Reasons why windows sucks! Tuesday, July 8, 2008

I can't stand anymore or go back to windows at any cost. It really sucks. What I intend to do here is consider the accessibility and usability part of windows and why it sucks. I haven't dealt with the copycat part of windows which is to be made a full post like this.

Windows is the biggest scam in the computer world.

I feel windows has contributed to the productivity paradox. It many times remained the cause for the paradox.

This time parasite takes all your time

I'd say the paradox is because of the time you waited for it to boot up or restart after some crash, You must have spent a lot of time watching the windows installer's progress bar to finish installation.

You also might have spent a lot of time on whatever problem that you faced. Lot of them are conflicts. Windows was the real time waster in my business.

Further proof:

Growing bigger and faster

How many times windows updates are automatically installed on your computer. You know it. Do you ever wonder if those updates and upgrades have increased your productivity or did they ever speed up your system in any means?

Truth about updates

The reality is that you waste bandwidth by allowing updates which make no real changes to the OS. By default windows allocates 20% of your Internet bandwidth for automatic upgrades. What if you turn off automatic updates? There are no updates installed but also the bandwidth is also not given back to your normal internet connection. 20% of your Bandwidth is wasted at last.


Wake up People!

Its time to go for a faster computer and a better operating system. Microsoft is making money by selling the latest and greatest operating system.In fact windows does not ship a single useful application with its OS and its the inefficient operating system which makes your computer look like the dumb and slow duck.It's all a part of the scam.

Computer CRASHES are not normal

Believe me, your computer is designed to run for weeks together without crashing and your Intel or AMD processor is just great! Crashing everyday is NOT normal. It is accepted normal because of windows.

How many times did you use windows help and support?

Windows help is pretty useless.What a time waster. How many times did you have had a problem and windows help had an answer? Also I have never solved a problem I had using the Windows Help Troubleshooter.

WinXP help tries to be smarter by taking you to Web but sadly some are broken URLs.

What new features?

Microsoft harps on the new features that they provide with each release. Features that are hardly ever used. I want the computer to remember the last directory I opened and hate opening My Computer and navigating again. This is just one feature that most computer users want. The latest release Windows vista does not even provide it.

Still more there was a feature called spotlight in Mac OS 10 which gives instant access to search files stored on hard disk. Guess what? You must have seen a search bar in the start menu in Vista. After all the big old copy cat has no ideas of its own and including new features from OS X. There are more stuff copied from it. This is the most popular one.

Do you think vista had made life easier? A feature is something that makes the user feel better, not lost in a forest.

Idiotic Behavior

Why does windows blame the user for all the times it had crashed. It also insists checking the hard disk for errors. Meanwhile it also says that the system was not shutdown properly. What a great way to make the user feel something was wrong with their usage.Its not the user's fault that windows crashed. Microsoft take responsibility for its buggy OS.


Windows has a registry

It has such a great thing called registry and its the best and worst part of windows architecture. The best part is it stores all the settings and the worst part is that if your system is infected by a virus you delete something that your anti-virus says. Guess what removing the registry entry makes the system throw an error each time the system starts. It is really annoying if there is something deleted from the registry by mistake.

Busy work

It makes you wait by showing the sand clock most of the time. Windows is busy when you want to get something done. There is no option other than to wait and watch the sand clock disappear. You must have used the search feature in XP which takes all the time of its own to list a few documents.

Viruses are tiny and invisible. They affect the system in big ways. Can you tell me which is the best anti virus? Did you spend a lot of time deciding that? There is no answer. But it depends on the type of virus that infects your system.I'm sure there are millions of viruses out there.

I still wonder how such an OS is in existence. Might be because people did not look at the alternatives.It owes its existence to microsoft's monopoly and marketing strategy.

Its time to look at this page where I mentioned alternatives using free softwares.

SEO and Me Tuesday, July 1, 2008

SEO is Search Engine Optimization and it means optimizing the web sites for its pages to appear on SERPs(Search Engine Result Pages). I would call this rocket science more or less because SEO involves a large set of parameters that determine the page rank. I'm not speaking about the SEO factors here. It runs to a huge list having 100+ parameters.I'm speaking about the unknown side of my business.

You cannot produce instant results

Unless you are running a site that updates news, 3-5 times a day. You cannot see instant results with SEO. In short a web page published yesterday will not show up on the search results today.In terms of long term profit business one who does SEO cannot show results to their customer in a short time. Its up to the people who run the business to convince them about their efforts to their clients.There are some web sites out there who promise "high Google rank"
in two weeks. These are people who either lie or someone who owns a 7+ page rank. The second possibility might not be true because everyone who does SEO is after instant benefits and they undoubtedly commit some mistakes while they don't notice them.Finally its the major corporates whose official web sites fall under the 7+ category.You can be pretty sure that the content you just added to your web site will show up on search engines only when its a news
agency site or your site needs to be 2 or 3 years old with no bad remarks from Google. In fact they never tell you the remarks, they just add it to their knowledge base.

Google is Against us.

Meet Mr.Matt Cutts the head of Google web spam team.He and his team is ruthlessly working against web spam. When Google's web master guidelines are breached to a large extent. Its what they call Web Spam. There are a "LOT" of people around the world working on SEO. These guys are professionals just like me. But there is not CMMi level certification awarded even for those who produce best results. Some companies get a CMM levels for their software and show it up for SEO. Thats a bad thing. There is not standard method of doing sEO. Everyone of these SEO will have their own practices for doing it. But no matter what we do, Google always is against manipulating itself for high rank.No one of us wanted to be manipulated or even cheated and so is Google. They punish web sites if they try some methods to trick the search engine robot for getting a higher rank. They're right on their part. So what is the solution to all this work againsts. Some of the successful people in getting higher ranks( I don't mean SEO guys) are those who followed the Google web master guidelines either intentionally or just a part of building their own site.Wikipedia is one such example. To me right now SEO means following Google's guidelines. In fact following this would give a lot of benefits both for Visitors and Google.

SEO is not Super Easy Optimization

What does it mean? If you start a blog today and slap some ads on it with your "imaginary" visitors and look for income,it doesn't work.Eventually you lose the interest and stop working on it.This is not such a business. I'm working on it for more than a year and its only now I reap the benefits. Believe it or not Yahoo took six months to take one of my pages to top ten in search results. I hate yahoo for doing this. These guys are just too strict,can't blame them for it because they look at quality of the page and put you in a sandbox for long time. Its six months inside the sandbox and I'm out of it now.Google's pretty fast and I'm getting a lot of visitors from Google Search results.

We face problems same as search engines

You type in some query and Google produces a list of sites that are related to that term. Most relevant based on their algorithms.But what runs in the mind of someone who searches is not known. Might be search engines deliver results to you based on your earlier queries.This does not solve the problem.If I want to get a page for the search term "USB driver for P2P". The result pages look as if Google functions flawlessly, yes it is flawless but what goes in the mind of the person who searches is different from the algorithmic results. The person bears in mind the
driver that is used to connect two PC's using USB ports. But the results produced are for the P2P file sharing over the Internet.Any search engine fails on this account. Might be some geek at Google will solve it soon just like they solved the mistyped word with the "Did you mean" feature. This problem with the user's context meaning is also applicable to us. When someone lands on my site and gets content that is not desirable the user experience degrades. This is a small problem when considering the ratio of good vs bad results. But the problem is not solved in anyway.When you start optimizing for some keywords, the combinations that are not wanted are also produced.Take this example "Google is Good. Microsoft Sucks". If I place this on the title of my page. There is a possibility that the page appears for the search term "Google Sucks". The person who authored the page did not mean it. But still algorithmic results suck in this way also. I mean all search engines suffer the same problem as this.

Algorithms keep changing


Google does not have the algorithm same as in 1998, these guys keep revising the algorithm at all times.And this is a problem when SEO starts deviate towards the "Black Hat" kind. Search Engines eliminate black hat techniques as each time the algorithm is revised and this the learning happens cumulatively. Apart from their algorithm their Sand boxing technique changes. In spite of these changes, you try tricking the bot in a big way, you're done, they block your site depending on the penalty that you receive.


How long will SEO survive?


It will survive as long as Internet and web design survives. It is increasingly becoming the integral part of web site design itself.So there is much more opportunities experiment with search engines.With experience it makes a lot of difference to your online presence.Some time in the next 100 years some technology might replace Internet. Till then its good time for people like me.


So,What is SEO?

SEO is advertising for free. I'm not telling its free money,its free advertising. You pay some bucks to Google to get place your ads on the side of search results each time it appears on the results. Why not spend money to be on the search results for infinite number of times. Contact me if you want to apply SEO for your site.

Another SEO tactic,
I just want to know how long does it take to index this post by search engines. So I use this word nivashification which is not on any other page on the web. After this page gets indexed type in nivashification will show up this page.

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