A Google "Mistake"?
As the story goes, "somebody" at Google made a mistake and sent out a message about the company's new browser. It wasn't really ready yet, the story went, but Google would release what they had, a browser called "Chrome" in beta form. And that could be exactly what happened, except that I have to be a bit suspicious when something like this happens on what would otherwise be a very slow day for technology news. If you make a mistake on a slow day, the media folks who are looking for a new story will be all over it. You'll get a lot of free publicity. Google has shown that it's quite adept at getting free publicity.
Regardless of who did what, when, why, or how, I did download Chrome. It's clearly beta software. In less than 5 minutes, I had done something to it that caused to to crash and I was able to replicate the crash at will.
According to Google, people are spending an increasing amount of time online and they're doing things never imagined when the web first appeared in 1993. The announcement says that Google developers "began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if you started from scratch and built on the best elements out there." This is all very altruistic, but it doesn't take into account the coming battle between Google and Microsoft. It doesn't mention that Microsoft could take steps to shut Google out of its browser, or at least make Google something that users would have to specifically enable. If Google has its own browser, the playing field is a lot more even.
On the altruistic side, Google says that the company owes "a great debt to many open source projects," specifically naming Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox. Google says that all of its Chrome code will be open source and that the company hopes to "collaborate with the entire community to help drive the [W]eb forward."
It's true that in the past decade and a half, the Web has involved from simple text pages to a delivery vehicle for interactive applications. "What we really needed," Google says, "was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for [W]eb pages and applications."
The beta version is, to put it in Google words, "far from finished." If you download it and install it, you'll see an interesting glimpse into the future. The page is simple and clean, but it's not immediately clear how to accomplish some tasks. Google says that the plan is to make a browser that stays out of the user's way because your experience on the Web isn't about the browser but about the content.
One of the most promising features attempts to accomplish what modern operating systems do: If one application breaks, it shouldn't take down the entire operating system. Applied to the browser, this means that a website or Web application that crashes one tab in the browser shouldn't cause the entire browser to crash.
Add to this a newly developed Javascript engine and improved protection against rogue sites and you might have the beginning of the next generation browser. At least, that's what Google hopes will happen.
But still, there's that cold, hard business logic. The logic that wants to put Google in charge.
Missteps
One of the most serious errors Google made was in its terms of service (which Google refers to as the end user license agreement [EULA]): "By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, and distribute any Content which you submit, post, or display on or through, the Services." Wow! That's breathtakingly broad! Use Chrome to post anything and you will have just given Google full copyright ownership.
Needless to say, the stink that arose was large, malodorous, and fast. So fast that Google back peddled in something approaching 10th gear. I've never seen anyone go faster in reverse. "It was a mistake," Google said, adding that they will fix the EULA and make it retroactive. All very believable, except that Google has made exactly this kind of "mistake" in the past.
In fact, ABC News wonders if Google is turning into big brother. There is ample evidence to support this view. According to reporter Michael S. Malone, "Google's ambitions are bigger than most of us have ever imagined, and the company is now rich enough, and powerful enough, to execute them -- even if it means the short-term sacrifice of a major new revenue source."
So maybe these "mistakes" weren't really mistakes after all.
Beware geeks bearing gifts.
Other Opinions
No shortage there. Here are just a few of the opinions, from thumbs up to thumbs down:
- Google Chrome Shines in First Look
- Serious Potential in Google's Browser
- Could Google Chrome Nuke Microsoft?
- 7 Really Awesome Things About Google Chrome
- Google Chrome lacks polish under the hood
Bottom line: Chrome is free and worth every penny.
Chrome is a good proof of concept, but it's not ready for prime time. A cursory examination of the browser by security experts reveals serious security problems. Even by Google's definition of "beta", this is an application to treat with caution. If you're concerned that the company with the "don't be evil" slogan might someday renege on that promise, you might want to avoid the urge to download.
For more information, visit Google's Chrome (Windows only) site.
Memories ...
Every few weeks, I clean up my e-mail folders. The amount of space freed depends largely on the number and size of large attachments I've sent or received. It never fails to amaze me when the volume of messages deleted approaches 1 GB, which is 63 times the size of my original hard drive and 90 times the size of the original IBM XT hard drive.
In the past two weeks, I had received about 50 large Word documents, each with an embedded image that I needed to extract. Once that was done, I could delete the e-mail message with the Word attachments. Those messages accounted for 50 to 100MB.
While going through my e-mail files, I was also uploading a 1.2GB file to a website. It consisted of those images from the Word document. I had converted them to Photoshop format files, added some adjustment layers to fix problems with some of them, put them all in a zip file, and wanted to place them on the client's website for retrieval. Yes, it does take quite a while to upload a 1.2GB file.
Also, I've just deleted more than 40GB of video files that I won't need any more. When I started the clean-up project, I had more than a terabyte of files stored on this computer. Now it's down to a mere 768GB. Remember when a 1GB drive was more storage than you could imagine filling?
The total available storage on this computer is about 1.5TB (for the math challenged, that would be 1,500GB or 1,500,000MB or 1,500,000,000KB or 1,500,000,000,000 bytes.) This is the total of available space on 2 internal drives and 3 external USB drives. When I first became involved with computers, in the late 1970s, IBM probably didn't have a terabyte of storage capacity. In those days, personal computers had two floppy disk drives. Businesses owned computers with 40MB hard drives attached. The drives sat on the floor and were about half the size of a washing machine.
At the time, a Honeywell 200 (not exactly state-of-the-art even then, but it did its job) had 64KB of core memory in a box that was about 6 inches wide, more than a foot deep, and 18 inches tall. Today you can buy an 8GB thumb drive for less than $30.
The DEC PDP/11 systems that were the backbone of the operation I was working for at the time had, as I recall, 128KB of memory. Some may have been upgraded to 256KB. Yes, kilobytes. Today my watch has that much RAM and today most operating systems won't even load in less than 256MB of RAM; if you want decent performance, you'd better have 1GB. Or 2.
Stupid Spam of the Week
There's not much to this week's stupid spam, but it's the kind of message that somebody who's just a little too curious might fall for. I received a message from Russia about a transaction that had been halted by Russian security. The message wasn't addressed to me, but it claimed to include a PDF document with information about the transaction. So the victim (aka "sucker") might be just curious enough to open the "PDF". That would be a very bad idea.
You know the story about curiosity and the cat. The same holds true for humans. And maybe it's not always just curiosity. Some people probably think that they might be able to find a way to get a refund for the payment they never sent. In that case, I don't really feel very sorry about what will happen to them.
The link to Western Union is, of course, real. At first glance, this looks like a Nigerian 419 scam or maybe just a plain vanilla identity theft operation. The attached file, as you may be able to tell from the icon is a zip file. The PDF is supposed to be inside.
So I saved the attachment, copied it to a thumb drive, and took it to a Mac. It's possible to have a zipped file extract and run, so I didn't want to take any chances. The file inside the zip displayed a PDF icon, but it was actually an executable file. Swapping one icon for another is trivial, but it's enough to convince someone that the file is really just a PDF, particularly if you haven't modified Microsoft's brain-dead file display options.
By default, all current versions of Windows hide the file extension. So if the file displays a PDF icon and Windows doesn't show the file extension, you'll think it's a PDF. I sincerely hope that whoever pushed to hide file extensions by default has been fired. This is probably the dumbest thing Microsoft has ever done. Except maybe for Bob.
So if you're on a Windows machine and you're reasonably cautious, you've saved the attachment and then you've opened the zip file. You've extracted the document from the zip and maybe you've even scanned it with your antivirus program (which will probably give it a clean bill of health). What will happen when you open the "PDF" document that's really a program file?
I don't know and I don't want to find out because I know that whatever it is won't be pleasant.
Nerdly News
Rearranging the Deck Chairs at Yahoo
As of late this past week, Yahoo's stock price had dropped to a 5-year low with no sign of decelerating. The company refused Microsoft's (overly generous) offer of a $47.5 billion and is now resting at a level that's more than $13 billion below what shareholders would received if the company had accepted the May offer of $33 per share.
Yahoo wanted more and wouldn't settle for less. Stockholders, and maybe even company management, would be delighted to get $33 per share now and the board is under intensifying pressure to dump chief executive and co-founder Jerry Yang. Yang is also a member of the board and he has promised to increase Yahoo's net revenue by 25% or more per year for the next two years.
The big question from most observers is "How?"
Yahoo's annual meeting was in August and more than one third of the shareholders opposed Yang's re-election. Yahoo has worked out a deal with Google, but it looks suspiciously like the "joint operating agreements" that were popular with newspapers a couple of decades ago. The JOA had the effect of propping up a declining newspaper for a few years, then allowing the stronger paper to kill the weaker one at will.
Google's free Web browser, Chrome (noted above), will certainly direct adopters to Google searches and away from Yahoo searches. Smart.
SanDisk May Become SamDisk
Samsung Electronics is already the world's largest maker of memory chips. Now it may buy flash memory maker SanDisk. A recent regulatory filing notes that Samsung is considering acquisition of the $3.2 billion company. According to a company news release, Samsung is considering various opportunities concerning SanDisk.
If this happens, it would be a problem for Toshiba, one of the other big players in the market. SanDisk plays its cards close to its virtual vest, admitting conversations with various companies, Samsung included, but refusing to elaborate. Currently Samsung pays SanDisk nearly $354 million per year in licensing fees and the market price of flash memory is dropping.
If you have any doubts about that, consider the advertised price of 8GB flash memory cards: Advertised specials price these at less than $50 and often less than $20. And because flash memory will eventually replace magnetic disk storage, there has been speculation that companies such as Seagate Technology are interested in buying a flash memory company such as SanDisk.
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