Just yesterday I was chatting with a student in a programming class. She was complaining that she got in trouble for using language features that were "not taught yet" in the class.
That is sad. I did the same thing in junior high. We had a small unit in a computer apps class on programming in Basic. I did some research in the library to come up with idea for a group project program and ended up making a game. I used RND to randomize the outcome of a choice, a function that had never been covered in class. That and the fact the teacher could tell I wrote the whole game myself (since i was a lousy typist the other guys typed up what I'd handwritten) earned me a grade of 115% of the available points.
I know, and that's part of the problem. Internet Explorer used to have a separate "Search" and "Go" button on the right side of the menu bar so you could choose which action was performed. Not anymore. And I'm seeing more and more cases where simply hitting the enter key after entering a URL actually does search, leaving it a mystery if it's even possible to go right to the site anymore.
Wait, which is it? Do you want browser makers to try and fix the address bar so more people know how to use it, or do you want to preserve the status quo?
I want them to fix the address bar so more people know how to use it, but that's not what they're doing. They're trying to make it into a combination address bar and history/web search box, and they're making it harder and harder to actually use it as the former for business reasons.
I have talked to people who are unable to reach the gateway of their DSL router to make changes to it, because every time they type the gateway IP into the address bar, even if they jut hit [enter], it runs the string through Bing (or one of dozen other sites), instead of trying to go there. They can only get pages of search results that contain the IP address (usually help pages from router makers), and the results page, nor the browser interface offer an easy to find way of telling the browser to go right to the IP. I have to have these people pull up a Run box on Windows in order to go right there.
If I were one of your company's customers, I would rightfully be blaming you, not google, for your inability to make google understand how I should get to my email.
Jesus Christ, did you read what you just wrote? Google Search exists to help people find what they're looking for, and you're saying it's our job to tell Google how to help people find our site? No. It's Google's job to do that. Their whole search premise is based on this idea they have spiders crawling the Net, building a comprehensive index of everything on it. This a public website, we aren't hiding it or anything. If Google can''t locate it when they have applications on users phones and computers that are literally watching where they go online, it's their fault.
If people want to find our web mail portal they can come to the website we print on their damn bill, or they can call and ask us how to get to it. They might miss us, though. We're only open 24 hours a day. Hey, we'll even tell them how to set up their email in a client so they don't even have to worry about finding a website or remembering their login -- their email will magically appear from clicking an icon.
I doubt Google would like to be so blatant as the Great Firewall of China, if you search for a particular site you'll find it. If you're only vaguely close though it might end up on page 10 instead of page 2.
This is all they have to do really. I know I said Google could remove the listings from their index, but they could also bump them way down the list just as easily. Of the people who depend on Google to find everything for them, how many do you think are patient enough to look through more than the first couple pages of results? There might as well not be more than three pages of results displayed. Same result -- but plausible deniability ("We didn't remove the site. It's still there, see? Right on page eighteen! The algorithm is what decides how things are displayed, we don't influence it.")
Google needs to appear neutral, they're just an action house selling off adwords to the highest bidder while displaying whatever search results their robots have found. If they start messing with that image though obviously taking sides they'll lose far more business than they gain. Google is now to online marketing what lawyers are to lawsuits, no matter what side wins they always get paid. They'd have to be really, really dense to mess with that.
It doesn't have to be Google themselves. That's what Googlebombing and SEO is all about -- making sure it's not the most relevant results that are displayed, but the ones the purchaser of the service wants to have come up, when certain keywords are typed in.
If you type the actual address in the address bar and it is parsed as a URL by the bar -- you're going to get what you want, unless there's DNS poisoning going on. There's little room for someone to influence what you get for their personal gain.
It actually makes a lot of sense to use google for everything. At the beginning there were IP addresses ; hard to remember. Then DNS came up and URLs got much easier to remember.
No, that would only be true if Google were able to deliver the result you're looking for 100% of the time, and in a listing a person can easily recognize as the correct one. This requires a user to be able to differentiate between the real site and another site that claims to be the site and isn't purely by the listing text.. this is exactly how phishing works. Making people think they're where they want to be and they aren't. And in this case it's just a SEO trip away. You shouldn't trust PageRank to keep you out of danger.
I do Internet support. One of the companies I support (which shall remain nameless, but it's pretty big in rural areas) did not, until recently, have their webmail site listed on Google. I don't know how that happened, as I assume Chrome is spying enough to have told the mothership about the existance of the site, but no, it was not possible to find this web portal by searching for it by URL on Google. To make matters worse, there is another arm of the same ISP that maintains a separate webmail site that looks very similar to the first one, but is not the same site. That site is what Google gave for search results when you looked up the first one, even though they are slightly different URLs and completely separate sites. Customers would repeatedly go to the wrong site and be unable to log into their email because they were not on the right website.
Now ignoring how stupid this whole situation was for the customers (and the tech support people like me who had to deal with it), note that in this case they simply got sent to a site by the same company, that failed to give them their email.
What if it hadn't been the same company? What if it was a phishing site? All these people who thought they had reached the right destination because they did a Google search for the site, instead of just typing the URL in their address bar have been typing their email credentials into someplace they shouldn't, giving them to who knows who.
Um Google owns the Blogger site so ya they are hosting the images. So they are making money from the images because they draw more people and that means more ads placed, more ads clicked, more ads sold. Bit of a women hater hu?
Were DMCA requests filed against the specific web pages hosting those pics? Or did they file a request for the images to be taken down from one person's blog, and assume that request runs to perpetuity for all future occurrences of the same image? Some people think Google actively monitors all the content on their services and will see the files automatically.
These photos were leaked on the Internet, and Google is like King of the Internet and can control and censor every last thing that happens on it.
This is more true than it should be. There's a whole generation of people using the Internet who literally don't know how to browse to a website directly. They don't know how an address bar works, and go to google to look up whatever they want. Even when they have the URL.. That's like going to a reverse phone book to look up a person by their number -- to find out how to call them..
The biggest problem (that is often ignored) is you're now putting control over your access to the Internet in Google's hands by doing this. If Google doesn't want you to visit a website for business reasons, or political reasons, all they have to do is remove the sites from their search index. Unless you know how to actually browse to the site or think of looking on a search engine other than your usual, you're effectively blocked from it.
For these people Google does, in practice, have the ability to censor the Internet. And browser makers increasing trend to monkeying with the address bar's function only makes it worse.
I got the impression the police were distributing this as some kind of internet filter, and secretly using it to monitor your computer. It's not. The are advertising it for what it is. A keylogger... so you can spy on your kids.
If it's for parents to monitor children, why is the data being sent to a third-party server? It should be staying on the computer for parents to peruse later.
Interpretation: only remove what *I* want you to remove. Because if you so much as dare to remove my stupid, barely-used half-broken feature and make me install an addon to get it back, you're worse than Hitler. But screw everyone else, they can lose whatever, no matter how useful or heavily-used it is by comparison.
The excuse Mozilla gave years ago when they first started to bloat things up was that people were not really making use of extensions or even aware of their existence. People don't want to have to search for and install the extensions and would rather have that functionality built-in when they first install.
Instead of adding the features to the core app, they could have created extensions that added this functionality, then bundled them, enabled by default, with Firefox. That way the functionality would already be there without the user having to do anything, and then the "power users" who were more familiar with the extensions system and didn't want that functionality could just go disable them to improve performance and memory usage.
Just rebuilt my NAS in a different case, and while I have no qualms about covering the power LED with electrical tape and blocking it out completely, I'd like the hard disk LED to be visible but dimmer so I can still see it to monitor it for heavy disk activity, but not have it bright at night.
They'll run the project to rave reviews for years, then suddenly replace all the 2.4 Ghz access points for 5 Ghz-only ones. Only a small percentage of people will enjoy the new service, and everyone else will complain about how they can't use their 802.11b and older 802.11n devices on it. Then they will begin running the old routers in tandem. Users will be able to pick them up under with the SSID "Classic".
Eventually the 5 Ghz routers will be decommissioned and no one will speak of them again.
The Walled Garden is OSX itself. Part of what makes Apple machines popular is how well they run compared to infamous versions of Windows like ME and Vista (pre SP1). Having such tight control of both the hardware and the software helps make this possible. They aren't having to tweak their own hardware or drivers to suit the latest change by a third-party (Microsoft).
I was also talking about the iPod "halo effect". Apple's reputation as being a premium brand is also based on how "exclusive" the whole ecosystem of products is. Can you use an iPhone or an Apple iCloud email account on a PC -- yes. But the products are really made to be more seamless on OSX and there are some features that are heavily tied into other products (like Photostream using iDevices). This kind of integration is possible on Windows -- but that's the problem. It becomes a [i]Windows[/i] thing. Not a Dell thing. That doesn't raise Dell's own brand reputation because it's not exclusive to their products. Apple can create that exclusivity, which in turn builds their brand into something more than just a nameplate on another made-in-China computer. It becomes a "club" (or a cult as some say).
Just the opposite, the Apple crowd only buys niche products so when they want a gaming PC they tend to buy an Alienware PC or other niche vendor product.
Dell wants a larger niche group. Alienware is kids with too much allowance. They want adults with regular income and a large portion of it disposable. Up to this point they have been in the race to the bottom with other PC manufacturers.
Except Alienware is niche. Even if it is an up-market brand, it's more closely associated with "gamer kid" than "high fashion". It wouldn't attract the yuppie crowd Apple gets.
I actually have one somewhere in my junk in storage. It was an analog modem mated with a hub pretty much. You would connect your devices with Ethernet and the modem would hold it's own dialer setup. When something wanted to connect the modem would call in the provider and it (and any other devices) were online.
In practice it didn't work that good, because once a computer thinks it has an always-on network connection it tends to try making remote connections for all sorts of things unless you lock it down. So the modem was always connected pretty much. This isn't practical when you don't have a dedicated phone line for it and even then many ISPs had systems set up to not allow you to keep connections on constantly like that.
I just had to reformat my machine a couple weeks ago and, just like the first time I set up the machine from the Windows 8 final retail version, I used a Local account (no Microsoft Account tie in at all). After I installed all the normal Windows 8.0 patches I clicked the store and right there on the left was the huge-ass tile for the 8.1 update. I clicked it the machine started downloading it, and I went out for a couple hours to run some errands. No login prompt at all.
When I got home it was (coincidentally) just finishing the install.
I have a Hotmail account but I never enter the information on Windows 8 Mail (because I've heard it will convert a local user account setup to a Microsoft Account enabled one if you do. I also never use Skype out of the same concern. I access the Hotmail account as IMAP in Thunderbird, same way I do all my other email accounts, and IM with people on the MSN Messenger network using Pidgin to connect to it (news of MSN's death are greatly exaggerated -- by Microsoft to get people to start using Skype).
Amazon has been "helpfully" adding books to people's Kindle devices for months now. They just show up on your library like you purchased them and you didn't. I haven't heard any big outrage over that.
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Just yesterday I was chatting with a student in a programming class. She was complaining that she got in trouble for using language features that were "not taught yet" in the class.
That is sad. I did the same thing in junior high. We had a small unit in a computer apps class on programming in Basic. I did some research in the library to come up with idea for a group project program and ended up making a game. I used RND to randomize the outcome of a choice, a function that had never been covered in class. That and the fact the teacher could tell I wrote the whole game myself (since i was a lousy typist the other guys typed up what I'd handwritten) earned me a grade of 115% of the available points.
LOL.
It's still people trying to use the unlimited Internet service they paid for, of course Verizon will keep throttling them.
I know, and that's part of the problem. Internet Explorer used to have a separate "Search" and "Go" button on the right side of the menu bar so you could choose which action was performed. Not anymore. And I'm seeing more and more cases where simply hitting the enter key after entering a URL actually does search, leaving it a mystery if it's even possible to go right to the site anymore.
Wait, which is it? Do you want browser makers to try and fix the address bar so more people know how to use it, or do you want to preserve the status quo?
I want them to fix the address bar so more people know how to use it, but that's not what they're doing. They're trying to make it into a combination address bar and history/web search box, and they're making it harder and harder to actually use it as the former for business reasons.
I have talked to people who are unable to reach the gateway of their DSL router to make changes to it, because every time they type the gateway IP into the address bar, even if they jut hit [enter], it runs the string through Bing (or one of dozen other sites), instead of trying to go there. They can only get pages of search results that contain the IP address (usually help pages from router makers), and the results page, nor the browser interface offer an easy to find way of telling the browser to go right to the IP. I have to have these people pull up a Run box on Windows in order to go right there.
If I were one of your company's customers, I would rightfully be blaming you, not google, for your inability to make google understand how I should get to my email.
Jesus Christ, did you read what you just wrote? Google Search exists to help people find what they're looking for, and you're saying it's our job to tell Google how to help people find our site? No. It's Google's job to do that. Their whole search premise is based on this idea they have spiders crawling the Net, building a comprehensive index of everything on it. This a public website, we aren't hiding it or anything. If Google can''t locate it when they have applications on users phones and computers that are literally watching where they go online, it's their fault.
If people want to find our web mail portal they can come to the website we print on their damn bill, or they can call and ask us how to get to it. They might miss us, though. We're only open 24 hours a day. Hey, we'll even tell them how to set up their email in a client so they don't even have to worry about finding a website or remembering their login -- their email will magically appear from clicking an icon.
some of us see the world in green vertical Greek letters.
the rest of us saw it in green vertical Katakana
I saw both. Does that make me a more "worldly" person?
Ford sued by families of hit-n-run victims, Colt sued by families of suicide-by-cops, and McDonald's sued for making kids obese.
Um...
http://articles.latimes.com/20...
I doubt Google would like to be so blatant as the Great Firewall of China, if you search for a particular site you'll find it. If you're only vaguely close though it might end up on page 10 instead of page 2.
This is all they have to do really. I know I said Google could remove the listings from their index, but they could also bump them way down the list just as easily. Of the people who depend on Google to find everything for them, how many do you think are patient enough to look through more than the first couple pages of results? There might as well not be more than three pages of results displayed. Same result -- but plausible deniability ("We didn't remove the site. It's still there, see? Right on page eighteen! The algorithm is what decides how things are displayed, we don't influence it.")
Google needs to appear neutral, they're just an action house selling off adwords to the highest bidder while displaying whatever search results their robots have found. If they start messing with that image though obviously taking sides they'll lose far more business than they gain. Google is now to online marketing what lawyers are to lawsuits, no matter what side wins they always get paid. They'd have to be really, really dense to mess with that.
It doesn't have to be Google themselves. That's what Googlebombing and SEO is all about -- making sure it's not the most relevant results that are displayed, but the ones the purchaser of the service wants to have come up, when certain keywords are typed in.
If you type the actual address in the address bar and it is parsed as a URL by the bar -- you're going to get what you want, unless there's DNS poisoning going on. There's little room for someone to influence what you get for their personal gain.
It actually makes a lot of sense to use google for everything. At the beginning there were IP addresses ; hard to remember. Then DNS came up and URLs got much easier to remember.
No, that would only be true if Google were able to deliver the result you're looking for 100% of the time, and in a listing a person can easily recognize as the correct one. This requires a user to be able to differentiate between the real site and another site that claims to be the site and isn't purely by the listing text.. this is exactly how phishing works. Making people think they're where they want to be and they aren't. And in this case it's just a SEO trip away. You shouldn't trust PageRank to keep you out of danger.
I do Internet support. One of the companies I support (which shall remain nameless, but it's pretty big in rural areas) did not, until recently, have their webmail site listed on Google. I don't know how that happened, as I assume Chrome is spying enough to have told the mothership about the existance of the site, but no, it was not possible to find this web portal by searching for it by URL on Google. To make matters worse, there is another arm of the same ISP that maintains a separate webmail site that looks very similar to the first one, but is not the same site. That site is what Google gave for search results when you looked up the first one, even though they are slightly different URLs and completely separate sites. Customers would repeatedly go to the wrong site and be unable to log into their email because they were not on the right website.
Now ignoring how stupid this whole situation was for the customers (and the tech support people like me who had to deal with it), note that in this case they simply got sent to a site by the same company, that failed to give them their email.
What if it hadn't been the same company? What if it was a phishing site? All these people who thought they had reached the right destination because they did a Google search for the site, instead of just typing the URL in their address bar have been typing their email credentials into someplace they shouldn't, giving them to who knows who.
Um Google owns the Blogger site so ya they are hosting the images. So they are making money from the images because they draw more people and that means more ads placed, more ads clicked, more ads sold. Bit of a women hater hu?
Were DMCA requests filed against the specific web pages hosting those pics? Or did they file a request for the images to be taken down from one person's blog, and assume that request runs to perpetuity for all future occurrences of the same image? Some people think Google actively monitors all the content on their services and will see the files automatically.
These photos were leaked on the Internet, and Google is like King of the Internet and can control and censor every last thing that happens on it.
This is more true than it should be. There's a whole generation of people using the Internet who literally don't know how to browse to a website directly. They don't know how an address bar works, and go to google to look up whatever they want. Even when they have the URL.. That's like going to a reverse phone book to look up a person by their number -- to find out how to call them..
The biggest problem (that is often ignored) is you're now putting control over your access to the Internet in Google's hands by doing this. If Google doesn't want you to visit a website for business reasons, or political reasons, all they have to do is remove the sites from their search index. Unless you know how to actually browse to the site or think of looking on a search engine other than your usual, you're effectively blocked from it.
For these people Google does, in practice, have the ability to censor the Internet.
And browser makers increasing trend to monkeying with the address bar's function only makes it worse.
This is a misleading story and summary.
I got the impression the police were distributing this as some kind of internet filter, and secretly using it to monitor your computer.
It's not.
The are advertising it for what it is. A keylogger... so you can spy on your kids.
If it's for parents to monitor children, why is the data being sent to a third-party server? It should be staying on the computer for parents to peruse later.
Interpretation: only remove what *I* want you to remove. Because if you so much as dare to remove my stupid, barely-used half-broken feature and make me install an addon to get it back, you're worse than Hitler. But screw everyone else, they can lose whatever, no matter how useful or heavily-used it is by comparison.
The excuse Mozilla gave years ago when they first started to bloat things up was that people were not really making use of extensions or even aware of their existence. People don't want to have to search for and install the extensions and would rather have that functionality built-in when they first install.
Instead of adding the features to the core app, they could have created extensions that added this functionality, then bundled them, enabled by default, with Firefox. That way the functionality would already be there without the user having to do anything, and then the "power users" who were more familiar with the extensions system and didn't want that functionality could just go disable them to improve performance and memory usage.
But they didn't do that for some reason...
Coming soon - the Microsoft Watch.
It has a paperclip for it's face, and asks you really stupid questions ...
Microsoft Watch: "Do you know what time it is?"
Thank you for the tip.
Just rebuilt my NAS in a different case, and while I have no qualms about covering the power LED with electrical tape and blocking it out completely, I'd like the hard disk LED to be visible but dimmer so I can still see it to monitor it for heavy disk activity, but not have it bright at night.
They'll run the project to rave reviews for years, then suddenly replace all the 2.4 Ghz access points for 5 Ghz-only ones.
Only a small percentage of people will enjoy the new service, and everyone else will complain about how they can't use their 802.11b and older 802.11n devices on it. Then they will begin running the old routers in tandem. Users will be able to pick them up under with the SSID "Classic".
Eventually the 5 Ghz routers will be decommissioned and no one will speak of them again.
The Walled Garden is OSX itself. Part of what makes Apple machines popular is how well they run compared to infamous versions of Windows like ME and Vista (pre SP1). Having such tight control of both the hardware and the software helps make this possible. They aren't having to tweak their own hardware or drivers to suit the latest change by a third-party (Microsoft).
I was also talking about the iPod "halo effect". Apple's reputation as being a premium brand is also based on how "exclusive" the whole ecosystem of products is. Can you use an iPhone or an Apple iCloud email account on a PC -- yes. But the products are really made to be more seamless on OSX and there are some features that are heavily tied into other products (like Photostream using iDevices). This kind of integration is possible on Windows -- but that's the problem. It becomes a [i]Windows[/i] thing. Not a Dell thing. That doesn't raise Dell's own brand reputation because it's not exclusive to their products. Apple can create that exclusivity, which in turn builds their brand into something more than just a nameplate on another made-in-China computer. It becomes a "club" (or a cult as some say).
Just the opposite, the Apple crowd only buys niche products so when they want a gaming PC they tend to buy an Alienware PC or other niche vendor product.
Dell wants a larger niche group. Alienware is kids with too much allowance. They want adults with regular income and a large portion of it disposable. Up to this point they have been in the race to the bottom with other PC manufacturers.
Food can sit in a garbage can for a week before they come by.
How do they tell the difference between wasted food and food that was thrown out because it was spoiled and unsafe to eat to start with?
Except Alienware is niche. Even if it is an up-market brand, it's more closely associated with "gamer kid" than "high fashion". It wouldn't attract the yuppie crowd Apple gets.
Dell thinks they can be Apple, but don't have the walled garden that makes it work.
ignore this. accidentally modded it
I actually have one somewhere in my junk in storage. It was an analog modem mated with a hub pretty much. You would connect your devices with Ethernet and the modem would hold it's own dialer setup. When something wanted to connect the modem would call in the provider and it (and any other devices) were online.
In practice it didn't work that good, because once a computer thinks it has an always-on network connection it tends to try making remote connections for all sorts of things unless you lock it down. So the modem was always connected pretty much. This isn't practical when you don't have a dedicated phone line for it and even then many ISPs had systems set up to not allow you to keep connections on constantly like that.
Sorry. Factually wrong.
I just had to reformat my machine a couple weeks ago and, just like the first time I set up the machine from the Windows 8 final retail version, I used a Local account (no Microsoft Account tie in at all). After I installed all the normal Windows 8.0 patches I clicked the store and right there on the left was the huge-ass tile for the 8.1 update. I clicked it the machine started downloading it, and I went out for a couple hours to run some errands. No login prompt at all.
When I got home it was (coincidentally) just finishing the install.
I have a Hotmail account but I never enter the information on Windows 8 Mail (because I've heard it will convert a local user account setup to a Microsoft Account enabled one if you do. I also never use Skype out of the same concern. I access the Hotmail account as IMAP in Thunderbird, same way I do all my other email accounts, and IM with people on the MSN Messenger network using Pidgin to connect to it (news of MSN's death are greatly exaggerated -- by Microsoft to get people to start using Skype).
Amazon has been "helpfully" adding books to people's Kindle devices for months now. They just show up on your library like you purchased them and you didn't.
I haven't heard any big outrage over that.
Oh, that's right. That's not Apple.