I watch television programs that have sponsors, and the programs are not advertisements themselves. (Blah blah product placement blah blah Joe Sixpack blah blah.)
If Google wants everyone to understand that sponsored links are advertisements, they could at least label them "Advertisements." Those deceptive advertisement-filled supplements in newspapers are labeled "Advertisement" on every page, not "sponsored supplement."
That was true for a while, but MSN Search results now show ads either in colored backgrounds above the regular links, or in ordinary colors alongside the regular links just like Google does.
There are no "sponsored links that are displayed without colored backgrounds or physical separation from the search results." I never claimed as such in my original post.
There are, however, sponsored links that are displayed in the same color scheme as the ordinary search results. Because the sponsored links look so similar to the genuine search result links, they may be confusing to the consumer. The only indication that the links are "sponsored" is a line of grey text.
I believe that Google phased out the colored-background links for ordinary AdWords for two reasons: (1) to get advertisers to pay more for what they had been getting for free, and (2) because end users would easily confuse the similarly-colored sponsored links with general search results.
Really? All the cheap AdWords ads (say, on a search for "linux") are in the exact same color scheme as the non-sponsored links.
Google used to put all the sponsored links against colored backgrounds, but they now reserve the special backgrounds for the larger and more expensive ads. Perhaps they want the consumer to believe that the sponsored links are very similar to the unsponsored ones....nah, that'd be evil and Google can't be evil.
I just tried a search using Google.com (from the USA) and found an ad that only read "Find it for sale," not "Find African Slaves for sale." I clicked it and was directed to a page not unlike this one, a search for "African Slaves" on eBay.
I wrote a script that pulled random words from/usr/dict/words. One of those words was "fevergum." I looked it up in the dictionary to see what it meant but found no entries. I turned to Google, which promises sexy fevergum singles and "about 350" copies of/usr/dict/words.
Try searching on some of the other clever non-words in/usr/dict/words, and you'll find that adwords is surprisingly popular among the cat/usr/dict/words | whatever crowd.
Oh, there isn't one? Guess I'll have to wait for version 2, since iWork with spreadsheets every day and I haven't found a decent Mac spreadsheet app besides Excel. OpenOffice's spreadsheet program is non-native, ass-slow, and supports half as many rows as Excel does (32,000 versus 65,536). Gnumeric is even worse than OpenOffice at reading or writing Excel files, and it too is not Mac native.
If you want to run a program that uses X libraries to draw windows, then you need an X server. Most X servers for Windows can run in "rootless" mode so your X application windows can be moved around just like Windows windows.
Because I'd like to be able to watch one live show while recording another. I accomplished this years ago with a cheap little cable splitter. Once everything requires a cable box that you have to remotely control, the level of complexity increases very quickly.
Right now your only options for "watching one live show while recording another" are to stick with analog cable, to get a DirecTiVo, or to get two cable boxes. Plan A works for me, but I hate IR blasters. One more box to watch TV is one too many.
Outlook Express is a mediocre e-mail client. It costs $0 with Windows. It supports Hotmail if you pay for a special Hotmail Super Plus Foo account; Hotmail-OE integration used to be free but Microsoft killed that recently.
Outlook is a mediocre e-mail client with a contact manager, task list, notes facility, and calendar. When coupled with an Exchange server, Outlook makes for an excellent groupware tool. It costs about $110 per seat, plus the cost of Windows, when purchased by itself. It can also integrate with Hotmail if you pay money for Hotmail Plus Super Deluxe Monkey Edition.
HP will sell you a HP Compaq dx2000 "Small & Medium Business PC" for about $650 that includes Microsoft Works (not MS Office, not MS Works Suite) and Windows XP Professional. Office costs $100 more. (Select "Windows XP Professional with SP1a" for the OS.)
Gateway will sell you an E-2300 desktop for $550 with Windows XP Professional and Works Suite (which includes Word and Encarta but not Outlook). Office Basic (Word, Excel, and Outlook) costs $90 more.
Most companies that have an Exchange server buy Outlook with their PCs or have a license agreement to install it throughout the company. However, don't try to sell me this "you can't buy a business PC without Outlook" argument.
Gmail is every bit as "non-free" as Hotmail. Your average Gmail session is still obscured by layers upon layers of JavaScript, and use of third-party programs is in direct violation of the Program Policies: "users may not:... Modify, adapt, translate, or reverse engineer any portion of the Gmail Service."
They offer free POP delivery just like Yahoo! Mail used to do, but who's to say whether that will continue when (if?) Gmail comes out of beta?
If you really want free access, sign up for a real non-beta e-mail service. I recommend Fastmail.
Outlook lets you use WebDAV to search for free/busy times. Just have it publish your free/busy times to a WebDAV server (http://your-company.site/~you/freebusy) then tell it to look for your co-workers' times that they published the same way (http://your-company.site/~(name)/freebusy). I've done it. It works when everyone's using Outlook.
Download Opera M2. It had GMail's "paradigm" of labels and lightning-fast searches for years before GMail was ever conceived. It also supports folders.
And if you really don't like paying for things, there's an ad-supported version -- it even uses Google Adsense for targeted advertising!
If you force your family to use Firefox instead of IE, they'll just enter their account details in Firefox instead of IE.
"But Firefox displays the actual URL in the bottom right corner! Nobody can spoof that..."
It doesn't matter. Phishers can just use insecure sites to harvest their information.
"But you can download AwesomePhishBlockerFreeExtension 0.1!"
All that will do is compare the site to a known blacklist. Phishers set up web sites faster than the producers of AwesomePhishBlockerFreeExtension 0.1 can catalog them.
He was comparing the iPod to the Sony Network Walkman, which plays music files off an internal hard disk. The Network Walkman has failed to grab any market- or mindshare from the iPod in North America.
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I watch television programs that have sponsors, and the programs are not advertisements themselves. (Blah blah product placement blah blah Joe Sixpack blah blah.)
If Google wants everyone to understand that sponsored links are advertisements, they could at least label them "Advertisements." Those deceptive advertisement-filled supplements in newspapers are labeled "Advertisement" on every page, not "sponsored supplement."
That was true for a while, but MSN Search results now show ads either in colored backgrounds above the regular links, or in ordinary colors alongside the regular links just like Google does.
Example
There are no "sponsored links that are displayed without colored backgrounds or physical separation from the search results." I never claimed as such in my original post.
There are, however, sponsored links that are displayed in the same color scheme as the ordinary search results. Because the sponsored links look so similar to the genuine search result links, they may be confusing to the consumer. The only indication that the links are "sponsored" is a line of grey text.
I believe that Google phased out the colored-background links for ordinary AdWords for two reasons: (1) to get advertisers to pay more for what they had been getting for free, and (2) because end users would easily confuse the similarly-colored sponsored links with general search results.
Really? All the cheap AdWords ads (say, on a search for "linux") are in the exact same color scheme as the non-sponsored links.
...nah, that'd be evil and Google can't be evil.
Google used to put all the sponsored links against colored backgrounds, but they now reserve the special backgrounds for the larger and more expensive ads. Perhaps they want the consumer to believe that the sponsored links are very similar to the unsponsored ones.
I just tried a search using Google.com (from the USA) and found an ad that only read "Find it for sale," not "Find African Slaves for sale." I clicked it and was directed to a page not unlike this one, a search for "African Slaves" on eBay.
I wrote a script that pulled random words from /usr/dict/words. One of those words was "fevergum." I looked it up in the dictionary to see what it meant but found no entries. I turned to Google, which promises sexy fevergum singles and "about 350" copies of /usr/dict/words.
/usr/dict/words, and you'll find that adwords is surprisingly popular among the cat /usr/dict/words | whatever crowd.
Try searching on some of the other clever non-words in
Don't give me a laundry list of features. How well does Pages export to Word? How well can PowerPoint 2003 for Windows read Keynote-created files?
Do you know anything about how well these programs work, or are you just going to parrot Apple's marketing?
Why hasn't Apple blindly followed everyone else's decision to change X servers?
:)
Because they Think Different (tm), of course.
Where's the Excel replacement?
Oh, there isn't one? Guess I'll have to wait for version 2, since iWork with spreadsheets every day and I haven't found a decent Mac spreadsheet app besides Excel. OpenOffice's spreadsheet program is non-native, ass-slow, and supports half as many rows as Excel does (32,000 versus 65,536). Gnumeric is even worse than OpenOffice at reading or writing Excel files, and it too is not Mac native.
If you want to run a program that uses X libraries to draw windows, then you need an X server. Most X servers for Windows can run in "rootless" mode so your X application windows can be moved around just like Windows windows.
Because I'd like to be able to watch one live show while recording another. I accomplished this years ago with a cheap little cable splitter. Once everything requires a cable box that you have to remotely control, the level of complexity increases very quickly.
Right now your only options for "watching one live show while recording another" are to stick with analog cable, to get a DirecTiVo, or to get two cable boxes. Plan A works for me, but I hate IR blasters. One more box to watch TV is one too many.
Outlook Express is a mediocre e-mail client. It costs $0 with Windows. It supports Hotmail if you pay for a special Hotmail Super Plus Foo account; Hotmail-OE integration used to be free but Microsoft killed that recently.
Outlook is a mediocre e-mail client with a contact manager, task list, notes facility, and calendar. When coupled with an Exchange server, Outlook makes for an excellent groupware tool. It costs about $110 per seat, plus the cost of Windows, when purchased by itself. It can also integrate with Hotmail if you pay money for Hotmail Plus Super Deluxe Monkey Edition.
Hope this helps.
Oh, and I almost forgot: Dell Business PC with Microsoft Windows XP Pro and no office software at all.
HP will sell you a HP Compaq dx2000 "Small & Medium Business PC" for about $650 that includes Microsoft Works (not MS Office, not MS Works Suite) and Windows XP Professional. Office costs $100 more. (Select "Windows XP Professional with SP1a" for the OS.)
Gateway will sell you an E-2300 desktop for $550 with Windows XP Professional and Works Suite (which includes Word and Encarta but not Outlook). Office Basic (Word, Excel, and Outlook) costs $90 more.
Most companies that have an Exchange server buy Outlook with their PCs or have a license agreement to install it throughout the company. However, don't try to sell me this "you can't buy a business PC without Outlook" argument.
Gmail is every bit as "non-free" as Hotmail. Your average Gmail session is still obscured by layers upon layers of JavaScript, and use of third-party programs is in direct violation of the Program Policies: "users may not: ... Modify, adapt, translate, or reverse engineer any portion of the Gmail Service."
They offer free POP delivery just like Yahoo! Mail used to do, but who's to say whether that will continue when (if?) Gmail comes out of beta?
If you really want free access, sign up for a real non-beta e-mail service. I recommend Fastmail.
Microsoft Works Suite doesn't include Microsoft Outlook. Neither does WordPerfect, which I see as the default option on the cheapest Dell PCs.
Furthermore, Dell has no monopoly.
Thanks. Where do I get a functional calendar to go along with it?
(Sunbird isn't even close to what Outlook can do.)
Outlook lets you use WebDAV to search for free/busy times. Just have it publish your free/busy times to a WebDAV server (http://your-company.site/~you/freebusy) then tell it to look for your co-workers' times that they published the same way (http://your-company.site/~(name)/freebusy). I've done it. It works when everyone's using Outlook.
Download Opera M2. It had GMail's "paradigm" of labels and lightning-fast searches for years before GMail was ever conceived. It also supports folders.
And if you really don't like paying for things, there's an ad-supported version -- it even uses Google Adsense for targeted advertising!
Just include "-mtcomments" with all your search queries, and Google will exclude all the most commonly-spammed blogs.
It's the best course of action until Google Non-Blog Search BETA comes out next month.
No. I'm sorry, but you'll just have to think for yourself. President Dean will implement a program to encourage citizens to do just that.
It doesn't matter whether people want it or not. The real point is: will you submit a patch to make it happen?
Here you go: everything you ever wanted to know about the Sony PSP in one easy-to-read report.
If you force your family to use Firefox instead of IE, they'll just enter their account details in Firefox instead of IE.
"But Firefox displays the actual URL in the bottom right corner! Nobody can spoof that..."
It doesn't matter. Phishers can just use insecure sites to harvest their information.
"But you can download AwesomePhishBlockerFreeExtension 0.1!"
All that will do is compare the site to a known blacklist. Phishers set up web sites faster than the producers of AwesomePhishBlockerFreeExtension 0.1 can catalog them.
He was comparing the iPod to the Sony Network Walkman, which plays music files off an internal hard disk. The Network Walkman has failed to grab any market- or mindshare from the iPod in North America.