TexasXtreme

I don’t know about all of you out there, but I’m occasionally reminded about how terrible our Tel-Comm infrastructure is compared to the other high technology nations. I’ve about had it with ISP’s who refuse to build out the network and instead keep trying to milk more money from consumers. 

Oh man, poor Granny (Score:5, Insightful)

by ZorbaTHut (126196) on Sunday September 07, @08:09AM (#24909121) Homepage

She’s being victimized by the file traders! And we, the ISPs, are powerless to help! If only there were some way to make Granny’s internet connection higher priority. Some kind of . . . service quality protocol. Quality of Service, perhaps. We could call it that. But no such thing exists, of course, because if it did, we’d be using it by now. And we aren’t. So.

But even if it did, it would rely on web traffic being easily recognizable. And it isn’t! It’s not like virtually all web traffic goes through a specific “port” or anything. And it’s not like HTTP connections are easy to check for and flag as “higher priority”. The technology *just doesn’t exist*, and can never be developed. Ever.

And even if that all existed, well, of course it would be impossible to implement it! For reasons I don’t feel like explaining right now. Just trust me. And I suppose we *could* just buy more bandwidth but, whoops, that takes too much money! Money which we’ve spent on . . . uh, we just don’t have it. That’s right. We don’t have it. It’s . . . I think someone else has it. Ask them. I guess, instead of solving the problem, we’ll just have to whine at the lawmakers until they prop up our badly-designed business. Wait that’s not right. Let me try that again. We’ll have to complain in news articles and attempt to villainize our customers who foolishly took our contracts as contracts. No, no, no, that’s not right at all. Man I just can’t think of the proper solution right now.

Well, to make a long story short, we’re too cheap to solve the problem QUICK LOOK OVER THERE it’s an elderly person who’s being inconvenienced by those damn hoodlums again! Think of your grandmother!

Slashdot | Why Is the Internet So Infuriatingly Slow?.

ESPN - East Carolina controls West Virginia from start to finish - NCAA College Football Recap.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA.

Political Issues Examiner: Fake Sarah Palin Photo and Needless Mischief.

It’s amazing what some people will do with Photoshop. These are fairly sophisticated Photoshops. The creator definitely spent time matching skin tones and matching pixels on the neck line. Seems more than just a joke to me.

The above article goes into detail about the origination of both photos, but I thought I should put the pictures up for all to see:

Google Chrome for Mac and Linux is coming! I like that each platform has a team that understands the target platform. 

One overriding goal we have had from the start has been to build the best browser we can. When it comes to Mac and Linux versions, this means that our goal is not to just “port” a Windows application to these other platforms–rather, our goal is to deliver Chromium’s innovative, Google-style user interface without rough edges on any of them. Chromium’s overall design has been multi-platform from the start, but we are also committed to getting the details right for users on each platform. For an application that most of us “live in” most of the day, rough edges in the user experience or operating system integration are like having a stone in your shoe no matter how well the rest of the product works.

One application, one team

In order to make sure Chromium feels right, each platform’s version is being built by people who live and breathe that platform; the engineers working on these versions are long-time Mac and Linux engineers who are just as picky about the details as anyone. It’s also not just the engineers; Macs and Linux machines are very popular at Google at all levels, so progress is already being followed avidly across all levels of the company.

Official Google Mac Blog: Platforms and Priorities.

There’s much more to the below post, go give it a read. At least in the next 4 to 10 years, we will finally be able to say the Credit Crisis is over. (/Sarcasm off)

We’re entering that exciting phase of any financial crisis when the lawsuits come fast and furious, criminal charges are lodged, and Wall Street firms agree to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for having snookered their customers once again.

In recent weeks, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, UBS and Wachovia have reached settlements with state regulators under which they agreed to pay more than $500 million in fines and penalties. They have also agreed to buy back more than $50 billion in so-called auction-rate securities from retail investors who had been misled into believing that those securities were as safe as shares in money-market funds.

Steven Pearlstein - A Con Game In Pinstripes - washingtonpost.com.

I particularly liked the following paragraph.

What is so telling about these stories — and, rest assured, there will be many more before we’re finished — is that they come only a few years after these same companies reached similar settlements for defrauding many of the same investors during the telecom and dot-com boom. While the fraud back then had more to do with bogus research and accounting and manipulation of initial public offerings, it is clear that they sprang from the same slimy ethical culture that has produced the current credit crisis. Wall Street has become a fundamentally corrupt enterprise in which the motto is: “We’ll do anything for a fee.”

In a way I sympathize with the investors, fraud is fraud. However, when you invest in instruments that you ken nae unnerstan, you bear the risk of the instruments losing money.

I just finished watching McCain’s speech. It was decent; not bad not great. Definitely softer hitting than Palin’s rouser.

There was one line from the speech that I particularly enjoyed which I’ll paraphrase: “. . . when I’m President, I will veto any pork barrel spending bill that comes to my desk. . . ” Sorry for the paraphrase, but when I tried to find the actual transcript, the word veto does not exist in either NPR’s transcript or Instapundit’s transcript. NPR’s page links to an audio file, I remember it being in the first 5 or so minutes of his speech. Maybe McCain actually, you know, read the crowd?

While the classical liberal in me loves the phrase for its content, I think it was about the only part of McCain’s speech where his delivery matched the crowd. The crowd’s spontaneous and charged chants of “U.S.A., U.S.A.” just felt mismatched when compared to McCain’s more or less subdued delivery. When McCain delivered the above line, he sounded and appeared charismatic, energetic, and inspired. Unfortunately for McCain, he then dropped back into his regular pattern. Can you tell there was something he did beyond the plain words that perked my ears? In this swing voter’s non important opinion (I live in Tex., my vote only counts for things other than President) I think McCain’s speech started on a high point and trailed off. 

On another note, his speech did not reek of the usual pandering to fundies that I had gotten used to from these conventions. However, I’m still young enough that my only points of comparison are GW, Gore, and Kerry. 

It’s going to be an interesting two and a half months. Come on Barry and John; give us more ammo for some editorial cartoons!

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Update: It appears a big name news outlet (cough Pajamasmedia cough) didn’t get the memo. This kind of piece follows the MSM’s tactic of bringing in viewers at the cost of following up. I hope the truth makes it out to the Chrome downloaders who subsequently uninstalled. 

Update 2: Emphasis mine; and the bracketed editor quote IS part of the article:

First, Google believes that Chrome could be its Microsoft killer.  Not only does it have the potential to beat MS Explorer, but, fulfilling Larry Ellison’s old dream, it could be a way to let users easily download applications from the Web – and thus circumvent Microsoft’s lock on Office, even Windows, the very core of its business.

But a second reason is more sinister.  Only a few people have noticed yet that in the Terms of Service for signing up for Chrome, Google demands “perpetual, irrevocable, world-wide, royalty free and non-exclusive” license to any materials users create with the browser [Under public pressure, Google retracted the Chrome Terms of Service last night – ed.]
 
And that’s only part of the story:  an earlier reviewer of Chrome, Andrew Cheung of TGDaily, has noted that the browser almost seems to work “too well.”  For example, Cheung found that with a few keystrokes, Chrome will go into an on-line banking site and find account numbers, balances and transaction activity.  Cheung suggests that it is a security flaw in the product.  I’m not so sure.

Microsoft only wanted all of our money.  Increasingly, it seems that Google wants all of our data.  In running away from the Evil Empire, have we now instead rushed into the arms of Big Brother?

I do not agree at all with the Author’s method of alerting his readers that the TOS was withdrawn. Especially the author’s statement that Google retracted the TOS due to public pressure. (See the Official Google Blog post regarding the retraction below). 

Additionally, I think the theory that Chrome works “too well,” is easily explained by Chrome’s unique new way of making each and every browser tab a separate process. This would explain enhanced responsiveness. What I don’t understand is how the Author relays from a reviewer that Chrome is finding account numbers, balances, transaction activity. I find it hard to believe that any court of law would be able to find the TOS enforceable with respect to a web browser being allowed to download personal financial information. I would imagine Google would be opening itself to all sorts of liability if it ever comes to light that they were actually harvesting such information. 

In my humble opinion, I think Google is paving the technical way for better browser technology. So what if that involves a play at usurping Office? 

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Google got their act together and fixed their Terms of Service. Posted below is the full content of the post from Google’s Official Blog. 

9/04/2008 11:22:00 AM
Whenever we release a product in beta as we just did with Google Chrome, we can always count on our users to come up with ways to improve it. This week’s example: several eagle-eyed users andbloggers have expressed concern that Section 11 of Google Chrome’s terms of service attempts to give us rights to any user-generated content “submitted, posted or displayed on or through” the browser.

You’ll notice if you look at our other products that many of them are governed by Section 11 of ourUniversal Terms of Service. This section is included because, under copyright law, Google needs what’s called a “license” to display or transmit content. So to show a blog, we ask the user to give us a license to the blog’s content. (The same goes for any other service where users can create content.) But in all these cases, the license is limited to providing the service. In Gmail, for example, the terms specifically disclaim our ownership right to Gmail content.

So for Google Chrome, only the first sentence of Section 11 should have applied. We’re sorry we overlooked this, but we’ve fixed it now, and you can read the updated Google Chrome terms of service. If you’re into the fine print, here’s the revised text of Section 11:

11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

And that’s all. Period. End of section.

It will take a little time to propagate this change through the 40+ languages in which Google Chrome is available, and to remove the language in the download versions. But rest assured that we’re working quickly to fix this. The new terms will of course be retroactive, and will cover everyone who has downloaded Google Chrome since it was launched.

Posted by Mike Yang, Senior Product Counsel

This is hilarious! For something so innocent and cute, the producers sure cut away mighty fast. 

Below are 2 charts: The S&P500 and the Russel Small Cap 2000. Seems the small caps were great in hindsight. 

Charts courtesy of Stockcharts.com

Google is entering the browser wars with their latest offering, Chrome. Unfortunately, I’ll have to wait till later this evening to test out the beta as the OS X and Linux versions have not been released.  Google designed Chrome from the ground up to take advantage of new web concepts such as Flash, Java applications and of course all of Google’s applications. 

Another nice feature is that every single tab opened in Chrome runs on its own process. This prevents the dreaded RAM hogging that happens to IE8, Firefox, or Safari after a full day of websurfing without closing down the browser in full. When you close a tab, you actually close the tab, memory and all. The folks at Google even created a web-comic to explain Chrome.

Here’s a nice blog post talking about some more features of Chrome with a few snapshots of the comic book. 

Here’s a link to the usual Slashdot back and forth. Read at your own risk. 

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Update: I had a chance to use it this evening on a Windows XP box. I like the dynamic tab features. I like the ability to pop up an Incognito page on my browser. I didn’t like how Flash kept crashing when trying to have 4 tabs with different YouTube videos. However, Chrome seemed stable with 20+ tabs open when they weren’t playing Flash video. Afterall, Chrome is still in its Beta phase.

Additionally, some of the Slashdotters are concerned about the fine print in the License Agreement. Here’s the post on Slashdot. Mini Update: Google has fixed their TOS. 

I’ll use Chrome exclusively when I’m on my XP box, however, the majority of my webbrowsing is spent in Safari and good old fashioned Lynx.