Technology good news and bad news. Mostly bad news.

It is funny how (before you can use youtube) they make you sign an agreement that you watch videos only online and never download them (you might miss the ads!), and then recommend to get youtube-dl.py to help *them* (in other news, they permanently changed the interface just to make scraping harder for youtube-dl.py).

I still don't understand why they don't simply move the videos over to their youtube (yahoo did this with pictures - they closed "yahoo photo" after their acquired flickr).

You said that with the release of the IE 10, it would only run on Windows 7, then you stated that that would be the end of the Internet Explorer. Just what are you implying here? Is Microsoft no longer going to make the IE after the upcoming release of 10?

That is not their plan, Wayne. I did not elaborate, but here is my thinking: IE exists today only because IT decision makers and web-interface using enterprise developers are tricked or scared into using IE because it is produced by God (i.e., Microsoft). This has been true for years, though it is becoming less true. A training program, a web-interfaced personnel system or database or HR system or whatever requires IE and is "not guaranteed to work" on some other browser (i.e. firefox) etc.

Having the browser work on only one of the several systems you produce, some of which are in use in enterprise systems, makes it obsolete. This means that the shift to NOT designing for IE will be more rapid. Once people are not forced to use it, they'll mostly stop.

Microsoft will probably still make a browser. They still make Notepad, after all. But no one will notice.

It will simply become an "unused icon" on the desktop.

What was Google Video? If not very many people were using it, why should they keep it? Should they be required to maintain every service they build, even if it is a failure? Was Google Video an essential social service? An economic necessity? Apparently not.

This has been true for years, though it is becoming less true.

Much, much less true, though it's probably much more true for intranet sites such as you describe than for the general web world.

Explorer's just barely the most popular explorer these days, with inroads being made by WebKit (from Konqueror, now the engine inside Safari and Chrome as well as being available for Linux). Firefox is hanging in there.

So no one who really wants to do business on the web tailors their site for IE any more because no one wants to limit themselves to 1/2 of the possible market.

And the other reason is that MicroSoft decided to embrace HTML standards rather than divide-and-conquer. IE9 does very well on ACID3, for instance - better than Firefox 3 (and about as good as FF4).

Moopheus: I have no idea. Do you know that no one was using it? There were no projects that relied on its existence, like school/classroom projects or training systems? It may well be that no one was using it, but you're adducing that as a fact in evidence without any documentation. I think maybe you just don't like my idea of the gummit taking over major internet services.

And I can understand that. It is highly controversial. But what is becoming less controversial over time is the assumption that government is automatically more nefarious than private industry.

Especially given the rise of the new monopolies.

No, I don't know if anyone was using it. So what? Google clearly didn't think it was enough to be worth supporting. Products and services disappear from the market all the time. If not enough people are using them, that's what happens. The people who were using them have to adapt. I'm sorry there's no more Kodachrome, but should I whine to the government about it? I don't think government is more nefarious than private industry; that would be very difficult. I don't think it would necessarily do any better. Look at the food industry, the banking industry--the government regulators that are supposed to be on the case are as useless and corrupt as the people they're supposed to be monitoring.

What new monopolies? True, Google has the majority of the search engine usage, but so what? Will this always be true? Microsoft once had 95% of the browser market, and people worried that gave it a monopoly power, and you yourself have now declared it to be dead.

Amazon isn't even close to being a monopoly. Sure, they have a lot of market power, but they don't have nearly the economy-warping power of, say, Wal-Mart or Costco.

The last real monopoly we had was Ma Bell, which the government spent decades trying to break, and finally they did. How'd that work out? Well, now we can choose between AT&T and Verizon. Yay! Though at least we can now buy our own phones and long distance is cheaper.

IE will work on all platforms and it is more easy to use in windows 7
Google Videos is a video search engine, and formerly a free video sharing website, from Google Inc. Before removing user-uploaded content, the service allowed selected videos to be remotely embedded on other websites and provided the necessary HTML code alongside the media, similar to YouTube. This allowed for websites to host large amounts of video remotely without running into bandwidth or storage capacity issues.

I still don't understand why they don't simply move the videos over to their youtube

Morphus: I know. It's probably a sed one-liner to do that. Maybe it has to do with the agreements agreed to or implied when people did uploads.