee that a single AV package is going to get all viruses. Just the same that something like Ad-Aware isn't going to get all Malware on its own. So it often gets combined with something like Spybot S&D. In my opinion, it is far better to hedge your bets.
On the flipside, a software firewall is better than nothing, but I personally don't rely on them. Multiple firewalls are pointless and more likely to cause problems that provide a functioning service. So I understand your point in that regard.
Far better to get a machine that is specifically set up for the purpose of providing firewall services and only firewall services. Or, if people must use Windows, get the Windows version of Checkpoint FW-1 instead of Norton Internet Security and do things properly
ClamAV is just a scanner. A good scanner that I've found is often updated before many others, but its just a scanner.
;-)
Most common use for it is to scan email through an MTA or web traffic through Squid. I've also used it to run scans on network mounts via a cronjob in the middle of the night.
The Windows port of it is quite good. But again, its just a scanner and it doesn't offer Live/resident scanning for files opened/closed in the way most other AV packages do. Its only manual scanning. Where it comes in to its own on Windows is that there is a Firefox extension for the Windows port of ClamAV that will scan all downloaded files automatically. I'm not aware of AVG or others easily doing that with Firefox without being set up as a proxy.
Results with ClamAV have been pretty good. My experience has been that its at least as good as something like AVG as far as detection goes. At one of my client sites, mail goes through ClamAV and then f-prot. f-prot has never picked up anything, so I can only assume that ClamAV is performing at least as well as f-prot. For most of my client sites, I (and my clients) trust it enough to use ClamAV on its own.
None of my clients run Windows on their servers (all small companies with very simple infrastructure needs) so I can't personally compare it with something like Symantec or McAfee (or other) products when it comes to email filtering at the server.
As long as people remember ClamAV is just a scanner and will only scan what you explicitly tell it to, when you tell it to, I see no reason not to trust it as you might trust any other piece of AV software available.
I think what makes ClamAV stand out is that its very easy to integrate as a scanning solution for most software. Very simple to add to Squid filters, very simple to add to most MTAs such as Postfix, Sendmail and Qmail. If you're familiar with scripting, not difficult to add to anything thats scriptable.
Does that answer your question?
I direct your attention to http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Con tent&ID=3 and may it help speed up the validation of your local election offices website ;-)
You didn't keep your eye on the ball. Its already a law in the US that all federal websites must be accessible to all persons. Including those with some form of disability (such as blindness, hearing impairment and so on.)
n tent&ID=3
http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Co
Why shouldn't blind people be able to access a website just as easily as a sighted person? In the UK its as good as law that a site be accessible to persons with sight or hearing disabilities. I personally have no problem with it at all. I think its a good thing.
Sites I develop personally, I always make sure I can navigate easily within Lynx or Links. If I can't use the site easily and comprehensively using either of those then I consider the site a failure and either rework the design or restart it from scratch. The benefits far outweigh the disadvantages in my opinion.
Why are people so adverse to advertising in a game?
;-)
I pay a subscription to my satellite TV provider, yet I still get ads on the channels I like to watch. Even in the middle of sporting events. I had to pay for my decoder box and pay my monthly subscription.
Advertising in a game is acceptable to me as long as it is within context. I don't want to see an ad for CocaCola(tm) in the middle of Droknar's Forge in Guild Wars. Or an ad for Gillete Mach3 over the door to the Auction House of Orgrimmar in World of Warcraft.
Running a MMORPG, or any persistant online gaming service, is not cheap. Why shouldn't companies offer advertising to help offset that cost? Especially if its within context. It allows them to ensure that the cost to the consumer is affordable.
I don't see people stop playing Anarchy Online because of the ads. In fact, by allowing advertising, Anarchy Online got a massive influx of players because the advertising allowed the basic game to be offered freely. This extended the life of a game that was starting to slow down.
Also consider that games like Gran Turismo, Project Gotham Racing and many other racing games have had non-dynamic ingame advertising for a long time. Billboards all around the race tracks that have fake or paid for static ads. Doesn't stop you playing the game does it? So what if the fake ads on the ingame billboards now become real advertising space?
Get used to it. Life is expensive. If advertising helps keep a game affordable, is that any worse than advertising keeping my subscription to a channel affordable? You either like the service or you don't.
If you don't want the advertising, offer to pay a premium for ad-free service. But consider how much that premium would have to be to offset the advertising.
Don't get me wrong. I didn't say Google wouldn't do what they can to maximise the value of the company. Its in their own best interests to do that no matter what. Even without the issue of being a publicly traded company.
However, my point was more that Google are less likely to follow the whims of Wallstreet just to make Wallstreet happy. They're going to do things their way as they have always done because that was, and remains, a profitable way for them to do things.
Google looks to its own skin first, Wallstreet can like it or lump it as they wish.
Wallstreet didn't like that Google paid out $90m in a click fraud case... Too bad. It had to be done anyway. And it was probably cheaper to settle that case than to spend all the money on litigating it. Even if they'd won in the end, would the win really have been worth the cost?
Google has some of the best minds in the world working for it. Wallstreet is all about dollars in the immediate future. The people at Google look to the long term I'd suggest.
Agreed. Also remember that Google didn't really want to go public, they were just at the point where they were making so much money that the Feds forced them to.
I think Google's attitude will probably remain that Wallstreet wants Google more than Google wants Wallstreet. They were quite successful and turning a profit, even with their massive expenses, long before the SEC said they had to become a public company.
Google Talk is a full Jabber app, but with voice added as well. XMPP alone should increase its rankings as a good app.
The interface is clean, simple, uncluttered and very straight forward and easy to use. The integration with Gmail is far and away the best Web conversion I have ever seen of any IM client. MSN Webmessenger and the web version of Yahoo! Messenger are no where near close to being as good as the Gmail Chat version of Google Talk.
Then consider that any Jabber network can chat with people using Google Talk. If you are connected via jabber.org (or any other Jabber network) you can chat with gtalk users just by adding them to your list. Don't need to use any extra protocols or plugins.
Then consider the future proofing of using XMPP over creating yet another IM protocol. XMPP is exceptionally modular and the clients talk to the servers in exactly the same language that the servers talk to each other in. So adding new services/features on the server side won't always require a client upgrade. Not to mention that XMPP is unburdened by patent issues and the license is pretty damn good by most people's opinion.
Also consider connecting with the other networks. Google will be able to easily implement the shared connection with AOL simply because all thats required is a plugin on the server side. The client wouldn't need to be upgraded. If in future MSN and Yahoo! decide to stop trying to hedge their share of the IM pie, communication with their networks would also be exceptionally easy.
Jabber has a huge following in the corporate environment. Businesses like it because they can control it to meet their own policies. This is also especially true of financial organisations. Now those organisations can extend their network to chat with Google Talk connected clients/partners/associates without having to give up that control internally.
Google Talk is a fantastic step in the right direction and the fact that Google even donated libjingle to the Jabber community as a whole means that everyone has gotten something beneficial out of it. I don't doubt Google will offer more in the future too.
And none of this mentions the fact that even though Google is very much an advertising company, there is no advertising at all in the Google Talk client. Not even Microsoft, AOL or Yahoo! can make that claim. They're not even primarily advertising companies in the way Google is.
Google Talk is more than just a simple or bland client. I gave up using all others when it was released simply because of how clean the interface is. I don't need graphical smilies or useless animations in my chats. They don't convey anything I cant achieve with old school text emoticons in the first place.
I logged in to MSN Messenger the other day for the first time in a long while. I wanted to send a message to my cousin in a different city who doesn't use Gmail. I was absolutely taken back by how cluttered the interface is. So many features of no value at all. Many of which can't even be turned off. Not to mention how bulky the interface just 'felt'. It was like going from a sports car back to a family sedan.
No thanks. I'll take Google Talk over any other vendor client on the market today. I even prefer it over the old favourites like GAIM and its like.
Yes, I'm very familiar with the history of the Mozilla Foundation, Netscape, AOL and TimeWarner. I owned a *small share* of that history at one point.
Now go back and re-read my original post and see if you can actually get the meaning this time round. Heres a hint, its about the poster's assertion that this will help promote Linux to AOL customers. Not about promoting Firefox or OpenOffice.org. They were just examples.
Sorry, but where the hell does Linux come from in this argument? Google uses Linux on their servers, but are in no way an evangelist for Linux in any way other than "Yeah, we use Linux" type statements.
You'd be far better off saying that this is good in that it might promote Mozilla Firefox and OpenOffice.org to AOL customers. 2 products that Google is actively promoting and helping with development on. Very little of what Google does with Linux is ever seen outside of Google.
This is not, was not and will not ever be about Linux. There is absolutely no justification for any such link or hypothesis.
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The desktop is dead. Long live the browser!
DOM3? So not only do I have to now check for the different implementations of the XMLHttpRequest that each browser uniquely puts together, I also have to use DOM3 Load/Save to get the same functionality to work properly on Opera?
;-)
I'd rather they fixed their XMLHttpRequest object myself. Its bad enough fudging things to work properly on both IE and Firefox, but also Opera and Safari? Screw that. Gave up even trying. Haven't (and won't) even tried Konqueror given the state of Safari.
DOM3 Load/Save might be nice one day, but before implementing the cool new latest standards, it'd be nice if they fixed the defacto standards that most people are starting to use now. DOM3 is miles away from general adoption because at the moment its just not needed. On the flipside, the XMLHttpRequest object is in daily use. It may not be a W3C standard, but its becoming common enough now that Opera would really do well to fix it properly.
Even aside from that. The GUI just sucks anyway.
Sorry, but IBM only started out as the primary developer. The Eclipse Foundation is now substantially more than just IBM. There are a lot of other very big players involved with Eclipse including CA, Intel, BEA, Borland, Sybase, Zend among others.
Saying Eclipse is dominated by IBM is like saying Linux development is dominated by Redhat. Sure, they're big players when it comes to contributions, but they don't make up the majority on their own.
They do? Can't say I've ever noticed that. I see KOffice and Gnome Office (Abiword, Gnumeric and so on) getting more praise than OOo. In fact, most of what I read about OpenOffice.org is complaints about its speed (or lack there of) and its cluttered interface. From the OSS community, its about how gawdawful the code itself is. Bloated, difficult to follow, full of legacy crap thats so tangled that its difficult to decypher.
The only ones I seen praise OpenOffice.org are usually those with some sort of investment in the platform. Whether it be as a contributer or because they are relying on it in some way already.
Theres a simple solution to that. Its called bandwidth provisioning and using QoS/ToS to ensure that VoIP traffic has a guaranteed minimum bandwidth priority over other traffic. Its not Cisco's fault, its the network admins for not configuring their switches or edge routers properly.
Oh, and to my knowledge, google does no direct advertising themselves. A real product doesn't need to.
Strange... I get paid by Google to advertise their Google AdSense program and their Firefox toolbar. That seems like pretty direct advertising to me. There are graphical banners for it and all.
Google do advertise Google services. But they don't advertise their Google Search. Not much point in doing that given that most people (wrongly) know Google as "the" search engine. Tis why 'google' became a verb that nearly cost Google that specific trademark.
Google is an advertising and information company. It uses its search techology to improve and provide the fundamental services offered to its advertising clients. It also uses the information provided by its clients to improve its search technology, thus creating a positive feedback loop. Better information from the clients and the web means better advertising returns, which makes the clients happier to offer more information to Google which improves the information available for advertising campaigns. Continued better advertising revenue for both Google and clients is the result.
Google has its fingers in a lot of other pies, but its bread and butter income is advertising. Its using the the revenue from that to improve it services in other areas and to fund the improved search features.
Sure, there are a lot of other ways you could describe Google but first and foremost they are advertising. Everything else now comes second to that. Google Search is just a feeder for their advertising. Google AdSense allows Google to discover more pages to crawl and also to provide direct (and indirect) market advertising to its clients. Google Sitemaps allows Google to improve its search/crawler technologies which improves the relevance of its Google AdWords clients CPC ads. Look at Google Analytics. Its tightly integrated with Google AdWords for many reasons. Not only to provide companies more info about their campaigns and their site traffic, but also to help Google improve its information about sites, user habits, advertising targetting and so on.
In fact, the popularity of Google Analytics is frightening. Consider that Google is now in a position to be able to track a user across the web far more effectively than they ever could with their Google AdSense placements. I can't think of a single one of my clients that doesn't use Google Analytics in combination with their Google AdWords campaigns now. And most of them don't run Google AdSense on their sites. Combine those sites with Google AdSense with the sites with Google Analytics bugs and you've got a massive amount of information that Google can track to pretty much any and everything they could ever want to about almost every user as they travel across the web.
Yahoo!/Overture and MSN have nothing even remotely close to this sort of information gathering capability. Overture might have their advertising network, but they're picky about the sites they let run their ads and so are gathering a much smaller amount of data. MSN don't even offer an ad campaign like Google AdSense outside of their own network yet. That is coming in the near future, but its a day late as they say. Neither have anything close to Google Analytics that they offer. Even if they did, I don't think it would see the amount of interest that Google Analytics did. The response to Google Analytics was so overwhelming that not even Google expected it. It hadn't provisioned enough servers to handle the load they received and spent at least the first week trying to catch up to and meet demand.
Google has achieved a hell of a lot, and I'm definitely a big Google fan. I can't think of any of their services available to me in New Zealand that I don't use. From GMail to Google AdWords and Google AdSense to Google Base. But I think a lot of people completely miss the fact that Google is out to make money. Lots of money. A lot of geeks disagree with much of what Google has done as a Corporate lately,
Depends on what pressure the glass in the windows has been tested to and which ocean you drop it in ;-)
As long as the information is true or labeled as opinion and not libelious in anyway, the companies can't shut down someone who is reviewing their product. Look at what happened with Computer Associates tried to put a clause in their EULA that said you weren't allowed to write/publish a bad review of their products.
All this software will allow companies to do is track the reaction of the public to something they do/release/say or any topic they're interested in. I think you'll find this will be used more as a marketing tool than as a way to sue people that voice their dislike of something.
Sorry, forgot my little ;-) there. I was referring to his relationship with Melinda with the 'very interested' comment, but wasn't sure if he'd had any coding role on the project.
Bought CP/M for $25,000 then rebranded it and sold 'licenses' for a hell of a profit. :-)
Still, he was a master of BASIC. He developed many BASIC roms for a lot of different machines in the late 70s and early 80s. DOS's BASIC was actually a derivative of much of his early code.
He knew machine code and ASM pretty much inside out for much of the architectures he built a BASIC interpretter for. To be honest though, beyond some of the original BASIC interpretters, and the earliest versions of PC-DOS/MS-DOS, I really cannot think of anything he directly had a hand in. By the time Xenix and OS/2 were on the cards, they'd already hired a decent sized development pool. I don't think he had any hand in developing the Microsoft contributions to those code bases.
I vaguely recall him being very involved in Project Bob, but I can't remember if that was as a developer or just a very interested manager. Not that it matters. Project Bob was dumped in favour of Cairo.
Who says they're running the GNU system? :-) They could just be using a Redhat kernel that loads their rendering software directly ;-)
Still, it wasn't my phrasing, it was from the original article.
So whats wrong with a local repository and doing network installs of Linux? The repository already has the software configured the way you want it and the net installer just grabs the packages and installs the system. Redhat call it Kickstart. I roll my own based on Ubuntu simply because its easy.
Managing users is simple too. OpenLDAP is a lot more capable than Active Directory in my opinion. Sure, its a bit of a learning curve, but anyone familiar with the fundamentals isn't going to have a problem. On the other hand, my personal preference is for eDirectory combined with dir-xml (Novell Identity Manager). This allows not only all the disparate operating systems but also a huge number of applications to all use a single authentication store (AD, eDirectory, OpenDirectory, OpenLDAP, SunOne... even use a database instead of a directory if you want.)
Sure, if you haven't done it before and aren't familiar with doing it, it might take a bit more time to set up initially than Ghost, but once its setup it is just as easy. And if you really want, why not build images and do an install in a similar vein to the way Gentoo does.
I'm not saying the way you do it now is bad, I'm just saying that it is completely possible to put together something with the same (or close to it) functionality with negligable costs. Any experienced Unix/Linux admin should be able to build the backend quickly and once thats built, any user in the world could start off an install by putting even a crafted floppy disc in a drive (or a CD or a USB stick or any other media the machine can boot from).
Alternatively, make it even faster and keep the OS images on the server and mount them locally. Reboot the machine and any changes by the user outside their home directory (or other intended directory) are wiped clean and fresh immediately. Not hard, done every day in Internet Cafe's and Kiosks.
There has been plenty of legal action taken by authors of code released under the GPL. The problem has been that until recently, no one has ever let it get to court. Its always been settled out of court. That has changed in Europe where German developers have successfully won cases in a court against people that have infringed the GPL. There has also been more popping up around the globe as time goes on. Probably the most obvious and 'in-your-face' case at the moment would be the SCOX vs IBM case.
0 Steps%20Up
In regards to SpecOps Labs, it has nothing to do with Linux. Its all about the WINE project. S.O.L tried to release a program called "David" off as their own, but when it was inspected it turned out to be nothing but a really poor obfuscation of Wine. Basically changing the strings in the code, but not much more. And yes, there were steps taking. Technically, S.O.L no longer has permission to access WINE as their license was revoked. Unfortunately I doubt they've actually taken any notice of it given they're in the Phillipines and probably think no "long haired hippy" is going to chase them down and enforce it. Unfortunately for them, they are alleged to have stolen code from CodeWeavers; so in this case there is a significant corporate entity willing to defend their business.
Here is WineHQ's initial annoyance at the issue.
http://www.winehq.org/site?issue=222
And here is where it was last at between WineHQ and S.O.L as far as I am aware.
http://www.winehq.org/?issue=241#SpecOps%20Labs%2
There are probably more details about it, but those two issues of the newsletter are definitely the best places to start. After that, search Google and you can see the massive slagfest of a word fight that was going on back in the middle of 2004. It got pretty heated and very ugly there for a while.
Thanks, I needed that. First time I've snorted water out my nose since a family christmas many years back. Even choking like that I was still laughing. :-)
I've decided that in future I'll not read your posts while drinking anything... Just in case. ;-)