It's nice on the one hand that Microsoft is making the privacy option the default, but if DNT is unenforceable, wouldn't "DNT by default" give certain entities an excuse to ignore the DNT flag by default?
Responding to complaints from Chinese Googlers that the search engine is 'inconsistent and unreliable,' Google has updated its service to help users steer clear of search queries that will result in page errors. Google will now highlight characters and phrases that are likely to 'break' a user's connection.
My reading of that is that Google is being censored, not that Google is censoring as otherwise not a word in it makes sense.
If Google were censoring, then the search engine would work normally, it's just certain search results would not appear. So a search for "Tienanmen Square Massacre" would come up with pages of results of, say, Fred Tienanmen's blog entry where he massacres those proposing that squares have the same sized sides, but would be absent anything about some funny business that occurred in China during the 1980s.
That's not what's happening though. What TFS is saying is that users are suffering random page errors, that the engine feels "inconsistent and unreliable". That's consistent with a third party, say, perhaps, the Great Firewall of China, interrupting page downloads as they happen because they have naughty words on them.
You do know that Google didn't own Motorola until LAST WEEK, right? And that Motorola's lawsuits were launched long before Google started the process of buying Motorola?
Could you list all the products Google had out a decade ago that now require you provide a phone number and real name to use, that didn't then?
Does Google search require this, for example? (Answer: no)
What about GMail? (Answer: no)
Google groups? (Answer: no)
Google maps? (Answer: no)
Google news? (Answer: no)
OK, well, iGoogle? (Answer: no)
Youtube? (Answer: no)
OK... so what are we talking about here?
I know that the generic Google account system recommends you give it a cellphone number, so you can recover your password more securely. But you're not required to. In fact, the only tool I'm aware of that requires you give your phone number is Google Voice, which it's required you do since its inception, because it needs it in order to work properly.
What about real names? Well, there's Google+, but that's new. And it has plenty of competition. And in fact, the real names thing is probably why Google+ hasn't taken off. So that pretty much kills that argument.
Real names are also required for... well, anything that uses payments (Google Play, for example, if, and only if, you buy something, and AdWords), because, well, credit cards are difficult to charge if you don't have a fucking name. But that's ALWAYS been the case, since Froogle.
AdSense does too, but again always has done. (Yes, Google knows who I am)
So, really, what's your argument here?
Google has always had services that require real names and/or real telephone numbers. They're pushing the latter recently solely to help you recover lost passwords, and they're pushing the former only in relation to one service that, by no stretch of the imagination, can remotely be considered to be having monopoly power, and whose primary competitor, which pre-existed Google+ by many years, has always had the same policy.
What? Google has patent trolls running proxy fights on phone makers who install Windows Phone, really?
That said, I'm not 100% sure Google is right here. Microsoft seems to be fairly open about wanting a slice of the Android phone cash bonanza, and is negotiating with phone manufacturers (as it should be - those are the people actually selling devices that have a price on them) without demanding amounts that would make Android phones impossible or uncompetitive.
Microsoft has even put some effort into ensuring Android phones fit within a Windows infrastructure, from licensing ActiveSync so it's integrated within the Android's native mail app, to porting across the Lync and OneNote clients.
That doesn't look to me to be Microsoft's usual brand of hostility. That looks, to me at least, more like Microsoft's attitude towards, say, Mac OS and Mac OS X. Provide the integration, and profit by the fact corporations can safely pick Microsoft-only infrastructure rather than rushing into the arms of rivals who provide more open, standard, systems than they do.
Well, no, but again, going back to the original question, why? It would have made more sense to "disappear" the negotiators at Bretton Woods who put the US dollar in a straitjacket for two decades.
This is a conspiracy theory based on national pride, not national interest, that suggests any threat to the dollar's position as "international currency" is a bad thing. The reality is that the US, more so than it's needed for seventy years, needs to be able to shake off the dollar centric international economy. Until it does so, it can't very well do much but whine when countries like China devalue their currencies in order to improve their competitiveness at the US's expense.
According to a documentary they're showing at the moment, Chernobyl - after well over two decades - is currently inhabited by mutated zombie like beings. It's not really surprising people would be concerned.
While it's tempting to think "Watergate... impeachment... wait a moment... he was set up... conspiracy!", it's important to remember that he was thought of as a Cheneyish politician long before he was even elected. "Tricky Dicky" actually predates Watergate.
I don't know, was there ever a time that class action lawsuits didn't help the defendant more than the plaintiff anyway?
"As part of the settlement, you will all receive a 10% off coupon for your next purchase of a Windows operating system, and a free bumper sticker with the words "I think Microsoft is AWESOME!" inscribed upon it."
Yeah, I know the lawyers get their cut, but that's almost the cost of a marketing campaign anyway.
Having a national currency be an international currency also has always been a liability for the country involved. The only reason the American dollar held that position for so many decades was because of stupidity and national pride on the part of American negotiators at Bretton Woods. If you allow it to happen, even informally like today, it becomes very, very, difficult to manage the value of your own currency, you're essentially putting it in the hands of rival countries.
The problem here is that it's a portable, pocketable, device that's supposed to spend large amounts of time away from any location where it can be charged. What you're arguing is the equivalent of saying (CAR ANALOGY AHEAD!!! WARNING! WARNING!) that it'd be OK if a car had a gas tank that was just large enough for amount five miles worth of gasoline simply because THE LEATHER SEATS ARE TEH AWESOME.
OK, now I know what you're going to say. "But squiggy, leather seats don't affect gasoline usage", but that's missing the point. The point here is that ten hours (life of a Galaxy Nexus) is UTTERLY absurd. It's barely usable. Who the hell makes a phone with a battery that pathetic? Who the hell, I'm looking at you Google, puts their fucking branding all over such a device?
Why is it ten hours? Because Samsung wanted to make the phone really thin. That's it. That's the only reason. If the GN were, say, the same thickness as my older phone, you'd be able to fit a battery three or four times in the size in it.
My Nokia 9190 had a battery life that was measured in hundreds of hours. I'm not kidding. A smartphone that could last almost a week away from a charger, even with moderate use.
Why have we gone backwards this far? And why do we get hysterical apologetics for it when we point this out?
Yep, that's a great demonstration of a conservative making a fact free assertion in an attempt to paint an opponent as having inconsistent views.
Here's the problem though: we pretty much know (as far as anything can be known) that AGW is real. So it's pretty fair to point out that AGW deniers are ignoring anything that doesn't fit the narrative that they're wrong, because, well, if they weren't ignoring them, they'd not have the views they have.
"Warmers", however, or "people who follow the scientific method, and those who respect the results of those who follow the scientific method" to use a fairer description, may or may not be "ignoring anything that doesn't fit their narrative" but there's no way to tell. You see, if someone comes along and says "Aha! AGW is a ridiculous liberal myth! You see, MARS IS WARMING UP!" then, actually, one of two things may happen.
The first is that the person concerned about AGW might ignore it in the way you say. However, by happy chance, the person is still right, just as he or she'd be right if they were told "The sky's BROWN!!" and, instead of looking up to check, they rolled their eyes and walked on.
The second is that the person concerned might look into it, and come to the conclusion that the fact is interesting, but not pertinent. These latter people who look into things and check to see if they do falsify a theory are called "scientists". They often write up their results too, sometimes in a way that means the non-scientists can understand it.
That's how it works. So, while it's safe to say that ALL AGW deniers ignore anything that doesn't fit their narrative, it's demonstrably false to say that ALL of those concerned about AGW ignore anything that doesn't fit their narrative. In fact, sites like RealClimate.org prove pretty conclusively that they do, actually, investigate what AGW deniers claim. The problem is... virtually nothing the AGW Denial community has proves the AGW theory wrong, which is why it's such a solid theory.
Here's an idea, rather than letting the manufacturers get away with making the dick waving contest be about screen resolution, why not force them to fix the fucking smartphone battery life problem?
It's fairly common, especially in MS-only shops. Even my employer, which uses a mixture (although sadly mostly PHP on the GNU/Linux side, urgh) has their entire back-end in.NET, mostly VB.NET.
Don't underestimate the influence of VB. There's lots of business logic coded in VB, originally glued to Crystal Reports libraries and Access databases, which has been migrated to more centralized, sane, infrastructure thanks to VB.NET. And because small portions got ported in that way, the end result has been massive.NET apps, using SQL Server, all written in VB. It's seen as easier and safer for many businesses, especially the types of business that wouldn't touch a *ix box in a million years.
Note the term "normally use" and the rest of my comment.
You don't "normally use".NET for desktop applications. Some people do, but I said "normally", not "ever". You would use Metro for desktop apps, however.
You don't "normally use" (actually, I think "ever" would work in this context) Metro for back-end, Enterprise web app type stuff. Some people may for reasons that are related to dominatrices and whips, but few would. The most common use of.NET is for back-end, Enterprise web app, type stuff.
I didn't say the contracts with Netflix were unreasonable!
I'm saying that it's highly improbable that Netflix is subject to an entirely different set of contracts than other online streamers. Both Amazon and Google have licensed the same Hollywood content, and Hulu has licensed content from the same studios, and all three are using Flash.
There's no reason to believe Netflix's choice of DRM had to do with the studios. It's more likely they, a company whose web presence prior to the instant streaming thing had been in the form of a fairly limited website for editing lists of movies to mail, found a company willing to do the work for them, in this case Microsoft, and asked them to do it.
Realistically, I don't think Hollywood would have cared if Netflix had gone for Flash, or even if they'd gone for RealPlayer. All they cared about was that some form of DRM was implemented.
And VB. Large amounts of VB stuff these days is back-end.NET stuff, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it, but is easy to ignore if you're living in a Java/Unix world.
Microsoft isn't deprecating.NET in favor of Tablet form factor Metro apps because that wouldn't make any sense whatsoever..NET is usually used as a back-end technology, huge amounts of the web are delivered using.NET applications. You wouldn't use Metro for what you normally use.NET for, and vice versa.
Yes, certain media outlets have hyped the fact Metro isn't.NET as some kind of evidence Microsoft doesn't like.NET or whatever. You can safely ignore any media outlet that does that. I'm not saying there's no desktop stuff in.NET, there's plenty around, but that's not where the focus is in.NET world, any more than it's the focus in Java world.
Non-obvious problem: The studios that actually own all the distribution rights to the videos on Netflix are, for the most part, wary about DRM on Linux, under the belief that obscurity grants security. Now, we all know that's stupid, but we also all know they are stupid.
If that were the case, then surely the same movies wouldn't be available via Amazon's instant streaming thing? Or Youtube's commercial play.google.com video service?
Netflix is very much the odd one out for the major commercial movie streamers in not using Flash. I really don't think the studios are mandating the technology, I think it's a straightforward case of them going to a major technology vendor to get a "solution", and getting the solution that vendor, Microsoft, found most in their interest to sell.
Amazon, YouTube, and, for that matter, Hulu (which streams stuff from different divisions of the same media companies, who are just as obsessive about piracy), are more tech savvy enterprises, being made up of people who were expecting to deliver stuff via the web from the get-go, so it's not surprising they'd go with an established technology like Flash rather than Silverlight. The only surprise, to a certain extent, is that Real didn't ever manage to muscle in on this market.
You're absolutely right. Why someone would drive a car on the highway when taking a train is a hell of a lot more convenient and practical is something I'll never know.
Just wish America actually had a proper comprehensive train system outside of the North East.
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It's nice on the one hand that Microsoft is making the privacy option the default, but if DNT is unenforceable, wouldn't "DNT by default" give certain entities an excuse to ignore the DNT flag by default?
From TFS:
My reading of that is that Google is being censored, not that Google is censoring as otherwise not a word in it makes sense.
If Google were censoring, then the search engine would work normally, it's just certain search results would not appear. So a search for "Tienanmen Square Massacre" would come up with pages of results of, say, Fred Tienanmen's blog entry where he massacres those proposing that squares have the same sized sides, but would be absent anything about some funny business that occurred in China during the 1980s.
That's not what's happening though. What TFS is saying is that users are suffering random page errors, that the engine feels "inconsistent and unreliable". That's consistent with a third party, say, perhaps, the Great Firewall of China, interrupting page downloads as they happen because they have naughty words on them.
You do know that Google didn't own Motorola until LAST WEEK, right? And that Motorola's lawsuits were launched long before Google started the process of buying Motorola?
Could you list all the products Google had out a decade ago that now require you provide a phone number and real name to use, that didn't then?
Does Google search require this, for example? (Answer: no)
What about GMail? (Answer: no)
Google groups? (Answer: no)
Google maps? (Answer: no)
Google news? (Answer: no)
OK, well, iGoogle? (Answer: no)
Youtube? (Answer: no)
OK... so what are we talking about here?
I know that the generic Google account system recommends you give it a cellphone number, so you can recover your password more securely. But you're not required to. In fact, the only tool I'm aware of that requires you give your phone number is Google Voice, which it's required you do since its inception, because it needs it in order to work properly.
What about real names? Well, there's Google+, but that's new. And it has plenty of competition. And in fact, the real names thing is probably why Google+ hasn't taken off. So that pretty much kills that argument.
Real names are also required for... well, anything that uses payments (Google Play, for example, if, and only if, you buy something, and AdWords), because, well, credit cards are difficult to charge if you don't have a fucking name. But that's ALWAYS been the case, since Froogle.
AdSense does too, but again always has done. (Yes, Google knows who I am)
So, really, what's your argument here?
Google has always had services that require real names and/or real telephone numbers. They're pushing the latter recently solely to help you recover lost passwords, and they're pushing the former only in relation to one service that, by no stretch of the imagination, can remotely be considered to be having monopoly power, and whose primary competitor, which pre-existed Google+ by many years, has always had the same policy.
Yes, blaming Google for the actions started years ago of a company they literally bought last week is sure to prove your argument.
What? Google has patent trolls running proxy fights on phone makers who install Windows Phone, really?
That said, I'm not 100% sure Google is right here. Microsoft seems to be fairly open about wanting a slice of the Android phone cash bonanza, and is negotiating with phone manufacturers (as it should be - those are the people actually selling devices that have a price on them) without demanding amounts that would make Android phones impossible or uncompetitive.
Microsoft has even put some effort into ensuring Android phones fit within a Windows infrastructure, from licensing ActiveSync so it's integrated within the Android's native mail app, to porting across the Lync and OneNote clients.
That doesn't look to me to be Microsoft's usual brand of hostility. That looks, to me at least, more like Microsoft's attitude towards, say, Mac OS and Mac OS X. Provide the integration, and profit by the fact corporations can safely pick Microsoft-only infrastructure rather than rushing into the arms of rivals who provide more open, standard, systems than they do.
My God, I hadn't realized that all but four nations had left the "UN."
Well, no, but again, going back to the original question, why? It would have made more sense to "disappear" the negotiators at Bretton Woods who put the US dollar in a straitjacket for two decades.
This is a conspiracy theory based on national pride, not national interest, that suggests any threat to the dollar's position as "international currency" is a bad thing. The reality is that the US, more so than it's needed for seventy years, needs to be able to shake off the dollar centric international economy. Until it does so, it can't very well do much but whine when countries like China devalue their currencies in order to improve their competitiveness at the US's expense.
According to a documentary they're showing at the moment, Chernobyl - after well over two decades - is currently inhabited by mutated zombie like beings. It's not really surprising people would be concerned.
While it's tempting to think "Watergate... impeachment... wait a moment... he was set up... conspiracy!", it's important to remember that he was thought of as a Cheneyish politician long before he was even elected. "Tricky Dicky" actually predates Watergate.
I don't know, was there ever a time that class action lawsuits didn't help the defendant more than the plaintiff anyway?
"As part of the settlement, you will all receive a 10% off coupon for your next purchase of a Windows operating system, and a free bumper sticker with the words "I think Microsoft is AWESOME!" inscribed upon it."
Yeah, I know the lawyers get their cut, but that's almost the cost of a marketing campaign anyway.
What could Kahn do that Nixon didn't do already? And why wasn't Nixon charged with rape?
Having a national currency be an international currency also has always been a liability for the country involved. The only reason the American dollar held that position for so many decades was because of stupidity and national pride on the part of American negotiators at Bretton Woods. If you allow it to happen, even informally like today, it becomes very, very, difficult to manage the value of your own currency, you're essentially putting it in the hands of rival countries.
The problem here is that it's a portable, pocketable, device that's supposed to spend large amounts of time away from any location where it can be charged. What you're arguing is the equivalent of saying (CAR ANALOGY AHEAD!!! WARNING! WARNING!) that it'd be OK if a car had a gas tank that was just large enough for amount five miles worth of gasoline simply because THE LEATHER SEATS ARE TEH AWESOME.
OK, now I know what you're going to say. "But squiggy, leather seats don't affect gasoline usage", but that's missing the point. The point here is that ten hours (life of a Galaxy Nexus) is UTTERLY absurd. It's barely usable. Who the hell makes a phone with a battery that pathetic? Who the hell, I'm looking at you Google, puts their fucking branding all over such a device?
Why is it ten hours? Because Samsung wanted to make the phone really thin. That's it. That's the only reason. If the GN were, say, the same thickness as my older phone, you'd be able to fit a battery three or four times in the size in it.
My Nokia 9190 had a battery life that was measured in hundreds of hours. I'm not kidding. A smartphone that could last almost a week away from a charger, even with moderate use.
Why have we gone backwards this far? And why do we get hysterical apologetics for it when we point this out?
My Nokia 9190 is a smartphone. It'd last almost a week on a single charge, and that's with moderate use.
The idea that smartphones should have pathetic battery lives is a post-iPhone thing.
Yep, that's a great demonstration of a conservative making a fact free assertion in an attempt to paint an opponent as having inconsistent views.
Here's the problem though: we pretty much know (as far as anything can be known) that AGW is real. So it's pretty fair to point out that AGW deniers are ignoring anything that doesn't fit the narrative that they're wrong, because, well, if they weren't ignoring them, they'd not have the views they have.
"Warmers", however, or "people who follow the scientific method, and those who respect the results of those who follow the scientific method" to use a fairer description, may or may not be "ignoring anything that doesn't fit their narrative" but there's no way to tell. You see, if someone comes along and says "Aha! AGW is a ridiculous liberal myth! You see, MARS IS WARMING UP!" then, actually, one of two things may happen.
The first is that the person concerned about AGW might ignore it in the way you say. However, by happy chance, the person is still right, just as he or she'd be right if they were told "The sky's BROWN!!" and, instead of looking up to check, they rolled their eyes and walked on.
The second is that the person concerned might look into it, and come to the conclusion that the fact is interesting, but not pertinent. These latter people who look into things and check to see if they do falsify a theory are called "scientists". They often write up their results too, sometimes in a way that means the non-scientists can understand it.
That's how it works. So, while it's safe to say that ALL AGW deniers ignore anything that doesn't fit their narrative, it's demonstrably false to say that ALL of those concerned about AGW ignore anything that doesn't fit their narrative. In fact, sites like RealClimate.org prove pretty conclusively that they do, actually, investigate what AGW deniers claim. The problem is... virtually nothing the AGW Denial community has proves the AGW theory wrong, which is why it's such a solid theory.
Here's an idea, rather than letting the manufacturers get away with making the dick waving contest be about screen resolution, why not force them to fix the fucking smartphone battery life problem?
It's fairly common, especially in MS-only shops. Even my employer, which uses a mixture (although sadly mostly PHP on the GNU/Linux side, urgh) has their entire back-end in .NET, mostly VB.NET.
Don't underestimate the influence of VB. There's lots of business logic coded in VB, originally glued to Crystal Reports libraries and Access databases, which has been migrated to more centralized, sane, infrastructure thanks to VB.NET. And because small portions got ported in that way, the end result has been massive .NET apps, using SQL Server, all written in VB. It's seen as easier and safer for many businesses, especially the types of business that wouldn't touch a *ix box in a million years.
Note the term "normally use" and the rest of my comment.
You don't "normally use" .NET for desktop applications. Some people do, but I said "normally", not "ever". You would use Metro for desktop apps, however.
You don't "normally use" (actually, I think "ever" would work in this context) Metro for back-end, Enterprise web app type stuff. Some people may for reasons that are related to dominatrices and whips, but few would. The most common use of .NET is for back-end, Enterprise web app, type stuff.
I didn't say the contracts with Netflix were unreasonable!
I'm saying that it's highly improbable that Netflix is subject to an entirely different set of contracts than other online streamers. Both Amazon and Google have licensed the same Hollywood content, and Hulu has licensed content from the same studios, and all three are using Flash.
There's no reason to believe Netflix's choice of DRM had to do with the studios. It's more likely they, a company whose web presence prior to the instant streaming thing had been in the form of a fairly limited website for editing lists of movies to mail, found a company willing to do the work for them, in this case Microsoft, and asked them to do it.
Realistically, I don't think Hollywood would have cared if Netflix had gone for Flash, or even if they'd gone for RealPlayer. All they cared about was that some form of DRM was implemented.
And VB. Large amounts of VB stuff these days is back-end .NET stuff, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it, but is easy to ignore if you're living in a Java/Unix world.
Microsoft isn't deprecating .NET in favor of Tablet form factor Metro apps because that wouldn't make any sense whatsoever. .NET is usually used as a back-end technology, huge amounts of the web are delivered using .NET applications. You wouldn't use Metro for what you normally use .NET for, and vice versa.
Yes, certain media outlets have hyped the fact Metro isn't .NET as some kind of evidence Microsoft doesn't like .NET or whatever. You can safely ignore any media outlet that does that. I'm not saying there's no desktop stuff in .NET, there's plenty around, but that's not where the focus is in .NET world, any more than it's the focus in Java world.
If that were the case, then surely the same movies wouldn't be available via Amazon's instant streaming thing? Or Youtube's commercial play.google.com video service?
Netflix is very much the odd one out for the major commercial movie streamers in not using Flash. I really don't think the studios are mandating the technology, I think it's a straightforward case of them going to a major technology vendor to get a "solution", and getting the solution that vendor, Microsoft, found most in their interest to sell.
Amazon, YouTube, and, for that matter, Hulu (which streams stuff from different divisions of the same media companies, who are just as obsessive about piracy), are more tech savvy enterprises, being made up of people who were expecting to deliver stuff via the web from the get-go, so it's not surprising they'd go with an established technology like Flash rather than Silverlight. The only surprise, to a certain extent, is that Real didn't ever manage to muscle in on this market.
You're absolutely right. Why someone would drive a car on the highway when taking a train is a hell of a lot more convenient and practical is something I'll never know.
Just wish America actually had a proper comprehensive train system outside of the North East.
Or maybe Microsoft's lawyers don't bother sending the same notices to Bing because, well, who uses Bing?
(OK, I use Bing once in a while, before going back to Google when I realize Bing is just as crappy as Google search.)
You're off by one :)