Posts tagged ‘search market’
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Earlier this month Louis L. Stanton, the senior judge on the United
States District Court for the Southern District of New York, with
Google.
Viacom’s first line of defense when the negative press hit was
obfuscation. “Viacom has not asked for and will not be obtaining any
personally identifiable information of any YouTube user. The
personally identifiable information that YouTube collects from its
users will be stripped from the data before it is transferred to
Viacom.”
Google’s self imposed is “Don’t be evil.” It doesn’t say “don’t be
evil unless there’s important litigation at stake.” Google’s
reputation is on the line, and how they respond will show their true
character. They’ve shown they’ll go to bat for employees, now it’s
time for them to show they’ll go to bat for their users.
Lawmakers, as well as the , should it team up with the industry’s No.
2 player Yahoo in the third-party advertising agreement.
by July 12, 2008 1:19 AM PDT @JCPayne: Nonsense! AT&T/Bell South don’t
even come close to dominating 90% of the cell phone market ( In fact
Verizon alone has nearly as many phone users as AT&T/Bell South, and
we haven’t even mentioned T-Mobile, Sprint etc). By contrast,
Google/Yahoo will have 90% of the search market. Any pact that ends up
with 90% of any market power, concentrated in the hands of 2
companies, has to be stopped by the DOJ. I don?t care how ?non-
exclusive? the pact is. Who the heck else is Yahoo going to form a
pact with, outside this ?non-exclusive? pact with Google, given that
since Yang is barely on speaking terms with Microsoft, and outside
Microsoft , there is only another 1% or so search market left. Reply
to this comment by July 12, 2008 8:19 AM PDT Back@Kwasiowusu: For one
thing I wasn’t talking mobile phone service. I was talking the regular
old POTS system. (And fiberoptics system that it is rapidly becoming
instead.) The reason the national system was broken up into regional
units was to remove domination of the whole national telephone system.
Now, to allow Bellsouth and the former parts of SBC to merge together
(albeit changing their name to AT&T) that does very little to preserve
the competitive atmosphere in the United States when it comes to
telecoms and high speed Internet even…As far as Google-Yahoo
cooperation…. What monopoly??? They have a technology that every
other company and individual on the net has access to. **Pixels on a
website** is not proprietary. Anybody can come up with an onlinead
network …. You may have to be creative in getting sites to adopt
yours along with Google or Yahoo but none the less it can be done if
you’re smart enough.Clearly with all the resources Microsoft has–
they are admitting that they aren’t smart enough to put together an ad
network. Hence why they want to buy a ready-made one. (Yahoo’s)…..
So now we basically have Microsoft which launched a battle to take on
Google. They decided they would take Yahoo’s assets and try to
dominate Google, so Google went in cut a deal with Yahoo themselves
and Microsoft ends up as the odd-man out crying all those big
crocodile tears and wants to launch a big court case to win back their
plan of domination. BS I say… Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008
11:09 AM PDT Agreed w/ JCPayne. I strongly suspect that MSFT’s only
role in this is to act as a spoiler. Given that MSFT is mostly on the
defensive nowadays (when they should be busy trying to build core
products that are actually worth something), I suspect that they’ll
lose this one too. Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 3:13 PM PDT
If Ballmer gets to address the committee, the company will be doomed.
Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 4:21 PM PDT @JCPayne, It
doesn?t make any difference whether you were talking about POTS or
about wireless. An AT&T hookup with Bellsouth still doesn?t even come
close to controlling 90% of the phone market, POTS or wireless. As at
today, cable companies like Time Warner, offer full phone service , as
well as broadband internet, in direct competition with phone companies
like AT&T, not to mention, millions of Americans don?t even bother to
sign up for wired phones anymore, simply preferring to use their cell
phones for all their phone calls, saving themselves the extra expense
of paying for a wired phone they hardly use. The old POTS phone lines
are increasingly irrelevant. Revenues for both AT&T and Verizon, from
wired POTS lines have been going down sharply for years. You simply
can?t compare the dying POTS business to a Google/Yahoo pact that end
up putting control of 90% of the very fast growing internet search in
the hands of just 2 companies Reply to this comment
by July 12, 2008 4:31 PM PDT @JCPayne, this bit by you is even more
laughable 😕 As far as Google- Yahoo cooperation…. What monopoly???
They have a technology that every other company and individual on the
net has access to?.You clearly have no idea what a monopoly is. Anyone
can use Google/Yahoo search, so therefore its not a monopoly? Will you
excusing me while I laugh? Unless you are gonna tell me that Google
gives away the source code of their highly secret search algorithms to
anyone to use as they like, then you are simply blowing smoke.
Reply to this comment View reply Hide reply
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by July 12, 2008 4:49 PM PDT @JCPayne , you also claim that: ?with all
the resources Microsoft has– they are admitting that they aren’t
smart enough to put together an ad network?Yeah? You mean like how
Google tried their own video sharing network, failed at it, and went
and bought Youtube so they could dominate web video sharing ? Earth to
JCPayne, companies regular buy other companies. Google has bought
plenty of companies even in their short life span as a company. As for
Microsoft launching a strong protest against a Google/Yahoo pact, it
sounds very good to me. After all, Google has virtually taken
permanent residence at the DOJ and at the EU Commission, constantly
whining against non-existent ?crimes? that they claim Microsoft
thinking of committing, its only fair that Microsoft strongly hit back
against the very real danger of Google?s rabid monopolistic maneuvers,
while at the same time giving Google, the same thing Google has been
giving Microsoft in the last 5 years at least. Reply to this comment
by July 12, 2008 8:27 PM PDT Where is the lock in that keeps customers
dependent and keeps out competitors?All this proves is what everyone
already knew: MS can not succeed on a level playing field. Reply to
this comment
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With the debut of the AppStore come a number of native applications
that replicate the functionality of already extant iPhone-optimized
Web sites. The impetus for creation of native applications has, thus
far, been driven by the ability to use location sensitivity, access to
the camera, and other iPhone technologies that are conventionally
inaccessible through MobileSafari.
The “Explore More Google Products” button brings you to a
page that shows all of Google’s Apps on one screen. Touching one
of those App icons results in Safari launching and bringing to that
application.
The My Friends section allows you to see your top friends, all of
them, those that are online, new friends, and friends with birthdays.
You also have complete access to your MySpace email. You can visit
your inbox, compose messages and even see your sent, saved and trashed
emails. The Mail icon at the bottom of the Apps screen notifies you
when you have new messages by displaying a white plus-sign inside of a
red circle.
The app also features a miniature version of My eBay. It shows you
active items and items where the auctions have ended at a glance that
you are watching, items you are buying or selling.
The company knows this and perhaps that is why it bluntly states that
it counter-offered Microsoft the option to buy the entire company for
$33-a-share or enter re-negotiations to just buy its search business.
It claims Microsoft rejected both offers.
Yahoo also name drops its new search advertising partner (and major
Microsoft rival), Google, quite prominently. Point number one of why
Yahoo rejected this latest deal reads:
I continue to believe that one way or another, this deal is going to
happen. Microsoft simply has no other real options if it is serious
about gaining in the search business, while Yahoo simply looks like it
has no other options — period.
Viacom wants to know which videos YouTube employees have watched and
uploaded to the site, and Google is refusing to provide that
information, CNET News has learned.
Since the judge issued the order, Viacom has been . “Viacom suggested
the initiative to anonymize the data, and we have been prepared to
accept anonymous information since day one,” said a Viacom spokesman.
Google may have a tougher time with this issue than the fight to
protect user information. Companies sue each other all the time and
frequently turn over computer records belonging to employees when
pertinent. Often, these records reveal e-mails, memos and other
documents that can shed light on events
YouTube has always argued that it has no way to prevent users from
uploading unauthorized copies of TV shows, movies, or other
copyrighted material, and adheres to the DMCA by also removing
infringing videos when notified by a copyright owner.
Google has been accused of encouraging massive copyright violations by
Viacom and by a group of copyright holders represented by the
Proskauer Rose law firm. The group in Britain and France, and U.S.
television journalist Robert Tur.
) 11 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 12, 2008 12:11 PM PDT I did not
follow with detail this V-G affair but it seems to me that it is
following the SCO-IBM Unix affair in which SCO made a complain that
IBM should prove innocent… just the inverse of common law: you are
innocent up to the moment that you are proved guilty.Am I right? Am I
too far in understanding Viacom/RIAA/etc. lawyers? Reply to this
comment by July 12, 2008 1:54 PM PDT This kind of looks like “Viacom”
is scrabbling, a bit, to continue its, unfocused, IP-lawsuit (and
vicarious responsibility for the actions of others) claims.I also
notice that a totally unproven accusation (that Youtube employees,
allegedly, knowingly allowed, and/or encouraged, copyright-
infringement)… is actually being used to further justify an
apparently, otherwise, clearly dubious- attack.Can you say RED-
HERRING..? But, you know how corporations work… once they start down
a path, no matter how insanely-asinine, they will simply NEVER back-
down (even if… it ends-up tearing them apart, and costing their
stock-holders enormously). Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 2:54
PM PDT I’d like to see the reverse, that is, the uploading habits of
anyone from a Viacom IP, or using a Viacom (or viacom property domain,
such as comedycentral.com). Did anyone on The Daily Show, or any
staffer of those shows, or any other Viacom company, ever upload
something copyrighted to YouTube? Reply to this comment by July 12,
2008 5:11 PM PDT Relax. Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:49 PM
PDT Viacom just wants to destroy the progression and the future of the
internet because they have LOST to the internet. They are old media,
like newspapers, old like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop
the new wave, the new generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You
either roll with it or it rolls right over you. Have you looked at
Viacom’s stock price lately. That’s a reflection of where they’ll
continue to head which is down, down, down if they don’t get with the
NEW! Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:50 PM PDT Viacom just
wants to destroy the progression and the future of the internet
because they have LOST to the internet. They are old media, like
newspapers, old like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the
new wave, the new generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either
roll with it or it rolls right over you. Have you looked at Viacom’s
stock price lately. That’s a reflection of where they’ll continue to
head which is down, down, down if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply
to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:50 PM PDT Viacom just wants to
dessstroy the progression and the future of the internet because they
have LOST to the internet. They are old media, like newspapers, old
like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the new wave, the new
generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either roll with it or it
rolls right over you. Have you looked at Viacom’s stock price lately.
That’s a reflection of where they’ll continue to head which is down,
down, down if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply to this comment by
July 12, 2008 7:51 PM PDT Viacom just wants to dessstroy the
progression and the future of the internet because they have LOSSST to
the internet. They are old media, like newspapers, old like oldy moldy
Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the new wave, the new generation, Web
2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either roll with it or it rolls right over
you. Have you looked at Viacom’s stock price lately. That’s a
reflection of where they’ll continue to head which is down, down, down
if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply to this comment
by July 12, 2008 7:53 PM PDT Viacom will lose to the future of the
internet if they don’t get with the new.
Reply to this comment View reply Hide reply
Processing
by July 12, 2008 11:30 PM PDT Chad and the team knew about SNL content
being on YouTube. It’s what made YouTube popular, showing copyrighted
clips from comedy shows off TV. The whole YouTube thing was based on
being an archive of video from all sources. Viacom, NBC Universal,
Disney, Sony, Fox and others should sue YouTube/Google for every
infraction. Basically YouTube is the Napster of video and should be
accountable for theft of copyrighted material. Reply to this comment
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The situation is further complicated by the fact that Google can only
sell advertising around video that is not of questionable legal
provenance.
When you have accumulated, say, fifty thousand, you could get a prize.
Maybe free child care for a year or something?
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COTA on July 4 put a trip-planning tool developed by on its Web site
that allows users to punch in starting and ending addresses and – with
clicks of a computer mouse – get step-by-step directions for taking
the bus to their destination. The routes are displayed on the popular
Google Maps platform.
“There is no question about it, the Google system is better,” he said.
“It’s got some great features and user-friendliness.”
For immediate access to this article, as well as the most recent
edition of Business First online, become a print subscriber.
The U.S. Small Business Administration armed Joey Johnson with the
money and motivation to step out and launch her graphic design
business. Johnson formed Graphic Mechanic Design Studio in October
2006, after running the company on the side for nearly a decade.
The swastika, the symbol of Nazism, still provokes strong feelings of
fear and anger. So it was something of a shock when late last week…
It became the Web mystery du jour: How did the swastika get there, why
did it become so popular and who, or what, caused its demise? The
search for the answer sent Google-watchers on a chase that led through
China, Tel Aviv, London and finally back to the secretive company’s
Silicon Valley, Calif., headquarters, from which Google issued a rare
apology.
The tale began Thursday when Web users started to notice that one of
Google’s most intensively searched terms that morning was not a term
at all, but a symbol — the swastika. Often, the terms on the
list reflect a burst of interest in some news- or commerce-related
event, and readers can use the list as a kind of cultural heat map
— for example, when the iPhone 3G went on sale on Friday. Yet
somehow the swastika had ascended to the top of the list without a
single swastika-related news story or blog post.
“We have an automated system to identify and remove inappropriate or
offensive material in Hot Trends,” it read. “In rare cases, when such
material is missed, we manually remove these results.
It was slow. It was clunky. The interface was pretty disappointing.
Hell, even the ‘Avatar choosing’ part was badly done. I couldn’t tell
if I was supposed to be designing my own somewhere or just ‘using
someone elses’. It seems to be a half-baked beta indeed.
“Second Life is not a game,” Dwight replied authoritatively. “It is a
multi-user virtual environment. It doesn’t have points or scores; it
doesn’t have winners or losers.”
So its a new Web 2.0-esque masturbation party where people can chat
with avatars, instead of on AIM or god forbid, calling them on the
phone.
Do you have a lawn, and if so, any particular thoughts on where I
should be in relation to it?
He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John
Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth”
iPhone/iPod touch only: Google’s first offering in the iPhone App
Store comes in the form of Google Mobile, an application that
integrates your local contacts and the web for seamless searching
between the two. Developed in part by one of our favorite programmers
Nicholas Jitkoff (), Google Mobile brings many of the things we love
about Quicksilver to the iPhone—namely universal search. From
one search box, you can look up web sites (I’m Feeling Lucky-style),
entries on Wikipedia, call any contact, or access their contact card.
The app also uses your location data for local search, so searching
for pizza will give you a link to search for pizza places in Google
Maps.
Ultimately Google Mobile is more like a first stab at universal
search, because although the contact and web integration is nice, the
only local data it searches at the moment is your Contacts. That
leaves out calendars, notes, music, email, and bookmarks, among many
others. We’d kill to see integration with the rest of the iPhone’s
local data in the future.
I’ve looked on the App Store in iTunes & on my iPhone but can’t find
it. Can anyone else see it?
you in the US, Jono? I tried to see that google mobile thingie from
the swiss app store, but not to be found there, so I switched over to
the US store, and presto, there it was
@: not sure if my first msg went thru, jono, are you located in the
US? if not, well, that’s the culprit, didnt see google mobile in the
swiss app store myself, then switched over to the US store, and
presto, there it was
The view — looking east toward Treasure Island, the surrounding water
and the Bay Bridge — is to die for.
Tomorrow’s CIO: Do you have what it takes? Find out at the 2008
InformationWeek 500 Conference Sept. 14-16, St. Regis Resort, Monarch
Beach, Calif.
According to Google’s official blog, Gmail users will no longer have
to worry about fake messages pretending to be from PayPal or eBay.
Google displays a message to its Gmail users above the email warning
that the message may not be from the sender that it claims. However,
if the message sender claims to be eBay or PayPal, will now
automatically check to see if the message has a DomainKey signature.
If the message doesn’t, the message will just disappear, leaving users
with a clean Inbox and the security of knowing that the ones that did
make it through really are from eBay and PayPal.
DomainKeys is an e-mail or reject it outright. Yahoo! (which owns the
patent) has long been a proponent on this system, but many ISPs also
like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), and Microsoft backs SenderID.
Hey nimish — maybe you didn’t read the fine print in google’s
prospectus: your common shares have 1/10th the voting power of those
held by the two founders + the CEO. Google’s “public” offering was a
complete artifice (some might say a fully-disclosed sham), something
barely *ever* reported by the financial press. They can do whatever
they want — there are no pesky shareholders to appease.
As part of a planned UK launch of Street View – a tool which allows
users to navigate using 360-degree street level pictures – the search
engine has deployed a fleet of camera cars to log details.
Campaigners have attacked the move as an invasion of privacy but
Google defended its actions, stating that it employs face-blurring
technology.
Google has confirmed it is now in the process of photographing Britain
as part of the Street View project.
The letter states that unless these fears are addressed, the campaign
group will be forced to lodge a complaint with the UK Information
Commissioner “with a request that Street View deployment be suspended
pending a formal investigation”.
Jul 11, 2008, 8:33 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:30 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:27 am Jul
11, 2008, 8:13 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:04 am Jul 10, 2008, 6:10 am
[July 3, 2008] Gartner revises Q1 numbers after getting some new
information on HP selling prices, while iSuppli has better news for
AMD. [July 3, 2008] While text messaging leads consumers’ must-have
features, signs point to good news for advancements being pushed by
handset makers, carriers and developers. [July 3, 2008] New research
finds overall broadband use spreading, but suggests that economic
squeeze might be slowing uptake among certain segments. [July 2,
2008] IDC did some counting on the rising cost of storage worldwide.
With petabytes of data floating around, Google developed its own
protocol for data interchange and now it’s open sourcing it.
Digg Del.icio.us furl StumbleUpon BlinkList Newsvine Magnolia Facebook
Tailrank Slashdot Technorati Google Bookmarks Yahoo Favorites Windows
Live Ask
For most organizations Extensible Markup Language, or XML (), is the
lingua franca for data interchange. Apparently XML alone isn’t fast
enough for Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), so Google went off and developed its
own data format, called Protocol Buffers.
“You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can
use special generated source code to easily write and read your
structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a
variety of languages,” Google’s documentation states.
As to why after years of in-house development Google is now making
Protocol Buffers open source, Varda said it’s just a question of time.
“We have wanted to release protocol buffers for a long time,” he said.
“The only limitation was finding enough engineering time to get it
done.”
So far, Google has included support for C++, Java, and Python for
protocol buffers, though other languages are welcome.
Digg Del.icio.us furl StumbleUpon BlinkList Newsvine Magnolia Facebook
Tailrank Slashdot Technorati Google Bookmarks Yahoo Favorites Windows
Live Ask
Google, for example, offers a promising that Gmail, the online e-mail
component of its overall Google Apps service, will be available 99.9
percent of the time, with service credits extended to paying customers
if Gmail dips below that level.
Google is a major proponent of cloud computing, with advocacy work
down to the level of of its own. The trend has the potential to
seriously redistribute wealth within the computing industry.
There are two broad categories of cloud computing. First are online
applications such as Google’s Apps, on which customers can run their
own applications.
Taking the plunge into the cloud Service level agreements are the kind
of contractual guarantees that appeal to CIOs making cost-benefit
analyses. But there’s a gut-level factor at play here, too.
Psychologically, it’s well-known in risk analysis circles that people
feel more comfortable with risk if they feel in control. Thus people
are often more comfortable driving a car on a congested freeway
compared with being flown somewhere in a commercial jet, regardless of
the relative safety of the two forms of transport.
Companies are working to address this side of the equation, too. One
prime example is the site, which shows the response time for a
Salesforce.com server transaction. It also details when problems
happened, what they affected, and what caused them.
Amazon.com, too, offers a . “A service dashboard is something our
developers asked us for, and we made the service available to them as
soon as possible,” said spokeswoman Kay Kinton.
“Own your own risk” And some others are even trying to make a business
out of reducing the uncertainties of cloud computing. One is open-
source monitoring and management software company . The company is
working hard to extend its monitoring service to other sites, too,
including Google App Engine, said Stacey Schneider, senior director of
marketing.
“You can’t get away from owning your own risk. This is slowing the
adoption of the cloud,” she said.
Risks of non-cloud computing, too Much ado can and should be made of
the risks of cloud computing, but it should be noted that even the
much more mature business of computing without a cloud has its risks.
Downtime, either with ailing or stolen PCs or with overtaxed or faulty
servers, is a serious problem there, too.
) 8 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 11, 2008 1:01 PM PDT If could
computing can be standardized. I believe it will be a great benefit to
Business operating online. Could computing is probably less risky than
managing your own hardware. Especially, if you don’t have resources to
manage large servers and configurations. Google has the talent the
scale like few others do. Reply to this comment by July 11, 2008 1:47
PM PDT It will depend who’s going to own the data and what right the
provider when go out of business be forced to hand over data. Reply to
this comment
by July 11, 2008 3:31 PM PDT What’s the point of having a PERSONAL
computer when you are 100% reliant on a server? Haven’t we gone a full
circle now and arrived right back at the mainframe model that we SO
badly wanted to get away from? Let’s just bring all of the VAX’s out
of retirement and say that the last 15 years were a waste of effort!
Reply to this comment View reply Hide reply
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LAS VEGAS, July 11, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/
—-Columbus Geographic Systems (GIS) Ltd. (“Columbus”) (Pink Sheets:
CGSE) today announced it has reached an important understanding with
DigitalGlobe, world leader in high-resolution commercial imagery.
DigitalGlobe also supplies the popular Google Earth website with its
images. According to the understanding, Columbus will have access to
DigitalGlobe’s digital image bank for use in the Ranger navigation
system.
DigitalGlobe operates three imaging satellites: Worldview I, Worldview
II, and QuickBird. These satellites collect the highest resolution
commercial imagery of the Earth, and offer the largest image size, and
greatest on-board storage capacity and resolution compared to any
other commercial satellite imagery available today.
Columbus is a rapidly growing player in the geographic imaging systems
and navigation industry. The company’s leading product, Ranger, is a
cutting-edge navigation software package providing location-based, GPS
mapping, navigation, and information solutions for the off-road
environment.
— Highly-effective off road, outdoor GPS navigation tools, working on
a full range of devices including Car PC, PDA, and Personal Navigation
Devices (PND), with options for 3D imaging.
Dutton Associates Announces Investment Opinion: General Steel Holdings
Strong Speculative Buy In Update Coverage By Dutton Associates
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or
redistributed. 2008 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved.
It will include close-ups of buildings, cars and people. Critics say
the site is a ‘burglar’s charter’ that makes it easy for criminals to
check out potential victims.
It’s an issue we’ve been following for months, of course: with stories
like along the way, among others.
However, the paper’s influence and its spittle-spewing rage are new
additions to the mix – and there’s an extra political angle, too.
Just as David Davies standing on a civil liberties platform, so the
Mail continues to support the Tory leader, David Cameron.
But in this case, Cameron has very close links with Google – – and
it’ll be interesting to see if the Mail gets the Tory front bench to
take a stand on this issue, or if it just slides into history as
another one of the paper’s moments of fury.
In many respects I’m all for consideration of how our civil liberties
are perhaps being eroded. Yet in this instance I think the value of
the service outweighs anything against it.
So if Google’s doing it in an organised manner, that’s not terrible as
it’s a genuinely useful service. And they’re putting it on the net for
all to see. If I want to see CCTV footage of myself from the dozens of
cameras that catch sight of me daily, I’m going to have to file a
significant number of Freedom of Information requests to see the
footage.
‘However, given the number of CCTV cameras which spy on me every day,
I’m not sure that a Google car counts as the biggest infringement of
my liberties right now.’ It’s not a zero-sum game, is it? You don’t
just pick the things that seem the most threatening now and *ignore*
the rest, if only because it’s easier to sort out privacy implications
before they become huge problems. Maybe, for example, if a little more
attention had been paid to Google’s hoarding of data – or its
statements on the privacy of IP addresses – recent hoohas could have
been avoided. It’s this sort of attitude that makes me distrust so
many of the campaign groups who claim to be protecting me but who roll
over depending on who the threat comes from – and to value the ones
who don’t take no prisoners even when I think they’re being a little
creepy, intense or insane. By the way, would it really be better if
the feeds from all CCTV cameras were publically available?
I always get the feeling that only pedos and racists read The Mail.
And I am right. Its a nasty little rag which should be used only to
line the floor of a pig sty. Disgusting.
I think it’s a terrible invasion of privacy, which is why I’m going to
render their photo of my house useless by standing naked in the front
window at all times.
“But now, thanks to Google, we would be wrong to think that. Because
of the profiles built up by Google, we are now pursued every day by
cold- call telephone sales, and by online intrusions.
But seriously – I agree in part as I am as concerned with how our data
is circulated. That said I have far more fear of the private sector
than the public.
Given a choice I would rather have Google in my front bed room than
the Daily Mail any day of the week. I would have thought that the well
read Daily Mail folk would know that Google ”don’t do evil.” Keep
the good work up Google!!
@lb001: “Is that libelous?” You can’t (except in extreme
circumstances) libel an organisation or company. I was going to make a
comment about the other quotes you offered but then realised those
*might* be libellous because they would be about a person. So I’ll
restrain myself to pointing out that Google doesn’t sell its data, and
doesn’t deal in phone numbers, so it can’t have any connection with
cold callers. However I can’t find the AN Wilson piece on the Mail’s
site, so perhaps he didn’t say that.
@CharlesArthur. Daily Mail have removed it, but it is still available
in a cache form, if you type “invasion almost criminal” into Google,
and click the second, indented link.
Slander is when you make a wrongful comment about an individual,
defamation is when you make one about a company or organisation, I
believe. Although that might be wrong!
We are surely entitled to ask by what right Google is intruding into
our lives to this degree?
However much you feel ‘got at’ by advertisements, at least the
shopkeeper is not literally tugging your elbow.
But now, thanks to Google, we would be wrong to think that. Because of
the profiles built up by Google, we are now pursued every day by cold-
call telephone sales, and by online intrusions.
Other companies, wishing to peddle their wares, can learn from these
Google profiles your tastes and likely areas of purchase.
The Conservative MP David Davis has put the taxpayer to very great
expense by forcing a by-election on the issue of personal liberty.
His arguments are based on what he perceives to be the dangers of the
State keeping ever more watchful-tabs upon us. His fears ranged from
the potentially very serious – the holding of suspects without trial
for 42 days – to the comparatively trivial – local councils spying on
what rubbish we put into our wheely bins.
There are probably two sides to the arguments which political
libertarians such as David Davis attempt to raise. I would admit, as
would most people, to a good deal of uncertainty about the issue.
But that is an argument about the power of the state to interfere in
the lives of citizens.
Identity theft is one of the growing crimes of our age. A clever
manipulator of computers can reconstruct from a single electricity
bill, or one credit card, a huge raft of information about us,
including our bank account numbers and even our medical records. Such
thefts are rightly regarded as crimes.
Want to upgrade your iPhone? Only via O2’s site, which is wavering in
and out of reality… (updated) (and now they’re “gone”!)
The researchers’ proposal includes mining activity data to make
suggestions for activities, from what to watch on television to
finding your favorite songs on your MP3 player and playing them in the
room with the best acoustics. At the point at which Google is
proposing the idea of thinking for people as well as mining their
data, it might be time to worry about more than whether a link to the
company’s privacy policy is on its front page.
Turning civic booster, Newsom called San Francisco a city of dreamers
and entrepreneurs while touting its economic strength amid a
nationwide downturn.
To protect our readers from malicious comments SFGate asks that you
login or register to post a comment.
Alex Pham covers consumer electronics and video games (no, she doesn’t
get to play World of Warcraft all day). She has been a business
reporter for nearly two decades, writing for the Oregonian, the
Washington Post, USA Today and the Boston Globe before joining the
Times in 1999 at the peak of the dot.com bubble. When not chewing on
SEC filings, Alex enjoys mixing up Lego bricks with her son. alex.pham
@ latimes.com
Michelle Quinn covers computers and digital music. She has chronicled
the digital revolution since 1993, when she wrote for the first issue
of Wired magazine about how computers were changing Hollywood special
effects. She covered Netscape’s 1995 public offering for the San
Francisco Chronicle and rode the roller coaster of the dot-com boom
and bust for the San Jose Mercury News. In the evenings, the Delaware
native can be found at home watching TV shows and movies on her
laptop, with another nearby to surf the Web. michelle.quinn @
latimes.com
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Yahoo Inc. has rejected Microsoft’s latest
attempt to buy its online search operations in a “take or leave it”
proposal that Yahoo said would have dismantled its Internet franchise.
As described by Yahoo in a statement released late Saturday, Microsoft
packaged its latest offer with activist investor Carl Icahn, a
billionaire who is seeking to overthrow Yahoo’s board of directors in
a shareholder meeting scheduled for Aug. 1.
Yahoo said it received the complex proposal Friday and was given less
than 24 hours to respond.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment late
Saturday. Efforts to reach Icahn were unsuccessful.
Yahoo said it unsuccessfully reiterated its willingness to sell the
entire company to Microsoft for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share
— a bid that the software maker dangled in early May before
withdrawing it in a pique over Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang’s
demand for $37 per share.
Microsoft in May offered to buy Yahoo’s search operations for $1
billion and to spend another $8 billion to acquire a 16 percent stake
in Yahoo’s remaining operations.
Yahoo said the proposal that Microsoft submitted Friday “contains a
number of improvements,” but insisted it still wasn’t good enough.
As Google has become more successful, both Yahoo and Microsoft have
been regressing, a dynamic that many analysts believe make it
imperative for the two companies to put aside their differences and
combine forces.
Lively reminds me of something like IMVU, an instant messaging program
that enables 3D avatar chat, in that it provides off-the-shelf avatars
with teen appeal for socialising. It’s a pretty simple: it’s about
chatting in rooms that can be customised to reflect your taste, and is
nothing like as grandiose as something like Second Life or There. It’s
not a single persistent world, but a bunch of ad hoc virtual spaces
that let people come together and show off their avatar identity
through chatting and flirting.
One thing Google doesn’t do is bet against the web, and as you’d
expect Lively is firmly web-based: it runs in your browser after
you’ve downloaded an applet (if you’re lucky – it keeps crashing
my browsers). The idea of a 3D experience that can be easily built and
accessed via the web, rather than some huge downloadable client is a
solid one. It’s one of the principles behind virtual world heavy-
weight Ralph Koster’s company, Metaplaces. However, Metaplaces has
much grander ambitions, and wants to provide web-based tools that will
scale from simple games to rich virtual worlds: according to its
website, “We have a vision: to let you build anything, and play
everything, from anywhere.”
Google Earth comes alive because it’s a living, breathing online
community which uses the power of social networks to layer value onto
a planet simulation. You enter a 3D space but can then easily locate
and activate 2D web information, such as pictures or Wikipedia
entries. It’s this integration of 2D and 3D which is so powerful, and
Google, which dominates the world’s text-based information and has
hell of a leg up in 3D via Google Earth, seems to me well placed to
create the ultimate mash-up of real and virtual world content. It will
be interesting to see how Lively develops, but for now, we don’t need
another stand alone virtual space: the real magic will happen when
these worlds start to collide.
TypePad rolled out its blogging application for the iPhone. Google’s
Blogger received no such special treatment. There was at least one RSS
product available from the App Store, but Google’s Reader wasn’t one
of them. The list could go on.
It could be that Google is reserving its best for Android, and it
probably should. Given Google and Apple’s love affair with each other,
though, I was expecting more.
Tomorrow’s CIO: Do you have what it takes? Find out at the 2008
InformationWeek 500 Conference Sept. 14-16, St. Regis Resort, Monarch
Beach, Calif.
I can see Lively being implemented into Android, Apple and other
mobile platforms before too long. Why send a boring old text message
to someone, when you can chat them up on the roof of a high-rise or in
the middle of the jungle? Bring a handful of your friends in and
spend time debating the latest episode of The Hills or whatever kids
are watching these days. It would be easy to open the program or point
your browser to the chat rooms and talk away.
Looks like Peter and the gang at SpatialNetworking have a new release
in the works to include facebook and Twitter integration…
In addition to updating the popular Twitter and facebook service, it
can also tie in to your Google calendar and import from TripIt and
Doplr… cool. The tie in to Google Calendar is very powerful and
something that users are going love! See video demo below (source:
http://vimeo.com/1313233) – I can’t wait for a mobile client!
Serves the decision makers responsible for networking, voice data, and
video communications technologies at enterprise and service provider
Google has released as open source a web application assessment tool,
Ratproxy, that was designed to root out potential security flaws.
Separately, Google also released Browser Sync, a product designed for
keeping multiple versions of Firefox synchronised, under an open-
source licence.
Last month, Google said it would terminate support for Browser Sync,
and this week the company open sourced the code for the product’s
client software in order to allow the developer community to continue
to use and improve it, said Google developer Aaron Boodman in a blog
post. “It would be great to see the server ported to Google App
Engine, or support for Firefox 3 implemented,” Boodman wrote.
The main advantage of Ratproxy is its focus on Web 2.0 applications,
drawing on Google’s experience with such applications, Zalewski said.
For instance, it offers a number of advanced and unique checks,
content-sniffing functions capable of distinguishing between
stylesheets and Javascript code snippets, and the ability to take into
account particular browser-related quirks and content-handling
oddities, according to Zalewski’s documentation for Ratproxy. The
proxy can be used in a chain with third-party security testing
proxies, he said.
Google has come under increasing pressure in recent months to tighten
its security strategy. Last month StopBadware.org, a site sponsored by
Google, found that Google itself was one of the top five networks
hosting malicious web pages, largely due to the popularity among
attackers of Google-owned networks such as Blogger. The other four
top-five networks were based in China.
Google will no longer forward eBay and PayPal phishing emails to
recipients using its (DKIM) standard. The protocol provides for simple
signing of outgoing email using a key which is valid for the relevant
domain and can be queried by the recipient via the domain and matched
with the incoming email.
Users finding email apparently from eBay or PayPal in their inboxes
can thus in future be sure that it isn’t a phishing attempt. Users
will of course still have to be on their guard against other phishing
tricks, such as entering the sender as ‘poypal.com’. According to
Taylor, eBay and PayPal have worked hard on the solution of signing
absolutely all their email with domain keys. Google has apparently
been carrying out successful tests on the method for some weeks, with
no problems or complaints encountered, indeed few users have even
noticed the change. Google is hoping to set a good example for others.
The team behind DKIM is also that other companies will follow suit.
Uptake at present remains slight.
South Derbyshire MP Mark Todd said: “Taking photos of people
outside their homes leaves an opportunity for those images to be
misused.
A spokeswoman said: “Google works hard to make sure our products
respect both users’ expectations of privacy, and local privacy laws,
in each country in which they are launched.”
But law expert Mr Bampton said the company had a lot of work to do if
it was to avoid tricky legal situations. He said: “If a person
is photographed going into a sexually-transmitted disease clinic, you
could argue the information being revealed is personal, so there may
be grounds for a court case.
Special options are available to registered members. for the member
login page or to register as a member.
By Cassidy FriedmanStaff writerThe people at Google first felt obliged
to capture images of the boring U.S. cities in their virtual tour of
America.Places like Manhattan, San Francisco and Los Angeles.But Twin
Falls locals say they’ve spotted the Internet company’s distinctive
camera car in their town, a sign the company must be planning to add
this town to the ranks of the big cities.The company can’t actually
say for sure – the cars now traversing the nation operate
independently. But a Google spokeswoman said it’s likely the car –
which shoots 360-degree street-level photographs of all public roads
where it travels – cruised through Twin Falls earlier this
month.Chances are, the car spotted in Twin Falls was first deployed to
a larger metropolitan area like Boise, before it expanded its trip
east through Twin Falls, said spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo.”We have
over 60 metropolitan areas,” Filadelfo said. “And within each of those
metropolitan areas we really try to include the surroundings. We think
everywhere can benefit from this. We think everybody, whether they
live in New York or Twin Falls can benefit.”Filadelfo said each car in
Google’s large fleet is armed with a sophisticated camera mounted on
its roof that shoots still photographs at and between
intersections.The photos, to be added to Google Maps at some
unspecified date in coming months, allows an on-screen visual tour.One
reason for the StreetView effort is to allow users the novelty of
taking a virtual drive through most American cities and a dozen or so
national parks. But the program also satisfies practical needs,
Filadelfo said.In one Midwestern state, department of transportation
officials use the program to identify dilapidated roads they need to
pave, Filadelfo said. It saves gas and time, they said. Viewers can
check out a restaurant’s ambience – at least exterior – before they
dine there. They can see a neighborhood before they rent a home on the
block.”We’ve seen a lot of really great uses of it and heard some
great feedback,” the spokeswoman said.It’s unclear how long the photos
will be of use, however. The company is unclear on when it might make
subsequent passes and update the street scenes.Google hit a patch of
rough road when some members of the public caught in StreetView’s
frames complained the photographs posted online invaded their
privacy.Viewers could request their face or private property be
blotted out.When shooting Manhattan in May, Google blurred all the
faces in its imagery, Filadelfo said.By June, despite having the clear
legal upper hand to shoot photographs of what takes place in public,
Google began blurring faces in all its shots. So don’t expect to be
famous for anything but your shirt and shoes, Twin Falls.”We thought
the focus was on business and geography and it just seemed a way to
preserve that,” Filadelfo said.Cassidy Friedman may be reached at
208-735-3241 or .
We have an automated system to identify and remove inappropriate or
offensive material in Hot Trends. In rare cases, when such material is
missed, we manually remove these results from our Hot Trends list. We
apologize to any users who were offended by this situation.
It’s truly pathetic that David Sarno believes that the question of
whether or not a swastika is offensive is “debatable”. Despite the
ancient origins of the symbol, most folks today don’t recognize it as
a symbol of Hinduism — its primary meaning has been its association
with the murderous racism of the Nazis. When Sarno brightly refers to
the swastika as a symbol with a “multifacted history”, you’d think he
was referring to the peace sign.
“Svasti” is a Hindu (Sanskrit) word that translates as “well being.”
The svastika (swastika) was a sacred symbol to Hindus and Buddhists
alike, and one can find temples and homes adorned with it throughout
South Asia. Sadly, when Hitler appropriated the swastika as the symbol
of his National Socialist (Nazi) Party in the early 1930’s, it came to
represent evil and genocide. Thus, modern Western civilization abhors
it. When a Buddhist temple in LA decorated its fences with wrought
iron swastikas, many people became offended, because average Joe
America is simply not ready for a return to the original, peaceful
meaning of svasti (the memories of WWII and Bergen-Belsen are still
too fresh). The monks wisely decided to remove the symbols rather than
attempt to explain the sacred meaning to the clamoring crowds.
Ironically, the local Jewish community, well aware of the many
meanings of the swastika, came to the defense of the temple, declaring
that they had the right to display the swastika in its context as a
symbol of goodness.
….it’s too bad that a purported fount of information (Google) caters
to the indignation of a few ignorant individuals.
Why not post something educational which links to the “offensive”
image for the dingbats concerned, rather than kowtowing to “politcally
correct” outrage that only serves to reinforce the empowerment of a
symbol that shouldn’t be given such impact any more?
“Despite the ancient origins of the symbol, most folks today don’t
recognize it as a symbol of Hinduism — its primary meaning has been
its association with the murderous racism of the Nazis.”
I am surprised and dismayed that Google removed swastika from Google
Trends. After all, people will continue to search for swastika, trends
or no trends.
Thank god. Now that that’s out of my system I see I am not alone after
reading others’ opinions on Adina’s comment.
I suppose this means the “most folks” who live in Europe or the US? Oh
wait, surely those millions who live in India and other parts of Asia
don’t count! What if they don’t see it as a hateful symbol? What if it
means something completely different to them? Oh of course, that
doesn’t matter, does it! This Eurocentric world view makes me sick.
Censorship is generally evil. Censoring information about what is
being censored and who the censors are is particularly egregious.
Let’s not let Google keep mum about what precisely happened, because
by censoring the Hot Trends data, Google can mislead the people
concerning what they are thinking. After that, it is a tiny step for
most to be told what to think. Who made Google the world’s Ministry of
Propaganda?
The swastika is an ubiquitous symbol throughout all of South and East
Asia. And, incidentally, the ‘right facing’ is the most common form,
especially in the Hindu world. As right-facing means evolution and
left facing means involution, in the Hindu sense. In Buddhism when
facing right it stands for strength and intelligence and facing left
it stands for love and mercy. And is an important part of Dharma in
both religions as it signifies universal harmonies and the balance of
opposites.
Obviously, this symbol became popular in the early 20th century as a
symbol of good luck (often pre WWI air forces would use the symbol for
just that, ie Finland). Then it was high-jacked by the NSDAP for their
international symbol and evil, horrendous crimes against humanity
ensued across Europe under fascism.
Sounds like this is a lose-lose situation for Google. They shouldn’t
have taken it down. Since they issued a statement anyway, they should
have just explained the many OTHER different (and usually positive)
meanings of the symbol.
Here’s a more likely explanation. If you do a (Baidu is the Chinese
equivalent of Google), you’ll find that there was a swastika-related
story recently in the Chinese press that has gotten widespread
coverage over the past week. apparently there was a big mural-type
advertisement on a wall somewhere in xi’an (ancient capital of China,
geographically speaking it’s roughly in the center). the mural
contained a painting of a long black train with a nazi-inspired
swastika painted on the train’s head. judging from the baidu news
results, this story was literally reproduced in hundreds of online
news outlets. my sense of the article is that it’s meant to inspire
shock (as in, how could they not know this looks like a nazi
swastika?!), but also to provide the general lesson that the swastika
has negative connotations outside of buddhism (for those who don’t
know anything about the nazis? also remember: Buddhism comes from
India too). i’d say this story is what inspired all those google
searches, and not the simple fact that “good luck is on their minds.”
This week, Google jumped into the battle against Bell Canada’s anti-
BitTorrent practices, this time through the country’s equivalent of
the FCC, and on different legal grounds than privacy advocates.
Not Canadian, But its interesting to watch this particular story. So
goes the north, so will follow the rest IMHO… so this seems to be
the thing to watch and learn from.
Since 1999, more than half of Canadians have downloaded video from the
Web, and about a quarter of Canadians do so at least once a week. So
the CRTC’s “broad investigation into the way Canadian ISPs manage the
flow of traffic” is extremely timely. Better to have some Internet
oversight urging Canadian content on the Web. The alternative is to
have our telephone, cable and satellite bills subsidizing commercial
appetites that hope to bypass the Canadian system altogether.
TORONTO — Google on Tuesday branded the use of “traffic-shaping”
technology by domestic phone giants to choke off BitTorrent and other
bandwidth hogs as “unjust discrimination” and contrary to Canadian
law. “The Internet is simply too important to allow Bell and other
broadband Internet access services to act as such a gatekeeper; the
Internet’s myriad benefits can only be fully realized when Canadian
carriers allow end users to choose the applications and content they
prefer,” Google said in a 15-page filing to the Canadian Radio-
television and Telecommunications Commission. The CRTC is weighing the
right of phone carriers to use packet filtering technology to manage
Internet traffic. Google gave its backing to smaller Canadian
Internet-access providers that lease phone lines to provide their
service to Canadians. Bell Canada and other phone giants have told the
CRTC that they should be allowed to hamper serial file-sharers that
greatly slow the time it takes online subscribers to legitimately
transfer music, video, software and other large files.
Internet giant says large carriers shouldn’t be slowing certain
traffic and is calling for a halt to the practice
Google Inc. says Bell Canada and other telecommunications companies
that slow or restrict certain types of Internet traffic are violating
Canadian law and is calling on federal watchdogs to put a stop to the
process.
The technology titan calls Bell’s policy of slowing or “shaping”
certain forms of Internet traffic – mostly peer-to-peer file transfers
– “unjust discrimination” and says the practice should be prohibited
in Canada. It makes the argument in a recent filing with the Canadian
Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
“The Internet is simply too important to allow [Bell and other
broadband Internet access services] to act as such a gatekeeper; the
Internet’s myriad benefits can only be fully realized when Canadian
carriers allow end users to choose the applications and content they
prefer,” Google says in its filing.
“The commission should make clear in this proceeding that at least
blocking or degrading applications of consumers’ choice is prohibited
in Canada because it is not technologically and competitively
neutral,” Google says in the filing.
When John Beck, design director at South Side-based , needed a
software developer with a specific skill set, he had several options
— post an online ad, comb through Google or seek personal referrals
from trusted contacts.
He logged onto LinkedIn, a 5-year-old professional networking site,
and cast out a call for help to his stable of online colleagues.
Some businesses are beginning to leverage social networking sites for
more than just connecting with old friends. They’re being used for
leads, referrals and recruiting.
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print subscription and have access to the complete article.
The U.S. Small Business Administration armed Joey Johnson with the
money and motivation to step out and launch her graphic design
business. Johnson formed Graphic Mechanic Design Studio in October
2006, after running the company on the side for nearly a decade.
, ,
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otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of
bizjournals.
and why not keeping them in a country where privacy still means
something, so that no US judge can touch them.
And for google to “request all the records” from their separate
company formed to hold the records would be an operation requiring
special permission, extensive justification, and full disclosure,
regarding reasons for the request, which the board of the other
company would have to vote on (after researching to guarantee that
Google is not possibly under any kind of duress in making the request,
to release information).
The US-based Google would have half the information; the foreign “data
storage” company would have the other half — and no individual
record could be obtained without bitwise XOR’ing all pieces together.
And there could be more than two pieces: there could be more than 1
subsidiary that has to agree to any massive information release
request.
We just have this compulsion to hang onto everything because we can,
and perhaps with the faint hope that somewhere down the line we’ll be
able to show extreme cleverness to our PHB’s when they ask some inane
question like, “Duh, how many unique IP addresses have accessed our
website since 1991?” and we’ll be able to say, “Give me 10 minute and
I’ll let you know (wag tail).”
Chances are that Google themselves has never had to follow-up on an IP
address to identify a user for anyone except the Chinese government
and/or the NSA, neither of which are our friends. The first poster who
asks why they keep this at all, let alone weren’t anonymizing it long
ago has it right. This is hardly the first time Google has had to turn
over access records so they certainly know that it can and will
happen.
Don’t be evil at Google seems to mean don’t destroy data you never
needed in the first place in the event that some government we want to
keep as our friend might want it. But now we find out that more than
just governments can get to it with baseless suits and moronic judges.
Why do I feel like I’m the only person that takes “don’t be evil” with
a grain of salt. Google has been a great corporation because they
understood people on the Internet and how they wanted to be treated.
But, they also use that knowledge when they calculate how far they can
push the envelope. “Don’t be evil” has translated into webmail
accounts with massive amounts of space, web ads that’s don’t flash or
pop-up, and a search engine who’s front page maintains the very bland
basic HTML feel. Now people dream of Google being the great fixer in
any industry that has annoyed them over the years.
…if you don’t have a Google login name. Google search works just
fine without one. It even works fine without any Google cookies.
Why would the **AA sue me? I’ve never uploaded, downloaded, or
sideloaded any of their stuff. They have nothing I want. If they sue
me it will be because they fucked up and confounded me with someone
else.
If privacy is to have any meaning, then we need a right to protect our
personal information. Well, actually we already have the right, though
it’s a bit scattered around the Bill of Rights. (Speaking for
Americans, and only in theoretical terms as regards the current
administration.)
So what’s the strongest form of protection for our personal
information? The famous “possession is 9 points of the law”. We should
possess our personal information and we should have to right to say
who can see it, and when.
There is an interesting tie in here to something I’ve promoted all
along: If the last mile was owned by cooperative groups (meaning NOT
ISPs) then they could pool the IP addresses assigned in a random, and
meaningless way. That is to say that if 237 people in a housing
association were sharing DHCP IP addresses through a server system
with enough bandwidth that many ISPs could hook up and serve out email
and other services by user, it would be possible to hide the end user
IP. Then any stats by Google or others would apply to the group, not
an individual. Share that cooperative environment out amongst all the
people of your neighborhood or town where the number is now thousands
or tens of thousands and the problem of privacy becomes less of a
concern.
“We expect Google’s second-quarter results to be inline or slightly
better than consensus estimates, driven by: a) continued gains in
U.S.-search market share, b) international growth and c) monetization
improvements,” said Youssef Squali, a financial analyst for Jefferies
& Co.
The aborted hotel deal doesn’t represent the full extent of Google’s
penny-pinching, either — the company recently closed a
Or maybe it’s positively a sign that the company is finally getting
pinched by an economic slowdown.
Local cookbook authors and chefs will be there to guide kids through
hands-on cooking activities, and there will be live music from Banana
Slug String Band. Included in the entry price ($20 for adults, $12 for
ages 5-17, little guys free), are food tastings prepared by Google’s
chefs, smart folks that have figured out that working in a high-end
Silicon Valley cafeteria is a better deal than slaving away in a
restaurant.
The event will take place from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Google
headquarters, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View.
WOW! Sounds like a great time. WOW! The cost of admission. With gas,
and admissions we would be looking at a cost of over $150 for our
family. We’ll just wait for the show,and in the mean time visit the
local farmers market ( met the farmers, food samples, education
stations, and shopping for the weeks meals at far less than $150).
The event and show premise are intriguing but I wonder how many
“regular” folks will be able to attend for the reasons mom3 mentioned.
————————Charles Siegel (of Charles Chocolates) may be
busy that day! If he’s at this Doof event, he’ll have to race back
over to his Chocolate Bar and factory in Emeryville, for a free open
house. http://www.charleschocolates.com/events.php
Ironic that this comes just days after the NY Times article blasting
Google for their decision to raise the prices of their in house
daycare by 75%! Its a shame that a trailblazing company like Google
chooses to make something as important as a childcare the realm of
only the very wealthy. Apparently Sergey Brin was quoted as saying
he’s tired of people getting so many perks like free food and
otherwise. Since when has childcare fallen on the same level as free
M&Ms;?
One of them was a £30m executive Airbus bought as a birthday
gift for his wife on her 44th birthday. (He is said to be planning to
give her a $1 billion 27-storey home on her next birthday complete
with helipad, health club and six floors of car parking — which
goes to show that you can top a £30m jet as a present.)
We expect it will be quite empty if the taxman continues to do his job
with such vigour.
This dream nearly happened. You see, another Michael — Green,
the former head of Carlton, which with Granada formed ITV in 2004
— had a chance to buy Google for a mere £400m (it was a
long time ago).
The $2 trillion industry put in its worst performance during the first
half of the year since most credible records began
The luxury hotel group wants to buy Island off Guernsey that spent
much of the Second World War under German occupation
A bike activist has collected more than 35,000 signatures on an online
petition asking Google to add a “Bike There” feature to .
Mr. Smith asks that the feature take into account bicycle lanes from
the area being mapped. The says that such a feature would:
Google Maps currently offers a option for a number of cities in the
United States and around the world (but not Boston, for some reason).
Smith envisions that the link to “Bike There” would sit
next to the transit link.
Others have tried to create Google Maps mashups that offer bicycle
directions. The site offers bike directions for Portland, Ore., and
Milwaukee.
People who walk places rather than drive tend to be more active,
right? Well why don’t those over-active people who don’t
like to drive to the end of their driveway to get the morning paper
walk down to a gas station and use the money that they saved by
walking on a map. Then they’ll be able to put that map in their
fanny-pack, walk out of the gas station, walk their over-active bodies
home and flip through the map and figure out a route on their own?!
First, the news: Google Transit and Metro are still in talks to bring
the popular online service to Los Angeles County. but a feature that
some people say Google does better.
Two sources, speaking on background, said there are several issues
that need to be resolved. One is boring and involves data formatting.
The other is not and involves whether Google intends to make money
from advertising placed on the maps. Like all transit agencies, Metro
is cash-strapped and looking for new revenue and apparently doesn’t
want to give proprietary information to a firm that may profit.
As for Google Transit, I spent some time playing around with it
yesterday and came away mostly impressed. It’s quick — quicker than
the Metro trip planner. And to have all that information housed on one
website is pretty convenient.
I asked the Google press office about this also and they replied that
Google Transit is currently available for Blackberry and Java-based
phones (here’s a from Google) and that Google is working to bring it
to more platforms. Note to Google: the 2.0 version of the iPhone comes
out next week and is expected to sell like hotcakes.
What do you think Bottleneckers? Google Transit? Are you a believer? A
skeptic? The comment board awaits your wisdom….
First of all, Google will give bizzare directions at times, especially
when involving walking- such as: walking across multi-lane highways
and in some cases even over water! Also, when Google maps walking
directions, they don’t have step by step walking directions and show
you walking through buildings, landmarks, etc. It basically draws a
line between the origin and destination, paying no attention to
streets.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Google Transit is great, but for more
detailed itineraries I will use the transit companies trip planner.
Google also has the ability to infest your computer if they disagree
with you. Their google android project is 2-4 generations from
completion who really needs more from them than a search engine. One
of the grown ups probably thought of guugle ads revenue.
Yes, it does the job, mostly, but it’s flaky as hell and almost
impossible for a newbie to use. You have to learn all sorts of stupid
tricks, like knowing that for some reason the Universal City subway
stop is called “University City Sta” in the planner. It also does a
shoddy job of telling you how long a commute is gonna take.
I say bring on Google. Yes Google’s system isn’t perfect, but it’s
essentially free and would let metro save money on bandwidth, upkeep,
and a bunch of other web costs while offering superior service.
BTW, if you are ever dismayed to find that the timetables on OCTA
signs don’t match what you were given on Google maps, don’t worry; the
signs are what’s wrong.
While I’m mostly appreciative of this transit system from Google
(thank you Google), I too have a couple peeves to point out…
BTW is Google (or Metro) even thinking about a real-time bus/train
locator by GPS, an extension of the marginally-helpful TransiTV?
Steve Hymon is The Times’ Road Sage. He covers traffic and
transportation in a region united by a confounding network of freeways
that frustrate drivers daily. The Bottleneck Blog is Steve’s website
home, where he breaks transportation news, reports on traffic tie-ups
and brings a critical but humorous eye to commuting in Southern
California. You can reach Steve at steve.hymon@latimes.com.
Google has added a significant new feature to the tool that
advertisers can use to select the keywords they want to bid for: the
ability to see roughly how many people actually search using those
terms.
The move is probably smart: advertisers love quantitative analysis,
and this gives them more hard data immediately.
Comment reply Submit Cancel The posting of advertisements, profanity,
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After spending Friday morning playing with an iPhone 3G, I can see why
Apple enthusiasts lined up again for Steve Job’s latest wonderful
device.
But the rest of the world’s really going to wonder what the big deal
is this time around.
It’s an absolute breeze to install applications such as news feeds
from the AP and The New York Times, or the restaurant finder from
Seattle’s . You can load them from the phone, but it’s slow —
even with the faster network speeds. Or you could just click to add
them in iTunes, like a song.
Apple is heavy-handed with software developers writing iPhone
applications, but it pays off for consumers who get a consistent
experience downloading, finding and using the applications.
What appears even better is the process to synchronize the phone with
Exchange. However, I couldn’t complete this task because my employer
hasn’t tweaked its servers to accept iPhones yet, so I was unable to
finish the last step.
My tip of the day: Check with your IT department to be sure it has
authorized iPhones. Otherwise, you may get a message saying that it’s
unable to verify a certificate and the sync won’t work.
Think about what’s going to happen over the next two years: The
economy aside, it’s going to be a golden era for advanced phones and
mobile Internet devices.
Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage
in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday,
July 17.
FITSNews – July 11, 2008 – Ever since the Rev. Jesse Jackson said he
wanted to “,” the nation’s interest in the testicles
of the Democratic presidential nominee has apparently gone through the
roof.
He’s right … who would have thunk it. Of course,
Obama’s nuts will never be as famous as .
by at
I tried it and had to disable it because it ruins Google Reader’s best
feature: its speed. It’s painfully slow. It would take something
awfully amazing for me to put up with an add-on that tanks GR
performance.
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A number of readers have noted Google’s , with which it is most
comparable. Google’s blogger claims, “And, yes, it is very fast
— at least an order of magnitude faster than XML.”
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted
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“Google protocol Buffers” is cooler than the OMG terminology, but this
kind of thing has been around for 20 years.
“Google’s blogger claims, “And, yes, it is very fast — at least an
order of magnitude faster than XML.” That is just because they aren’t
using enough XML!
I agree that the tiny “person” example is not a good benchmark case.
It was intended as a usage example, not a speed example, but I stuck
the speed numbers in there just meaning to give people a vague idea of
the difference. The “20-100 times faster” comment is based on testing
a variety of formats — both unrealistic ones and real-life formats
used in our search pipeline — against programmatically generated XML
equivalents (which may or may not themselves be realistic, though they
contain the same data with the same structure). libxml2 was used for
parsing XML. I don’t really know how libxml2’s speed compares to other
XML parsers, but I didn’t have a lot of time to investigate. The 20x
faster number comes from the largest data set (~100k-ish) while the
100x number comes from a very small message. The most realistic case
was about 50x. Sorry that I cannot provide exact details of the
benchmark setup since many of the test cases were proprietary internal
formats.
both really from the same design sheet, but thrift has been
opensource’d for over a year, and has many more language bindings. its
been in use in several opensource projects (thrudb comes to mind), and
has much more extant articles/documentation.
Obviously, those at Google felt XML didn’t work well for them. They
have the resources to invent a protocol and libraries to support it.
And, they are big enough to be their own ecosystem, which means as
long as everyone at Google is using their formats, interop is no
biggie. Good for them, I don’t begrudge that decision.
2. Verification in situations when it’s impossible to devise a
meaningful reaction to a failure (other than either “everything
failed, turn off the computers and go home” and “assume the data to be
valid anyway because ALL of it will have the same formatting error
because the same program generates it”)
4. Either communicating between programs that have the same knowledge
of message semantics, or preparation of pretty human-readable
documents.
Structurally Protocol Buffers are similar to JSON, yes. In fact, you
could use the classes generated by the Protocol Buffer compiler
together with some code that encodes and decodes them in JSON. This is
something some Google projects do internally since it’s useful for
communicating with AJAX apps. Writing a custom encoding that operates
on arbitrary protocol buffer classes is actually pretty easy since all
protocol message objects have a reflection interface (even in C++).
Modify JSON so unquoted attributes are ‘type labels’ and define the
type of an attribute by giving a label or a default value. For
instance:
Maybe somebody can explain, but it doesn’t seem like protocol buffers
really have much advantages over JSON. It sounds like it is
effectively just a binary format for JSON-like data (name-value pairs
they say) along with a code generator to access it. The code generator
is nice, but this is like a day’s work max. Maybe I’m not
understanding google’s problems, but I’ll stick with JSON since it
actually is a cross-platform, language neutral data format… and you
can always optimize it if actually needed.
Perl is to programming languages what English is to natural languages:
easy to fool around with, hard to learn well, but when you do, the
expressive power is incredible. And when you mess it up, nobody
understands what you’re trying to say.
Seems like you are missing the code they released that allows you to
implement this in a number of languages from the ‘get-go’.
You’ve also missed that they’ve just told the world how the majority
of their systems talk, something most people would find interesting
given how much Google does and the fact that one of Google’s strong
points is mangling huge amounts of data in a relatively quickly
manner.
As for Protocol Buffers, given the existing solutions out there (such
as ASN.1 and CORBA) are generally ugly and/or over-engineered, it
sounds to me like they’re simply addressing a gap in the industry…
after all, XML and SOAP aren’t the end-all and be-all of generic
object-passing protocols.
Google’s just-debuted virtual world is clunky right now, but expect it
to grow into a monster success – and play a leading role in business
as well a social networking.
[July 3, 2008] Gartner revises Q1 numbers after getting some new
information on HP selling prices, while iSuppli has better news for
AMD. [July 3, 2008] While text messaging leads consumers’ must-have
features, signs point to good news for advancements being pushed by
handset makers, carriers and developers. [July 3, 2008] New research
finds overall broadband use spreading, but suggests that economic
squeeze might be slowing uptake among certain segments. [July 2,
2008] IDC did some counting on the rising cost of storage worldwide.
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Tailrank Slashdot Technorati Google Bookmarks Yahoo Favorites Windows
Live Ask
Internetnews.com recently had the opportunity to chat with DiBona
about the SoC and Google’s view on open source development.
I don’t know if we’ll deal with them in a different way, but I think
we’ll be a lot more clear.
We had 49 different countries represented in the student body that we
had and some of the tax issues were pretty vexing for them. I think
that next year will be a little easier. The fact of the matter is
taxes are complicated. This isn’t a typical scholarship because it’s
based on performances measured by an external body.
We have it structured very carefully so that we can include people in
other countries and also not invalidate the visas of students here in
the U.S. that took part. I think that next time should we do this it
will be a lot clearer up front that this is kind of complicated.
Q: What was the experience like revising your landmark book Open
Sources some six years after first publication?
Q: One of the most widely used open source security tools, Nessus,
recently closed its source. There is now apparently a fork under
development. Is that something that Google would help to support?
It’s not really our thing and it’s not a matter of commenting or not.
Forks happen in open source software and I think it’s really healthy
that they do. Google doesn’t have a horse in that race.
Q: Is there any chance that Google would ever use one of the new ,
such as the Community License, that may well be free software-
compatible licenses?
We’re really happy with the Apache Software Foundation license and I
don’t think that it gets enough attention.
It’s good for us when we want to release software because it gives a
good amount of indemnification, which is what companies look for when
they release software. When we use software externally, the demands
that are put on us from a compliance point of view are pretty easy to
track.
I love working at Google. It’s been fantastic. Not just the people I
work with but the depth of resources.
It’s a remarkable environment for a computer scientist. Not just for
the amazing code that there is, either. Some of the code that we have
internally is just shockingly good.
: Yeah, I think you’re right. Plus, from some of the
descriptions I’m getting it sounds like rockets…
Officials stated 3 people were killed and 21 injured. However,
eyewitnesses [ru] and the city has returned to its normal life again
Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where
readers can share and discover new web pages.
Thats a good point. With Google you knew where you stood. They might
use your info to to target advertising. They might reveal it to the
government if ordered to do so. They would not be likely to sell it to
spammers or pass on lists of people who bookmark anti-Islamic sites to
an Al-Qaeda operative. Without google hosting it you need to host your
own or find someone you can trust.
I can’t imagine a company that actually does what the public asks?
They must have a secret agenda!
Well, I’d disagree, I think we’re doing fine from a kernel release
perspective. We could do more, and in time, we will, but we only
really started a concerted effort to release changes 3 years ago,
so…not so shabby. Red Hat has been more important than Google or any
linux -user- in the development of the kernel.
Your comments about manipulation are weirdly paranoid. The original
list that Greg posted was 20+ companies long, and originally didn’t
include us, as he didn’t count Andrew to us. He fixed that, and the
post I sent to you was from his talk at Google. It’s part of his
presentation to call out the company he visits, which is one of the
reasons we invited him out.
Google is built on software, some of which comes from the world of
open soruce, and most of which was written here. To give back, we both
release code from the company (a significant amount >1m lines per
year), fund external code (uncountable, really) and through the summer
of code, create new developers and even more code still (2.1m+ last
year, at least 3m this).
That’s not too shabby, in my book. I also would point out that it is
disingenuous to equate linux use with some license fee savings. If
linux had initially charged a license fee, then the world of linux
users would be using bsd. Linux is successful because it is free of
charge and free to use and free to modify. I think it is important
that we give back and the rest, and we do that, but to multiply the
number of machines running linux on the internet and consider that
money as having been stolen is antithetical to the whole idea behind
free software and open source.
If they’re not going to develop it any further, they might as well let
someone else have a go. Now all we have to do is convince Microsoft to
release the source code to Windows ME.
There’s no clear reason given as to why it’s being discontinued, but
if it’s due to lack of interest, it was probably lack of advertising;
I wasn’t even slightly aware of this project, and it sounds like
something I would have been very interested in. I use Foxmarks
religiously and have trouble functioning without it.
I’m sure there’s better examples, but off the top of my head I know
that a few years ago, there was a petition started to release the
source code to [wikipedia.org], an old (yet brilliant) 3D RTS game
that still stands out amongst the crowd today. After a few months
(possibly a couple of years), Eidos scrambled together the source code
and released it to the community.Since then, the Warzone resurrection
project has come leaps and bounds – fixing bugs, improving what
platforms the game runs at, allowing higher resolutions, improving the
AI, etc.The only slight catch (that I’m aware of) is that the Video
CODEC used in the original game was proprietary, so Eidos couldn’t
release the source to that and the company that owns the CODEC
wouldn’t allow it to be distributed any more.
Is Amazon no longer a third party? Granted I trust them as much as I
trust Google (and from an advertising perspective, they probably have
better data about me as they have actual data points for my purchases,
not just my purchase-related searches) but that still seems like a
rather dumb statement.
The angle places the user at street level and allows for complete
360-degree panning and zooming. Google said that the aim of the
project was to offer a perspective similar to that of a cyclist in the
race.
The service generated controversy when it debuted in the US and has
been cause for concern with UK privacy groups.
© Incisive Media Ltd. 2008. Incisive Media Limited, Haymarket
House, 28-29 Haymarket, London SW1Y 4RX, is a company registered in
the United Kingdom with company registration number 04038503
You can set a reminder e-mail at the same time that you’re adding an
event to your calendar. Just look for the gray box titled
“options.” Click “add a reminder” to schedule
an e-mail or pop-up reminder from five minutes to one week before the
event. By going through the “settings” link at the top
right of the screen, you can set up your mobile phone to receive
calendar notifications.
Q: I earn my living as a writer, and years of material I would love to
retrieve is on floppy disks down in my basement. The problem is, the
disks are 5.25-inch floppies. The only thing I can do, as far as I
know, is print every page and scan it into my computer. Can you help
me find an easier, quicker, high-tech fix? Everyone I have consulted
about this problem has been stumped, including some world-class geeks.
The issue, as I’m sure you and the geeks you enlisted know, is that
external 5.25-inch floppy drives don’t appear to exist nowadays. As a
quick reminder, we’re talking about the large disks with holes in the
middle that flopped when you shook them.
Even if you could find an external 5.25-inch drive, it’s far more
likely to have a serial connection than today’s more standard USB
port.
Mark your calendars for a day full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing: Reps from Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) :
As everyone has noted, the irony is that this time, the Microsoft guys
aren’t the ones under antitrust scrutiny.
with a BSD-style license. The code is extensive – in addition to all
the required bits to hook it up to Firefox, you’ll find dozens of
Javascript files involved. Fortunately, the source is reasonably well-
commented, so it’s at least clear what’s happening where, if not how
to move it forward to the current version of Firefox.
One way or another, releasing this code should ultimately satisfy
those users who have missed the project – either some enterprising
developer will bring things up to scratch for Firefox 3.0, or the best
ideas can be melded into Weave or other projects.
In any case, it’s good to see this particular project out in the open,
and as a Firefox user I’d love to see someone pick up the ball and run
with it.
© 2008 OStatic. Design by . Built on fine Open Source Software
from projects like , , , , and .
Hi, I found this user’s comment on CNET and thought you might be
interested in reading it. Send e-mail Cancel
Salesforce.com shows details about service responsiveness and
specifics about problems that do emerge. (Click image to see larger
version.)
Google, for example, offers a promising that Gmail, the online e-mail
component of its overall Google Apps service, will be available 99.9
percent of the time, with service credits extended to paying customers
if Gmail dips below that level.
“We don’t have an SLA yet for Google Calendar or Google Docs, but it’s
something we’re moving quickly toward,” said Rishi Chandra, product
manager for Google Apps. Google wants “to get the same level of
reliability for all of Apps,” he said.
Psychologically, it’s well-known in risk analysis circles that people
feel more comfortable with risk if they feel in control. Thus people
are often more comfortable driving a car on a congested freeway
compared with being flown somewhere in a commercial jet, regardless of
the relative safety of the two forms of transport.
“We’ve found working with our customers they want transparency. They
want to know exactly what’s going on all the time,” said Bruce
Francis, Salesforce.com’s vice president of corporate strategy. “If
there’s an issue, they’re not furious; they just want to know exactly
what’s going on.”
Risks of non-cloud computing, too Much ado can and should be made of
the risks of cloud computing, but it should be noted that even the
much more mature business of computing without a cloud has its risks.
Downtime, either with ailing or stolen PCs or with overtaxed or faulty
servers, is a serious problem there, too.
That might not be five nines, and it’s for Gmail only today, but
Google chooses to see the glass as half full.
“We talk to customers, and 99.9 percent is mostly much higher than
most organizations with their internal service today,” Chandra said.
A company called Sentinel, funded by the U.S. Defense Department, has
posted a that shows the viewer flying through 3D cityscapes with live
videos embedded in them.
The software, AVE Video Fusion, “combines Google Earth-like features
with live camera videos projected on a 3D model” the video caption
says. “This program is NOT Google Earth. It is written from scratch
using C++ and OpenGL.” It runs on PCs and requires no custom hardware.
Applications include wide-area surveillance systems such as those at
military bases, airports, railroad stations, borders, coastlines,
harbors, and power plants, .
More than 500 applications are already clustered in the App Store,
many of them tiny apps and widgets that have been custom-built to run
natively on the upgraded iPhone firmware. Most of these early entrants
are nearly identical to the iPhone-optimized versions previously
released by publishers to work with the iPhone Classic.
Amit Agarwal from blog today outlining how anyone can use the service
as a live blogging tool. The writing format, which has become an
increasingly popular way for bloggers to cover events as they’re
happening (mainly useful for things like Apple keynote speeches), but
also manages to work for smaller conferences and events, too.
By scrutinizing the traffic Google searches produce, Internet analysis
firm Hitwise in January . So what’s next?
That doesn’t mean that you can’t check if your favorite coffee
watering hole (or office) is going the way of $2 gas. According to The
Seattle Times, employees at stores that are facing closure have been
given some extra heads-up to either find new jobs or transfer
elsewhere.
Keep in mind that not all of the Starbucks locations listed are
definitely being shuttered. Most listings are based either on rumors
or speculation, since the first smattering of downed stores has not
yet been announced.
Google gives two reasons for its prohibition against manual
intervention. First is its belief that its own individual judgment is
never as good as the collective judgment of the Internet overall,
whose hyperlink structure forms part of the basis for Google ranking.
Second, fixing the algorithm rather than a specific result, if done
right, helps more than just one particular search. “Often a broken
query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our
ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only
improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and
often for all languages,” Singhal said.
Interestingly enough, of the three services offered in Google Docs,
only the word processor and presentation tool were truly down. If you
had a link to a spreadsheet you could apparently view and edit it just
fine.
The technology, , uses cryptography to verify the domain of the sender
of an e-mail. It allows e-mail providers to validate the domain from
which an e-mail originates, and it enables easier detection of
phishing attempts by helping identify abusive domains.
The DomainKeys technology is covered by a patent assigned to Yahoo.
The company released it under a dual-license scheme that allows the
companies to use it royalty-free under the GNU General Public License
(GPL 2.0), which enabled the Internet Engineering Task Force to
approve it as a proposed Internet standard.
Google Maps is starting to roll out a beta of walking directions in
addition to driving directions, on Monday.
It looks like it’s available to select users in select locations for
the time being, and indeed, I can’t access it from my Google account
yet. It’s also unclear whether this will get expanded to the mobile
version of Google Maps, where the availability of walking directions
would certainly help.
A clause in Google’s 2005 purchase agreement for the AOL stake gives
the Web search leader the right, but not the obligation, to force a
public offering of the shares or a repurchase at fair market value as
of July 1, 2008.
AOL and companies like News Corp’s MySpace have been driven to conduct
deal talks since Microsoft revealed its pursuit of Yahoo in February,
a takeover attempt that threatened to redraw the Internet landscape by
creating a more viable rival to Google.
The country’s new architecture exudes an aura that has as much to do
with intellectual ferment as economic clout.
David Pogue looks at the Eye-Fi memory card, which stamps photos with
the location where they were taken.
David Pogue talks about how to save your old photo prints, cassette
tapes and vinyl records from the dustbin o…
The google and yahoo google’s obfuscation
Viacom’s first line of defense when the negative press hit was
obfuscation. “Viacom has not asked for and will not be obtaining any
personally identifiable information of any YouTube user. The
personally identifiable information that YouTube collects from its
users will be stripped from the data before it is transferred to
Viacom.”
But not really. Everyone involved in the lawsuit (except the users,
who weren’t asked) agreed that a YouTube login ID isn’t personally
identifiable. The original Stanton order summarized: “Defendants do
not refute that the ?login ID is an anonymous pseudonym that users
create for themselves when they sign up with YouTube? which without
more ?cannot identify specific individuals?.”
Google’s self imposed is “Don’t be evil.” It doesn’t say “don’t be
evil unless there’s important litigation at stake.” Google’s
reputation is on the line, and how they respond will show their true
character. They’ve shown they’ll go to bat for employees, now it’s
time for them to show they’ll go to bat for their users.
Top legal counsel for Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft will address a
Congressional hearing Tuesday, as lawmakers examine the and its
potential anticompetitive effects on the future of Internet
advertising.
by July 12, 2008 1:19 AM PDT @JCPayne: Nonsense! AT&T/Bell South don’t
even come close to dominating 90% of the cell phone market ( In fact
Verizon alone has nearly as many phone users as AT&T/Bell South, and
we haven’t even mentioned T-Mobile, Sprint etc). By contrast,
Google/Yahoo will have 90% of the search market. Any pact that ends up
with 90% of any market power, concentrated in the hands of 2
companies, has to be stopped by the DOJ. I don?t care how ?non-
exclusive? the pact is. Who the heck else is Yahoo going to form a
pact with, outside this ?non-exclusive? pact with Google, given that
since Yang is barely on speaking terms with Microsoft, and outside
Microsoft , there is only another 1% or so search market left. Reply
to this comment by July 12, 2008 8:19 AM PDT Back@Kwasiowusu: For one
thing I wasn’t talking mobile phone service. I was talking the regular
old POTS system. (And fiberoptics system that it is rapidly becoming
instead.) The reason the national system was broken up into regional
units was to remove domination of the whole national telephone system.
Now, to allow Bellsouth and the former parts of SBC to merge together
(albeit changing their name to AT&T) that does very little to preserve
the competitive atmosphere in the United States when it comes to
telecoms and high speed Internet even…As far as Google-Yahoo
cooperation…. What monopoly??? They have a technology that every
other company and individual on the net has access to. **Pixels on a
website** is not proprietary. Anybody can come up with an onlinead
network …. You may have to be creative in getting sites to adopt
yours along with Google or Yahoo but none the less it can be done if
you’re smart enough.Clearly with all the resources Microsoft has–
they are admitting that they aren’t smart enough to put together an ad
network. Hence why they want to buy a ready-made one. (Yahoo’s)…..
So now we basically have Microsoft which launched a battle to take on
Google. They decided they would take Yahoo’s assets and try to
dominate Google, so Google went in cut a deal with Yahoo themselves
and Microsoft ends up as the odd-man out crying all those big
crocodile tears and wants to launch a big court case to win back their
plan of domination. BS I say… Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008
11:09 AM PDT Agreed w/ JCPayne. I strongly suspect that MSFT’s only
role in this is to act as a spoiler. Given that MSFT is mostly on the
defensive nowadays (when they should be busy trying to build core
products that are actually worth something), I suspect that they’ll
lose this one too. Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 3:13 PM PDT
If Ballmer gets to address the committee, the company will be doomed.
Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 4:21 PM PDT @JCPayne, It
doesn?t make any difference whether you were talking about POTS or
about wireless. An AT&T hookup with Bellsouth still doesn?t even come
close to controlling 90% of the phone market, POTS or wireless. As at
today, cable companies like Time Warner, offer full phone service , as
well as broadband internet, in direct competition with phone companies
like AT&T, not to mention, millions of Americans don?t even bother to
sign up for wired phones anymore, simply preferring to use their cell
phones for all their phone calls, saving themselves the extra expense
of paying for a wired phone they hardly use. The old POTS phone lines
are increasingly irrelevant. Revenues for both AT&T and Verizon, from
wired POTS lines have been going down sharply for years. You simply
can?t compare the dying POTS business to a Google/Yahoo pact that end
up putting control of 90% of the very fast growing internet search in
the hands of just 2 companies Reply to this comment
by July 12, 2008 4:31 PM PDT @JCPayne, this bit by you is even more
laughable 😕 As far as Google- Yahoo cooperation…. What monopoly???
They have a technology that every other company and individual on the
net has access to?.You clearly have no idea what a monopoly is. Anyone
can use Google/Yahoo search, so therefore its not a monopoly? Will you
excusing me while I laugh? Unless you are gonna tell me that Google
gives away the source code of their highly secret search algorithms to
anyone to use as they like, then you are simply blowing smoke.
Reply to this comment View reply Hide reply
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The “Explore More Google Products” button brings you to a
page that shows all of Google’s Apps on one screen. Touching one
of those App icons results in Safari launching and bringing to that
application.
Once you’ve logged into the MySpace application you are
presented with your own personalized home screen. You have immediate
access to your mood settings, profile, Friends Status and Mood,
Friends Updates, Comments, bulletins, and the ability to search for
other people. The interface feels a bit cramped on the iPhone’s
screen. Along the bottom you’ll find a row of five buttons that
immediately jump to home, mail, requests, friends, and photos.
AOL’s Radio App for the iPhone and iPod touch is a native
streaming application that is also location aware. Once you confirm
access to your location it reveals local radio stations that provide
streamed radio programming in your area. In the Houston Bay Area, the
app revealed four stations: 100.3 KILT, CNN 650 Radio News, HOT 95.7
and Sports Radio 610. Other locales like Atlanta, Baltimore,
Cleveland, Los Angeles, etc. are offered.
The Favorites button opens up a screen that will either display your
favorite streaming radio stations or individual songs you’ve
marked as favorites. Songs are added by touching the magnifying glass
next to the album art. You can find the song in iTunes or on AOL
Music. A “Remember This Song” feature allows you to add a
song to your favorites. Finally, there is a Recents button that does
exactly what it says – tracks your recent stations you listened to.
Yahoo also takes a portion of its press release to call out Icahn for
being contradictory. It quotes him as saying previously that Yahoo
selling its only search business to Microsoft would be
“crazy.” Now he is a major force in trying to make such a
deal happen.
This dispute is the reason the two companies and lawyers representing
a group of other copyright holders suing Google, have failed to reach
a final agreement on anonymizing personal information belonging to
YouTube users, according to two sources close to the situation.
YouTube’s employee information could prove crucial to Viacom’s case
against Google, as it could go a long way to proving how much
knowledge YouTube has about piracy on the site.
Critics dispute that and point out that records show the judge in the
case only ordered YouTube to hand over information asked for by
Viacom. As for the employee records, Google said Saturday that it
isn’t willing to talk about anything else until that matter of user
privacy is resolved.
“Viacom and other plaintiffs never should have demanded private
viewing data in the first place,” a Google spokesman said in an
e-mail. “They should have agreed a week ago to let us anonymize it. We
are willing to discuss the disclosure of viewing activity of all the
relevant parties. But the simple issue of protecting user information
should be resolved now. Our users’ privacy should not be held hostage
to advance the plaintiffs’ additional litigation interests.”
It’s safe to say that many copyright owners are skeptical of these
claims. For years, rumors have circulated in the technology sector
that some of YouTube employees salted the site, especially in its
early days, by posting clips from popular TV shows in order to bring
attention to the site. No evidence of this has ever surfaced.
) 11 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 12, 2008 12:11 PM PDT I did not
follow with detail this V-G affair but it seems to me that it is
following the SCO-IBM Unix affair in which SCO made a complain that
IBM should prove innocent… just the inverse of common law: you are
innocent up to the moment that you are proved guilty.Am I right? Am I
too far in understanding Viacom/RIAA/etc. lawyers? Reply to this
comment by July 12, 2008 1:54 PM PDT This kind of looks like “Viacom”
is scrabbling, a bit, to continue its, unfocused, IP-lawsuit (and
vicarious responsibility for the actions of others) claims.I also
notice that a totally unproven accusation (that Youtube employees,
allegedly, knowingly allowed, and/or encouraged, copyright-
infringement)… is actually being used to further justify an
apparently, otherwise, clearly dubious- attack.Can you say RED-
HERRING..? But, you know how corporations work… once they start down
a path, no matter how insanely-asinine, they will simply NEVER back-
down (even if… it ends-up tearing them apart, and costing their
stock-holders enormously). Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 2:54
PM PDT I’d like to see the reverse, that is, the uploading habits of
anyone from a Viacom IP, or using a Viacom (or viacom property domain,
such as comedycentral.com). Did anyone on The Daily Show, or any
staffer of those shows, or any other Viacom company, ever upload
something copyrighted to YouTube? Reply to this comment by July 12,
2008 5:11 PM PDT Relax. Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:49 PM
PDT Viacom just wants to destroy the progression and the future of the
internet because they have LOST to the internet. They are old media,
like newspapers, old like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop
the new wave, the new generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You
either roll with it or it rolls right over you. Have you looked at
Viacom’s stock price lately. That’s a reflection of where they’ll
continue to head which is down, down, down if they don’t get with the
NEW! Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:50 PM PDT Viacom just
wants to destroy the progression and the future of the internet
because they have LOST to the internet. They are old media, like
newspapers, old like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the
new wave, the new generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either
roll with it or it rolls right over you. Have you looked at Viacom’s
stock price lately. That’s a reflection of where they’ll continue to
head which is down, down, down if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply
to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:50 PM PDT Viacom just wants to
dessstroy the progression and the future of the internet because they
have LOST to the internet. They are old media, like newspapers, old
like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the new wave, the new
generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either roll with it or it
rolls right over you. Have you looked at Viacom’s stock price lately.
That’s a reflection of where they’ll continue to head which is down,
down, down if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply to this comment by
July 12, 2008 7:51 PM PDT Viacom just wants to dessstroy the
progression and the future of the internet because they have LOSSST to
the internet. They are old media, like newspapers, old like oldy moldy
Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the new wave, the new generation, Web
2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either roll with it or it rolls right over
you. Have you looked at Viacom’s stock price lately. That’s a
reflection of where they’ll continue to head which is down, down, down
if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply to this comment
by July 12, 2008 7:53 PM PDT Viacom will lose to the future of the
internet if they don’t get with the new.
Reply to this comment View reply Hide reply
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by July 12, 2008 11:30 PM PDT Chad and the team knew about SNL content
being on YouTube. It’s what made YouTube popular, showing copyrighted
clips from comedy shows off TV. The whole YouTube thing was based on
being an archive of video from all sources. Viacom, NBC Universal,
Disney, Sony, Fox and others should sue YouTube/Google for every
infraction. Basically YouTube is the Napster of video and should be
accountable for theft of copyrighted material. Reply to this comment
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Strangely, in the US, the nation that has created a whole new plane
for commerce, ads in movie theaters are still something of a surprise.
Even in the last couple of years, I have heard US movie audiences hiss
the very presence of ads, as if by clutching their popcorn and putting
their feet up on the seat in front, they have suddenly become a VIP
audience at the Cannes Film Festival.
Talk of pre-roll being their only choice reflects the fact that
perhaps 95% of all online video advertising is actually pre-roll.
Google, on the other hand, in the search for something a little more
clever, a little more Google, has slipped into cultural quicksand.
It will find it very hard to expect its devotees to watch an ad before
every video. (tmz offers a series of videos daily. You only have to
watch one ad. And the one I just looked at was for Herbal Essences,
which promised to treat my non-existent hair to a luscious fragrance.)
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Demand for public transit is on the rise and the has taken a step to
simplify the effort of getting from Point A to Point B.
Google Maps Transit, which is in use at 48 domestic bus systems and in
17 cities outside the United States, is easier to use than COTA’s trip
planning tool and is expected to help conquer a perennial hurdle to
building ridership – confusing routes, said COTA chief Bill Lhota.
“There is no question about it, the Google system is better,” he said.
“It’s got some great features and user-friendliness.”
If you are already a Business First subscriber please create or sign
into your bizjournals.com account to link your valid print
subscription and have access to the complete article.
The U.S. Small Business Administration armed Joey Johnson with the
money and motivation to step out and launch her graphic design
business. Johnson formed Graphic Mechanic Design Studio in October
2006, after running the company on the side for nearly a decade.
Various theories made their way around. A blogger named Dan at a site
called “tdaxp” noticed the strange phenomenon. “The swastika is a
traditional Chinese good-luck character, the Olympics are coming up
and good luck is on the Chinese mind.”
Meanwhile, there was the other, perhaps thornier issue of why the
swastika suddenly disappeared from Google’s Hot Trends list.
Generally, when a term is searched by enough people to shoot it to the
top spot, it takes hours for it to fade from the list. An initial
inquiry to Google on what might have happened to the swastika was met
with a cagey reply. Instead of saying why it vanished, Google
suggested its own theory of why it had appeared.
Enter 4chan, one of the Internet’s most trafficked “image boards”
— a place where members congregate to chat and swap photos and
images — many of them related to Japanese anime cartoons. One
particularly well-known section of 4chan is called “b” — a rowdy
back channel filled with obscene images and profanity-riddled
discussion.
At some point on Thursday, a member of 4chan’s “b” channel posted a
simple two-part instruction. First, Google “卐”. Second, enjoy.
Obviously, there is no character for the swastika on the standard
keyboard. But Internet browsers can display many, many characters
— the trick is knowing the short code (called html) that
represents each. In this case, the code a 4chan member posted was the
shorthand for the swastika. Once the code is processed by a browser,
it shows up as the symbol.
The flurry of searches for the swastika code — most of which, it
seems, were by people who did not know what the code represented
— shot the swastika itself to the top of the Trends list.
“We have an automated system to identify and remove inappropriate or
offensive material in Hot Trends,” it read. “In rare cases, when such
material is missed, we manually remove these results.
joc1985 writes “An after a few hours of playing around. It seems to be
a bad copy of Second Life. Somehow all the rooms are crowded, and porn
has made its way in there already”
Are you kidding me? Porn the ultimate mark of success. The fact that
Lively has it before it has even taken off properly makes it like an
uber stamp of approval. Yes yes.
Besides the fact that guy obviously isn’t a native English speaker,
“several” and “maybe a dozen” seem pretty in line to me. His point
seems to be that Google isn’t being as tight with it as they are with
YouTube, which is certainly true (although I’d suspect that’s a result
of pre-takeover YouTube policies being carried on by Google). It’s not
a matter of any concern to me, but its his opinion. And it’s not like
adding keyboard shortcuts would eliminate mouse usage, as you seem to
think.
I’ve wondered if there could be a market for “Christian porn” that
addresses all the issues they have with it.
Actually, calling it a beta is being generous. There are a lot of
interface quirks and bugs to work out, and the content (as far as
avatars, furniture, clothes, etc.) definitely feels more like a sample
of what will be available. Once they open it up to user created
content, I imagine there will be no shortage of “stuff”. FWIW, I
didn’t really have the connection problems the reviewer had. The whole
thing thing gets a little laggy in a crowded room, especially if the
room is full of junk, but I didn’t have any problems getting in. As
far as the sex themed rooms, they seemed pretty tame to me, at least
for now. (Uh, not that I checked them out or anything.) You’re limited
to streaming videos from YouTube, so you can’t show anything that
wouldn’t pass muster there. You can also display static images in a
“picture frame”, but the frames seems to be pretty broken at the
moment. They seem to only display a small portion of the image,
regardless of the resolution. So, at least for the moment, it’s pretty
much impossible to display anything pornographic. I imagine once they
open it up to user created content, though, it will become yet another
haven for furries.
I looked at this the other day and it seemed to claim to be a “Windows
only” service. My Windows system was busy at the time, so I didn’t
investigate further and it was unclear if they planned on supporting
other platforms in future. That’s a non-starter in my book.
It could be a good thing if it was an antimatter copy of Second Life,
which was then brought into contact with the original Second Life.
He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John
Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth”
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their
respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest ©
1997-2008 , Inc.
UPDATE: After spending some time with it I’m also frustrated with the
local search. Right now the local search only provides Search for “x”
near me in the results when the word matches common local search terms
in a whitelist. If I want to use the app to find a place by name, I
have to switch specifically to a Local search only search to get the
“near me” option—and ultimately that’s about two clicks too many
to make it as useful as it could be.
you in the US, Jono? I tried to see that google mobile thingie from
the swiss app store, but not to be found there, so I switched over to
the US store, and presto, there it was
@: not sure if my first msg went thru, jono, are you located in the
US? if not, well, that’s the culprit, didnt see google mobile in the
swiss app store myself, then switched over to the US store, and
presto, there it was
, Jul 11, 2008 07:24 PM
On Thursday evening, Google threw open the doors of its San Francisco
office to members of the media and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
Though Google’s San Francisco office has been , the dust has cleared
and Google wanted to celebrate.
The view — looking east toward Treasure Island, the surrounding water
and the Bay Bridge — is to die for.
But don’t look up: The FBI and the Secret Service, in the form of the
, maintain a regional office in the Hills Plaza building on the floor
above Google.
Having set up his answer, Newsom then posed a question: “What makes
Google so much better than its competitors?”
Of course, Google’s brand and business model both count for a lot,
too, nowadays. But the praising people always goes over well when
addressing those very same people.
I mean, how much applause do you think Newsom would have received had
he said its all about patents, servers, lack of competent competitors,
and consumer inertia?
According to Google’s official blog, Gmail users will no longer have
to worry about fake messages pretending to be from PayPal or eBay.
Google displays a message to its Gmail users above the email warning
that the message may not be from the sender that it claims. However,
if the message sender claims to be eBay or PayPal, will now
automatically check to see if the message has a DomainKey signature.
If the message doesn’t, the message will just disappear, leaving users
with a clean Inbox and the security of knowing that the ones that did
make it through really are from eBay and PayPal.
It’s about time, though. eBay (which owns PayPal) announced plans for
adopting DKIM in October 2007. Making an announcment and actually
implementing on every single one of its servers is not the same thing,
though, and until there was some assurance that eBay really was using
DKIM, there was no way to accurately and thoroughly figure out what
was fake eBay and what was real. Thanks to this agreement with Google,
other ISPs also scanning DKIM now have a way to get rid of all the
fake eBay and PayPal messages. If only more major companies would do
it from their end. It would be nice to see those Bank of America
messages disappear from my inbox.
Copyright © 2008 Silicon Alley Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our .
Internet giant Google yesterday defended plans to photograph millions
of British homes and publish the snapshots online.
Google has confirmed it is now in the process of photographing Britain
as part of the Street View project.
Windows Server Catalog: Certified Servers. Search the Windows Server
2008 catalog to find servers you can deploy with confidence.
For most organizations Extensible Markup Language, or XML (), is the
lingua franca for data interchange. Apparently XML alone isn’t fast
enough for Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), so Google went off and developed its
own data format, called Protocol Buffers.
Currently Google is using Protocol Buffers for its internal Remote
Procedure Calls, or RPC(), protocols and file formats.
, Google’s program manager for open source, noted Google encodes
almost any sort of structured information that needs to be passed
across the network or stored on disk using this protocol.
As to why after years of in-house development Google is now making
Protocol Buffers open source, Varda said it’s just a question of time.
“We have wanted to release protocol buffers for a long time,” he said.
“The only limitation was finding enough engineering time to get it
done.”
The potential for Protocol Buffers could well be large. Google is not
currently using Protocol Buffers as a replacement for XML-based Web
services — at least not yet. In response to a question from
InternetNews.com about whether Protocol Buffers could be leveraged to
create some kind of smaller, faster Web services/SOA alternative,
Google developer Varda noted, “That sounds like a possibility, but we
have no firm plans at this time.”
“We welcome participation from the open source community,” Varda
commented. “Managing broad participation in development of such a
critical piece of Google’s infrastructure will be tricky, but we’re
going to try.”
Cloud computing, in which software runs not on PCs or company servers
but instead on computers on the Internet, requires something of a leap
of faith both technologically and culturally. Those making the move
must get accustomed to a reliance on somebody else’s computing
infrastructure, and that can be scary.
Google, for example, offers a promising that Gmail, the online e-mail
component of its overall Google Apps service, will be available 99.9
percent of the time, with service credits extended to paying customers
if Gmail dips below that level.
“We don’t have an SLA yet for Google Calendar or Google Docs, but it’s
something we’re moving quickly toward,” said Rishi Chandra, product
manager for Google Apps. Google wants “to get the same level of
reliability for all of Apps,” he said.
There are two broad categories of cloud computing. First are online
applications such as Google’s Apps, on which customers can run their
own applications.
Companies are working to address this side of the equation, too. One
prime example is the site, which shows the response time for a
Salesforce.com server transaction. It also details when problems
happened, what they affected, and what caused them.
“We’ve found working with our customers they want transparency. They
want to know exactly what’s going on all the time,” said Bruce
Francis, Salesforce.com’s vice president of corporate strategy. “If
there’s an issue, they’re not furious; they just want to know exactly
what’s going on.”
Amazon.com, too, offers a . “A service dashboard is something our
developers asked us for, and we made the service available to them as
soon as possible,” said spokeswoman Kay Kinton.
“Own your own risk” And some others are even trying to make a business
out of reducing the uncertainties of cloud computing. One is open-
source monitoring and management software company . The company is
working hard to extend its monitoring service to other sites, too,
including Google App Engine, said Stacey Schneider, senior director of
marketing.
“With the docs outage, we posted immediately in the administrative
console that there was an issue. We posted to the help center and the
phone line system that we were working quickly to resolve it,” Chandra
said.
Risks of non-cloud computing, too Much ado can and should be made of
the risks of cloud computing, but it should be noted that even the
much more mature business of computing without a cloud has its risks.
Downtime, either with ailing or stolen PCs or with overtaxed or faulty
servers, is a serious problem there, too.
) 8 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 11, 2008 1:01 PM PDT If could
computing can be standardized. I believe it will be a great benefit to
Business operating online. Could computing is probably less risky than
managing your own hardware. Especially, if you don’t have resources to
manage large servers and configurations. Google has the talent the
scale like few others do. Reply to this comment by July 11, 2008 1:47
PM PDT It will depend who’s going to own the data and what right the
provider when go out of business be forced to hand over data. Reply to
this comment
by July 11, 2008 3:31 PM PDT What’s the point of having a PERSONAL
computer when you are 100% reliant on a server? Haven’t we gone a full
circle now and arrived right back at the mainframe model that we SO
badly wanted to get away from? Let’s just bring all of the VAX’s out
of retirement and say that the last 15 years were a waste of effort!
Reply to this comment View reply Hide reply
Processing
In watching a Webcast of the iPhone introduction I heard Steve Jobs
mention the “cloud” when talking about the new Mobile Me service Apple
is rolling out. When he says the data is pushed from the cloud what
exactly does that mean?
The term cloud computing started when network architects started
drawing diagrams for their presentations. The architects had symbols
for computers and servers and hard drives and switches, but they
didn’t have a universal symbol that represented “the Internet.”
It became common to talk of pushing data “into the cloud” to represent
using the internet to send files to and from servers and Web sites.
Users of Google’s Google Docs service are really using the cloud. Not
only are the files stored on Google’s servers, the applications
themselves are stored there.
The big exception is the U.S., which buys vastly more stuff than it
sells, and has done so for decades.
Why does this matter? Well, in order to buy those shirts, you need
money. And if you are buying more shirts than you’re selling shirts,
you’re losing money. If you’re a business, you won’t be in business
much longer.
Well, because the U.S. has been buying a lot of stuff from China for
many, many years, China holds a lot of U.S. dollars. If China were to
sell those dollars on the market at some point, well, it wouldn’t be
very good. The U.S. dollar’s value would fall — making imports and
traveling abroad much more expensive.
Trade deficits are usually a good thing, because it shows that the
global economy is working. It’s just when a trade imbalance gets too
high where economists and investors start to become concerned.
LAS VEGAS, July 11, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/
—-Columbus Geographic Systems (GIS) Ltd. (“Columbus”) (Pink Sheets:
CGSE) today announced it has reached an important understanding with
DigitalGlobe, world leader in high-resolution commercial imagery.
DigitalGlobe also supplies the popular Google Earth website with its
images. According to the understanding, Columbus will have access to
DigitalGlobe’s digital image bank for use in the Ranger navigation
system.
Dutton Associates Announces Investment Opinion: General Steel Holdings
Strong Speculative Buy In Update Coverage By Dutton Associates
The internet giant’s StreetView website will allow anyone in the world
to type in a UK address or postcode and instantly see a 360-degree
picture of the street.
It will include close-ups of buildings, cars and people. Critics say
the site is a ‘burglar’s charter’ that makes it easy for criminals to
check out potential victims.
However, the paper’s influence and its spittle-spewing rage are new
additions to the mix – and there’s an extra political angle, too.
I’d trust Google more than most governments, particularly ours and the
US, anyway – which in itself is very worrying. I have big issues with
our surveillance society, but as you say this is a snapshot and not
rolling film like the 300+ CCTV cameras that supposedly capture us
each day. I love using the US one to show people around where I used
to live so although it goes against some of my issues with privacy I
have to admit that I’ve been looking forward to this announcement and
can’t wait to use it.
It’s thoroughly legal for anyone to take photos of anything or anybody
in the street. Lots of Community Support Police Officers might think
otherwise, but it is. Likewise, anybody can put a CCTV camera on the
front of their building and video what they like. So it’s a quid pro
quo.
Also it isn’t perfectly legal to set a camera up on your house and
film anything. If you camera looks onto anothers property you would be
breaching privacy rules and even filming past your own borders and
into the public space could be challenged.
As for the whole Streetview thing – it’s the same thing as Public
Space CCTV as far as I’m concerned. By being in the Public Space you
expect to be seen. Does it really matter if it’s by the bloke selling
The Big Issue or a bored office worker in Arizona?
But the reality is that I can point my camera into the public space in
front of my building and record it to my heart’s content. And I don’t
suppose that there’s anything to stop me putting it online or sending
it in to one of those “People do the funniest things..” type shows.
‘By being in the Public Space you expect to be seen. Does it really
matter if it’s by the bloke selling The Big Issue or a bored office
worker in Arizona?’ Surely one difference is that you expect to be
able to see the people who can see you, or who are photographing you?
Part of the fear surrounding privacy debates – leaving aside actual
losses like identity theft or someone getting your bank details – is
that you just don’t know who’s accessing your details.
But seriously – I agree in part as I am as concerned with how our data
is circulated. That said I have far more fear of the private sector
than the public.
Slander is when you make a wrongful comment about an individual,
defamation is when you make one about a company or organisation, I
believe. Although that might be wrong!
For some time the facility known as Google Earth has allowed us to
call up our own address – or anyone else’s address, for that matter –
and to home in on a photograph of our – or their – house.
Now the facility has been brought down to street level, and at the
press of a key on your computer, you will be able to summon up the
image of any street. An arrow on the picture will direct you to your
own door – or indeed to anyone else’s door
Aren’t invasions of personal privacy by commercial companies every bit
as indefensible as similar intrusions into our lives by a Big Brother
state?
However much you feel ‘got at’ by advertisements, at least the
shopkeeper is not literally tugging your elbow.
Other companies, wishing to peddle their wares, can learn from these
Google profiles your tastes and likely areas of purchase.
His arguments are based on what he perceives to be the dangers of the
State keeping ever more watchful-tabs upon us. His fears ranged from
the potentially very serious – the holding of suspects without trial
for 42 days – to the comparatively trivial – local councils spying on
what rubbish we put into our wheely bins.
And most of us would think that some element of discreet intrusion by
the State was legitimate.
The matter of Google is of a quite different order. This is a computer
company which is spying upon us for the sole purpose of exploiting us,
controlling us and making money out of us.
Identity theft is one of the growing crimes of our age. A clever
manipulator of computers can reconstruct from a single electricity
bill, or one credit card, a huge raft of information about us,
including our bank account numbers and even our medical records. Such
thefts are rightly regarded as crimes.
. Schilit, Yang, and McDonald propose something called activity
monitoring, in which a smart home would watch your movements, helping
with such mundane tasks as reminding you to take medication that you
missed, or feed the cat. That’s a level of making life easy that I
just don’t want Google to be involved in.
The researchers’ proposal includes mining activity data to make
suggestions for activities, from what to watch on television to
finding your favorite songs on your MP3 player and playing them in the
room with the best acoustics. At the point at which Google is
proposing the idea of thinking for people as well as mining their
data, it might be time to worry about more than whether a link to the
company’s privacy policy is on its front page.
Google is already thinking of easing the commutes within the office. A
slide is planned that will whisk workers between floors, in what is
perhaps the ultimate throwback to the Internet bubble years.
So, it’s only natural that Google should eventually open an office
here, the mayor and proclaimed Thursday night in officially welcoming
to his city the company with the “don’t be evil” slogan.
After all, nearly every other mayor in the country boasts a Google
office, Newsom joked. And Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey
Brin are the .
Gavin Newsom is a fruitcake and an embarrassment to America, as is San
Francisco. Google should be ashamed of itself to ally itself with a
guy like this.
Michelle Quinn covers computers and digital music. She has chronicled
the digital revolution since 1993, when she wrote for the first issue
of Wired magazine about how computers were changing Hollywood special
effects. She covered Netscape’s 1995 public offering for the San
Francisco Chronicle and rode the roller coaster of the dot-com boom
and bust for the San Jose Mercury News. In the evenings, the Delaware
native can be found at home watching TV shows and movies on her
laptop, with another nearby to surf the Web. michelle.quinn @
latimes.com
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Yahoo Inc. has rejected Microsoft’s latest
attempt to buy its online search operations in a “take or leave it”
proposal that Yahoo said would have dismantled its Internet franchise.
Without providing many specifics, Yahoo said Microsoft renewed an
earlier bid to buy the company’s search engine and proposed turning
over the remaining pieces to a board controlled by Icahn.
“It is ludicrous to think that our board could accept such a
proposal,” Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock said in the statement. “While
this type of erratic and unpredictable behavior is consistent with
what we have come to expect from Microsoft, we will not be bludgeoned
into a transaction that is not in the best interests of our
stockholders.”
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment late
Saturday. Efforts to reach Icahn were unsuccessful.
Yahoo said it unsuccessfully reiterated its willingness to sell the
entire company to Microsoft for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share
— a bid that the software maker dangled in early May before
withdrawing it in a pique over Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang’s
demand for $37 per share.
The breakdown of those takeover negotiations infuriated many Yahoo
shareholders who fear the company’s stock price would plunge back
below $20 — a threshold reached just before Microsoft made its
initial bid in early January. Yahoo shares finished Friday at $23.57.
Yahoo’s squandered opportunity to sell to Microsoft in May prompted
Icahn to lead a rebellion aimed at removing Yahoo’s entire board so he
could fire Yang and try to revive sales talks with Microsoft.
Since it dropped its bid to buy all of Yahoo, Microsoft had focused
its overtures on Yahoo’s search engine — the second most used
on the Internet behind Google Inc.’s.
As Google has become more successful, both Yahoo and Microsoft have
been regressing, a dynamic that many analysts believe make it
imperative for the two companies to put aside their differences and
combine forces.
Google has quietly ventured into the virtual worlds space with a web-
based 3D chat application called Lively. Does it matter?
Lively will allow online conversations to become realistic as users
‘sit down’ with one another in a virtual environment
The second unique advantage is Google Earth. This is already an
amazing creation, a mirror world of incredible richness available free
on most PCs. You can already see the planet from space, dive down to
the street level and see incredible detail in 360-degree panoramas.
You can already build your own 3D buildings and add them to Google
Earth, and Google continues to add more content to this remarkable
piece of software.
Solid-state notebooks use electronic memory rather than a disk drive,
making them lighter and faster to start up
While the iPhone’s Safari browser is no doubt a powerful tool, native
applications would be better. Just about every photo-sharing site out
there has a new application for the iPhone, including Flickr and
PhotoBucket. Google’s Picasa? Nowhere to be found.
Of course, there are the browser-based versions of Gmail, Calendar,
Docs, Talk, News, Notebook, and iGoogle. Don’t get me wrong, these are
all usable and work fine … in the browser. I get that Google is all
about the cloud, but having native clients to make accessing some of
these services faster or better would be great.
Blogger and Picasa are probably the two that make the most sense to
have available in a standalone form. But what I was really hoping for
was an application that lets you compose Google Documents on the
iPhone and then sync them with Google’s Docs online. Now that would
have been a very useful app indeed.
Tomorrow’s CIO: Do you have what it takes? Find out at the 2008
InformationWeek 500 Conference Sept. 14-16, St. Regis Resort, Monarch
Beach, Calif.
I can see Lively being implemented into Android, Apple and other
mobile platforms before too long. Why send a boring old text message
to someone, when you can chat them up on the roof of a high-rise or in
the middle of the jungle? Bring a handful of your friends in and
spend time debating the latest episode of The Hills or whatever kids
are watching these days. It would be easy to open the program or point
your browser to the chat rooms and talk away.
Andy on :
I suppose Lively does have potential, but definitely needs a lot of
work to be the sort of app I’d like it to be. The biggest
problem with it, currently, is all the sexually oriented rooms that
are popping up all over the place, when this is a service meant for
those as young as 13. Either Google needs to do a better job with
blocking, or removing unsuitable content or they need to separate them
out (i.e. have 13 & older rooms and 18 & older rooms that are in a
separate location). For now I’m staying away until they have
some sort of legitimate solution figured out.
In addition to updating the popular Twitter and facebook service, it
can also tie in to your Google calendar and import from TripIt and
Doplr… cool. The tie in to Google Calendar is very powerful and
something that users are going love! See video demo below (source:
http://vimeo.com/1313233) – I can’t wait for a mobile client!
Learn to address security risks in wireless handheld computing systems
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– Users from more than 120 countries come to learn new skills, share
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4–8, 2008, in San Diego, California.
– September 9-12, 2008, Moscone West, San Francisco, CA – Wireless
Data… it’s how you use it.
Google has released as open source a web application assessment tool,
Ratproxy, that was designed to root out potential security flaws.
The proxy works passively by analysing existing, user-initiated
traffic, and is particularly tuned for complex Web 2.0 environments,
Zalewski said in a blog post.
“We decided to make this tool freely available as open source because
we feel it will be a valuable contribution to the information security
community, helping advance the community’s understanding of security
challenges associated with contemporary web technologies,” Zalewski
wrote. He added that Ratproxy is intended to complement active
crawlers and manual proxies, as well as other passive proxies.
What was achieved there is recognised to be of fundamental importance
to both winning the war (Churchill visited to say ‘thank you’ to them)
and the development of the computer. Maybe Bill Gates doesn’t want to
support this museum because it underlines where electronic computing
started i.e. here, not the U.S.
He said: “It may mean burglars get a bit fatter because they can
sit at home and scope out people’s houses rather than have to go
walking up and down the street.
“Obviously, it’s not going to make it harder for someone
planning a burglary to have access to this.”
A spokeswoman said: “Google works hard to make sure our products
respect both users’ expectations of privacy, and local privacy laws,
in each country in which they are launched.”
Campaigners fighting plans to build four 335-ft high wind turbines at
Carsington Pasture have criticised claims that they would not affect
local views ,
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Your pages should have a clear hierarchy and relevant internal links.
We also recommend creating a Sitemap and using Google’s
Webmaster Tools. These tools are useful, user-friendly and will
provide information such as where your backlinks come from or which
queries visitors used to reach your site.
We have an automated system to identify and remove inappropriate or
offensive material in Hot Trends. In rare cases, when such material is
missed, we manually remove these results from our Hot Trends list. We
apologize to any users who were offended by this situation.
On a separate note: Google also clarified that “we were just
speculating” in an earlier statement about the origin of the search.
(That statement said, “In this case, it appears that the html code for
this query was posted on a popular internet bulletin board, which led
to quite a few people searching to find out more about this symbol.”)
It’s truly pathetic that David Sarno believes that the question of
whether or not a swastika is offensive is “debatable”. Despite the
ancient origins of the symbol, most folks today don’t recognize it as
a symbol of Hinduism — its primary meaning has been its association
with the murderous racism of the Nazis. When Sarno brightly refers to
the swastika as a symbol with a “multifacted history”, you’d think he
was referring to the peace sign.
And yes, David, please update us in your keen investigation into those
nefarious Israeli Google employees and their insistence on considering
the swastika offensive. I’m sure you’d happily wear it on your
t-shirt, but most people have a slightly less ambivalent view of
symbolized evil.
“Svasti” is a Hindu (Sanskrit) word that translates as “well being.”
The svastika (swastika) was a sacred symbol to Hindus and Buddhists
alike, and one can find temples and homes adorned with it throughout
South Asia. Sadly, when Hitler appropriated the swastika as the symbol
of his National Socialist (Nazi) Party in the early 1930’s, it came to
represent evil and genocide. Thus, modern Western civilization abhors
it. When a Buddhist temple in LA decorated its fences with wrought
iron swastikas, many people became offended, because average Joe
America is simply not ready for a return to the original, peaceful
meaning of svasti (the memories of WWII and Bergen-Belsen are still
too fresh). The monks wisely decided to remove the symbols rather than
attempt to explain the sacred meaning to the clamoring crowds.
Ironically, the local Jewish community, well aware of the many
meanings of the swastika, came to the defense of the temple, declaring
that they had the right to display the swastika in its context as a
symbol of goodness.
The Hindu ( and American Indian, etc.) swastika runs counter-clockwise
– facing the left. The swastika adopted by the Nazis faced to the
right. In addition, the swastika has been used as a graphic
representation of positive energy by numerous cultures for centuries.
I’m sure there are now links here, via Google or elsewhere that make
this info redundant, and I don’t mean for my input to be condescending
or insensitive, but since I remember a few things from high school I
leave the research to the bleeding hearts. Swastikas for Dummies,
anyone?
Gosh Adina, are you serious? You might as well just say “white people
are all honkies”. You know, because some of them are, therefore they
all are. The symbol known as a “swastika” has a deeper history that
what you seem capable of recognizing. Its a bunch of lines in a
pattern. It wasn’t just a part of Hindi culture and German oppression.
Heck, it was even represented in some Native America tribes. But that
doesn’t mean folks have to “wear it on their t-shirt” to acknowledge a
simple fact – symbols can be easily distorted by groups of people.
Regardless…they are still symbols, meaningless to many as their the
cultural significance isn’t readily translatable. But they are still
symbols, and have different meanings.
Sounds more like one of those viral emails going about that promise
good luck if you send it on to your ten closest friends within the
next five seconds. Maybe it triggers a Google search by having the
recipients click on a link. Have you checked out the serps when you
google for whatever the html code is?
Thank god. Now that that’s out of my system I see I am not alone after
reading others’ opinions on Adina’s comment.
I suppose this means the “most folks” who live in Europe or the US? Oh
wait, surely those millions who live in India and other parts of Asia
don’t count! What if they don’t see it as a hateful symbol? What if it
means something completely different to them? Oh of course, that
doesn’t matter, does it! This Eurocentric world view makes me sick.
Obviously, this symbol became popular in the early 20th century as a
symbol of good luck (often pre WWI air forces would use the symbol for
just that, ie Finland). Then it was high-jacked by the NSDAP for their
international symbol and evil, horrendous crimes against humanity
ensued across Europe under fascism.
If the sight of the swastika does offend you, then I may suggest no
traveling Asia east of Pakistan, because you can’t miss it. I think
the most blatant clashing of East and West, in regards to the
swastika, I’ve encountered was in Kochi in the Jewish Quarter, where a
simple spice shop, owned by Indian Jews is named ‘Swastik Spices’. And
the swastika is proudly displayed on their sign, windows, business
card and labels, right facing. i would gladly post the picture from
that establishment, if I could here.
The Hindu swastika runs counter-clockwise – facing the left. The
swastika adopted by the Nazis faced to the right.
Sounds like this is a lose-lose situation for Google. They shouldn’t
have taken it down. Since they issued a statement anyway, they should
have just explained the many OTHER different (and usually positive)
meanings of the symbol.
This week, Google jumped into the battle against Bell Canada’s anti-
BitTorrent practices, this time through the country’s equivalent of
the FCC, and on different legal grounds than privacy advocates.
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reason. Please keep your responses appropriate and on topic. Foul
language and personal attacks will not be tolerated.
It’s about time that a more powerful company steps in to help out with
this fight. BT Throttling is just BS and we all know it. DPI is also
something that shouldn’t be implemented. The number of ways an ISP can
manipulate this technology is too overwhelming.
In 1999, the Internet was largely e-mail and alpha-numeric services.
It was not a world where our telecom, cable and satellite companies
controlled more than 70 per cent of Canada’s Internet service provider
traffic. Moreover, it was not a world with TV distributed by Internet
protocol technology. So the Internet is already being “regulated” – by
boardrooms – except when giants such as Google draw attention.
Since 1999, more than half of Canadians have downloaded video from the
Web, and about a quarter of Canadians do so at least once a week. So
the CRTC’s “broad investigation into the way Canadian ISPs manage the
flow of traffic” is extremely timely. Better to have some Internet
oversight urging Canadian content on the Web. The alternative is to
have our telephone, cable and satellite bills subsidizing commercial
appetites that hope to bypass the Canadian system altogether.
Google Inc. says Bell Canada and other telecommunications companies
that slow or restrict certain types of Internet traffic are violating
Canadian law and is calling on federal watchdogs to put a stop to the
process.
“Protecting end user choice is the central issue in this proceeding,
but also a much larger issue. It goes to the heart of the Internet and
how it acts as an extraordinary platform for innovation and fair
competition.”
Bell Canada – a division of Montreal-based BCE Inc. – has faced harsh
criticism from CAIP and other proponents of “net neutrality” over its
policies regarding the flow of content on its network. CAIP is
alleging that Bell is illegally managing their subscribers’ traffic.
Net neutrality supporters argue that all Web traffic must be treated
equally and that slowing down any data is both undemocratic and should
be illegal.
Last month, however, the head of the commission said a broad
investigation into the way Canadian ISPs manage the flow of traffic on
their networks is likely.
“The CAIP complaint is really only the tip of the iceberg,” CRTC
chairman Konrad von Finckenstein told a telecom conference last month.
He logged onto LinkedIn, a 5-year-old professional networking site,
and cast out a call for help to his stable of online colleagues.
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The U.S. Small Business Administration armed Joey Johnson with the
money and motivation to step out and launch her graphic design
business. Johnson formed Graphic Mechanic Design Studio in October
2006, after running the company on the side for nearly a decade.
, ,
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769 comments
, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing
Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on
YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday. Although Google argued that turning
over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the .
and why not keeping them in a country where privacy still means
something, so that no US judge can touch them.
That didn’t mean much to one European BitTorrent tracker site who was
ordered by U.S. judges to turn over all access logs where the site
didn’t even keep logs to start with. The judge said in his infinite
wisdom that because the data existed in RAM at some instant that the
logs were required to be created and then turned over.
While I respect the USA law within the USA, I despise when judges
attempt, often with too much success, to enforce it outside of the
USA. And not just data laws. We enforce US sex laws in other countries
to criminalize behavior completely legal there. This Is Wrong!
And for google to “request all the records” from their separate
company formed to hold the records would be an operation requiring
special permission, extensive justification, and full disclosure,
regarding reasons for the request, which the board of the other
company would have to vote on (after researching to guarantee that
Google is not possibly under any kind of duress in making the request,
to release information).
The US-based Google would have half the information; the foreign “data
storage” company would have the other half — and no individual
record could be obtained without bitwise XOR’ing all pieces together.
If they really wanted to, they could still manage this.. encrypt the
logs with your youtube account password, and then then using the
Ajax/Zero Knowlege App ideas that we had an article about the other
day (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/30/1416238), ensure
that decryption of that data in done at the user end…
To cover themselves legally. The issue of whether YouTube and other
similar sites are responsible for the gazillion copyright violations
that occur there is legally still up in the air. This Viacom lawsuit
should hopefully clear it up but until then Google’s position is that
they are doing everything they can to prevent copyrighted materials
from being posted. Keeping the logs helps them keep up that pretense –
they can cooperate if need be and identify the violators etc. They
have no legal requirement to g
Chances are that Google themselves has never had to follow-up on an IP
address to identify a user for anyone except the Chinese government
and/or the NSA, neither of which are our friends. The first poster who
asks why they keep this at all, let alone weren’t anonymizing it long
ago has it right. This is hardly the first time Google has had to turn
over access records so they certainly know that it can and will
happen.
I would also like to know how the judge has completely ignored the
[privacilla.org]? If it’s on the Internet suddenly all privacy concern
automatically goes away, even if you’re engaged as a customer of a
company with a published privacy policy offering you many protections?
As for Google, their lawyers should have IMMEDIATELY said to the judge
“Our client cannot do that, on privacy grounds. Google’s duty to
protect the privacy of millions cannot be dismissed by a legal
ruling.” Judges are not omnipotent, even when some of them think they
are.
But the problem isn’t Google, it’s us. We keep using Google, though we
knew about the risks and problems. The day a company risks significant
revenue over privacy, is the day they will pay attention to it.
Why do I feel like I’m the only person that takes “don’t be evil” with
a grain of salt. Google has been a great corporation because they
understood people on the Internet and how they wanted to be treated.
But, they also use that knowledge when they calculate how far they can
push the envelope. “Don’t be evil” has translated into webmail
accounts with massive amounts of space, web ads that’s don’t flash or
pop-up, and a search engine who’s front page maintains the very bland
basic HTML feel. Now people dream of Google being the great fixer in
any industry that has annoyed them over the years.
It is a mistake to think you can anonymize this data. Sure, you could
strip everything out of the data, but then you would just have public
information, since youtube will tell you how many views each video has
already. So I presume the people who want to “anonymize” think they
will, like the AOL logs, give pseudonyms to people.
I can think of many problems. For example, there are tons of videos on
youtube that are never accessed except by the uploader and a few
friends. Pretty easy to identify who the likely uploader is from the
records, and thus identify a user. Or even if you never upload, a lot
can be learned. For example, somebody looking for my records could
first see what youtube videos have me in them. Most people have
probably searched for their own name, and as such this is a clue as to
which user is probably me.
Of course, I’ve never posted, so maybe that’s why.
I guess my IP address does ID “me”, however. My DSL address changes a
lot, but I assume the telco keeps those records… too.
My cable IP address doesn’t change often, I had one IP address for
almost 10 years without changing… just when I did a router upgrade
it switched.
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There probably aren’t many people who have made money betting against
Google; the company repeatedly tops Wall Street expectations and
generally knocks the socks off investors. What’s not to love?
But as an economic downturn looms, deteriorating ad spending will
likely cramp Google’s style — if it hasn’t already. While Wall Street
largely anticipates a dandy second-quarter — the — we suspect the
economy has finally caught up with the search monstrosity.
The aborted hotel deal doesn’t represent the full extent of Google’s
penny-pinching, either — the company recently closed a
Or maybe it’s positively a sign that the company is finally getting
pinched by an economic slowdown.
The event will take place from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Google
headquarters, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View.
This is a “big piece of chicken” question…but what are those
children holding? I think I see legs and fur… but beyond that I
can’t identify the mystery meat. I can only assume, at such a food
event, that the “petting zoo” comes with a very realistic ending?
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PITY Bombay’s poor billionaires. No sooner have they invested in
an executive jet than the taxman comes knocking for his share.
Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, found himself in a
humiliating situation when customs officers impounded two executive
jets belonging to his Reliance Industries, claiming he had failed to
pay an estimated £12m in tax on them.
We expect it will be quite empty if the taxman continues to do his job
with such vigour.
I DON’T wish to spoil Michael Grade’s Sunday, but imagine
how different his job would be if ITV owned Google.
And, who knows, he might even be in sunny California right now playing
with a new Google toy rather than fretting about the next instalment
of Dancing on Ice.
A clever banker pitched the idea but Green didn’t much care for
the plan and instead opted to buy a 25% stake in Ask Jeeves —
Google’s punier rival.
The $2 trillion industry put in its worst performance during the first
half of the year since most credible records began
In February, Austin cyclist Peter Smith launched a website, to promote
a petition requesting that Google allow users to search for safe
bicycle routes along with driving routes.
Others have tried to create Google Maps mashups that offer bicycle
directions. The site offers bike directions for Portland, Ore., and
Milwaukee.
People who walk places rather than drive tend to be more active,
right? Well why don’t those over-active people who don’t
like to drive to the end of their driveway to get the morning paper
walk down to a gas station and use the money that they saved by
walking on a map. Then they’ll be able to put that map in their
fanny-pack, walk out of the gas station, walk their over-active bodies
home and flip through the map and figure out a route on their own?!
If you’re going to bike somewhere, you’d imagine that it
wouldn’t be much more than 40 kms (24.85 miles or a little over
an hour bike ride) away, right? Cause any more than that and
you’ll have a 3+ hour bike ride there and back. So why
wouldn’t you know how to get to a destination on your bike
that’s only an hour bike ride away? Get a life.
A future of poisoned oceans, withered crops, and irate polar bears is
nobody’s idea of a good time. It’s clear to anyone who is paying
attention that our civilization is due for an upgrade. Bright Green
covers the news, ideas, opinions, and trends littering the road to an
environmentally sustainable future.
Andrew Brown, founder and CEO of New Amsterdam Project, a Cambridge
company that hauls cargo via industrial tricycles.
Several large agencies in California have signed up with Google,
including OCTA in Orange County, the largest transit agencies in the
Bay Area including BART and Caltrain and the MTS in San Diego. The
Burbank bus system is also featured on Google Transit.
Metro has been talking with Google for months and the blog even
reported in April that Google Transit was imminent. Well, not so fast.
“We’re still talking to them,” Marc Littman, a Metro spokesman, told
me yesterday afternoon. “There is no contract.”
Two sources, speaking on background, said there are several issues
that need to be resolved. One is boring and involves data formatting.
The other is not and involves whether Google intends to make money
from advertising placed on the maps. Like all transit agencies, Metro
is cash-strapped and looking for new revenue and apparently doesn’t
want to give proprietary information to a firm that may profit.
As for Google Transit, I spent some time playing around with it
yesterday and came away mostly impressed. It’s quick — quicker than
the Metro trip planner. And to have all that information housed on one
website is pretty convenient.
And that means what exactly? Catch a bus at the Metrolink station
that’s going to the Metrolink station?
In addition, Google does not display bus/rail disruptions or other
alerts related to your trip. It does not give users options to plan
trips by Walking Distance or Minimize Trips by Transfer Time, Walking
Distance or Transfers. Furthermore Google doesn’t recognize as many
locations as the transit provider’s tripplanner and may have outdated
data.
Google needs some grown ups who remember when transit systems were not
government funded. They are usually 2-4 generations away from
actualization of producing industrial strength software.
Try communicating with one of them on a personal level they are so
insular it’s incredible. They have receptionists that have graduate
degrees just to swish the public away..
Google Maps is the best thing since sliced bread. It’s not Google’s
fault that Apple is dumb and only allows limited bits of AJAX to work
on their phones.
BTW is Google (or Metro) even thinking about a real-time bus/train
locator by GPS, an extension of the marginally-helpful TransiTV?
Steve Hymon is The Times’ Road Sage. He covers traffic and
transportation in a region united by a confounding network of freeways
that frustrate drivers daily. The Bottleneck Blog is Steve’s website
home, where he breaks transportation news, reports on traffic tie-ups
and brings a critical but humorous eye to commuting in Southern
California. You can reach Steve at steve.hymon@latimes.com.
Google makes the vast majority of its revenue and profit from
advertisers whose text ads appear next to search results. Advertisers
bid for the words, and their ads appear based on a formula involving
how much they’re willing to pay and the quality of the ads themselves.
As of mid-June, . Advertisers pay only when searchers actually click
on the ads.
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Excerpts from the blog After spending Friday morning playing with an
iPhone 3G, I can see why Apple enthusiasts lined up again for Steve…
After spending Friday morning playing with an iPhone 3G, I can see why
Apple enthusiasts lined up again for Steve Job’s latest wonderful
device.
The browser is a bit faster — it took about 25 seconds to load
with three bars of 3G reception showing here in South Lake Union.
Having GPS brings the device up to par with other high-end phones, but
Apple’s interface is a step above.
In the settings menu, you have the option to add a mail account.
Exchange is the top of the list, above Apple’s MobileMe, Gmail, Yahoo
mail and AOL.
My tip of the day: Check with your IT department to be sure it has
authorized iPhones. Otherwise, you may get a message saying that it’s
unable to verify a certificate and the sync won’t work.
A few little quirks: Just because the 3G phone uses a faster network,
don’t expect blinding speed over the wireless network.
You also can’t connect to iTunes over the network — you must be
on a Wi-Fi network to connect to the store.
So is the iPhone 3G worth the $2,000 you’ll spend owning and operating
one for the next two years?
Think carefully before taking the plunge. Not because of any
shortcomings with the phone. It’s lovely, and continues to define a
well-designed phone/mobile Web device.
A range of amazing handheld computers will appear using new mobile
chips from Intel and new software platforms from Google, Microsoft and
Nokia. For instance, the first “Google phone” built on its Android
platform should be available from T-Mobile USA by the end of the year.
The iPhone software will continue to get better and it may stay ahead
of the competition, but the phone hardware may seem dated soon,
especially the wimpy 2 megapixel camera that can’t take video.
As I mentioned in the comments yesterday, I’m getting ready to depart
this space; I’ll have a fuller explanation tomorrow, sometime before
or after I get in line to buy the new iPhone.
It was thrilling not only for the splendor of the place — even their
commodes are computerized — and the welcoming attitude of my hosts at
the Authors@ program (the company buys your books and hands them out
to employees for free), but also because Googlers seemed to
intuitively grasp my argument and posed many penetrating questions.
Google records these things and posts them up on YouTube, so if you’re
looking for something to watch while eating a sandwich at your desk,
have at it:
Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage
in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday,
July 17.
If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and
spin in the digital age, do stop by.
Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material
from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly
prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.
The owner of “Obama’s Chocolate Nuts” is feeling
like “the luckiest person on Earth” in the wake of the
Rev. Jesse Jackson’s crude remarks about Sen. Barack Obama.
Jesse Jackson is no more than a vicious Black thug that fantasizes
about castrating other Black Liberal males.
Are we the sexiest blog ever? You better believe it, people. Even Amy
Adams (above) says so. And if she didn’t actually say it, you can bet
she’s thinking it.
SIC WILSON … talk to the hand, cause the volleyball ain’t listening.
THE FITS GIRLS … somebody’s gotta be the brains of this operation.
SIC WILLIE … not sweating but protecting the technique.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted
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I guess the main difference here is that their “compiler” can generate
the actual language-domain classes off of the descriptor files, which
is a definite advantage over “classic” IDL.
Well, let’s also not forget that the meaning of the expression “an
order of magnitude” depends strongly from the numeric base you’re
using.
I drink the XML kool-aid plenty — but there are things it’s good for,
and things it’s not. Serializing and parsing truly massive amounts of
data is part of the latter set.
We wanted to give an idea of the speed without trying to boast too
much or look like we were directly challenging anyone. Of course every
news outlet has chosen to highlight the speed comment — including the
numbers which were intended to be ballpark figures — more than was
intended, but I guess that isn’t surprising.
I agree that the tiny “person” example is not a good benchmark case.
It was intended as a usage example, not a speed example, but I stuck
the speed numbers in there just meaning to give people a vague idea of
the difference. The “20-100 times faster” comment is based on testing
a variety of formats — both unrealistic ones and real-life formats
used in our search pipeline — against programmatically generated XML
equivalents (which may or may not themselves be realistic, though they
contain the same data with the same structure). libxml2 was used for
parsing XML. I don’t really know how libxml2’s speed compares to other
XML parsers, but I didn’t have a lot of time to investigate. The 20x
faster number comes from the largest data set (~100k-ish) while the
100x number comes from a very small message. The most realistic case
was about 50x. Sorry that I cannot provide exact details of the
benchmark setup since many of the test cases were proprietary internal
formats.
It looks like Google has taken some of the good elements of CORBA and
IIOP into its own interchange format.While CORBA certainly is bloated
in a lot of ways, the IIOP wire protocol it uses is vastly faster and
more efficient than any XML out there.. and yes it is just as “open”
(publicly documented and Freely available for use in any open source
application) as any XML schema out there. J2EE uses IIOP as well and
its is technically possible to interoperate (although the problem with
CORBA is that different implementations never really interoperated as
they were supposed to). As a side note, I’d rather write IDL code than
an XML schema any day of the week too, but that’s another rant.
both really from the same design sheet, but thrift has been
opensource’d for over a year, and has many more language bindings. its
been in use in several opensource projects (thrudb comes to mind), and
has much more extant articles/documentation.
I’m actually a game developer, not a web developer, so I’ll speak to
XML’s use as a file format in general. Here’s a few points regarding
our use of XML:
* We only use it as a source format for our tools. XML is far too
inefficient and verbose to use in the final game – all our XML data is
packed into our own proprietary binary data format.* We also only use
it as a meta-data format, not a primary container type. For instance,
we store gameplay scripts, audio script, and cinematic meta-data in
XML format. We’re not foolish enough to store images, sounds, or maps
in a highly-verbose, text-based format. XML’s value to us is in how
well it can glue large pieces of our game together.* All our latest
tools are written in C# and using the.NET platform (Windows is our
development platform, of course). It’s astoundingly easy to serialize
data structures to XML using.NET libraries – just a few lines of
code.* Because it’s a text-based format and human readable, if a file
breaks in any way, we can just do a diff in source control to see what
changed, and why it’s breaking.
Since they’re Google people will clamor over this (as we’re doing
here) and the result will be at least a handful of folks will learn
and use it. Google’s key to success has always been finding fresh
talent and removing barriers from their contributing and advancement
so what I’ve seen they’ve done is A) help train potential employee’s
on how they’re tech and thought process works, and B) provide
themselves a filter by which to gauge the ability for a potential
employee to understand they’re system.
And as a bonus, they help undermine opponents who use competing
technologies by helping train the workforce away from their practices.
Overall I think it’s very intelligent and well done strategic move.
The point of this isn’t so much that it’s faster than XML (so is
everything else), it’s that google took everything that a real person
needs in a IDL and cut out everything else. Most IDLs have a serious
case of second system effect, where features are added that nobody
uses but seriously complicate the API. Even XML suffers from that
(have you ever seen the kind of data structure you need to store a
DOM, or what that does to library APIs for manipulating XML)? I’d use
it because 95% of the time all I need is something simple like this,
and the other 5% of the time I should go back and rethink my design
anyway. That said, there is still a case for XML, especially the self
documenting and human readable nature of the document, but there are a
lot of cases where it is used today where it only adds unnecessary
complexity and actually makes your code more difficult to maintain
instead of simpler.
4. Either communicating between programs that have the same knowledge
of message semantics, or preparation of pretty human-readable
documents.
The advantage of using the protocol buffer format instead of JSON is
that it’s smaller and faster, but you sacrifice human-readability.
Modify JSON so unquoted attributes are ‘type labels’ and define the
type of an attribute by giving a label or a default value. For
instance:
You’ve also missed that they’ve just told the world how the majority
of their systems talk, something most people would find interesting
given how much Google does and the fact that one of Google’s strong
points is mangling huge amounts of data in a relatively quickly
manner.
PS. Your format stinks and is horribly slow and unscalable when it
comes to adding to the library. Genre’s are so unbelievably grey
defined that you might as well just sort them by the dominate color of
the cover. Google would have done better.
You think? Take BigTable. Wikipedia describes it as: ‘”a sparse,
distributed multi-dimensional sorted map”, sharing characteristics of
both row-oriented and column-oriented databases’. Sounds, to me, like
a specialized solution to a very specialized problem, a problem that,
I presume, didn’t fit with any existing solution. Same goes with GFS.
After all, do you really think they didn’t evaluate existing solutions
before embarking on building an entirely new distributed filesystem?
Do you really think they’re that stupid?
He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John
Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth”
Whitepaper: Virtualization from the Data Center to the Desktop. Meet
evolving demands more effectively as you transform your IT
infrastructure from a cost center to a strategic business asset.
The company also recently donated $350,000 to Oregon and Portland
State Universities in support of open source development. Google open
source projects and efforts are documented at the Web site.
Q: Were there any real standout projects from Summer of Code that just
made you say “Wow”?
What that means is if you put in cancer or a certain kind of cancer
you can find out what genes in the human genome express that disease.
Or you can put in a gene and find out which proteins and genes it’s
connected to.
For instance we have an article in there from a fellow who is applying
the concepts behind open source into biology. It’s sort of like,
here’s this core open source advance on how it’s been done over the
last six years, and then there are also people who have learned from
open source and what they’re doing, too.
Q: So there isn’t going to be a Google open source license? It’s just
the GPL and OSI-approved licenses for Google?
Q: Is there any chance that Google would ever use one of the new ,
such as the Community License, that may well be free software-
compatible licenses?
For instance, when we release code we often just want people to be
able to use it and we don’t really care how. We just want them to see
the code and get out of it what we do, and the ASF license lends
itself quite well for that.
I love working at Google. It’s been fantastic. Not just the people I
work with but the depth of resources.
: woarhex etbdml
: My Lonely Planet book said that if you want to stay with a family
instead of the hotel you need to register…
: No info on that. As far as I heard from friends in Bukhara,
everything seems to be more or less ok now….
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But with your data encrypted, why do you need to trust anyone? For you
it is the state of your browser, passwords etc, but for anyone else it
is random bits.
I can’t imagine a company that actually does what the public asks?
They must have a secret agenda!
Well, I’d disagree, I think we’re doing fine from a kernel release
perspective. We could do more, and in time, we will, but we only
really started a concerted effort to release changes 3 years ago,
so…not so shabby. Red Hat has been more important than Google or any
linux -user- in the development of the kernel.
That’s not too shabby, in my book. I also would point out that it is
disingenuous to equate linux use with some license fee savings. If
linux had initially charged a license fee, then the world of linux
users would be using bsd. Linux is successful because it is free of
charge and free to use and free to modify. I think it is important
that we give back and the rest, and we do that, but to multiply the
number of machines running linux on the internet and consider that
money as having been stolen is antithetical to the whole idea behind
free software and open source.
If they’re not going to develop it any further, they might as well let
someone else have a go. Now all we have to do is convince Microsoft to
release the source code to Windows ME.
I’m sure there have been other examples, but this is the first and
possibly only example I can think of of a company *actually
responding* to requests for a discontinued product to be open-sourced.
Let alone actually going ahead and doing it.
my settings is set to give trolls +1 and flamebait +2.It’s often some
of the most humerous and insightful comments. At other times it’s just
gay fiction.
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1997-2008 , Inc.
The angle places the user at street level and allows for complete
360-degree panning and zooming. Google said that the aim of the
project was to offer a perspective similar to that of a cyclist in the
race.
The map will cover all 21 stages of the race, which began on Saturday
in the coastal town of Brest and ends on 27 July in the Champs
Elysées in Paris.
Q: I enter events into AOL’s calendar and program it to send me e-mail
to remind me. Unfortunately, a few months ago, I stopped receiving
e-mail reminders, and AOL has not been able to correct this problem.
Do you know of any other software programs that will let me enter
events into a calendar and receive e-mail to remind me?
When you’re adding an event in Internet Explorer, scroll down to the
reminders tab to send a reminder to your e-mail inbox, mobile phone or
Yahoo Messenger. You can schedule reminders from five minutes to two
weeks before the event.
Mark your calendars for a day full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing: Reps from Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) :
As everyone has noted, the irony is that this time, the Microsoft guys
aren’t the ones under antitrust scrutiny.
Institutional investors are mostly not tuned into the Google ()
Creative Suite. For Google and other SaaS-styled companies, it’s
not about product cycles. New products, particularly strategic ones,
do have a role to play and bear watching closely.
In fact, one might speculate as to whether this sort of closed-to-open
strategy could become more formalized and popular. Suppose Google knew
in advance that this was their plan: they could have escrowed a copy
of the source code with some reliable third party, along with a
covenant to release on a certain date unless the covenant was revoked.
Such a plan might ultimately bring us more open source software, by
encouraging innovation with slightly lower risk.
By scrutinizing the traffic Google searches produce, Internet analysis
firm Hitwise in January . So what’s next?
) 2 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 9, 2008 2:54 PM PDT Google has a
specific music search function already Reply to this comment by July
10, 2008 11:32 AM PDT google also has a specific government search
function already.it’s under the “Topic-specific search engines” Reply
to this comment
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Psychologically, it’s well-known in risk analysis circles that people
feel more comfortable with risk if they feel in control. Thus people
are often more comfortable driving a car on a congested freeway
compared with being flown somewhere in a commercial jet, regardless of
the relative safety of the two forms of transport.
“We’ve found working with our customers they want transparency. They
want to know exactly what’s going on all the time,” said Bruce
Francis, Salesforce.com’s vice president of corporate strategy. “If
there’s an issue, they’re not furious; they just want to know exactly
what’s going on.”
“Own your own risk” And some others are even trying to make a business
out of reducing the uncertainties of cloud computing. One is open-
source monitoring and management software company . The company is
working hard to extend its monitoring service to other sites, too,
including Google App Engine, said Stacey Schneider, senior director of
marketing.
“You can’t get away from owning your own risk. This is slowing the
adoption of the cloud,” she said.
Google is trying to communicate better with users and customers,
Chandra said, though he stopped short of revealing what the uptime is
for Google Docs or detailing why exactly it had problems earlier this
week.
“With the docs outage, we posted immediately in the administrative
console that there was an issue. We posted to the help center and the
phone line system that we were working quickly to resolve it,” Chandra
said.
Risks of non-cloud computing, too Much ado can and should be made of
the risks of cloud computing, but it should be noted that even the
much more mature business of computing without a cloud has its risks.
Downtime, either with ailing or stolen PCs or with overtaxed or faulty
servers, is a serious problem there, too.
The software, AVE Video Fusion, “combines Google Earth-like features
with live camera videos projected on a 3D model” the video caption
says. “This program is NOT Google Earth. It is written from scratch
using C++ and OpenGL.” It runs on PCs and requires no custom hardware.
The El Segundo, Calif.-based company was founded in 2005 by computer
science and electrical engineering professors at the University of
Southern California.
This screenshot shows a live USB camera and 18 live TV feeds projected
onto monitors in a lab in Hong Kong.
With so much fairy dust in the air over Apple’s day-early for a ride
to test out some of these apps. Be forewarned that the firmware has
not yet been Apple-approved for wide release and cannot be vouched
for.
Amit Agarwal from blog today outlining how anyone can use the service
as a live blogging tool. The writing format, which has become an
increasingly popular way for bloggers to cover events as they’re
happening (mainly useful for things like Apple keynote speeches), but
also manages to work for smaller conferences and events, too.
Agarwal’s suggestions are to either set it up as a special page on
compatible blogging platforms so that your writings will show up like
a regular post, or to simply embed it on the page as I’ve done here.
One of the platform’s strong suits is that it lets several people work
on a document at the same time, which your standard blogging platform
likely won’t allow.
By scrutinizing the traffic Google searches produce, Internet analysis
firm Hitwise in January . So what’s next?
That extra foresight chronicling which stores will soon be going
under, even if their closures have not yet been announced.
The most interesting element of the , a Google fellow who oversees the
area, is a discussion of why the company doesn’t manually elevate
particular search results to obtain the right order. However, the
company does of course hand-tune the algorithm that ranks the results,
so you can consider manual intervention still relevant at a higher
level.
Google gives two reasons for its prohibition against manual
intervention. First is its belief that its own individual judgment is
never as good as the collective judgment of the Internet overall,
whose hyperlink structure forms part of the basis for Google ranking.
Second, fixing the algorithm rather than a specific result, if done
right, helps more than just one particular search. “Often a broken
query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our
ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only
improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and
often for all languages,” Singhal said.
Though the company has talked earlier about how it doesn’t hand-tune
specific search results, Singhal went into a little more detail. Not a
lot, though: the post is more of a teaser that lays some groundwork,
but Singhal promised more later.
The DomainKeys technology is covered by a patent assigned to Yahoo.
The company released it under a dual-license scheme that allows the
companies to use it royalty-free under the GNU General Public License
(GPL 2.0), which enabled the Internet Engineering Task Force to
approve it as a proposed Internet standard.
It looks like it’s available to select users in select locations for
the time being, and indeed, I can’t access it from my Google account
yet. It’s also unclear whether this will get expanded to the mobile
version of Google Maps, where the availability of walking directions
would certainly help.
This sort of feature can be very useful in cities with lots of one-way
streets, like New York, or with parks and thoroughfares that
accommodate pedestrians but not cars. Currently, Google Maps
directions may suggest an extremely roundabout route when a much more
direct one is possible by walking or biking.
The July 1 date was viewed months ago as a catalyst for the Time
Warner board of directors to speed discussions to spin off or sell AOL
to any interested party, including Yahoo, Microsoft or News Corp.
Renewed hopes for an AOL sale or merger sent Time Warner shares rising
as much as 2.6 percent on Monday after Citigroup named the company its
top pick within large cap media and entertainment stocks on the
conviction that AOL would be sold or merged into either Yahoo or
another company.
Jason Bazinet, a Citigroup analyst, estimated that the merger of AOL’s
advertising business and Yahoo would generate $900 million of annual
cost reductions.
After Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy its search business and
struck a search ad deal with Google in June, the momentum for Internet
mergers has slowed, analysts said.
David Pogue looks at the Eye-Fi memory card, which stamps photos with
the location where they were taken.
David Pogue talks about how to save your old photo prints, cassette
tapes and vinyl records from the dustbin o…
David Pogue on the new $100 movie player from Netflix, which sends
movies from your computer screen to your TV…
strmvlt 
The google and other inappropriate comments’s nonsense
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So Viacom didn’t abandon any of their data rights, but they sure went
out of their way to suggest they did. And anyone who watched the will
know that users were absolutely identified based on nothing more than
a list of the search terms they entered. Does anyone really believe
that a motivated plaintiff couldn’t identify individuals based on a
user selected ID (mine is “TechCrunch”), IP address and a list of all
watched videos?
Here’s the problem – I don’t know if Viacom will live up to their
promise, or not. The fact that Google is to hand over employee data
tells me they’re not so sure, either. And frankly I shouldn’t have to
care or have to worry about Viacom’s trustworthiness. As a user I
interacted only with Google, and there are implicit and explicit
promised by Google to protect my data. If Google hands my data over to
Viacom, it doesn’t really matter to me if Viacom uses it or not. All I
will remember is that Google gathered and stored information without
my consent, and then handed it over at the first sign of trouble.
by July 12, 2008 1:19 AM PDT @JCPayne: Nonsense! AT&T/Bell South don’t
even come close to dominating 90% of the cell phone market ( In fact
Verizon alone has nearly as many phone users as AT&T/Bell South, and
we haven’t even mentioned T-Mobile, Sprint etc). By contrast,
Google/Yahoo will have 90% of the search market. Any pact that ends up
with 90% of any market power, concentrated in the hands of 2
companies, has to be stopped by the DOJ. I don?t care how ?non-
exclusive? the pact is. Who the heck else is Yahoo going to form a
pact with, outside this ?non-exclusive? pact with Google, given that
since Yang is barely on speaking terms with Microsoft, and outside
Microsoft , there is only another 1% or so search market left. Reply
to this comment by July 12, 2008 8:19 AM PDT Back@Kwasiowusu: For one
thing I wasn’t talking mobile phone service. I was talking the regular
old POTS system. (And fiberoptics system that it is rapidly becoming
instead.) The reason the national system was broken up into regional
units was to remove domination of the whole national telephone system.
Now, to allow Bellsouth and the former parts of SBC to merge together
(albeit changing their name to AT&T) that does very little to preserve
the competitive atmosphere in the United States when it comes to
telecoms and high speed Internet even…As far as Google-Yahoo
cooperation…. What monopoly??? They have a technology that every
other company and individual on the net has access to. **Pixels on a
website** is not proprietary. Anybody can come up with an onlinead
network …. You may have to be creative in getting sites to adopt
yours along with Google or Yahoo but none the less it can be done if
you’re smart enough.Clearly with all the resources Microsoft has–
they are admitting that they aren’t smart enough to put together an ad
network. Hence why they want to buy a ready-made one. (Yahoo’s)…..
So now we basically have Microsoft which launched a battle to take on
Google. They decided they would take Yahoo’s assets and try to
dominate Google, so Google went in cut a deal with Yahoo themselves
and Microsoft ends up as the odd-man out crying all those big
crocodile tears and wants to launch a big court case to win back their
plan of domination. BS I say… Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008
11:09 AM PDT Agreed w/ JCPayne. I strongly suspect that MSFT’s only
role in this is to act as a spoiler. Given that MSFT is mostly on the
defensive nowadays (when they should be busy trying to build core
products that are actually worth something), I suspect that they’ll
lose this one too. Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 3:13 PM PDT
If Ballmer gets to address the committee, the company will be doomed.
Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 4:21 PM PDT @JCPayne, It
doesn?t make any difference whether you were talking about POTS or
about wireless. An AT&T hookup with Bellsouth still doesn?t even come
close to controlling 90% of the phone market, POTS or wireless. As at
today, cable companies like Time Warner, offer full phone service , as
well as broadband internet, in direct competition with phone companies
like AT&T, not to mention, millions of Americans don?t even bother to
sign up for wired phones anymore, simply preferring to use their cell
phones for all their phone calls, saving themselves the extra expense
of paying for a wired phone they hardly use. The old POTS phone lines
are increasingly irrelevant. Revenues for both AT&T and Verizon, from
wired POTS lines have been going down sharply for years. You simply
can?t compare the dying POTS business to a Google/Yahoo pact that end
up putting control of 90% of the very fast growing internet search in
the hands of just 2 companies Reply to this comment
by July 12, 2008 4:31 PM PDT @JCPayne, this bit by you is even more
laughable 😕 As far as Google- Yahoo cooperation…. What monopoly???
They have a technology that every other company and individual on the
net has access to?.You clearly have no idea what a monopoly is. Anyone
can use Google/Yahoo search, so therefore its not a monopoly? Will you
excusing me while I laugh? Unless you are gonna tell me that Google
gives away the source code of their highly secret search algorithms to
anyone to use as they like, then you are simply blowing smoke.
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The application has a settings screen that is accessible by pressing
the grey circled italic “i” in the upper right corner of
the Apps screen. In the settings pane, you can configure Google to
search your contacts, previous searches or websites. You can turn
Google suggestions on or off and even turn on Safe Search. Safe Search
will not pull up any adult topic returns in the search results.
Finally you can clear your search history.
The “Explore More Google Products” button brings you to a
page that shows all of Google’s Apps on one screen. Touching one
of those App icons results in Safari launching and bringing to that
application.
AOL’s Radio App for the iPhone and iPod touch is a native
streaming application that is also location aware. Once you confirm
access to your location it reveals local radio stations that provide
streamed radio programming in your area. In the Houston Bay Area, the
app revealed four stations: 100.3 KILT, CNN 650 Radio News, HOT 95.7
and Sports Radio 610. Other locales like Atlanta, Baltimore,
Cleveland, Los Angeles, etc. are offered.
The latest proposal sent to Yahoo on Friday had a 24-hour time limit
to accept. It would have had Microsoft take over Yahoo’s search
business while putting a new board of directors, as chosen by Icahn,
in place to run the rest of the company.
Yahoo also takes a portion of its press release to call out Icahn for
being contradictory. It quotes him as saying previously that Yahoo
selling its only search business to Microsoft would be
“crazy.” Now he is a major force in trying to make such a
deal happen.
I continue to believe that one way or another, this deal is going to
happen. Microsoft simply has no other real options if it is serious
about gaining in the search business, while Yahoo simply looks like it
has no other options — period.
Viacom wants to know which videos YouTube employees have watched and
uploaded to the site, and Google is refusing to provide that
information, CNET News has learned.
As part of Viacom’s $1 billion copyright suit against Google’s
YouTube, two weeks ago to disclose records, such as IP addresses and
usernames. Google was also supposed to turn over records that included
the viewing and uploading histories of YouTube employees, according to
the sources.
Google balked over the issue of turning over information that would
include data about videos employees watched or uploaded to YouTube,
according to the sources. If Chad Hurley, one of YouTube’s co-
founders, uploaded a copyright video or viewed them, Viacom’s lawyers
believe they have a right to know about it, the sources said.
YouTube’s employee information could prove crucial to Viacom’s case
against Google, as it could go a long way to proving how much
knowledge YouTube has about piracy on the site. If YouTube employees
knew what was uploaded to the site–or posted pirated clips themselves
–YouTube could lose its protection under the .
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But the cinema companies were very clever in encouraging agencies to
create ads for movie theaters that the TV authorities wouldn’t accept.
Strangely, in the US, the nation that has created a whole new plane
for commerce, ads in movie theaters are still something of a surprise.
But with YouTube, Google has the issue of a dedicated following whose
attention-span rivals that of a hamster having a nervous breakdown.
Talk of pre-roll being their only choice reflects the fact that
perhaps 95% of all online video advertising is actually pre-roll.
is a good example, a site that claims to do 400 million page views a
month. Its video clips seem to have been ambushed by a very beige Brad
Paisley ad for Hersheys for at least the last month. Yet viewers seem
to accept it as they do any TV ad.
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The U.S. Small Business Administration armed Joey Johnson with the
money and motivation to step out and launch her graphic design
business. Johnson formed Graphic Mechanic Design Studio in October
2006, after running the company on the side for nearly a decade.
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The swastika, the symbol of Nazism, still provokes strong feelings of
fear and anger. So it was something of a shock when late last week…
At some point on Thursday, a member of 4chan’s “b” channel posted a
simple two-part instruction. First, Google “卐”. Second, enjoy.
According to Maximin, hundreds or even thousands of 4chan members gave
it a try. “They just wanted to know what it was,” Maximin said. “And
what Googling it would do.”
Obviously, there is no character for the swastika on the standard
keyboard. But Internet browsers can display many, many characters
— the trick is knowing the short code (called html) that
represents each. In this case, the code a 4chan member posted was the
shorthand for the swastika. Once the code is processed by a browser,
it shows up as the symbol.
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This is hardly an objective review. Then again the Slashdot submitter
is also the author of the blog… When you read comments like “if it
wasn’t for the logo at the top left you wouldn’t even know it was
owned and operated by Google. The page is blend with no much color or
style” it really makes you wonder. Does it matter that Google didn’t
brand it everywhere they could like other companies? In classical
Google fashion, they took a simplified approach, which itself is a
form of Google branding (just look at google.com) Then the reviewer
goes on “It is 100% centered around the mouse, this for me is a
horrible defect that must be solved immediately. I happen to know
every keyboard shortcut known to man kind (sic) and I absolutely hate
the mouse. I am sure there are many people like me out there. “Well
good for you buddy. And great research you’ve done there in assuming
that everyone else is just like you. Finally he concludes with saying
he found “several Sex oriented rooms”. A quick glance through the room
index shows maybe a dozen of the 1000+ rooms that are listed there
have a sexual theme. Seems like a pretty good ratio considering the
amount of porn to be found on the internet and people’s computers in
relationship to the rest of the content on the web. But then again,
remember this blog is from “The Random thoughts of a Christian IT
Professional.”
He has a point on porn: the terms of service forbid it, much to my
dismay, I must say. But then, it is open for anyone older than 13 so I
see no way Google could get around that.
Are you kidding me? Porn the ultimate mark of success. The fact that
Lively has it before it has even taken off properly makes it like an
uber stamp of approval. Yes yes.
Besides the fact that guy obviously isn’t a native English speaker,
“several” and “maybe a dozen” seem pretty in line to me. His point
seems to be that Google isn’t being as tight with it as they are with
YouTube, which is certainly true (although I’d suspect that’s a result
of pre-takeover YouTube policies being carried on by Google). It’s not
a matter of any concern to me, but its his opinion. And it’s not like
adding keyboard shortcuts would eliminate mouse usage, as you seem to
think.
Direct hit to the nail head. I was truly let down with Second Life. I
will even go back here and there to see if things changed but they
never do. Last time I ventured into second life I searched for ‘Beach’
and was treated to a picture of a girl fingering herself. I had hopes
for Second Life for businesses that I work with to have open house and
virtual tours for lodging. I would not think about suggesting it
anymore.
I’m pretty sure slashdoter and unbiased can’t be said in the same
sentence with a stright face either. In fact you have to work pretty
hard to find anyone who is unbiased.
He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John
Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth”
UPDATE: After spending some time with it I’m also frustrated with the
local search. Right now the local search only provides Search for “x”
near me in the results when the word matches common local search terms
in a whitelist. If I want to use the app to find a place by name, I
have to switch specifically to a Local search only search to get the
“near me” option—and ultimately that’s about two clicks too many
to make it as useful as it could be.
I’ve looked on the App Store in iTunes & on my iPhone but can’t find
it. Can anyone else see it?
Hey barbino. No, I’m not in the US, I’m in the UK. Thanks for pointing
that out. Have you managed to download the app? I went to the US store
& found it, but when trying to download it I entered my Apple ID & it
recongnised I wasn’t in the US, so wouldn’t let me download it 😦
, Jul 11, 2008 07:24 PM
On Thursday evening, Google threw open the doors of its San Francisco
office to members of the media and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
Though Google’s San Francisco office has been , the dust has cleared
and Google wanted to celebrate.
The view — looking east toward Treasure Island, the surrounding water
and the Bay Bridge — is to die for.
Newsom took, and seemingly deserves, some credit for that, due to his
efforts to bring high-tech companies into San Francisco. He noted that
46 biotech companies had opened offices in city and that other
technology companies have been setting up shop as well.
Tomorrow’s CIO: Do you have what it takes? Find out at the 2008
InformationWeek 500 Conference Sept. 14-16, St. Regis Resort, Monarch
Beach, Calif.
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DomainKeys is an e-mail or reject it outright. Yahoo! (which owns the
patent) has long been a proponent on this system, but many ISPs also
like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), and Microsoft backs SenderID.
SPF has recently come under fire for not being effective for users who
redirect all mail to Gmail or other ISPs because the server
verification breaks and Google automatically rejects those forwarded
messages. This wouldn’t apply for DKIM, since DKIM is an encrypted
signature in the data of the message, independent of a server lookup.
Co-founder Brin breathlessly joined Page and Schmidt about half an
hour into the interview. Brin had been riding a bicycle and said he
had a flat. In his remarks, Brin was very emotional about the need for
good teachers and schools in the U.S. He was responding indirectly to
New York City Schools chancellor Joel Klein’s earlier presentation
about the state of education in the country. “Another important factor
that nobody talks about is teachers’ salaries,” Brin said. “Teachers
are among the lowest paid professionals. At Google, we’ve been paying
our teachers 25 per cent more, but even with that, they’re among the
lowest paid employees. I think it’s really important to have a living
wage for teachers.”
Hey nimish — maybe you didn’t read the fine print in google’s
prospectus: your common shares have 1/10th the voting power of those
held by the two founders + the CEO. Google’s “public” offering was a
complete artifice (some might say a fully-disclosed sham), something
barely *ever* reported by the financial press. They can do whatever
they want — there are no pesky shareholders to appease.
Thanks to a new feature from Google, you can now stand in Longview’s
Civic Circle, walk a portion of Lake Sacajawea, maybe even get a view
of your front door — all from your computer.Google recently
added parts of the local area to its Street View feature of Google
Maps, allowing users a 360-degree perspective from various locations
around Cowlitz County.Here’s how it works: Google drives through an
area with a special camera mounted on a car’s roof. The camera takes
360-degree photos along the way. Google then stitches the photos
together and puts them on the Web.The result: When you bring up an
address in Google Maps, a window pops up showing a photo of the
buildings, houses, people, cars and everything else that was in that
spot when Google snapped its picture. Click right, and the camera pans
right. Click left, and the camera pans left. Another set of arrows
allows you to move up and down the street, just as though you were
driving on it.What’s the point? In an e-mail, Google said Street View
can be used for “virtual tourism” checking for landmarks, or just
getting to know an area better.Some question whether the feature
raises privacy concerns. In other cities, the Google car has captured
a man walking out of a strip club, another man near an adult book
store and what appears to be prostitutes on a street corner. In one
case, a Chicago-area woman flashed the camera.The feature has been
limited to mostly large cities since it launched last year. Google
said it added Street View for Cowlitz County June 10, along with the
Portland area. By the time the photos make it onto the Web, they’re
typically between a few months and a year old, Google said.Street View
isn’t included for all of the area. Downtown Longview is conspicuously
absent. Google also skipped a lot of residential streets. It’s unclear
when, or if, the Google car will return to flesh out the rest of the
map.To check it out, visit . Type in an address and click “Street
View.”
Internet giant Google yesterday defended plans to photograph millions
of British homes and publish the snapshots online.
Google has confirmed it is now in the process of photographing Britain
as part of the Street View project.
A spokeswoman said: “Google works hard to make sure that our products
respect both users’ expectations of privacy, and local privacy laws,
in each country in which they are launched. Google Maps Street View is
no exception.”
Jul 11, 2008, 8:33 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:30 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:27 am Jul
11, 2008, 8:13 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:04 am Jul 10, 2008, 6:10 am
Digg Del.icio.us furl StumbleUpon BlinkList Newsvine Magnolia Facebook
Tailrank Slashdot Technorati Google Bookmarks Yahoo Favorites Windows
Live Ask
For most organizations Extensible Markup Language, or XML (), is the
lingua franca for data interchange. Apparently XML alone isn’t fast
enough for Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), so Google went off and developed its
own data format, called Protocol Buffers.
According to Google’s documentation, protocol buffers were initially
developed at Google to deal with an index server request/response
protocol.
, Google’s program manager for open source, noted Google encodes
almost any sort of structured information that needs to be passed
across the network or stored on disk using this protocol.
As to why after years of in-house development Google is now making
Protocol Buffers open source, Varda said it’s just a question of time.
“We have wanted to release protocol buffers for a long time,” he said.
“The only limitation was finding enough engineering time to get it
done.”
“There is some patent activity around Protocol Buffers, but I’d like
to point out that we use the Apache license, which grants permission
to use any applicable patents,” DiBona told InternetNews.com.
“We don’t have an SLA yet for Google Calendar or Google Docs, but it’s
something we’re moving quickly toward,” said Rishi Chandra, product
manager for Google Apps. Google wants “to get the same level of
reliability for all of Apps,” he said.
Google is a major proponent of cloud computing, with advocacy work
down to the level of of its own. The trend has the potential to
seriously redistribute wealth within the computing industry.
So naturally there’s some fear with cloud computing: it means you
can’t reboot your laptop or check for blinking red lights on the data
center servers.
“Own your own risk” And some others are even trying to make a business
out of reducing the uncertainties of cloud computing. One is open-
source monitoring and management software company . The company is
working hard to extend its monitoring service to other sites, too,
including Google App Engine, said Stacey Schneider, senior director of
marketing.
Google is trying to communicate better with users and customers,
Chandra said, though he stopped short of revealing what the uptime is
for Google Docs or detailing why exactly it had problems earlier this
week.
Risks of non-cloud computing, too Much ado can and should be made of
the risks of cloud computing, but it should be noted that even the
much more mature business of computing without a cloud has its risks.
Downtime, either with ailing or stolen PCs or with overtaxed or faulty
servers, is a serious problem there, too.
Those with high-end services boast of “five nines” of reliability,
where services are available 99.999 percent of the year and therefore
down no more than 5 minutes and 15 seconds per year. Google’s Gmail
SLA, at 99.9 percent uptime, promises downtime of less than 9 hours
per year.
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In watching a Webcast of the iPhone introduction I heard Steve Jobs
mention the “cloud” when talking about the new Mobile Me service Apple
is rolling out. When he says the data is pushed from the cloud what
exactly does that mean?
–S. K., Arlington The cloud is a fancy term for a computer or
server in a data center somewhere other than at your house.
Apple’s new Mobile Me service lets users store files on a server owned
or leased by Apple. Those servers are accessed through any Internet
connected computer. That’s like having a big thumb drive “in the
clouds.”
Users of Google’s Google Docs service are really using the cloud. Not
only are the files stored on Google’s servers, the applications
themselves are stored there.
You can open a word processor in your Web browser, create, edit and
save the text file and copy it to your computer all without installing
any software. It all happens over the Internet “in the cloud.”
Trade Deficit
Everyone would agree they see more “Made in
Taiwan/China/Japan/etc…”tags than “Made in the USA” tags for the
past several years. Well, that “Made in _____” tag on your clothing
has an economic term sewn into it: trade deficit. A trade deficit
happens when one country buys more goods than it sells to other
countries.
But, countries aren’t businesses. They are, well, countries, and can
print all the money they want. People who deal with currencies, or
each country’s version of money, look at trade deficits as one way to
find out how much each country’s currency is worth. If you have to
print more money, each dollar you print can possibly lower the value
of the other dollars out there. Like stocks, you can buy and sell
currencies on what’s called the foreign-exchange market (or, if you
want a buzzword for the office, say Forex market).
DigitalGlobe operates three imaging satellites: Worldview I, Worldview
II, and QuickBird. These satellites collect the highest resolution
commercial imagery of the Earth, and offer the largest image size, and
greatest on-board storage capacity and resolution compared to any
other commercial satellite imagery available today.
There can be no assurance that such statements will be accurate and
actual results and future events could differ materially from those
anticipated in such statements. The Company undertakes no obligation
to update forward-looking statements to reflect subsequently occurring
events or circumstances or to reflect unanticipated events or
developments.
Dutton Associates Announces Investment Opinion: General Steel Holdings
Strong Speculative Buy In Update Coverage By Dutton Associates
The paper’s front page is screaming furiously that the arrival of
Street View in the UK could be a privacy-invading nightmare – saying
Google’s cars “WILL PHOTOGRAPH EVERY DOOR IN BRITAIN”.
Personally, I’m torn. I use the US version of Street View a lot, but
don’t like the idea of a surveillance society. However, given the
number of CCTV cameras which spy on me every day, I’m not sure that a
Google car counts as the biggest infringement of my liberties right
now.
I’d trust Google more than most governments, particularly ours and the
US, anyway – which in itself is very worrying. I have big issues with
our surveillance society, but as you say this is a snapshot and not
rolling film like the 300+ CCTV cameras that supposedly capture us
each day. I love using the US one to show people around where I used
to live so although it goes against some of my issues with privacy I
have to admit that I’ve been looking forward to this announcement and
can’t wait to use it.
In many respects I’m all for consideration of how our civil liberties
are perhaps being eroded. Yet in this instance I think the value of
the service outweighs anything against it.
It’s thoroughly legal for anyone to take photos of anything or anybody
in the street. Lots of Community Support Police Officers might think
otherwise, but it is. Likewise, anybody can put a CCTV camera on the
front of their building and video what they like. So it’s a quid pro
quo.
So if Google’s doing it in an organised manner, that’s not terrible as
it’s a genuinely useful service. And they’re putting it on the net for
all to see. If I want to see CCTV footage of myself from the dozens of
cameras that catch sight of me daily, I’m going to have to file a
significant number of Freedom of Information requests to see the
footage.
adambowie1 – sorry to be pedantic but hey it’s Friday afternoon. As a
Public Space CCTV manager I can tell you that any number of Freedom of
Information requests would be rejected as CCTV footage falls outside
of FOI as it is a Data Protection issue. So my advice is ask for a DP
form and save yourself some time.
Also it isn’t perfectly legal to set a camera up on your house and
film anything. If you camera looks onto anothers property you would be
breaching privacy rules and even filming past your own borders and
into the public space could be challenged.
As for the whole Streetview thing – it’s the same thing as Public
Space CCTV as far as I’m concerned. By being in the Public Space you
expect to be seen. Does it really matter if it’s by the bloke selling
The Big Issue or a bored office worker in Arizona?
But the reality is that I can point my camera into the public space in
front of my building and record it to my heart’s content. And I don’t
suppose that there’s anything to stop me putting it online or sending
it in to one of those “People do the funniest things..” type shows.
I must admit that I find it more scary that people stop me taking
photos outside in public places rather than me stopping Google from
doing the same. We all have cameras on our mobiles and happily snap
away anywhere.
Oh and it really isn’t like Enemy of the State. Most systems are so
underfunded that we cheer when we can get a copy off within the
confines of our own room never mind having the infrastructure to allow
MI5 to hack in.
Finally – thank god they cry – this Information Commissioner doesn’t
take many prisoners. The rules are there – they just need sticking to.
@lb001: “Is that libelous?” You can’t (except in extreme
circumstances) libel an organisation or company. I was going to make a
comment about the other quotes you offered but then realised those
*might* be libellous because they would be about a person. So I’ll
restrain myself to pointing out that Google doesn’t sell its data, and
doesn’t deal in phone numbers, so it can’t have any connection with
cold callers. However I can’t find the AN Wilson piece on the Mail’s
site, so perhaps he didn’t say that.
@lb001 @Charles. Bizarley the Mail seems to have left a text version
of the “almost criminal” (almost insane?) words of AN Wilson. So just
to ensure they are not lost for posterity:
You are being watched. Not by the KGB, or by the Inland Revenue, or
even by one of those strange vans parked in your street, which purport
to know whether or not you own a television licence.
You are being watched, rather, by Google, which wants to take a
photograph of every single front door in this country.
For some time the facility known as Google Earth has allowed us to
call up our own address – or anyone else’s address, for that matter –
and to home in on a photograph of our – or their – house.
Now the facility has been brought down to street level, and at the
press of a key on your computer, you will be able to summon up the
image of any street. An arrow on the picture will direct you to your
own door – or indeed to anyone else’s door
Aren’t invasions of personal privacy by commercial companies every bit
as indefensible as similar intrusions into our lives by a Big Brother
state?
But now, thanks to Google, we would be wrong to think that. Because of
the profiles built up by Google, we are now pursued every day by cold-
call telephone sales, and by online intrusions.
Other companies, wishing to peddle their wares, can learn from these
Google profiles your tastes and likely areas of purchase.
The Conservative MP David Davis has put the taxpayer to very great
expense by forcing a by-election on the issue of personal liberty.
How else could terrorists be apprehended in times of peace or war? How
else would it be possible for the Inland revenue to detect tax fraud?
Identity theft is one of the growing crimes of our age. A clever
manipulator of computers can reconstruct from a single electricity
bill, or one credit card, a huge raft of information about us,
including our bank account numbers and even our medical records. Such
thefts are rightly regarded as crimes.
Don’t worry if you aren’t getting an O2 iPhone – nobody else is
either. Especially if they haven’t sent their passport. (Updated;
again)
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008 Registered
in England and Wales. No. 908396 Registered office: Number 1 Scott
Place, Manchester M3 3GG ·
San Francsico Mayor Gavin Newsom (left) with Google co-founder Larry
Page at event held at Google’s Mountain View headquarters last year
In opening an office in the city, Newsom said that Google has saved
some its workers from a long commute down the 101 to the company’s
Mountain View headquarters. Granted, he conceded that San Francisco’s
public transit system faces challenges, ticking off several MUNI lines
that frequently run late or not at all.
“I love this company,” Newsom eventually effused before calling Google
co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who did not attend Thursday’s
festivities, “just wonderful human beings.”
“I have been beating on Larry and Sergey for years” to open an office
in San Francisco. City-dwelling employees who traded city fog for the
sun that beams over Google’s Mountain View headquarters seemed pleased
with their shorter, commutes.
The open house was attended by employees from all facets of Google’s
massive organization, including Google.org and the newbies from the
Doubleclick acquisition. Headlining the event was one of Google’s top
executives and public faces, Marissa Mayer.
“This is a city of doers and dreamers,” overflowing with technology
and new-media companies drawn to a place that celebrates, not just
tolerates, diversity, Newsom said, drawing applause.
Gavin Newsom is a fruitcake and an embarrassment to America, as is San
Francisco. Google should be ashamed of itself to ally itself with a
guy like this.
Michelle Quinn covers computers and digital music. She has chronicled
the digital revolution since 1993, when she wrote for the first issue
of Wired magazine about how computers were changing Hollywood special
effects. She covered Netscape’s 1995 public offering for the San
Francisco Chronicle and rode the roller coaster of the dot-com boom
and bust for the San Jose Mercury News. In the evenings, the Delaware
native can be found at home watching TV shows and movies on her
laptop, with another nearby to surf the Web. michelle.quinn @
latimes.com
As described by Yahoo in a statement released late Saturday, Microsoft
packaged its latest offer with activist investor Carl Icahn, a
billionaire who is seeking to overthrow Yahoo’s board of directors in
a shareholder meeting scheduled for Aug. 1.
Without providing many specifics, Yahoo said Microsoft renewed an
earlier bid to buy the company’s search engine and proposed turning
over the remaining pieces to a board controlled by Icahn.
“It is ludicrous to think that our board could accept such a
proposal,” Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock said in the statement. “While
this type of erratic and unpredictable behavior is consistent with
what we have come to expect from Microsoft, we will not be bludgeoned
into a transaction that is not in the best interests of our
stockholders.”
Yahoo said it unsuccessfully reiterated its willingness to sell the
entire company to Microsoft for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share
— a bid that the software maker dangled in early May before
withdrawing it in a pique over Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang’s
demand for $37 per share.
Yahoo said the proposal that Microsoft submitted Friday “contains a
number of improvements,” but insisted it still wasn’t good enough.
Yahoo offered no concrete details about what Icahn had proposed to do
with the rest of the business, but indicated part of the plan included
selling the company’s Asian operations. The Sunnyvale-based company
pooh-poohed the notion of entrusting its business to Icahn, noting his
inexperience in the Internet industry.
Icahn, who has been challenging corporate boards for more than two
decades, owns a roughly 5 percent stake in Yahoo and hopes to make a
profit by pushing the company’s stock price above $30.
Instead of selling its search engine to Microsoft, Yahoo opted to
forge an advertising partnership with rival Google Inc. That
represented a bit of irony because Google’s dominance of the Internet
search advertising market is the primary reason that Microsoft is
pursuing Yahoo.
But Yahoo’s alliance with Google is being closely vetted by antitrust
regulators because the two companies together control more than 80
percent of the U.S. search advertising market. To accommodate the
review, Yahoo and Google have voluntarily agreed to wait until late
September to begin working together.
Google has quietly ventured into the virtual worlds space with a web-
based 3D chat application called Lively. Does it matter?
Google’s Lively team seem to want you to, uh, hang around in some cool
online chat rooms and exchange virtual hugs. To be honest, the whole
thing seems a bit underwhelming. Its launch reminds me a bit of
Google’s social network site, Orkut. This was another project, like
Lively, that was developed by a Google employee in part of the
“20 per cent time” devoted to individual pet projects, and
another one that has not really set the world alight. Orkut is a
perfectly respectable online community, but of course something of an
also-ran in a world now dominated by My Space and Facebook.
For now, Lively is what we’ve got: that’s the science fact. However,
given Google’s extraordinary scale and the immense possibilities
created by its huge web audience, I can’t help thinking more along the
lines of science fiction, imagining where Google could take this
technology and do something really interesting with it.
Lively will allow online conversations to become realistic as users
‘sit down’ with one another in a virtual environment
The second unique advantage is Google Earth. This is already an
amazing creation, a mirror world of incredible richness available free
on most PCs. You can already see the planet from space, dive down to
the street level and see incredible detail in 360-degree panoramas.
You can already build your own 3D buildings and add them to Google
Earth, and Google continues to add more content to this remarkable
piece of software.
Solid-state notebooks use electronic memory rather than a disk drive,
making them lighter and faster to start up
, Jul 10, 2008 05:27 PM
Sure, Google may have offered up a for the iPhone in the App Store
today, but what about applications for its vast number of services
other than search? I am seriously disappointed.
Blogger and Picasa are probably the two that make the most sense to
have available in a standalone form. But what I was really hoping for
was an application that lets you compose Google Documents on the
iPhone and then sync them with Google’s Docs online. Now that would
have been a very useful app indeed.
It could be that Google is reserving its best for Android, and it
probably should. Given Google and Apple’s love affair with each other,
though, I was expecting more.
I immediately start thinking of Second Life, There, and The Sims when
I peruse . It’s probably not going to end up being a Second Life
killer or anything else killer. It’s simply just another option
for people, but from Google and people generally warm to them pretty
easily. I looked through some of the rooms already created and saw
plenty with between 4,000 and 10,000 visitors. One of the advantages
I see Lively having is that you can embed your room into websites.
You just know Google will promote that through their millions of free
Blogger sites.
To download Lively, you need Windows XP/Vista with either IE or
Firefox. Yep, another cloud based application. We wouldn’t
expect anything else from Google, would we?
With no native application to install, it would likely not be a drain
on your battery. Having an always available connection like 3G or Wi-
Fi would ensure that you can hop in and out of rooms at your leisure.
To top it all off, location based chat rooms and hangouts would be
sure to go over well. Imagine a room full of high school students
talking to each other in front of a landmark. Or virtual tour guides
to answer questions from visitors and tourists. I could see virtual
movie or television sets where you can meet your favorite stars for
some Q&A.
is a former sales rep with a cellular provider. With around 10 years
worth of tech industry experience, he knows a thing or two. But
definitely not three.
… where retail meets industry – The fourth edition of the No. 1
European Navigation Event will take place in the inspiring environment
of the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
“We decided to make this tool freely available as open source because
we feel it will be a valuable contribution to the information security
community, helping advance the community’s understanding of security
challenges associated with contemporary web technologies,” Zalewski
wrote. He added that Ratproxy is intended to complement active
crawlers and manual proxies, as well as other passive proxies.
It was not so long ago, April 1, 2004, when Google mail first
appeared. In 2005 there were 5.4 mln subscribers and 51 mln in early
2007. Do you know how many Gmail accounts were registered…
Users finding email apparently from eBay or PayPal in their inboxes
can thus in future be sure that it isn’t a phishing attempt. Users
will of course still have to be on their guard against other phishing
tricks, such as entering the sender as ‘poypal.com’. According to
Taylor, eBay and PayPal have worked hard on the solution of signing
absolutely all their email with domain keys. Google has apparently
been carrying out successful tests on the method for some weeks, with
no problems or complaints encountered, indeed few users have even
noticed the change. Google is hoping to set a good example for others.
The team behind DKIM is also that other companies will follow suit.
Uptake at present remains slight.
“Obviously, it’s not going to make it harder for someone
planning a burglary to have access to this.”
Internet giant Google has now deployed a fleet of camera cars in
Britain, where critics are branding the site an invasion of privacy.
“No doubt they would have to fuzz out the faces but that doesn’t
mean criminals won’t be able to see when there is a fancy BMW in the
driveway. But I don’t see how you could ban it. There isn’t an
international internet law.”
A spokeswoman said: “Google works hard to make sure our products
respect both users’ expectations of privacy, and local privacy laws,
in each country in which they are launched.”
But law expert Mr Bampton said the company had a lot of work to do if
it was to avoid tricky legal situations. He said: “If a person
is photographed going into a sexually-transmitted disease clinic, you
could argue the information being revealed is personal, so there may
be grounds for a court case.
Special options are available to registered members. for the member
login page or to register as a member.
Your pages should have a clear hierarchy and relevant internal links.
We also recommend creating a Sitemap and using Google’s
Webmaster Tools. These tools are useful, user-friendly and will
provide information such as where your backlinks come from or which
queries visitors used to reach your site.
Update(10:14 p.m.): Google has refused to comment on whether their
position is that a swastika is offensive. They would also not say if
it was an Israel-based employee who made the decision to remove the
entry from Hot Trends, though earlier a spokesperson stated that
delays in getting a comment on the situation were in part due to the
Google Trends team’s being based in Tel Aviv.
Google is evil. They’ve never been a neutral arbiter of anything.
Money is all that matters. Get over it.
Google has refused to comment on whether their position is that a
swastika is offensive. They expected to be honest. Why don’t they
comment if swastika is obscene, or objectionable and HOW.??
Go to H-E-double hockey sticks, Adina. Some of us are quite aware of
the Hindu meaning and prefer to think of that symbolism rather than
the atrocity that the swastika received in the early 20th century. And
unlike you some of us prefer not to continue that atrocity by looking
for the good where it exists and expunge the bad. Rather than, oh, I
don’t know, continue to give some ugly concept any more publicity. So,
again, Go to H-E-double hockgy sticks, Adina.
“Despite the ancient origins of the symbol, most folks today don’t
recognize it as a symbol of Hinduism — its primary meaning has been
its association with the murderous racism of the Nazis”
If the sight of the swastika does offend you, then I may suggest no
traveling Asia east of Pakistan, because you can’t miss it. I think
the most blatant clashing of East and West, in regards to the
swastika, I’ve encountered was in Kochi in the Jewish Quarter, where a
simple spice shop, owned by Indian Jews is named ‘Swastik Spices’. And
the swastika is proudly displayed on their sign, windows, business
card and labels, right facing. i would gladly post the picture from
that establishment, if I could here.
The Hindu swastika runs counter-clockwise – facing the left. The
swastika adopted by the Nazis faced to the right.
Not Canadian, But its interesting to watch this particular story. So
goes the north, so will follow the rest IMHO… so this seems to be
the thing to watch and learn from.
Toronto — Re Google Raises Fuss Over Bell’s Speed Bumps (Report on
Business, July 9): Bell Canada and other telecommunications companies
have been slowing, shaping and restricting Internet traffic for some
time. In addition, the line between traditional television and new
media has been getting blurrier every day. Because of this, the CRTC
is set to revisit its 1999 decision to exempt the Internet from
regulation.
TORONTO — Google on Tuesday branded the use of “traffic-shaping”
technology by domestic phone giants to choke off BitTorrent and other
bandwidth hogs as “unjust discrimination” and contrary to Canadian
law. “The Internet is simply too important to allow Bell and other
broadband Internet access services to act as such a gatekeeper; the
Internet’s myriad benefits can only be fully realized when Canadian
carriers allow end users to choose the applications and content they
prefer,” Google said in a 15-page filing to the Canadian Radio-
television and Telecommunications Commission. The CRTC is weighing the
right of phone carriers to use packet filtering technology to manage
Internet traffic. Google gave its backing to smaller Canadian
Internet-access providers that lease phone lines to provide their
service to Canadians. Bell Canada and other phone giants have told the
CRTC that they should be allowed to hamper serial file-sharers that
greatly slow the time it takes online subscribers to legitimately
transfer music, video, software and other large files.
Subscribe to The Hollywood Reporter and see the entertainment industry
from its best angle: the inside looking out. Complete access to real-
time news and exclusive analysis that goes behind the scenes from film
to television, home video to digital media.
Google’s comments, which were filed with the commission on July 3 and
made public by the CRTC over the weekend, were submitted in support of
a complaint made by the Canadian Association of Internet Providers
(CAIP), a group of independent Internet service providers (ISPs) that
lease network access from Bell.
A spokesman for Bell declined to comment, saying the company would be
filing its response with the CRTC tomorrow.
Bell Canada – a division of Montreal-based BCE Inc. – has faced harsh
criticism from CAIP and other proponents of “net neutrality” over its
policies regarding the flow of content on its network. CAIP is
alleging that Bell is illegally managing their subscribers’ traffic.
“The CAIP complaint is really only the tip of the iceberg,” CRTC
chairman Konrad von Finckenstein told a telecom conference last month.
Some businesses are beginning to leverage social networking sites for
more than just connecting with old friends. They’re being used for
leads, referrals and recruiting.
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Because it doesn’t matter where the logs are housed as long as Google
does business in the U.S.. Housing them elsewhere does not make them
immune to a court order.
Because the use and manner which the records could be accessed would
be spelled out by some binding agreement.
The US-based Google would have half the information; the foreign “data
storage” company would have the other half — and no individual
record could be obtained without bitwise XOR’ing all pieces together.
We just have this compulsion to hang onto everything because we can,
and perhaps with the faint hope that somewhere down the line we’ll be
able to show extreme cleverness to our PHB’s when they ask some inane
question like, “Duh, how many unique IP addresses have accessed our
website since 1991?” and we’ll be able to say, “Give me 10 minute and
I’ll let you know (wag tail).”
> Google has just been stupid here about privacy, and now it’s coming
home to roost in a very public way.
Of course, I’ve never posted, so maybe that’s why.
I guess my IP address does ID “me”, however. My DSL address changes a
lot, but I assume the telco keeps those records… too.
So what’s the strongest form of protection for our personal
information? The famous “possession is 9 points of the law”. We should
possess our personal information and we should have to right to say
who can see it, and when.
(However, some people would no doubt trade away their privacy for
coupon discounts or whatever–but right now we have no choice. Lots of
companies (and of course including Google) collect lots of our
personal information and treat it like *THEIR* property when it should
belong to *US*.)
We may THINK there’s no reason for Google to have to keep logs for 18
months, but these days I wouldn’t be surprised to find there’s some
hidden provision of the Patriot Act, or possibly some law we’ve never
heard of, which it’s illegal for us to hear of or read in the first
place. So maybe there IS a law requiring them to keep it for 18
months, it’s just not one the public is allowed to know of until it’s
used to prosecute them.
Only when there is centralized control of Internet usage is there a
privacy issue. Imagine being part of a cooperative with 34 connections
to various ISPs, and all of the 12000 users in the cooperative using
something like TOR. Standard Internet browser usage would be
anonymized completely. The idea that you should be identifiable comes
from the fact that there is a way currently to identify you. If your
packets arrived to the greater Internet backbone from more than one
source and more than one IP, it would be anonymous, and the ‘grid’
would be truly that. If you and 14999 of your friends decide to make a
mesh network using wireless and landline connections at each node, it
would be impossible for anyone to identify your network habits. It
would also be nearly impossible to cause a network-only outage. Power
loss could still be catastrophic. My point is this, if you truly want
anonymity, you have to work hard for it. Most people don’t want to.
Consequences of that are inevitable, unavoidable, costly.
But as an economic downturn looms, deteriorating ad spending will
likely cramp Google’s style — if it hasn’t already. While Wall Street
largely anticipates a dandy second-quarter — the — we suspect the
economy has finally caught up with the search monstrosity.
That’s fine, but the signs are on the wall that the company is in
retrenchment mode: Last month, with the city, but we suspect timing
was an issue, too — why would a technology company fork over billions
of dollars for a hotel just as the economy slips into recession?
The aborted hotel deal doesn’t represent the full extent of Google’s
penny-pinching, either — the company recently closed a
If you want to give your kids a little more exposure to cooking and
nutritious food, and you’d enjoy the chance to snoop around Google’s
Headquarters, you might want to head to Mountain View this Saturday
for .
And, who knows, he might even be in sunny California right now playing
with a new Google toy rather than fretting about the next instalment
of Dancing on Ice.
The $2 trillion industry put in its worst performance during the first
half of the year since most credible records began
The luxury hotel group wants to buy Island off Guernsey that spent
much of the Second World War under German occupation
* Make bicycling safer for millions of bicyclists around the world. *
Empower world citizens to better adapt their lifestyles to face the
challenges of global climate change. * Help Google realize its core
mission of “organizing the world’s information and making
it universally accessible and useful.”
In recent months, Google has made a serious attempt to green its
image. Last November, the search giant launched .
Smith’s petition may be gaining some traction. In April, he
wrote that the city of Austin is in “” to provide bicycle
directions on Google Maps. He wasn’t able to get more
information than that.
If you’re going to bike somewhere, you’d imagine that it
wouldn’t be much more than 40 kms (24.85 miles or a little over
an hour bike ride) away, right? Cause any more than that and
you’ll have a 3+ hour bike ride there and back. So why
wouldn’t you know how to get to a destination on your bike
that’s only an hour bike ride away? Get a life.
One of the most fascinating ongoing stories in the world of
transportation, I think, is the use of technology to relay real-time
information to users. This runs the gamut from trying to give
motorists immediate information on freeway accidents to using cell
phones to tell someone the bus he’s waiting for has broken down.
The web search and advertising giant Google has recently jumped into
the game with a feature called Google Transit. In some areas, if you
do a search for directions on Google maps, you will also get
directions to reach your destination via mass transit.
As for Google Transit, I spent some time playing around with it
yesterday and came away mostly impressed. It’s quick — quicker than
the Metro trip planner. And to have all that information housed on one
website is pretty convenient.
Some quibbles: I thought the directions were sometimes less than
clear. For example, I asked the site to provide bus directions from
Magnolia Boulevard and San Fernando Road in downtown Burbank to the
Burbank airport. The directions were to take one bus to the Burbank
Metrolink station and switch to the “Empire Building” bus line, which
was followed by this odd note: “Direction — Arrive at Metrolink
station.”
What do you think Bottleneckers? Google Transit? Are you a believer? A
skeptic? The comment board awaits your wisdom….
Google is fast, easy and having all the data in one place is nice.
That said, no one can provide better itineraries and schedules than
the transit provider itsself.
Google also has the ability to infest your computer if they disagree
with you. Their google android project is 2-4 generations from
completion who really needs more from them than a search engine. One
of the grown ups probably thought of guugle ads revenue.
If Metro’s trip planner was nice to use, I could imagine them saying
no to google and keeping the ad revenue for themselves, but the Metro
trip planner is awful.
Google Maps is the best thing since sliced bread. It’s not Google’s
fault that Apple is dumb and only allows limited bits of AJAX to work
on their phones.
While I’m mostly appreciative of this transit system from Google
(thank you Google), I too have a couple peeves to point out…
Nice to know I’m not the only one keeping up on these systems. They’re
very impressive and should be very helpful to many people in the
future. By the way, some Universities already have their own online
transit systems that provide real time data, and many of them are very
impressive. Example:
I don’t bother with the map feature at Metro.net; it’s a joke. The
trip planner also suffers from constant crashes, something I don’t
*think* would carry over into Google (in the long term). I think that
Google’s interface promises a lot more user-friendliness, but I’d want
to know its flexibility: to option for Metro-only or bus-only routes,
for example. Click-and-drag for multiple-stop trips? If either Google
or Metro.net can manage that… HOT.
If you are under 13 years of age you may read this message board, but
you may not participate.
Comments are moderated, and will not appear until they’ve been
approved.
Steve Hymon is The Times’ Road Sage. He covers traffic and
transportation in a region united by a confounding network of freeways
that frustrate drivers daily. The Bottleneck Blog is Steve’s website
home, where he breaks transportation news, reports on traffic tie-ups
and brings a critical but humorous eye to commuting in Southern
California. You can reach Steve at steve.hymon@latimes.com.
Google has added a significant new feature to the tool that
advertisers can use to select the keywords they want to bid for: the
ability to see roughly how many people actually search using those
terms.
The move is probably smart: advertisers love quantitative analysis,
and this gives them more hard data immediately.
) 2 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 9, 2008 8:18 AM PDT Google trends
looks a lot like thatNath Reply to this comment by July 9, 2008 8:18
AM PDT Wow. Targeting? Reply to this comment
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But the rest of the world’s really going to wonder what the big deal
is this time around.
Maybe the applications I was using were slammed by all the new users
Friday, but it took longer than expected to connect to the news feeds
from the AP and The New York Times.
So is the iPhone 3G worth the $2,000 you’ll spend owning and operating
one for the next two years?
In the meantime, I thought I’d add a note about one of the more fun
events related to my book’s release — the opportunity I had, in May,
to speak at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.
If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and
spin in the digital age, do stop by.
Are we the sexiest blog ever? You better believe it, people. Even Amy
Adams (above) says so. And if she didn’t actually say it, you can bet
she’s thinking it.
Technically, you are correct – platform-agnostic data transfer has
been possible since Sun’s earliest RPC implementations. However, this
seems to be considerably lighter-weight (although so is Mount Everest)
and because order is specified, it’s going to be much simpler to pluck
specific data out of a data stream. You don’t need to have an order-
agnostic structure and then an ordering layer in each language-
specific library.
There have been all kinds of attempts to produce this sort of stuff.
RPC, DCE, Corba, DCOM, etc, are programmatic interfaces and handle
function calls, synchronization, etc. OPeNDAP is probably the closest
to Google’s architecture in that it is ONLY data. It’s more
sophisticated, as it handles much more complex data types than mere
structures, but it has its own overheads issues. It isn’t designed to
scale to terabyte databases, although it DOES scale extremely well and
is definitely the preferred method of delivering high-volume
structured scientific data – at least when compared to the RPC family
of methods, or indeed the XML family. I wouldn’t use it for the kind
of volume of data Google handles, though, you’d kill the servers.
I drink the XML kool-aid plenty — but there are things it’s good for,
and things it’s not. Serializing and parsing truly massive amounts of
data is part of the latter set.
We wanted to give an idea of the speed without trying to boast too
much or look like we were directly challenging anyone. Of course every
news outlet has chosen to highlight the speed comment — including the
numbers which were intended to be ballpark figures — more than was
intended, but I guess that isn’t surprising.
In any case, I’m hoping that some independent source conducts some
tests because I think anything we produced would probably have
unintentional biases in it. Of course, I’ll update the numbers in the
docs if they turn out to be wildly off-base.
both really from the same design sheet, but thrift has been
opensource’d for over a year, and has many more language bindings. its
been in use in several opensource projects (thrudb comes to mind), and
has much more extant articles/documentation.
Just wait for the XML zealots to come crashing and not believing that
XML is not the fastest, best, solution to all the world’s problems
(including cancer) and of course people at Google are amateurs and
id10ts and WHY DO YOU HATE XML kind of stuff.
* We only use it as a source format for our tools. XML is far too
inefficient and verbose to use in the final game – all our XML data is
packed into our own proprietary binary data format.* We also only use
it as a meta-data format, not a primary container type. For instance,
we store gameplay scripts, audio script, and cinematic meta-data in
XML format. We’re not foolish enough to store images, sounds, or maps
in a highly-verbose, text-based format. XML’s value to us is in how
well it can glue large pieces of our game together.* All our latest
tools are written in C# and using the.NET platform (Windows is our
development platform, of course). It’s astoundingly easy to serialize
data structures to XML using.NET libraries – just a few lines of
code.* Because it’s a text-based format and human readable, if a file
breaks in any way, we can just do a diff in source control to see what
changed, and why it’s breaking.
Since they’re Google people will clamor over this (as we’re doing
here) and the result will be at least a handful of folks will learn
and use it. Google’s key to success has always been finding fresh
talent and removing barriers from their contributing and advancement
so what I’ve seen they’ve done is A) help train potential employee’s
on how they’re tech and thought process works, and B) provide
themselves a filter by which to gauge the ability for a potential
employee to understand they’re system.
And as a bonus, they help undermine opponents who use competing
technologies by helping train the workforce away from their practices.
Overall I think it’s very intelligent and well done strategic move.
None of the above even remotely applies to anything practical except
UI/display formats — this is why XHTML and ODF (and because of that
at some extent XSL) are usable, SOAP is a load of crap, and for the
rest of purposes XML is used as a glorified CSL with angle brackets.
XML is widespread because monumentally stupid standard is still better
than no standard.
You’ve also missed that they’ve just told the world how the majority
of their systems talk, something most people would find interesting
given how much Google does and the fact that one of Google’s strong
points is mangling huge amounts of data in a relatively quickly
manner.
You think? Take BigTable. Wikipedia describes it as: ‘”a sparse,
distributed multi-dimensional sorted map”, sharing characteristics of
both row-oriented and column-oriented databases’. Sounds, to me, like
a specialized solution to a very specialized problem, a problem that,
I presume, didn’t fit with any existing solution. Same goes with GFS.
After all, do you really think they didn’t evaluate existing solutions
before embarking on building an entirely new distributed filesystem?
Do you really think they’re that stupid?
As for Protocol Buffers, given the existing solutions out there (such
as ASN.1 and CORBA) are generally ugly and/or over-engineered, it
sounds to me like they’re simply addressing a gap in the industry…
after all, XML and SOAP aren’t the end-all and be-all of generic
object-passing protocols.
He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John
Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth”
Google’s just-debuted virtual world is clunky right now, but expect it
to grow into a monster success – and play a leading role in business
as well a social networking.
Google has emerged as one of the leading proponents of open source
software development, as a user of open source technologies and as a
developer of open source code. And as a funding source, Google’s open
source commitment is well known.
The company also recently donated $350,000 to Oregon and Portland
State Universities in support of open source development. Google open
source projects and efforts are documented at the Web site.
I don’t know if we’ll deal with them in a different way, but I think
we’ll be a lot more clear.
We have it structured very carefully so that we can include people in
other countries and also not invalidate the visas of students here in
the U.S. that took part. I think that next time should we do this it
will be a lot clearer up front that this is kind of complicated.
Q: Were there any real standout projects from Summer of Code that just
made you say “Wow”?
The point of the program wasn’t just to create software that everyone
could immediately use and that would change the world, but to create
developers that later on could create software that could develop that
kind of wonderful software. And we think it did that.
For instance we have an article in there from a fellow who is applying
the concepts behind open source into biology. It’s sort of like,
here’s this core open source advance on how it’s been done over the
last six years, and then there are also people who have learned from
open source and what they’re doing, too.
I haven’t done a deep reading of them. If they’re OSI-approved I would
consider them, but I would have to read them.
Q: What has your time at Google been like and has it been a positive
experience for you to work at Google?
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Live Ask
: No info on that. As far as I heard from friends in Bukhara,
everything seems to be more or less ok now….
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Thats a good point. With Google you knew where you stood. They might
use your info to to target advertising. They might reveal it to the
government if ordered to do so. They would not be likely to sell it to
spammers or pass on lists of people who bookmark anti-Islamic sites to
an Al-Qaeda operative. Without google hosting it you need to host your
own or find someone you can trust.
Doesn’t Browser sync already supports encrypting your data? Even if it
doesn’t I am sure this capability can be added now that it is open-
source.
Well, I’d disagree, I think we’re doing fine from a kernel release
perspective. We could do more, and in time, we will, but we only
really started a concerted effort to release changes 3 years ago,
so…not so shabby. Red Hat has been more important than Google or any
linux -user- in the development of the kernel.
Your comments about manipulation are weirdly paranoid. The original
list that Greg posted was 20+ companies long, and originally didn’t
include us, as he didn’t count Andrew to us. He fixed that, and the
post I sent to you was from his talk at Google. It’s part of his
presentation to call out the company he visits, which is one of the
reasons we invited him out.
I’m sure there have been other examples, but this is the first and
possibly only example I can think of of a company *actually
responding* to requests for a discontinued product to be open-sourced.
Let alone actually going ahead and doing it.
I’m sure there’s better examples, but off the top of my head I know
that a few years ago, there was a petition started to release the
source code to [wikipedia.org], an old (yet brilliant) 3D RTS game
that still stands out amongst the crowd today. After a few months
(possibly a couple of years), Eidos scrambled together the source code
and released it to the community.Since then, the Warzone resurrection
project has come leaps and bounds – fixing bugs, improving what
platforms the game runs at, allowing higher resolutions, improving the
AI, etc.The only slight catch (that I’m aware of) is that the Video
CODEC used in the original game was proprietary, so Eidos couldn’t
release the source to that and the company that owns the CODEC
wouldn’t allow it to be distributed any more.
my settings is set to give trolls +1 and flamebait +2.It’s often some
of the most humerous and insightful comments. At other times it’s just
gay fiction.
Google has posted a new feature to its Maps service which allows users
to view the entire route of the Tour de France.
Q: I enter events into AOL’s calendar and program it to send me e-mail
to remind me. Unfortunately, a few months ago, I stopped receiving
e-mail reminders, and AOL has not been able to correct this problem.
Do you know of any other software programs that will let me enter
events into a calendar and receive e-mail to remind me?
You can set a reminder e-mail at the same time that you’re adding an
event to your calendar. Just look for the gray box titled
“options.” Click “add a reminder” to schedule
an e-mail or pop-up reminder from five minutes to one week before the
event. By going through the “settings” link at the top
right of the screen, you can set up your mobile phone to receive
calendar notifications.
The issue, as I’m sure you and the geeks you enlisted know, is that
external 5.25-inch floppy drives don’t appear to exist nowadays. As a
quick reminder, we’re talking about the large disks with holes in the
middle that flopped when you shook them.
Even if you could find an external 5.25-inch drive, it’s far more
likely to have a serial connection than today’s more standard USB
port.
If the data were stuck on 3.5-inch disks, you could order an external
3.5-inch floppy USB drive for $19.95 from FloppyDisk.com. The store
mentions on its site that it can’t find equivalent drives for
5.25-inch disks.
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Mark your calendars for a day full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing: Reps from Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) :
As everyone has noted, the irony is that this time, the Microsoft guys
aren’t the ones under antitrust scrutiny.
The problem is that many mainstream investors have a hard time sorting
out the important aspects of what’s going on at Google from the
unimportant ones. Offsetting the difficulty in separating the wheat
from the chaff is a blissfully short memory that generally means any
Google weak launches or eventual failures are forgotten quickly.
Google remains an essential portfolio holding as they are perhaps the
best technology architecture for modern computing although they
occasionally put out some stinkers. (Requires Windows XP and Internet
Explorer?!)
Developing a good feel for Google as an investment requires an ability
to make more “doesn’t matter” decisions than we have seen with
any technology company in the past.
with a BSD-style license. The code is extensive – in addition to all
the required bits to hook it up to Firefox, you’ll find dozens of
Javascript files involved. Fortunately, the source is reasonably well-
commented, so it’s at least clear what’s happening where, if not how
to move it forward to the current version of Firefox.
In fact, one might speculate as to whether this sort of closed-to-open
strategy could become more formalized and popular. Suppose Google knew
in advance that this was their plan: they could have escrowed a copy
of the source code with some reliable third party, along with a
covenant to release on a certain date unless the covenant was revoked.
Such a plan might ultimately bring us more open source software, by
encouraging innovation with slightly lower risk.
© 2008 OStatic. Design by . Built on fine Open Source Software
from projects like , , , , and .
“The data suggests Google Autos and Google Music,” Hopkins said. “I am
not sure we’ll see Google Government just yet!”
) 2 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 9, 2008 2:54 PM PDT Google has a
specific music search function already Reply to this comment by July
10, 2008 11:32 AM PDT google also has a specific government search
function already.it’s under the “Topic-specific search engines” Reply
to this comment
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Google, for example, offers a promising that Gmail, the online e-mail
component of its overall Google Apps service, will be available 99.9
percent of the time, with service credits extended to paying customers
if Gmail dips below that level.
So naturally there’s some fear with cloud computing: it means you
can’t reboot your laptop or check for blinking red lights on the data
center servers.
“We’ve found working with our customers they want transparency. They
want to know exactly what’s going on all the time,” said Bruce
Francis, Salesforce.com’s vice president of corporate strategy. “If
there’s an issue, they’re not furious; they just want to know exactly
what’s going on.”
“Own your own risk” And some others are even trying to make a business
out of reducing the uncertainties of cloud computing. One is open-
source monitoring and management software company . The company is
working hard to extend its monitoring service to other sites, too,
including Google App Engine, said Stacey Schneider, senior director of
marketing.
“You can’t get away from owning your own risk. This is slowing the
adoption of the cloud,” she said.
That might not be five nines, and it’s for Gmail only today, but
Google chooses to see the glass as half full.
“We talk to customers, and 99.9 percent is mostly much higher than
most organizations with their internal service today,” Chandra said.
The software, AVE Video Fusion, “combines Google Earth-like features
with live camera videos projected on a 3D model” the video caption
says. “This program is NOT Google Earth. It is written from scratch
using C++ and OpenGL.” It runs on PCs and requires no custom hardware.
The El Segundo, Calif.-based company was founded in 2005 by computer
science and electrical engineering professors at the University of
Southern California.
Agarwal’s suggestions are to either set it up as a special page on
compatible blogging platforms so that your writings will show up like
a regular post, or to simply embed it on the page as I’ve done here.
One of the platform’s strong suits is that it lets several people work
on a document at the same time, which your standard blogging platform
likely won’t allow.
We’ve covered several live blogging tools on Webware before. Rafe’s
favorite is . Both offer live updating, and options to let your
readers get notifications and reminders on when live coverage will
begin.
Update: While Google Docs works just fine as a live blogging tool,
there are some things to note about the embed option that some might
consider shortcomings.
I’ve embedded the original live blog after the break, which is simply
the same post as what’s seen above (sans update).
In the top 20 classes of Internet sites toward which Google sent
traffic, only three have no corresponding in-house Google project,
according to Hitwise’s June 2008 research.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t check if your favorite coffee
watering hole (or office) is going the way of $2 gas. According to The
Seattle Times, employees at stores that are facing closure have been
given some extra heads-up to either find new jobs or transfer
elsewhere.
That extra foresight chronicling which stores will soon be going
under, even if their closures have not yet been announced.
Keep in mind that not all of the Starbucks locations listed are
definitely being shuttered. Most listings are based either on rumors
or speculation, since the first smattering of downed stores has not
yet been announced.
Second, fixing the algorithm rather than a specific result, if done
right, helps more than just one particular search. “Often a broken
query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our
ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only
improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and
often for all languages,” Singhal said.
As a reminder, outages for Google Results should not result in data
loss. Google’s GFS (Google File System) backup method is one of the
most rigorous systems used by any data host. As I , a lost copy of
your data on one server is backed up in a dozen other places, so you
won’t even notice.
“For a short period this morning, our users had difficulty accessing
Google Docs. Some Google Apps users were also affected … We have now
resolved the problem. We know how important Google Docs is to our
users, so we take issues like this very seriously.”
Update 2: Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds tells us the problem
stemmed from the servers that control the view of the document
workspace as well as the home document listing. The data where your
documents were stored suffered no down time.
A clause in Google’s 2005 purchase agreement for the AOL stake gives
the Web search leader the right, but not the obligation, to force a
public offering of the shares or a repurchase at fair market value as
of July 1, 2008.
The July 1 date was viewed months ago as a catalyst for the Time
Warner board of directors to speed discussions to spin off or sell AOL
to any interested party, including Yahoo, Microsoft or News Corp.
That is because a similar scenario played out when Comcast sought to
resolve its 21 percent stake in Time Warner Cable in 2003. The two
agreed to buy and divide the assets of the bankrupt cable operator
Adelphia, and the deal eventually led to the partial spinoff of Time
Warner Cable.
Renewed hopes for an AOL sale or merger sent Time Warner shares rising
as much as 2.6 percent on Monday after Citigroup named the company its
top pick within large cap media and entertainment stocks on the
conviction that AOL would be sold or merged into either Yahoo or
another company.
Jason Bazinet, a Citigroup analyst, estimated that the merger of AOL’s
advertising business and Yahoo would generate $900 million of annual
cost reductions.
AOL emerged as one of the most attractive alternatives for a deal with
either Microsoft or Yahoo after Microsoft walked away from its buyout
offer in May, but potential buyers have been wary of its history of
strategic missteps and of sluggish growth in its advertising business.
After Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy its search business and
struck a search ad deal with Google in June, the momentum for Internet
mergers has slowed, analysts said.
Google’s “deal with Yahoo muddies the waters,” said Larry Haverty, a
portfolio manager at the Time Warner investor, Gabelli & Co.
“Nothing’s going to happen,” he said of Google exercising its option
on AOL.
But “it’s looking increasingly less likely,” Lindsay said, that Time
Warner will find a taker for AOL. “There’s less incentive to take it
public now, and less likely that AOL will have a deal with either
Yahoo or Microsoft. It’s back to status quo with much lower energy.”
The country’s new architecture exudes an aura that has as much to do
with intellectual ferment as economic clout.
July 13, 2008 at 2:05 pm Leave a comment