Blue Water Open Source Web Log

Google continues to consider itself the arbitrator of what is right and wrong as they will comply with a Brazilian court order to release information from various hate sites that operate there. Today's edition of the Washington Post goes into greater detail:

Google Inc., which refused in the past year to hand over user search data to U.S. authorities fighting children's access to pornography, said yesterday that it was complying with a Brazilian court's orders to turn over data that could help identify users accused of taking part in online communities that encourage racism, pedophilia and homophobia.

The difference, it says, is scale and purpose.

The arrogance of this company is starting to expand anything that has come out of Microsoft. I have tried to avoid politics in this journal and keep to things that involve the industry, but clearly politics is what is going on with this action. Google, as a corporation is making decisions regarding what it feels is unnecessary in a society and what it feels is tolerable. In addition they are holding what appears to be an aggressive animosity toward the United States which is dreadfully apparent to any observer of their actions.

What disturbs me the most with this entire situation is Google will sell out it's high moral standing if money is at stake. Put cash on the table and they will suddenly become compliant with anything a Nation wants regardless of the consequences.

Google released a statement yesterday saying it was complying with the Brazilian court orders following a ruling Thursday by a Brazilian judge that threatened Google with a fine of $23,000 a day for noncompliance.

Google defended itself by saing the information they refused to provide to the U.S. Justice department was too vauge.

The Justice Department wanted Google's entire search index, billions of pages and two months' worth of queries, for a broad civil case. Brazil, by contrast, is looking for information in specific cases involving Google's social networking site, Orkut.

"What they're asking for is not billions of pages," said Nicole Wong, Google associate general counsel. "In most cases, it's relatively discrete -- small and narrow."

This is an important issue. If Google is going to resist being the search engine for oppressive governments to persecute their citizens then I commend them on their stand. If they are going to be anti-American mouth pieces to a political agenda, then I condemn them in the harshest terms. It appears right now they are attempt to do both and that does no one any good.

A great story in Wired magazine detailing just how valuable the plans for the Playstation 3 are for the future of Sony is the talk of the gaming world right now. After a series of incompetence and arrogant statements, it has become fashionable to bash Sony. This mob mentality will cost Sony deeply in both cash and creditability. No matter how good the PS3 is, it will fight for at least six months to a year to overcome their stumbling out of the gate.

Since the PS3 appears to be a device aimed at winning Sony the battle of next generation video formats, the danger lies in forcing a product into production which the public is not ready for, nor is interesting in buying.

Blu-ray is equally fraught. For starters, the whole business of high-definition disc drives seems designed to invite cynicism. With DVD players now in 85 percent of US homes, sales fell in 2005 for the first time – so some manufacturers may need a next-gen disc player, but it's not clear consumers do. Especially after August 2005, when talks aimed at averting a standards war with Toshiba's rival HD-DVD format ended in a stalemate.

I don't know the statistics on just how many homes have High Def Televisions in them. I do not, nor do I intend to have one until my current Television dies off. I see no rational need to spend that type of money for the limited improvement.

For example, the difference between VHS and DVD was very impressive. The difference between Blu-ray and DVD is not noticeable unless you have a television or projector valued at several thousand dollars. Therefore, Sony is marketing toward high end video users who will buy anything no matter the price. While that makes short term business sense, it's a long term loser.

Looking over a history of Sony failures doesn't bode well for the Ps3

• The entire Betamax/VHS debacle. Sony had a superior format, it didn't matter.
  
• How the company that created a market with the Walkman for easy portable music missed out on creation of the iPod type device is a failure of epic scale. If Sony fails, it will not be because of the Ps3, it will because the missed out on the largest market which was staring them in the face the entire time.
  
• In the gaming world, they had the largest subscriber base with Everquest. They then had the potential to increase that with Everquest II and failed to deliver. Instead everyone now plays World of Warcraft and Blizzard rakes in the revenue which could have belong to Sony On-Line.
  
• Had the greatest license to print money in gaming today, Star Wars. They found a way to drop the ball again with the disaster that Star Wars Galaxies became.
  

In almost all cases Sony shrugged off what their fans and the overall public at large were trying to tell them. Instead they focused on creating their own standards and formats. In each case they seemed to lose those battles. There is an explanation for some of this as pointed out in the article:

At Sony, most engineers want to invent something new by themselves. That's a very different goal.

I am not ready to write off the Ps3 or Sony. Many are pilling on because it's the “cool” thing to do right now. Those same people will be standing in line to get a brand new Ps3 on release date. Since I try not to base my happiness on which console is doing better, I'm hoping that the Ps3 does well and actually delivers on some of what it's promising.

The mob mentality which passes for gaming journalism is not impressive. The same people will be writing just how great things are soon.

I have decided to create my first Open-Source project. It is a very simple project, but here is the basic outline of what I'm trying to accomplish.

Calorie Counting System:

Goal:
To create a web based calorie counting system along with a daily journal option, which will assist dieters to keep accurate track of their food consumption per meal. By using this system the individual user will be able to see the progress of what they have eaten and adjust their meal choices and quantity as the day unfolds, thereby providing a greater chance of success in their weight loss.

Features:
User will enter the food consumed and the calories will be counted for that meal and overall on the day. In addition to the caloric addition, the program will also compute the amount of overall fat in the diet. It will also compute a daily report and track weekly/monthly/yearly progress in an attempt to pinpoint weakness.

Take input based on individual's weight and activity level and subtract that from the calories consumed on a daily basis.

The site will also have the ability to compute exercise length and type, and subtract that amount from the caloric intake and normal body consumption, with the overall goal of having a negative number daily.

Feature Detail:
Design Decisions are still in process. Key Details are:

1. Use of Ajax to ensure the page updates with out reloading.
   
2. Investigation of the best way to store Caloric/Fat Data.
   

There are some additional features that need to be added. As time goes on I'll add to this outline what is necessary. There will have to be a log-in procedure and a way to save data and link it to a specific individual.

I realize this is a simple project and there are a lot of sites out there which already do similar things. I'm not trying to reinventing the wheel. Instead what I'm attempting to accomplish is that I can outline a specific goal, code it, modify the code and made it something useful. I will be posting updates here as things unfold.

An interesting debate has started in the Open Source Community. One of the key players in defining and explaining what that community has to offer, Eric Raymond, has openly stated that it is time for users to pay for proprietary multimedia codecs. This is a direct change and attitude by one of the movement's pioneers and represents a significant compromise. It is Raymond's contention that in order to unseat Microsoft Windows as the preeminent operating system, Linux must have the ability to plug in an iPod and have it work with the ease of iTunes. Raymond further goes on to explain that while these multimedia codecs could be reverse engineered, doing so would create a great deal of legal problems.

Q: How important is it that you get multimedia apps working before that 2008 deadline?
A: Well, as I said in the panel, whenever I try to pitch Linux to somebody who is under 30 and has grown up with the Internet, the questions I get are things like, Will it work with my iPod? Will it work with iTunes? Will I be able to stream with this media format video? Will I be able, in other words, to use the content that’s out there that’s already published?

Q: How difficult is that currently for the average user to do?
A: Quite difficult; if you are prepared to go to the effort and expend a fair amount of copious work and expertise on it, you can actually then manage to put together most of a full multimedia suite, the problem is, you can't do it legally because most of those codecs have not been licensed for use under Linux. However, as it turns out, here’s one big exception to that. There’s an effort called Linspire, you might have heard about. And for complicated reasons, including winning successful trademark lawsuit against Microsoft, they are the only outfit on the planet that has the ability to distribute a lot of these codecs under Linux completely legally.

Several issues here deserve comment and analysis. First and foremost the Open Source Community needs to have an serious debate on just what their long term intention is. Is it to take on Microsoft Windows and end their dominance on the computer desktop, or is it to produce an alternative under their own guidelines and user agreements? Answering this question is the essential point. If it is to destroy Windows than Raymond is 100% correct, getting iPod's and other media working properly becomes the most important feature necessary to supplant Windows at this second. On the flip side, if the community is carving out a niche as an alternative where people contribute to the project because of their love of the work, than it's the need to sell out your ideals simply to get an iPod to transferor files is flat out wrong. (For the Record, you can use an iPod with an Ubuntu distribution right now)

Mr. Raymond is one of the largest voices in the community but also one of the flakiest. He's written books on a great deal of subjects from hacking, business relationships, sexual techniques, and a myriad amount of other titles. If I'm forced into placing my opinion on the table I would state that doing something that you are resistant to do usually leads to even larger compromises down the road and a dilution of what you wanted to accomplish. Therefore, I would not be interested in paying royalty fee's for these Codecs.

Open Source is about the free exchange of ideas and people working together to achieve something greater than one individual could accomplish. In may ways that is an overwhelming naive and simplistic ideal. In many ways it isn't, mainly because of the success it's already achieved. The goal, in my opinion, isn't to unseat Microsoft. To fall to the over inflated ego driven attitude that you can supplant Microsoft, Dell and Intel, who are all joined at the hip, and all it will take is the Apple AAC codec is the definition of delusional thought. Together these are companies worth hundreds of Billions of dollars and they have entered into a business relationship that is reliant on each other and is in fact a money printing operation.

If Mr. Raymond wants to take on Microsoft directly he should look away from the iPod and more toward virtualization. We are nearing a time where you may be able to run any program though any operation system. That is where the future lies. Microsoft has already seen this by stated that Vista will be the last of it's kind.

Interesting article which can hopefully continue to debate forward in the community.

Other Comment Sites on this issue.
Slashdot

I must apologize for the delay in writing on this web log and not keeping up with some of the tutorials. Over the next few weeks and months I will be redesigning a great deal of this entire web site to greater fit my knowledge and expertise. In limiting some of the services I can preform and attempt to display the learning process of software development a bit better, I feel that I can be a more effective professional.

What I do as a consultant is provide basic computer services. I am not an expert in custom programming or scripting to be a contract type employee. What I can do is upgrade hardware, build custom PC's, install both Linux and Windows and finally get new technology products working. Those are my strengths. I am able to construct basic web sites for a business that is looking for a simple business card placeholder type web site. I have contacts with other companies and individuals who can create more technical and bold experiences for the end user.

So I will continue to use this web log to document several things.

1. My writing ability. I need to compose something on a daily basis to ensure I have the quality communication skills necessary to assist customers. In addition, improvements in writing will allow greater chances to morph my career into Technical Writing.
   
   
2. Attempt to help someone who is looking for plain simple advise. I can assist someone by pointing out flaws inherent with technology products and help guide them into a product or operating system they are looking for and will suit them best. I will not be a zealot one way or the other. I have strong feelings in certain areas but am knowledgeable enough to realize that what works in one case doesn't in another.
   
   
3. Documenting the projects I'm working on. I have decided to start some basic development in web based programming and Python/C scripting. In limited amounts I have achieved some success in PHP and Ajax. I will now be expanding that into creation of a specific project which I will outline tomorrow. I have never utilized Python, but it's usage in Linux shell scripting is too powerful to ignore any longer. I will be posting code and walking though the development process as I learn more and more.
   
   
4. Improve my logic skills by looking at daily opinion and news and forming a clearer outlook at technology, it's current usage and future outlook. Look beyond the marketing speak which has plagued the computer industry almost from the moment of it's inception and garner what is tangible and what is hype.
   

These things are the new direction I will be taking this web log. I hope this will provide a more informative narrative for anyone interested in reading it.

Google today showed the first inclination that their decision to censor search engine results in China may not have been the correct choice. While this is encouraging, there is still a great deal of debate about Google's claim to be a "do no evil" company. Speaking in an interview to the British Times On-Line Google Co-founder Sergey Brin admitted the following:

Speaking in Washington, Sergey Brin, Google’s billionaire co-founder, said the company, which operates under the motto "do no evil", had adopted "a set of rules that we weren’t comfortable with".


In a hint that Google could adjust its stance in China in the future, he added: "Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense."

Mr Brin said: "We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference."

Since this is a technology opinion piece, it appears on the outside there is something very calculated in this comment. Calculated in a way that Google is attempting to have it both ways now that some of the heat is on them from users and Wall Street. What is at play by Brin is a move to convince the technology world that they may have made a mistake, but at the same time not ending what they are doing in order to continue to earn money. You can't have it both ways by covering yourself with words that have no meaning.

Google has no plans to leave their Chinesee business model. They will continue to censor results for the Communist Chinesee government because other American companies are doing it. This stance is wrong ethically and anyone criticizing Google for Hypricracy would be correct in doing so.

However, don't look at Google's history of censorship in just China, to further illustrate the point of this is a regular company policy, they are doing the same thing with Google News inside the United States. Google has been dropping a great deal of conservative web sites and blogs under the guise they promote "hate speech". The Washington Times points out the following:

The reality is that Google is a private company, with one important caveat: Google's success depends on search neutrality, meaning that a user will find what he's looking for, not what Google wants him to find. Which is why recent reports, documented by Newsbusters.org, a sister site of the Media Research Center, that Google is censoring political sites on account of "hate speech" threaten the company's vigorously cultivated standing with the public.

As Newsbusters reports, in March 2005, Rusty Shackleford, who runs the conservative blog the Jawa Report, received an e-mail message from Google informing him that: "Upon recent review, we've found that your site contains hate speech, and we will no longer be including it in Google News." A year later, Jim Sesi, who runs the conservative MichNews.com, received a similar e-mail from Google: "We have received numerous reports about hate content on your site, and after reviewing these reports, decided to remove your site from Google news." Two weeks ago, Frank Salvato, who runs the conservative New Media Journal, also heard from Google that his site was being removed, again because of "hate content."

Aside from each of these three sites being largely conservative in outlook, the offending material cited by Google were articles criticizing radical Islam and Islamists. Upon review, the articles contain language no more -- in some cases far less -- inflammatory than the numerous Muslim Web sites a user can find when searching Google News. So, at least on the surface, it's reasonable to assume that it is Muslims who are complaining to Google, which then chooses to avoid further criticism by simply expelling the sites.

Cencsorship is in fact a Google policy in the United States and China. Whenever a search engine decides which results are relevant and which are not, they are becoming a self-appointed gateway. Either you index the sites or you don't, it's that simple. The price of free speech is all sides get their say no matter what they put forth. What Google does by their elitism is inflict policies upon the user and attempting to foster dangerous thought control under the guise of consumor complaint.

Google can try and spin the China decision all they want. Any company that considers itself "non-evil" should not be limiting results by appointing itself a moral judge simply to keep it's stock price high. They can't have it both ways.

In the previous article I spoke of how Google.com's web search is often times filled with sites where are gateways for advertisement This morning while looking over my newsfeeds I saw a story from Tom's Hardware on gaming PC cases. Since I am interested in a new case for my gaming PC and Tom's has a reputation of accurate reviews, I loaded the page to take a look at their opinion. Since I am unable to get broadband access where I live, the pages took quite some time to load, around a minute or so. I was reading other articles, so while annoying it was not a major deal. When I saw the tab was completely loaded, I started to read the story only to see that it had 29 pages to it. Yes, in order to read the entire review article, I'd need to load that page 28 more times ! Needless to say, no review is worth a half hour of wait just to read.

The only content related to the story which was visible was one small box which contained the following.

Case vendors always seek to attract younger buyers with extravagant form factors and outrageous looks. There are, for example, cases geared for gamers that evoke Spiderman or Batman, ready to make themselves at home in a kid's room or a teenager's lair. We look in detail at what five gaming cases, mostly from Asia, offerin in the way of modding fantasy and good 'ole fashioned quality.


However, gaming cases of this kind often lose something from the moment of their conception until when they reach retail channels. Another downside is that, because of cost considerations, many vendors choose to build with plastic, which is a lot more fragile than metal.

That was it for content on page one. Why is it like this ? I use a Firefox extension called adblock which keeps advertisement from popping onto my screen, so for this instance I disabled it and reloaded the page trying to discover what was really there. Once I did this, I counted 31 separate links, images and information for products and web sites which took up approximately 75 to 80 percent of the screen. I'm sorry, this is a sick perversion, sites like this need to go away and Google could do us all a favor and stop indexing them.

I understand the need for ad revenue and advertisement and I have nothing against someone turning a profit, but would you watch a one-hour television show that was broken into 28 parts and each had 50 minutes of commercials on it? Of course not, why bother with a web site that does the same thing. One of the great things about the Internet is there are just too many sites out there who don't treat their readers as click factories and provide the same information. Tom's hardware.com was once a great site, they are a shell of their former self.

Google has been a leader in keeping the tech sector moving forward. Following the dot com boom of the 90's Google made wise business decisions and kept reforming their product, turning their company into a darling of Wall Street after it's initial IPO. While Google's cap has grown to unbelievable levels, there are still some dangers on the horizon.

The rest of this entry will be totally my own opinion Upfront I'll admit that my knowledge of Google's marketing plans and internal business forecast are unknown. I am not an expert in search engines or site indexing. What I will speak as is someone who uses the Internet on a daily basis and has a good eye at noticing trends in the technology field. While I'm not trying to generate any anger with this statement, there is one thing I've noticed recently that makes me wonder if Google might have a rough road ahead, as displayed by some recent problems with investors. This thought revolves around a simple fact, Google's search engine is getting more and more useless by the day.

Search is Google's core product. While they have other products and innovations I'm speaking strictly of what you get when visiting www.google.com. Google built it's reputation as providing quality searches. You enter information and you get relevant results. Those days are long gone. As someone who uses Google to search for problems, information, and articles, I've found that Yahoo now does a far better job of presenting what I'm looking for. When I search Google, often times all that is found is gateway pages designed to provide ad programs, pages that are designed for a single purpose of tricking the indexing spider into listing them high on certain entries or forum entries that are not remotely close to what I'm trying to discover.

The situation gets even worse when a user tries to learn more about various subjects in the tech world involving Windows. I would no longer suggest anyone go to Google when looking for a solution to a Microsoft problem. What you will experience is frustration beyond words. It is easy to find a specific problem, but every site listed will require you pay for the information. In a lot of cases, these sites will not be very reputable. Therefore Google is quite possibly driving people to questionable sites. It is in no way Google's fault, they are not the people designing sites that attempt to do this, however reputable and questionable business have figured out how to get themselves listed number one on searches and that is Google's responsibility.

Search engines are difficult to create. Google has done work beyond expectations at creating a site that goes out to almost every page on the Internet and index's it. The server backbone, bandwidth, and complex coding necessary to do this is an amazing feat of design engineering What I think Google made need to realize is their search engine is at a crossroads. They need to develop the attitude that people are consistently trying to manipulate their ranking system and come up with ways to keep that from happening. It will be a moment to moment battle. Right now, they are losing it.