YouDesigns

MS-Who-o?

Alejandro Wainer — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 18:47:00 +0000

I read that Microsoft is bidding $45 billion for Yahoo. That is at the very least interesting...(see http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/01/technology/microsoft_yahoo/index.htm?cnn=yes )

Leaving aside all other implications - very serious indeed - there is a detail that boggles my mind (or whatever little I have left of it):
Apparently Micrsoft searchers (MSN + Windows (formerly)Live) share only about 9% of the internet search market...!

Think about it: every installation of Windows or IE comes with these search engines as a system default; it is up to the user to actually abandon passivity, jump ship on good ole inertia and change it.

We know in most other respects, users do not like to fiddle around, but I wonder if the search engine has become what the wallpapers/fonts/themes of teenage girls' PC's used to be. (you know, the first thing they "personalized" in their new computers, until the screen was pink, dizzying and illegible, in order to feel "unique")

Maybe being the default setting is actually playing against them... or maybe they just plain suck.

Duck Soup

Alejandro Wainer — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 01:01:00 +0000

MS is apparently upset with Goggle. It feels that the always exponentially growing search engine (lately reincarnated into a giant Swiss army knife) is becoming a monopoly through the acquisition of competitors and its own expansion.
I can't decide if this needs a comment or the sheer absurdity of the situation comes through as first class comedy without any further words....

Of course, it is nothing new that Googs would act as the ruler and ultimate judge of just what the web should be. Their rules for inclusion, disguised only very thinly as recommendations to webmasters have steadily progressed into absurdly restrictive and arbitrary laws.

The penalty is obviously exile - and to be outside of Goggle is certainly akin to virtual death. The ultimate absurdity is that if your website is deemed in violation of these rules, the only way back into their database is by admission of guilt.

No, I am not joking. The reinstatement form request that you explain how you broke the rules and what steps you took to remedy it. The Pope would be proud.

There is no way to ask for an explanation even when you may feel your site is fully compliant. But of course, how could it be? The guidelines make it clear: the rules they publish are not *all* the rules. There are more, but they are not about to tell us what they are...

In the middle of all this megalomania, the end user is left behind. As with any other case in which a company, due to enormous demand and overwhelming share of the market, has the customer by the balls (isn't this more or less the idea of the monopoly thing?) the quality of the service is lagging.

The tendency of Goggle to reward the size and popularity of sites above everything else has filled the first page returns of most searches with links to artificially inflated forums and directories that do little for the end user.

Let me lay down an example: It used to be that if you find your PC infected with a virus or other malware, a quick search for the name of the file in question would return a viable cure somewhere in the first ten positions.

Today such search will most likely take you for a tour of half deserted forums where people poses the question "How do I get rid of X?" in messages without follow-ups.

Searching for a hardware driver will take you page after page containing listings of directories containing listings of searches with results containing listings of directories…. Like in a Zenon paradox, we are doomed never to catch up to the web

So MS pointed its gilded finger towards Goggle, and it is funny to think that they are doing this at a time when their own machinery is fully engaged pushing Vista into our collective consciousness and subjecting our desktops to their own flavour of mediocrity.

Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll sue each other into utter poverty...

A Personal Linux Story.

Alejandro Wainer — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 23:36:00 +0000

Sometime around 1996 I started fiddling with Linux. In order to install my Slackware one-point-something I needed to download countless 1.4 diskette images, burn them and proceed to spend most of the night next to my PC, accepting prompts for installing such or such package and switching diskettes on command.

When all this was done, it came the never-ending chore of finding, compiling and installing the drivers for my devices. My hardware was rather far from mainstream; computing was back then not my work, but my hobby; the main pc - an IBM PS/2, with a 486SX33 processor an a glorious 4 megs of memory - was my son's, so I was limited to the spoils of my garage sale purchases and my scavenging of the free bins in the computer stores.

I owned a number of XTs, 286s and finally this 386 I could use for Linux. It had 2 megs of memory, a plain VGA card and a RLL hard drive of 35 megs that weighted 2 tons and took up most of the case.

And a 9600 modem… Configuring it and the script to dial-up my connection was the single biggest chore in the process. Once I even got banned from my ISP because my letters were leaving the server addressed as "root" from their domain. They never even told me about it - they just cut me off; I had to phone them and find out. They are out of business now; go figure...

Of course I learned by running myself smack against the wall over and over again - not because I was unwilling to stop and ask for directions, but because I somehow enjoyed learning that way. I learned much about computers and computing from those early installations. I'd never do it another way.

Throughout the years I kept informed about the developments in the Linux world. Most of the time I had one system or another going - I abandoned slack when they jumped like 3 numbers at once in their nomenclature -not for that reason, though - I poked RedHat but never got to like it, flirted with Debian and settled finally with Suse.

The problem was, I always depended in very specific Windows apps to do my job, and so Linux remained confined to the playground. And I don't do games, so there is very little to do in a PC when you cannot work or play in it. So I tested distros, re-installed, configured desktops to my taste, setup servers ... in general, I tinkered.

Knoppix was the last step down: I didn't even needed to install anymore; I just booted from a CD an voila! - I had a system going. Linux became a file saver, pc restore utility for me, and no more.

But now my new PC was ready. A monstrosity of power, speed and memory for someone like me, that has always lived a bit on the trailing tail of technology. An AMD64 dual core processor. 2 gigs of DDR2 memory, 512 of video memory in a PCI express card! - A long way to come from my XTs, eh?

Here was a dilemma. I could install Win XP - a 32 bits home edition I own; I can spend a lot of money in getting a copy of XP64 or I can get me a copy of Vista. I downloaded and tested trial versions of these last two and the performance was poor. In particular Vista, seemed to use all the extra processing room and memory I gained by upgrading just to be able to get more toys in my desktop.

To make it even worse my windows applications I so needed to work were buggy or downright incompatible with the new platforms. Time to give good ole' Linux a new test ride...

I got hold of a copy of Kubuntu; a single DVD installation. In about 25 minutes I was all installed and ready to go. All my peripherals detected in the process and handily connected to the LAN.

My PC is faster and more solid than it ever was with any Windows flavour and my system resources are available TO ME, to use them and dispose of them as I see fit. No more a slave to anonymous dlls or unidentified services (svchost.exe, anyone?). If a service is running there is because I wanted it there.

Sure, I keep my older box with XP home, because if a client uses FrontPage extensions I *need* to be able to upload via FrontPage, or a couple of other such cases; but the bulk of my work it is now proudly being done in an ideologically coherent open source environment!

I’ll keep you up to date.

Welcome to YouDesigns.

Alejandro Wainer — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 07:39:00 +0000

This journal will try to be a running comment on the web as a media, and the vicissitudes of the people that tries to populate it. I do not have any illusions about my production: do not expect daily entries or extensive articles - but then, who on the web has time for such things? We are all so busy chasing the hits, the profitable angle, the fun and games…

Nevertheless we do contribute a great deal to this growing nation; I just hope we will be allowed to keep it up, rather than being co-opted by the big global projects and reduced to express ourselves by means of abbreviations and emoticons.

See you all!

Victor Alejandro Wainer; Webmaster and SEO