Off to see the solar eclipse

Rahu

Credit: Nongnit

Amazon Echo hits $99

No doubt Amazon is getting ready to launch the Echo 2 (or Amazon Echo Creators Update Pro for Workstations, North American Fall Edition = AECUPFWNAFE, in Microsoft nomenclature).

That said, I’ve never seen a cheaper Echo. It’s the whole thing. $99.

I use my Echo and Dot constantly as an intercom, and frequently for all sorts of other things.

Use the link on the right and AskWoody gets a small kickback — no cost to you, of course.

Search engine market share – Bing and Yahoo neck-and-neck

Add this to the long list of things I didn’t know.

A tweet from @teroalhonnen led me to poke around the usage statistics for web search engines. Of course, Google’s far out in front. But I didn’t realize that Bing and Yahoo are neck-and-neck. Yahoo, for heaven’s sake.

Statcounter says in July, Google ran 92% of market share, Bing was 2.55% and Yahoo 2.23%.

The big Chinese search engine Baidu (which is probably underrepresented in the results) came in at 1.44% and Russian giant Yandex (also likely underrepresented) was 0.89%. Remember that Statcounter only tallies hits on web sites that it monitors, and, unlike Netmarketshare, doesn’t try to jiggle the figures for parts of the world that it doesn’t cover so well.

Bing’s been on a downhill spiral for the past five years. In July 2012, its share stood at 2.96%. In July 2014, it ran all the way up to 3.84%. Last month’s 2.55% was the lowest score ever.

This in spite of the fact that Bing’s the default search engine — and bloody difficult to change — on Edge in particular, and all versions of Windows 10 in general.

Bezos and Midas – Facebook and Amazon market cap

I don’t usually cover market news, but for those of you who haven’t heard:

Jeff Bezos just became the world’s richest person, with more money than Gates. (Gates, of course, has been giving away tons to his foundation. Nonetheless, he’s still at #2.)

Facebook’s total market capitalization (the total value of its outstanding stock) just hit $500 billion, one day after Amazon hit $500 billion.

For comparison:

Apple about $800 billion
Google (Alphabet) about $665 billion
Microsoft about $570 billion
Berkshire Hathaway about $425 billion
Alibaba about $410 billion

Adobe announces the end of Flash in December 2020

… and not a moment too soon. I can’t imagine how much they’re spending on keeping the holes plugged in the holy mess.

Adobe Corporate Communications:

 we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.

I.e., HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly.

Microsoft’s announcement:

We will phase out Flash from Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer, culminating in the removal of Flash from Windows entirely by the end of 2020.

Good riddance, sez I.

Did you read the fine print, last time you ticked that box to say you did?

It’s a rare occasion that the terms and conditions are fully read and understood, when doing things online or for EULA.

This article, published by CNet.com, is about UK’s Purple experiment – they added a clause about community service in their wi-fi terms:

22,000 agree to unblock sewers (they didn’t read Wi-Fi terms)
by Chris Matyszczyk | July 13, 2017

We’re too keen to get the app, get the Wi-Fi that we’re not going to read the legalistic screed. We just hope it will never be relevant to us.

UK Wi-Fi provider Purple decided to experiment with people’s wholesale acceptance of terms and conditions. It inserted a community service clause into all the legal mumbo and jumbo attached to its hotspot terms.

It read: “The user may be required, at Purple’s discretion, to carry out 1,000 hours of community service.”

 
You can read the full article here

Pardon my (security cert) lapse…

As many of you have noted, the AskWoody site was down for a few hours this afternoon. Ends up that the SSL certificate (the thing that puts the “s” in “https”) expired — and it shouldn’t have.

Anyway, we’re back up and running like crazy…

Today is Net Neutrality day

If you missed our recent blogpost on Net Neutrality, check it out:
https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/net-neutrality-day-is-july-12th-2017-a-call-to-action/

You could also check out:
https://www.savetheinternet.com/net-neutrality-what-you-need-know-now
http://www.netneutrality.com/
https://www.battleforthenet.com/
https://twitter.com/hashtag/NetNeutrality?src=hash
https://twitter.com/hashtag/NetNeutralityDay?src=hash