The editor (Alice Hill of RealTechNews) seems to misinterpret -- or overstate -- the reviewers conclusion.
From what I can see, David Johnston actually says that Writer is comparable to or better than Word (this from a reviewer that actually thinks lack of features [Gramamar Checking] is a Good Thing), but notes that PowerPoint wins over Impress. He also seems wary of using Calc due to compatiblity issues with Excel. In other words: It doesn't seem like OpenOffice kicks Microsoft Office's around the block at all.
If anything, it's snapping at Office's heels a litle annoyingly.
I've seen a couple of projects on the net trying to achieve this. The obstacle always seems to be speed: Distributed P2P searching won't give near instantaneous answers like Google and Yahoo does.
But the idea is intriguing. What I've been thinking is that if something like that should be made, it should be done as a part of Firefox. Every page you visit could be indexed by Firefox. Not any other pages. There's not a crawler involved, because you're the crawler: Your surfing habits decides which pages are indexed and which are not.
Now think about BitTorrent: The more people sharing the same file, the faster you can download it. Imagine if the same applied to your distributed search engine: Often and much visited pages would have a high distribution, and would therefore "be more searchable" and therefore automatically be ranked highly.
With this you'd get a search engine where pages could be ranked according to popularity and freshness in a way that ordinary search engines cannot do. It would be a kind of social bookmarking service for search.
Um, idealism *is*, essentially, what's making Google rich.
...and...
What I see in Google is a company doing the best they can given limited resources.
I know I'm gonna blow all my good karma on this thread. But you can't be serious when you say that Google is a company that's doing the best they can given limited resources? Google is now as near as you can come a company without resource limits at all. Just a couple of days ago they capitalized stock worth four billion dollars.
So it sure isn't cash that holds them back when they prioritize Windows; that mechanism is called capitalism. I'd say Google's mode is now trying to do 'good enough' with near limitless resources.
As I said in my original post: I'm as capitalistic as the next guy, and I see nothing wrong in doing business this way. That's how almost everyone is doing business. What puzzles me is that we Slashdotters seems to view Googles capitalism as idealism, something capitalism seldom is.
Don't write up Lucene just because they're not using Lucene for the site search. Lucene is good. I've only used it on my laptop to index a couple of hundred thousand news articles, but even on a laptop Lucene performs well.
Take a look at http://www.theserverside.com/ - the enterprise java community. Their search is powered by Lucene. It's pretty fast and a very capable site search.
You also have open source projects, such as Beagle (the desktop search for Gnome), that uses the.Net version of Lucene. Lookout, a search plugin for Outlook (recently bought by Microsoft), also uses.Net Lucene for the indexing and searching.
Google on the other hand releases specs and APIs to work with the system and they don't care which platform you happen to be running on.
Google don't care which platform I'm running on? Then why is Google Earth, Google Desktop 2 and Google Talk not available on any other platform than Windows?
And to make matters worse: Have you tried using Google Desktop 2 on a Windows computer where Opera is the default browser? The indexing starts but when you try to open a search window, you get a message that your browser is not supported and that Google Desktop probably won't work as expected for you.
I'm not dissing Googles products here, I merely want to point out that Google are not as platform agnostic and idealistic that people here seem to think they are. And why should they? Idealism seldom makes anyone rich.
It's worth noting that Atom is more than RSS is, in that it is also a push/publication format. You can use Atom to post to your blog; you can use it to upload pictures and files, delete postings, etc. It's quite possible that the two formats could continue to co-exists peacefully, merely because they fill different functions.
My only problem with this service has to do with the songs you only can buy: Music is more often than not licensed region by region, country bycountry. This means that even if I find a song from iTMS here, it's quite possible I actually won't be able to buy it -- even though iTMS is available in my country.
Apart from this I think Audio Search is a great move from Yahoo. For once they've come with a search related service, that's not only a "me too" feature.
I'll stick with bash or ksh, thanks very much. But thanks for trying.
If that sums up your technology view in general, why do you use computers? It can't be because you enjoy innovation.
To me, Monad is an exciting effort to try to reinvent the command line. The simplest aspect of Monad to grasp is that it's a CLI with something similar to GUI guidelines: If you know command switches for one program, you should be able to guess/know the switches for other commands/utilities/programs.
But's what's more interesting is how it moves the pipe paradigm over to the object oriented world of.Net. Programs can pass objects to each other and manipulate their contents. This gives you extreme programmability, along with control over programs, processes, etc.
If you're a Windows user, you should really look into it: I'm a bash fan myself (I use Cygwin on Windows for my shell needs), but in my opinion this is actually the first exciting development in command lines in a long, long time. Of course I have to relearn a lot of what I know already, but if that gives me even more control and flexibility it's a small sacrifice to make (maybe I'm this positive because my systems aren't depending on thousands or millions of lines of custom made shell code).
Does IBM have mindshare? Hell yes. Does IBM have good reputation? Arguable, but certainly not all too negative these days. What happened to OS/2? It never took off[...]
I understand your point, but the situation for an eventual OS X for any Intel PC is different than OS/2's situation was. OS/2 came from nowhere. In the beginning it had no applications written for it; customers didn't know anyone with OS/2 experience, and this -- together with the break with Microsoft and the latter's momentum -- caused IBM to fight an uphill battle.
But Mac OS X is proven technology. Many people know someone that uses Macs. The important and well known applications are there (Office, iTunes, Photoshop, the web browsers). The battlefield is very different this time.
Letting Mac OS X run on any x86 machine would be a great idea for customers, a great threat to Microsoft, and a great risk for Apple. Will they take it? Not according to Phil Schiller.
A couple of weeks later it's a fact. I'm not saying it will happen, but what's considered thruth one month will be false the next. Things happens fast in this business.
You can hardly compare an eventual Apple strategy of selling their OS for non-Apple boxes with Be's history. Be, inc. had an unfinished OS and little else. No wonder they went bankrupt.
I comparison, Apple has a proven OS with real life applications written for it. They have mindshare. They have the iPod. They have the brand. With the possible exception of Dell, I think Microsoft have shown the world that the real big bucks in the PC world is in software, not hardware.
So if someone, someday, propoes to Apple that they should sell OS X separately for PCs, I'd say that's a bet that they should be willing to take.
Your assumption that this is merely a contract for Intel to fabricate the next generation of PPC chips doesn't make sense, if the reports are correct in that the low end Macs will get them first.
I don't dare to believe that they're switching, but a part of me says that the story may be correct. The reason? The low end Macs are targeted against switchers and first time buyers. These guys don't have any previous investments in Mac software, so for them it won't matter whether the processor inside is Intel or IBM. For switchers, the Intel Inside sticker may even be a stamp of approval.
When the Xbox 360 was launched two weeks ago amid much brouhaha over its custom-designed IBM PowerPC-based CPU with 3 symmetrical cores running at 3.2GHz each, WindowsForDevices.com wondered aloud, "What OS runs inside the Xbox 360?"
We offered a few alternatives and called on our readers for their ideas on the subject. Now, we think we have the answer to our question.
But first, a bit of background.
As we stated in our previous story on this topic, the earlier Xbox (shown at right) was based on a Pentium-family processor and was said to run a variant of Windows 2000. But the new Xbox 360 has a completely different architecture, based on a custom triple-core IBM PowerPC processor along with other specialty silicon including a custom graphics processor made by ATI, plus 512MB of system DRAM (see table of specs at the bottom of this article).
Since neither Windows XP nor Windows CE supports the PowerPC architecture (Windows hasn't supported PowerPC architecture since Windows NT 4.0 SP3), we devised the following set of alternatives for the Xbox 360's embedded OS: A hitherto unpublicized port by Microsoft of Windows XP or Windows CE to the PowerPC
A version of some off-the-shelf embedded OS, possibly even a variant of BSD Unix or #%$@& (sorry, our censors deleted the "L-word")
A new embedded software platform developed specifically for Xbox use And the OS is...
So, which is it -- choice 1, choice 2, or choice 3?
Our readers had some interesting comments, ranging from a derivative of the "yet to be released Longhorn" to "a ported Win XP kernel" to "its own private OS that was built from the ground up for gaming." And, to no one's surprise, nobody seemed to think Microsoft would embed BSD or "#%$@&" inside its Xbox!
We also asked fellow editor and ExtremeTech technology analyst Jason Cross (and self-described "certified geek") whether he had turned up anything about the Xbox's embedded OS while he was at E3 2005. There, we seem to have struck gold. "Yes," Cross replied, he had indeed uncovered some interesting tidbits in conversations with folks both inside and outside of Microsoft. Here's what he told us . ..
The original Xbox ran an OS that had its roots in Windows 2000. Granted, by the time you strip out everything that is not needed in a console like the Xbox and replace some of the parts with stuff specific to that device (like the file system), and add a few pieces, it hardly resembles anything remotely like Windows 2000 at all. But you could say that's where its original roots lie, even if 95 percent of it has been cut or heavily altered.
The Xbox 360's OS, in turn, has its roots in the OS of the original Xbox. I've been told (not by Microsoft, but by one of its hardware partners) that the Xbox absolutely positively does NOT run Linux [oops, the censors missed that one --Ed.] or Unix or some variant of that. The Xbox 360 project started with the Xbox OS the same way the Xbox project started with Windows 2000. They cut, added, and changed it in both large and small ways. It's now quite a bit different from the Xbox OS, which was itself quite a bit different from Windows 2000.
Really, the best way to think of it is as "The Xbox 360 OS." But if you really have to think of it in Windows terms, you could say it has roots in Windows 2000 by way of the original Xbox, albeit with sweeping changes along the way.
So there you have it: the Xbox 360 reportedly runs a second-order derivative of Windows 2000 that has been ported to the custom triple-core IBM PowerPC processor. Well, that's what we think, anyhow.
Why does it matter?
Bear in mind, Microsoft has big plans for the home -- plans that include media center PCs, family entertainment centers, TV set-top boxes, portable media players, mobile phones, and, of course, gaming devices.
Considering that the Xbox 360 represents a powerful new computing platform that will be finding
If you had read the entire thread, you'd see that the topic was searches phrased as questions - "Why are flamingos pink", etc. Someone pointed out that ask.com was best at answering these kinds of questions, while someone else proved that Google was best.
I merely tried to point out that in some cases -- such as this -- searches phrased-as questions can return no relevant answers at all on Google.
Another thing: I may have composed my search in an idiotic fashion. But don't you think most people are idiots, in the way that they ask naïve, corteous questions to Google and expect an answer? Very few people actually reads Google's search tips before searching.
[Google] CLEARLY providing better results on at least this topic than either Yahoo or MSN.
Yes, at least on that topic. But here's my favorite: Try searching for WHO IS THE WHO on Google and Yahoo. Google is nowhere near an answer on page one, but Yahoo's first result is The Who's home page.
I know that this probably is caused by algorithms and how the different search engines treat stop words, but still: It seems as if no one search engine is best at everything yet, although Google currently (probably) scores better most times.
Why do you prefer IceRocket to Google? It seems to me as if IceRocket's search results comes from Google; ranking of results and even grouping of similar results are identical.
Using thumbnails of the page is a great visual touch, though.
Guys, I'm amazed at how calmly you're discussing this issue! Most of you're discussing workarounds -- e.g. how to use gpg or secure-im to avoid being eavesdropped on.
In my opinion the real issue is that the statement "You waive any right to privacy" may be the most evil statement in any EULA ever. Shouldn't these six words alone cause an outrage beyond belief here?
I've been looking with interest at Monad, the new.Net based Microsoft shell/scripting language (video demonstration here and another one here). I'm an avid Unix and bash user, but I'm still excited by the demonstration of this shell. It seems to have a lot of new functionality I even hadn't imagined before, and if it's as good as its demonstration in real life, it'll be a very powerful tool.
My question: I find it very interesting that you're enhacing the power of the command line in future versions of Windows, and even improving and inventing new and unexpected functionality. Since most Unix sysadmins does much of their work on the CLI, and the dependence on GUIs for even trivial tasks keeps many of us Unix guys from Windows, does this also meen that future versions of Windows will come with remote login such as SSH, and that more software can be automated and managed from the command line?
The guy who came up with the idea said that he didn't want to attach any demands to his contribution. But I say: Why not?
If Trekkies really want to save the show and donate money to get a season produced, they should also demand that the producers released every episode on popular P2P networks a couple of weeks after an episode has aired.
This way those who paid for the production costs could actually get the stuff they paid for back, and what's better: Anyone could download and watch the show. For that has to be the point of donating: Keeping the show alive and spreading the Gospel of Star Trek to all Unbelievers out there?
There's no better way of doing that than giving the show away for free -- legally and with high quality .
Maybe I'm wrong, but I've felt Google has gotten lazy. Lots of the search results are nothing but sales sites these days... with all that brain power they brag about, you'd think they could have done something about that by now.
I'm not sure that it's Google that's gotten lazier, but you'd be surprised if you knew all the time and money that gets invested in trying to figure out how to optimize a web page to get optimal ranking on Google. That you're seeing more sales sites ranked high these days is natural, given that these are the sites that really gains much by adapting their site to a Google-friendly fashion.
/* Short version: Put important links early in your document, use large fonts if you can (yes, Googlebot seems to know about font size), repeat the important words you want to be found as often as you can in your text, try to figure out if you're using plural forms of words that people search for the singular versions of (do people search for "recipes" or "recipe"?), don't use too many parameters in a dynamic url, and if you can: Use mod_rewrite to generate "search engine friendly" or "human readable" URLs, etc etc.
As simple as these trick may seem to be, they're not obvious until you've learned about them. They can also be time consuming to implement, and that's why you're seeing a certain category of sites improving their rankings nowadays. But the rest of us will follow, I guess. */
If Google's presentation of cached pages is fair use, it would mean that I could rip out entire articles from the New York Times and post them on my web site, call it "quoting" and get away with it.
Would that be fair use? I'm certain New York Times wouldn't say so. But because Google is so dominant, I guess most people won't say anything. Don't mess with Goliath, unless you're David.
As for stopping caching: I know that I can stop Google from caching via Meta tags, and that I can stop Google from indexing my site via robots.txt. I understand robots.txt, but when it comes to caching it's strange that I should opt out, when in fact it (in my view) is Google that should ask _me_ for permission to use my content, not me who should ask Google kindly _not_ to use my content.
When it comes to crumb trails I actually have a clue as to what I'm talking about, but perhaps I explained what I meant badly.
My point is not that crumb trails are bad. I simply mean that crumb trails are a Yahoo!-ish way of designing and navigating pages, that most sites stopped using because most users didn't follow them. But they will do this because of the way Google's algorithm is tuned, and the way the crawler itself prefers to crawl the site. The crawler, quite naturally, crawls urls that comes first in a document, and if it has to choose, it selects pages that's the shortes distance from a site's front page.
Crumb trails eases Google's path to the content, and therefore you'll see that more and more sites will do the same kind of "tricks" -- crumb trails being one of them -- not because the users gain anything from it, but because it helps Google.
I'm not saying it is bad per se, but if you're a web developer or rather what used to be called an "information architect", I think in the future you'll experience that much of what you're doing is adapting and tuning your site, your content and your navigation so that Google ranking, Googlebot crawling and similar things will be improved.
These kinds of statements always angers me: I can't see why I shouldn't support Microsoft, if their technology happens to be better suited to my needs than the competitions?
I guess you worry about Microsofts monopolistic practises. Guess what: In a couple of years, if things don't change, you'll worry about Google as well.
- Even if Google's not responsible for killing usenet, it sure helped speed up the process.
- Take a look at the cached content feature of Google: In every other context this feature would have been called breach of copyright.
- Take a look at the image search: This too is breach of copyright.
- Look at how people are designing web pages today: The old ideas of crumb trails (navigation paths on top of pages) are coming back, not because users need them but because Google needs them to crawl your site well.
The thing is that the web is adapting to Google now, not the other way round. If you're paranoid you should worry more about Google than about Microsoft because what Google does actually matters.
blinkx requires Microsoft Windows 98, Windows 2000 or Windows XP (support for other versions of Windows coming soon) in order to be able to run. Microsoft Office is supported up to MS Office 2003.
You're wrong. I linked to the main blinkx-page, which also promotes a desktop search tool. That tool's for Windows and soon for Mac.
But the video search is a web search, such as Google. I.e. as cross platform as it gets (what software you need to watch the videos are another matter, of course). Try it yourself on www.blinkx.tv.
As cool as Google is, I also think Blinx.com's search deserves mentioning. According to their white paper they transcribe video content on the fly, and you can even set up "smart searches" which notifies you when new content matching your search becomes available.
This apparently only applies to video content available on the web, but I guess it could potentially be done with TV content as well. It seems to me like this -- if it works -- is one step ahead of Google's approach.
Slashdot Mirror
The editor (Alice Hill of RealTechNews) seems to misinterpret -- or overstate -- the reviewers conclusion.
From what I can see, David Johnston actually says that Writer is comparable to or better than Word (this from a reviewer that actually thinks lack of features [Gramamar Checking] is a Good Thing), but notes that PowerPoint wins over Impress. He also seems wary of using Calc due to compatiblity issues with Excel. In other words: It doesn't seem like OpenOffice kicks Microsoft Office's around the block at all.
If anything, it's snapping at Office's heels a litle annoyingly.
I've seen a couple of projects on the net trying to achieve this. The obstacle always seems to be speed: Distributed P2P searching won't give near instantaneous answers like Google and Yahoo does.
But the idea is intriguing. What I've been thinking is that if something like that should be made, it should be done as a part of Firefox. Every page you visit could be indexed by Firefox. Not any other pages. There's not a crawler involved, because you're the crawler: Your surfing habits decides which pages are indexed and which are not.
Now think about BitTorrent: The more people sharing the same file, the faster you can download it. Imagine if the same applied to your distributed search engine: Often and much visited pages would have a high distribution, and would therefore "be more searchable" and therefore automatically be ranked highly.
With this you'd get a search engine where pages could be ranked according to popularity and freshness in a way that ordinary search engines cannot do. It would be a kind of social bookmarking service for search.
So it sure isn't cash that holds them back when they prioritize Windows; that mechanism is called capitalism. I'd say Google's mode is now trying to do 'good enough' with near limitless resources.
As I said in my original post: I'm as capitalistic as the next guy, and I see nothing wrong in doing business this way. That's how almost everyone is doing business. What puzzles me is that we Slashdotters seems to view Googles capitalism as idealism, something capitalism seldom is.
Don't write up Lucene just because they're not using Lucene for the site search. Lucene is good. I've only used it on my laptop to index a couple of hundred thousand news articles, but even on a laptop Lucene performs well.
.Net version of Lucene. Lookout, a search plugin for Outlook (recently bought by Microsoft), also uses .Net Lucene for the indexing and searching.
Take a look at http://www.theserverside.com/ - the enterprise java community. Their search is powered by Lucene. It's pretty fast and a very capable site search.
You also have open source projects, such as Beagle (the desktop search for Gnome), that uses the
And to make matters worse: Have you tried using Google Desktop 2 on a Windows computer where Opera is the default browser? The indexing starts but when you try to open a search window, you get a message that your browser is not supported and that Google Desktop probably won't work as expected for you.
I'm not dissing Googles products here, I merely want to point out that Google are not as platform agnostic and idealistic that people here seem to think they are. And why should they? Idealism seldom makes anyone rich.
It's worth noting that Atom is more than RSS is, in that it is also a push/publication format. You can use Atom to post to your blog; you can use it to upload pictures and files, delete postings, etc. It's quite possible that the two formats could continue to co-exists peacefully, merely because they fill different functions.
My only problem with this service has to do with the songs you only can buy: Music is more often than not licensed region by region, country bycountry. This means that even if I find a song from iTMS here, it's quite possible I actually won't be able to buy it -- even though iTMS is available in my country.
Apart from this I think Audio Search is a great move from Yahoo. For once they've come with a search related service, that's not only a "me too" feature.
I think the Lisa II was also called Macintosh XL. Maybe data compatibility between the Mac and the XL was reason for the switch to 3.5 " floppy disks?
To me, Monad is an exciting effort to try to reinvent the command line. The simplest aspect of Monad to grasp is that it's a CLI with something similar to GUI guidelines: If you know command switches for one program, you should be able to guess/know the switches for other commands/utilities/programs.
But's what's more interesting is how it moves the pipe paradigm over to the object oriented world of
If you're a Windows user, you should really look into it: I'm a bash fan myself (I use Cygwin on Windows for my shell needs), but in my opinion this is actually the first exciting development in command lines in a long, long time. Of course I have to relearn a lot of what I know already, but if that gives me even more control and flexibility it's a small sacrifice to make (maybe I'm this positive because my systems aren't depending on thousands or millions of lines of custom made shell code).
But Mac OS X is proven technology. Many people know someone that uses Macs. The important and well known applications are there (Office, iTunes, Photoshop, the web browsers). The battlefield is very different this time.
Well, the May 24 Apple said rumors about switching to Intel were just that: Rumors. See http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23447
A couple of weeks later it's a fact. I'm not saying it will happen, but what's considered thruth one month will be false the next. Things happens fast in this business.
You can hardly compare an eventual Apple strategy of selling their OS for non-Apple boxes with Be's history. Be, inc. had an unfinished OS and little else. No wonder they went bankrupt.
I comparison, Apple has a proven OS with real life applications written for it. They have mindshare. They have the iPod. They have the brand. With the possible exception of Dell, I think Microsoft have shown the world that the real big bucks in the PC world is in software, not hardware.
So if someone, someday, propoes to Apple that they should sell OS X separately for PCs, I'd say that's a bet that they should be willing to take.
Your assumption that this is merely a contract for Intel to fabricate the next generation of PPC chips doesn't make sense, if the reports are correct in that the low end Macs will get them first.
I don't dare to believe that they're switching, but a part of me says that the story may be correct. The reason? The low end Macs are targeted against switchers and first time buyers. These guys don't have any previous investments in Mac software, so for them it won't matter whether the processor inside is Intel or IBM. For switchers, the Intel Inside sticker may even be a stamp of approval.
...so here's the article text:
.
When the Xbox 360 was launched two weeks ago amid much brouhaha over its custom-designed IBM PowerPC-based CPU with 3 symmetrical cores running at 3.2GHz each, WindowsForDevices.com wondered aloud, "What OS runs inside the Xbox 360?"
We offered a few alternatives and called on our readers for their ideas on the subject. Now, we think we have the answer to our question.
But first, a bit of background.
As we stated in our previous story on this topic, the earlier Xbox (shown at right) was based on a Pentium-family processor and was said to run a variant of Windows 2000. But the new Xbox 360 has a completely different architecture, based on a custom triple-core IBM PowerPC processor along with other specialty silicon including a custom graphics processor made by ATI, plus 512MB of system DRAM (see table of specs at the bottom of this article).
Since neither Windows XP nor Windows CE supports the PowerPC architecture (Windows hasn't supported PowerPC architecture since Windows NT 4.0 SP3), we devised the following set of alternatives for the Xbox 360's embedded OS:
A hitherto unpublicized port by Microsoft of Windows XP or Windows CE to the PowerPC
A version of some off-the-shelf embedded OS, possibly even a variant of BSD Unix or #%$@& (sorry, our censors deleted the "L-word")
A new embedded software platform developed specifically for Xbox use
And the OS is...
So, which is it -- choice 1, choice 2, or choice 3?
Our readers had some interesting comments, ranging from a derivative of the "yet to be released Longhorn" to "a ported Win XP kernel" to "its own private OS that was built from the ground up for gaming." And, to no one's surprise, nobody seemed to think Microsoft would embed BSD or "#%$@&" inside its Xbox!
We also asked fellow editor and ExtremeTech technology analyst Jason Cross (and self-described "certified geek") whether he had turned up anything about the Xbox's embedded OS while he was at E3 2005. There, we seem to have struck gold. "Yes," Cross replied, he had indeed uncovered some interesting tidbits in conversations with folks both inside and outside of Microsoft. Here's what he told us . .
The original Xbox ran an OS that had its roots in Windows 2000. Granted, by the time you strip out everything that is not needed in a console like the Xbox and replace some of the parts with stuff specific to that device (like the file system), and add a few pieces, it hardly resembles anything remotely like Windows 2000 at all. But you could say that's where its original roots lie, even if 95 percent of it has been cut or heavily altered.
The Xbox 360's OS, in turn, has its roots in the OS of the original Xbox. I've been told (not by Microsoft, but by one of its hardware partners) that the Xbox absolutely positively does NOT run Linux [oops, the censors missed that one --Ed.] or Unix or some variant of that. The Xbox 360 project started with the Xbox OS the same way the Xbox project started with Windows 2000. They cut, added, and changed it in both large and small ways. It's now quite a bit different from the Xbox OS, which was itself quite a bit different from Windows 2000.
Really, the best way to think of it is as "The Xbox 360 OS." But if you really have to think of it in Windows terms, you could say it has roots in Windows 2000 by way of the original Xbox, albeit with sweeping changes along the way.
So there you have it: the Xbox 360 reportedly runs a second-order derivative of Windows 2000 that has been ported to the custom triple-core IBM PowerPC processor. Well, that's what we think, anyhow.
Why does it matter?
Bear in mind, Microsoft has big plans for the home -- plans that include media center PCs, family entertainment centers, TV set-top boxes, portable media players, mobile phones, and, of course, gaming devices.
Considering that the Xbox 360 represents a powerful new computing platform that will be finding
If you had read the entire thread, you'd see that the topic was searches phrased as questions - "Why are flamingos pink", etc. Someone pointed out that ask.com was best at answering these kinds of questions, while someone else proved that Google was best.
I merely tried to point out that in some cases -- such as this -- searches phrased-as questions can return no relevant answers at all on Google.
Another thing: I may have composed my search in an idiotic fashion. But don't you think most people are idiots, in the way that they ask naïve, corteous questions to Google and expect an answer? Very few people actually reads Google's search tips before searching.
I know that this probably is caused by algorithms and how the different search engines treat stop words, but still: It seems as if no one search engine is best at everything yet, although Google currently (probably) scores better most times.
Why do you prefer IceRocket to Google? It seems to me as if IceRocket's search results comes from Google; ranking of results and even grouping of similar results are identical.
Using thumbnails of the page is a great visual touch, though.
Guys, I'm amazed at how calmly you're discussing this issue! Most of you're discussing workarounds -- e.g. how to use gpg or secure-im to avoid being eavesdropped on.
In my opinion the real issue is that the statement "You waive any right to privacy" may be the most evil statement in any EULA ever. Shouldn't these six words alone cause an outrage beyond belief here?
I've been looking with interest at Monad, the new .Net based Microsoft shell/scripting language (video demonstration here and another one here). I'm an avid Unix and bash user, but I'm still excited by the demonstration of this shell. It seems to have a lot of new functionality I even hadn't imagined before, and if it's as good as its demonstration in real life, it'll be a very powerful tool.
My question: I find it very interesting that you're enhacing the power of the command line in future versions of Windows, and even improving and inventing new and unexpected functionality. Since most Unix sysadmins does much of their work on the CLI, and the dependence on GUIs for even trivial tasks keeps many of us Unix guys from Windows, does this also meen that future versions of Windows will come with remote login such as SSH, and that more software can be automated and managed from the command line?
The guy who came up with the idea said that he didn't want to attach any demands to his contribution. But I say: Why not?
If Trekkies really want to save the show and donate money to get a season produced, they should also demand that the producers released every episode on popular P2P networks a couple of weeks after an episode has aired.
This way those who paid for the production costs could actually get the stuff they paid for back, and what's better: Anyone could download and watch the show. For that has to be the point of donating: Keeping the show alive and spreading the Gospel of Star Trek to all Unbelievers out there?
There's no better way of doing that than giving the show away for free -- legally and with high quality .
As simple as these trick may seem to be, they're not obvious until you've learned about them. They can also be time consuming to implement, and that's why you're seeing a certain category of sites improving their rankings nowadays. But the rest of us will follow, I guess. */
If Google's presentation of cached pages is fair use, it would mean that I could rip out entire articles from the New York Times and post them on my web site, call it "quoting" and get away with it.
Would that be fair use? I'm certain New York Times wouldn't say so. But because Google is so dominant, I guess most people won't say anything. Don't mess with Goliath, unless you're David.
As for stopping caching: I know that I can stop Google from caching via Meta tags, and that I can stop Google from indexing my site via robots.txt. I understand robots.txt, but when it comes to caching it's strange that I should opt out, when in fact it (in my view) is Google that should ask _me_ for permission to use my content, not me who should ask Google kindly _not_ to use my content.
When it comes to crumb trails I actually have a clue as to what I'm talking about, but perhaps I explained what I meant badly.
My point is not that crumb trails are bad. I simply mean that crumb trails are a Yahoo!-ish way of designing and navigating pages, that most sites stopped using because most users didn't follow them. But they will do this because of the way Google's algorithm is tuned, and the way the crawler itself prefers to crawl the site. The crawler, quite naturally, crawls urls that comes first in a document, and if it has to choose, it selects pages that's the shortes distance from a site's front page.
Crumb trails eases Google's path to the content, and therefore you'll see that more and more sites will do the same kind of "tricks" -- crumb trails being one of them -- not because the users gain anything from it, but because it helps Google.
I'm not saying it is bad per se, but if you're a web developer or rather what used to be called an "information architect", I think in the future you'll experience that much of what you're doing is adapting and tuning your site, your content and your navigation so that Google ranking, Googlebot crawling and similar things will be improved.
I guess you worry about Microsofts monopolistic practises. Guess what: In a couple of years, if things don't change, you'll worry about Google as well.
- Even if Google's not responsible for killing usenet, it sure helped speed up the process.
- Take a look at the cached content feature of Google: In every other context this feature would have been called breach of copyright.
- Take a look at the image search: This too is breach of copyright.
- Look at how people are designing web pages today: The old ideas of crumb trails (navigation paths on top of pages) are coming back, not because users need them but because Google needs them to crawl your site well.
The thing is that the web is adapting to Google now, not the other way round. If you're paranoid you should worry more about Google than about Microsoft because what Google does actually matters.
But the video search is a web search, such as Google. I.e. as cross platform as it gets (what software you need to watch the videos are another matter, of course). Try it yourself on www.blinkx.tv.
As cool as Google is, I also think Blinx.com's search deserves mentioning. According to their white paper they transcribe video content on the fly, and you can even set up "smart searches" which notifies you when new content matching your search becomes available.
This apparently only applies to video content available on the web, but I guess it could potentially be done with TV content as well. It seems to me like this -- if it works -- is one step ahead of Google's approach.