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Well, I searched for "adult naked women sex cookies" on AltaVista and there was not one single page in the top 50 that had anything to do with anything other than internet cookies and baked cookies!

So does that mean that AltaVista doesn't give good results?!?!?

Es ist nicht einfach, zu sein grün.

According to babelfish, you're right.

It's posted on a German site, so you'd better run it through Babelfish first. Ah, that's much better.

[And for those of you with no sense of humor, this is not a time to hit the moderation button. Even though the site's slashdotted and you have nothing better to do.]

It's not just about pr0n though. It's the whole censorship thing. For instance, if you allow access to Altavista, kiddies can get access to banned literature. At least I'm guessing it's banned in the Holland Library. Next thing you know, it's showing up in a plain brown wrapper at the unsuspecting parents' house.

Open access can also lead to open research into crime. It's not all pipe bombs. You can actually get pictorial details of RAPE.

There are some arguments to be made in favour of the censorware. For instance, suppose your aging and unindoctrinated grandmother accidentally enters www.whitehouse.com thinking she's checking on the president's latest bout of good work... She's in for a surprise. With NetNanny, CyberSitter, SurfWatch, or CyberPatrol in place, she won't be shocked into cardiac arrrest. (And if she does survive, she'll NEVER get rid of the annoying pop-up windows that show up when you try to close the browser.)

Personally, I'm against censorware in general, but there are arguments to be made for it. Perhaps what's needed is a new dot-xxx domain for outright pron sites... But then who'll decide what is or isn't classified as such...?

- - - -

Altavista finds 61663 unique webpages about bugs in the Debian Linux distribution:

http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?sc=on&hl=on &kl=en&pg=q&text=y es&q=%2Bhost%3Adebian.org+%2Bbug

Shocking news? No, not really because this figure includes bugs which are fixed, bugs which are trivial, duplicates, comments, bugs which are hidden from end-users, etc.

Conclusion: quoting raw statistics without giving a detailed interpretation can be highly misleading...

This comment is not specific to any OS

I can see the day coming when you'll have to sign up with something like PornoPass to get to an uncensored search engine.

So, a quick look on Altavista lead me to this page, where I found out the (this is low-level.. only because I have no real idea what OOP really means) jist of OOP is that the objects have control over starting and killing themselves, and they communicate with each other. So, say, would that mean that a new device would load its driver only when you called on that device.. and kill it after a period of inaction? (instead of, say, the kernel loading the module at the user's/root's command?)

If so, and that's the "only" advantage to HURD/the idea that HURD is OO programmed... how is that better? Is it a more efficient way of using processor time/system resources/memory?

Or.. what's the dealio?

(Other than that, though, I'd have to say I agree with you when you say:


"This is one of the most incredibly content-free, flame-inviting statements I've seen in the main body of an article on /. for a long time.")

In a story this morning about our new Affiliate Network, ZD Net inaccurately states AltaVista is "giving away the source code for its search engine." ZD Net is correcting its story.

The new affiliate program is based on a syndicated model, where we are providing the HTML and search box interface to web sites, large and small, to enable their users to access AltaVista's premier services including search, stock quotes, language translation, multimedia, news and discussion group content. Users can choose from an array of search boxes that fit their personal brand. The search box then acts as a gateway for users to tap into our robust index. Those Web sites that choose to participate in AltaVista's Affiliate Network will receive three cents per click-through when their users access AltaVista branded services. To learn more about the affiliate program visit http://doc.altavista.com/affiliate/.

This program is not to be confused with the other products we provide that do allow customers to access our source code and build their own search products. We provide an array of tools that allow customers to create their own customized engines. Information about these programs is available at (big huge link here).

In a story this morning about our new Affiliate Network, ZD Net inaccurately states AltaVista is "giving away the source code for its search engine." ZD Net is correcting its story.

The new affiliate program is based on a syndicated model, where we are providing the HTML and search box interface to web sites, large and small, to enable their users to access AltaVista's premier services including search, stock quotes, language translation, multimedia, news and discussion group content. Users can choose from an array of search boxes that fit their personal brand. The search box then acts as a gateway for users to tap into our robust index. Those Web sites that choose to participate in AltaVista's Affiliate Network will receive three cents per click-through when their users access AltaVista branded services. To learn more about the affiliate program visit http://doc.altavista.com/affiliate/.

This program is not to be confused with the other products we provide that do allow customers to access our source code and build their own search products. We provide an array of tools that allow customers to create their own customized engines. Information about these programs is available at (big huge link here).

Ok, here you go:
http://doc.altavista.c om/company_info/press/press_news.shtml.
or in particular:
http://doc.altavista.com /company_info/press/pr013100.shtml
See, that's what's called a "press release". There's a difference between a press release and a news article. I know, I must be really bored if I'm going to respond to childish flames from an ignorant coward, but hey, it's Tuesday.

Ok, here you go:
http://doc.altavista.c om/company_info/press/press_news.shtml.
or in particular:
http://doc.altavista.com /company_info/press/pr013100.shtml
See, that's what's called a "press release". There's a difference between a press release and a news article. I know, I must be really bored if I'm going to respond to childish flames from an ignorant coward, but hey, it's Tuesday.

i thought i might sign up for their affiliate program, just to get the occasional $.03 check from altavista, but when i saw the application form, i was appalled.

not only does it ask for all your contact information (several times) but it asks for your social security number. all on an insecure form!

http://live.altavista.com/scripts/editorial.dll?ca tegoryid=&only=y&bfromind=980&eetype=art icle&render=y&eeid=1461716&avr=1

Try LOOKING at the Altavista site? This article is apparently accurate enough for AltaVista to post themselves. (probably written for ZD by AV anyway)

I made no point about "OpenSource" at all, so how do you know if I missed it? I repeated what the article said, that AltaVist is "giving away" the source code. Yes, I know there is a difference, that is why I did not say "open source". Maybe you can e-mail Hemos about his misuse?

BTW, ZDNET has apparently pulled the story already (no, not slashdotted, "page not found" and headline removed from ZDNET). I do not know where anybody saw the AltaVista press release saying you must be an affiliate to get the source, but it is not showing up here live.altavista.com, so I am just going from the articles that I have working links to.

You guys MAY be right, but I have yet to see ANYTHING saying that AltaVista requires affiliation acceptance to get a copy of the source.

AltaVista is jointly owned by CMGI and Compaq, they get advertising revenue from DoubleClick, and one look at their press page shows that they're making deals left and right, among other things.

So why this click-thru service anyway? Isn't this just the last resort for porn webmasters and script kiddies? What exactly does this prove...that at the mention of the phrase "open source," people come running? This just doesn't make any sense to me.

Thoughts?

Be an Internet Search Partner (from the home page). Right down the bottom of that page, you'll see a link to the AltaVista Affiliate Network, which is what the article is talking about.

T&C's, FAQs, etc., can be found at the second URL.

...j

Be an Internet Search Partner (from the home page). Right down the bottom of that page, you'll see a link to the AltaVista Affiliate Network, which is what the article is talking about.

T&C's, FAQs, etc., can be found at the second URL.

...j

The Altavista Affiliate Program Agreement states:

Affiliate may not alter the HTML code within the Program boxes. If changes to boxes are detected, all accrued payments to Affiliate will be canceled. This includes changes that affect functionality, performance or tracking capabilities of Affiliate Links.

(Italics added for emphasis.)

I don't really see how Altavista giving people some HTML source - no matter how "proprietary" - counts as them opening their source code to their search engine, which seems to be what the article is trying to imply. Many other sites - Lycos, for one - have had similar programs in the past, though the $0.03 per clickthrough sounds like a different twist.

Chalk it up as effective marketing - they put the words "open" and "source" in the same sentence, and managed to generate the expected amount of talk about what is essentially a non-event. 'Course, I may have missed the "Download Altavista search engine source here!" link on their site, but I don't think so :-)

Altavista has been offering its search engine (executables) for download for quite a while here. It is not the same engine they use on their web site.
Here is the press release from Altavista.

Altavista has been offering its search engine (executables) for download for quite a while here. It is not the same engine they use on their web site.
Here is the press release from Altavista.

Altavista news got the story from ZDnet. Would have expected it to be the other way around.

Well, I though it was funny

But what happens when a search engine looks at another search engine?

Do the laws even begin to cover this?

-----

Well, this answers a question I've had for a while...whether or not all Slashdot users get the same fortune at a particular time. Apparently they do, because I've got the same one. btw, babelfish translates it to:

' Mounten ' is used for three things: a ' mounting ' horses, ' latch ' from fixed disks into file systems,
and, now, ' mount ' with the Sex.

they provide the ads for many many many sites. do a view-image on an Altavista ad, for example.

I realize that this message may be misplaced in its delivery to one or more of the people who have received it, but I am sending it to any and all addresses for BMG employees that appear to be potentially applicable (or who may know where it should be forwarded).

It has come to light that recently BMG has begun releasing copy-protected music CDs to the general public. Due to the fact that these CD's are not Red Book compliant, they do not play on many conventional CD players, nor do they play on computer CD drives. They do not bear a label or message anywhere on them that states this. Now, I don't know if you're aware or not, but many retail outlets do not accept returns of opened CD's (after all, someone might have copied it). This means that I, as a consumer of music, stand an indefinite chance of purchasing a useless plastic coaster anytime I purchase a CD from BMG Entertainment or its subsidiary companies. I also am a significant user of the MP3 music format. I have a household network with computers in many rooms of my home, including one hooked up to my stereo system. I have an MP3 player in my car, and also a portable player. By removing (or, as I'll illustrate in a momeny, simply complicating) my ability to convert a CD that I legally purchase into a *legal* copy for listening, you have removed a great portion of the reason for me to purchase that CD. In fact, you have not even removed my ability to perform that conversion; there are several ways that such copy-protection could be circumvented - and one of them is certain to work.

I am a long-time member of the BMG Music Service in the United States. As things stand, I have no guarantee that when I purchase a CD from you that it will in fact be a CD Audio (Red Book) compliant disc, nor that it will work in my high-end (but old) CD player. If this matter is not resolved acceptibly, this leaves me no choice other than to cancel my membership with BMG Music Service.

Here's a link to an article (in German) if you hadn't already heard about this:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker /data/cm-25.01.00-000/

For those that can't read German, here it is (poorly) translated through Babelfish:
http://babelfish.altavista.com/cgi-bin/trans late?doit=done&urltext=http://www.heise.de/newstic ker/data/cm-25.01.00-000/&lp=de_en

The fish sez: So far the albums " Razorblade Romance " of the group of Him and " My private ones are were concerned " the former Independent Heroen Philip Boa & The Voodoo club.. Man them krauts are kinky. They have a group called "My private ones were concerned"? Kinda makes "Limp Biskit" look silly doesn't it?

According to the fish, "The copy protection prevents [...] a playing on all D-CRcOcM-cDrives"! How will I listen to it?? I play all my music through my 26x D-CRcOcM-cDrive!

The fish also tells me that "Possibly also the seal Compact Disc digital audio is not entitled to the product". Ok, well that may be fine for "Compact Disc digital audio" but what about my pet seal Lenny? Is Lenny entitled to the product? (Man those germans have wierd names for their seals).

Ah, fun with babelfish, it never gets tiring. For those of you who haven't tried it, try a modern day version of "telephone". Write a simple paragraph into the box, translate it to german, translate it back to english, translate it to french, translate it back to english, and so on until you've done all the languages... then compare your original paragraph with the translation.

Evidently, this isn't entirely a new revelation. A quick altavista sear ch returned this (among others), which is older than this article (hasn't been touched since '98) but goes into a LOT more detail on this thing. This may be out of date for all I know, but it was kinda hard to tell from the posted article which had breathtakingly little real information in it... Too bad, too, this looks like some interesting stuff. I wish I knew enough on the subject to have some guess as to whether this is really an exciting thing, or just somebody trying to generate some publicity...

I just want to back up the feelings that I have and that have been growing due to rampant abuses of power and the fact that a little conspiracy has essentially screwed a whole class of people over.

Dude, you're seeing things from a strictly user-based perspective. There are a lot of things in the 'net that are beyond user control...but choice of ISP isn't one of them. If your ISP does something you don't like--be that yanking things from you, or behaving so badly as to get themselves UDP'd--then you can change to another.

I've posted elsewhere in this thread about public-access or commercial news servers. They are out there; you can use them, and since USENET is all they do, you can be darned sure they do it pretty well. You're not strictly locked into one ISP forever, you know.

The net shouldn't cost so god damned much in the first place.

Guess what? It doesn't anymore. In fact, if I lost my school account, I could 'net completely for free just by using a dialin account from someone like AltaVista, Bluelight.com, Worldspy, or any of the dozen other free-dialup ISPs out there. (Granted, I'd be stuck in Windows as none yet support Linux, but still.) Add those to a news-only ISP, and you've got free news.

Well, let's see. There's Deja & Remarq just for starters.

Yahoo also has a listing of public-access USENET sites. Sadly, spammers being who and what they are, most public-access sites that allow posting soon become abused right out of existence.

For those willing to pay a bit of extra money, there is also Yahoo's commercial news server category.

There are always choices for USENET service. Even if you already pay your ISP for its USENET, additional access elsewhere isn't really all that expensive. These are also viable options for people who use free dialin services like AltaVista or Blue Light that don't provide anything beyond bare-bones dialup access.

BBC - Using RDS

Radio data system info (in german I'm afraid, but it seems very informative... maybe this is a case for babelfish?)

RDS forum

Radio data system info (in german I'm afraid, but it seems very informative... maybe this is a case for babelfish?)

RDS forum

Try http://babelfish.altavista.com/cgi-bin/translate?d oit=done&urltext=http: //www.linux.com.uy/&lp=es_en.

At this rate, ETOYS will be worthless soon enough. How low does it have to fall before it simply ceases to exist in it's current form? In this age of internet stocks being so highly valued how can ETOYS not realize the damage this has caused them? How can they be so blind?

Perhaps they have forgotten that we talk to each other. Perhaps they have forgotten that we can hear all sides of the stories. perhaps they have forgotten that we could have been their market and their investors had they not done this.

Perhaps they're just blind.

AltaVista, Yahoo, MSN, Netscape, Excite, and of course AOL all have links to this. All of these guys have money, and it's very probable that at least one of them won't obey this court order through sheer carelessness. Let's get ready to Sue!

Surprising that a search engine isn't included in that list, as it can also be made to link to that site. Or how about a link to a link to a link to a link that has a link to DeCSS? Oh, no, I just realized I linked to altavista, now I'm gonna be sued, too!@#%$

I like Google because they

• Load quickly
• Have good results
• Run on Linux (anyone know if this is still true?)

You're forgetting that "Einstein" is still a popular surname. If you search altavista for +eins tein -albert, you'll come up with 134,250 pages found. Albeit, plenty of people refer to Einstein by just his surname, but plenty of those 134k pages have nothing to do with our dear Albert.

Now if I could just figure out why /. munged "+einstein" by inserting a space in the middle.

Well, I sure don't use ZD articles as a shopping tool. When I am looking for solutions for uncommon problems, I often ask my friends at the consulting firm where I used to work what has worked for them. I also ask my hardware vendors for advice, but that has to be taken with a grain of salt since they're usually just trying to sell the most expensive solution. I also use AltaVista to search for text strings like "enterprise document management" or "PDF automation". Sure, I have to put up with "2,102,893 matches found, displaying results 1 - 10", but I find some pretty off-the-wall stuff that way

For more mundance solutions, I usually stick with what I know works. I'm a little surprised that HP didn't send me a Christmas card this year, as we buy a whole lot of their products. All the Intel-based servers are HP NetServers, the workstations are HP Kayaks, and the low-end clients are *cheap* and reliable HP Vectras. It doesn't hurt that the CEO and COO are both technophiles, and have realized the productivity gains of their employees as our IT infrastructure has grown.

One of the reasons I've pushed to make everything web-based is to create some level of platform independence. We have a huge number of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on our network, so for the time being everyone needs MS-Office, and thus, Windows, but at least there are packages out there with import/export tools for MS-Office, such as StarOffice and ApplixWare. What is more insidious are the client/server applications that will probably never get ported outside of Windows. By pushing the web-centric option, we leave open the possibility of making an alternative OS the primary desktop.

The engineers will probably never be able to leave NT, as AutoCAD, SolidWorks, and Pro/Engineer would all have to offer UNIX versions of their product to make that switch, but virtually everyone else in the company could someday be moved.

You are correct; it is all of those things.

But...some non-features:

• Table rendering blows. Load Slashdot or AltaVista to see this.
• It doesn't support GIF transparency. And I whine that Netscape doesn't have a full alpha channel in PNG images. This is much worse.
• It looks like crap. It uses the Athena widgetset!

If you want a browser, I suggest:

• Netscape 4.7. Bloatware.
• Mozilla M12. Watch it crash. Bloatware.
• Konqueror. Smaller and faster but alpha.
• Opera. Smaller and faster but alpha and non-open-source.
• StarOffice. And you thought Netscape was bloated...
• Any of the other options. They suck.

So...those are your choices. Rejoice.

Touchphone is an intelligent telephone, an agenda electronic, one telephone secretariat, a manager of electronic mail, the ideal vehicle in order to be annoying immediately in Internet. Touchphone is the synthesis of worst electronic expressed in a studied product in order to facilitate one simple, personal, fast communication and without limits.

Moderate this down (-1, Sleazy)
--

http ://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&sc=on&q=le onardo&kl=XX&stype=stext

Leonardo DiCaprio and Leonardo Da Vinci are the only links I saw (I didn't go any further than the first 10 results)

Have fun, people. You can figure it out :-)

IMHO, it's not just Fox that are at fault here, it's commerical "web design" in general. Ever notice how places like PCWeek, Altavista, mp3.com, and many -- many -- others use pages replete with br and such to force the 640x480 look on people? Most of the time it's not even centred, forcing me to stare at the left 30% of my monitor.

There is no excuse why this should be. Give me my content, give it to me nicely, and, damnit, let me view it in my browser window at proper scaling. There was an artcle on some site about Slashdot long ago. I had to use Opera to magnify the page view 300% for it to show the "content" at a decent size in my 1024x768 desktop. When I started using Linux exclusively (with Windows as a glorfied Nintendo), the problem was exacerbated by the simple fact that the pages designed to look great at 640x480 also assumed a bunch of fonts (which I did later setup, thanks to the ttf font server in the Slackware contrib dir).

Why bother to take the time, spend lots of your company moola, only to come up with a hard-coded, useless, junky site?

Flash? Great -- what's the point? Slow downloads suck, and I'm on a cable modem! The only site I've seen to use Flash in a compelling way (in terms of "mainstream" sites), is After Y2K. With Cascading Style Sheets, it is trivial to implement really nice looking sites that scale well. Netscape, Opera, and (gahck) IE support CSS very well, as does Mozilla. With Lynx, it's a non-issue ;-)

If anyone doesn't understand what I mean, go look at my webserver (Thock.com) for an example of how I write my HTML (which is all hand written, and generally tested well). I'll also welcome any comments anyone has on my HTML, I am writing an HTML primer, and related, documents for the webserver.
---

Somebody had to say it (and somebody probably has, but why should that stop me?)
Don't forget babelfish. That's got to be worth something. ;-)

more or less what the previous poster said:

What Alta Vista the sell/provide that it could be supposed in the value $5 billion?

Search Engine, which, if popular, the quality of the section of its competition of upstart cannot fit up, google of the IE.

A support, that, if in such a way popular is, not of this no different one a support better good and portal is tenth dollar in dúzia nowadays.

Some jobs of Web Web Web Web bidding that, fully sincerely, do not shift ebay in any height, those soon.

it gives maintenance to jobs Web Web based the email, as if any another fact of this nowadays.

also have a look at this article by c't (german). use babelfish to translate it. it has some interesting thoughts why microsoft changed the name.

--
www.game-over.ch - Jesus rules!

I was actually just thinking about a practical way to interface to some translation software to write a real-time IRC bot to translate conversations as they happen. The only free translation software I knew of to do this was Babelfish, and writing an interface to that would be slow as hell for a real-time app, but this thing might be the answer. :)

It's really good to see that there is work going on to progress these type of programs. What part of the problem with babelfish is that it doesn't quite get the job done. Several of my classmates have tried to cheat when writting a paper in a different language. Someone in Germany said this to me once in response to my translation...

"I know what you say, but I don't know what you say. You funny American!"

Since when is SuSE a stock cooperation (AG)? Have I missed their IPO? Last time I checked, SuSE has been a private limited company (GmbH) and it still says so on their homepage.

I had wondered for some time what those abbreviations mean, so I played with Babelfish a bit and got these results:

• AG: Aktiengesellschaft, or corporation
• GmbH: Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, or limited liability company

You learn something new every day. I lived in Germany for two years, and never figured those out while I was there. :-)