er, rather, last time I checked, the Associated Press style manual (closest thing to an English usage manual, save a dictionary) dictated using generic terms instead of trademarks, unless you were specifically intending to reference the trademarked product. As I recall, Kleenex and Xerox even had their own entries in the manual.
When someone says to "Google it," they personally may mean "use Google.com" but in common practice the saying is generalized to mean "look that information up on the web."
I have told people explicitly "look it up on Google" and they then proceed (in front of me) to look it up using their favorite non-Google search engine. It's not your intentions that matter; it's what people do in practice.
Please refrain from using the word "Google" in the form of a verb or in any manner that does not directly refer to the noun known as the Google search engine web site (www.Google.com) and its associated services.
We wouldn't want to diminish their trademark, now would we?
Instead of "Kleenex" say "facial tissue."
Instead of "Xerox" say "photocopy."
Instead of "Frisbee" say "flying disc."
Instead of "Slashdotted" say "fubar'd."
Instead of "Google" say "look it up," or "check your facts."
Hey, if Google's mission really is to collect all of the information on earth, how soon will it be before Ashcroft's Total Information Awareness ploy causes him to declare eminent domain and seize Google for national interests?
"Google has vowed not to do evil, but evildoers will do evil by exploiting Google. We must stop the evildoers by destroying their evil tool."
Which web-based e-mail do you use now? I'd gladly dump Yahoo if there was a marketing-free alternative that also happens to auto-insert your cursor into the login box. That cursor treatment is important because it's annoying having to grab the mouse.
If you're a Windows user, try Proxomitron. It's a free filter that can block banner ads, Flash ads, sounds, pop-ups and many other really annoying things.
I'm shocked these days when I use a terminal that doesn't have Proxomitron filtering because then I realize just how crappy a place the web has become. I pity anyone who consumes the web raw.
I swear I've seen/. use Google. I seem to recall doing a search once and being very annoyed because I was redirected to Google results. I wanted to find a week-old article and Google typically refreshes its data only once a month for any given site.
Am I dreaming? Hasn't Slashdot used Google on occassion? Perhaps when its in-house engine was experiencing trouble?
I, too, am bothered that Google is trying to be more than 'just search.' In five years Google may be as irrelevant as Yahoo is today. Evil is growing behind that colorful clownish logo.
People are oblivious to the feature creep right now because they see it as related to search, or just find the new services useful. It will become bloat when Google tries to be all things to all people. Google has that in its blood. Our honeymoon with Google will not last.
I suspect Yahoo is coasting on its prior popularity. In the early days Yahoo was "it." Everyone recommended Yahoo. It's been a couple years since I've heard anyone recommend Yahoo. It's all Google now. Free e-mail? Yes. Web portal? No.
When Yahoo infused its front page with several hundred links it took a pummeling to the head. When it started charging to add businesses to its link directory it knocked itself out.
Anyone with an oedipal complex knows what the triology was really about. How many times did we see Marty in bed with his hot mother (or hot maternal kin) next to him?
I bought some of the cheap non-name-brand China imports at a local mall merchant for $15 and saw a couple national chain stores in the same mall selling them. Only after purchase did I go back and look at those spams to see I bought the same product.
From my point of view, I supported a local merchant who imported the product, avoided giving my money to a retail chain corporation, and avoided giving money to a spammer. The cars are fine. In the same mall I would have paid $21 *more* for a MicroSizer. And the $20 Radio Shack ZipZaps are out-of-stock until after Xmas.
As a gadget, these cars lose their luster quickly for an adult. For my children, they couldn't care less whether it's a MicroSizer, ZipZap, or noname junk. They'll never want upgradeability. I bought 4 cars for $15 each, totally $60. I saved $84, thankyouverymuch.
When I receive an unsolicited call on my cell phone, I get charged.
In the not so distant future ISPs will charge us for spam we receive. X cents per 100 e-mails, or somesuch.
Charging you is far, far easier and cheaper than tracking down and pursuing a hundred spammers in court.
After all, the ISP will say, it's your fault for not guarding your address from spammers. You jumped into shark infested waters and got bit. You are to blame. Oh, we'd be happy to set you up with a new address to fix your problem. There's only a $15 processing fee. Thankyouverymuch.
It's a solution politicians will love too because it allows "legit" corporations to continue spamming without regulation.
I boycott RIAA. It's easy enough to listen to alternative radio and buy CDs direct from local musicians. There's was a tough transition period, but eventually the shakes subsided.
For movies, I'm a victim of the system. I can watch indy movies, but they don't compare to a handful of powerhouse movies produced each year (ex: Two Towers). There is no comparable experience, and so I'm stuck forking my money over to shadow forces.
In the meantime, I do pay to see fewer and fewer movies, perhaps one every 3 months. But that's easy because most movies being produced are crap (or maybe I've fallen between the cracks of marketing demographics... it's a loney existence.)
Leisure time I used to spend watching movies I now spend playing online games and low impact sports (you know, pool, bowling, sex, etc.).
These new Google services are more feature creep. How about less frill and better search?
The quality of search results is going down, in my opinion. More often I find myself using other search engines because my Google searches turn up junk. Let us tweak the ranking criteria so we can bypass the web sites that have engineered themselves to be at the top of the results.
Consumer opinion sites are worthless, in my opinion.
Rely on community-oriented forums where you know the people you're talking to. It's not foolproof though because, in my opinion, some corporations have staff who do nothing but post in forums as if they're consumers like you and me. In the end I fall back on independent review organizations like Consumers Union and sole operators of web sites that have an established, widespread following (for example, dpreview.com for digital cameras).
And no, that wasn't a typo in my previous message. Everyone knows corporations virtually run the government. Don't waste your time talking to their political puppets. Cut out the middleman. Lobby your corporations today.
Oh, I do get the point. Wired.com looks like crap in Netscape 4 because it does not use tables. W3C specs are the optimal goal, but the best code can mean you leave 10% (or whatever) of your users with a lousy experience. If I can provide the same experience for v4 and v6 users with tables, and still be accessible to disabled users, why bother with newer code _at_this_time_?
If you show people Wired's layout in IE6 and Netscape 4, I kind of doubt anyone would prefer the Netscape view of the site.
Yes, my logs show slightly above 10% of users have v4 and v3 browsers. In what other business would ignoring 10 percent of your customers be acceptable?
I agree accessibility can be achieved with a table-based design, but it is not optimal. It is not the future. Here's my issue with tableLESS designs -- "Is the future now?"
Slashdot Mirror
I "forgot" a lot of common trademarks...
Here's a list of words to capitalize (scroll down 3/4 of the page).
er, rather, last time I checked, the Associated Press style manual (closest thing to an English usage manual, save a dictionary) dictated using generic terms instead of trademarks, unless you were specifically intending to reference the trademarked product. As I recall, Kleenex and Xerox even had their own entries in the manual.
When someone says to "Google it," they personally may mean "use Google.com" but in common practice the saying is generalized to mean "look that information up on the web."
I have told people explicitly "look it up on Google" and they then proceed (in front of me) to look it up using their favorite non-Google search engine. It's not your intentions that matter; it's what people do in practice.
Please refrain from using the word "Google" in the form of a verb or in any manner that does not directly refer to the noun known as the Google search engine web site (www.Google.com) and its associated services.
We wouldn't want to diminish their trademark, now would we?
Usability experts should live by this rule: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Villian? How about Villain
Hey, if Google's mission really is to collect all of the information on earth, how soon will it be before Ashcroft's Total Information Awareness ploy causes him to declare eminent domain and seize Google for national interests?
"Google has vowed not to do evil, but evildoers will do evil by exploiting Google. We must stop the evildoers by destroying their evil tool."
Which web-based e-mail do you use now? I'd gladly dump Yahoo if there was a marketing-free alternative that also happens to auto-insert your cursor into the login box. That cursor treatment is important because it's annoying having to grab the mouse.
If you're a Windows user, try Proxomitron. It's a free filter that can block banner ads, Flash ads, sounds, pop-ups and many other really annoying things.
I'm shocked these days when I use a terminal that doesn't have Proxomitron filtering because then I realize just how crappy a place the web has become. I pity anyone who consumes the web raw.
I swear I've seen /. use Google. I seem to recall doing a search once and being very annoyed because I was redirected to Google results. I wanted to find a week-old article and Google typically refreshes its data only once a month for any given site.
Am I dreaming? Hasn't Slashdot used Google on occassion? Perhaps when its in-house engine was experiencing trouble?
I, too, am bothered that Google is trying to be more than 'just search.' In five years Google may be as irrelevant as Yahoo is today. Evil is growing behind that colorful clownish logo.
People are oblivious to the feature creep right now because they see it as related to search, or just find the new services useful. It will become bloat when Google tries to be all things to all people. Google has that in its blood. Our honeymoon with Google will not last.
I suspect Yahoo is coasting on its prior popularity. In the early days Yahoo was "it." Everyone recommended Yahoo. It's been a couple years since I've heard anyone recommend Yahoo. It's all Google now. Free e-mail? Yes. Web portal? No.
When Yahoo infused its front page with several hundred links it took a pummeling to the head. When it started charging to add businesses to its link directory it knocked itself out.
Anyone with an oedipal complex knows what the triology was really about. How many times did we see Marty in bed with his hot mother (or hot maternal kin) next to him?
The Norton spams are not from Norton. They're spammers selling products. That doesn't mean the products are evil.
You operate under the false impression that the spammers are the same people selling the cars in shopping malls.
I get Linux and Windows and Norton spams. Does that mean I should only use Macintosh without anti-virus software? Gimmeabreak.
I bought some of the cheap non-name-brand China imports at a local mall merchant for $15 and saw a couple national chain stores in the same mall selling them. Only after purchase did I go back and look at those spams to see I bought the same product.
From my point of view, I supported a local merchant who imported the product, avoided giving my money to a retail chain corporation, and avoided giving money to a spammer. The cars are fine. In the same mall I would have paid $21 *more* for a MicroSizer. And the $20 Radio Shack ZipZaps are out-of-stock until after Xmas.
As a gadget, these cars lose their luster quickly for an adult. For my children, they couldn't care less whether it's a MicroSizer, ZipZap, or noname junk. They'll never want upgradeability. I bought 4 cars for $15 each, totally $60. I saved $84, thankyouverymuch.
When I receive an unsolicited call on my cell phone, I get charged.
In the not so distant future ISPs will charge us for spam we receive. X cents per 100 e-mails, or somesuch.
Charging you is far, far easier and cheaper than tracking down and pursuing a hundred spammers in court.
After all, the ISP will say, it's your fault for not guarding your address from spammers. You jumped into shark infested waters and got bit. You are to blame. Oh, we'd be happy to set you up with a new address to fix your problem. There's only a $15 processing fee. Thankyouverymuch.
It's a solution politicians will love too because it allows "legit" corporations to continue spamming without regulation.
I bruise easily.
I boycott RIAA. It's easy enough to listen to alternative radio and buy CDs direct from local musicians. There's was a tough transition period, but eventually the shakes subsided.
For movies, I'm a victim of the system. I can watch indy movies, but they don't compare to a handful of powerhouse movies produced each year (ex: Two Towers). There is no comparable experience, and so I'm stuck forking my money over to shadow forces.
In the meantime, I do pay to see fewer and fewer movies, perhaps one every 3 months. But that's easy because most movies being produced are crap (or maybe I've fallen between the cracks of marketing demographics... it's a loney existence.)
Leisure time I used to spend watching movies I now spend playing online games and low impact sports (you know, pool, bowling, sex, etc.).
These new Google services are more feature creep. How about less frill and better search?
The quality of search results is going down, in my opinion. More often I find myself using other search engines because my Google searches turn up junk. Let us tweak the ranking criteria so we can bypass the web sites that have engineered themselves to be at the top of the results.
Consumer opinion sites are worthless, in my opinion.
Rely on community-oriented forums where you know the people you're talking to. It's not foolproof though because, in my opinion, some corporations have staff who do nothing but post in forums as if they're consumers like you and me. In the end I fall back on independent review organizations like Consumers Union and sole operators of web sites that have an established, widespread following (for example, dpreview.com for digital cameras).
And no, that wasn't a typo in my previous message. Everyone knows corporations virtually run the government. Don't waste your time talking to their political puppets. Cut out the middleman. Lobby your corporations today.
Find out which corporations operate in your congressional district and begin writing them today.
Oh, I do get the point. Wired.com looks like crap in Netscape 4 because it does not use tables. W3C specs are the optimal goal, but the best code can mean you leave 10% (or whatever) of your users with a lousy experience. If I can provide the same experience for v4 and v6 users with tables, and still be accessible to disabled users, why bother with newer code _at_this_time_?
If you show people Wired's layout in IE6 and Netscape 4, I kind of doubt anyone would prefer the Netscape view of the site.
Joe, do you know Jakob Nielsen? What's he like?
(Sorry, an overt attempt at +1 funny, if you know what I mean.)
Yes, my logs show slightly above 10% of users have v4 and v3 browsers. In what other business would ignoring 10 percent of your customers be acceptable?
I agree accessibility can be achieved with a table-based design, but it is not optimal. It is not the future. Here's my issue with tableLESS designs -- "Is the future now?"