You don't even need to see the ads for this to have happened. Xenu.net is third in the new search results, up from eighth or ninth.
Perhaps I can take some credit for this; in my moldy old anti-CoS site, I promptly put up a link to Xenu.net, and I'm betting a lot of other people did too. This would raise their ranking without any other manipulation.
The ads might be a really nice revenue source for Google, since if the CoS behaves as it usually does, it will promptly advertise as well. They did this with GoTo.com and paid truly extravagent amounts for search results, especially when anti-CoS surfers discovered they could cost Scientology real bucks simply by clicking on a few links...
It's not quite that bad because of the extra width. But you are right that there is a problem.
When I switched to MacOS X, I had a 19" Sony which I always ran at 1152x864 as the most comfortable resolution. As soon as I got X, the I switched it to 1280x1024 and got roughly the same experience.
Anti-aliased text definitely looks best at higher screen DPI. If you go to the Apple Store and look at the original Cinema Display, you'll see the anti aliasing looks a little rough. It actually looks better on the 1600SW due to the higher DPI. But the Cinema Display is a lot brighter.
It's too bad the best MacOS X experience is restricted to the select few who can afford a $3,500 monitor, and I say that even as someone who's quite likely to join that elite group.
I don't think there's any call for "you are a fool" style insults here. We're just having a friendly discussion. Or so I would hope.
I've been editing video for months now on my 1600SW and haven't had any problems with it at all. It works great for me.
What's wonderful about LCDs is that they have much sharper text, and it remains sharp throughout the life of the unit. CRTs start reasonably sharp, but degrade over time.
When I replaced my 19" Sony with the 1600SW, I couldn't believe how much crisper and sharper it was.
Since most of us spend a ton of time entering and editing text, that's a huge advantage for the LCD. The lack of flicker is also great for the eyes.
If you got the bucks, buy a LCD. That's still my advice.
Anyone halfway knowledgeable knows what an ugly group of sharks they are.
The danger is that there are still people who don't know about them and can get sucked in.
I can't help but notice that Xenu.net was the only site that was in the first page of results when searching for 'scientology'. Everything else is various Scientology clone sites. So now, there's nothing but clones in the results.
What Google should do is flush the clone sites from their database; that would be a routine cleanup and would cause other anti-CoS sites to appear in their list.
That way, they've behaved in an entirely neutral and impartial manner, since I'm sure Scientology's spamming of Google's results is a blatant violation of Google policy.
Actually, exactly the same thing has happened in the Mac world over the last few months. For instance, the high end PowerMac G4/dual 800 was $3,499, while its dual 1ghz replacement is $2,999. The PowerBook G4/667 was $ 3,500 when it was first released; now it's $2,999.
The new iMac is only a little more expensive than previous iMac price points, but you're getting tons more for your money.
Actually, the margin on the iMac is 20%, and the margin on the high-end Tower is 30%. They all have to sell pretty well for Apple to make its profit targets.
I think these price increases was so they could maintain the 20% margin. Otherwise their shareholders get pretty upset.
I'm not sure what the margin on the new Cinema Display is, but the only people who will buy it are seriously rich hobbyists and seriously professional graphic artists and motion graphics/video editing people. That's a rich audience, but the whole market for that thing is a few thousand people.
At least they undercut Sun, who is charging $4,500 (versus $3,500) for what looks like almost the same thing.
If I had the money, I'd be in line at the Apple Store to buy it the second it opened tomorrow (or whenever it actually became available).
As it is, I'll be saving my pennies, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if I buy one with my next Mac, later this year.
That's how much I love using high-resolution displays.
I currently have a SGI 1600SW display, which is the same resolution as the Cinema Display, but smaller. Even with this 1600x1024 display, I run out of screen real estate with painful ease. Increasing it to 1900x1200 would really help me. A lot.
I think almost anyone involved in video, especially with Final Cut Pro's screen-gobbling new features, would feel the same.
What I like about iPhoto is that I plug my camera in, have it download pictures automatically, and I never even worry about where they are. I just export any that I need outside of the iPhoto universe.
For anyone who doesn't want to spend hours tweaking and digitally redoing their photographs, iMovie reigns supreme. It's really easy to use, and the organizational scheme of rolls is simple and makes it trivial to find your pictures.
Even though I have a high-end camera (EOS D30), I've been very pleased with iPhoto as an organizational framework for my pictures.
D
Which, of course, brings you Final Cut Pro ...
on
ZDNet Reviews iMovie
·
· Score: 2
which is true industrial strength professional quality.
It's a fantastic program; I've used it for a wide variety of projects and really love it. The ultrasophisticated interface and features let you do just about anything you'd want.
Of course for special effects-oriented projects After Effects reigns supreme, at least at price points the average dabbler hobbyist (like me!) has a prayer of meeting.
I've always wanted to own a brand-name PC, because I like at least a little flash in my industrial design.
You white box people should really experiment a bit with design, because every time I've bought a brand-name PC, it's let me down in some way. Most of them use ultra-cheap video cards that are largely incompatible with Linux. And if you give up on Linux and want to go back to the Operating System of Evil, it's a big hassle getting Windows back; you actually have to call the company and beg them for the restore CD.
I've solved that problem recently by switching almost entirely to the Macintosh platform (with most of my remaining mindshare in the SGI camp, and the rest in Linux). But I will need to hold my nose and get a modern Windows machine fairly soon, because I really should be viewing what I design in something vaguely like what others see.
So white box folks, perhaps you could introduce a case design that was a little more sophisticated than a white (or beige) box. Even black would help.
What I've noticed is that every time companies merge, service gets worse, people get laid off and products plunge in quality.
I don't understand this weird business romance thing. It's almost impossible to glue together two very different corporations, especially if they are billed as a "merger of equals" where people don't get hurt.
People do.
I think 95% of the mergers that occur are shameful failures.
Okay, I liked your remark about Apple, so I couldn't resist replying.
Apple has an odd market niche. There are actually plenty of more expensive PCs, you just don't see them in mainstream stores. To get something as powerful as the $2,999 2x1ghz PowerMac for the audio/video applications that are its primary market niche, you'd have to buy a $3,500-4,500 PC. You just don't see many of those in store shelves, so Apple looks expensive.
If you want a LCD monitor, the iMac is amazingly competitive, especially when the low-end models finally show up.
Of course as long as you have a Mac already, I don't see her as having tastes any more expensive than PCs. All the software prices I've seen are the same on both platforms.
I find it interesting that Adobe is very close to being as much of a monopoly as Microsoft, but almost nobody hates them.
I think it's the quality of their products that makes the difference. They also still include thick manuals printed on nice, creamy paper, which gives their products that undefinable touch of class that makes buyers happy.
I will have ungrudgingly spent more than $1,000 on Adobe products this year without a second thought, while I've given Microsoft precisely zero.
I almost bought Windows XP because I was curious about it, but thanks to the "1984-style" registration, I was just too nausesated to go through with the $99 purchase.
Adobe is a good monopoly. They create great, classy products at prices not too far out of line. Not bad.
Although I will admit their mishandling of that Russian programmer was not good, it's not going to stop me from upgrading my Photoshop to the MacOS X version.
True, but I don't know if Blender's worth much without the developers who created it in the first place. If you bought it out of bankruptcy, who would you have maintaining it?
Intellectual property is a bit odd that way - it would be very rare that a commercial entity would pick up something like this due to maintainability issues.
Blender was a nice shot at 3D for the masses. I downloaded it many moons ago, even bought the manual, but could never quite figure it out.
I'm sorry their business model wasn't more of a success - they always seemed like a cool bunch of people and I wish them well in the future.
D
Re:Not as bad as all that
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 2
Even a Google search for Scientology, which might be something a naive person with an interest in Scientology would type, comes up with Operation Clambake [an anti-Scientology site] as third in line.
The reasonable individual, confronted with the first ten listings on Sicentology, would certainly gravitate towards Operation Clambake, since the other sites are obvious propaganda.
You have a perfect right to be confused about those keys.
IBM introduced SysReq with the Personal Computer/AT many, many years ago. (It was the first PC to use the powerful 286 processor). If my memory serves (and hopefully a Slashdotter will be able to correct me if I'm wrong) it was designed to send a message to a remote mainframe asking it for attention.
Scroll Lock used to stop the screen from scrolling so you could read the text, back in the days before scrollbars.
Break would stop a runaway program from the command prompt.
I don't think these keys have been used for anything worthwhile in Windows.
Hope that helps. I took a long time writing this, so I might be redundant now:-(.
Could the solution to your funk be to learn how to use what you already have? Seems to me that you have hours of technical fun and playtime at hand, if you decided to do it.
The real problem is that our lives are so full of projects and stuff to do that we don't even have time to learn our own gadgets! Crazy but true.
On the other hand, Katz has a point. I owned a Nikon Coolpix 990 that I hardly used at all - I took about 1150 pictures in a year. I hated it because the controls were so confusing. Even reading the manual didn't help; for some reason, the information just didn't 'take'.
I solved the problem by giving it to a friend and buying a Canon EOS D30, a $3,400 camera (once lens and CF card are included) that has extremely intuitive controls. I literally read through the manual once and was able to immediately grasp 95% of its features right away. Now I can manually focus, manually expose and change ASA on the fly, tasks I could never remember how to do with the old camera. In a shade over two months of ownership, I've taken 1,750-odd pictures. That's well over ten times the number I took with the Coolpix!
Another example: I had a Motorola cellphone some years back that came with Nextel's service. I liked Nextel but the phone required that you memorize three digit codes for all its functions, so as soon as I lost the manual, I was hopeless. Then I lost the phone.
My next cellphone was a Nokia. What a difference! Clear, easy to follow menus, even the equivalent of keyboard shortcuts with the ability to type menu numbers in sequence. Eventually I even memorized some of the numeric sequences thanks to the prompts. Unfortunately, none of that excellence prevented me from losing the phone anyway, but you get the idea.
In other words, excellent design makes a big difference in pretty much any kind of technical gadget.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't even need to see the ads for this to have happened. Xenu.net is third in the new search results, up from eighth or ninth.
...
Perhaps I can take some credit for this; in my moldy old anti-CoS site, I promptly put up a link to Xenu.net, and I'm betting a lot of other people did too. This would raise their ranking without any other manipulation.
The ads might be a really nice revenue source for Google, since if the CoS behaves as it usually does, it will promptly advertise as well. They did this with GoTo.com and paid truly extravagent amounts for search results, especially when anti-CoS surfers discovered they could cost Scientology real bucks simply by clicking on a few links
D
Let's see what kind of action they take first.
If they follow my advice, Scientology will actually be worse off than they were before, and there isn't a darn thing they can do about it.
D
I think he was referring to Scientology.
In which case, I agree.
D
I gotta tell you, this is far from a mediocre story.
:-(.
They've gone after BBS sysops, they've gone after ISPs, they've gone after anyone who dares to criticise them.
They hate the truth. If you ever wind up dealing with them, well, you'll know that this is an important story indeed.
I almost lost my breakfast when I read it
D
It's not quite that bad because of the extra width. But you are right that there is a problem.
When I switched to MacOS X, I had a 19" Sony which I always ran at 1152x864 as the most comfortable resolution. As soon as I got X, the I switched it to 1280x1024 and got roughly the same experience.
Anti-aliased text definitely looks best at higher screen DPI. If you go to the Apple Store and look at the original Cinema Display, you'll see the anti aliasing looks a little rough. It actually looks better on the 1600SW due to the higher DPI. But the Cinema Display is a lot brighter.
It's too bad the best MacOS X experience is restricted to the select few who can afford a $3,500 monitor, and I say that even as someone who's quite likely to join that elite group.
D
I don't think there's any call for "you are a fool" style insults here. We're just having a friendly discussion. Or so I would hope.
I've been editing video for months now on my 1600SW and haven't had any problems with it at all. It works great for me.
What's wonderful about LCDs is that they have much sharper text, and it remains sharp throughout the life of the unit. CRTs start reasonably sharp, but degrade over time.
When I replaced my 19" Sony with the 1600SW, I couldn't believe how much crisper and sharper it was.
Since most of us spend a ton of time entering and editing text, that's a huge advantage for the LCD. The lack of flicker is also great for the eyes.
If you got the bucks, buy a LCD. That's still my advice.
D
Scientology's public image is already ruined.
Anyone halfway knowledgeable knows what an ugly group of sharks they are.
The danger is that there are still people who don't know about them and can get sucked in.
I can't help but notice that Xenu.net was the only site that was in the first page of results when searching for 'scientology'. Everything else is various Scientology clone sites. So now, there's nothing but clones in the results.
What Google should do is flush the clone sites from their database; that would be a routine cleanup and would cause other anti-CoS sites to appear in their list.
That way, they've behaved in an entirely neutral and impartial manner, since I'm sure Scientology's spamming of Google's results is a blatant violation of Google policy.
D
Actually, exactly the same thing has happened in the Mac world over the last few months. For instance, the high end PowerMac G4/dual 800 was $3,499, while its dual 1ghz replacement is $2,999. The PowerBook G4/667 was $ 3,500 when it was first released; now it's $2,999.
The new iMac is only a little more expensive than previous iMac price points, but you're getting tons more for your money.
D
Actually, the margin on the iMac is 20%, and the margin on the high-end Tower is 30%. They all have to sell pretty well for Apple to make its profit targets.
I think these price increases was so they could maintain the 20% margin. Otherwise their shareholders get pretty upset.
I'm not sure what the margin on the new Cinema Display is, but the only people who will buy it are seriously rich hobbyists and seriously professional graphic artists and motion graphics/video editing people. That's a rich audience, but the whole market for that thing is a few thousand people.
At least they undercut Sun, who is charging $4,500 (versus $3,500) for what looks like almost the same thing.
Sun beat them to market, though.
D
If I had the money, I'd be in line at the Apple Store to buy it the second it opened tomorrow (or whenever it actually became available).
As it is, I'll be saving my pennies, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if I buy one with my next Mac, later this year.
That's how much I love using high-resolution displays.
I currently have a SGI 1600SW display, which is the same resolution as the Cinema Display, but smaller. Even with this 1600x1024 display, I run out of screen real estate with painful ease. Increasing it to 1900x1200 would really help me. A lot.
I think almost anyone involved in video, especially with Final Cut Pro's screen-gobbling new features, would feel the same.
D
Yikes! I'm sorry, of course you were right :-).
Guess I shouldn't get up quite so early.
What I like about iPhoto is that I plug my camera in, have it download pictures automatically, and I never even worry about where they are. I just export any that I need outside of the iPhoto universe.
D
For anyone who doesn't want to spend hours tweaking and digitally redoing their photographs, iMovie reigns supreme. It's really easy to use, and the organizational scheme of rolls is simple and makes it trivial to find your pictures.
Even though I have a high-end camera (EOS D30), I've been very pleased with iPhoto as an organizational framework for my pictures.
D
which is true industrial strength professional quality.
It's a fantastic program; I've used it for a wide variety of projects and really love it. The ultrasophisticated interface and features let you do just about anything you'd want.
Of course for special effects-oriented projects After Effects reigns supreme, at least at price points the average dabbler hobbyist (like me!) has a prayer of meeting.
D
I've always wanted to own a brand-name PC, because I like at least a little flash in my industrial design.
You white box people should really experiment a bit with design, because every time I've bought a brand-name PC, it's let me down in some way. Most of them use ultra-cheap video cards that are largely incompatible with Linux. And if you give up on Linux and want to go back to the Operating System of Evil, it's a big hassle getting Windows back; you actually have to call the company and beg them for the restore CD.
I've solved that problem recently by switching almost entirely to the Macintosh platform (with most of my remaining mindshare in the SGI camp, and the rest in Linux). But I will need to hold my nose and get a modern Windows machine fairly soon, because I really should be viewing what I design in something vaguely like what others see.
So white box folks, perhaps you could introduce a case design that was a little more sophisticated than a white (or beige) box. Even black would help.
D
What I've noticed is that every time companies merge, service gets worse, people get laid off and products plunge in quality.
I don't understand this weird business romance thing. It's almost impossible to glue together two very different corporations, especially if they are billed as a "merger of equals" where people don't get hurt.
People do.
I think 95% of the mergers that occur are shameful failures.
D
Okay, I liked your remark about Apple, so I couldn't resist replying.
Apple has an odd market niche. There are actually plenty of more expensive PCs, you just don't see them in mainstream stores. To get something as powerful as the $2,999 2x1ghz PowerMac for the audio/video applications that are its primary market niche, you'd have to buy a $3,500-4,500 PC. You just don't see many of those in store shelves, so Apple looks expensive.
If you want a LCD monitor, the iMac is amazingly competitive, especially when the low-end models finally show up.
Of course as long as you have a Mac already, I don't see her as having tastes any more expensive than PCs. All the software prices I've seen are the same on both platforms.
D
I find it interesting that Adobe is very close to being as much of a monopoly as Microsoft, but almost nobody hates them.
I think it's the quality of their products that makes the difference. They also still include thick manuals printed on nice, creamy paper, which gives their products that undefinable touch of class that makes buyers happy.
I will have ungrudgingly spent more than $1,000 on Adobe products this year without a second thought, while I've given Microsoft precisely zero.
I almost bought Windows XP because I was curious about it, but thanks to the "1984-style" registration, I was just too nausesated to go through with the $99 purchase.
Adobe is a good monopoly. They create great, classy products at prices not too far out of line. Not bad.
Although I will admit their mishandling of that Russian programmer was not good, it's not going to stop me from upgrading my Photoshop to the MacOS X version.
D
I like the context offered by one of my favourite sites:
http://www.appleturns.com/scene/?id=3223
And yes, there is a working link to both the original and its sequel, the almost as legendary "Developers".
Hope that helps.
D
They own Alias|Wavefront!
D
True, but I don't know if Blender's worth much without the developers who created it in the first place. If you bought it out of bankruptcy, who would you have maintaining it?
Intellectual property is a bit odd that way - it would be very rare that a commercial entity would pick up something like this due to maintainability issues.
D
If you have $7,500 for the low-end version, sure.
Blender was a nice shot at 3D for the masses. I downloaded it many moons ago, even bought the manual, but could never quite figure it out.
I'm sorry their business model wasn't more of a success - they always seemed like a cool bunch of people and I wish them well in the future.
D
Even a Google search for Scientology, which might be something a naive person with an interest in Scientology would type, comes up with Operation Clambake [an anti-Scientology site] as third in line.
The reasonable individual, confronted with the first ten listings on Sicentology, would certainly gravitate towards Operation Clambake, since the other sites are obvious propaganda.
D
What would actually be wrong with implementing a SQL database as a file system?
It strikes me as a neat idea, actually.
D
You have a perfect right to be confused about those keys.
:-(.
IBM introduced SysReq with the Personal Computer/AT many, many years ago. (It was the first PC to use the powerful 286 processor). If my memory serves (and hopefully a Slashdotter will be able to correct me if I'm wrong) it was designed to send a message to a remote mainframe asking it for attention.
Scroll Lock used to stop the screen from scrolling so you could read the text, back in the days before scrollbars.
Break would stop a runaway program from the command prompt.
I don't think these keys have been used for anything worthwhile in Windows.
Hope that helps. I took a long time writing this, so I might be redundant now
D
Could the solution to your funk be to learn how to use what you already have? Seems to me that you have hours of technical fun and playtime at hand, if you decided to do it.
The real problem is that our lives are so full of projects and stuff to do that we don't even have time to learn our own gadgets! Crazy but true.
On the other hand, Katz has a point. I owned a Nikon Coolpix 990 that I hardly used at all - I took about 1150 pictures in a year. I hated it because the controls were so confusing. Even reading the manual didn't help; for some reason, the information just didn't 'take'.
I solved the problem by giving it to a friend and buying a Canon EOS D30, a $3,400 camera (once lens and CF card are included) that has extremely intuitive controls. I literally read through the manual once and was able to immediately grasp 95% of its features right away. Now I can manually focus, manually expose and change ASA on the fly, tasks I could never remember how to do with the old camera. In a shade over two months of ownership, I've taken 1,750-odd pictures. That's well over ten times the number I took with the Coolpix!
Another example: I had a Motorola cellphone some years back that came with Nextel's service. I liked Nextel but the phone required that you memorize three digit codes for all its functions, so as soon as I lost the manual, I was hopeless. Then I lost the phone.
My next cellphone was a Nokia. What a difference! Clear, easy to follow menus, even the equivalent of keyboard shortcuts with the ability to type menu numbers in sequence. Eventually I even memorized some of the numeric sequences thanks to the prompts. Unfortunately, none of that excellence prevented me from losing the phone anyway, but you get the idea.
In other words, excellent design makes a big difference in pretty much any kind of technical gadget.
D