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Apple Still Has Not Patched the DNS Hole
Steve Shockley notes an article up at TidBITS on Apple's unexplained failure to patch the DNS vulnerability that we have been discussing for a few weeks now. "Apple uses the popular Internet Systems Consortium BIND DNS server, which was one of the first tools patched, but Apple has yet to include the fixed version in Mac OS X Server, despite being notified of vulnerability details early in the process and being informed of the coordinated patch release date."
Stud dogs go about the whole sex thing rather differently than primates (or equines). Unlike us, male canines don't have an orgasm that involves a short, intense ejaculation. Instead, once they have become fully erect, they will have a continuous orgasm for from 10 to 45 minutes or longer. The "standard" procedure for dogs, when they are mating, is that the male "ties" with the bitch - which means that, after he has penetrated fully, his penis will develop a knot at its base that is several times wider than the rest of his shaft.
For reference, a 80 pound Golden stud dog might have, let's say, a cock that is 7 or 8 inches long when erect - but his knot will be at least as big around as a tennis ball. This knot swells inside the bitch, and so long as he remains erect the dogs are "tied." No, this isn't painful for her - canine females long ago developed an entire set of muscular supports for this process. Generally, once they are tied, most stud dogs prefer to step off and over, so he and the bitch are tail-to-tail. Theories abound on why this evolved - I have yet to see one that was truly convincing. Anyway, they'll stand like this, with the male having a continuous orgasm during the whole tie - until he starts to shrink and they pop apart. Bitches also have orgasms, and she'll likely have quite a few during the tie, as well - research has shown that her orgasms are essential to increasing the chances of pregnancy, due to muscular contractions.
Anyway. if a guy like me has a stud dog partner, one form of intimacy is for him to tie with us, anally. As young teenagers, many of us learned the hard way about the knot, and the tie - particularly back in pre-interweb days. So we'd suddenly find ourselves locked together, with this tennis-ball width cock inside us. Nowadays, I suspect most young zoos know all about this. However, some folks still have eyes bigger than their stomach, err their you-know-what.
It would not be accurate to say that I have a stream of visitors who show up at my house just for sex with my canine partners. However, it is true that I do not exercise any sort of unilateral control/ownership over the relationships my canine boys might develop with other people - they are adults, and if they desire to get frisky with another two-legger and I judge that the person is respectful and unlikely to do anything mean or stupid, I have no moral ground on which to say "oh, no, you aren't allowed - he can only have sex with me." That just makes no sense, so if there's a time when a friend is visiting and there's a spark between them and one of my partners, I'm ok with that. In truth, I think it's great to have the boys' enjoy other positive relationships and I love to see them happy, whatever the circumstances.
Many years ago, a friend was visiting - a zoo who had been active with his own stud dog for quite a few years. His boy was a breed that is not small, but is also somewhat known by old-school zoos as being, well, on average not so well-endowed relative to their body size. This friend had tied with his partner on a number of occasions - and he often talked about how intense and rewarding the experience was, for both of them. That's great, I said - while thinking that he'd probably not fare so well with a larger breed.
As it turns out, he and one of my canine friends hit it off quite clearly right from the get-go - the chemistry was there and the two of them seemed like they'd known each other for ages. After several visits, I could see that they were sort of getting closer and closer - my friend was worried that I'd feel he was somehow intruding into my relationship with this handsome stud dog - who had been in my own family for close to a decade. Of course not, I told him - if you guys hit it off and things get steamy, I'd hardly throw cold water on it just so I can be all possessive and insecure. HOWEVER, I warned him, that handsome boy with whom you're making goo-goo eyes is much bigger than your own long-time partner.
I tried to be nice about this, but some zoos get the
If you are going to roll out a new search engine, please try to make one that has more going for it than a silly name and cheap, misleading PR. Thus we have Cuil, the search engine rolled out this last week by some ex-Google folks who see a market opportunity. While all the people involved seem competent and have great resumes, the site itself out-and-out stinks.
It's buggy. It's slow. It seems hand-tweaked in odd ways. Worse, it requires exact spelling. Use lower case on a proper name and it can come up empty (but not always).
But it's the apparent fiddling with the results that bother me the most. Here's where it gets funny. Type in "Sergey Brin" (the founder of Google) and you get back a whopping "250 results for Sergey Brin"; yes, 250. And they are mediocre hits, many dating back to his Stanford days in the 1990s. There is an "Explore by Category" box, which won't help me find out anything about Brin, from what I can tell. It's pathetic. On Google you get 1.5 million hits. And if you think that's because of Google bias, on MSN Search you get over 3 million hits.
This is pathetic, since Cuil founder Anna Patterson has 11,381 results for herself. And the top search hit is her glowing bio on the Cuil site itself. What a coincidence! Try finding a Brin bio. Then if you search for Louis Monier, the ex-Googler and go-to man at Alta Vista who is now working at Cuil, he gets over 13,000 hits, many with flattering pics that are of other people.
So I decide to do a vanity search on myself to find out where my current bio appears. It's on the Dvorak.org site here. Low and behold, the Cuil engine doesn't seem to find my blog at all, let alone my bio. One version of the search using my middle initial comes close, offering up at least a Wikipedia entry. But subsequent uses of my middle initial come up dead altogether. So I go with "John Dvorak." My blog gets a million page views a month, but Cuil finds a bunch of other blogs and tired old posts or people grousing. The top hit was a CSS blog commenting on a two-year-old story I wrote (although Cuil never found the story itself); the next two were "Dvorak is an idiot" posts from even more obscure blogs followed by various entries about me that you find on speakers' bureaus' Web sites. Yeah, this is endearing. No mention of PC Magazine, MarketWatch.com, Cranky Geeks, or any number of things I'm doing.
So I go to page two. After waiting for an eternity, I get pretty much the same thing on page two: people who condemned me on their blogs. Hey, I can go to Technorati for this abuse! Page 3: still no mention of my own blog or PC Magazine or MarketWatch.com or even Mevio. In fact, some of the hits are redundant. OK, so how many times do I have to pound this thing to find my base Web sites--any of them? I gave up after page six and figured that this site was useless. I mean, if your search term has their own Web site, you'd think said Web site would be in the search results. If I was doing a search engine, it would be a priority. After all, Dvorak is in the URL!!
And, yes, I do have enough presence on the Web to use myself as a benchmark.
Now you're wondering if this site has any usefulness. When the site was actually reviewed by others, I didn't see anybody jacked up about anything. Here is an example from this BBC blog:
Search term: "Nikon d50 reviews problems". Plenty of articles on the D70 camera, but none on the D50 (which might suggest it isn't doing its job in terms of prioritising meta tags and headlines above freetext). Google however got a good review from a reputable independent source as first link.
So while I'm always hoping for something better or more interesting or uniquely valuable, I still end up having to use Google. This over-hyped product is just another dead-end as far as I can tell. Oh, and the name is stupid too.
Remind me again, this week are we suppose to love Apple or hate them. I'm not a fan and any time I've posted comments that are less than adoring regarding me personal experiences with Apple, I've seen the moderation work like a yoyo. +5 no +2 no +4 no -1:Troll.
I mean moderation is broken and I say what I think without paying much attention, but it's annoying that it's so broken that you're not allowed to hold a consistent opinion without being punished for it.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If you're more worried about how you get moderated and what the results are than about saying what you really think, you're worried about the wrong thing.
Moderation is a gimmick to get people to come talk here. I sometimes succumb to the temptation to check how I've been moderated, too. But the only way I (think I) am letting moderation affect my posts is to motivate me to write clear, succinct, logical posts. And you can see that I don't let moderation motivate me very much. :|-
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.