Time Scale theory: Are software companies producing obselete software?

First of all, I would like to thank IOLO for making a wonderful software (System Mechanic). But with new versions getting released everyday you have GOT to ask yourself. Is the software you're buying worth the money? Sure, you get future upgrades for free. Im not denying that. But what is it about the future upgrades that makes you WANT to buy the software so much? Possibilities:

> Better user interfaces

> Better functionality

> Faster (?) than previous versions

> Supposed "overall" upgrades

Personally, I just stick to the first version of any software I use (that is barring windows of course!). Similarly, I was very impressed with System Mechanic 6.0 when it first came out. Even though IOLO came out with System Mechanic 7.0 and version 8 is on the docks, I still love the UI in System Mechanic 6.0 . Why? Due to the simple fact that I found this software worthwhile, unlike its
successors. This isnt just the case of IOLO and System Mechanic. Its the same with Nero 8. The software is jam packed with features that I dont use, and these end up hogging memory, installing shell extensions that I dont use, and in turn, I have to labor hard to uninstall these to keep my installations to the bare minimum. So, Why not just stick to the previous versions?This goes for each and every software I have used.
There is a theory I recently made up. Its called the "Time Scale Theory".It goes something like this:

"There is a peak in every software company's production cycle. At this peak, the software company has built up enough reputation to sell its most endorsed product in quantities of millions. It makes a lot of money and repute. After this peak time is over, the company merely survives on its earlier reputation. Any software produced henceforth will be completely obselete and will add features to make users' experiences worse than the previous versions."

The same thing goes for IOLO(System Mechanic 6.0), MicroSoft(Windows XP-Current, excluding windows Vista), IBM(The peak time seems to be neverending!, but it will end nonetheless!), Google(In its peak right now).

Google? Hell NO!!!

I am sick and tired of using Google as my search engine. If you use it at all, I suggest you check out the others available on the net. Many of these are free services which will provide you with higher quality search results.

General
Alexa Internet
Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves)
Baidu (Chinese)
Cuil
Exalead (French)
Google
Live Search (formerly MSN Search)
Sogou (Chinese)
Sohu (Chinese)
Wikia Search
Yahoo! Search

Geographical limited scope
Accoona, China/US
Alleba, Philippines
Ansearch, Australia/US/UK/NZ
Araby, Middle East
Baidu, China
Daum, Korea
Guruji.com, India
Goo (search engine), Japan
Leit.is, Iceland
Miner.hu, Hungary
Najdi.si, Slovenia
Naver, Korea
Onkosh, Middle East
Rambler, Russia
Rediff, India
SAPO, Portugal
Search.ch, Switzerland
Sesam, Norway, Sweden
Walla!, Israel
Yandex, Russia
ZipLocal, Canada/US

Accountancy
IFACnet

Business
Business.com
Nexis (Lexis Nexis)
Thomasnet (United States)

Enterprise
See also: Enterprise search
AskMeNow: S3 - Semantic Search Solution
Dieselpoint: Search & Navigation
dtSearch: dtSearch Engine(SDK), dtSearch Web
Endeca: Information Access Platform
Exalead: exalead one:enterprise
Expert System S.p.A.: Cogito
Fast Search & Transfer: Enterprise Search Platform (ESP), RetrievalWare (formerly Convera)
Funnelback: Funnelback Search
ISYS Search Software: ISYS:web, ISYS:sdk
Microsoft: SharePoint Search Services
Northern Light
Open Text: Hummingbird Search Server, Livelink Search
Oracle Corporation: Secure Enterprise Search 10g
SAP: TREX
TeraText: TeraText Suite
Vivisimo: Vivisimo Clustering Engine
ZyLAB Technologies: ZyIMAGE Information Access Platform

Job
Main articles: Job search engine and Employment website
See also: Category:Job search engines
Bixee.com (India)
CareerBuilder.com (USA)
Craigslist (by city)
Eluta.ca (Canada)
Hotjobs.com (USA)
Incruit (Korea)
Indeed.com (USA)
Monster.com (USA)
Recruit.net (International)
SimplyHired.com (USA)
TheLadders.com (USA)

Legal
WestLaw
Lexis (Lexis Nexis)
Quicklaw

Medical
Bioinformatic Harvester
Entrez (includes Pubmed)
EB-eye EBI's Search Engine EMBL-EBI's Search engine
GenieKnows
GoPubMed (knowledge-based: GO - GeneOntology and MeSH - Medical Subject Headings)
Healia
Searchmedica
WebMD
PubGene
Nextbio (Life Science Search Engine)

News
Daylife
MagPortal
Newslookup
Nexis (Lexis Nexis)
Topix.net
Yahoo! News

People
PeekYou
Ex.plode.us
InfoSpace
Spock (website)
Spokeo
Wink
Zabasearch.com
ZoomInfo

Real property
Fizber.com
Home.co.uk
HotPads.com
Properazzi
Rightmove
Zillow.com

Video Games
GenieKnows
Wazap

By information type

Search engines dedicated to a specific kind of information

Forum
Omgili

Blog
Amatomu
Bloglines
BlogScope
IceRocket
Sphere
Technorati

Multimedia
blinkx
FindSounds
Picsearch
Podscope
SeeqPod
Veveo
YouTube
Pixsta

Source code
JExamples
Koders
Krugle

BitTorrent
These search engines work across the BitTorrent protocol.
Btjunkie
Demonoid
FlixFlux
Isohunt
Mininova
The Pirate Bay
TorrentSpy

Email
Nicado
TEK

Maps
Géoportail
MapQuest
Live Search Maps
Yahoo! Maps

Price
Kelkoo
MSN Shopping
MySimon
PriceGrabber
PriceRunner
Shopping.com
ShopWiki
Shopzilla (also operates Bizrate)
TheFind.com

Question and answer
Answers.com
AskMeNow
BrainBoost
eHow
hakia
Lexxe
Lycos iQ
Powerset
Live Search QnA
Uclue
Yahoo! Answers

By model
Open source search engines
DataparkSearch
Egothor
Gonzui
Grub
Ht://dig
Isearch
Lucene
Lemur Toolkit & Indri Search Engine
mnoGoSearch
Namazu
Nutch
OpenFTS
Sciencenet (for scientific knowledge, based on YaCy technology)
Sphinx
SWISH-E
Terrier Search Engine
Wikia Search
Xapian
YaCy
Zettair

Social search engines
ChaCha Search
Eurekster
Mahalo.com
Rollyo
Trexy
Wink provides web search by analyzing user contributions such as bookmarks and feedback

Metasearch engines
Brainboost
ChunkIt!
Clusty
Dogpile
Excite
HotBot
Info.com
Ixquick
Kayak
Mamma
Metacrawler
MetaLib
Mobissimo
Myriad Search
SideStep
Turbo10
WebCrawler

Visual search engines
ChunkIt!
Grokker
Kartoo
Pixsta
PubGene

Based on

Google
AOL Search
CompuServe Search
MySpace Search
Netscape
Ripple

Yahoo!
AltaVista
AlltheWeb
GoodSearch
Rectifi

Live Search
A9.com
Tafiti
Ms. Dewey

Ask.com
Hakia (semantic search)
iWon
Lycos

Defunct search engines
BRS/Search (now OpenText Livelink ECM Discovery Server)
Google Answers
Infoseek
Inktomi
Lotus Magellan
Overture.com (formerly GoTo.com, now Yahoo! Search Marketing)
PubSub
Singingfish
Teoma
WiseNut
World Wide Web Worm
Excite (now a metasearch)
WebCrawler (now a metasearch)


And you say you dont have a choice when it comes to GOOGLE?? WAKE UP!!!

Alt3rn4t|v3 s comment on Bux is scam post

I got a mail from blogger telling me that someone left me a comment on this post. I came to check it out, and found this, and the reference was with respect to a post I made earlier.
This post has "Alt3rn4t|v3"s comments in quotes and my comments in ">>>>"...Lets answer some questions.

"Hi.

Before I start, let me be clear on something - although I'm a staff at Bux.to, it doesn't stop me from being objective."

>>>>"Well ofcourse it doesnt...you, unlike the rest of us, are paid to scam others"

"As both a staff and a normal member, I do not condone the excessive waiting times nor the irresponsibility displayed now and then, but there's nothing I can do about it."

>>>>How can a staff be a normal member? Im willing to ignore that fact...for now. Of course you, being a bux.to staff member cant do "anything" about it. Who else were you expecting to make a change?...Pink Panther? Oh, did I forget?? BUX pays its employees to do NOTHING about complaints...We cant blame you,you poor thing.

"Having said that, I can only say that your post is filled with biased dejectiveness and dosen't serve as an objective (or even correct) understanding of your own situation."

>>>>"biased dejectiveness" ? YES, 'cause I had half the people I know joined Bux.to and they'r probably cursing me thinking I scammed them. Pardon me, but we are all simple minded citizens, who fail to understand how bux.to or any other company can refuse to pay, when we havent use autoclickers or used our technical mindset to scam them! (I run a technology blog afterall, and Im more than certain, I could up my earnings if I even tried!)

You make accusations like "though I cant imagine what that could be, other than PayPal refusing to support scam sites!", which is not true. Since you seem to have checked the forums before, you should probably do some searching before posting. That's the rule of the thumb for a blogger.

>>>>Yes, Paypal DID refuse to support scam sites and Pay per clickers such as BUX! Being a staff member YOU of all people should know that! Besides I just think you're playing naive though I cant think of a better explanation of what you have said. Thanks for the advise BUB!! But I think I have scanned the forums for possible explanations, and Im much more thorough with the forums than some admins....EXACTLY the reason I run a BLOG!!! DUH!!!

Now tell me, when was - "Next, they tell me they have a 'MAJOR' problem with the sites' script" - said?

>>>>The question is "When was it NOT said!!!". I hear that they were changing their scripts 3 times in a row over the span of a month. Their website went down, and some of the clickers found that their balances had MYSTERIOUSLY reduced to nothing..It doesnt take einstein to put 2 and 2 together.

"they even have a calculator for that, for crying out loud!!!" - For crying out loud, Bux.to doesn't have a calculator. Your post was made in late July. We abandoned the "calculator" (which wasn't even official in the first place) MONTHS ago.

>>>>IF you have visited the forums atleast once, you will find the admins "recommending" the calculator even TODAY!! This generally happens when some non-premium member asks when he's gonna get paid, and loads of "have patience" posts later.

"On top of that, they post fake success stories every now and then." is probably one of the worst accusations you made, though.

Oh? Then why would you be responding if I faked the fact that you were faking fake posts? :)

Don't be surprised if they manage to find this post that you made, see the fake accusations that you've made about them and use their "freedom to remove you at the outset of any circumstance" clause to deny you your payment. You don't have any reason to call Bux.to a scam then, because by then, it's self-pwn - no one's fault but yours.

>>>>This is exactly why I wrote this post...only one word describes it best....."hippocracy" !

To "Alt3rn4t|v3"...

> You're handle is lame.

> You stink.

> insert derogatory term here: _______________________

> Thank you as always for a patient read.

Opera 9 rocks!

I have been using Opera 9 since my last windows installation, and I must say, Im very impressed.Here are the features and why I liked them :

> The toolbar is better than menus in most browsers.

> Integrated email reader : You get to compose mail and send it, or read other mail without waiting for minutes to login to your inbox. This comes as a boon to many of us Gmail users, as it takes a long time to login. Whats more? You can specify multiple mail accounts to draw your mail from, all within your browser. You will be instantly alerted to any mail in your inbox.

> Opera uses full bandwidth : I have a dial-up connection. Surfing the web was a pain until opera came by. Unlike Internet Explorer, Opera uses my full bandwidth, and thus makes surfing a breeze.

> Built in bit torrent client, download accelerator : Opera can handle downloads and file transfers with ease. whats more? Forget your port forwarding worries if Utorrent conflicts with your firewall, cause opera identifies itself as a browser and thus doesnt get blocked.

> Lots of widgets to choose from.

> Write notes within your browser and set times to get alerted!

> And now, the greatest advantage of all : ITS FREE!!!

Get it here http://opera.com

Are older softwares better than newer ones?

with new versions of photoshop and flash coming out every 2 months, you have got to ask yourself, "Are the newer versions worth my money? Do I really need the newer versions when I have got used to the older ones?".

I recently switched back to photoshop 7 and I must say I have been very efficient with it.I found myself at home with photoshop with 7. The UI is simple and intuitive, and it doesnt take a genius to make out what the "accented edges" filter does.

I have always been a critic of new software, and have always advocated the older ones. Photoshop 7 continues to be the most productive tool in Adobes galleria, as I am told. This goes for windows XP too! How many times have you thought "Man, it really sucks that vista is running so slow on my 2 week old PC" ?

What is the need for you to use newer software when you're god darned efficient with the previous one?