Moe Lane

I mean, I like Firefox, but dear God but I want this:

Google’s Chrome browser might soon be getting an easy way to tell you which open tabs are making noise, or recording it. The new feature is part of the latest Chromium build, and features a throbbing EQ animation over the noisy tab’s favicon (video below) to tell you and your system that it’s doing audio stuff. Chromium is the open source project that feeds into Google’s Chrome browser, and is often the first place that its new features show up.

Via Instapundit.  I don’t know why this isn’t built into every browser anyway, honestly.

This is awesome.  I know that this post will also make no sense starting Sunday, but that’s all right.

Eric Schmidt’s not very happy with life:

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, gave a remarkable interview this month to the Washington Post. So remarkable that Post editors preceded the transcript with this disclosure: “He had just come from the dentist. And he had a toothache.”

[snip]

“So we get hauled in front of the Congress for developing a product that’s free, that serves a billion people. OK? I mean, I don’t know how to say it any clearer,” Mr. Schmidt told the Post. “It’s not like we raised prices. We could lower prices from free to . . . lower than free? You see what I’m saying?”

Yeah, Eric: you’re saying that your company got mugged by the branch of the legislature (i.e., the Senate) still controlled by the political party (i.e., the Democrats) that you’ve been giving a badly-disguised leg up for some time now, and you don’t care for it.

…Oops?

Moe Lane

Let me explain this one: there’s a debate Thursday that’s being sponsored by FoxNews & Google.  Google is letting people submit questions via YouTube – frankly, this has more than a slight whiff of gimmick about it, but let’s roll with the notion for a moment.  The preliminary survey of submitted questions indicate that the top two categories of questions submitted are “Government Spending” and Debt (17%) and “Jobs & Economy” (16%), with “Social Issues” (12%) and “Energy and Environment” (9%) being the next two.  By my calculations, that means that roughly 54% of the questions being submitted involve one of those four topics, which I think that we can all agree are legitimately of interest to Republican voters, yes?

Well, WE HAVE YET TO HAVE A 2012 REPUBLICAN PRIMARY DEBATE WHERE FIFTY-FOUR PERCENT OF THE QUESTIONS WERE LEGITIMATELY OF INTEREST TO REPUBLICAN VOTERS.  We have, instead, had inane questions at worst and invitations to intra-debate sniping at best. I for one am getting tired of it.  And, apparently, I’m not the only one, either. (more…)

(Via Hot Air Headlines) To summarize this Politico article: Google’s testing out a new ad program that harvests email addresses.  Fine*.  This appeals to political campaigns.  Also fine.  A NRSC staffer saw something that looks like said ad program – one apparently bought by the Obama campaign – on Real Clear Politics last month, and emails Google’s ad people to get a pricing on a similar service.  Still fine. But Google informed the NRSC staffer that:

“This is a pre-alpha product that is being released to a select few clients,” [a Google saleswoman] wrote in an email, referring to the first stage of a product’s roll-out. “I’d be happy to get you into the beta if you’re interested.”

Not fine. (more…)

OK, I admit it: when I heard this morning that Rep. Weiner had supposedly sent a coed a picture of his (encased) genitalia via Twitter, I assumed that somebody was just having his or her little joke by hacking into the man’s account and indicating that Weiner is, as I put it, one of the bigger d*cks in Congress.  But that was before Ace of Spades demolished this argument utterly (H/T: Neil Stevens) (remember, folks [and bad Moe!]: identity theft is a crime), so now I am taking this seriously as a possible scandal, and I found something interesting going on.  Somebody’s scrubbing the recipient’s Internet presence, even as we speak.

(more…)

Well, isn’t this interesting: apparently Blogger/Google has decided to remove Ann Althouse’s blog.  They’re also being neither particularly helpful in either explaining why, nor sounding particularly sympathetic that it’s been taken down, either.  One reason why I never used that particular webhosting service

Wonder if this has anything to do with Ann’s objective (and thus, anti-administration) coverage of the Wisconsin protests?  I certainly hope that it has nothing to do with that…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

THEY’VE DECIDED THAT THEIR NEW LINE OF WEB-OPTIMIZED NETBOOKS WILL NOT HAVE A CAPS LOCK KEY, BECAUSE – I QUOTE – “WE EXPECT THIS WILL IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF COMMENTS ACROSS THE WEB.”

It won’t, of course – as Gizmodo notes, this can be evaded via the trivial exercise of holding down the shift key, assuming that some aggrieved caps locker doesn’t create a mod that addresses the problem – and as Gizmodo also notes, this kind of restriction doesn’t actually fix the underlying problem.  I will add that Google’s willingness to still try to take my choices away from me pretty much confirms that it’ll be a c0ld day in Hell before I buy one of their netbooks and/or use the Chrome browser.  Because if they have a taste for restricting my behavior for the perceived sins of others on this unbelievably minor issue, then what’s keeping from trying to do it for more important things?

THAT’S RIGHT.  NOTHING.

Moe Lane

Update: Backtracking already?

(more…)

FLEE!!!!! (more…)

I’m really looking forward to the day when tech CEOs feel comfortable in saying “Damn RIGHT, I helped kill newspapers! I’m running a business here!” – Matt Welch.

He goes on to suggest a certain amount of shock therapy, which just happens to resemble high school bullying. Speaking as somebody who suffered from it once*, it does have a certain motivational power to it. It does also breed a certain desire for blood-soaked revenge, so caution seems… best.

Via R.S. McCain, who has an Unfortunate Picture.

Moe Lane

*Once. It turns out that diving off of a bleacher your freshman year to tackle somebody does wonders for ensuring a reasonably tranquil high school existence. My only regret is – well, my only two regrets are the lack of a video camera and that I was unable to convincingly froth at the mouth.

Well, I wasn’t looking for popularity. I was looking to do my time and be left the Hell alone.

Prison metaphor deliberate.

Crossposted to RedState.

It’s been wonky for the last two weeks or so now – to the point where I’m pretty much automatically loading up the basic HTML version so that I can read my mail – and now it’s utterly collapsed into a 502 server error mess. Is there a DDOS attack going in, or did the hamsters stop running the wheel, or what?

I shall now publish this, and thus have Gmail immediately load up, simply to spite me.

[UPDATE]  Dammit.

Well, I needed to add my comments policy to the About page anyway.  Short version: it’s whatever I feel like it being, in case that wasn’t obvious already.

It’s come out (via Cynthia Yockey – sorry, Cynthia) that Just a Girl in short shorts talking about whatever got effectively shut down by Google. Again. Details here and here. Like Cynthia, I recognize that the obvious advice – don’t rely on Google for anything about your website that you don’t mind losing if the company decides to turn on you – is unwelcome because it’s so unfair, but life isn’t fair, or even unfair in our favor often enough.

As for videos, though: Heritage New Media Partners offers a free hosting service.  Keep that in mind if YouTube decides to play “Oops, we lost your campaign video” games again next year.

Crossposted to RedState.