So, Alexa is flawed... the question is by what margin of error. Looking up some sites there, the ranking kind of shows up as expected. I guess the error ratio is not much greater than +/- 20% overall, which means that you can only compare your website meaningful to another one if the gap is big enough.
Anyway, I took a quick search and found some more ranking sites you might want to look into: Quantcast (open) Nielsen (commercial) Comscore (commercial) Hitwise (commercial)
Oh, and by the way...
like 80% of users run IE. It doesn't really matter which browser-statistics site you are looking at; it's kind of ~33% IE, ~33% FF, ~33% other. Well, at least I hope it will be this month or the next.
Why, yes, I'm already preparing to celebrate the victory of Firefox in the holy browser wars. Yeehaw!;-)
[...]to further attack IE's dominance Is it really still a dominance? Ever since Mozilla advertised Firefox on TV and right on the Google frontpage and bundled it with several hardware and software, their marketshare skyrocketed and is, according to several browser statistic pages, almost head-to-head with IE now. There are probably no other applications included in Windows that have such a strong competitor while "playing in the same league". (Well, maybe Windows Media Player vs. iTunes.)
Everyone who cares will probably use FF sooner or later and those who don't care are hard to convince. Yes, I really think that people who are using their own computer at home and care to download and test this or that application have heard of Firefox by now.
Web Applications are often advertised as "access from everywhere" which sounds like "centralize your data." The real meaning, however, is "access with everything" - Web-Apps should be working on every electronic device running a modern browser; every PC with every possible OS, mobile phones, even game consoles.
If you, let's say, make a presentation with your favorite online app, you can show it to everyone every time.
The same goes for Flash, Silverlight and other fancy web technologies. There is nothing "more cross platform" than a browser these days.
It's not the reinvention of the wheel, it's making your car fly;)
Someone could also conclude that just the number of people already owning a desktop computer and buying a second one has increased, which is usually a laptop because only "die hard" users own two desktop computers.
Linux has no killer app. I don't think it really needs one. As every new electronic device including game consoles and cell phones are finally nothing else than a PC, developers start to dream about writing applications or games only once and seeing them work on every available hardware without any major changes.
The only reason it's not really already happening are the artificial limitations most manufacturers are still implementing to remain in control about how their device can be used.
Some Web2.0 applications and Flash games already run everywhere today because every device uses a webbrowser. However, the stuff you can do there is of course very limited. In order to make a hardware-accelerated 3D game, that runs everywhere, you would need the same kind of interoperatiblity that Ajax and Flash provide on a lower level. And guess what runs everywhere, too? Yes, Linux. There are projects making Linux work on the Wii, PS3, XBOX 360, etc. It's already on PCs and MACs, cell phones, PDAs, DVD players, recievers, you name it. Heck, you can even install it on your Roomba.
[dreaming]
Next there will be a Linux game console (already in the making) and someone will make a truly scaleable and modular opensource game engine, which uses scripting for player-interaction to make it easily work with every controller and provides plugin-functionality for everything that is not a core component.
Then someone else will launch a sourceforge-like website based on that engine, where everything released will be open source and free, including 3d models, textures, sounds and music, so those can be shared between projects. It will take off as professional artists will plunder their archives of unused stuff and contribute it to the community. There will probably be an automatically generated credits-file, that has to be included in every project, so the information who did what won't get lost. This will be important as money gets involved one way or another, i.e. Microsoft and Sony dropping XBOX live and Playstation Home and replacing it with this project or perhaps in game advertising on a whole new level: car manufacturers providing the community with original 3d models of their cars to be used in the game, etc.
[/dreaming]
As far as casual public server playing goes, there might be another solution: Statistics.
40% aiming accuracy? Too good. 5 headshots in a row? Too good. etc.
It wouldn't even have to have anything to do with cheating, actually. The message a detected player would recieve would be something like this: "Sorry, you are already too good for this server, it's low-skill only. You will be kicked in 5 seconds, so the noobs here will have more fun in a more even and fairer game. Feel free to play on our mid- or high-skill servers over here."
The German newspaper "Ruhrnachrichten" reported today that Google is still in negotiations with the musicrights organisation GEMA (German RIAA eqivalent) about copyrighted music used in videoclips on Youtube without royalties getting paid.
They quote an unnamed Google spokesman saying that a German Youtube site will hopefully follow in a few month.
I really don't see how the GEMA could now demand their cut on behalf of a simple German translation of Youtube. It seems that the other already translated sites are still hosted in the USA and I guess de.youtube.com will be as well.
Re:A question for large print graphics designers..
on
The History of Photoshop
·
· Score: 2, Informative
From TFA:
According to the MPAA, Torrentspy helps others commit copyright infringement by directing people to sites which enable them to download copyright material, an offense claims the MPAA, of secondary copyright infringement. So does Google and perhaps every other searchengine as well. Oh, and/. because it now links to Google, right?
I really think that with all these torrent-sites providing access to content people should pay for, things have gone too far, but so does going after sites that link to sites that host torrents that provide connection to a tracker to find people sharing the files - and even these people are in most cases still far away from the original source.
Most people don't like to be identified or even their synonyms used on different websites to be linked; otherwise you would see more people registering with their real name in the first place and OpenID would be pretty common too by now. I guess the next newsitem on this topic will probably be filed under YRO.
Imaging logging into your workaccount from home and your boss looking up the IP in Google Identity Search or something and seeing every website you visited and every comment you made. Google could probably really do something like that, since they know every website using Adsense you visit anyway and that's a lot.
Also, I couldn't care less if someone writing informative and insightful comments here on/. is trolling on some other website. It's the content of that one particular comment that matters and not what he wrote a year ago on some other website. Next thing will be that people don't even read comments anymore because everyone gets automodded based on his karma anyway?;)
With a killer application like the iPod or Youtube someone can sometimes take over an almost equally shared market, but Google did exactly this already and so it became a totally different situation. To dethrone a monopolist it takes a lot more than just doing it better. Think Linux vs. Windows.
Does he get goods delivered to his house? No, but maybe to his IP adress through a large proxy chain or TOR. I guess you can purchase downloadabel stuff like movies, games, ebooks and music via CC.
OpenDNS is bummed that Google figured out a way to make money off the proposition. OpenDNS should have thought of that first. No, actually OpenDNS is bummed because they already make money this way - Malformed URLs like slashdoz.org leads to this page with sponsored links. Note that it's powered by Yahoo.
Or is it destined to fail in the already-saturated online Q&A market? It may be saturated, but there still isn't a clear market-leader and that doesn't suprise me.
People have quickly learned to use the omniscient Google/Wikipedia combination to find answers and I don't think that any Q&A service could compete as there is simply no gap at the moment.
For example, if you want to know who Mozart was, then you could perhaps ask any Q&A service and eventually get a short answer, but you probably want to know more about him and about the music he did and maybe about other musicians of his time and so on, and that's where those services start to malfunction. That is mainly because you are still sitting at your desk and have the time to figure out stuff yourself
In the future, however, where the majority will be connected to the internet through mobile devices all the time and you just shout any question in your tiny headset and expect to get a short answer by a nice synthetical female voice, those services could become interesting (if they manage grow a large enough database by then). The only problem is that at this time the Semantic Web will probably have gone off and some AI using the old Google/Wikipedia combination for you, will summarize the same answer just as quickly and with an even nicer synthetical female voice, drawing Q&A services redundant.
Although this sounds like a reasonable retaliation, Google's priority seems to be keeping sites indexed and cached by all means; otherwise they wouldn't even have gone to court and try to win this case.
Perhaps they will find a semantic solution to this problem.
Why has the system failed to produce a quality reference work? According to a survey by Nature Magazine in December 2005, Wikipedia performed better than Encyclopaedia Britannica. Out of 42 randomly chosen articles, experts found respectively six profounding mistakes in each reference, but Wikipedia scored slightly better in all other criterions. I don't think it got worse in the last year. So if Wikipedia isn't a quality reference work, then Britannica apparently isn't either.
What can be done to change the system?
Is radical change required, or just small adjustments to the current set-up? I guess Wikipedia will continue to constantly improve in many ways, but the system that everyone can edit anything should stay at all costs, even if some articles written by experts are sometimes edited by people who think they know it better, but unfortunately don't. At the end you will still have the biggest reference with the most recent informations available, just a day behind the news, which is a very big achievement on it's own. Here on Slashdot, every piece of news gets torn apart in the comments-section and often leave all those "well researched" articels with incorrectnesses behind. Wikipedia will probably always suffer from the same amount of false information.
Does this matter, given that Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world? Of course it does, but this is not a problem as long as you understand two things:
1. Wikipedia can only be accurate to a certain degree which, however, won't differ from any other reference work.
2. Sometimes, especially on complicated topics, it will maybe only represent what the mayority thinks is correct.
All independent research has always shown that filesharing has not and does not affect record sales. All information that comes from the record companies says that they do. Actually, both could be correct. While the RIAA probably only looks at sales of it's members, indepentent studies are likewise to cover the whole music market, including independent artists.
If that were true, then it would be just a shift. People who mostly bought mareketed mainstream before, are now buying independent artits as well. The cause would be indeed P2P, but the internet itself as well because now everybody gets to know artists, who can't afford much or any promotion or a music video, through websites. If it's that easy, then the big labels should just cut down on their marketing in the same line as the decreasing influence of it and the profit stays the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, I took a quick search and found some more ranking sites you might want to look into:
Quantcast (open)
Nielsen (commercial)
Comscore (commercial)
Hitwise (commercial)
Oh, and by the way...
like 80% of users run IE. It doesn't really matter which browser-statistics site you are looking at; it's kind of ~33% IE, ~33% FF, ~33% other. Well, at least I hope it will be this month or the next.
Why, yes, I'm already preparing to celebrate the victory of Firefox in the holy browser wars. Yeehaw!
Everyone who cares will probably use FF sooner or later and those who don't care are hard to convince. Yes, I really think that people who are using their own computer at home and care to download and test this or that application have heard of Firefox by now.
Oh, and of course there will be a firefox mobile version.
Web Applications are often advertised as "access from everywhere" which sounds like "centralize your data." The real meaning, however, is "access with everything" - Web-Apps should be working on every electronic device running a modern browser; every PC with every possible OS, mobile phones, even game consoles.
;)
If you, let's say, make a presentation with your favorite online app, you can show it to everyone every time.
The same goes for Flash, Silverlight and other fancy web technologies. There is nothing "more cross platform" than a browser these days.
It's not the reinvention of the wheel, it's making your car fly
Someone could also conclude that just the number of people already owning a desktop computer and buying a second one has increased, which is usually a laptop because only "die hard" users own two desktop computers.
The only reason it's not really already happening are the artificial limitations most manufacturers are still implementing to remain in control about how their device can be used.
Some Web2.0 applications and Flash games already run everywhere today because every device uses a webbrowser. However, the stuff you can do there is of course very limited. In order to make a hardware-accelerated 3D game, that runs everywhere, you would need the same kind of interoperatiblity that Ajax and Flash provide on a lower level. And guess what runs everywhere, too? Yes, Linux. There are projects making Linux work on the Wii, PS3, XBOX 360, etc. It's already on PCs and MACs, cell phones, PDAs, DVD players, recievers, you name it. Heck, you can even install it on your Roomba.
[dreaming]
Next there will be a Linux game console (already in the making) and someone will make a truly scaleable and modular opensource game engine, which uses scripting for player-interaction to make it easily work with every controller and provides plugin-functionality for everything that is not a core component.
Then someone else will launch a sourceforge-like website based on that engine, where everything released will be open source and free, including 3d models, textures, sounds and music, so those can be shared between projects. It will take off as professional artists will plunder their archives of unused stuff and contribute it to the community. There will probably be an automatically generated credits-file, that has to be included in every project, so the information who did what won't get lost. This will be important as money gets involved one way or another, i.e. Microsoft and Sony dropping XBOX live and Playstation Home and replacing it with this project or perhaps in game advertising on a whole new level: car manufacturers providing the community with original 3d models of their cars to be used in the game, etc.
[/dreaming]
As far as casual public server playing goes, there might be another solution: Statistics.
40% aiming accuracy? Too good. 5 headshots in a row? Too good. etc.
It wouldn't even have to have anything to do with cheating, actually. The message a detected player would recieve would be something like this: "Sorry, you are already too good for this server, it's low-skill only. You will be kicked in 5 seconds, so the noobs here will have more fun in a more even and fairer game. Feel free to play on our mid- or high-skill servers over here."
Let the Kids decide
The German newspaper "Ruhrnachrichten" reported today that Google is still in negotiations with the musicrights organisation GEMA (German RIAA eqivalent) about copyrighted music used in videoclips on Youtube without royalties getting paid.
They quote an unnamed Google spokesman saying that a German Youtube site will hopefully follow in a few month.
I really don't see how the GEMA could now demand their cut on behalf of a simple German translation of Youtube. It seems that the other already translated sites are still hosted in the USA and I guess de.youtube.com will be as well.
I never tried it, but it seems like Gimp does run Photoshop plugins as well
I really think that with all these torrent-sites providing access to content people should pay for, things have gone too far, but so does going after sites that link to sites that host torrents that provide connection to a tracker to find people sharing the files - and even these people are in most cases still far away from the original source.
Most people don't like to be identified or even their synonyms used on different websites to be linked; otherwise you would see more people registering with their real name in the first place and OpenID would be pretty common too by now. I guess the next newsitem on this topic will probably be filed under YRO.
/. is trolling on some other website. It's the content of that one particular comment that matters and not what he wrote a year ago on some other website. Next thing will be that people don't even read comments anymore because everyone gets automodded based on his karma anyway? ;)
Imaging logging into your workaccount from home and your boss looking up the IP in Google Identity Search or something and seeing every website you visited and every comment you made. Google could probably really do something like that, since they know every website using Adsense you visit anyway and that's a lot.
Also, I couldn't care less if someone writing informative and insightful comments here on
With a killer application like the iPod or Youtube someone can sometimes take over an almost equally shared market, but Google did exactly this already and so it became a totally different situation. To dethrone a monopolist it takes a lot more than just doing it better. Think Linux vs. Windows.
Tabbed UI, Agostino Ramelli, circa 1588. Screenshot, story.
In the future, however, where the majority will be connected to the internet through mobile devices all the time and you just shout any question in your tiny headset and expect to get a short answer by a nice synthetical female voice, those services could become interesting (if they manage grow a large enough database by then). The only problem is that at this time the Semantic Web will probably have gone off and some AI using the old Google/Wikipedia combination for you, will summarize the same answer just as quickly and with an even nicer synthetical female voice, drawing Q&A services redundant.
Although this sounds like a reasonable retaliation, Google's priority seems to be keeping sites indexed and cached by all means; otherwise they wouldn't even have gone to court and try to win this case.
Perhaps they will find a semantic solution to this problem.
So if Wikipedia isn't a quality reference work, then Britannica apparently isn't either. What can be done to change the system?
Is radical change required, or just small adjustments to the current set-up? I guess Wikipedia will continue to constantly improve in many ways, but the system that everyone can edit anything should stay at all costs, even if some articles written by experts are sometimes edited by people who think they know it better, but unfortunately don't. At the end you will still have the biggest reference with the most recent informations available, just a day behind the news, which is a very big achievement on it's own. Here on Slashdot, every piece of news gets torn apart in the comments-section and often leave all those "well researched" articels with incorrectnesses behind. Wikipedia will probably always suffer from the same amount of false information. Does this matter, given that Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world? Of course it does, but this is not a problem as long as you understand two things:
1. Wikipedia can only be accurate to a certain degree which, however, won't differ from any other reference work.
2. Sometimes, especially on complicated topics, it will maybe only represent what the mayority thinks is correct.