Slashback: Price-fixing, Borneo, Index

Greetings from the Wings Academy of the Bronx, from which this trio of Slashback entries springs. (I'm sitting with Miguel Muirhead, Jay Sulzberger and Ariel Rosa as we semi-surreptitiously install Red Hat and Debian distributions on two of this school's computer-lab desktops.) I hope you enjoy these updates.

I went down to the sacred store ... While the music industry (odd phrase, no?) certainly has more things to worry about, like not selling shiny disks full of overproduced pap, but dcigary writes to remind us: "The music industry was trying to control prices via their 'MAP' pricing scheme, but the FTC has started to put a stop to that. Discount retailers are responding by lowering prices dramatically -- sometimes cheaper-than-wholesale."

This doesn't find my lovely friend Uyen, though. Admin writes: "Howdy. Nearly 2 years ago, after a year of building the thing, I announced www.theindex.com search engine on Slashdot, which promptly gave it the drubbing it deserved. The reponse crashed TheIndex into the dirt. 2 years and lots of money and hard work later, TheIndex is now finished, and kicks butt. This started when I was whining to my software-engineer son about either having to wade thru "237,542 search results found", 10 at a time, or thru sub, sub sub, ad nauseum, categories. TheIndex has NO categories, (it uses a synonym-search process instead) and gives results 100 links at a time. It has nearly all of the best of the Internet (no one has it all) and the rest will come. There are NO porn or personal websites. Nearly all of the crap has been weeded out. This is a search engine built by only two people that is just as good, or better, than most of the top engines. We would really appreciate another chance on Slashdot, to show what TheIndex can do."

It sure looks promising, but failed to find a few friends whose names I tapped in, and surely that's a frequent search engine task. Anyhow, time to give these guys some constructive criticism again, eh? The more search engines the better as far as I'm concerned!

Cultural differences aren't just for yogurt Reader Leong Chii Kee objected to many of the comments in the story about bringing Internet-linked computers by boat to remote parts of Malaysia, and wrote with some clarifications:

After checking out your post Bringing The Internet To Borneo -- By Sea, which started an entire line of misinformation about my country, I figured I'd write to the source and hope that you would put up a additional description of the situation.

Firstly, There is essentially two parts of Malaysia, West Malaysia, which most of you would know is where our capital is, Kuala Lumpur (don't ask me why it translates to "mud cove" - I didn't name it) and there is East Malaysia. West Malaysia is fairly developed, we have our own silicon valley equivalent, and last I checked even those "kampung" (as our tourism board happily promotes it!) houses in the middle of the jungle had a phone line and electricity (and with a cheap copy of linux who said the poor can't afford internet access). But the situation is vastly different in East malaysia, which remains rather under-developed (you know jungles, rain forests, orang utans and stuff).

Secondly, the article deals with how the central government (located in west malaysia - lucky fellas) is trying to introduce the internet to eastern malaysians and NOT the attempts to bring Maylasian citizens into the Internet Age.. So it's nothing more than bringing internet to part of a country that doesn't have it (because it ain't that easy laying fiber optic cables in the rain forest when you have some eco-protection agency breathing down your neck about protecting the forest)... Imagine if you're sitting comfortably in front of your all powerful Athlon server with broadband access and halfway across globe someone calls you a spear wielding, hide wearing native. You'll be pissed too.

Thanks in advance,

CK

Comments

Re:theindex

[pjrc]

I agree, there's a lot of personal pages that have a lot of really valuable info (will list some below). My personal pages have been on the net since Sept '95, originally hosted at OSU, but for the last couple years with my own domain name. I've put a lot of work into them, and at least for their specialized topics, I think they're at least reasonable, perhaps better than a good portion of the more mainstream commercial sites I've seen.

Having worked so much on my personal pages, and having seen others that are really great, it's a bit distubing to hear an attitude like "all of the best of the Internet ... NO porn or personal websites".

There certainly are a lot of cases of personal sites that are arguably better than a good portion of their commercial counterparts. Phil's Photo.net comes easily to mind. Jakob Nielsen's Useit.com is probably another well known example. How about mp3projects.com, which is hosted on freeservers.com.

So I'm wondering what is it, exactly, that makes a personal website, well, a personal site that they're above indexing?

• Contact info for the author, instead of a generic webmaster@ ??
• Having the tilde ("~") in the URL?
• Authored by a real person who cared instead of a by-the-hour web consulting firm?
• Not selling any products?
• Not being a company or institution (w/ a logo)?
• A main page lacking over-done graphical design and/or flash-based intro?
• Black-n-Yellow "Under Construction" signs?

Of course, what I'm really wondering is if my little site will be countable? I just tried their submit url page, so maybe I'll find out if I count for anything. I submitted the url for my 8051 microcontroller page, so maybe that'll not-personal enough for them?

Still, the attitude expressed about personal websites is a bit disturbing. You'd think folks building an index of the net would know a bit more about some the truely great personal sites.

theindex

[Phexro]

um, quite a lot of the really good resources on the net are at people's personal homepages.

for example, this site, which provides all sorts of info to USQwest DSL users.

is it really a good idea to silence the voice of the masses like this?
--

Boo hoo, $10 CDs

[sulli]

From the CD price war article:

"Right now, the discount retailers are just absorbing the loss, but this is worrying for everybody in the industry because it sets the tone at the consumer level that CDs should be $10 or less," said one music distribution exec.

Well, CDs should be $10 or less. And now everyone knows that!