Google's popularity is certainly not waning, their proportion of all searches went from 48% a year ago to 56% this year (for july at least), they're rolling out google earth, gmail, froogle, orkut, search history, video search, google maps, and a myriad of other services. Their only notable mistakes were a)the web accelerator debacle b)certain recent enhancements to their search algorithms which seem not to have affected the searches visibly.
Google, as a public company, certainly cannot be 100% good. Their "do no evil" moto has become relative, they can't avoid at least a bit of mingling with "evil". Looking at the solidity of google maps and gmail amongst others, I hardly see them as "coming down". Are any other replacements anywhere close to where google is standing? MSN? no. Yahoo? a bit. Altavista? Belongs to yahoo. Excite? uh, they still exist? lycos? bought over by some spanish ISP... webcrawler? impopular! astalavista.box.sk? no comments on that one... Clusty? Not bad... Other startups? Nowhere close. So for the time being, they still seem to be the kings of the hill and I don't see anything in their recent history that would make me think otherwise.
This is some of the worst Canada bashing I've heard, and I'm a Québec independentist! Every time I've been south of the border, I've met genuinely nice people, some idiots, some rednecks, but generally people were nice. What you describe is unusual here to say the least, and your *informed* opinion seems tendencious and downright sleazy. However, the people I met in the States were generally wealthy but *ignorant* people felt dribble by corrupt, oligarchist media, right-wing sleaze-mongers and a whole bunch of religious born-again freaks whose morals are downright heinous. Remember, you're the people who invade other people for false reasons, try to impeach a great president for sleeping with an intern but won't even question going to war for false reasons, trash the environment, refuse any compromises on international treaties (you people haven't signed the anti-landmine treaty while hundreds of thousands are wounded yearly by these engines of death) and I could go on and on... We're not agressive folk up here, our immigrants actually *like* us and don'T try to blow us up, we don't have 1 in 218 people in jail, it's more like 1 in 2500 here... We're tolerant, liberal, free to travel wherever we want without being killed or taken hostage, we respect other folks and cultures, our politicians actually *care* about the commoner and not only the wealthy! Yours is a clear case of looking at the straw in one's eye but not noticing the branch shoved in your own eyesocket.
Our guilded cage? Despite what you hear about our health system, it beats the *Crap* out of your anydays. And while it's true that private health care needs to be allowed, here ANYONE who is sick will be cared for. If you're a religious republican, all I have to tell you is that up north, our conservatives = your democrats, our liberals = your green party, and we're WAY better off for it. Free health care, nearly-free university-level education for everyone (here in Québec at least), free universal day care system, a small military (blue helmets are a canadian invention of our former prime minister Lester B Pearson) which HELPS people instead of invading them for patently false and dubious reasons your media ignore... Canada has much more freedoms, no no-fly lists, no invading security forces, no crazy amount of prisoners, a MUCH lower crime level, no crazy rednecks carrying concealed handguns, our government has a freaking SURPLUS every year, while yours loses 450 billion a year on top of a 500 billion trade deficit... Your glory days are over dude! Wake the f*** up and move up north, we don't even care if you're a troll, and there's plenty of money to be made here too. Sheesh.
Geez man you sound so cynic, so disabused, so jaded... Bet you can't see any motive other than $VAGUE_REASON or $CONTRADICTORY_REASON... Looks like you suspect $POORLY_CONCEIVED_AMBITIONS in everybody... You got a good case of $POORLY_HIDDEN_CYNISIM going on!
Ever heard of port redirecting? No ports are blocked on telus' server packages, but we (being a telus employee) do block common service ports on our network. Guess why we don't have as many port scans as other (i.e. cable) networks?
"I guess the difference when it's a Mac OS, it's a big deal because someone actually bothered to write something malicious for a small segment of the computer population."
Maybe it's changing, but by default on mac os x you are not logged in as admin. IT'S ALWAYS ABOUT WHAT ACCOUNT YOU'RE USING, NO MATTER WHICH OS YOU USE. Owned Linux boxes are rarer but definitely more frightful than 0wned windows boxes!
Slashdot Mirror
Google's popularity is certainly not waning, their proportion of all searches went from 48% a year ago to 56% this year (for july at least), they're rolling out google earth, gmail, froogle, orkut, search history, video search, google maps, and a myriad of other services. Their only notable mistakes were
a)the web accelerator debacle
b)certain recent enhancements to their search algorithms which seem not to have affected the searches visibly.
Google, as a public company, certainly cannot be 100% good. Their "do no evil" moto has become relative, they can't avoid at least a bit of mingling with "evil". Looking at the solidity of google maps and gmail amongst others, I hardly see them as "coming down". Are any other replacements anywhere close to where google is standing? MSN? no. Yahoo? a bit. Altavista? Belongs to yahoo. Excite? uh, they still exist? lycos? bought over by some spanish ISP... webcrawler? impopular! astalavista.box.sk? no comments on that one...
Clusty? Not bad... Other startups? Nowhere close. So for the time being, they still seem to be the kings of the hill and I don't see anything in their recent history that would make me think otherwise.
This is some of the worst Canada bashing I've heard, and I'm a Québec independentist! Every time I've been south of the border, I've met genuinely nice people, some idiots, some rednecks, but generally people were nice. What you describe is unusual here to say the least, and your *informed* opinion seems tendencious and downright sleazy. However, the people I met in the States were generally wealthy but *ignorant* people felt dribble by corrupt, oligarchist media, right-wing sleaze-mongers and a whole bunch of religious born-again freaks whose morals are downright heinous. Remember, you're the people who invade other people for false reasons, try to impeach a great president for sleeping with an intern but won't even question going to war for false reasons, trash the environment, refuse any compromises on international treaties (you people haven't signed the anti-landmine treaty while hundreds of thousands are wounded yearly by these engines of death) and I could go on and on... We're not agressive folk up here, our immigrants actually *like* us and don'T try to blow us up, we don't have 1 in 218 people in jail, it's more like 1 in 2500 here... We're tolerant, liberal, free to travel wherever we want without being killed or taken hostage, we respect other folks and cultures, our politicians actually *care* about the commoner and not only the wealthy! Yours is a clear case of looking at the straw in one's eye but not noticing the branch shoved in your own eyesocket.
Our guilded cage? Despite what you hear about our health system, it beats the *Crap* out of your anydays. And while it's true that private health care needs to be allowed, here ANYONE who is sick will be cared for. If you're a religious republican, all I have to tell you is that up north, our conservatives = your democrats, our liberals = your green party, and we're WAY better off for it. Free health care, nearly-free university-level education for everyone (here in Québec at least), free universal day care system, a small military (blue helmets are a canadian invention of our former prime minister Lester B Pearson) which HELPS people instead of invading them for patently false and dubious reasons your media ignore... Canada has much more freedoms, no no-fly lists, no invading security forces, no crazy amount of prisoners, a MUCH lower crime level, no crazy rednecks carrying concealed handguns, our government has a freaking SURPLUS every year, while yours loses 450 billion a year on top of a 500 billion trade deficit... Your glory days are over dude! Wake the f*** up and move up north, we don't even care if you're a troll, and there's plenty of money to be made here too. Sheesh.
Geez man you sound so cynic, so disabused, so jaded... Bet you can't see any motive other than $VAGUE_REASON or $CONTRADICTORY_REASON... Looks like you suspect $POORLY_CONCEIVED_AMBITIONS in everybody... You got a good case of $POORLY_HIDDEN_CYNISIM going on!
"primus" never crossed any line in this case... Might not the name Telus be more accurate?
Ever heard of port redirecting? No ports are blocked on telus' server packages, but we (being a telus employee) do block common service ports on our network. Guess why we don't have as many port scans as other (i.e. cable) networks?
"I guess the difference when it's a Mac OS, it's a big deal because someone actually bothered to write something malicious for a small segment of the computer population." Maybe it's changing, but by default on mac os x you are not logged in as admin. IT'S ALWAYS ABOUT WHAT ACCOUNT YOU'RE USING, NO MATTER WHICH OS YOU USE. Owned Linux boxes are rarer but definitely more frightful than 0wned windows boxes!