Tag Archives: internet

by | July 23, 2011

Amy Winehouse dies at age 27

LONDON (AP) — Amy Winehouse, the beehived soul-jazz diva whose self-destructive habits overshadowed a distinctive musical talent, was found dead Saturday in her London home, police said. She was 27.

Winehouse shot to fame with the album “Back to Black,” whose blend of jazz, soul, rock and classic pop was a global hit. It won five Grammys and made Winehouse – with her black beehive hairdo and old-fashioned sailor tattoos – one of music’s most recognizable stars.

Police confirmed that a 27-year-old female was pronounced dead at the home in Camden Square northern London; the cause of death was not immediately known. London Ambulance Services said Winehouse had died before the two ambulance crews it sent arrived at the scene.

An ambulance could be seen parked beneath the trees outside her London home, and the whole street was cordoned off by police tape. Officers kept onlookers away from the scene.

Last month, Winehouse canceled her European comeback tour after she swayed and slurred her way through barely recognizable songs in her first show in the Serbian capital of Belgrade. Booed and jeered off stage, she flew home and her management said she would take time off to recover.

“I didn’t go out looking to be famous,” Winehouse told the Associated Press when “Back to Black” was released. “I’m just a musician.”

But in the end, the music was overshadowed by fame, and by Winehouse’s demons. Tabloids lapped up the erratic stage appearances, drunken fights, stints in hospital and rehab clinics. Performances became shambling, stumbling train wrecks, watched around the world on the Internet.

Born in 1983 to taxi driver Mitch Winehouse and his pharmacist wife Janis, Winehouse grew up in the north London suburbs, and was set on a showbiz career from an early age. When she was 10, she and a friend formed a rap group, Sweet ‘n’ Sour – Winehouse was Sour – that she later described as “the little white Jewish Salt ‘n’ Pepa.”

She attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School, a factory for British music and acting moppets, later went to the Brit School, a performing arts academy in the “Fame” mold, and was originally signed to “Pop Idol” svengali Simon Fuller’s 19 Management.

But Winehouse was never a packaged teen star, and always resisted being pigeonholed.

Her jazz-influenced 2003 debut album, “Frank,” was critically praised and sold well in Britain. It earned Winehouse an Ivor Novello songwriting award, two Brit nominations and a spot on the shortlist for the Mercury Music Prize.

But Winehouse soon expressed dissatisfaction with the disc, saying she was “only 80 percent behind” the album.

“Frank” was followed by a slump during which Winehouse broke up with her boyfriend, suffered a long period of writer’s block and, she later said, smoked a lot of marijuana.

“I had writer’s block for so long,” she said in 2007. “And as a writer, your self-worth is literally based on the last thing you wrote. .. I used to think, ‘What happened to me?’

“At one point it had been two years since the last record and (the record company) actually said to me, ‘Do you even want to make another record?’ I was like, ‘I swear it’s coming.’ I said to them, ‘Once I start writing I will write and write and write. But I just have to start it.’”

The album she eventually produced was a sensation.

Released in Britain in the fall of 2006, “Back to Black” brought Winehouse global fame. Working with producers Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi and soul-funk group the Dap-Kings, Winehouse fused soul, jazz, doo-wop and, above all, a love of the girl-groups of the early 1960s with lyrical tales of romantic obsession and emotional excess.

“Back to Black” was released in the United States in March 2007 and went on to win five Grammy awards, including song and record of the year for “Rehab.”

Music critic John Aizlewood attributed her trans-Atlantic success to a fantastic voice and a genuinely original sound.

“A lot of British bands fail in America because they give America something Americans do better – that’s why most British hip-hop has failed,” he said. “But they won’t have come across anything quite like Amy Winehouse.”

Winehouse’s rise was helped by her distinctive look – black beehive of hair, thickly lined cat eyes, girly tattoos – and her tart tongue.

She was famously blunt in her assessment of her peers, once describing Dido’s sound as “background music – the background to death” and saying of pop princess Kylie Minogue, “she’s not an artist … she’s a pony.”

The songs on “Black to Black” detailed breakups and breakdowns with a similar frankness. Lyrically, as in life, Winehouse wore her heart on her sleeve.

“I listen to a lot of ’60s music, but society is different now,” Winehouse said in 2007. “I’m a young woman and I’m going to write about what I know.”

Even then, Winehouse’s performances were sometimes shambolic, and she admitted she is “a terrible drunk.”

Increasingly, her personal life began to overshadow her career.

She acknowledged struggling with eating disorders and told a newspaper that she had been diagnosed as manic depressive but refused to take medication. Soon accounts of her erratic behavior, canceled concerts and drink- and drug-fueled nights began to multiply.

Photographs caught her unsteady on her feet or vacant-eyed, and she appeared unhealthily thin, with scabs on her face and marks on her arms.

There were embarrassing videos released to the world on the Internet. One showed an addled Winehouse and Babyshambles singer Pete Doherty playing with newborn mice. Another, for which Winehouse apologized, showed her singing a racist ditty to the tune of a children’s song.

Winehouse’s managers went to increasingly desperate lengths to keep the wayward star on the straight and narrow.

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by | September 3, 2010

Texas investigating Google search rankings

We here at the BrokenCountry have been complaining about this for years. Google is not giving raw search results. Instead, Google directs traffic to websites that either feature Google ads, or sites that pay Google for page rank. For the record, this type of manipulation of search results is exactly what killed Yahoo.

Eventually people grow weary of trying to find what they are actually looking for and they find a new search engine. JD

Google Inc.’s methods for recommending websites are being reviewed by Texas’ attorney general in an investigation spurred by complaints that the company has abused its power as the Internet’s dominant search engine.

The antitrust inquiry disclosed by Google late Friday is just the latest sign of the intensifying scrutiny facing the company as it enters its adolescence. Since its inception in a Silicon Valley garage 12 years ago, Google has gone from a quirky startup to one of the world’s most influential businesses with annual revenue approaching $30 billion.

A spokesman for Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott confirmed the investigation, but declined further comment.

The review appears to be focused on whether Google is manipulating its search results to stifle competition.

The pecking order of those results can make or break websites because Google’s search engine processes about two-thirds of the search requests in the U.S. and handles even more volume in some parts of the world.

That dominance means a website ranking high on the first page of Google’s results will likely attract more traffic and generate more revenue, either from ads or merchandise sales.

On the flip side, being buried in the back pages of the results, or even at the bottom of the first page, can be financially devastating and, in extreme cases, has been blamed for ruining some Internet companies.

European regulators already have been investigating complaints alleging that Google has been favoring its own services in its results instead of rival websites.

Several lawsuits filed in the U.S. also have alleged Google’s search formula is biased. Google believes Abbott is the first state attorney general to open an antitrust review into the issue.

“We look forward to answering (Abbott’s) questions because we’re confident that Google operates in the best interests of our users,” Don Harrison, Google’s deputy general counsel, wrote in a Friday blog post.

Harrison said that Abbott has asked Google for information about several companies, including: Foundem, an online shopping comparison site in Britain; SourceTool, which runs an e-commerce site catering to businesses; and MyTriggers, another shopping comparison site.

All of those companies offer features that Google includes in its search engine or in other parts of its website. Foundem, SourceTool and MyTriggers have previously filed lawsuits or regulatory complaints against Google.

“Given that not every website can be at the top of the results, or even appear on the first page of our results, it’s unsurprising that some less relevant, lower quality websites will be unhappy with their ranking,” Harrison wrote.

Google says its closely guarded search formula strives to recommend websites that are most likely to satisfy the needs of each user’s request. If it didn’t keep its users happy, Google argues that people would become disgruntled and switch to other search engines offered by Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Ask.com.

Regulators and lawmakers in the U.S. and Europe also have been looking into Google’s privacy practices and its acquisitions as the company tries to fortify its power.

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by | May 9, 2010

Obama attacks the media, talk radio . . . again

It seems that Mr Obama wants nothing but glowing reviews of his presidency from the media and talk radio. Insiders in Washington say that Obama is a megalomaniac obsessed with how the media perceives him and his ideas.

Obama uses almost every opportunity to attack talk radio, the internet and the media that dares to scrutinize him. When he hears or sees something he doesn’t like, he threatens to regulate it out of existence. I have read a number of articles that say Obama sometimes seems more like Hugo Chavez that an American president.

At yet another commencement speech, Obama said “You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank all that high on the truth meter,” Obama said at Hampton University, Virginia.

He bemoaned the fact that “some of the craziest claims can quickly claim traction,” in the clamor of certain blogs and talk radio outlets.

“All of this is not only putting new pressures on you, it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy.”

As if the media, blogs and talk radio should simply sit back and give Obama free reign to do as he pleases with America and the peoples freedom. Talk about being deluded.

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by | January 4, 2010

The Liberal American and the Internet

liberal on the internet angry funnyThere are many things in life that confound me,  but none more than the liberal perspective on America today.   I have been using online services since the old days, long before the internet went public.   Back then you could only access bulletin board sites,  or BBS’s.   Most of these BBS’s were run by colleges and were heavily regulated as to content and rules of engagement.

There were a few local sites like The Ledge in Pasadena California,  where one could engage in reasonably unfettered chats with others in the area about politics and current events. Back then,  most of the bulletin boards had only a couple of phone lines.  Each of these lines was a separate phone number with a modem attached to the BBS.   Some had six or eight lines, but each line cost money so these BBS had to charge you to use them.

Enter Prodigy and Compuserve.   Most of you are probably too young or newbies to the world of personal computing,   but this was when it became a lot easier to get online and make your thoughts and opinions known to all that would listen.  Its important to remember that this was still a Microsoft DOS world where everything was text based.  That’s right.  There was no graphical user interface,  or GUI.  It was a glorious time for personal computing.

The reason it was so glorious was because in order to use a computer and get online,  a person would actually have to know DOS commands and have a reasonable understanding of how computers work.   A bit of programming experience was a must. This almost assured all of the people that were in chat rooms that they were at least dealing with a person that had a bit of intelligence.

With Compuserve,  I was exposed to a whole world that I did not know existed.   People were exchanging ideas about politics, life and news events in an open forum where everything seemed to make sense.   There were people “flaming” each other,  name calling and the like,  but a person could get on Compuserve  and engage in an exchange of ideas and discussions that were civil and compelling.    I didn’t like Prodigy,  because it used a really primitive GUI running in a DOS environment and it was slow and clunky.

Then came America Online,  or AOL.   It was streamlined,  they had a gazillion phone lines to connect with,  multiple access points that did not cost you a long distance line charges and fairly easy to install and use.   AOL ran in a Windows 3.0 environment and had the ability to exploit the Microsoft GUI DLL’s and extensions.   This really was the beginning of the end of the fun.   The online experience was beginning to suck,  and AOL was calling all the shots.

Out of necessity people like me were forced to switch to AOL.  I held out for as long as I could on Compuserve and by simply using an FTP or File Transfer Protocol client to access the internet,  but eventually AOL crushed the competition and Compuserve and Prodigy fell by the wayside.   I know I am missing a few other smaller services that were available,  but for the sake of attention span,  I will leave them out.

AOL sucked.  It was all these newbies that didn’t know shit from Crisco when it came to computers,  and they were clogging up the forums and chat rooms with mindless drivel and flaming people with their name calling and accusations.   The thought process of intelligent conversation and exchanges of ideas was gone forever,  and the end result were chat rooms filled with idiots that would attack you if you didn’t go along with their way of thinking,  and most of these dullards were liberals.

But AOL did have its advantages.  First,  there was no such thing as anti-virus software and internet security.   A guy like me that understood how servers and the internet worked,  could easily exploit AOL.  You see,  these chat rooms had degenerated into the early 1990′s edition of CB radio.  People could talk smack and call names with what they perceived as virtual anonymity.   Unfortunately for the flaming liberal,  name calling idiots,  this was not the case.

During all of the AOL craze,  a small start up company called Earthlink,  located in Pasadena California,  came online and I was already using the internet with a full blown GUI and the like.  You could download a browser,  I think back then it was Netscape which was in its infancy as well,  and peruse the internet at your leisure without the clunky, slow connections of AOL.  But I kept AOL because it was just too easy to hack around on and really give the newbies the business.

My reasons for hating AOL and Microsoft are now becoming apparent.  These to companies have ruined personal computing.  I am of the opinion that a person should have at least a minimal understanding of how computers work.  How servers work.  How it is that one can click a few buttons and suddenly be “surfing the net.”   I always hated the phrase “surfing” because I surf,  and trust me,  sitting in an easy chair on your laptop is not surfing.

This is where the internet carnage would begin.   I would be sitting in an AOL chat room with some of my old liberal online pals,  RAF comes to mind,  Old man lib, and many others of both political parties,  having these great discussions about the current political situations.   Invariably,  these liberal idiots would come into the room and start flaming.  Dropping stupid comments.   Making stupid pictures with ASCII text.   It became unbearable.  So I figured out how to hack AOL and did just that.

I’m not going to go into details here,  but AOL was incredibly easy to hack.   With just a few simple commands,  you had access to everything on their servers.   User names, passwords, ( changing people’s passwords was the easy)  and even personal information like names,  addresses and phone numbers.  Did you hear me?  I said PHONE NUMBERS!    So these knuckleheads,  most of them but not all of them liberals,  would come into the forum and take a big shit on the discussion.  I would warn them several times,  and if they did not relent,  I would change their password and boot them from AOL.

They would get kicked,  try to log back on and get an “Invalid Password” error.  This would keep them on the phone for nine hours waiting on hold to get a new password.   But like the stupid liberals that they are,  they would get back online and come back to the forum and drop their shit again!  It was amazing.  This went on all day,  all night.  The same stupid people lining up to be hacked and crapped on.

The persistent ones got the double whammy.   If they insisted on coming back time and time again,  I would simply hack their user file and find their real name.  Then I would go back to the forum and drop the name in the chat room.  Usually this made them run from the chat room like the Lollipop Kids from the wicked witch.   If that didn’t work,  then I would drop their name, address and phone number in the chat room.   It was just too easy.

Flash forward to the internet of today.  Here we all sit,  looking at the same mundane crap,  day in and day out.   Going from site to site and not ever really getting anywhere at all.  Its all commercialized and put nicely into a tin can for easy purchase.  The internet has become a shell of what it once was.  Research is skewed and biased to the point that no one knows exactly who or what to believe anymore.   People get online and suddenly think they know something the rest of us don’t know.

But there is one universal constant that never seems to leave the internet.   The apologist liberal.   The supply of these people seems to be unlimited.  They are out there to throw common sense to the wolves and simply except the liberal cause regardless of the situation.   I think this became apparent during the Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Here we had a sitting president,  that perjured himself under sworn testimony,  and the liberal toadies were all over the internet saying things like “Its a personal matter” and gems like “Its none of our business.”   Perjury is perjury.   What really made matters worse was that Bill Clinton lied on national television to the American people by saying “I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky”  only to have to come on TV again a short time later and admit that he lied to all of us.

Still there was the never ending chorus of liberals all over the internet trying to explain this away.   When confronted on the absolute hypocrisy of the left,   these liberal used the typical liberal response.  Name calling and accusations.   It used to actually work too,  until the people on the right got hip to it and began to ignore it.

I have been ignoring it for years,  but there are so many newbies nowadays that come out of the woodwork to sites like mine and flame and trash talk day in,  day out,  and they actually think that they are the first liberal toady to think of doing it.

With all of this being said,  and understanding that there are conservative toadies out there too,  I must say that every once in a while I get good comments from incredibly intelligent liberals like Real American,  SoCalDem,  GWGeorge and many others.   These people don’t get bogged down in the name calling,  they don’t take cheap shots and they have all their ducks in a row when it comes to facts.   I appreciate these people the most on my comments page.   So I guess all is not lost.

Keep in mind that I go back to the 8088 days when there was no such thing as a hard drive and a modem consisted of what appeared to be two ear muffs that you put your hand set of your phone into and turned the DIAL to dial the number and get online.   Ah the good old days.  They are gone forever.   Now come hit me with your liberal bull shit.    JD

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by | November 22, 2009

Has Google ruined the way we use the internet?

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The Almighty Google. I remember using the old college bulletin board systems around the country on my old 2400 kb modem. funny now, but back then it only took about ten minutes to download a 100,000 kilobyte file. A person could get up, make a sandwich, call some friends and engage in some chit chat, and come back just as the download had finished.

Then along came the internet. It changed everything. ISP’s like Prodigy, Compuserve and America Online were all the rave. I personally liked Compuserve when it was all text based and you could hack around and have a lot of fun with the newbies of the day. There was a time and a day when the only game in town was AOL. It sucked man. To get on the internet you had to jump through hoops while juggling balls and playing spoons.

Things became a lot easier when Netscape and independent ISP’s like Earthlink entered the picture. The internet, still in its infancy, was a glorious place to spend hours online playing games, hitting new websites and meeting new people around the world. I remember at COMDEX in Las Vegas in maybe 1995, Bill Gates was telling the world why Windows 95 was not going to debut until 1996, and he was asked about the internet and whether Microsoft would produce a web browser. Gates response was to say something like “The internet is a passing fad that will never catch on” or something like that. What an idiot.

Then came Yahoo. Before yahoo you could run scripting programs like Web Ferret to search the internet, but there really was no real way to look for web content. Yahoo changed all that. It was great. You could simply type in a phrase or a word, and get a whole host of random results, and somewhere in the fray, you would find what you were looking for.

But doing a search like that was not an efficient way to make money off of the internet. If there were only a way to steer people toward specific websites, more importantly, specific websites that paid Yahoo for search page placement, well then you could generate revenue off of the search.

This was great for Yahoo and Yahoo shareholders, because this is what Yahoo turned into with regard to its search engine. Many consider this way of thinking the beginning of the end of Yahoo. But it was horrible for people like me that don’t use the web to play games, watch porn or scam innocent people out of money.

Web searching became tedious, monotonous work. One would have to go through countless pages of nonsense to simply find a part for a car door, or a gift for a friend. People often forget about the early days of personal computing, when there was no internet. But the internet was what made people want to go out and purchase a PC in the first place, and Yahoo in my opinion, had successfully helped to ruin the fun for a time.

Enter Google. I had a friend attending Cal State Berkeley. She called me one day and as we were talking about computers, she asked me if I had heard of Google. I asked her what the hell a Google was. She said its a search engine that these guy here at Berkeley made. She missed it by a few miles, it was actually Stanford, but nonetheless, I used it and I was stunned.

Suddenly, searching the internet had become a breeze. I could type in the most obscure thing I could think of, and presto, I had instant, pertinent results. I once found a lock bolt for the front door of my house on Google. The door set cost more than six hundred dollars. Surely the bolt must be available as a separate part. Google found it and it was less than five miles from my house. It cost eleven dollars. I had an RV and the refrigerator control board burned out. Camping World wanted three hundred dollars for the part and another hundred to put it in. I found it on Google for fifty six dollars and it took me twenty minutes to install.

Now here is the questions portion.    Has anyone noticed any difference with their search results?    Because when I search things out,  I get nothing but sites that pay Google for their search results placement,  and the results are not even remotely close to that which I am looking for in the first place.   This is almost always the case when I am researching old news stories for articles here on brokencountry.com.  I use correct syntax,  sometimes I will even quote the lines in a particular story and not get the right results.

My next question would be how Google indexes its news articles.   I use Google to get my news,  because the visual media is so full of shit that it has become impossible to watch.   Articles on Google News seem to go only to the major news outlets,  which stands to reason because after all,  they are news outlets.   But there are many articles I find from some of the smaller news outlets around the country that are rarely displayed on Google’s front page and go widely unreported.

I’m just wondering if anyone else has noticed this trend,  because this is one of the many reasons that Yahoo fell by the wayside.   They decided that money was more important than accuracy.   If that is the case,   perhaps its time for a new search engine.  Twitter comes to mind.  Maybe the fine folks at twitter should create a sort of back to basics type search engine.   This might work well for people like me.  The schmendricks of society that ask for nothing more than accuracy on the internet.  Let me know what you think.   JD

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