The Definition Of Beta

As of late, Google has taken a lot of heat over minor glitches in its Gmail service. Some bloggers have been producing lots of harsh comments out of their frustration with the isolated service interruptions.

While I fully appreciate the affliction associated with the brief absence of a necessary service such as e-mail, I'm going to take it upon myself to introduce a word to everyone's vocabulary: Beta.

Beta is one of the most important words of the computer age. But prior to the affiliation with software development, it held a long-standing role as the second letter of the Greek alphabet and flirted with various scientific terminologies.

As if that wasn't a solid enough resume, today's Beta is a constant reminder that the public testing of a product or service does not imply guarantees of its stability.

The aforementioned bloggers should take note that Gmail is a partially-public beta. As such, it should not be used to conduct business or be relied upon for time-sensitive exchanges of information.

Google has been conducting this public test of its e-mail service for a mere 2 years. Microsoft acquired Hotmail in 1998, before Google was even a company, and it is still frequently plagued by bugs and outages.

The Reuters Spin On Paid Advertising

All the major news organizations would love to have you believe that the content they give birth to is factual, researched and void of opinion. As such, we would all like to think that the news media has a set of standards that prevents them from crossing into unethical territory.

Robert MacMillan is doing an excellent job of removing the public's veil of ignorance.

On March 10th, 2006, MacMillan published an article so completely void of morals or significant information, I feel as though society has died a little inside.

The story reads like a sales pitch from a used car dealer, naming Best Buy and its computer service child, Geek Squad, 8 times in a piece that was supposed to be about the perils of wireless networking. Unintelligent quotes from the company's employees include an appeal for potential customers to buy new computers instead of trying to network "older" ones. A careful use of words aims to convince the reader that Geek Squad is not only a capable choice for network troubleshooting, it's the only choice.

I sincerely hope that this fusion of journalism (I use that term loosely) and advertising does not become commonplace. However, the fact that this article slipped past Reuters quality control and made it onto several news sites, including CNET's News.com, I fear that corporate dollars have already won this battle.

I'd like to take this moment to notify you that, chances are, you have a high school student in your community that is probably more capable of computer and network troubleshooting than your closest Geek Squad technician. One that will likely charge little or nothing.