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Posts with tag lock-in

Filed under: Internet, Office, Web services, Google, Microsoft

Google says: "Take your data with you!"

GoogleJust say no to data lock-in! That's what Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at San Francisco's Web 2.0 conference earlier this week. "If you look at the historical large company behavior, they ultimately do things to protect their business practices or monopoly or what have you, against the choice of the users," Schmidt said. "The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end user, let them move it if they don't like us, the better." He said that making it easy for users to leave at any time and take their data with them keeps the company on its toes, and that other software companies should adopt a similar policy. He also said that Google's ever-expanding corpus of web-based office programs isn't "an office suite" per se and that Google isn't trying to replace Microsoft's ubiquitous Office.

Filed under: Web services

11 ways to backup your del.icio.us bookmarks

Backup del.icio.usWe've talked about data lock-in before, that sorry state when a web service won't give you your data in a useful, standard format. del.icio.us, I am happy to observe, is no such web service, and by way of proof I direct you to 11 ways to backup your del.icio.us bookmarks. In addition to the obvious—export HTML or XML—you can backup to Gmail or straight to a MySQL database, safe them to an Excel spreadsheet, automatically sync them with a whole pile of other bookmarking services, and more.

Featured Time Waster

Forumwarz - a potentially offensive time waster

I pwn UAfter spending the better part of an hour on Forumwarz I still can't decide if it's just sick or if it's kind of fun. It's a bit like a car wreck on the highway. I know I shouldn't be looking but I can't quite turn away.

It's sick, it's twisted, it's the internet on it's worst level and darn it, it's kind of fun. At least for a little while.

Forumwarz is a parody role-playing game that takes place on the internet - or at least the Forumwarz version of it. Your goal is to complete missions that are given to you through a mock up of GoogleTalk called Sentrillion.

Your first "friend" is ShallowEsophagus who begins giving you missions to pwn various forums by being a troll. Depending on the character type you are assigned at start up, you have tools like drooling on the keyboard or bashing your head on the keyboard that you can use to destroy forum threads and eventually, pwn a forum.

Future missions involve buying illegal software from the Russians, pwning more difficult forums and other internet oddness.

Completing missions gives you cash, called Flezz in game, and items that you can pawn or use in other missions. The game is NOT for those easily offended. It's crass, coarse and there are frequent f-bombs in the fake chat sessions.

This is also a game for a more mature audience as it requires you to shop at the Drugs R Fun store to get various concoctions to improve your playing, engage in certain cyber activities to get more Flezz and just generally use a more adult perspective.

If you can get past that, here are the more enjoyable and time-wasting aspects.

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