I'm not sure you can call Google honest, only that they have not been proven dishonest, unlike Microsoft.
Google is still a company, the point of which is to make a profit. I don't think they're going to do anything nefarious with my e-mail, but I also don't give them any special dispensation because one of their mottos is "Don't be evil." So far they're just a company which makes a very good search engine, and a few peripheral tools and utilities. I don't see anything to make me think they're honest or dishonest, they are just good at providing their service.
I've never noticed a real e-mail address in a spam, it makes them far too easy to block. Generally they just point to a website which will have the contact details, or more likely just sales material, on it. Also, if I was receiving e-mail from spam, I wouldn't want to dig through a webmail interface to get it, that's pretty inefficient compared to getting it over POP/IMAP where the client can also filter out the responses with lots of swearing in them.
The invites system has been a great way of getting people to talk about the service. I've seen threads on several mailing lists and forums about who has invites and giving them out. It's scored a real buzz for the service which the other providers don't have.
Functionally better toasters still turn bread in to toast.
Better e-mail services from the ISP and filtering on the e-mail client will cut down the spam, which is alreading happening. I can't see anyone giving up e-mail any time soon, most of the bleating I've heard about it has come from journalistic circles where it seems to be something used to fill up column inches.
I'd agree with the backing up. When my 600 MHz iBook went it would be fine after a reboot, but quickly got worse and worse so by the time I phoned Apple and went through their tests on the phone it wouldn't boot at all. Luckily before it got to this stage I got most of my data copied off it, but I could easily have lost everything if the fix hadn't gone well.
From first symptoms of glitching video through to pretty-paperweight stage only took about a week for me. Maybe you're lucky and something else caused those problems.
However, in the UK we have a speed limit for vehicles that use the pavement - motorised wheelchairs are limited to a 4mph top speed. Buggies (larger chairs with covers over the top, often used by people with limited mobility) can go faster, but they have to go on the road. Effectively it's illegal to use Segways on the pavement here.
I wonder if the Segways could have a button for 'pavement' which would drastically limit their top speed. However, policing this to ensure it was used would be quite awkward - pavement speed traps just for the odd Segway? Madness!
BBC World Service broadcasts on LW, and they transmit BBC Radio 4 when they don't have World Service stuff to send out.
This saved my sanity a few years back when I was doing some painting in Paris for my uncle and I'd got bored of all my CDs. French radio had just gone over to playing much more French music (by law) and was mainly godawful. Those LW broadcasts were fantastic!
The last time I remember the stats being revealed, something like 80% of Slashdot visitors never read the comments. This seemed odd to me, as I also feel that it's the comments that makes Slashdot more interesting than just visiting a few news sources myself.
While I can use my 6310i as a modem for my Mac with no problems, I can't access the phone book in it, which is highly annoying, and using 'Support non-confirming phones' hasn't made any difference to that.
It's a shame - this is something the Sony/Ericsson phones do very well, but I still prefer Nokias overall (mainly because of their interface.)
I haven't really found any reason to use OO rather than Appleworks yet, apart from OO will read Word docs, whereas Appleworks isn't that good at it.
If you've already got Appleworks, there's not a lot of reason to get OO unless you find you're hitting the limits of what Appleworks can do, then it's worth checking out OO as it doesn't cost anything. If you have to buy Appleworks, it's worth checking out OO as a free alternative, but Appleworks is much quicker starting / in use on my G3 system.
Not the best analogy, I'm afraid. Toyota pick-ups have taken over from Land Rovers in the areas of the world where reliability and ruggedness is the absolute requirement (e.g. the desert.)
1 - lots of people don't realise they can change their home page to something else. I know it sounds stupid, but it's true, and as more non-technical people use the web that proportion of users will become higher. This is partly why you still see those "make this website your homepage" links, it's because people just don't know they could set whatever they like as their home page.
2 - I see the remark "I'll change from Google when another search engine gives me better results." For lots of people, the same holds true for MSN - they get results that are good enough from the place they are automatically, so they have no reason to change.
I'm not happy about the way Microsoft have got all these users by setting one of their sites as the default home page, but there are a lot of people out there who like it and won't want to change. This is partly why Yahoo advertises (or at least used to) so much - they were telling people their website was out there and did searching.
Yahoo all ready have shareholders to keep happy. Having research going on that is easily shown to be to do with advertising is a good way to keep shareholders from complaining about 'blue sky' research being done. I'm all for research, but most of the people I see who do lots of stocks and shares care about the 'bottom line' and that's all, they may not see where the research can lead on to better services and revenue that way.
Also - you could just say Yahoo is being honest. Google is going to want to make money out of the services it creates at some point, otherwise it won't be able to continue serving them.
That's no good if you're on dial-up. Dealing with spam yourself is fine if you're on broadband, but it's a pain in the arse if you're on dial-up as you have to download all the crap before the software deals with it. That's why ISP-level spam control is attractive to lots of people.
As far as I can tell, this was aimed mainly at people producing things like e-mail newsletters.
The Lockergnome newsletters started to use the Habeas haiku a while ago because they had problems when people started marking their sign-up newsletters as spam when they didn't want to receive them any more, rather than using the unsubscribe options. The people on large ISPs that aggregate what people think of as spam were then banning the newsletters from other subscribers.
Getting yourself unbanned from ISPs usually involves contacting their staff and convincing them that you're not a spammer. In the case of Lockergnome the second part was straightforward, but it was taking up a lot of time, and you only know you've lost subscribers when someone asks when the next newsletter's coming because they haven't received any for a while.
The Habeas system gives the ISPs an easy way to let through stuff marked with it, as long as Habeas defend their haiku against spammers successfully. So far they've done this, but finding the spammers to enforce their copyright, as they're trying to do in this latest case, isn't always easy/fast.
While it's good to see another hard drive based player in the market with some innovative features, I can see some problems with it:
Syncing over wifi is great, if a bit slow, but I don't think it will affect sales of devices like iPods for two reasons:
1. Many people who want players don't have wifi. The most likely to have wifi are people who own new Powerbooks, who are also the most likely to buy iPods as it's also made by Apple. It wouldn't really be worth getting wifi just so you could sync with the player, that would greatly increase the cost of the device.
2. The wifi syncing is really only useful for people who want to leave the player in their car. Otherwise, it's so little hassle to plug a player in to a cable or put it down in to a dock, either of which you'd need to do anyway to charge it (in the case of the iPod.)
OK, so lets say you can leave the player in your car attached to the cigarette lighter to keep it charged (my car doesn't have a cigarette lighter socket, but lets leave that aside.) Now, I can see a problem where the battery in the player is getting lots of short charges from the car. This isn't good for rechargeable batteries - they're better if they're allowed to drain completely and then charged up. So I can see a problem like the recent fuss over iPod batteries degrading quickly happening with the Aireo player as well.
If the player is in the car all the time, it won't matter if the battery doesn't work for very long, except for when you want to take it somewhere out of the car.
Really, car-wise, I can't see this beating the portable CD player I bought which plays discs of MP3s. It's not particularly great (it was a cheap one, much cheaper than the Aireo) but then again neither is the stereo in my car. However, when I want new music I can burn a new disc on my computer and leave it in my car. I effectively have infinite storage, and back-up of my music in one go. Also, if I buy a new CD I can listen to it on the same device, rather than having to take it to a computer to encode it. Now some proper car-based CD players have the ability to play discs of MP3s, if you want a good car-based experience they might be a better bet.
Back to the cable-based syncing: I'm not discounting that Apple, Creative and other MP3 player makers will put wifi in to their future devices. Once wifi becomes very widespread it will probably make sense. However, monitoring for wifi networks is going to be a drain on the players battery, so it will probably be something that needs to be turned on and off, which means if you forget to turn it on there's no difference between having to go and find the player and turn it on against finding it and carrying it to the computer and plugging it in.
And, lets face it, you're probably going to go to that computer anyway. That's the thing with MP3 players - generally they're carried around by you anyway, so having it in your pocket when you go to the computer anyway and plugging it in when you're there really isn't much of an effort. At the moment syncing involves bringing two pieces of personal equipment - the personal stereo and personal computer, together. You don't really need wifi for that, a cable is probably going to be long enough.
Oh yeah, Carma II was a good upgrade, whereas III just seemed more of an... effort somehow.
Wasn't it II that had the American football stadium in one of the levels? I used to love sliding around on that trying to take out the whole line of players in one go. Even more fun if you got the rock solid car powerup in the corner - dead handy for taking out the competition.
Finding every single person on a level of Carmageddon and running them down. It was nothing to do with getting enough time to finish the level, just about pure-grade destruction.
Carmageddon was great for that. Didn't look very good, but was enormous evil fun.
Re:17" iMac 800 to 1.33Ghz as well?
on
Upgrade Your eMac
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· Score: 1
Erm... pillows? Or more likely - boxes with pillows on top?
Probably best would be a large empty cardboard box, put the iMac upside down so the screen is in the box but you can close the lid a bit and put something across to support the dome unit.
Generally I find businesses do not upgrade, because it can take a lot of staff time to do. From what I've seen computers get shuffled around the office to people who don't need the latest & greatest, while certain people get brand new computers.
The classic in an office is to see a boss with a top of the range box who uses it for e-mail and the occasional bit of word processing, while their secretary has a much less powerful computer and is doing all the multi-tasking and heavy spreadsheet work. The trickle-down can't happen fast enough in these sorts of cases.
According to the logs of my website, people are still using Yahoo to search. Not as many as from Google, but quite a few, and they all get to me from the Google powered results because I'm not in Yahoos category listings (I don't want to pay the fee for my personal site.)
I even see people finding my site on Yahoo after also finding it from Google a few minutes earlier with the same search terms. It looks to be like people are using Yahoo as their secondary search site, when they're not happy with what Google is giving them.
OK, this means people don't realise they're seeing the same results as from Google, even though there's a 'powered by Google' image. But that doesn't really matter - they won't care when it's powered by something Yahoo owns, they just want to find what they're searching for.
Lots of spam is just going to random names / likely addresses at a domain name, your address doesn't have to be public to receive spam.
I support the idea of a textbox, but it's a barrier to people using a website. With a site I'm about to launch I'm going to want an e-mail address in plain text, so it is available to anyone who might want to contact me. That means I'm going to get spam, but I'll take that over the chance of missing out on a contract.
Personally, I always prefer websites that have a contact e-mail address, and/or phone number as well, it gives me more confidence that I can get hold of them than a form that might not be sending a message out. And when I send an e-mail, I can easily keep a copy of the message I've sent indefinitely.
Slashdot Mirror
I know lots of people who use webmail at work because they're not supposed to send personal e-mail through their work accounts.
Also, people can send mail to their friends, and still use the same mailbox when they get home in the evening.
Using webmail is a lot easier than setting up POP on whatever client your office uses, even if that's a setting you have permission to change.
I'm not sure you can call Google honest, only that they have not been proven dishonest, unlike Microsoft.
Google is still a company, the point of which is to make a profit. I don't think they're going to do anything nefarious with my e-mail, but I also don't give them any special dispensation because one of their mottos is "Don't be evil." So far they're just a company which makes a very good search engine, and a few peripheral tools and utilities. I don't see anything to make me think they're honest or dishonest, they are just good at providing their service.
I've never noticed a real e-mail address in a spam, it makes them far too easy to block. Generally they just point to a website which will have the contact details, or more likely just sales material, on it. Also, if I was receiving e-mail from spam, I wouldn't want to dig through a webmail interface to get it, that's pretty inefficient compared to getting it over POP/IMAP where the client can also filter out the responses with lots of swearing in them.
The invites system has been a great way of getting people to talk about the service. I've seen threads on several mailing lists and forums about who has invites and giving them out. It's scored a real buzz for the service which the other providers don't have.
Functionally better toasters still turn bread in to toast.
Better e-mail services from the ISP and filtering on the e-mail client will cut down the spam, which is alreading happening. I can't see anyone giving up e-mail any time soon, most of the bleating I've heard about it has come from journalistic circles where it seems to be something used to fill up column inches.
I'd agree with the backing up. When my 600 MHz iBook went it would be fine after a reboot, but quickly got worse and worse so by the time I phoned Apple and went through their tests on the phone it wouldn't boot at all. Luckily before it got to this stage I got most of my data copied off it, but I could easily have lost everything if the fix hadn't gone well.
From first symptoms of glitching video through to pretty-paperweight stage only took about a week for me. Maybe you're lucky and something else caused those problems.
Banning does seem to be going a bit far.
However, in the UK we have a speed limit for vehicles that use the pavement - motorised wheelchairs are limited to a 4mph top speed. Buggies (larger chairs with covers over the top, often used by people with limited mobility) can go faster, but they have to go on the road. Effectively it's illegal to use Segways on the pavement here.
I wonder if the Segways could have a button for 'pavement' which would drastically limit their top speed. However, policing this to ensure it was used would be quite awkward - pavement speed traps just for the odd Segway? Madness!
I remember reports a few years ago that Apple and Freeplay / Trevor Bayliss were experimenting to try and make a hand-cranked Newton or eMate.
Nothing ever came of it, but I'd have loved to see a bunch of business men on the train every morning, winding up their laptops.
BBC World Service broadcasts on LW, and they transmit BBC Radio 4 when they don't have World Service stuff to send out.
This saved my sanity a few years back when I was doing some painting in Paris for my uncle and I'd got bored of all my CDs. French radio had just gone over to playing much more French music (by law) and was mainly godawful. Those LW broadcasts were fantastic!
The last time I remember the stats being revealed, something like 80% of Slashdot visitors never read the comments. This seemed odd to me, as I also feel that it's the comments that makes Slashdot more interesting than just visiting a few news sources myself.
Thanks - great link (sorry I didn't reply earlier.)
It doesn't seem to greatly like my BT dongle, but I'll keep fiddling as it does exactly what I need.
Thanks
While I can use my 6310i as a modem for my Mac with no problems, I can't access the phone book in it, which is highly annoying, and using 'Support non-confirming phones' hasn't made any difference to that.
It's a shame - this is something the Sony/Ericsson phones do very well, but I still prefer Nokias overall (mainly because of their interface.)
I haven't really found any reason to use OO rather than Appleworks yet, apart from OO will read Word docs, whereas Appleworks isn't that good at it.
If you've already got Appleworks, there's not a lot of reason to get OO unless you find you're hitting the limits of what Appleworks can do, then it's worth checking out OO as it doesn't cost anything. If you have to buy Appleworks, it's worth checking out OO as a free alternative, but Appleworks is much quicker starting / in use on my G3 system.
Not the best analogy, I'm afraid. Toyota pick-ups have taken over from Land Rovers in the areas of the world where reliability and ruggedness is the absolute requirement (e.g. the desert.)
Hopefully the Mac will do rather better.
There's two bits of behaviour here:
1 - lots of people don't realise they can change their home page to something else. I know it sounds stupid, but it's true, and as more non-technical people use the web that proportion of users will become higher. This is partly why you still see those "make this website your homepage" links, it's because people just don't know they could set whatever they like as their home page.
2 - I see the remark "I'll change from Google when another search engine gives me better results." For lots of people, the same holds true for MSN - they get results that are good enough from the place they are automatically, so they have no reason to change.
I'm not happy about the way Microsoft have got all these users by setting one of their sites as the default home page, but there are a lot of people out there who like it and won't want to change. This is partly why Yahoo advertises (or at least used to) so much - they were telling people their website was out there and did searching.
Yahoo all ready have shareholders to keep happy. Having research going on that is easily shown to be to do with advertising is a good way to keep shareholders from complaining about 'blue sky' research being done. I'm all for research, but most of the people I see who do lots of stocks and shares care about the 'bottom line' and that's all, they may not see where the research can lead on to better services and revenue that way.
Also - you could just say Yahoo is being honest. Google is going to want to make money out of the services it creates at some point, otherwise it won't be able to continue serving them.
That's no good if you're on dial-up. Dealing with spam yourself is fine if you're on broadband, but it's a pain in the arse if you're on dial-up as you have to download all the crap before the software deals with it. That's why ISP-level spam control is attractive to lots of people.
As far as I can tell, this was aimed mainly at people producing things like e-mail newsletters.
The Lockergnome newsletters started to use the Habeas haiku a while ago because they had problems when people started marking their sign-up newsletters as spam when they didn't want to receive them any more, rather than using the unsubscribe options. The people on large ISPs that aggregate what people think of as spam were then banning the newsletters from other subscribers.
Getting yourself unbanned from ISPs usually involves contacting their staff and convincing them that you're not a spammer. In the case of Lockergnome the second part was straightforward, but it was taking up a lot of time, and you only know you've lost subscribers when someone asks when the next newsletter's coming because they haven't received any for a while.
The Habeas system gives the ISPs an easy way to let through stuff marked with it, as long as Habeas defend their haiku against spammers successfully. So far they've done this, but finding the spammers to enforce their copyright, as they're trying to do in this latest case, isn't always easy/fast.
While it's good to see another hard drive based player in the market with some innovative features, I can see some problems with it:
Syncing over wifi is great, if a bit slow, but I don't think it will affect sales of devices like iPods for two reasons:
1. Many people who want players don't have wifi. The most likely to have wifi are people who own new Powerbooks, who are also the most likely to buy iPods as it's also made by Apple. It wouldn't really be worth getting wifi just so you could sync with the player, that would greatly increase the cost of the device.
2. The wifi syncing is really only useful for people who want to leave the player in their car. Otherwise, it's so little hassle to plug a player in to a cable or put it down in to a dock, either of which you'd need to do anyway to charge it (in the case of the iPod.)
OK, so lets say you can leave the player in your car attached to the cigarette lighter to keep it charged (my car doesn't have a cigarette lighter socket, but lets leave that aside.) Now, I can see a problem where the battery in the player is getting lots of short charges from the car. This isn't good for rechargeable batteries - they're better if they're allowed to drain completely and then charged up. So I can see a problem like the recent fuss over iPod batteries degrading quickly happening with the Aireo player as well.
If the player is in the car all the time, it won't matter if the battery doesn't work for very long, except for when you want to take it somewhere out of the car.
Really, car-wise, I can't see this beating the portable CD player I bought which plays discs of MP3s. It's not particularly great (it was a cheap one, much cheaper than the Aireo) but then again neither is the stereo in my car. However, when I want new music I can burn a new disc on my computer and leave it in my car. I effectively have infinite storage, and back-up of my music in one go. Also, if I buy a new CD I can listen to it on the same device, rather than having to take it to a computer to encode it. Now some proper car-based CD players have the ability to play discs of MP3s, if you want a good car-based experience they might be a better bet.
Back to the cable-based syncing: I'm not discounting that Apple, Creative and other MP3 player makers will put wifi in to their future devices. Once wifi becomes very widespread it will probably make sense. However, monitoring for wifi networks is going to be a drain on the players battery, so it will probably be something that needs to be turned on and off, which means if you forget to turn it on there's no difference between having to go and find the player and turn it on against finding it and carrying it to the computer and plugging it in.
And, lets face it, you're probably going to go to that computer anyway. That's the thing with MP3 players - generally they're carried around by you anyway, so having it in your pocket when you go to the computer anyway and plugging it in when you're there really isn't much of an effort. At the moment syncing involves bringing two pieces of personal equipment - the personal stereo and personal computer, together. You don't really need wifi for that, a cable is probably going to be long enough.
Oh yeah, Carma II was a good upgrade, whereas III just seemed more of an... effort somehow.
Wasn't it II that had the American football stadium in one of the levels? I used to love sliding around on that trying to take out the whole line of players in one go. Even more fun if you got the rock solid car powerup in the corner - dead handy for taking out the competition.
Finding every single person on a level of Carmageddon and running them down. It was nothing to do with getting enough time to finish the level, just about pure-grade destruction.
Carmageddon was great for that. Didn't look very good, but was enormous evil fun.
Erm... pillows? Or more likely - boxes with pillows on top?
Probably best would be a large empty cardboard box, put the iMac upside down so the screen is in the box but you can close the lid a bit and put something across to support the dome unit.
Generally I find businesses do not upgrade, because it can take a lot of staff time to do. From what I've seen computers get shuffled around the office to people who don't need the latest & greatest, while certain people get brand new computers.
The classic in an office is to see a boss with a top of the range box who uses it for e-mail and the occasional bit of word processing, while their secretary has a much less powerful computer and is doing all the multi-tasking and heavy spreadsheet work. The trickle-down can't happen fast enough in these sorts of cases.
According to the logs of my website, people are still using Yahoo to search. Not as many as from Google, but quite a few, and they all get to me from the Google powered results because I'm not in Yahoos category listings (I don't want to pay the fee for my personal site.)
I even see people finding my site on Yahoo after also finding it from Google a few minutes earlier with the same search terms. It looks to be like people are using Yahoo as their secondary search site, when they're not happy with what Google is giving them.
OK, this means people don't realise they're seeing the same results as from Google, even though there's a 'powered by Google' image. But that doesn't really matter - they won't care when it's powered by something Yahoo owns, they just want to find what they're searching for.
Or a certain Mr Rhythm.
Lots of spam is just going to random names / likely addresses at a domain name, your address doesn't have to be public to receive spam.
I support the idea of a textbox, but it's a barrier to people using a website. With a site I'm about to launch I'm going to want an e-mail address in plain text, so it is available to anyone who might want to contact me. That means I'm going to get spam, but I'll take that over the chance of missing out on a contract.
Personally, I always prefer websites that have a contact e-mail address, and/or phone number as well, it gives me more confidence that I can get hold of them than a form that might not be sending a message out. And when I send an e-mail, I can easily keep a copy of the message I've sent indefinitely.