You can gild one though, and call it Turd Vista.

>You CAN Polish Turd

>It just needs to be frozen...

Spot the engineer! Indeed, after freezing, you can polish one.

But <Dilbert>

* Sealing it inside a shell of some sort (e.g. lamination), although it's a bit of a cheat because you'll actually be polishing the shell.

* Allow it to fossilise - they can be polished

* Baking to remove the water could give a polish-able surface

* Application of a caking agent could harden the surface

</Dilbert>

I'm sure there are more, although all of them are partly dependent on Curry/Chilli/Guiness intake as well...

when I'm already using the Chrome browser to view their site? Even the basic coding on my own humble web site is able to determine what browser version is viewing it.

I'm all for over the top derisiveness in the name of smug self satisfaction - but chrome a turd? I think not... Chrome rocks! Within a couple of days it has completely replaced firefox in my daily life (although I do miss adBloc).

What's that you say? A commercial company is using its own website to further its commercial aims? Disgusting.

Well done El Reg for exposing this despicable tactic

Rather than echoing some of the sentiments up above, pointing out that their a company with a product, and that this isn't worth of a news article (oh look, I did echo them!), I thought I'd say something new...

Haven't google always done this? Big product launch, little link under the search box. For things like the Google Talk launch, etc etc?

Did nobody actually READ the article where they were talking about having only 28 words?

"(That's the word count for the basic page if you are signed out, there's no promotional line running beneath the search box, you've set Google as your homepage and thus don't get the "Make Google Your Homepage!" link, and you count "©2008 Google" as two words.)"

Seeing as they're promoting Chrome, I'd think that this qualifies as a "Promotional line"

"when I'm already using the Chrome browser to view their site? Even the basic coding on my own humble web site is able to determine what browser version is viewing it."

I expect Chrome is just pretending to be Internet Explorer. If you listen to Firefox and Opera weenies, all browsers pretty much *have* to pretend to be IE because all web servers refuse to serve pages to any other, and the UK.gov does a survey to decide which browsers they have to support and, ooo lookie here, everyone is using IE.

The "user-agent" feature has to be the single biggest design flaw in HTTP. Initially, it facilitates non-standard features. Eventually, it forces everyone to lie to the server. Neither is a terribly great design feature for a network protocol.

...which is the only reason I forgave her rather self-important and facile 28 words article. And to be fair, we can also discount this Reg article, as one of her caveats for the 28 is:

"there's no promotional line running beneath the search box"

There is, so there can be more than 28. Write a proper article, please.

Wow, I'm irritable today.

Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel. Run out of ways to run down Google? Never mind, you'll think of some more soon.

The story is about double standards, not whether it is acceptable for Google to hawk its wares on its own front page. If Google hadn't made such a song and dance about the privacy link _then_ this would be a non-story.

Have to admit to using Chrome as well. It loads faster than firefox and with less ...errrmm .. chrome. The main reason I changed from Opera to Firefox in the first place.

The security of the product I couldn't care less about as I am at work and that is an SEP. AdBlock would be nice, but the limited web sites I will visit are not that ad heavy.

It doesn't seem to parse our Intranet very well, but then thats a pile of smeggy M$ Sharepoint.

On the note of turd polishing - you invariably end up with shit on your hands.

However, if you chrome something, then all the nastyness is incased in a highly shiny bubble. Thus preventing people from seeing what is on the inside...

What the hell? Did Google sleep with your sister, or something?

And the connection with autism is....?

@Ken

It identifies itself more closely to Safari (obvious really) than IE, but still you can identify it properly so that's no excuse:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.29 Safari/525.13

@David

I was wondering the same thing. I'd guess it's a fairly harmless but nasty tasting 'Rainman' type gag about how autistics are all really really really rule bound or something. Considering El Reg's target audience, I'd have thought it was a pretty dumb slur to make, no?

OK, you don't GET IT. It was a funny double-standard joke.

But then to go overboard in Google's defense. Classic!

How about this? Migrate a database where:

1) Users are authenticated against a plain-text "users" table. To "protect" this, the table has no access rights assigned to it. To allow authentication to this "no rights" table, the front end has hard-coded into it a SQL login with SA rights.

2) Rather than link tables or use stored procedures, the Access front end uses queries on the fly of the type: "Select * from {database.table ]user=[aboveaccountwithSArights] pw=[twowordpasswordassignedtoabove]" - again, hard coded into the front end.

3) Front end is an Access .mde file and the "developer" did not leave the .mdb. So the code is all compiled and we don't have the source.

Alas the so-called "developer" is long gone, or I would stuff my turd-polishing rag down his throat so far it would polish his turds as well.