No, I don't work for Microsoft. And I didn't ever think I'd say this about Office, but this upgrade comes with a vastly improved user experience. The grouping of functions on the toolbar is very good, and toolbars that contextually adjusts to the situation hand-holds me trough things that were always (in my opinion) hard to find and do. This, together with much better default templates and styles than before, actually made Office a little more fun to use.
And one minor improvement is actually quite important: The 65,000 rows limit of Excel spreadsheets is now gone.
Perhaps not exactly what Microsoft intended when they released the Internet Explorer Administration Kit
I'd say it is the other way around. This is exactly what Microsoft intended: Let companies and users make and distribute customized versions of Explorer, and by doing this help Microsoft regain market share. The fact that two out of the top ten internet sites now does this, must be great for the IE team (if not for the Windows Live Search team).
If it takes longer than a second, the baby's going out with the bathwater.
Eudora's built in search is powered by technology from X1, makers of the commercial X1 Desktop Search (X1 is the basis of Yahoo's Desktop Search). X1 is closed source, and even though the press release doesn't say anything about it, I bet that the search part of Eudora 7.0 won't be open sourced. Open source or not: X1 is FAST, and it beats every other desktop search (for Windows) that I know of.
Re:Why is the processor seen as a ripped-off desig
on
China to Make $125 PCs
·
· Score: 1
You're kidding, right? Did you actually look through those comments? There are numerous accusations.
I admit that I wasn't clear on what I meant -- I didn't think about the comments, but about the wording in the lead text.
China is constantly running afoul of international copyright and patent laws, and they always deny it, even when the evidence is overwhelming.
I know this, and I didn't mean to present Hu's words as evidence of anything. I just thought he used some colorful (and funny) metaphors when trying to explain that they're innocent:-)
Why is the processor seen as a ripped-off design?
on
China to Make $125 PCs
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
In earlier coverage on Slashdot of this chip (see the initial announcement, the follow up and the announcement of a 64-bit variant), at least in the coverage of the 32-bit Dragon version of the chip, no one blamed the chinese for ripping of anything. I even remember someone saying that the MIPS specification were free to use for anyone, as long as they paid around $20 for access to the specs. What has happened since then, and what is different in this case from, say, AMD cloning til Intel instruction set?
The principal investigator of the Godson program, Hu Weiwu, have some colorful comparions to houses and bedrooms when he tries to explain why he means that the Godson-2 processor does not infringe on any patents or intellectual properties.
Reading your reply to my comment, I honestly don't understand what I wrote that deserve the aggressive tone. I guess you'll reply to this by telling me that's because I'm an idiot.
Yes, Time Machine may be -- deep down -- somewhat like VMS's versioning system of old. But isn't that missing the point completely? From the look of it, this is the first time versioning has been done understandable and usable for the masses. See the quicktime video on Apples web site. Look how the versioning is associated to a specific application, not a file or a file type. That paradigm shift alone makes Time Machine very special indeed.
I think the reason is much simpler and not conspiratoric at all: Adobe sells an incredibly expensive ($299) version of the Adobe PDF software which, among other things, adds "Save to PDF" capabilities to Microsoft Office. I guess that a lot of licenses are sold on the Office Save to PDF functionality alone. With PDF writing built into Office, their market would be marginalized.
Personally I having Save to PDF built into Office would've been good for the PDF standard, and find it difficult to sympathize with Adobe on this one.
But would you be willing to pay for the quality of a VHS/TV based release? I'm not sure that I would.
I remember in the early days of DVD, the market was flooded by VHS based DVD tranfers -- lo-res 4:3 pictures with 2.0 stereo sound. I don't think anyone would accept this quality today, even clearly branded and at a bargain price today, when you can pick up a fairly recent and in every aspect high quality DVD such as Return of the King for less than $10.
None of the digital movie download services I know of lets the user download the movie and then burn it to DVD. Apparently this has to do with CSS and burnable DVDs (you can't encrypt or encrypt properly burned DVDs). The last I heard of this was that there was work on a new version of CSS that would let you burn DVDs yourself, but that there might be compatibility issues with older DVD players. [In the meantime the porn industry chose its own encryption format which apparently works with existing players.]
Does this kiosk development mean that the new version of CSS is ready? If so DVD burning could be available for online digital download services as well. As I see it they're held back by the simple fact that connecting a computer to a TV is not as easy as putting a DVD into the player.
I agree. That's what would make me a happy customer too. But I think you'll see that if you're thinking of movies produced within the Hollywood studio system, the same movies -- or fewer -- that what's available today on DVD will be available here. You have the same issues with digitizing movies from original prints/negatives here as you have with DVD releases, so the basic costs will be the same whether you think of using the digital version for DVDs or digital download.
Re:Ask.com: Google's up-and-coming rival?!
on
Ask.com's Rising Star
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Would you say MSN Search was _not_ a competitor of Yahoo Search, just because of the fact that they shared the ad system? (MSN Search used Overture (Yahoo) Ads until recently, when they in the US switched to their own AdCenter) I think the article indicates that Ask won't be using Google Ads indefintely, but that they'll contractually obliged to continue using Google for quite som time. From the article:
its ads are provided by that much-larger competitor, in a deal that extends through the end of next year.
There's no economy in search ads before you have a large number of advertisers. This is because of the auction driven pricing and the fact that you buy keywords and search phrases. So before you're big enough on your own, you need the scale of a bigger network to get any revenues to speak of.
So shall they make it completely on their own, they need to grow. That's why they, in my eyes, are a Google Competitor, even though Google (for the time being) earns money on their success.
PS! One irony: Ask tries to monetize Image Searches with Google Ads, an area where Google is not trying to earn money yet. So the irony goes both ways, apparently.
You might say Microsoft's good at tedious, but you have to hand it to them: This time they're really trying something new. Where the other search engines tries to achieve quality and relevance trough variations of link cardinality, anchor text, page rank (how many and how highly valued pages links to a page), etc., Microsoft's trying neural networks and some kind of "artificial intelligence".
So far MSN Search/Windows Live Search is worst of the three big players when it comes to relevance. But they're not too bad, either, and I think there's been a lot of improvement since they launched their beta last year (the beta was incredibly bad). If this "self learning" idea works out, MSN Search very well could become the best engine of them all.
I'd also like to point out that relevance is a subjective matter, and sometimes the correct answer to a query might not come from the web index at all. Microsoft already emphasizes answers from Encarta when suitable (Google and Yahoo is doing similar things), as seen in this example: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=what+is+chimp anzee&FORM=QBRE
I don't know how FairPlay works, but with Windows DRM it's possible to distribute a protected media file. When you try to play this file, you're automatically sent to a web page where you can pay to "unlock" the file.
I don't know if P2P built into the OS makes any sense, but certainly it makes sense to build it into iTunes (the application). Some people have claimed that Apple's margin on iTunes content is razor thin. I don't know whether that's true or not, but I certainly know that bandwidth -- when you want the best possible access to your customers, no matter where they are -- doesn't come cheap.
So adding P2P to iTunes could be one area where Apple could improve their margins. I guess the credit system would be a way to secure that people actually kept on sharing their files after they were downloaded/bought from iTunes (the store).
* Moved the banner ad from Internet dominance to second-class status.
The poster you call a loonie has a great point and that's that Google has become an advertising company first and foremost. That's why I'll bet you'll see them move banner ads back to first-class status if that's what'll increase growth for them.
Take a look at this: Not only is Google bringing Flash Ads to their AdSense network; now also video ads has been spotted on AdSense sites. Also take a look at yesterday's articles about Google providing an AdSense products for parked domains.
In short, Google's a business now -- and what they do first and foremost is things that'll improve their ad business. Even if that means bringing back the banner ad in an ever more annoying form than before.
Complaining about Google being default in Firefox is Microsofts job (or Yahoo or someone else). However, if Microsoft had complained about that they would have _had_ to make it optional in IE7 as well. So, Microsoft kept quiet about that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think anyone has much to cry foul for when it comes to whoever's the default seach provider in Firefox. That's because it seems as if you've got enough cash, you can buy the default search provider spot in Firefox. Google bought this spot for Europe and the US, and Yahoo bought the same for the Asian versions of Firefox.
I don't think you can buy this spot in Internet Explorer 7. Whether this is monopolistic practice or not: This will make the race for becoming the number one search engine interesting again.
Sometimes it's very satisfying to obnoxiously say "I told you so". Because this is basically what I said would happen in a comment here january last year (I wrote, among other things, about sites adapting their design -- if not wording -- to Google).
Almost all of today's search engines also uses the content of anchor text (i.e. the text on the links that points to a page) when you search for something. Google has admitted that the linking of the terms "miserable failure" and "failure" to this particular biography page, is caused by link bombing -- i.e. an organized practical joke, where several pages (maybe hundreds) have been created. On these pages there are links to this biography page, and the link text (anchor text) uses the words failure or miserable failures.
If you're serious with your argument (that maybe Google's right), you have to be one of the biggest Google apologists I've ever heard of. Can that company do nothing wrong in your eyes? In my eyes they can. They're just humans, like the rest of us.
What search engine I do use? It depends actually. I use Google for international searches, but for local searches (I'm not American) I use local search engines. I also use Yahoo search a lot after installing the Yahoo toolbar (mostly because of the My Web functionality). But in Firefox I've also installed the MSN Search Mycroft extension. The quality of MSN Search increases all the time, actually, and given the rate of improvement I believe that this is the search engine that can -- in a year or two -- match or surpass Google quality wise.
Is there no limit to the paranoia of Slashdot readers? How is that error more intentionally incorrect than Google's top result for the search term miserable failure (it points to George W. Bush's biography page on the White House's web server).
Relevance tuning of search engines is not easy at all. Errors like these creep up all the time. If you want some background info on the inner workings of MSN Search, and why errors like these happen, see Robert Scoble's somewhat geeky but very interesting video interview with two MSN Search Guys (it's an hour long interview).
Even though Google is not reselling the books in Google Print, they're profiting from it -- because they have traffic to sell text ads on.
There's one thing I don't understand in what you say: You say that I can't steal pictures off the internet to print in my newspaper. Why can't I? There's plenty of high-res pictures on the net, that would print well in a newspaper.
I'm not American, so I'm not familiar with your legal system. But isn't it so that what's fair use or not is determined on a "per medium" basis, i.e. what you can do with pictures on the Internet (post thumbnails on your own site) is different from what you can do in a newspaper (printing a smaller version of a picture from another newspaper, unless it's in facsimile form, is not fair use)?
If so I don't see that you couldn't say that what's fair use of web content could be different from what's fair use when it comes to transferring content between mediums.
The Google Print service is cool and even useful, but the more I think about the service, the more I see some problematic points. One problematic issue is Eric Schmidths comparison of web and print, where he in an almost childish, threatening manner says something that could be translated to: "If you don't allow us to do this, we won't do the other thing either (web search)"
The big difference between indexing the web and indexing books is the senders intention: When I publish my web pages, I make them electronically accessible. I want them to be found, I want them to be read and I acknowledge the fact that the content has to be transmitted electronically to another party for this to happen.
What Google does with Google Print, however, is to take content from a medium (books) that probably never were intended to be transmitted in this manner. I think that's a big difference from crawling the web, and the main reason why I think Google Print is problematic no matter how useful the service is in itself.
Another strange statement from Google is that they say that a publisher could ask for a book to be removed. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't Google ask for permission?
Now, people argue that Google Print isn't reselling the content unless the copyright has expired. There's no way to access the full text of the books. What we should remember, though, is that Google isn't in the business of selling books -- they're in the business of creating traffic to sell text ads on.
Google Print is one way to create such traffic. And to create the traffic in this particular case, Google needs someone else's copyrighted work. Perhaps if Google proposed that they'd share some of the revenues from Google Print the whole lawsuit would go away, but I don't see that happening, though.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I don't work for Microsoft. And I didn't ever think I'd say this about Office, but this upgrade comes with a vastly improved user experience. The grouping of functions on the toolbar is very good, and toolbars that contextually adjusts to the situation hand-holds me trough things that were always (in my opinion) hard to find and do. This, together with much better default templates and styles than before, actually made Office a little more fun to use.
And one minor improvement is actually quite important: The 65,000 rows limit of Excel spreadsheets is now gone.
I know this, and I didn't mean to present Hu's words as evidence of anything. I just thought he used some colorful (and funny) metaphors when trying to explain that they're innocent
In earlier coverage on Slashdot of this chip (see the initial announcement, the follow up and the announcement of a 64-bit variant), at least in the coverage of the 32-bit Dragon version of the chip, no one blamed the chinese for ripping of anything. I even remember someone saying that the MIPS specification were free to use for anyone, as long as they paid around $20 for access to the specs. What has happened since then, and what is different in this case from, say, AMD cloning til Intel instruction set?
The principal investigator of the Godson program, Hu Weiwu, have some colorful comparions to houses and bedrooms when he tries to explain why he means that the Godson-2 processor does not infringe on any patents or intellectual properties.
Reading your reply to my comment, I honestly don't understand what I wrote that deserve the aggressive tone. I guess you'll reply to this by telling me that's because I'm an idiot.
Yes, Time Machine may be -- deep down -- somewhat like VMS's versioning system of old. But isn't that missing the point completely? From the look of it, this is the first time versioning has been done understandable and usable for the masses. See the quicktime video on Apples web site. Look how the versioning is associated to a specific application, not a file or a file type. That paradigm shift alone makes Time Machine very special indeed.
Isn't this exactly what the All Party Parlamentaric Group in the UK is proposing?
I think the reason is much simpler and not conspiratoric at all: Adobe sells an incredibly expensive ($299) version of the Adobe PDF software which, among other things, adds "Save to PDF" capabilities to Microsoft Office. I guess that a lot of licenses are sold on the Office Save to PDF functionality alone. With PDF writing built into Office, their market would be marginalized.
Personally I having Save to PDF built into Office would've been good for the PDF standard, and find it difficult to sympathize with Adobe on this one.
But would you be willing to pay for the quality of a VHS/TV based release? I'm not sure that I would.
I remember in the early days of DVD, the market was flooded by VHS based DVD tranfers -- lo-res 4:3 pictures with 2.0 stereo sound. I don't think anyone would accept this quality today, even clearly branded and at a bargain price today, when you can pick up a fairly recent and in every aspect high quality DVD such as Return of the King for less than $10.
None of the digital movie download services I know of lets the user download the movie and then burn it to DVD. Apparently this has to do with CSS and burnable DVDs (you can't encrypt or encrypt properly burned DVDs). The last I heard of this was that there was work on a new version of CSS that would let you burn DVDs yourself, but that there might be compatibility issues with older DVD players. [In the meantime the porn industry chose its own encryption format which apparently works with existing players.]
Does this kiosk development mean that the new version of CSS is ready? If so DVD burning could be available for online digital download services as well. As I see it they're held back by the simple fact that connecting a computer to a TV is not as easy as putting a DVD into the player.
I agree. That's what would make me a happy customer too. But I think you'll see that if you're thinking of movies produced within the Hollywood studio system, the same movies -- or fewer -- that what's available today on DVD will be available here. You have the same issues with digitizing movies from original prints/negatives here as you have with DVD releases, so the basic costs will be the same whether you think of using the digital version for DVDs or digital download.
There's no economy in search ads before you have a large number of advertisers. This is because of the auction driven pricing and the fact that you buy keywords and search phrases. So before you're big enough on your own, you need the scale of a bigger network to get any revenues to speak of.
So shall they make it completely on their own, they need to grow. That's why they, in my eyes, are a Google Competitor, even though Google (for the time being) earns money on their success.
PS! One irony: Ask tries to monetize Image Searches with Google Ads, an area where Google is not trying to earn money yet. So the irony goes both ways, apparently.
You might say Microsoft's good at tedious, but you have to hand it to them: This time they're really trying something new. Where the other search engines tries to achieve quality and relevance trough variations of link cardinality, anchor text, page rank (how many and how highly valued pages links to a page), etc., Microsoft's trying neural networks and some kind of "artificial intelligence".
2 /483846.aspx (Robert Scoble's video inteview with the guys behind the search engine).
p anzee&FORM=QBRE
s et=1 and the image search http://www.live.com/#q=chimpanzee&scope=images&lod =2&page=results for examples.
So far MSN Search/Windows Live Search is worst of the three big players when it comes to relevance. But they're not too bad, either, and I think there's been a lot of improvement since they launched their beta last year (the beta was incredibly bad). If this "self learning" idea works out, MSN Search very well could become the best engine of them all.
See http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=2273 (Search Engine Watch) and http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/10/2
I'd also like to point out that relevance is a subjective matter, and sometimes the correct answer to a query might not come from the web index at all. Microsoft already emphasizes answers from Encarta when suitable (Google and Yahoo is doing similar things), as seen in this example: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=what+is+chim
I think we'll see more similar stuff from MSN Search in the future. Also, Microsoft seems to be the only one interested in experimenting with the search interface on a major service, as can bee seen on their live.com site -- see http://www.live.com/#q=what%20is%20chimpanzee&off
(Yahoo also has an interesting interface experiment going on an obscure part of an almost forgotten search engine: http://livesearch.alltheweb.com/)
My point is quite simply that what they're doing may be tedious, but this time they're also trying some fresh ideas.
I don't know how FairPlay works, but with Windows DRM it's possible to distribute a protected media file. When you try to play this file, you're automatically sent to a web page where you can pay to "unlock" the file.
I don't know if P2P built into the OS makes any sense, but certainly it makes sense to build it into iTunes (the application). Some people have claimed that Apple's margin on iTunes content is razor thin. I don't know whether that's true or not, but I certainly know that bandwidth -- when you want the best possible access to your customers, no matter where they are -- doesn't come cheap.
So adding P2P to iTunes could be one area where Apple could improve their margins. I guess the credit system would be a way to secure that people actually kept on sharing their files after they were downloaded/bought from iTunes (the store).
It's an interesting idea (if it's true).
That's why I'll bet you'll see them move banner ads back to first-class status if that's what'll increase growth for them.
Take a look at this: Not only is Google bringing Flash Ads to their AdSense network; now also video ads has been spotted on AdSense sites. Also take a look at yesterday's articles about Google providing an AdSense products for parked domains.
In short, Google's a business now -- and what they do first and foremost is things that'll improve their ad business. Even if that means bringing back the banner ad in an ever more annoying form than before.
I don't think you can buy this spot in Internet Explorer 7. Whether this is monopolistic practice or not: This will make the race for becoming the number one search engine interesting again.
Sometimes it's very satisfying to obnoxiously say "I told you so". Because this is basically what I said would happen in a comment here january last year (I wrote, among other things, about sites adapting their design -- if not wording -- to Google).
Google has a post on it's blog explaining why this happened.
Almost all of today's search engines also uses the content of anchor text (i.e. the text on the links that points to a page) when you search for something. Google has admitted that the linking of the terms "miserable failure" and "failure" to this particular biography page, is caused by link bombing -- i.e. an organized practical joke, where several pages (maybe hundreds) have been created. On these pages there are links to this biography page, and the link text (anchor text) uses the words failure or miserable failures.
If you're serious with your argument (that maybe Google's right), you have to be one of the biggest Google apologists I've ever heard of. Can that company do nothing wrong in your eyes? In my eyes they can. They're just humans, like the rest of us.
What search engine I do use? It depends actually. I use Google for international searches, but for local searches (I'm not American) I use local search engines. I also use Yahoo search a lot after installing the Yahoo toolbar (mostly because of the My Web functionality). But in Firefox I've also installed the MSN Search Mycroft extension. The quality of MSN Search increases all the time, actually, and given the rate of improvement I believe that this is the search engine that can -- in a year or two -- match or surpass Google quality wise.
Is there no limit to the paranoia of Slashdot readers? How is that error more intentionally incorrect than Google's top result for the search term miserable failure (it points to George W. Bush's biography page on the White House's web server).
Relevance tuning of search engines is not easy at all. Errors like these creep up all the time. If you want some background info on the inner workings of MSN Search, and why errors like these happen, see Robert Scoble's somewhat geeky but very interesting video interview with two MSN Search Guys (it's an hour long interview).
Even though Google is not reselling the books in Google Print, they're profiting from it -- because they have traffic to sell text ads on.
There's one thing I don't understand in what you say: You say that I can't steal pictures off the internet to print in my newspaper. Why can't I? There's plenty of high-res pictures on the net, that would print well in a newspaper.
I'm not American, so I'm not familiar with your legal system. But isn't it so that what's fair use or not is determined on a "per medium" basis, i.e. what you can do with pictures on the Internet (post thumbnails on your own site) is different from what you can do in a newspaper (printing a smaller version of a picture from another newspaper, unless it's in facsimile form, is not fair use)?
If so I don't see that you couldn't say that what's fair use of web content could be different from what's fair use when it comes to transferring content between mediums.
The Google Print service is cool and even useful, but the more I think about the service, the more I see some problematic points. One problematic issue is Eric Schmidths comparison of web and print, where he in an almost childish, threatening manner says something that could be translated to: "If you don't allow us to do this, we won't do the other thing either (web search)"
The big difference between indexing the web and indexing books is the senders intention: When I publish my web pages, I make them electronically accessible. I want them to be found, I want them to be read and I acknowledge the fact that the content has to be transmitted electronically to another party for this to happen.
What Google does with Google Print, however, is to take content from a medium (books) that probably never were intended to be transmitted in this manner. I think that's a big difference from crawling the web, and the main reason why I think Google Print is problematic no matter how useful the service is in itself.
Another strange statement from Google is that they say that a publisher could ask for a book to be removed. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't Google ask for permission?
Now, people argue that Google Print isn't reselling the content unless the copyright has expired. There's no way to access the full text of the books. What we should remember, though, is that Google isn't in the business of selling books -- they're in the business of creating traffic to sell text ads on.
Google Print is one way to create such traffic. And to create the traffic in this particular case, Google needs someone else's copyrighted work. Perhaps if Google proposed that they'd share some of the revenues from Google Print the whole lawsuit would go away, but I don't see that happening, though.
Yeah, a neanderthal, and there's evidence to back up your claim too...
http://www.tarmo.fi/arc/monkeydance.mpeg