Arbitrary

Yeah, but obviously in the case of the Earth and moon, the Earth is quite a bit larger than the moon. Charon is around half the size of Pluto, so a lot of people consider them like the stars that revolve around each other. They think that Charon revolves around Pluto as much as Pluto revolves around Charon. The Earth is different as it obviously does not revolve around the moon while the moon is also revolving around the Earth. @illini319, yes, it is purely semantics. But then we could say using + to represent addition is semantics. Everything in the world is semantics, like the definition of life is decided by biologists, but who is to know that they are right? Without semantics there really wouldn't be anything to discuss. Although I do find this plant-or-not discussion rather pointless.

Hum...but the point is--are any of Google's products actually out of BETA? I mean, it's search engine obviously is, but besides that? Google sort of seems to be using Beta as a coverup for the releases of its services in case there are any flaws. That way, they can't be blamed in such a harsh manner for their mistakes. Nonetheless, I do like Google Suggest. It's useful, and I end up learning a lot of new phrases or about new things just by chosing some query on the Suggest list. I usually use Suggest when I'm bored and want to find out about something new, though. If it's really something I must get done fast and need to stick to the topic, I just use normal Google search. Faster, and less distracting.

True, true. I thought that was surprising too. I got my site indexed in MSN a lot faster than Google. I even submitted my site to Google, but it still took quite a few months for Google to index it. I agree with your last point too. There must be some kind of competition. Competition always forces corporations to make their services better. It's just like how browser wars are spouting up again, so Microsoft has finally decided to release IE 7. Without competition from Firefox, MS would never have improved. Likewise, without competition, Google wouldn't bother to improve. Personally, though, I think compeition for Google is more likely to come from Yahoo than MSN. Yahoo currently turns up a lot of similar, (and relevant) results like Google does. MSN doesn't have quite as many relevant results. Moreover, both MSN and Yahoo lack one thing Google has--simplicity. If either of them wish to take over search from Google, they're going to have to simplify their search engines. People aren't interested in horoscopes or movies when what they want is to search! Advertising doesn't really do much good either. Anyway, it's very likely that neither MSN nor Yahoo will manage it, and some other little company that comes along will break Google's monopoly.

Yeah, I agree that 1337 is really annoying. But it is quite funny to see it on Google's Language List, as you'd expect that list to contain mostly "official" languages, not some weird dialect of a real language like 1337 or Pig Latin or Bork! Bork! Bork!. I also wonder how people can manage to type in 1337 -- if it's on purpose, doesn't it take quite a bit of work to pull off? Yeah, I like their April Fools jokes. But it's going to be a while before I get tricked again. I've also heard that Gmail originally originated on April Fools Day, so everyone thought that Google was just playing an April Fools joke by announcing that they were offering an email service with so much space. Then eventually those people found out that Google was telling the truth and were shocked. XP

That is definitely very nice. Opera 9 does have something similar though, and I don't want to be downloading too many things, so I think I'll just stick to Opear. In any case, I thought Firefox also had an extension that was similar to this feature? I don't quite remember the name though.

It's good yes, as they are true to their statements. The only problem is: they never seem to be open to giving people new domains. Often times when I try, co.nr just tells me that registration is currently closed and they tell me to check their updates and come back in a few weeks (or sometimes a few months). I come back a few weeks later, and they have the same problem. I'm sure it is possible to register a domain, as I've seen it done before, but it just seems kind of hard. Yep, popups are extremely annoying. IMO, it's better to stick to a subdomain than to move to a domain with tons of pop up ads. It'll look equally, if not more, unprofessional. People will simply hate you. :3 EDIT: I think I'll be trying out hostbidder.com. Seems interesting.

@mpinsky, agreed. It's impossible for mods and admin to force users to change. Users have to be willing to change, and if they aren't willing and are asked to leave, that still doesn't mean they've changed. Often times it is possible to tell if someone isn't a native speaker of English. For instance, I'm sure everyone (English speaker or not) knows about the use of periods and commas. Sure, their usage may not be perfect, but as long as its understandable, that's fine. On the other hand, if that person was using chatspeak, they can't give the excuse that they're nonnative. Get rid of the 1337 first. The basic point would be just to try your best. And if that doesn't work, then move on. Try to improve your English, or go to a similar forum that might be offered in your native language. The newspapers have no excuses though for spelling and grammar mistakes. People, are, after all, buying their service. If I pay for something, I should expect to get some high quality stuff out of it, not some random, thrown-together-at-the-last-minute crap. Forums I can't nitpick as much, as I don't pay to read the posts. And, the editors at the newspapers and magazines are getting paid to look over the articles. That's their job. If they can't do it correctly, the newspapers ought to hire someone else. Spelling matters a lot, IMO. Earlier someone posted that it's possible to read a paragraph without correct spelling, but that only goes for native English speakers. Now if that was a French paragraph written in the same manner, I'd be going, "Huh?" Punctuation usage matters too. After all.I.can't.just.randomly.go;laround.,.;putting...periods,,and,,commas,,everywhere..can I? No. That sentence is incomprehensible, doesn't matter what country you come from. Besides, I always thought most countries used similar punctuation, with the slight difference here and there.

True. Small text can be a major hassle for people with poor eyesight (especially the old). Websites should keep their fonts around 14px so that at least most people can see it. No one enjoys squinting. I don't particularly like white text on a black background either--it just makes for harder reading. The KISS theory has been applied to lots of places, and definitely applies here. The simpler the easier to navigate, and the easier to navigate the more visitors you will have, voila!. Applets can be quite a hassle too, especially if they come without a warning. For instance, if I knew the next loading page was going to be an applet because I knew I was accessing some game, that's fine. But if I didn't know and you decide to use applets for menus or something (I saw a site like this once. Pissed me off), I'm going to be really annoyed. Applets nearly freeze my computer every time they load. Background music is equally bad. 1) They take forever to load. 2) Not everyone may have the same music tastes as the webmaster and 3) Not everyone is in a situation where suddenly having music blast out from their computer is going to be very discreet. (What if someone next door is trying to soothe their crying baby?) As for animation...I've seen it done good and right on websites. (Though currently I've only seen one site that mastered this.) So if you're going to put animations, do it right. Put it in a nondistracting place; make the users amused instead of annoyed. If you can't do this, just skip animations--it won't cost you any to get rid of a possible annoyance. When I first started making a site, I thought marquees were very cool. I used them for nearly every banner, header, or piece of text. After a while, I visited a site with a marquee for a huge chunk of text that I was very interested in reading. As I attempted to read the text, I finally realized how annoying moving text was, the price of patience it could cost the reader. So after that it was "Bye bye" marquees.

True...there are sometimes when it doesn't render sites correctly. (Is it because those sites aren't standards compliant?) You could also just install the IE Tab extension (which I have for testing websites) so that anytime a site doesn't work in Firefox you can use the tab to view it in IE without having to actually open IE. Heh...I've always enjoyed the Bookmarks at the top, (I didn't bother with bookmarks in IE though), but I don't know, I guess Firefox should offer more options about where to place the bookmarks. The more freedom the better. And I've recently downloaded SessionSaver--very useful tool indeed. No more frantic clicking of bookmarks once Firefox loads itself. I had to uninstall and reinstall Bon Echo though--the main Google homepage just came up with a blank "Untitled" page after I attempted to login to my Google account. Weird. But then again, it is still in Alpha, so I can't complain.

Orkut sounds nice, but I have a couple of reasons for not joining. Most importantly, I don't want to get addicted. I have enough addictions, and one more certainly isn't going to help me. Best to save these addictive substances for use when I have a lot of free time. Orkut might be good if I just spent my spare time on it, but obviously that is not going to happen. I've also tried Hi5 -- it's not bad, but I didn't actually use the account. Someone I'd met over the Internet originally recommended me to use it, but since she left, I don't bother. Myspace I tried but didn't particularly care for. I hate the site design on most Myspace sites no offense to anyone. Most of the times there's a million animations and videos that freeze my computer while they are trying to load, garish backgrounds that make it impossible to see the text, and obviously non standards compliant code.

It probably is quite hard..but there is the great firewall of China. They're going to constantly try to improve that. While others are constantly trying to deprove it as well. Anyway, I think this porn and flowers thing is just plain wrong. And I don't see why someone who looks at his porn stuff would also be interested in buying his flowers. There are other, less illegal ways of attracting customers. At the same time, though, ten years is too much. Though he knew the laws.

Very very true. Google has to care about money--every company has to care about money, or else it wouldn't be alive. Google's just different from Microsoft because they use less of the corporate lures and offer better services. And yes, people do have tendencies to blame Microsoft, but most of those tendencies are based on good reasoning. If you offer good service, you get compliments. Now, Google Spreadsheets didn't get the greatest positive feedback, so we're not all defending Google.

Same as Chesso, I feel the site is slightly cluttered. There's plenty of space to be enlarging things (lotsa white space around the actual content), so that might be a good idea to try. Also, those images under the search and category buttons and selectors are kind of confusing. It might be better if they were removed altogether, both to save on clutter and because they might fool people into thinking they're links when they really aren't. The animation of BUY SELL TRADE is also slightly annoying IMHO. Mainly because I tend to associate all animations with ads (and a lot of other users do too, according to this test conducted about the matter), so it might be better to replace it with something more static.Still, overall it's nice--not that confusing to navigate or anything.

I am inclined to agree with you, (for the health of our poor people ) as we do need a couple of hours of relaxation every once in a while. After all, it's not like we can stay up twenty four seven and answer business calls and emails. Of course, the point behind this is that it's not the CEO's choice. Once airplanes begin offering Internet access, their clients will expect some contact even while they are on an airplane. If the clients know this is possible and decide (assume) that you are ignoring them on purpose, they could get pissed. So it all comes down to...what the airlines decide. (I hope they decide for the better) On the other hand, I'm also inclined to say that there isn't anything better to do on a plane anyway. What could you do--watch some movie, listen to music, read a book (if you brought one)? The Internet is at least something extra to chose from, so it's definitely not bad. And even with the Internet, we don't have to be talking to clients all the time--we could be just messing around and pretend to our clients that we don't exist on the Internet because we're not "on". Fixing our boredom is number one. And whichever way works best, I guess we ought to use it.

This question is indeed a very simple question with a simple answer. Xisto indefinitely. Now, I have tried many of the above listed hosts: Geocities -- It was my friends who recommended I try this, so I did. At first, I didn't think the ads were that bad, mainly because I thought that since I was getting a service for free, a couple of ads were okay. But as time went on, I started getting annoyed, so I ended up changing, again because of recommendations from friends. Freewebs -- This time my friends pushed me to Freewebs, and I truly thought they had no ads. I started working on my site--their features weren't horrible (at the time), they, after all, had a text editor. Then I started uploading images and the horror began. You could only upload one image at a time, the Multiple File Uploader apparently cose money. Then, after trying so hard to upload plenty of images, I found out there was a file size limit! That really got on my nerves, and I started Googling for new sites. biz.ly -- I Googled and got co.nr, which told me they didn't offer hosting services and recommended me to biz.ly. They horrible thing about biz.ly--they only offered 20MB of space! Eventually I blew that ground rule and decided I needed a new host. 50webs.com -- They weren't quite that bad, though it's true that they lack a page editor. (But I didn't really worry back then because I rarely used the page editors. I just wished 50webs had a file overwrite button so I didn't have to delete everything and then upload). The thing that really bugged me about 50webs was the fact that they had no support for PHP. I badly needed to move. (Well, I do have a site there still hosted that uses no PHP...of which 50webs is suitable for that site...) And finally, Xisto... I have to say, it's great. I really like the html editor (Yes, I have realized the glory of it), the PHP support, the HUGE amount of space, and finally, no ads! I've also experimented with other PHP hosts (haven't actually hosted with them) like AwardSpace and a couple of others, but AwardSpace lacked support for the mail() function in PHP and this other site that said they offered PHP support actually did not.

Hmm...I don't think there's any drop down menus that can be created by HTML alone. (Or PHP for that matter). But if you're looking for vertical dropdowns that don't have a ton of JavaScript involved, AListApart does a very nice version here--http://alistapart.com/d/horizdropdowns/horizontal2.htm Though the title says 'Horizontal Menu' in their article, it seems quite vertical to me. ( They have another version of this menu that they call 'vertical' but looks very horizontal to me) In fact, if you have Firefox, you probably don't need the JavaScript bit at all to see the menu in action--apparently all of it is taken care of by CSS's hover property. (Unfortunately, since IE doesn't support it, the JavaScript has to be included...)

I opened it in Word, though Word did tell me that my current version of Word didn't support the format the document was in and asked me to install stuff, but I refused. It came out similar to your preview in notepad--there's some garbled text at the top, then there's plenty of content, and finally some garbled text at the bottom. I wonder if this has something to do with page breaks? Because apparently all my garbled text is nested with many page breaks. Also, did he write it in some other language? Often times when I write things in other languages not supported by Word, everything works fine while I'm writing, but after I save the file, close it, and then reopen it, the text becomes garbled.]Also, did you try opening the file in a bunch of different encodings? Maybe one of them will somehow hit the target.

Though I find Google to be a far superior search engine, I disagree there. My site appeared automatically on MSN search (I'm sitting here wondering how?), but it took many months (after a long submission process wait) before Google put it in. Luckily, Google hasn't taken it out. This is probably due to the fact that I don't have many incoming links (currently only two or three, and one of them isn't even in Google's index). Nonetheless, Google does come up with far more relevant results than MSN, thus, I tend to prefer it more. MSN's ads are definitely a major flaw. A clean, simple design attracts a lot of users (like me) who can't stand clutter. It also helps the visually confused--they can easily figure out Google's design and what exactly they're supposed to do on it, while MSN's takes some analyzing. For instance, my grandmother had a hard time figuring out just where MSN's search box was. Waaaay too much clutter. Wow. Really? Very possible....but also very shocking. If that were true, that's such a blatant attack..Gosh. Though, whatever system MSN uses, it doesn't exactly favor itself--when I search Google with the search query "website", it comes up with Microsoft Corporation. When I search MSN for the same thing, it comes up with the Wikipedia definition. I do suppose in this case MSN's search would be more relevant--most users searching "website" probably aren't interested in Microsoft's official website, nor Adobe's, nor George W. Bush's. On the other hand, searching something more relevant to me such as "drop down menus" returns results far more useful from Google than from MSN. Google ranks number one as AListApart, which does provide a great drop down menu example. MSN's number one site is a forum post. And another thing--MSN is very slow while loading. Google takes me around a second to load up its home page, but MSN takes at least three. Usually when I want to quick search something, I prefer to spend very little time in the search engine, and MSN makes that nearly impossible.

@warallthetm, yeah, first you copy it into a normal text file, save as Bouncy.java. And then you need a program to compile it--http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html. (as FearfullyMade said earlier) Then you upload the compiled file--the .class file up onto your website and follow everything else that FearfullyMade said and your applet is all ready to go. Or you can preview with AppletViewer before uploading...that's always very helpful. Anyways, nice tutorial! This explained it a lot clearer than those textbooks in my Java clas...those were quite very boring and dry. (And their explanations were rather technical than understandable )

Thanks everyone. I ran the setup wizard for the router and I enabled encryption on the computer and the router.

Yes, I've listened to a number of people blaming the iPod though the blame could fall on any kind of MP3 player. There was this kid at my school who rode his bike to school everyday while listening to an iPod. Then one day a truck crashed into him and nearly killed him. While he was in the hospital, his parents started telling everyone it was his iPod's fault--his iPod had distracted him from being aware of his surroundings. People are always interested in putting down the popular...

Flash is sometimes nice, depending on the context in which it is used. For instance, some websites use Flash for their banner, but that can often be misleading. Many users associate Flash banners with advertisements and thus tend to ignore the Flash banner even though it may display some important information about the company. I've found myself doing this a lot; and when I found out that the Flash banner was not an advertisement, I was quite shocked.On the other hand, Flash can be really useful for making some pretty GUIs. I actually like Flash sites (except for the ones that are really, really slow at loading), mainly because their design is so mesmerizing. However, in terms of practical use, websites should be made available in both the Flash version (for those with fast connections and appreciate aesthetics) and an HTML version (for those with slow connections). Flash would be really nice in the future when many people have broadband connections and support for Flash.

Hum. That is weird. Perhaps there's a delay time between Google's spiders crawling a site (and saving it somewhere) and actually indexing it and making it appear on Google's website. And maybe the crawled sites are listed when you search for links to a particular site. Eh...confusing indeed.Or maybe there's some cache version of Google saved by your browser and so its viewing that version instead of the currently updated Google? I dunno.

Yep, it definitely is. I think the only problem is that you have to actually learn the input style. Most average users will not think about putting more:option at the end of their search query and thus will not be able to experience this kind of help. It might be nicer if Google could do it automatically, and have a function to let users turn it off (and remember it on their computer) if they don't like it. Clicking advanced search does this automatically, but most users don't bother. Anyway, there are a number of useful Google refine options, like the following: - searchterm > Without the search term + searchterm >> Forces the search of common words that Google normally excludes . searchterm>> Single character wildcard * searchterm >> Any form of the search term that is traditionally used, i.e., if you search "happy*", you will get results such as "Happy Birthday" filetype:searchterm >> Search for things with only that filetype inurl:searchterm >> Search for websites whose URL contains the search term cache:searchterm >> Displays Google's cache of the site intitle:searchterm >> Google searches for the search term inside the title of the site site:searchterm >> Restricts search to within a certain website

As far as I know, Google's 'Add a website' function is really slow. I tried this before, and it took several months before my site actually got added to Google's index. I don't know if they purposefully slow down the adding process if you try to force them to add it or not, but it was slower for me. Another thing--did you try to add an exact page of the site? Because if you did Google might already have that site indexed. If it's already indexed, Google doesn't really want people to continue submitting pages inside the site by hand, as they say their search engine spiders will crawl the site. So that might also be the problem-- Google probably already has these sites listed, just not the exact pages.