Google & Semantics
So someone counted to see how many of the various Google services have a Beta tag. Almost half, it seems. For people who traditionally assume "Beta" to mean "Not yet quite ready for prime time" that percentage seems to be quite high. But then people shouldn't assume.
As a Google spokesman - a person who obviously produces spokes, a concatenation of words to have no or no known meaning - points out:
... We believe beta has a different meaning when applied to applications on the Web...
Which applies to other words as well. Whereas "Google" is a name to people at Google, to google is something quite differently to millions of people.
Google Special Effects
United Airlines share price has been hammered, because Google News picked up an old reprint about United Airlines being on the brink of bankruptcy in 2002 [it has recovered since]. When Google News linked the article as current news, it was picked up by news aggregators and eventually became a news flash on Bloomberg. Automated trading programs thus dumped United Airlines shares, which fell from $US12 to just three Dollars [a day later it was back at $10].
Spamfest
To some people the web is just an endless spamfest.
It'll be as useless soon as email has become. That spam tip linked above, btw, no longer works.
Solid Engineering
I know why Microsoft needs to advertise Vista. I'm just finishing off another design and yet again I've discovered some harebrained engineering. Some type of cumulative error prevents a drop down menu from working in IE6 depending on the background colour. I kid you not.
Open Redefinition
Google's browser is, according to Google's announcements, an Open Source application. This is, what it says in its EULA:
"You may not (and you may not permit anyone else to) copy, modify, create a derivative work of, reverse engineer, decompile or otherwise attempt to extract the source code of the Software or any part thereof, unless this is expressly permitted or required by law, or unless you have been specifically told that you may do so by Google, in writing".
There are, however, other definitions of Open Source.
Google's Shiny Browser
I would not be surprised, if you've read about Google's Browser somewhere else, or more than enough.
Still, there are questions. Such as why everything one uploads using the browser by the very act of doing so gives Google perpetual, irrevocable, etc rights to use this content.
Or why this browser is available for Windows only, even though all the Open Source components used to create it are available for other systems.
There are, though, people welcoming a new browser. As one poster on Slashdot said yesterday:
I am personally very excited that science has progressed to the point where we can now have tabs above the address bar.
Google Killer killing Hosts?
In a posting headlined Is Cuil Killing Websites Techcrunch reports that there's a lot of noise in forums about Cuil, the search engine that is "the biggest one on the planet" and still doesn't find what you want for many multi word queries.
Site owners are angry that Cuil's spider Twiceler eats bandwidth - big time. Cuil's spider page does state their current IP range in case it's needed.
How Long Can Culture Last if the Language Goes?
Interesting posting about cause and effect[1] and the apparent difficulty of deciding which is which. The consequences aren't disputed, though.
[1] http://technocrat.net/d/2008/8/31/48506
OpenOffice vs TextMaker
I've now created documents from scratch twice with TextMaker and have found several things interrupting my kind of work flow. This leads me to conclude that office type software is not for me [with OpenOffice being somewhat more productive than TextMaker for document creation].
I'll stick to Nedit for most of my "comfortable" editing needs now and use OpenOffice only when I need to tart up some documents.