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Slashback: Cradle, Indiscriminancy, Multiplicity
Power the hot tub with compost, remember the soy insulation. andyrossmeissl writes "William McDonough's book Cradle to Cradle was reviewed favorably back in 2002, and now its theories about making things sustainably will be put into practice in the C2C Home design competition. The judges (McDonough is on the panel) will present 9 awards and actually build four of the projects on sites in Roanoke, Virginia. Wanna try your hand? Students and professionals should register by November 15."
About that blind-date opportunity ... Alex Salkever, Tech Editor of BusinessWeek online, wrote with a response to the recent story about the dilemma Google faces in trying to make money from its Google News service:
"There is another side to this that I think is equally important, namely, that Google is undermining the news business with its algorithm-based story selection.It's clear to a journalist that this system was designed by someone who has no idea what's important in the news. While it may nail the top headlines, Google News can't do anything but that. There is no consideration of comprehensiveness of a story at one site over another. Often they cite bizarre news sources for stories way out of their specialty. Why else would we be seeing Al Jazeera as the top listing for a story on Kobe Bryant? The truth is, Web search in the Google model is a poor way to aggregate useful news. It's a great way to figure out what site posted news first but not much more than that.
All of which would be fine except that so many people go to Google for news that they have come to think its actually a really good source for news. It is, if you are searching for news. But if you are reading their home page it's wildly erratic. This ultimately hurts news outlets who work very hard to put together the best stories and draw traffic to their pages. Let me put it to you this way: Would you want the Google guys to set you up on a blind date? Guess what? They already did."
Fountain pens are still ineffective, at least. anomaly writes "I was quite displeased to see that the Kryptonite U locks were incredibly vulnerable to the venerable BIC pen.
I happened to be in the bike shop today and noticed that Kryptonite is sponsoring a lock replacement program. Now's the time to get that lock replaced with a more secure one - before the thieves make off with your bike. Kudos to Kryptonite for responding, and quickly."
Processor envy strikes hard. Adam writes "Orion Multisystems, the company which introduced two Linux-based multiprocessor supercomputers at the end of August, has begun selling the DT-12 Cluster Workstation online. The company claims that this 12-processor unit has a peak performance of 36 Gflops and is small enough to fit on a desk."
Neat stuff. Especially the lock thing. I am glad they are replacing the locks, because it would be so terrible if they just didn't care. How much do the locks cost BTW? Ooh! I want a hot tub!
l33t.
I prefer Google News myself. At least I can get news from a variety of sources, not just the local TV station. It would be better though if it filtered out duplicate articles (i.e. ones copied straight from the Associated Press or other wire sources).
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
I never read that article (will go read it now) but he seems a little jealous of google news.. ... I rather LIKE having stuff just picked by a computer.. Eliminates bias AS LONG AS the news sites dont start learning how to make sure they are the ones that google news posts.
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
Parse the news stories for things like names, places and products and substitute on Google News those stories for Google search links. That way, Google can pull the readers to its paid services and can probably innocently say "but we're just providing readers with the ability to find out more information about the story."
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
From my past experience with compost, I know that it doesn't smell that great, among other things. It would be interesting to see how they deal with this problem. I doubt my friends would want to hang out in a tub with the smell of manure and decomposing material in the air.
The Slindies?
l33t.
There have been slashbacks for a while..
At least, that's what I think you're complaining about.. I'm having a hard time understanding your message.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I know it's old news by now, but the gun cabinet maker denies that their locks are having this problem- but is offering free lock replacement.
Old news link about the gun cabinet.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
- Would you want the Google guys to set you up on a blind date?
What a great idea! Too bad Lotus Domino is squatting at gdate.com, but Blind Dating would put the oogle in Google.-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
One of the things I have learned from reading Google News is just how few people are doing any acutal reporting. The vast majority of major new organizations are just repeating what they get off of the AP wire, which you might as well read directly. When Google really shines though, is when it finds those out of the way news sources that actually break a non-AP story. During the US military engagements in the middle east, Al-Jezera is often more intelligent than the regurgitated spin releases vomited from CBS/FOX/etc. Google also give you the opportunity to compare coverage on a wide range of sites, aggregating the gamut of viewpoints. I'm sorry, but Google is only "hurting" more established channels by providing more direct access to the fringe press. For the fringes, and those of us who enjoy the range of analysis, this is a huge boon.
I'm not sure how impartial google news really is.
Since results must be biased in some way by the number of sources reporting a story, and the majority of our sources are (arguably) biased, won't the results come out skewed anyways. Regardless of Google's impartiality, I wonder how much of a chance smaller and important stories really have of making it to the surface? A kitten stuck in a tree covered by several newspapers might be able to creep pretty high, but a massacre in some remote country may rank pretty low.
Then again, Google is pure genius, so let's all not worry. ;)
If they're eco-friendly, then they're biodegradable.
Then the lock's new weakness is... DIRT!
I already get the Dallas Morning News, USA Today and the NYTimes, electronically, in my inbox every morning. I KNOW what "the journalists" give me as what THEY think is "important in the news."
What about those times when I DON'T want a journalist to decide for me what's "importantn"??
I think Google provides an excellent service.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
While it may nail the top headlines, Google News can't do anything but that. There is no consideration of comprehensiveness of a story at one site over another.
What a silly point. Google News doesn't try to tell you what to read. It gathers the most commonly reported events into headlines and intends the user to sort through them. As a way of organizing news reports, it's unparalleled. Just like traditional Google Search, it doesn't make the choice of resource for you (that's what our discernment is for), it merely organizes your choices so they are accessible. Perhaps from the perspective of a traditional journalist, the idea of a broad range of news sources at the fingertips of the reader rather blind dependency on a few well-known outlets is worrying because it threatens the old way of doing things. Personally, I think more accessibility and more choice for the reader will only make online news more competitive and allow quality articles outside of the conventional vendors to show themselves more easily.
They already know how to do it. Linguistic anomalies and other factors can skew Google News results. When you're talking about human events, there's no way to remove bias.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
This ultimately hurts news outlets who work very hard to put together the best stories and draw traffic to their pages.
If Google News is that much worse than traditional news outlets "working very hard", then those traditional news outlets won't have anything to fear, will they? If Google News is so "erratic", then obviously readers will flock to the traditional news outlets, won't they? It's funny how these comments were made by somebody from the traditional news outlets, isn't it?
Let me put it to you this way: Would you want the Google guys to set you up on a blind date? Guess what? They already did.
>Looks around< err... no, I'm pretty sure they didn't. What a stupid thing to say.
Often they cite bizarre news sources for stories way out of their specialty. Why else would we be seeing Al Jazeera as the top listing for a story on Kobe Bryant?
So? I am smart enough to click on the part that says, for example, "..and 650 more.." and look for sources that make more sense. I like having the option to read five or six or 50 different write-up's of the same story. I can tell when the first source or two are inappropriate and I can move on. I suspect the person who wrote in prefers the CNN or FOX, etc. format of deciding what should be the news for the day. Google dumps it all out there and in quantity. For a news junky, I think Google is great! I do read the CNN online news as well but sometimes I am astounded at the difference between CNN's version (which can lean left just as the Fox version can lean right) versus the BBC version or one of the India newspapers.
http://www.busyweather.com/
Before they had their news aggregator there were several others such as NewsHub and even Yahoo had one for a little while (though recently NewsHub's server performance is much slower, it started when Lycos became more visible on the home page). I agree with others that more filtering features needs to be added or publicized at the Google one to search by region, by newswire, etc.
Does he have any idea how insulting that is? Why do so many journalists not only want to decide what the news is, they also want you to get it from certain sources only and they don't want you think critically about the news or the source. Well, that's how I feel, anyway. Bastards.
http://www.busyweather.com/
While I understand his point, is that not the reason people go to Google for news (eg: to avoid or distribute human bias)? This just sounds to me like he is angry that people are not reading the news the way he wants them to.
This is what Salkever's statements sound like to me.
Quote:
Translation:Quote:
Translation:Quote:
Translation:I do not use Google News, but at least on the surface, it is a system that appears to be unfriendly to the obvious and harmful bias of US news sources. It also seems to me that reading a bunch of news from totally random websites might actually contribute to more open mindedness (something I, for one, would like to see more of in the US and in the rest of the world).
I think the simple point is: Readers are responsible for picking and choosing what they believe out of the news. While this has always been true, Google News is making it more obvious by sprinkling, sometimes very liberally, the news with opinions that are not standard within the news industry (and some opinions that are just downright absurd). This is probably a good thing.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Concordantly. Ergo. Vis-à-vis.
English is easier said than done.
Trying to confuse us all with unexpected and possibly illuminating news sources!
Shame on them for providing a portal for world views and domestic issues.
What could possibly go wrong?
Kudos to Kryptonite for responding, and quickly
Considering that the U lock pen opening technique was discovered circa 1992, I wouldn't call Kryptonite's response quick, exactly.
Nice of them, yes, but quick, no.
"It gathers the most COMMONLY REPORTED events into headlines..." Jeezus!! I thought slashdotters were above-average thinking folk. This entire thread is rife with people who think it's just peachy that things are so "convenient." Does it NOT occur to anyone here that if an ideological group can purchase up a bunch of "news sources"/media outlets, they can control what is "most commonly reported"? Sound familiar? It should. I get it, it's great for YOU (and all of the other posters who seem offended by the questioning of their right to a 'media-teat'), but do you ever leave your computer and go outside? There's a plethora of people who employ absolutely NO "discernment" when it comes to "news stories." How else do you explain the current US Administration's ability to (at least up to now) virtually will things into existence (or non-existence) by simply repeating them over, and over, and over, and over....? I'm not suggesting it should be stopped or outlawed, but let's engage a little more critical thinking about the overall consequences of our use of technology before we blindly throw-in behind it because WE think it's "cool." I think the overall point is solid and well taken--add this sort of mainstream news aggregation to a list of things we shouldn't necessarily do just because we "can."
It must take amazing brainpower to be able to spell 'inane' properly in only two tries.
Without studying locksmithing, how can we know Kyptonite has changed lock core vendors? How do you know that they have solved the root problem? A $50 lock should be good against far more specialized tools than a Bic pen - how can you be sure that they have done a real security audit, when they didn't find this themselves? How can you believe that they even have the capability?
You are waiting for a patch from Microsoft for a buffer overflow in an obvious location. You can wait for a patch, and hope that the next flaw is sufficiently less obvious, or you can install OpenBSD. That is, buy a big sold steel padlock from a vendor which at least tries for real security. Something that you'll actually see on the streets of NYC - Medico, Multilock, etc.
...cheap Orion. The "cheap" one.. uh huh
/me schemes late into the night for legit reason to buy one...
I *need* one, make the intarweb much faster. Uhh, could play a game better.... I mean, do serious research and discover antigravity water on mars which would solve world hunger and cure dandruff and stuff... umm, I could..... welll....
WAHHHHHHHH!
Got it!
This is the perfect machine to read all of google news 567 duplicate articles on every late breaking story!
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I really don't feel that Google News does a very good job of picking the best articles on a subject to make the front page.
This argument is applicable to any Google search. Google doesn't "pick" the best news articles or search results, it basically sorts them by popularity. If a lot of organizations report on a particular subject, those articles rise to the top of the page. If an article discusses a particular search result more deeply, that article rises to the top of its search results.
Maybe it is just really hard to properly organize news.
When you can give us a workable definition of "properly", I'll consider your arguments. As it is, even longtime news editors often have trouble deciding which articles deserve headline-page-one status and which ones ought to be bumped to the bottom. It's ultimately a matter of what one person considers important--except for Google, which considers what several hundred people consider to be important. It may not be better, but it's certainly no worse.
Kryptonite is willing to replace all the old locks except for their most popular model
Like many, many, many other bike owners, I have the Evolution 2000 lock. This is likely the best-selling bike lock in the world.
Yet when I try to register in Kryptonite's lock-swap program, their on-line form lets me select any model that they make, except for the Evolution 2000.
Maybe one of the dozens of other locks listed is same as the Evolution 2000. Hopefully this is so. But they sure aren't making it easy for a lot of their customers to get a replacement lock.
I read Google News for the same reason I metamoderate slashdot. It gives me a random glimpse of some things I wouldn't read otherwise.
It's not the best view, but it's an interestingly quirky one. But I also read other sources for a more consistent view, the same way I read the Slashdot homepage.
Is that it can't distinguish between news and humor on a news site. Just before the first presidential debate, one of the major stories on google news was quoted as saying that the Bush administration revealed that Bush's IQ was 65. Of course, it was a humor piece from (um...) Newsweek (I think). I took a screenshot, which is held up at work. But there was a brief moment when I thought that politics had taken a turn for the better
Some people, btw, just read the headlines and the excerpt. Something like that might just swing the election.
This is very unlikely to happen. If they made links that seemed like actual news items actually lead to advertisers' sites, then people would lose trust in them very quickly. This would lead to fewer hits to the news page, which would lead to fewer people using their search engine, which generates money via advertising dollars.
Google News seems more of a loss-leader, in that people use it for convenience, and are therefore more inclined to use their search engine.
So you can get a "cluster" in a small form factor on your desk that uses relatively slow Transmeta processors. How is that newsworthy? If you don't need the purty little box, you can build a system that's probably a bit gutsier in terms of rendering performance for not a lot more money, no?
Anyone seen actual performance deltas on real world tasks between the Efficeon and AMD64/P4 chips?
Cheers,
gives a whole new meaning to the button, "I feel lucky"
When google launched their image search I emailed them the suggestion to name this search Go Ogle. I think it might be even more appropriate for blind date searching.
You're talking to /.'ers here. The only pheromones around that hottub are their own!
This is not a radical notion.
There is actually a possible answer. If Kryptonite adopted a core that met the UL 437 standard, we'd know they were reasonably resistant to picking, impressioning and forced entry. Medeco is the best known maker of such cylinders, and Medeco offers a huge array of OEM cylinders for such applications. But they are more expensive.
Maybe CNN should have a special keyboard with a button for each news cliche. That would avoid such errors. You could have:
- denied the allegations
- suspected terrorist safehouse
- protect the environment
- protestors gathered
- a court ruled
- violated the pact
- under the terms of the settlement
etc.Argh. Teach me to be lazy when citing companies. I meant Medeco , purveyer of lock cores to the DOD. And mul-t-lock, which seems to be at least a tad harder to pick than a conventional lock.
I don't think the Myth Busters folks ever figured that anyone would plumb a toilet so that its drain went through a water heater...
I know *I* sure wouldn't have suspected it!