Have you seen Google's new Video Search? I heard about it the other day, so having just finished this week's episode of 24, I decided to try it out. Pretty cool, but I want video playback, not transcripts. I can see how this would be helpful though. It could be huge for students and research if it could index local newscasts as well. I wonder how they index the video, anyways... voice recognition? Hmm...
UPDATE: According to their "About" page, it works by indexing the closed-captioning text. Cool.
eWeek reports that Beta 2 will NOT be done by VSLive in 2 weeks, and will be delivered with a "Go Live" license in late March/early April. RC1 will more than likely be ready by PDC2005 in Los Angeles this September.
More at source.
I've seen a lot of posts in the last 24 hours about Google's new rel="nofollow" attribute on hyperlinks. Both Neowin and Google claim that this method will stop comment spam. I cannot stress enough that this viewpoint is absolutely incorrect. An attribute will not stop comment spammers at all. The only thing that the attribute does is stop the Google indexer from adding google-juice to the link. That's it. The link is still there for the users on the site itself, and if you run a .Text blog, you'll still get bombarded with e-mails every time a new comment is posted.
The best bet is to put in a multi-factor comment-spam protection solution that stops comment spam before it ever gets posted. A combination of a good CAPTCHA tool, and comment spam verification from CommentSpam.org is an excellent deterrent.
All rel="nofollow" will do is let Scoble link to people without increasing their Google ranking.
Looks to me like MSN is really starting to get the whole RSS thing. They just launched
new syndication options for MyMSN. I like how it integrates with my.msn.com, so I can get to my sites without a bulky aggregator. Go check it out.. I'm gonna spend some more time playing with it.
My laptop is dead. Long live my laptop. Good thing a brand new Dell Inspiron 8600 is on it's way tomorrow... Now hopefully it's the IDE controller that died on my laptop... and not the hard drive. Otherwise I just lost a week's worth of work.
As I mentioned over on my Open Letter To Microsoft the other day, it seems that many of the "Open Source" people are just "anti-Microsoft" people. If there was any doubt before, just take a look at the Open Source community's reaction to news that Firefox has security flaws. This particular quote was my favorite:
Some ZDNet UK readers took issue with the experts, arguing that the flaw shouldn't be regarded as a security vulnerability, because a Firefox user would already have to have clicked on a phishing e-mail and been taken to a fake site to be at risk. "Where is the problem? I hardly think that a spoofed site would link you to a legit download area," commented Pete Molina, a PC and LAN administrator.
"As far as a 'security hole,' it should be more of a user vulnerability, as only a dumb person goes clicking links in e-mails from odd places," argued Killian, another reader. "Granted, it's nice to know, but come on. Most of these 'announcements' just give the phishermen a reason to try to exploit it."
Basically he's saying that anyone who uses Microsoft stuff is a moron, and anyone that downloads Firefox is definitely smart enough not to click on a phishing e-mail to spoof a URL.
My next favorite not only gets the "Conspiracy Theory" award, but also needs a beating from the Grammar Police:
"Firefox, without a doubt, is the best and most secure browser on the market today, and no matter what propaganda is spread throughout the Net regarding its security in a negative way, those who actually know will continue to use Firefox and wait until the patch is complete, not actually even thinking nor caring whether it is released or not while using it," wrote one Web developer.
Can someone get this guy a freakin period, please?!? Calling that a run-on on sentence is being too nice, I think. From now, on, I say that OS stands for Ostrich Source, because once you're brainwashed by the cult, you can just bury your head in the sand to any threats that are propagated by "the Man".
Forget open standards, these wackos apparently want double standards. What a bunch of elitist crap. "Our people are too smart to fall for that." Wow. Way to kill your credibility guys.
I was watching clips from Bill's keynote... did anyone else notice that
hed made a really poor choice in chairs? Compared to the behemoth that is Conan
the advent... uh, I mean O'Brien, and the fact that it was so freakin wide... it
just made him look really puny. What, does Bill have a big ass? Why did he need
such a wide chair? He should have picked a skinnier chair with a shorter back...
would have made him look more prominent.