They both have their good an bad qualities, and I agree Yahoo's beta being flash is a negative. What Google really needs to fix is the accuracy of it's directions. It almost always suggests a non-logical, longer route (getting off interstates to take the more "direct" route on back country roads). And on very long trips it's even more inaccurate. Map a trip from Baltimore to New Orleans in both systems. Yahoo finds a route that's 6 hours shorter!
Oddly, according to the article, Google plans on charging more then PayPal. I don't really see an advantage to switching to Google, unless you just HATE PayPal... but Google seems to have equally crappy customer service.
Despite the joke, it goes to show how Google isn't that great at returning the "Best" result anymore. It needs to change its algorhythm now that all the SEO's know how to game the system.
I still prefer Clusty.com 's way of doing search...much easier to find the most relevant thing when you type in a term used for multiple things like "Paris" Does one want the porn star or city? or "Cold Fusion".. the technology, or the programming language? Google doesn't know, and for really common terms it fails. Clusty can tell the difference, Google can't.
Even better is Yahoo's beta search that allows you to filter results of sites that are more sales oriented or research oriented. If I want to find out about the new Trek Mountain Bike, Google hits me with tons of sales sites, when really I want reviews, or vice versa. If someone could combine all those, and then maybe a Digg like system of users rating relevance, they might have something.
It amazes me how transparent Microsoft lets itself be. The fact that someone can even post a blog like this about the company using internal company resources. As much as we rant about Microsoft being evil, you'd never see anything like this from Google, the only blogger about the internal day to day Google I know of was fired (Mark Jen).
What the streets looked like from 1,000 ft above helped you? Were you flying a helicopter? A9's street level photos may be more helpful for what your describing if by land.
The fact is, these computers are going to people who DO NOT... let me repeat that DO NOT have a shortage of food or other basic needs.
You are an idiot. Have you read their goals? No where does it state what class of people these go, and their goal is to have every child have a laptop. That includes the poor ones. One of the country's they have signed up, Nigeria, has a GDP per capita of under $1,000 and 60% of the population lives below the poverty line. With the required minimum order of 1,000,000 thats a cost to the Nigerian government of $100 mil.
Most people in the world get along just fine foodwise, even people living in the theoretical "village" talked about by Negroponte.
I think the 850 million people worldwide who are malnourished would disagree with you.
Well then I guess I should be more specific with my original comment, although it is still valid mr. technicality.:
How long til one of these ends up sold for $200 (in the poorer communities, that barely make this much in a year).
I'm not saying I disagree with the concept or the idea. I'm saying that it is very difficult in these countries to even find a policeman that cannot be bribed, let alone a laptop worth several months salary go unsold.
I've looked through all their websites, and they don't clearly indicate if these laptops are for the dirt poor or for the middle class.
Nothing you quoted indicates any of that, simply that they will be bought by the government and distributed to schools. I've read the website, it does not indicate if these schools are in mud hut villages or rural middle class or urban rich areas. Simply that they want every child to have a laptop.
I don't remember saying that. I've looked through all their websites, and they don't clearly indicate if these laptops are for the dirt poor or for the middle class. They give examples of a village without electricity etc, so i'm assuming their primary target are not children in downtown Hong Kong. Either way, $100 is a lot of money in many many countries, the GDP per capita of the lowest 25 nations is between $500-1000.
How long before we find these on eBay for $200? Money and food probably means a lot more to many of these people's immediate needs then a laptop for their child.
It's completely different then reporting bad news in a war. In this case there is almost no benefit to making the announcement, because the criminal is highly unlikely to discover what he/she has on their own. Now if someone hacked into the database to steal this data, then absolutely report it. But bigger hype has been made of this then what really went down. A laptop was stolen. Completely unrelated it had private data on it. How many laptops go missing every year with this type of data on it? Probably a lot more then you realize.
It would be like if someone stole a car, they might just normally strip it and ship it. Throw out any trash they had inside or just ignore it. But you make an announcement that a car was stolen today that contained a sheet of passwords to get into the CIA mainframe. Don't you think that INCREASES the likelyhood the data will be misused? I think it should have been reported to the authories and credit agencies, and then only if a pattern was detected that someone had discovered what data they had, then they could make an announcement.
First of all thieves don't sell things to pawn shops. Second, the odds of someone finding the data and knowing what it was would be pretty slim. Now if I bought a laptop off ebay or from some other secondhand source i'd probably check and see if it was the SSN laptop.
Someone stole a laptop. It would be wiped and sold on the street. 99% chance no one would be the wiser, the thief didn't know what he had. Now news comes out that there could be a laptop with tons of valuable info...thiefs all now look to see if they have the golden laptop! Another case where the news of the incident makes the problem worse. Lets make a big deal of this when someone actually knows they have this data and uses it for ill intent.
It does not do one of the things software needs to do, that is solve a need. Most casual users are not sharing spreadsheets with each other (and if they are, its usually filled with macros). Business are the main users of spreadsheets, and I don't see how this makes their lives any easier then saving an Excel sheet on the network.
Just because they build it, doesn't mean people will come. And whatever happened to Google's creed of sticking to search? I'd much rather them spend their time and money improving their search and solving click fraud then trying to spook MS.
All these 'wonderful' reviews running around on Vista, and still none exist that talk about the OS itself, all the reviews are doing is throwing up some pictures of the desktop and talking about AERO.
Um...thats all thats new in the OS. Shiny desktop, pretty pictures, lots of annoying security dialogs.
PageRank itself is the problem. It worked in 98 before everyone knew about it, now that they know the tricks, every search brings up forums and spam instead of the most relevant site. AdSense made the problem worse by letting spam sites turn an easy profit. Surely with all those PHD's there Google can come up with a more modern solution. Otherwise...wheres the next Google? Clusty.com ?
You should be happy about that. The memo shows they are documenting bugs and doing thorough testing. 65,000 bugs doesn't tell the whole story. BUG# 43456: "On specific machines running Pentium 166 MMX chips with Solitare running, icon may not appear as expected". Do you hold up the product for the other 99.999% of users because of that? I'm not sure i've ever ran into a bug in Windows 2000, certainly nothing that stopped me from doing my job.
Even though that's semi-trolly, I have to agree because Google has not improved its search to keep up with the Internet. A search on Google brings up blogs and forum discussions over more relevant sites, and link farms and adsense spammers fill the rest... I think Google may not want to change on purpose since improving search results means less AdWords revenue (why pay for an ad if my site comes up naturally?) and AdSense revenue (why fix the link farms when they bring in 50% of your revenue?).
Truely unique search engines like Clusty, and even the improvements Yahoo is doing will lead to Google's demise if they do not work to improve their search.
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They both have their good an bad qualities, and I agree Yahoo's beta being flash is a negative. What Google really needs to fix is the accuracy of it's directions. It almost always suggests a non-logical, longer route (getting off interstates to take the more "direct" route on back country roads). And on very long trips it's even more inaccurate. Map a trip from Baltimore to New Orleans in both systems. Yahoo finds a route that's 6 hours shorter!
Yahoo Maps beta is a lot better then Google maps. Traffic info, updated satellite imagery, and directions that actually are accurate!
Yeah, but have you seen Google Base? That thing is perhaps the most useless of all.
Maybe it was a typo, and the OS will be called lepard, as in the disease and the stigma that follows those who have it?
Oddly, according to the article, Google plans on charging more then PayPal. I don't really see an advantage to switching to Google, unless you just HATE PayPal... but Google seems to have equally crappy customer service.
Despite the joke, it goes to show how Google isn't that great at returning the "Best" result anymore. It needs to change its algorhythm now that all the SEO's know how to game the system.
I still prefer Clusty.com 's way of doing search...much easier to find the most relevant thing when you type in a term used for multiple things like "Paris" Does one want the porn star or city? or "Cold Fusion".. the technology, or the programming language? Google doesn't know, and for really common terms it fails. Clusty can tell the difference, Google can't.
Even better is Yahoo's beta search that allows you to filter results of sites that are more sales oriented or research oriented. If I want to find out about the new Trek Mountain Bike, Google hits me with tons of sales sites, when really I want reviews, or vice versa. If someone could combine all those, and then maybe a Digg like system of users rating relevance, they might have something.
It amazes me how transparent Microsoft lets itself be. The fact that someone can even post a blog like this about the company using internal company resources. As much as we rant about Microsoft being evil, you'd never see anything like this from Google, the only blogger about the internal day to day Google I know of was fired (Mark Jen).
What the streets looked like from 1,000 ft above helped you? Were you flying a helicopter? A9's street level photos may be more helpful for what your describing if by land.
You are an idiot. Have you read their goals? No where does it state what class of people these go, and their goal is to have every child have a laptop. That includes the poor ones. One of the country's they have signed up, Nigeria, has a GDP per capita of under $1,000 and 60% of the population lives below the poverty line. With the required minimum order of 1,000,000 thats a cost to the Nigerian government of $100 mil.
I think the 850 million people worldwide who are malnourished would disagree with you.
Well then I guess I should be more specific with my original comment, although it is still valid mr. technicality.: How long til one of these ends up sold for $200 (in the poorer communities, that barely make this much in a year).
I'm not saying I disagree with the concept or the idea. I'm saying that it is very difficult in these countries to even find a policeman that cannot be bribed, let alone a laptop worth several months salary go unsold.
Nothing you quoted indicates any of that, simply that they will be bought by the government and distributed to schools. I've read the website, it does not indicate if these schools are in mud hut villages or rural middle class or urban rich areas. Simply that they want every child to have a laptop.
I don't remember saying that. I've looked through all their websites, and they don't clearly indicate if these laptops are for the dirt poor or for the middle class. They give examples of a village without electricity etc, so i'm assuming their primary target are not children in downtown Hong Kong. Either way, $100 is a lot of money in many many countries, the GDP per capita of the lowest 25 nations is between $500-1000.
How long before we find these on eBay for $200? Money and food probably means a lot more to many of these people's immediate needs then a laptop for their child.
It's completely different then reporting bad news in a war. In this case there is almost no benefit to making the announcement, because the criminal is highly unlikely to discover what he/she has on their own. Now if someone hacked into the database to steal this data, then absolutely report it. But bigger hype has been made of this then what really went down. A laptop was stolen. Completely unrelated it had private data on it. How many laptops go missing every year with this type of data on it? Probably a lot more then you realize.
It would be like if someone stole a car, they might just normally strip it and ship it. Throw out any trash they had inside or just ignore it. But you make an announcement that a car was stolen today that contained a sheet of passwords to get into the CIA mainframe. Don't you think that INCREASES the likelyhood the data will be misused? I think it should have been reported to the authories and credit agencies, and then only if a pattern was detected that someone had discovered what data they had, then they could make an announcement.
First of all thieves don't sell things to pawn shops. Second, the odds of someone finding the data and knowing what it was would be pretty slim. Now if I bought a laptop off ebay or from some other secondhand source i'd probably check and see if it was the SSN laptop.
Someone stole a laptop. It would be wiped and sold on the street. 99% chance no one would be the wiser, the thief didn't know what he had. Now news comes out that there could be a laptop with tons of valuable info...thiefs all now look to see if they have the golden laptop! Another case where the news of the incident makes the problem worse. Lets make a big deal of this when someone actually knows they have this data and uses it for ill intent.
It does not do one of the things software needs to do, that is solve a need. Most casual users are not sharing spreadsheets with each other (and if they are, its usually filled with macros). Business are the main users of spreadsheets, and I don't see how this makes their lives any easier then saving an Excel sheet on the network. Just because they build it, doesn't mean people will come. And whatever happened to Google's creed of sticking to search? I'd much rather them spend their time and money improving their search and solving click fraud then trying to spook MS.
All these 'wonderful' reviews running around on Vista, and still none exist that talk about the OS itself, all the reviews are doing is throwing up some pictures of the desktop and talking about AERO.
Um...thats all thats new in the OS. Shiny desktop, pretty pictures, lots of annoying security dialogs.
How is the parent a troll? What he said is exactly correct... half the point of IPO's is to make insiders some instant cash.
PageRank itself is the problem. It worked in 98 before everyone knew about it, now that they know the tricks, every search brings up forums and spam instead of the most relevant site. AdSense made the problem worse by letting spam sites turn an easy profit. Surely with all those PHD's there Google can come up with a more modern solution. Otherwise...wheres the next Google? Clusty.com ?
I don't doubt their were bugs, and i'm not sure what qualifies as intensely... what are some of the bugs you've ran into?
You should be happy about that. The memo shows they are documenting bugs and doing thorough testing. 65,000 bugs doesn't tell the whole story. BUG# 43456: "On specific machines running Pentium 166 MMX chips with Solitare running, icon may not appear as expected". Do you hold up the product for the other 99.999% of users because of that? I'm not sure i've ever ran into a bug in Windows 2000, certainly nothing that stopped me from doing my job.
Even though that's semi-trolly, I have to agree because Google has not improved its search to keep up with the Internet. A search on Google brings up blogs and forum discussions over more relevant sites, and link farms and adsense spammers fill the rest... I think Google may not want to change on purpose since improving search results means less AdWords revenue (why pay for an ad if my site comes up naturally?) and AdSense revenue (why fix the link farms when they bring in 50% of your revenue?).
Truely unique search engines like Clusty, and even the improvements Yahoo is doing will lead to Google's demise if they do not work to improve their search.
How many US Governments are there anyhow?