...I can see someone getting their panties in a bunch over their place of business being photographed without permission....
Umm... That's probably why Google wants you to go inside and
...tell them about Google Maps and Google AdWords, collect information (such as hours of operation and types of payment accepted), and... get permission to
... take digital photos of the business. It all seems pretty well implied. You didn't even have to read the article.
Re:You still have service fees?
on
ATM Turns 40
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· Score: 1
You wouldn't believe the number of banks and credit unions in the US that charge fees to walk up to a human teller and deposit *coins* into your account. Legal tender coins. Even if you roll them properly before you arrive.
A friend of mine was closing his bank account a few years back because he was moving across the country where his bank didn't have any branches. He went to the bank several days early to let them know that he'd be withdrawing all his money (so that they could arrange to have the cash on hand). When he went to close the account, the teller told him he'd be charged a $20 fee for the certified check they would be giving him. He told them he's take cash instead of paying the fee. They claimed they didn't have adequate cash on hand and he'd have to take the check and pay the fee. He reminded them that he came in last week and told them to have the cash available. After several minutes, they finally handed him a certified check for his entire account balance and closed his account.
It's incredible what fees the banks in this country get away with charging. What's more incredible is that most people put up with it.
The problem with eBay is stupid bidders. If everyone would figure out how much they were willing to pay, then bid that much and be done with it, we'd all be happier buyers.
The problem is the bidders who either (1) have no idea how much they are willing to pay but, by God, they're gonna win this auction, or (2) they don't understand the way the bidding process works. Some people belong in both groups.
The people in group 1 somewhat artificially drive up the price. They increase their bid a couple of bucks a dozen times in the last few minutes because, rather than simply bidding the maximum they are actually willing to pay, they keep on jacking up the price until they've either got the high bid or time runs out.
People in group 2 don't seem to understand that they could bid $1,000,000,000.00 on a piece of $5 costume jewelry and they'll only have to pay a few bucks more than the 2nd highest bid. That's right folks: the *second* highest bidder sets the selling price that the highest bidder pays. The people who don't get this concept may have actually come up with a maximum they are willing to pay, but they ease up to it in the last few minutes instead of bidding their maximum and walking away. This group only encourages group 1's behavior.
Because of these groups who don't know how to play the auction game, the only way to win many auctions is to decide how much you are willing to pay and snipe at the last moment (unless it's already bid up higher than your personal maximum). Otherwise someone will decide "I guess I could bid a couple more bucks" in the last minutes of the auction. It's no wonder than people have developed sniping software to do this automatically for buyers who are busy sleeping, working, or enjoying life.
And by the way, if you're bidding on any of *my* auctions, forget all this. Bid early! Bid often!
Go to a flea market sometime. Stand in front of the booth where there's a guy selling 5-10 year old computers for $500 to technologically ignorant and quite poor parents of 8-year-olds. They've got a couple computers set up for people to play with. Just stand there and watch a few people play with Windows 98.
Once I did that and saw the *majority* of people move around the mouse and either double-click the right mouse button on everything or click squarely on the crack between the buttons every time, I began to understand Apple's one-button philosophy. And yes, they *always* double-clicked for some reason.
Sure these people could be educated about how the mouse controls the interface. But I bet they'd understand the Mac interface (with a one-button mouse) faster.
It's more like buying an unabridged audio book, transcribing it into print and publishing it. The punctuation and spelling might be a little different, but the content will still be practically identical. That's certainly not legal.
The argument about the guitar tabs comes mostly from music that isn't available in tablature format in a legal way. The websites want to make these tabs available to the consumers who demand them. The music publishers want to supply them to the consumers who demand them so they can make the money. The problem is, music publishers don't actually publish tabs for everything. It's just too expensive to publish tab books that won't see floods of sales.
So what the publishers need to do is offer inexpensive downloads of guitar tabs. It will work the same way as music downloads: people who are willing to pay a (small) price for a small amount of conveniently available content will do so. People who aren't willing to pay for it will either do without it, or they'll find an illegal way to get what they want.
Actually, for the great number of folks who don't want a calendar in their email client, it seems to make more sense in the current configuration: email client + separate calendar extension (Lightning). Lightning integrates into Thunderbird just fine. Even for a 0.3 release, Lightning seems to work pretty well. I imagine it's only going to get better. The Provider extension for Google Calendar works well too.
It would be nice if Lightning was offered in the Thunderbird installer--possibly like a "web installer", downloading the extra component during the install.
My real world: Even with DST, businesses have no global standard. Some open at 7am, some at 8am, some at 9am, some at 10am. Some stores close at 5pm, some at 6pm, some at 9pm. Some of them are even open 24 hours a day. Heck, stores in the same mall can have different hours.
Yes, but Home Depot keeps a regular schedule. Target keeps a regular schedule. If you're doing early morning shopping, you might remember "Target opens at 9 today; I should savor this breakfast for another hour before heading out." Particularly in the spring and fall, you apparantly want the hassle of remembering "wait, does Target open at 8 or 9?" Sure different businesses keep different schedules but, by and large, most keep consistent schedules year round. And thus, it's easy to remember when the businesses you frequent are open.
My real world: Even with DST, fewer people work in the summer time. A lot of people are on vacation. Many public transportation schedules reflect this by having a different "summer schedule".
But at least summer schedules only change at predetermined points of the year. You don't have to worry about the aforementioned problem of the bus schedule offsetting an hour starting a different week from your place of business.
My real world: Even with DST, businesses already maintain signage that says "Open 10am-5pm Monday-Wednesday, Open 10am-9pm Thursday-Friday, Open 9am-5pm Saturday, Open 11am-5pm Sunday.
Sure they do. And wouldn't it be great if everyone's hours had to be posted in 3-column tabular format?!
Makes it especially easy to read from the street! And just wait until you hear the recording when you call them on the phone!
If you think DST should be discontinued for it's own sake, that's fine; that has a whole different set of arguments. But to suggest that businesses and schools should change their operating hours during the year to achieve the same effect as DST and claim it would be no more inconvenient, that's just ridiculous.
Wow. I really don't think I could disagree with you more.
Your world: 1. Having to investigate when every business opens "this" time of the year. Since there's no standard, each business can decide when or if they want to change their schedule. 2. Having to deal with public transportation schedules that may or may not change the same time that your place of business decides to change its schedule. 3. Businesses having to maintain signage that says "Open 9am-11pm November-March, Open 8am-10pm April-October." 4. Someone having to answer the phone constantly at your place of business asking "When are you open?" since they are less likely to memorize your business's flexible hours. (And don't think that an automated attendant that answers the phone with this information is going to prevent this question getting through to a human; it won't.) 5. Getting to have noon magically when the sun is at the highest point in the sky. You know, if you happen to live on the meridian of your time zone where this actually occurs.
Or the real world: 1. Businesses keep reliable and memorizable hours. 2. Public transportation schedules vacillate rarely. 3. Businesses can keep their easy "Open 9am-11pm Every Day" signage. 4. Still have to answer the phone at work explaining your hours, but probably to fewer people since your hours aren't confusing and are a tad easier to memorize. 5. Noon is when it is. Doesn't matter since you can't reliably measure the time by looking at the sun most places in the world anyway. 6. Throw around a frisbee an extra hour after work in the summer when the weather is nice. 7. Change a dozen clocks and watches twice a year at a predetermined time that's widely publicized in the media, probably pre-marked on your calendar, and even changes automatically on machines with well-designed software.
So, um, are all your clocks especially difficult to change or something? Or do you have like 40 thousand of them? Oh, you're a sysadmin who got bit by the DST change? Refer to the end of #7.
Sir, you are a douchebag. When you are a douchebag, you have to live with the fact that the world does not revolve around your douchebagginess, and that you may have to work harder to make the solution that works for the rest of us, work for you.
I know this may sound perverse, but I use commas to reflect how I speak and not how they "should" be used to form a grammatically correct sentence.
Actually, it's not perverse at all. The original use of the comma was to indicate pause in speech. As it turns out, using commas "naturally" is one of the best ways to approximate using them in a "grammatically correct" fashion. It just so happens that good speakers generally insert pauses setting off: asides, appositives, free modifiers, adverbial phrases, independent clauses, list items, etc.
The first thing I think when I read a badly punctuated sentence is, "Did this person even read that?"
If it is voluntary, it will not work on principle, because every porn operator out there knows that the so called "blocks" will not be implemented only for children, but for everyone that is under anti-porn zealots internet jurisdiction, even who wouldn't mind to access this kind of content.
All you'd have to do is use someone else's DNS servers, right? Big deal.
The site owners themselves. If they are selling porn because they know they are selling porn, it's to everyone's advantage that they live on a.xxx domain. Easier to find; easier to filter. Hopefully there wouldn't be enough porn left on non-.xxx domains to stumble upon it nearly as often. It's not a perfect system, but it's a step in the right direction. If a site thinks it's art, let it stay on.com/.org; people who disagree will complain just like now. If a porn site stubbornly stays on a.com, people can complain to the site and hopefully they'll move to.xxx where they belong.
I think it all depends on the state. In Arizona, there isn't a sales tax (technically charged to consumers, but collected by vendors) but there is a gross receipts tax (charged to the vendors directly). It all comes from the same place though.
Actually "retail price" (i.e. list price) for most new DVDs is about $30. Borders just doesn't discount the CDs and DVDs very heavily to keep the margin reasonable. Given that the margin on books is so low, they can't really afford low margins on CDs and DVDs.
Best Buy, on the other hand, has high margins on enough of their product that they can take tiny margins on CDs and DVDs and not affect gross margin much. Add to that the fact the folks who buy CDs and DVDs are quite often interested in other things Best Buy sells at a higher margin.
Low price/low margin CDs and DVDs aren't nearly as likely to "lead" someone to buy books.
I think it'd be great if Firefox had one of those "Did you know" boxes on startup that you could easily disable once you're up with the play, and teach you all these tidbits until then.
It's my bug, and while the actual summary is more limited in scope, I actually mean it to be exactly what you describe. Too bad no one has time to work on something like this.
Amen brother. Bid the maximum amount you are willing to pay as near to the end of the auction as you can. Then the "I can't make up my mind how much this this is really worth to me, but I guess I don't mind spending a dollar more" jackasses don't have a time to outbid you.
i really don't understand sentimentality and nostalgia as the prime motivating factor when it comes to currency.
The "centuries" argument was definitely bunk. It's the "three-generations" problem. Money I use, my father used, and my grandfather used all looked relatively similar. Therein lies the sentimentality. If the mint simply changed the design of the money more dramatically, more often it wouldn't be a problem. If they start now, in another couple generations all the Americans still alive wouldn't be so idiotically sentimental about their money.
And in other news, people who pay with checks when there is anyone else behind them in the queue should be shot.
Amen. Working retail, it's unbelievable to me that anyone still takes checks. What a huge pain in the ass they are. If a huge retailer (say... Wal-Mart) just decided to quit accepting checks, everyone else could.
I don't even pay rent with checks anymore since my bank will send one in the mail as a "bill payment" for free. The only time I should see checks is in a birthday card from Grandpa. (Well before the time I'm a Grandpa, I'm sure there will be a much better way.)
Of course, I don't go to the 2 dollar mantinee [sic], so maybe that's the difference.
Strange. I find that the matinees are generally not so bad compared to the 7-11pm shows.
Moms take kids to kids' movies during matinees. Moms and Dads go to see R-rated action movies at night. Since they are too lazy to find a babysitter, they drag their tired/uninterested/scared kids with them and the kids whine and scream the whole time. Teenagers like the evening shows too, and they like to all sit and text their friends during the movies, lighting up the seats with backlit screens.
It still doesn't matter what time you go, because at all times of the day you have to deal with dirty screens (someone threw a soda at it), out-of-focus projection, and sound that isn't calibrated properly so it either is coming out of the wrong speakers, isn't syncing properly, or both.
I've gotten used to getting up and demanding my $9 back. They rarely hassle me about it, but since 80 people stayed in the theater and never bitch, they aren't going to improve anything since the margin loss is essentially zero.
I remember when I first heard about mounting LCD televisions in cars. My first thought was "great idea for minivans and long trips." This seems to be the most common use nowadays.
But the first time I noticed someone with one of these in a car: LCD mounted on the front dash--almost the passenger's dash since it was to the right of all the other panels. What was the driver watching? Porn.
it may be superior, but it came to market too late. Everyone already had an email address with AOL, Hotmail/MSN, Yahoo, etc. People don't like change.
Google Earth
great app, most people don't care and only want a mapping application. Google's real win with Earth is with corporate adoption: television stations use it a lot.
Google Maps
again, it's arguably superior. But mapquest is a verb just like google is. "I don't know where that it, but I can mapquest it." I hear that sentence practically every day.
Picasa
another great app. But most everyone's computer or digital camera came with a watered-down version of Photoshop or some other photo editing app. Photoshop definitely has the "name" in this market.
Then you're obviously doing something unusual. Been browsing multiple tabs in Firefox 2 for a few hours now. Only 47 MB used. Or are you running 80 tabs each with a stupid Java applet and 60 tabs with a complex nested table test in each?
Slashdot Mirror
...I can see someone getting their panties in a bunch over their place of business being photographed without permission....
Umm... That's probably why Google wants you to go inside and
...tell them about Google Maps and Google AdWords, collect information (such as hours of operation and types of payment accepted), and... get permission to
... take digital photos of the business. It all seems pretty well implied. You didn't even have to read the article.You wouldn't believe the number of banks and credit unions in the US that charge fees to walk up to a human teller and deposit *coins* into your account. Legal tender coins. Even if you roll them properly before you arrive.
A friend of mine was closing his bank account a few years back because he was moving across the country where his bank didn't have any branches. He went to the bank several days early to let them know that he'd be withdrawing all his money (so that they could arrange to have the cash on hand). When he went to close the account, the teller told him he'd be charged a $20 fee for the certified check they would be giving him. He told them he's take cash instead of paying the fee. They claimed they didn't have adequate cash on hand and he'd have to take the check and pay the fee. He reminded them that he came in last week and told them to have the cash available. After several minutes, they finally handed him a certified check for his entire account balance and closed his account.
It's incredible what fees the banks in this country get away with charging. What's more incredible is that most people put up with it.
Thank you for explaining this.
The problem with eBay is stupid bidders. If everyone would figure out how much they were willing to pay, then bid that much and be done with it, we'd all be happier buyers.
The problem is the bidders who either (1) have no idea how much they are willing to pay but, by God, they're gonna win this auction, or (2) they don't understand the way the bidding process works. Some people belong in both groups.
The people in group 1 somewhat artificially drive up the price. They increase their bid a couple of bucks a dozen times in the last few minutes because, rather than simply bidding the maximum they are actually willing to pay, they keep on jacking up the price until they've either got the high bid or time runs out.
People in group 2 don't seem to understand that they could bid $1,000,000,000.00 on a piece of $5 costume jewelry and they'll only have to pay a few bucks more than the 2nd highest bid. That's right folks: the *second* highest bidder sets the selling price that the highest bidder pays. The people who don't get this concept may have actually come up with a maximum they are willing to pay, but they ease up to it in the last few minutes instead of bidding their maximum and walking away. This group only encourages group 1's behavior.
Because of these groups who don't know how to play the auction game, the only way to win many auctions is to decide how much you are willing to pay and snipe at the last moment (unless it's already bid up higher than your personal maximum). Otherwise someone will decide "I guess I could bid a couple more bucks" in the last minutes of the auction. It's no wonder than people have developed sniping software to do this automatically for buyers who are busy sleeping, working, or enjoying life.
And by the way, if you're bidding on any of *my* auctions, forget all this. Bid early! Bid often!
Go to a flea market sometime. Stand in front of the booth where there's a guy selling 5-10 year old computers for $500 to technologically ignorant and quite poor parents of 8-year-olds. They've got a couple computers set up for people to play with. Just stand there and watch a few people play with Windows 98.
Once I did that and saw the *majority* of people move around the mouse and either double-click the right mouse button on everything or click squarely on the crack between the buttons every time, I began to understand Apple's one-button philosophy. And yes, they *always* double-clicked for some reason.
Sure these people could be educated about how the mouse controls the interface. But I bet they'd understand the Mac interface (with a one-button mouse) faster.
It's more like buying an unabridged audio book, transcribing it into print and publishing it. The punctuation and spelling might be a little different, but the content will still be practically identical. That's certainly not legal.
The argument about the guitar tabs comes mostly from music that isn't available in tablature format in a legal way. The websites want to make these tabs available to the consumers who demand them. The music publishers want to supply them to the consumers who demand them so they can make the money. The problem is, music publishers don't actually publish tabs for everything. It's just too expensive to publish tab books that won't see floods of sales.
So what the publishers need to do is offer inexpensive downloads of guitar tabs. It will work the same way as music downloads: people who are willing to pay a (small) price for a small amount of conveniently available content will do so. People who aren't willing to pay for it will either do without it, or they'll find an illegal way to get what they want.
Do you even know what science is? Name ONE scientific fact please.
It might as well have been legitimate reporting. I've met at least half a dozen pretentious jackasses just like the guy in that Onion article.
Actually, for the great number of folks who don't want a calendar in their email client, it seems to make more sense in the current configuration: email client + separate calendar extension (Lightning). Lightning integrates into Thunderbird just fine. Even for a 0.3 release, Lightning seems to work pretty well. I imagine it's only going to get better. The Provider extension for Google Calendar works well too.
It would be nice if Lightning was offered in the Thunderbird installer--possibly like a "web installer", downloading the extra component during the install.
My real world: Even with DST, businesses have no global standard. Some open at 7am, some at 8am, some at 9am, some at 10am. Some stores close at 5pm, some at 6pm, some at 9pm. Some of them are even open 24 hours a day. Heck, stores in the same mall can have different hours.
Yes, but Home Depot keeps a regular schedule. Target keeps a regular schedule. If you're doing early morning shopping, you might remember "Target opens at 9 today; I should savor this breakfast for another hour before heading out." Particularly in the spring and fall, you apparantly want the hassle of remembering "wait, does Target open at 8 or 9?" Sure different businesses keep different schedules but, by and large, most keep consistent schedules year round. And thus, it's easy to remember when the businesses you frequent are open.
My real world: Even with DST, fewer people work in the summer time. A lot of people are on vacation. Many public transportation schedules reflect this by having a different "summer schedule".
But at least summer schedules only change at predetermined points of the year. You don't have to worry about the aforementioned problem of the bus schedule offsetting an hour starting a different week from your place of business.
My real world: Even with DST, businesses already maintain signage that says "Open 10am-5pm Monday-Wednesday, Open 10am-9pm Thursday-Friday, Open 9am-5pm Saturday, Open 11am-5pm Sunday.
Sure they do. And wouldn't it be great if everyone's hours had to be posted in 3-column tabular format?!
Makes it especially easy to read from the street! And just wait until you hear the recording when you call them on the phone!
If you think DST should be discontinued for it's own sake, that's fine; that has a whole different set of arguments. But to suggest that businesses and schools should change their operating hours during the year to achieve the same effect as DST and claim it would be no more inconvenient, that's just ridiculous.
Wow. I really don't think I could disagree with you more.
Your world:
1. Having to investigate when every business opens "this" time of the year. Since there's no standard, each business can decide when or if they want to change their schedule.
2. Having to deal with public transportation schedules that may or may not change the same time that your place of business decides to change its schedule.
3. Businesses having to maintain signage that says "Open 9am-11pm November-March, Open 8am-10pm April-October."
4. Someone having to answer the phone constantly at your place of business asking "When are you open?" since they are less likely to memorize your business's flexible hours. (And don't think that an automated attendant that answers the phone with this information is going to prevent this question getting through to a human; it won't.)
5. Getting to have noon magically when the sun is at the highest point in the sky. You know, if you happen to live on the meridian of your time zone where this actually occurs.
Or the real world:
1. Businesses keep reliable and memorizable hours.
2. Public transportation schedules vacillate rarely.
3. Businesses can keep their easy "Open 9am-11pm Every Day" signage.
4. Still have to answer the phone at work explaining your hours, but probably to fewer people since your hours aren't confusing and are a tad easier to memorize.
5. Noon is when it is. Doesn't matter since you can't reliably measure the time by looking at the sun most places in the world anyway.
6. Throw around a frisbee an extra hour after work in the summer when the weather is nice.
7. Change a dozen clocks and watches twice a year at a predetermined time that's widely publicized in the media, probably pre-marked on your calendar, and even changes automatically on machines with well-designed software.
So, um, are all your clocks especially difficult to change or something? Or do you have like 40 thousand of them? Oh, you're a sysadmin who got bit by the DST change? Refer to the end of #7.
Sir, you are a douchebag. When you are a douchebag, you have to live with the fact that the world does not revolve around your douchebagginess, and that you may have to work harder to make the solution that works for the rest of us, work for you.
Actually, it's not perverse at all. The original use of the comma was to indicate pause in speech. As it turns out, using commas "naturally" is one of the best ways to approximate using them in a "grammatically correct" fashion. It just so happens that good speakers generally insert pauses setting off: asides, appositives, free modifiers, adverbial phrases, independent clauses, list items, etc.
The first thing I think when I read a badly punctuated sentence is, "Did this person even read that?"
The site owners themselves. If they are selling porn because they know they are selling porn, it's to everyone's advantage that they live on a .xxx domain. Easier to find; easier to filter. Hopefully there wouldn't be enough porn left on non-.xxx domains to stumble upon it nearly as often. It's not a perfect system, but it's a step in the right direction. If a site thinks it's art, let it stay on .com/.org; people who disagree will complain just like now. If a porn site stubbornly stays on a .com, people can complain to the site and hopefully they'll move to .xxx where they belong.
I think it all depends on the state. In Arizona, there isn't a sales tax (technically charged to consumers, but collected by vendors) but there is a gross receipts tax (charged to the vendors directly). It all comes from the same place though.
Actually "retail price" (i.e. list price) for most new DVDs is about $30. Borders just doesn't discount the CDs and DVDs very heavily to keep the margin reasonable. Given that the margin on books is so low, they can't really afford low margins on CDs and DVDs.
Best Buy, on the other hand, has high margins on enough of their product that they can take tiny margins on CDs and DVDs and not affect gross margin much. Add to that the fact the folks who buy CDs and DVDs are quite often interested in other things Best Buy sells at a higher margin.
Low price/low margin CDs and DVDs aren't nearly as likely to "lead" someone to buy books.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25868 2 (I think Bugzilla still disallows links from Slashdot, so copy, paste and remove the lame space Slashdot sticks in the link)
It's my bug, and while the actual summary is more limited in scope, I actually mean it to be exactly what you describe. Too bad no one has time to work on something like this.
Amen brother. Bid the maximum amount you are willing to pay as near to the end of the auction as you can. Then the "I can't make up my mind how much this this is really worth to me, but I guess I don't mind spending a dollar more" jackasses don't have a time to outbid you.
The "centuries" argument was definitely bunk. It's the "three-generations" problem. Money I use, my father used, and my grandfather used all looked relatively similar. Therein lies the sentimentality. If the mint simply changed the design of the money more dramatically, more often it wouldn't be a problem. If they start now, in another couple generations all the Americans still alive wouldn't be so idiotically sentimental about their money.
Amen. Working retail, it's unbelievable to me that anyone still takes checks. What a huge pain in the ass they are. If a huge retailer (say... Wal-Mart) just decided to quit accepting checks, everyone else could.
I don't even pay rent with checks anymore since my bank will send one in the mail as a "bill payment" for free. The only time I should see checks is in a birthday card from Grandpa. (Well before the time I'm a Grandpa, I'm sure there will be a much better way.)
Strange. I find that the matinees are generally not so bad compared to the 7-11pm shows.
Moms take kids to kids' movies during matinees. Moms and Dads go to see R-rated action movies at night. Since they are too lazy to find a babysitter, they drag their tired/uninterested/scared kids with them and the kids whine and scream the whole time. Teenagers like the evening shows too, and they like to all sit and text their friends during the movies, lighting up the seats with backlit screens.
It still doesn't matter what time you go, because at all times of the day you have to deal with dirty screens (someone threw a soda at it), out-of-focus projection, and sound that isn't calibrated properly so it either is coming out of the wrong speakers, isn't syncing properly, or both.
I've gotten used to getting up and demanding my $9 back. They rarely hassle me about it, but since 80 people stayed in the theater and never bitch, they aren't going to improve anything since the margin loss is essentially zero.
I remember when I first heard about mounting LCD televisions in cars. My first thought was "great idea for minivans and long trips." This seems to be the most common use nowadays.
But the first time I noticed someone with one of these in a car: LCD mounted on the front dash--almost the passenger's dash since it was to the right of all the other panels. What was the driver watching? Porn.
(Captcha for this post says it all: imbecile)
I'm hoping HD-DVD wins--on the name alone. Blu-ray is such an idiotic name. HD-DVD stands for what it is: High-Definition Digital Video Disc.
Search
OK, google's got best of breed there
Gmail
it may be superior, but it came to market too late. Everyone already had an email address with AOL, Hotmail/MSN, Yahoo, etc. People don't like change.
Google Earth
great app, most people don't care and only want a mapping application. Google's real win with Earth is with corporate adoption: television stations use it a lot.
Google Maps
again, it's arguably superior. But mapquest is a verb just like google is. "I don't know where that it, but I can mapquest it." I hear that sentence practically every day.
Picasa
another great app. But most everyone's computer or digital camera came with a watered-down version of Photoshop or some other photo editing app. Photoshop definitely has the "name" in this market.
Then you're obviously doing something unusual. Been browsing multiple tabs in Firefox 2 for a few hours now. Only 47 MB used. Or are you running 80 tabs each with a stupid Java applet and 60 tabs with a complex nested table test in each?