Posts by Rich

Mozilla mauls Microsoft on IE, Windows 7 bundle

hmm...

I've been thinking about this and come to the conclusion its possible a stalemate.

If you think about it from a bog standard users point of view. This is the scene that comes to mind. You buy Windows but it doesn't have a web browser available. How do I connect to the internet? How do I download firefox or any other browser?

In all my experiance normal users are muppets... they won't think about looking for a copy of a browser on a CD (to be fair how many are available on CD/DVDs these days?) so they'd get windows which is fine but they'd have no access to the net to get anything else. People are lazy, they like to have things given to them on a silver platter and if they're not, they wont use it. For that reason alone MS have probably been the best thing to happen to the internet (in as loose a way I can possibly make it) because they've made it easy and convenient for the average person who really doesn't give a crap about how things work or whats best thing to use... to use the internet.

From there they can learn (hopefully) that there are better alternatives around and will (again hopefully) start using them.

To sum up, I guess what I'm saying is without IE being bundled with windows the internet wouldn't be as good as it is today. Yes its annoying that lots of people stick with IE, but without it they wouldn't be around to spend money online, and thats a vital driving force.

Woman cuffed for deleting virtual husband

sounds daft but..

I'd be furious if that happened to my MMORPG characters.

Yeah it's just a game but unlike most games its a little more involving, lots of relationships are developed over time and lots of equipment / skills, which all take months of relentless grinding (usually) to get back.

AVG fake traffic spares Google AdWords

This is dangerous tech

At the moment its easily identified which means it can be dealt with for 2 reasons:

1) the good reason: reduce bandwidth, just serve up a basic page

2) the bad reason: hide whats really there

Either way, leads to a false sense of security to the user, since they assume its scanning the actual content of the page.

If they make it more tricky to detect, then its going to have some dodgy implications, if it uses my user-agent and IP then essentially my details are stored on the webservers logs even if I didn't click the link. In all my time using google, I'm more than aware that even on basic searches for "computer memory", something messed up can sneak in.