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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."
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
Take the Al-Jeezera on Kobe Bryant story example. There you have a perspective that nobody in the U.S. will otherwise be exposed to. Sure, they probably didn't do much in-depth reporting, but who needs in-depth stories on sports figure rape cases, anyway? That's the kind of thing that U.S. media has too much of as it is. I would rather learn what some nameless Al-Jeezera reporter thinks of Kobe Bryant's case than that of the whole cast and crew of Denver TV newsrooms put together.
Anyway, Google News Search and Alerts are indeed superb. Much better than the MSN and Yahoo alternatives, and I've been reading side-by-side alerts on a variety of topics for several months now.
I think his point is somewhat valid - 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. Quite often, I will want to read about a story, and the couple of sources listed on the front page will all be two paragraph summaries that provide absolutely no detail. I often have to search through the list of sources to find a decent story.
I really don't know why this is. Maybe it is just really hard to properly organize news. Considering how good of a job Google did with web search, I would expect more out of them. Maybe we just need some startup with brand new ideas to revolutionize the news aggregration business.
All that said, the article submitter (Salkever) did sound like a whiny jerk. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with computer aggregrated search results - Google has just been doing a pretty poor job of it so far.
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.