EcoblogIT

Take two Rottweilers....full details here.

The sixth of the 10 things that Google has found to be true may indeed be true, but the wording is clever. It doesn't say that Google will not make money by doing evil and however rationalised the reasons for deploying Google.cn are, the fact remains that profit has come before principles.

The Economist gives a somewhat positive report on the launch, highlighting the drop in share price when Google refused to hand over usage data to the DoJ, but I don't buy it. The simple fact of the matter is that Google wants a site in China that performs well enough for it to be able to maximise revenue from ads and increase market share.

The idea of creating a non-commercial web search engine resurfaced when Google began monetising its service, but that was when Google was good. I wonder if, in five years time, we'll look back at the launch of Google.cn as the beginning of the demise of Google?

Especially if you're a reporter and you don't attribute your source.

An article on CNET reveals as much about the iPod's disk structure as it could about you! Apparantly the MAC address of the source of files on a disk-based iPod are stored along with the data....

Mano's Blog explains all.

Wow, why didn't I think of this way of removing negative energy!

In TCH recently I wondered why no one has come up with a better way of getting stuff onto iPods than iTunes. Well Walt Mossberg outlined a couple of enhancements recently.

As Google stock grows in value, seemingly supported by the endless stream of new product launches, are the first signs of weaknesses appearing? At the announcement of "co-operation" between Sun and Google last year Eric Schmidt said that the indexing of non-web content was a big opportunity for Google. By this I took that he meant that monetisation of search results was not limited to the web.

Google's first forays into growing the universe for (Google) search were the Google Toolbar and Google Desktop Search (GDS). The Google Toolbar started this by taking the search functionality away from individual sites. It did this with the introduction of the Current site drop down - no longer do you need to be able to fathom the quirks of each site's search function. GDS took search into the world of corporate and personal data - allowing first local hard drives, then networked drives to be indexed and searched. All with the familiar Google interface.

Both of these products are now looking like they were rushed out and have holes in them that Google do not admit to (unlike the privacy issue with GDS which was fixed). I've noticed this with both tools and in searching for solutions (yes, using Google) have found that I'm by no means alone. The Google toolbar screws up pages that use CSS so that elements appear in the wrong place on the page. Despite apparantly being reported months ago, no fix has been forthcoming. GDS also has problems - most notably that it regularly takes up 100% of the CPU - when this happens it's pretty difficult to even get to Task Manager to kill the process.

Now I'm not saying that Google is doing evil here, but it does shine some light on their testing process. Google Labs and the extended beta of GMail seem to me to indicate that Joe Public is Google's tester and that even when faults are found, they don't get fixed very quickly. Google needs to learn that rushing out half-finished products to perpetuate the PR flow and thus keep the share price propped up isn't going to last for ever. The sooner it realises this the better for us all.

Not very techie, but very funny (also nsfw).London Underground : The Song

I can't believe this worked. Alex Tew of Wiltshire, England set up a blank website and charged advertisers $1 per pixel. 1,000,000 pixels and hundreds (thousands?) of ads later, the Million Dollar Homepage was born. Hmmm... does anybody want to buy a bridge?

Could flash memory someday replace spinning disks in laptops? In about 5 to 6 years says Steve Appleton, CEO of Micron Technology. Flash memory is faster, generates much less heat and its rate of growth is accelerating past Moore's Law. Appleton concedes though that hard disks will still be needed for storage heavy applications.

MIcrosoft brought out a patch ahead of schedule to fix the WMF flaw that hit the headlines last week.

The WSJ (sub. requied) reports that BellSouth is in talks with online movie firms to provide guaranteed delivery of their products over the web. Other telcos are looking at similar deals. Needless to say the likes of Vonage are not keen. Voice telephony is changing, but I'm still not yet convinced it'll all be free.