Categories
amusing

What google.com would look like … designed by a GeoCities user

http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2&music=1&url=google.com

(see what I did there? topical music + animated gif combo!)

Categories
amusing

Cloud Computing: Google Translate has stopped speaking Chinese, and we can’t get it back

Finally, I worked out how to type pinyin on a mac, using only the keyboard.

Nǐ hǎo!

Only, GoogleTranslate acts like a prick, and pretends it has no idea what you’re saying. This, Google, is just silly:

(for comparison, I tested – if you hit the “switch” button, and type “Hello”, you can copy the output, hit switch again, and Google still pretends you’re talking gibberish)

To add insult to injury, if you don’t manually hit the “Turn OFF instant translate”, it keeps manually switching the From language … to English. Every time you type a letter, it reverts to “English –> English”. HOW MANY WORDS IN ENGLISH EVER USE ACUTE, GRAVE, OR CIRCUMFLEX? Sigh. Not very smart.

Worst bit is … this was working fine a couple of months ago. Then Google “rewired it”, and now it’s broken. My friends at Google say this (constantly breaking things, never letting the user keep a working version) is “good” and “the future” because it puts control into Google’s hands: one version, on all desktops. If this is the future of Cloud Computing, Cloud Computing is dead and buried already… Version control is not a “feature”, it’s a right.