This is the only new thing i could notice, most probably there were other updates as well. If you frequently use paypal you can notice that almost every 2-5 days maintenance is performed. I find this feature quite handy and saves me some time, especially when i need to check on my invoices and bills.

TIPS FOR PAYPAL USERS:

1) NEVER, and i mean NEVER click links in emails which look bogus to you. Browse manually to paypal.com and login. Find more info in paypal security center.

2) Make sure you are protected! A simple antivirus won’t do. I highly recommend you use an anti-keylogger every time you do transactions online or use paypal/your credit card. Heck use an anti keylogger every time you log in somewhere. You don’t have to fear viruses, you have to fear keyloggers!

I personally recommend AKlog NT+ which runs in background and doesn’t affect any processes. It is free to use and doesn’t bug you with annoying pop-up purchase messages. You can check more info on AKlog NT+ Help page.

3) Never log in to paypal from public workstations(pc’s at school/work/net cafes), because you don’t know anything about the security of those PCs.

4) If it’s possible use a virtual keyboard and type in your username and password using the mouse pointer.

5) last but not least remember that you can NEVER BE TOO SECURE. Take precautions and avoid difficulties.

Along with the new nav, the Gmail Team added new shortcuts also:

“We’re also adding keyboard shortcuts: v for “Move to” and l (lowercase L) for “Labels.” Make sure you have keyboard shortcuts turned on to use these.”

These add-ons are great, but in my  point of view Gmail has the huge lack of tabbing,  i really like at yahoo mail that you can view lots of messages in tabs by this way letting you copy/paste and check stuff with a lot more ease.

Lets just hope that in the near future Google will come up with a solution for this issue also.

About 3 hours ago i checked my email, went out with my girlfriend and now when i got back i had a huge surpise! A brand new default theme for Gmail with a tooltip showing that i can select from a variety of themes. I rushed to the Gmail blog and found the post about the latest addon: Spice up your inbox with colors and themes.

Now, this my friend is a pwnage addon! I’ve been waiting for this for such a long time! I can finally get some darker colors( i don’t really like bright colors, becuase after a while they are unpleasant for the eye).

Currently this addon was implemented only in Gmal and not into Google Apps also, but the time when Gmail from G Apps will be updated is really close.

What’s next?

If we’re lucky the Gmail Dev team will make it possible to create custom themes and use or share them with other gmail users. Now this would be an other really cool feature, because gmail would be taken to the next level in the personalisation matter.

Back in the days people said “Alexa ranking isn’t very accurate”, shortly after that line became: “You can’t rely on Alexa ranking”, and now we can easily say that “Most definitely you can’t rely on the Alexa ranking”, which in the near future might become “Alexa ranking is unsiginficant”.

I’ve been noticing this for quite a long time now, especially in the past month when i kept a closer look on the Alexa ranking of serveral websites(including my own) and noticed that the rankings are so inaccurate that its almost like they are from a science fiction movie.

The thing that i noticed at my own blog is that alexa shows a huge drop in the rank, even though the traffic to my blog is increasing day-by-day. I’ve looked up stuff on google and found that many people recommend us to put an alexa traffic widget on our website to increase our ranking. Even if this is true, and the widget does increase the alexa ranking of a website why on earth would I ruin my design by adding that widget?

Previously i mentioned that i kept a closer look on several websites. I have a website which is in development and receives about 100uniques/day which generate ~ 200page views and it has a rank of about 140,000 and the graph shows that the ranking will be better. No alexa widget, no alexa rank increasing bots, no nothing. Well call me stupid, but at my blog i have 2000-5000 pageviews/day and it shows a huge traffic drop.

To be honest i don’t give 2 cents about Alexa rank, but its not what i think, it’s what others think: that Alexa rank is indeed important and they should consider it. Yeah right!

So basically the GMail team implemented this feature to prevent people from sending accidental messages while being drunk.

When Goggles is active in order to send a message you will have to answer some maths questions in a specified time frame(you can set the difficulty and the time when Goggles is active).

The PC(and in some cases the MAC) isn’t a cellphone on which with your eyes closed even in alcoholic coma you can send a TXT message. One thing’s for sure: when your drunk you don’t sit down in front of the PC,login to gmail and start sending crazy emails, when your drunk you can’t even hit the correct buttons.

My personal opinion about this is that either some of the guys from the GMail team can think clearly and compose messages while they are drunk after a friday night party or they simply ran out of ideas.

Lets look at the facts: GMail has been in Closed and Open beta for like 4 years now. As far as i know your keeping a product in beta while your testing it and adding new features and facilities which you don’t consider stable and consider that they need testing and enhancements.

The brand new gmail is the best email account provider that you could choose. It beats yahoo at security and features, it’s more simple to use and runs on the AJAXSLT framework, by this way giving the user even more flexibility.Gmail has millions of users worldwide, and yet Google is still keeping it in BETA. Weird isn’t it?

Yahoo Messenger 9

The new messenger features a way more sleeker GUI(General User interface) and even more echanced features than the ones in YM 8.

As you can see in the preview on the right the Friend’s list has been completely reshaped the friend’s having their avatars net to their name and status, and emoticons now appear when you put them in your status.

If you hover a friend in your Friend’s list his details will appear and the Fully-sized avatar, which is now bigger than the size in YM 8.

File sharing and Entertainment just got way easier, because stuff is now more organized letting you to have more flexibility and enjoyment.

The new YM features a new generation of emoticons, this means if you like the emoticons in YM 8 than you will LOVE the emoticons in YM 9, they are bigger, cooler and more fun with new emoticon additions!

With YM 9 you can send files up to 2GB/file(twice as big as in YM and if someone wants to show you a video on youtube and sends you the URL a player inside the IM window will appear and you will be able to view the video without opening your browser. The same applies to images.

Yahoo Messenger has a feature named Tabbed windows, which means that you won’t have to fill your taskbar and desktop with lots of windows, you will be able to chat with more people in a single window…umm..to make this more understandable: it’s like internet explorer 6 and firefox, firefox having tabbed browsing in a single window(i hope you got the idea this way).

An other nifty feature for us webmasters is Pingbox, which allows you to put a chatbox on your own website!

For a Full feature list(from ground up) visit the Yahoo Messenger Features page.

Chrome and the Copyright issue

Google got pretty much burned because of their EULA which they later modified when seeing that people don’t enjoy Google not respecting copyrights. Users who downloaded chrome in the first days before downloading agreed that they grant Google the right to

“perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly, perform, publicly display and distribute” anything Chrome users typed  on a web page while using the browser.

and allowed Google to share information with

“other companies, organisations or individuals with whom Google has relationships“

This also created a huge buzz on the internet, and on DigitalPoint Forums also. Many people uninstalled/didn’t install Chrome after seeing what they agreed to.

Matt Cutts posted up a blog post on his blog( it’s not always good to be fast), in the first part he’s talking about “Google didn’t want to assert rights on what people did using Google Chrome” , but the end part which he wrote after coming back from the meeting is much more fun:

“But it was clearly a mistake on Google’s part to include that language when it shouldn’t have been there, and I should have been grateful to the people that pointed it out. Instead of getting snippy with people, my reaction should have been more along the lines of “Oh crap, I don’t think that’s intentional. Thank you so much for noticing that and pointing it out. I’ll see if we can get an official clarification or reaction as soon as possible.” I apologize for that, and I appreciate the people who push Google to be better.”

IMO it’s a pretty lame excuse, but what the heck?, it gets the problem solved.

Yeah, Google noticed that the 11 and the 11.1 section of their eula needs to be modified, otherwise Chrome won’t have such a bright future as they expect it to have.

So they simply modified the 11 and the 11.1 section to:

11. Content license from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

Also they included in the 9.4 section:

9.4 Other than the limited license set forth in Section 11, Google acknowledges and agrees that it obtains no right, title or interest from you (or your licensors) under these Terms in or to any Content that you submit, post, transmit or display on, or through, the Services, including any intellectual property rights which subsist in that Content (whether those rights happen to be registered or not, and wherever in the world those rights may exist). Unless you have agreed otherwise in writing with Google, you agree that you are responsible for protecting and enforcing those rights and that Google has no obligation to do so on your behalf.

And this closes the copyright issue with Google Chrome.

User Opinions

Moving on to more happier things: i wanted to make this blog post yesterday, but after reading 634 posts in The Google Chrome thread over at DP i felt the huge eager to go and play some dotA and cool down a little,lol.

So basically yesterday I made 5 sections and counted the opinions that fit a section, after which i created a cool chart for you guys(and the guys @ dp):

(Click Image to enlarge Chart)

As you can see 32,37% of those who expressed their opinions think that Chrome Rocks!, but 35,25% think that their current default browser is better than Chrome and will stick with it.

While 10,79% think that Chrome will dethrone Internet Explorer, 17,27% think that Chrome has no chance against FF/IE.

The remaining 4.32% think that users who use Chrome will help Google make  SERP results more accurate.

User Reviews

User reviews vary so much, that i could make a 100 page post just containing people’s opinions, that’s why i’ll summarize:

Many people love the speed and simplicity of Chrome, and they would switch to it if it would have cool addons like Firefox.

Some people enjoy the icognito mode so much that they’ll switch to Chrome just because of it( you p0rnlovers! ).

An other group of people are scared to use Chrome ebcause of the exploits that were posted on the internet.

The rest of the people have varied thoughts that can’t be included in any of the categories specified above.

Chrome Comic

As many of you know Google released a comic book before launching Chrome.

The Register made a cool post titled Google’s comic capers: what they really meant to say with user submitted(modified) comicbook scenes.

Go ahead, check out the rest of the comics, you’ll have a good laugh!

Browser Usage Stats

About 9 days ago the guys at Statcounter posted up the Browser usage stats for Global/US/UK. Their stats included: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Other browsers. They put the stats in tables, which look pretty dull, so i made a cool visual chart which is more fun and easier to interpret(Contains Internet explorer, Firefox and Chrome). Data is expressed in %.

(Click Image to view full stats over at StatCounter)

This about wraps it up for now, if updates will pop up i’ll make a new blog post with updated data and info

]]> http://www.thaslayer.com/2008/09/21/chrome-opinions-reviews-usage-chart/feed/ 1 http://www.thaslayer.com/2008/09/13/the-guys-at-alexa-just-cant-make-up-their-minds/ http://www.thaslayer.com/2008/09/13/the-guys-at-alexa-just-cant-make-up-their-minds/#comments Sat, 13 Sep 2008 13:16:05 +0000 slayer http://www.thaslayer.com/?p=775

For quite a while i’ve been noticing that the guys at Alexa are shuffling between Ad companies. Since they quit using AdBrite so far they’ve used their own system, Google Adsense and now you can notice Ads by Microsoft. What’s next? Yahoo? To be honest i don’t really know but i’m pretty sure that the conversions aren’t as good as they expected that’s why they switched from Adsense to Microsoft Ads.

Along the ads served by Advertising companies Alexa displays 4x 125×125 ads which are visible on the whole website, but if you choose to advertise with them it’s not that simple.

If you plan to advertise on Alexa you have to know that the 125×125 ads are divided  into 4 sections: Alexa Home Page, Alexa Site Info Pages, Alexa Directory Pages, Alexa Top Sites Pages. The pricing varies for each section depending on the number of page impressions each month.

Either way, my opinion is that Alexa should have stuck with Adbrite

]]> http://www.thaslayer.com/2008/09/13/the-guys-at-alexa-just-cant-make-up-their-minds/feed/ 2 http://www.thaslayer.com/2008/09/11/wanna-bet-that-a-1987-mac-beats-a-pc-with-vista/ http://www.thaslayer.com/2008/09/11/wanna-bet-that-a-1987-mac-beats-a-pc-with-vista/#comments Thu, 11 Sep 2008 07:41:50 +0000 slayer http://www.thaslayer.com/?p=751 The ultimate fight between a PC and a MAC, the only difference is that the MAC is from 1987 running that good ol’ software and has a 16 MHZ processor with 2MB of RAM . The PC is a 2007 Toshiba Satellite laptop with an intel Pentium Dual Core CPU and 1GB of ram, running on Windows Vista.

Guess what? The MAC won the fight(most probably because Toshiba ran on Vista and not XP). This is yet again great proof why Vista sucks so hard and eats so many resources. Just take a look at the boot time and the shut down time on vista, its HUGE if you don’t have lots of RAMS. An other factor which slowed the Toshiba down was Office 2007(which is also crap) and by this way the beautiful Toshiba lost the fight against a 20 year older MAC(makes you wanna cry doesn’t it?).

There is a point when you might say that the MAC cheated when the guy in the back turned it off, yeah i thought the same, till i looked it up and found out that before the guy shut it off the Safe to shut down screen appeared(with this new technology i completely forgot about NON-ATX boxes). This gives enough proof that the fight between PC and MAC was legit.

Check out the video yourself:

Here are some comments:

Tim Garcia: lol
slayer: ^^
slayer: ITS ALL VISTA’S FAULT
Tim Garcia: yeah
Tim Garcia: it takes longer to shut down vista then it is to start it up, go figure

——————–

goadiz: and the PC with a 486 procesor beats a latest PC whitch runs vista?
slayer: PC with DOS
slayer: beats vista
goadiz: so you know it?
slayer: ya
slayer: everyone knows it
goadiz: cool
slayer: EVEN BILL KNOWS IT
goadiz: but bill makes money from the people who know that but dont care
goadiz: they want vista they buy vista

——————–

tYddA: wtf
slayer: ?
tYddA: the post
slayer: ya
tYddA: ’87 mac vs ’07 pc
tYddA: i’m stoned
slayer: ^^
slayer: ya
tYddA: O.o
tYddA: this is my face right now
tYddA:
slayer: mhm
tYddA: wait a sec  if the ’87 mac beats the ’07 pc  that means the ’07 mac beats the shitty motherf***er ’07 pc )
tYddA: true, no?
slayer: macbooks are the best laptops in the world
tYddA: i’m gonna buy me a mac ’87
slayer: doubt it…one like that costs a fortune
slayer: that belongs in a museum
tYddA: i’m gonna sell my dads house
slayer: yeah,sell your dad’s house and tell him when he gets home
slayer: “hey dad, i sold your house to buy a sexy mac from 87
slayer: i’m sure he’ll break it on your head and by this way you’ll loose your investment
slayer: IMO, doesn’t quite worth it,lol

Here’s my support ticket:

2008-07-07 10:39 Customer

Subject:How on earth can you be so incompetents? (wanted to put such..but because i was very pissed i put “so”)

okay this really does it, for more than a hour either my websites aren’t loading or

Not Found
The requested URL was not found on this server.
Servage.net Clustered Webhosting running enhanced Apache Webserver

appears

look, there’s a limit to everything and you can say that i endured quite much from servage’s messups(the most important one being servage hacked and not letting customers know about it, i had to read on a forum that the passwords were in fact reset due to a hack, and that the nice trojans that were popping up on my websites occurred also because of the same thing)

so, in max 30minutes i want to see my websites up and running without any issue

In about 2 hours i got a reply(yeah, they are bragging about 30minute support reply. the support is getting worse day by day just as the services do):

2008-07-07 12:20 Support – John

Please check it now. Your sites are loading fine now.

Kind Regards
John, Support
Servage Hosting

Yeah..this pretty much drew the line, as soon as my hosting package expires i’m getting out of there.

__________________

Check out some other “cool” posts about servage:

Some incompetents work @ servage? – April 16th, 2008

Servage has some really incompetent employees – February 22nd, 2008

Servage upgrades accounts to 510GB space and 5010GB bandwidth, but forgets about a “tiny” problem -  January 13th, 2008

SH*T Happens – servage – December 9th, 2007

Servage hosting – Problems over problems -  October 23rd, 2007