I started playing with Google Web Toolkit beta- actually I didn’t really start. Because I had to uninstall IE7 (which I don’t use at all), but hey I’d been curious.

The screenshot above is a ‘warning’ from the uninstall. I think they inserted it to deter people from stopping using it (interesting though how this compares to trailware).

But at the end the best one:

It is always more confusing to offer a negated phrase (”Are you not sure if you don’t want not all files lost on harddrive not being formatted [Y/N]”), instead of defaulting a reasonable choice.

The alert reader might have spotted that I use a french edition of XP (with the Vista L&F) - but everything comes in english?!

BTW: I think IE7 sucks. It is IE6 with tabbed-browsing, a terrible layout of controls and all known bugs. Worst of all: The anti-aliasing. Looks like s**t - if you happen to use Office 2003 you know this reading-layout - just like this, just a tad worse.

They should steal the anti-aliasing from Mustang, that works and looks really good.

PS: I now believe Microsoft invented the browser: It just took them longer than Netscape to come out with it:-) If the big battleship Microsoft is in hurry, some things might go over board

Once upon a time the was a search engine called Google. It had been a friendly search-machine and everyone liked it - not everyone of course , there was this nasty Giant of Redmond that was feared by everyone but also disliked by everyone.

End of the fairy-tale.

Google wants to make more money and “the next big thing” is localized services - if one believes the web to-point-”Ohh!” evangelist - formerly knows as the guys who didn’t get a word a Starbuck’s right and used them as brand names instead - who needs vowels, especially the ‘e’ is largely overrated (See G. Perec La disparition /A Void).
No google.de etc. are fully localized (to target you with more adspam). Also they provide more top-listed sites (It depends which google you talk about)… If I had the choice, they can do so, but what really bothers me is that it ignores whenI search with english or french terms: I still get only german pages… unless NO pages exists in german on the topic. Even if there is a single hit in german all other 200.000.000 hits are ignored…

Don’t say that I have to change my language preferences - they don’t have any effect on that: If you search you have to know now the language domain you want to investigate. My girl-friend is completly fucked: She mainly works translating french texts and when I say french I mean texts in french from France. Sadly Google now prefers Canada (Blame Canada!)…
Well perhaps they’ll improve on that, but actually it is a loss. All google sites looked the same because they were merely portals to the world’s information. The “global village” was too “.” O tied to Google to keep it connected. Now we go back to some regions (and some white(?) spots).
I have nothing against translations and reasonably ranked content, but I don’t like to revise all the weeks if I can still trust my dictionary. The rules must be transparent. The google-quirk can be circumvented (when using english) by querying google.com, but IBM and (guess who?) Microsoft made it worse: They use your IP-address to redirected you to localized content. This is very useful when you are in France and french is your third language (or 5th, 6th if computer languages count). At Microsoft it is just a bit annoying, but there is always the link to the translation (and the (english) original) on the same page and when you navigated a local site you won’t be dispatched without any notice while browsing it (I don’t except nobody to translate any bit of information immediately). IBM nows better: The transferred their mainframe-attitude to the 21st century. You can change your preferences, but you have to navigate away from the current page and you’ll never find the desired content…

A year ago I made a translation of a Wired article “Google vs. Evil”. This article is now four years old, but yesterday I read Jason Bell’s blog and found there a story that reminded me of the older article on Google.
I am not an idiot, I noticed the irony, so read on!
Point is why articles like this start to pop up since Google’s IPO. Before Google going public it had the charm of Linux. Nevertheless, the Wired article questions Google’s submissive attitude towards govermental pressure where nowdays we have to question Google’s pressure on goverments.
The latest Google project Google Print (perhaps not really the latest, but the one that made some waves) causes copyright-holders and libraries to raise concerns on the possible exploit of their property by Google that does not hold any right on them. Google offered copyright holders an opt-out to appease their concerns.
Well in fact if you opt-out this equals destroying your content - Google will not do it explicitly as annonced in the article, but your product will be virtually invisible as Google is the search-engine Superpower. This “either you’ll comply to our conditions or you’ll be eradicated” fits perfectly how the military Superpower acts nowdays.
Google is largely unaffected by govermental regulations unlike Microsoft that sells its products and thus has to comply with some laws. As Microsoft started/relaunched (in a desparate attempt to stop Google becoming the web’s hegemon) its search service everybody had the same concerns that now materialize in Google’s strategy.
I don’t want Microsoft to save me from that but I think something has to be done to limit the abuse of market share to prevent it becoming market power. Our culture that became so much richer by the web (and Google!) will quickly degenerate to MacInfomation when indexing of information will become indexing of products. Let’s face it: Google’s shareholders payed a ridiculous price and money can come only from selling things and as long Google does not sell anything directly the money has to come from content-providers.
In worst case you’ll have the top 1000 hits for “healthy nutrition” referencing the composition of a BigMac because McDo can outgun all other providers of “quality” content. A search Superpower, receptive to money and sufficiently “flexible” in its moral will give big companies a venue to extend their media control to the web.
Perhaps Google is not evil. I hope so. But their must be something like a true choice.