I've never thought they were innovative...they take a look at whats out there, and instead of reinventing the wheel, they just take the existing wheel and add some shiny spokes on it (but underinflate the tire). It's seemed to work well for them for the past 20 years....why change now?
Thats a major difference...how much more do you want it to do? Google maps didn't do anything that mapquest didn't already do...except that it is fast as lightning thanks to "AJAX". So thats just "one feature" that is different.
uh yeah...cuz Google was the first company to offer a map program....oh wait....but it was the first company to offer satellite images...wait wait no....I'm pretty sure it was the first company to have free web based email...or then again... um but its DEFINITELY the first company to offer a personalized portal with your news and stocks and sear...oh wait wait no....hmmm.
Why not? It happened to Alta Vista, Lycos, AOL and to some extent Yahoo. Do you really think there will be nothing to top Google ever? Personally I already think that Clusty provides a more useful search.
For me personally its just been a few things here and there...for one thing Google has grown in size to be hundreds of times what it originally was. Its also now a public company. Those two things mean that even if Sergey and Larry really wanted to do no evil, not everything can still reach their approval. Google has bought like 20 companies since going public...and things have started to slip through, like the Google Web Accelerator, which wreaked all kinds of havok...or the move away from "not being a portal" with the new personalized "my google" page. Sure all this stuff is free and great now...but its a company, its out to make money. Suppose their ad revenue dried up? Someone's gotta pay for those free cafeteria lunch and dinners...maybe some suit decides they should start charging for access to the map program api, since everyone is using their bandwidth on it... but meanwhile all these people have been linking into them. Or maybe they decide to stick huge advertisements in there....cuz they need to show their investors 20% growth this quarter...
There is no reason to trust Google as if it were different from any other company out there. Thats just plain naive. If anything, because it's growing so fast and spending money like crazy, while not diversifying its revenue, its an even more scary thing.
With a wireless card (no wires where my office is) on a 1.2ghz mac mini, the price is $578. My current computer, a dell with a 3 ghz p4, with monitor, keyboard, optical mouse etc was only $500. So the mini is still pretty expensive in comparision. But that aside, $580 might be an impulse buy for you, but $600 is an awful lot for some of us just to "try something out". And with those barebones specs of the mini, if I liked it, i would probably have to buy a "real mac" a couple of months later anyways. My point is that I already have some bucks invested in hardware...not having to scrap all that would be a serious selling point for picking up an x86 version of Tiger.
Well for one thing, anyone considering using OS X would only need to buy just the OS, not a whole bunch of expensive hardware as well. I was the biggest macophile in the past, but had to switch to using Windows for work and school...now OS X is the "in" thing, and i'd love to check it out, but I'm not going to buy a bunch of hardware just to play with it. If it were as simple as just installing a dual boot on my current PC, i'd do it in a second.
What I want to know is who are the people that are clicking on them and getting information...at least with comcast, when you click one it just displays some horrible text...if it showed you a commercial or something maybe they would be useful, but its always like "ROGAIN. GET BACK YOUR HAIR NOW. CALL 18883335498 FOR MORE INFO". (Ok yes, i guess I AM one of the people that clicked the ads...but only to see what they showed)
Because of a bloody banner ad? The current Xbox already has these types of ads...they seem more like news to me then ads "oh the new forza game is out"...they are mostly ignorable. I agree in principle that you shouldn't have to see ads in a pay service, but its not like the banner pops up while you are playing a game or anything.
I've said this before, and i'll say it again...if they put it out there, its fair to be judged. They have the beta tag on almost every single thing they offer. Just because they type "beta" at the top of one of their pages does not make it immune to criticism. In the past they have even issued press releases for new products which are "beta". Also beta or no beta, that still does not address the issues i complained about, unless magically by the final version they will author their own content and have a less reliance on searches for everything
It is ugly and cluttered....but more then that, its mostly useless. Take for example the stock quotes. On my.yahoo.com, it shows me my stocks...if i click one of the ticker symbols it shows me detailed data about the stocks from finance.yahoo.com . If i click on in google it does a web search for the ticker symbol ??? And shows an undetailed chart of the stock which is completely useless. If i then click that chart it takes me to finance.yahoo.com for the stock anyways. I think this is an example of where yahoo has the upper hand because they own the content they are providing. Google is so insistent that everything be done via a web search that things often take two or three more steps then they need to be. Another good example if the public domain books....why can't they have a button or directory somewhere that i can browse through these? I need to KNOW what book i'm looking for... And finally, this personalization, while i'm sure will be held as the greatest tech achievment in the world by the Google fans here, its 7 years behind yahoo and msn's idea, and a severely poor implementation compared to either of theirs.
It is ugly and cluttered....but more then that, its mostly useless. Take for example the stock quotes. On my.yahoo.com, it shows me my stocks...if i click one of the ticker symbols it shows me detailed data about the stocks from finance.yahoo.com . If i click on in google it does a web search for the ticker symbol ??? And shows an undetailed chart of the stock which is completely useless. If i then click that chart it takes me to finance.yahoo.com for the stock anyways. I think this is an example of where yahoo has the upper hand because they own the content they are providing. Google is so insistent that everything be done via a web search that things often take two or three more steps then they need to be. Another good example if the public domain books....why can't they have a button or directory somewhere that i can browse through these? I need to KNOW what book i'm looking for... And finally, this personalization, while i'm sure will be held as the greatest tech achievment in the world by the Google fans here, its 7 years behind yahoo and msn's idea, and a severely poor implementation compared to either of theirs.
Why does everyone care so much about the government seeing what you are reading? I have yet to hear a reason that doesn't involve protecting some illegal activity. I know there is a fear that maybe if you check out chemistry books all the time the feds might arrest you for a bombing or something, but there has yet to be a recorded case like that. Furthermore, the data isn't mined randomly to find patterns that might make a criminal, it is simply more evidence that can be used in a crime case. So if i have the Unibomber on trial i can look at his library record and see he took out books relating to bombings as further evidence. The books are owned by the government, I never assumed any kind of privacy in the past...i doubt library records are kept in some super secret database, and i often just chuck my receipt into the trash. So i ask, whats the big deal?
To all the people that take this "the poor content providers need money, so they have to use every method of getting ad dollars as possible" I say, if they are publishing the content to make money, or even break even, charge for the freakin' content. There is always someone out there who will provide similar content for free because it interests them. Most of the popular free content providers started doing it for fun, then realized they could turn a buck or two. If they need to trick me into clicking ads to make money, just charge for the service...if its that good we'll pay. Also, there are tons of ISP's that give unlimited bandwidth, sure you may be limited to a certain speed, but you can still provide content at a reasonable rate, even with high hits.
Is Google responsible for the actions of others? If someone covers his site with Google ads, does that make Google evil?
The thing that is evil is that the ads appear to be actual content. First if someone covers their page with Google Ads they all say "Google Ads", and they are mostly unobtrusive to my viewing of the web page. Ads crammed in RSS feeds, even if they do say "google ads" (which i'm not sure if they do), appear to be genuine articles. And if they don't appear that way, they just cause extra clutter like so much spam in my inbox. Regular Google ads can be somewhat helpful..."Hmm, i can't find NES games for sale on this page...oh look heres an ad for a place that sells them". No one is looking in their RSS feed for commerce. It's not like I'll see 5 news stories, and then an ad related to those news stories and find it helpful.
First of all, I wasn't the original poster, and I don't think making money through advertising is evil. The fact that they are an advertising company does not make them evil. No more then I think a gun company is evil for selling guns. People want a product, a company provides a solution, thats fine. Its the specific intent of the product they design that makes it "evil". I don't see people like you defending DoubleClick...maybe doubleclick "suggests" that popup ads be used discretely and sparingly, but that doesn't keep people from flooding your browser with them. Google's "do no evil" mission statement has always revolved around making products that do not make the users of Google advertisements mad. But this, and other recent ideas have gotten further and further away from that.
Furthermore, I don't understand why your responding to every negative post on this topic and defending Google...I can only guess that you must have a vested interest in Google or are a Google employee. If thats the case, why don't you just say so?
Google can recommend whatever they want...that doesn't mean thats how people will use it. Thats like being a maker of chemical weapons, and "suggesting" to the terrorist you sell them to that they only use them as pesticides or something.
I actually do think the way you do, I just think a lot of the people who ask these various "is there an open source version of such and such" just want a free version, but by saying "open source" it sounds like they have some greater good. A good example was the "Is there an open source tax preparation package?" question someone asked a month or two ago. One would not want to modify tax software...and since these come out yearly, they probably arn't worried about the fact that someone owns whatever. They just wanted a free version...and the responses to the question were mostly "you can do it for free on irs.gov" etc. Maybe you and a large amount of other people really want the benefits of open source, and thats all well and good, but I really think in a large amount of these cases you could give someone a "free" closed source version and they would be just as happy.
Agreed...Google's ads are sucessful because they are non intrusive. When I saw this idea I thought this is even MORE intrusive then popup ads...because at least I can block those. I can think of nothing more "evil" then RSS "stories" that are actually ads.
Every industry will be critically short of workers in 5-10 years. My company has estimated we may lose as much as 30% of our staff due to babyboomers retiring.
Exactly...even if depression, ADD, etc... are real biological conditions, it's not like Star Trek. We can't just scan someone and tell they have these problems. They usually just ask people a few questions "Sad 3 days a week?" "Tired?" "ok, heres some meds". All too often in this modern day where clinicians get paid by insurance companies, they just perscribe whatever...and if that doesn't work they try another drug.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never thought they were innovative...they take a look at whats out there, and instead of reinventing the wheel, they just take the existing wheel and add some shiny spokes on it (but underinflate the tire). It's seemed to work well for them for the past 20 years....why change now?
Thats a major difference...how much more do you want it to do? Google maps didn't do anything that mapquest didn't already do...except that it is fast as lightning thanks to "AJAX". So thats just "one feature" that is different.
uh yeah...cuz Google was the first company to offer a map program....oh wait....but it was the first company to offer satellite images...wait wait no....I'm pretty sure it was the first company to have free web based email...or then again... um but its DEFINITELY the first company to offer a personalized portal with your news and stocks and sear...oh wait wait no....hmmm.
Why not? It happened to Alta Vista, Lycos, AOL and to some extent Yahoo. Do you really think there will be nothing to top Google ever? Personally I already think that Clusty provides a more useful search.
Ray Kurzweil predicted this in Spiritual Machines (not affiliate link) 5 years ago.
For me personally its just been a few things here and there...for one thing Google has grown in size to be hundreds of times what it originally was. Its also now a public company. Those two things mean that even if Sergey and Larry really wanted to do no evil, not everything can still reach their approval. Google has bought like 20 companies since going public...and things have started to slip through, like the Google Web Accelerator, which wreaked all kinds of havok...or the move away from "not being a portal" with the new personalized "my google" page. Sure all this stuff is free and great now...but its a company, its out to make money. Suppose their ad revenue dried up? Someone's gotta pay for those free cafeteria lunch and dinners...maybe some suit decides they should start charging for access to the map program api, since everyone is using their bandwidth on it... but meanwhile all these people have been linking into them. Or maybe they decide to stick huge advertisements in there....cuz they need to show their investors 20% growth this quarter...
There is no reason to trust Google as if it were different from any other company out there. Thats just plain naive. If anything, because it's growing so fast and spending money like crazy, while not diversifying its revenue, its an even more scary thing.
So does Baltimore City
With a wireless card (no wires where my office is) on a 1.2ghz mac mini, the price is $578. My current computer, a dell with a 3 ghz p4, with monitor, keyboard, optical mouse etc was only $500. So the mini is still pretty expensive in comparision. But that aside, $580 might be an impulse buy for you, but $600 is an awful lot for some of us just to "try something out". And with those barebones specs of the mini, if I liked it, i would probably have to buy a "real mac" a couple of months later anyways. My point is that I already have some bucks invested in hardware...not having to scrap all that would be a serious selling point for picking up an x86 version of Tiger.
Well for one thing, anyone considering using OS X would only need to buy just the OS, not a whole bunch of expensive hardware as well. I was the biggest macophile in the past, but had to switch to using Windows for work and school...now OS X is the "in" thing, and i'd love to check it out, but I'm not going to buy a bunch of hardware just to play with it. If it were as simple as just installing a dual boot on my current PC, i'd do it in a second.
What I want to know is who are the people that are clicking on them and getting information...at least with comcast, when you click one it just displays some horrible text...if it showed you a commercial or something maybe they would be useful, but its always like "ROGAIN. GET BACK YOUR HAIR NOW. CALL 18883335498 FOR MORE INFO". (Ok yes, i guess I AM one of the people that clicked the ads...but only to see what they showed)
Because of a bloody banner ad? The current Xbox already has these types of ads...they seem more like news to me then ads "oh the new forza game is out"...they are mostly ignorable. I agree in principle that you shouldn't have to see ads in a pay service, but its not like the banner pops up while you are playing a game or anything.
I've said this before, and i'll say it again...if they put it out there, its fair to be judged. They have the beta tag on almost every single thing they offer. Just because they type "beta" at the top of one of their pages does not make it immune to criticism. In the past they have even issued press releases for new products which are "beta". Also beta or no beta, that still does not address the issues i complained about, unless magically by the final version they will author their own content and have a less reliance on searches for everything
It is ugly and cluttered....but more then that, its mostly useless. Take for example the stock quotes. On my.yahoo.com, it shows me my stocks...if i click one of the ticker symbols it shows me detailed data about the stocks from finance.yahoo.com . If i click on in google it does a web search for the ticker symbol ??? And shows an undetailed chart of the stock which is completely useless. If i then click that chart it takes me to finance.yahoo.com for the stock anyways. I think this is an example of where yahoo has the upper hand because they own the content they are providing. Google is so insistent that everything be done via a web search that things often take two or three more steps then they need to be. Another good example if the public domain books....why can't they have a button or directory somewhere that i can browse through these? I need to KNOW what book i'm looking for... And finally, this personalization, while i'm sure will be held as the greatest tech achievment in the world by the Google fans here, its 7 years behind yahoo and msn's idea, and a severely poor implementation compared to either of theirs.
It is ugly and cluttered....but more then that, its mostly useless. Take for example the stock quotes. On my.yahoo.com, it shows me my stocks...if i click one of the ticker symbols it shows me detailed data about the stocks from finance.yahoo.com . If i click on in google it does a web search for the ticker symbol ??? And shows an undetailed chart of the stock which is completely useless. If i then click that chart it takes me to finance.yahoo.com for the stock anyways. I think this is an example of where yahoo has the upper hand because they own the content they are providing. Google is so insistent that everything be done via a web search that things often take two or three more steps then they need to be. Another good example if the public domain books....why can't they have a button or directory somewhere that i can browse through these? I need to KNOW what book i'm looking for... And finally, this personalization, while i'm sure will be held as the greatest tech achievment in the world by the Google fans here, its 7 years behind yahoo and msn's idea, and a severely poor implementation compared to either of theirs.
Sell them all, and then borrow a $400 and buy an PS3
...their stock is up 4% (1 shiny penny).
Why does everyone care so much about the government seeing what you are reading? I have yet to hear a reason that doesn't involve protecting some illegal activity. I know there is a fear that maybe if you check out chemistry books all the time the feds might arrest you for a bombing or something, but there has yet to be a recorded case like that. Furthermore, the data isn't mined randomly to find patterns that might make a criminal, it is simply more evidence that can be used in a crime case. So if i have the Unibomber on trial i can look at his library record and see he took out books relating to bombings as further evidence. The books are owned by the government, I never assumed any kind of privacy in the past...i doubt library records are kept in some super secret database, and i often just chuck my receipt into the trash. So i ask, whats the big deal?
To all the people that take this "the poor content providers need money, so they have to use every method of getting ad dollars as possible" I say, if they are publishing the content to make money, or even break even, charge for the freakin' content. There is always someone out there who will provide similar content for free because it interests them. Most of the popular free content providers started doing it for fun, then realized they could turn a buck or two. If they need to trick me into clicking ads to make money, just charge for the service...if its that good we'll pay. Also, there are tons of ISP's that give unlimited bandwidth, sure you may be limited to a certain speed, but you can still provide content at a reasonable rate, even with high hits.
Is Google responsible for the actions of others? If someone covers his site with Google ads, does that make Google evil?
The thing that is evil is that the ads appear to be actual content. First if someone covers their page with Google Ads they all say "Google Ads", and they are mostly unobtrusive to my viewing of the web page. Ads crammed in RSS feeds, even if they do say "google ads" (which i'm not sure if they do), appear to be genuine articles. And if they don't appear that way, they just cause extra clutter like so much spam in my inbox. Regular Google ads can be somewhat helpful..."Hmm, i can't find NES games for sale on this page...oh look heres an ad for a place that sells them". No one is looking in their RSS feed for commerce. It's not like I'll see 5 news stories, and then an ad related to those news stories and find it helpful.
First of all, I wasn't the original poster, and I don't think making money through advertising is evil. The fact that they are an advertising company does not make them evil. No more then I think a gun company is evil for selling guns. People want a product, a company provides a solution, thats fine. Its the specific intent of the product they design that makes it "evil". I don't see people like you defending DoubleClick...maybe doubleclick "suggests" that popup ads be used discretely and sparingly, but that doesn't keep people from flooding your browser with them. Google's "do no evil" mission statement has always revolved around making products that do not make the users of Google advertisements mad. But this, and other recent ideas have gotten further and further away from that.
Furthermore, I don't understand why your responding to every negative post on this topic and defending Google...I can only guess that you must have a vested interest in Google or are a Google employee. If thats the case, why don't you just say so?
Google can recommend whatever they want...that doesn't mean thats how people will use it. Thats like being a maker of chemical weapons, and "suggesting" to the terrorist you sell them to that they only use them as pesticides or something.
I actually do think the way you do, I just think a lot of the people who ask these various "is there an open source version of such and such" just want a free version, but by saying "open source" it sounds like they have some greater good. A good example was the "Is there an open source tax preparation package?" question someone asked a month or two ago. One would not want to modify tax software...and since these come out yearly, they probably arn't worried about the fact that someone owns whatever. They just wanted a free version...and the responses to the question were mostly "you can do it for free on irs.gov" etc. Maybe you and a large amount of other people really want the benefits of open source, and thats all well and good, but I really think in a large amount of these cases you could give someone a "free" closed source version and they would be just as happy.
Agreed...Google's ads are sucessful because they are non intrusive. When I saw this idea I thought this is even MORE intrusive then popup ads...because at least I can block those. I can think of nothing more "evil" then RSS "stories" that are actually ads.
Every industry will be critically short of workers in 5-10 years. My company has estimated we may lose as much as 30% of our staff due to babyboomers retiring.
Exactly...even if depression, ADD, etc... are real biological conditions, it's not like Star Trek. We can't just scan someone and tell they have these problems. They usually just ask people a few questions "Sad 3 days a week?" "Tired?" "ok, heres some meds". All too often in this modern day where clinicians get paid by insurance companies, they just perscribe whatever...and if that doesn't work they try another drug.