The CueCat , styled :CueCat with a leading colon, is a cat-shaped handheld barcode reader that was given away free to Internet users starting in 2000 by the now-defunct Digital Convergence Corporation (which often styled its own name as Digital:Convergence Corporation).
65-462: By year-end 2001, barcodes were no longer distributed for the device, and scanning with the device using its original software no longer yielded results. However, third-party software can decode the lightweight encryption in the device, allowing it to be used as a general-purpose wand-type barcode reader. The CueCat can read several common barcode types, in addition to the proprietary CUE barcodes which had been promoted by Digital Convergence. The CueCat
130-531: A hotspot located in the bottom-left corner of the screen replaced the Start button, although this change was reverted in Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 . The Windows 95 taskbar buttons evolved from an earlier task-switching design by Daniel Oran, a program manager at Microsoft, that featured file-folder-like tabs across the top of the screen, similar to those that later appeared in web browsers . For this reason,
195-470: A secure connection to the website . Internet users are distributed throughout the world using a wide variety of languages and alphabets, and expect to be able to create URLs in their own local alphabets. An Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI) is a form of URL that includes Unicode characters. All modern browsers support IRIs. The parts of the URL requiring special treatment for different alphabets are
260-518: A " keyboard wedge ", interposer , or pass-through between the keyboard PS/2 jack and the motherboard PS/2 port . Because of USB-PS/2 compatibility , USB-PS/2 adapters may be optionally used. A native USB version of the CueCat scanner hardware was also produced, but fewer of them were made before all manufacturing of the hardware was discontinued. The CueCat patents are held by Jeffry Jovan Philyaw, who changed his name to Jovan Hutton Pulitzer after
325-474: A URL which directed the user's browser to the sponsored website. It also created a permanent advertisement-displaying taskbar on the user's computers, and could log the web-surfing habits associated with a user's real name and email address. In The Wall Street Journal , Walter Mossberg criticized CueCat: "In order to scan in codes from magazines and newspapers, you have to be reading them in front of your PC. That's unnatural and ridiculous." Mossberg wrote that
390-401: A URL. The company asserted that the ability of the device to direct users to a specific URL, rather than a domain name, was valuable. In addition, television broadcasters could use an audio tone in programs or commercials that, if a TV was connected to a computer via an audio cable, acted as a web address shortcut. The CueCat was connected to computers in the same way as a keystroke logger , as
455-609: A bar across the top of the screen with an Activities button on the left, a clock in the centre, and a notification area on the right. GNOME Shell does not contain a traditional taskbar; users can manage windows, virtual desktops, and launch applications from either a "Dash" on the side of the screen, or by searching from Activities Overview, which is displayed by clicking on the Activities button. GNOME 3.8 introduces Classic Mode, which re-implements certain aspects of GNOME 2's desktop as an alternate desktop environment that can be selected at
520-447: A border of pixels surrounding the Start button which did not activate the menu, allowing the menu to be activated by clicking directly in the corner of the screen. Icons in the notification area could now be hidden to save space and revealed with the arrow button. For Windows Vista , the taskbar remained functionally the same but received a visual overhaul to align the new Windows Aero design language, introducing transparency effects to
585-508: A breach of the main user database itself, but a flat text file used only for reporting purposes that was generated by ColdFusion code that was saved on a publicly available portion of the Digital Convergence web server. This failure was given a multi-citation Octopus TV "Failure Award" regarding brands that failed to take off and were hacked. Digital Convergence responded to this security breach by sending an email to those affected by
650-516: A clock and notification area, while the bottom panel contains buttons for navigating between virtual desktops , the window list proper, and a button which minimizes all windows (similarly to Windows' Show desktop button). The contents of panels are handled by widgets called panel applets, which can consist of application shortcuts, search tools, or other tools. The contents of the panels can be moved, removed, or configured in other ways. In GNOME 3, panels are replaced by GNOME Shell , which consists of
715-477: A database of all barcodes scanned by a given user and connect it to the user's name and address. For this reason, and because the demographic market targeted by Digital Convergence was unusually tech-savvy, numerous websites arose detailing instructions for "declawing" the CueCat — blocking or encrypting the data it sent to Digital Convergence. Digital Convergence registered the domain "digitaldemographics.com", giving additional credence to privacy concerns about
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#1732852467028780-513: A double slash ( // ). Berners-Lee later expressed regret at the use of dots to separate the parts of the domain name within URIs , wishing he had used slashes throughout, and also said that, given the colon following the first component of a URI, the two slashes before the domain name were unnecessary. Early WorldWideWeb collaborators including Berners-Lee originally proposed the use of UDIs: Universal Document Identifiers. An early (1993) draft of
845-507: A popular category of shareware on these systems. The Dock , as featured in macOS and its predecessor NeXTSTEP , is also a kind of taskbar. The macOS Dock is application-oriented instead of window-oriented. Each running application is represented by one icon in the Dock regardless of how many windows it has on screen. A textual menu can be opened by right-clicking on the dock icon that gives access to an application's windows. Mac OS X 10.2 added
910-399: A security vulnerability on the Digital Convergence website that exposed private information about CueCat users. Digital Convergence immediately shut down that part of their website, and their investigation concluded that approximately 140,000 CueCat users who had registered their CueCat were exposed to a breach that revealed their name, email address, age range, gender and zip code. This was not
975-407: A single click of the pointing device . Since the introduction of Windows 95, other operating systems have incorporated graphical user interface elements that closely resemble the taskbar or have similar features. The designs vary, but generally include a strip along one edge of the screen . Icons or textual descriptions on this strip correspond to open windows . Clicking the icons or text enables
1040-403: A taskbar onscreen by default. Application switching prior to Mac OS 8.5 was done by clicking on an application's window or via a pull-down menu at the right end of the menu bar . Prior to version 8.5 the menu's title was the icon of the foreground application. Version 8.5 introduced the ability to optionally also display the application name and to "tear off" the menu by dragging the title with
1105-410: A year, advertisements, special web editions, and editorial content containing CueCat barcodes appeared in many US periodicals, including Parade , Forbes , and Wired . The Dallas Morning News and other Belo-owned newspapers printed the barcodes next to major articles and regular features like stocks and weather. Commercial publications such as Adweek , Brandweek , and Mediaweek employed
1170-437: Is empty if it has no characters; the scheme component is always non-empty. The authority component consists of subcomponents : This is represented in a syntax diagram as: [REDACTED] The URI comprises: A web browser will usually dereference a URL by performing an HTTP request to the specified host, by default on port number 80. URLs using the https scheme require that requests and responses be made over
1235-414: Is therefore called gnome-panel ). By default, GNOME 2 usually contains two full-width panels at the top and bottom of the screen. The top panel usually contains navigation menus labeled Applications , Places , and System in that order. These menus hold links to common applications, areas of the file system, and system preferences and administration utilities, respectively. The top panel usually contains
1300-565: The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), as an outcome of collaboration started at the IETF Living Documents birds of a feather session in 1992. The format combines the pre-existing system of domain names (created in 1985) with file path syntax, where slashes are used to separate directory and filenames . Conventions already existed where server names could be prefixed to complete file paths, preceded by
1365-410: The behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner at Harvard . The taskbar is an exemplar of a category of always-visible graphical user interface elements that provide access to fundamental operating system functions and information. At the time of its introduction in 1995, the taskbar was unique among such elements because it provided the user with a means of switching between running programs through
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#17328524670281430-469: The rapid evolution of operating systems and graphical user interfaces, items that are native to each operating system have been included in the various designs. Windows 1.0 , released in 1985, features a horizontal bar located at the bottom of the screen where running programs reside when minimized (referred to as "iconization" at the time), represented by icons. A window can be minimized by double-clicking its title bar , dragging it onto an empty spot on
1495-514: The CueCat a " Rube Goldberg contraption ", a "massive flop", and a "fiasco". In 2001, Computerworld named CueCat as a Laureate in the Media Arts & Entertainment category. In 2001, Software and Information Industry Association named Digital Convergence Corp.'s :CRQ Technology as Best Reference Tool. In June 2005, a liquidator offered two million CueCats for sale at $ 0.30 each (in quantities of 500,000 or more). Once available for free,
1560-680: The CueCat's capabilities mostly superfluous. Uniform Resource Locator A uniform resource locator ( URL ), colloquially known as an address on the Web , is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), although many people use the two terms interchangeably. URLs occur most commonly to reference web pages ( HTTP / HTTPS ) but are also used for file transfer ( FTP ), email ( mailto ), database access ( JDBC ), and many other applications. Most web browsers display
1625-512: The HTML Specification referred to "Universal" Resource Locators. This was dropped some time between June 1994 ( RFC 1630 ) and October 1994 (draft-ietf-uri-url-08.txt). In his book Weaving the Web , Berners-Lee emphasizes his preference for the original inclusion of "universal" in the expansion rather than the word "uniform", to which it was later changed, and he gives a brief account of
1690-560: The Quick Launch toolbar in certain versions and configurations). In addition to deskbands, Windows supports "Application Desktop Toolbars" (also called "appbands") that supports creating additional toolbars that can dock to any side of the screen, and cannot be overlaid by other applications. Users can add additional toolbars that display the contents of folders. The display for toolbars that represent folder items (such as Links, Desktop and Quick Launch) can be changed to show large icons and
1755-545: The URL of a web page above the page in an address bar . A typical URL could have the form http://www.example.com/index.html , which indicates a protocol ( http ), a hostname ( www.example.com ), and a file name ( index.html ). Uniform Resource Locators were defined in RFC 1738 in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee , the inventor of the World Wide Web , and the URI working group of
1820-417: The ability for an application to add items of its own to this menu. Minimized windows also appear in the dock, in the rightmost section, represented by a real-time graphical thumbnail of the window's contents. The trash can is also represented in the Dock, as a universal metaphor for deletion. For example, dragging selected text to the trash should remove the text from the document and create a clipping file in
1885-411: The bar, or by issuing a command from one of its menus . A minimized window is restored by double-clicking its icon or dragging the icon out of the bar. The bar features multiple slots for icons and expands vertically to provide the user with more rows as more slots are needed. Its color is the same as that of the screen background, which can be customized. Minimized windows can be freely placed in any of
1950-424: The bottom of the screen and cannot be moved to the top, left, or right side). Up to and including Windows Server 2008, the taskbar is constrained to single display, although third-party utilities such as UltraMon allow it to span multiple displays. When the taskbar is displayed vertically on versions of Windows prior to Windows Vista, the Start menu button will only display the text "Start" or translated equivalent if
2015-406: The contention that led to the change. Every HTTP URL conforms to the syntax of a generic URI. The URI generic syntax consists of five components organized hierarchically in order of decreasing significance from left to right: A component is undefined if it has an associated delimiter and the delimiter does not appear in the URI; the scheme and path components are always defined. A component
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2080-435: The decade of the "2000s". In 2010, Time magazine included it on a list of "The 50 worst Inventions", adding that people didn't accept "the idea of reading their magazines next to a wired cat-shaped scanner". The CueCat device was controversial, initially because of privacy concerns about its collection of aggregate user data. Each CueCat has a unique serial number , and users suspected that Digital Convergence could compile
2145-516: The device "fails miserably. Using it is just unnatural." He concluded that the CueCat "isn't worth installing and using, even though it's available free of charge". Joel Spolsky , a computer technology reviewer, also criticized the device as "not solving a problem" and characterized the venture as a "feeble business idea". The CueCat is now widely described as a commercial failure. It was ranked twentieth in "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time" by PC World magazine in 2006. The CueCat's critics said
2210-484: The device can now be found on sale at eBay for prices ranging from $ 5 to as much as $ 100. Hobbyists have reverse-engineered the firmware, software, and the customer database. Other unrelated companies sold and supported surplus new CueCats as low-cost barcode scanners for use with their software, such as the Readerware library cataloging utility. Eventually, the widespread availability of barcode scanner smartphone apps made
2275-445: The device to deliver relevant content to a single or multiple users in a household. Privacy groups warned that it could be used to track readers' online behavior because each unit has a unique identifier. Belo officials said they would not track individual CueCat users but would gather anonymous information grouped by age, gender and ZIP code. In September 2000, security watchdog website Securitywatch.com notified Digital Convergence of
2340-529: The device was ultimately of little use. Joe Salkowski of the Chicago Tribune wrote, "You have to wonder about a business plan based on the notion that people want to interact with a soda can", while Debbie Barham of the Evening Standard quipped that the CueCat "fails to solve a problem which never existed". In December 2009, the popular gadget blog Gizmodo voted the CueCat the #1 worst invention of
2405-644: The domain name and path. The domain name in the IRI is known as an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN). Web and Internet software automatically convert the domain name into punycode usable by the Domain Name System ; for example, the Chinese URL http://例子.卷筒纸 becomes http://xn--fsqu00a.xn--3lr804guic/ . The xn-- indicates that the character was not originally ASCII . The URL path name can also be specified by
2470-774: The empty slots. Program windows cannot overlap the bar unless maximized. The Start button did not make an appearance in these early implementations of the taskbar, and would be introduced at a much later date with the release of Windows 95 . Another early implementation can be seen in the Arthur operating system from Acorn Computers . It is called the icon bar and remains an essential part of Arthur's succeeding RISC OS operating system. The icon bar holds icons which represent mounted disc drives and RAM discs, running applications and system utilities. These icons have their own context-sensitive menus and support drag and drop behaviour. AmigaOS featured various third party implementations of
2535-546: The failure of CueCat. Belo Corporation , parent company of the Dallas Morning News and owner of many TV stations, invested US$ 37.5 million in Digital Convergence, RadioShack $ 30 million, Young & Rubicam $ 28 million, and Coca-Cola $ 10 million. Other investors included General Electric , and E. W. Scripps Company . The total amount invested was $ 185 million. Each CueCat cost RadioShack about $ 6.50 to manufacture. Starting in late 2000 and continuing for about
2600-429: The incident claiming that it was correcting this problem and would be offering them a $ 10 gift certificate to RadioShack , an investor in Digital Convergence. The company's initial response to these hacks was to assert that users did not own the devices and had no right to modify or reverse engineer them. Threats of legal action against the hackers swiftly brought on more controversy and criticism. The company changed
2665-445: The licensing agreement several times, adding explicit restrictions, apparently in response to hacker activity. Hackers argued that the changes did not apply retroactively to devices that had been purchased under older versions of the license, and that the thousands of users who received unsolicited CueCats in the mail had neither agreed to nor were legally bound by the license. No lawsuit was ever brought against "hackers", as this tactic
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2730-462: The mouse. The torn off menu was displayed as a palette . The palette window could be configured using AppleScript to appear much like a taskbar, with no title bar and fixed to one edge of the screen. No control panel was provided by Apple to access this functionality, but third-party developers quickly wrote applications that allowed users unfamiliar with AppleScript to customize their application palettes. Third party taskbars such as DragThing were
2795-513: The option to show the application labels and reduce the taskbar height to create a taskbar similar to the design used in Windows Vista. At the right side of the taskbar, the Aero Peak button was added, allowing users to quickly view the contents of the desktop and their widgets by hovering over the button, or minimize all applications by clicking on it. Windows 8 introduced no functional changes to
2860-455: The protocol of the current page, typically HTTP or HTTPS. Taskbar The taskbar is a graphical user interface element that has been part of Microsoft Windows since Windows 95 , displaying and facilitating switching between running programs . The taskbar and the associated Start Menu were created and named in 1993 by Daniel Oran, a program manager at Microsoft who had previously collaborated on great ape language research with
2925-523: The taskbar concept, and this inheritance is present also in its successors. For example, AmiDock , born as third-party utility, has then been integrated into AmigaOS 3.9 and AmigaOS 4.0. The AROS operating system has its version of Amistart that is provided with the OS and free to be installed by users, while MorphOS has been equipped with a dock utility just like in AmigaOS or Mac OS X . The default settings for
2990-671: The taskbar in Microsoft Windows place it at the bottom of the screen and includes from left to right the Start menu button , Quick Launch bar , taskbar buttons , and notification area . The Quick Launch toolbar was added with the Windows Desktop Update and is not enabled by default in Windows XP . Windows 7 removed the Quick Launch feature in favor of pinning applications to the taskbar itself. In Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 ,
3055-431: The taskbar is wide enough to show the full text. However, the edge of the taskbar (in any position) can be dragged to control its height (width for a vertical taskbar); this is especially useful for a vertical taskbar to show window titles next to the window icons. Users can resize the height (or width when displayed vertically) of the taskbar up to half of the display area. To avoid inadvertent resizing or repositioning of
3120-451: The taskbar was originally intended to be at the top of the screen. But the final configuration of Windows 95 put the taskbar at the bottom of the screen, replacing a user interface element called the tray that had been borrowed from Microsoft's Cairo project. Windows 95 OSR 2.5 would add the Quick Launch toolbar. With the release of Windows XP, Microsoft changed the behavior of the taskbar to take advantage of Fitts's law by removing
3185-402: The taskbar would now change when Windows was set to tablet mode, hiding the pinned and running apps and collapsing the search bar into a search icon. It would also show a back button. The Windows taskbar can be modified by users in several ways. The position of the taskbar can be changed to appear on any edge of the primary display (except in Windows 11 , where the taskbar is permanently fixed at
3250-442: The taskbar, Windows XP and later lock the taskbar by default. When unlocked, "grips" are displayed next to the movable elements which allow grabbing with the mouse to move and size. These grips slightly decrease amount of available space in the taskbar. The taskbar as a whole can be hidden until the mouse pointer is moved to the display edge, or has keyboard focus. The Windows 7+ taskbar does not allow pinning any arbitrary folder to
3315-418: The taskbar, and a start button that now slightly overlapped the content displayed above the taskbar. With Windows 7 saw the first major redesign of the taskbar since its introduction with larger application icons, the ability to pin application to the taskbar so that they're shown even if they aren't running, and hiding the application names by default. Quick Launch was also disabled by default. Users still had
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#17328524670283380-473: The taskbar, but replaced the Start button and Aero Peek button with hot corners for desktop users. Tablet users could now use the Charms bar. Windows 8.1 restored the Start button, and with Windows 8.1 Update, it was now possible to see Metro apps on the taskbar and pin them, as well as to access the taskbar while on the Start screen. Windows 10 , version 1507 added various major changes to the taskbar. A search bar
3445-500: The taskbar, it gets pinned instead to the jumplist of a pinned Explorer shortcut, however third party utilities such as Winaero 's Taskbar Pinner can be used to pin any type of shortcut to the taskbar. Other toolbars, known as "Deskbands", may be added to the taskbar. This feature, along with many other taskbar features is currently absent in Windows 11. Windows includes the following deskbands but does not display them by default (except
3510-405: The technology. The CueCat bar codes also appeared in select Verizon Yellow Pages, providing advertisers with a link to additional information. For a time, RadioShack printed these barcodes in its product catalogs, and distributed CueCat devices through its retail chain to customers at no charge. Forbes magazine mailed out the first 830,000 CueCats as gifts to their subscribers, since the magazine
3575-481: The text for each item. Prior to Windows Vista, the Desktop Toolbars could be dragged off the taskbar and float independently, or docked to a display edge. Windows Vista greatly limited , but did not eliminate the ability to have desktop toolbar not attached to the taskbar. Windows 7 has deprecated the use of Floating Deskbands altogether; they only appear pinned into the taskbar. Classic Mac OS did not display
3640-479: The trash. The right side of macOS's Menu bar also typically contains several notification widgets and quick access functions, called Menu extras . In KDE Plasma 5 , taskbar uses Widgets as elements in taskbar. In the update 5.20 (November 2020) they updated the taskbar to look more like Windows 10 by only displaying icons by default and grouping application windows together. GNOME 2 used its own type of taskbar, known as panels (the program responsible for them
3705-564: The use of data. According to Internet technologist and Interhack founder Matt Curtin , each scan delivered the product code, the user's ID and the scanner's ID back to Digital Convergence. The data format was proprietary , and was scrambled so the barcode data could not be read as plain text . However, the barcode itself is closely related to Code 128 , and the scanner was also capable of reading EAN / UPC and other symbologies , such as Priority Mail, UPC-A, UPC-E, EAN-13, EAN-8, 2-of-5 interleaved, CODABAR, CODE39, CODE128, and ISBN. Because of
3770-620: The user in the local writing system. If not already encoded, it is converted to UTF-8 , and any characters not part of the basic URL character set are escaped as hexadecimal using percent-encoding ; for example, the Japanese URL http://example.com/引き割り.html becomes http://example.com/%E5%BC%95%E3%81%8D%E5%89%B2%E3%82%8A.html . The target computer decodes the address and displays the page. Protocol-relative links (PRL), also known as protocol-relative URLs (PRURL), are URLs that have no protocol specified. For example, //example.com will use
3835-424: The user to easily switch between windows, with the active window often appearing differently from the others on the strip. In some versions of recent operating systems, users can "pin" programs or files to this strip for quick access. In many cases, there is also a notification area, which includes interactive icons that display real-time information about the computer system and some of the running programs. With
3900-417: The user's name, age, and e-mail address, and demanded completion of a lengthy survey with invasive questions about shopping habits, hobbies, and educational level. Then users could scan bar codes on groceries , bar codes on books , and custom bar codes in ads in magazines, newspapers, Verizon Yellow Pages, and RadioShack catalogs. The :CRQ software then used that unique serial number from the device to return
3965-668: The weak obfuscation of the data, meant only to protect the company under DMCA guidelines (like DVD-Video 's Content Scramble System ), software for decoding the CueCat's output quickly appeared on the Internet, followed by a plethora of unofficial applications. ":CRQ" ("see our cue"), the desktop software, intercepted the data from both the keyboard and the CueCat, before passing it on to the operating system . Versions for both Windows 32-bit or Mac OS 9 were included. Users of this software were required to register with their ZIP code , gender, and email address. This registration process enabled
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#17328524670284030-421: Was named CUE for the unique bar code which the device scanned and CAT as a wordplay on "Keystroke Automation Technology". It enabled a user to open a link to an Internet URL by scanning a barcode — called a "cue" by Digital Convergence — appearing in an article or catalog or on some other printed matter. In this way, a user could be directed to a web page containing related information without having to type in
4095-879: Was not employed to go after specific users or the hacker community, but to show "reasonable assertion". This would prevent another corporation from developing integrated software within an operating system or browser, which could take over the device and circumvent the :CRQ supervisory software and the revenue model that Digital Convergence desired. In May 2001, Digital Convergence fired most of its 225-person workforce. In September 2001, Belo Corporation , CueCat investor and owner of newspapers and TV stations, who had sent at least 200,000 free CueCats to its readers, wrote off their $ 37.5 million investment, and stopped using CueCat technology with newspapers's editions, notably The Press-Enterprise , The Dallas Morning News , and The Providence Journal . Investors in CueCat lost their $ 185 million. Technology journalist Scott Rosenberg called
4160-486: Was now shown by default that could be replaced with a search button or be hidden, when Cortana was available, the search function was replaced with the digital assistant. The Task View button allowed users to quickly view their running apps and desktops. A button to open the Action Center was also added on the left hand side of the clock, before being moved to the right hand side in Windows 10, version 1607 . Additionally,
4225-425: Was starting to print CRQ ("See Our Cue") barcodes in their magazine. Wired magazine mailed over 500,000 of the free devices as gifts to their subscribers. Each publisher private-branded the CueCat hardware they sent to their mailing list. Organizations that used the :CueCat and compatible :CRQ software: Installation of software and hardware, configuration, and registration took around an hour. Registration required
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