He Says While Posting On His Blog

Here's something a gadget geek like me doesn't want to encounter on his travels on the Innertubes:

Study Finds Growing Up WIth Gadgets Has a Downside: Social Skill Impairment

The first thing that popped into my head reading this was, "But I didn't grow up with a lot of gadgets and I have terrible social skills." But I'm a gadget geek now. So I can't help but wonder if the reverse is more likely to be true. That is, perhaps poor social skills are part of what drives children to enjoy gadgets in the first place.

The Funniest Line I've Seen on Slashdot in a Long Time

Right here.

Windows 7 Beta: Now With 15% More Aggravation

Microsoft has done something new with their new version of Windows. They are allowing people to download a beta copy of their upcoming new Windows 7 operating system. While this is likely a reaction to the tepid reception that their current operating system received, it's a refreshing and forward thinking thing for Microsoft to let people take a look at their software and play around with it before plunking down dollars for it. But this being Microsoft, the download process is full of hoops to jump.

First you have to get a Windows Live ID. Fine, Microsoft has been trying to get people to use this service as a single log-on for websites for a long time and it actually has a useful purpose as it can reduce the number of usernames and passwords that you have to remember if it catches on with a lot of websites and services. Of course, Google has pretty much the same service and it's way more popular than Windows Live (I can actually go to a lot of websites and use Google Checkout to buy things through my Google Account but have never seen a website that allows you to buy things through Windows Live) but I digress.

The real annoyance about downloading the Windows 7 Beta is that it doesn't support web browsers like Firefox or Chrome. You have to use Internet Explorer to download it and you have to install an ActiveX extension in order to download the Windows 7 Beta. Huh? I had barely gotten a third of the way through Slashdot's Windows 7 discussion before finding direct links to disk images for Windows 7 residing right on Microsoft's servers. Just out of curiosity I clicked on one of those links and it started downloading right away. Thanks Microsoft.

Interestingly enough, the direct linked download is downloading much more slowly (Firefox estimates that the download will complete in anywhere from ten to twenty hours) than the download that went through Microsoft's hoops and is downloading through an ActiveX control (the download manager installed by the control estimate that its download will complete in about two and a half hours). So there is a method to Microsoft's madness after all. Poking around the download manager a little more shows that it is making four connections to make the download. Kewl.

It looks like Microsoft is using this ActiveX control to break up the original file into pieces which it downloads through different servers, tracks them, and reassembles them on my PC. Congratulations Microsoft, you've invented Bittorrent, a technology which has been around for years and which is currently being used to pirate your software. Maybe if you had actually used this technology for allowing people to download music and video instead of for hiding your beta software behind it, you might have become the media powerhouse which Apple is today.

Milky Way Galaxy Puts On Weight, Turns Up Speed On Treadmill

Slashdot links to a Cosmos article about a new study which shows that our Galaxy is about %50 more massive and that the sun rotates around it much faster than previously thought. Even though it's a pretty fascinating article with some rather profound implications for our very distant future, I must confess that I'm mostly writing this up as an excuse for the cheesy title I could give to the this blog post.

Google Evil? It's More (And Less) Likely Than You Think

Slashdot reports on a mistake by Google which resulted in an entire domain being blacklisted by Firefox which uses Google's list of bad website for its anti-phishing filter. The top comment by on the website encapsulated an increasingly common reaction towards Google:

"In my mind giving this power to Google is the most objectionable thing related to the company. I know somebody who has had his legitimate business ruined because Google mistakenly added his site to this list. Why? Because it was hosted on the same physical server as a truly objectionable web site.

People need to stop childishly sneering at Windows users and take their focus away from Microsoft. The terrible Goliath is clearly Google now. Even when it's not being evil it causes trouble just by being *clumsy*."

Whether or not you agree with this sentiment, there is still an undeniable kernel of truth to it. Google is now more powerful than Microsoft, the traditional big, evil boogyman of the computer industry. While Microsoft flails about trying to convince people that it is still relevant which weird ads, Google has quietly built an advertising and software empire which affects all of our lives. People instinctively use Google to search for information so much that the word has become a verb in popular culture. The ads on almost every website on the Internet are powered by Google. I personally use Google every day. I'm typing this blog post in Google's Chrome web browser and it will be posted on Google's Blogger website. And when I'm not at my computer, I still access Google on my cellphone. Clearly, Google is no longer the little company started by two graduate students at Stanford running on a computer made of Lego.

Because of this power, when Google makes a mistake, it affects people heavily. A couple of months ago, Google decided that I was a spammer and now I have to solve a CAPTCHA every time that I want to post something on my blog. Some of the twisted, mangled words that make up the CAPTCHAs can be surprisingly difficult to recognize. This can be discouraging at times and as a result, I'm posting a lot less these days. On the hand, spam blogs are a very real problem and Google would be doing a poor job if it didn't try to do something to stop them from proliferating.

As Google continues to grow larger and more powerful, it is natural that people will grow to distrust it. And the consequences of mistakes at Google will become more serious. I doubt if Google will ever be as "evil" as Microsoft whose hardball tactics are notorious in the software industry and which has been fighting off federal anti-trust and patent infringment suits for almost a decade. But Google's actions whether good or evil now have a very direct effect on people and often that effect can be felt directly in the pocketbook. With all this at stake, it's natural that people are going to get upset at Google even as they continue to use its seach engine and software every day—just like Microsoft.

PC Magazine Pronounces Usenet Dead—In Other News, PC Magazine is Apparently Still Alive

I suppose it was inevitable. Every so often, you see someone proclaiming The Death of Usenet. This time it's somebody from PC Magazine and much of the consensus at Slashdot is that he's right. In fact given the recent spate of ISPs dropping Usenet alt.* hierarchy at the behest of the Attorney General of New York, I'd say that the Death of Usenet article was a little late this time around.

And while all this is going on, here I am with a backlog of literally thousands of still unread Usenet messages. Thankfully Usenet clients are a lot more powerful than web posting boards like Slashdot and it is pretty easy to clean up most of the Usenet clutter using kill filters to eliminate trolls and spammers. I jumped ship from my ISP's Usenet feed to a third-party Usenet provider years ago so for now, the culling of Usenet by ISPs doesn't affect me. But it is fascinating to see history—or rather the recitation of history—repeat itself. The conventional wisdom for years has been that Usenet is dying, so naturally every Death of Usenet proclamation is treated with a chorus of "duhs" by people who have no idea that there are millions of people happily reading, posting to, and downloading binaries from Usenet to this day.

I also came to another realization. Other than the occasional rant by John Dvorak, this is the first time that I've read anything from PC Magazine in over ten years. Their website is every bit as hideous as I remember it and I haven't read the paper magazine in almost fifteen years. And yet I read Usenet every day. Now I'm sure that there are millions of people who read PC Magazine every day. And here I am living in an entirely different reality than these people. Am I just weird—well, that's a given. And it's nice to have an outlet for my weirdness on Usenet.

Slashdot Takes On AVG

It's official, I have no life. I've been pouring over a recent Slashdot discussion of AVG's LinkScanner problems. Along with the typically sensationalistic write-up calling Grisoft "slimy" for their product's perfectly legitimate if poorly implemented new feature, the discussion includes a lot of good stuff including how to disable LinkScanner and suggested alternative's to AVG antivirus. It's ironic that Slashdot, the website which first pioneered the Slashdot Effect, which is the term coinedd by how a popular website can knock a smaller website offline by linking to it is up in arms over what is essentially an automated version of the same kind phenomon.