As a Web developer, I have had a growing hatred towards the impossible-to-please Web browser, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. I find it astounding that a Web browser has remained in such existence for 10 years, but it seems like many corporations just haven’t wanted to risk upgrading to superior, and actually safer, Web browser. What has plagued IE6 to this day is the gross list of incompatibilities it has with standardized practices in Web designing and development. Web developers have always had to include IE6 conditional tags with alternate instructions in order to appease IE6 users – to put it blunt, this has been a pain in the ass. In fact, when I launched GeekGold, I decided to just forget about IE6 compatibility and I have yet to take the time to look at a BrowserShot of an IE6 rendering – I just don’t care.
Well, after a great number of campaigns in hopes of killing IE6 by third parties, it seems like Microsoft has joined the fight! Apparently 12% of the Web is still being browsed by the archaic IE6, with China taking responsibility for most IE6 activity. If you are still using IE6, please, please, upgrade! I would like to take the time to talk you into using a superior browser such as Chrome or Firefox, but if you are using IE6, I really don’t care if you stick with Microsoft. Just upgrade!!
Google provides a huge number of services and web apps to those wishing to use their products. Personally, I am a very heavy user of their products and have nothing but good things to report from my experience using Gmail, Documents, and many more Google services. While it doesn’t happen often with Google, all Web services experience occasional downtime and service disruptions. If you ever find that you are experiencing an issue with your Google service, the Google Apps Status Dashboard provides detailed information and updates regarding any on-going service disruptions and those that have occurred in the past. Google is quite transparent when it comes to reporting issues and always tries to publish the affected percentage of users. While service is disrupted, Google updates users on what is happening up until the issue is resolved.
It’s great to see a company that provides such a plethora of Web services be so open regarding the status of their products. Good job, Google!
Is there anything better than using hindsight to laugh at people talking about something they don’t quite understand? We have all seen clips of people form the 80′s and 90′s discussing computers and the Internet, but the kind folks over at URLESQUE have compiled many of these clips into a great video. Enjoy!
It’s really quite amazing how far the consumer Internet has come since the mid-1990′s. After all, “the Internet is a big city.”
Bandwidth caps are absolutely brutal in Canada. A monthly cap of 60GB is the norm and even high-end packages come with caps under 100GB per month. Luckily, I typically only use about 85% of my monthly bandwidth cap – until this month. With 4 days left before my cap resets I have just 3GB of space remaining – definitely not enough and at $2/GB I don’t want to hand Rogers any money for overage charges.
While trying to conserve my usage this morning I came to the realization that I can just tether my phone to my laptop! I have a monthly cap of 6GB on my phone and have used less than 100MB this month leaving me almost 6GB of data that I can use for my uploading, surfing and media consumption. Sure, the download (~1Mbps) and upload (~0.3 Mbps) speeds aren’t the best, but it is more than usable for 90% of my tasks. The image attached to this post shows my SpeedTest.net data for my tethered connection.
Let’s just file this one under awesome! One of the latest installments to the fabulous “Downfall”/Hitler speech meme involves something near and dear to my heart – ridiculous Internet cost and bandwidth limitations in Canada. As a Rogers customer (wireless, cable, Internet and home phone) I, bizarrely, empathize with Hitler’s hilarious sub-titles.
I am a huge fan of the capabilities of Netflix, but the sub-title author really hits the nail on the head as Canadian bandwidth caps (60GB on a normal plan) make Netflix completely impractical with certain providers. Another issue that is tackled in the video is that major US networks and their online content delivery systems have no problems showing Canadians pre-show advertisements, but we are then greeted with a “Sorry, this content is not available in your country”. Not cool…not cool at all.
I encourage anyone, particularly Canadians, to watch the video embedded below. Kudos to my buddy Andrew for bringing the video to my attention.
This post has little relation to UBB (usage-based billing) as I have been avoiding that topic due to extreme frustration with the telcos and our very own CRTC. In the future I may post a few of my thoughts on the subject, but for now it is best for me to be quiet.
Every once-in-a-while I enjoy performing some basic research using Google Trends. This service allows you to compare various search terms over flexible periods of time and flexible geographic regions. Enter your search terms with a simple comma between them and watch the magical graph appear in front of you. If you haven’t checked out Google Trends before, I highly recommend that you do.
Anyways, I was doing some research into Linux distributions and while I was doing so I was dumb-founded to find a steady decline in searches for the generic term, “linux”. I compared this trend to the various Windows releases (XP, Vista, 7), but the only interesting one that I found was, the now almost 10-years-old, Windows XP, which followed a similar trend – but with a neat relation! Every late-December the Windows XP searches would spike and the Linux searches would valley. There are many possible reasons for this – consumers receiving computers as gifts, increased time to troubleshoot due to holiday time, etc.
It makes sense that the Windows XP search volume would trend downwards as it was replaced by Vista and then Windows 7, but Linux trending downwards may have a different cause. One reason for this decrease, as illustrated by the Ubuntu dataset (notice the peaks at their release points and general rise to a plateau similar to the Linux data) is that individual Linux distributions have taken over for the more generic, Linux, term.
This post really isn’t meant to be overly insightful into the downward trends of Linux and Windows XP, it is more-so a demo showing just how much great data is available to anyone on the Web. Head over there and have some fun on your own!
As a Canadian, one of my favourite online computer retailers is NCIX – always offering top-notch service with very reasonable prices. While they may not always have the lowest prices in the country, they offer a fantastic price-matching program for both in-store and online purchases. NCIX does not guarantee that a price match request will be accepted, but they will do their best to give you their lowest price. Of course, the item must be in stock at both locations, in new condition and have matching model numbers. In order to find the best available prices online, I encourage you to use ShopBot.ca and the recently launched Canada Post Comparison Shopper.
Just yesterday, “Art Project, powere by Google” was released to the public. This Google project takes the Google Street View technology and applies it to top museums around the globe – MoMA (New York), National Gallery (UK), and Palace of Versailles (France) just to name a few! The project is still in its infancy, but provides full-walkthroughs of individual galleries and close-ups of some truly amazing artwork. Copyrights are respected by the Google Art Project and, as such, some works are blurred out and sections of galleries inaccessible – hopefully this will change in the near future.
As someone that enjoys checking out famous galleries whenever in a new city, I think this is an amazing technology that makes the best art in the world accessible to anyone with a computer and Internet connection.
The Microsoft search engine, Bing, was released back in the middle of 2009 in hopes of chipping away at Google’s search engine market share dominance. Bing has slowly been growing (mostly at the expense of Yahoo!) with a reported 12% search engine market share (Bloomberg) in December 2010 (Google at 66.6%). Personally, I am a Google user, but I have heard that the quick and contextual information provided with Bing searches is quite amazing. At some point in the near future I will have to force myself to use Bing for at least a few weeks in order to publish an educated comparison.
Anyways, according to the post “Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results – and denies it” post on the Official Google Blog, Bing has been using obscure search results straight from Google – and Google has some very reasonable proof, in my opinion. After a Googler (employee of Google) noticed a few search result similarities between Google and Bing, Google engineers decided to perform a few tests to see if the Bing algorithm used Google’s own search results in certain situations.
These tests involved setting up, what can essentially be called, a baited trap. Google took random strings of characters that no one would be searching (ie. delhipublicschool40 chdjob) and planted a completely unrelated and single search result. Not too long later, a search for the same string on Bing yielded the same seeded result. A few other similar tests were performed with the same results. Not good for Bing.
What will come of all of this? From the Google post, they are proud of the algorithms they have developed and they have a simple reques – “we’d like for this practice to stop.” Hopefully Bing will remove this element of their algorithm if they have not already done so.
The folks over at Gizmodo posted a browser speed test article this weekend comparing the latest and greatest Web browsers across a variety of tests. While Safari was left off the list all together, beta versions of Chrome, Firefox and Opera were included with their stable counterparts and Internet Explorer 9.
Google Chrome and Opera handily defeated both Firefox submissions and Internet Explorer in all tests except memory usage, where Firefox creamed the competition. Overall, the soon-to-be-released Google Chrome 10 came out on top with the stable Opera 10 a close second when factoring all tests.
What is your browser of choice? Check out the poll on the right!
This post really isn’t meant to be overly insightful into the downward trends of Linux and Windows XP, it is more-so a demo showing just how much great data is available to anyone on the Web. Head over there and have some fun on your own!
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