it doesn't say anything of the reasons why it is so - it might as well be a largely sociological effect.
Or, just as likely, test bias.
On my last flight from Germany to Japan with a Scandinavian airline, the in-flight entertainment system had a trivia quiz game very obviously implemented by an American company. The questions were so USA-centric, it nearly had an entertainment value of its own. The sports questions were nearly all about (US) baseball or ice hockey, the science questions nearly all of the form "who invented X", with the answere being some American guy. I won't even talk about the history and music questions.
All in all, anyone who didn't grow up in the USA had very little chance of managing the 50% correct answers required for the first level.
Actually, a simple check on the global email address book that each miltary email system accesses would have told them if and who the said Colonel was.
Not good enough. In this case, it would have told them that there's no person with that name and rank at the academy, but a real attacker would probably be smart enough to use an authentic name and forge the From: address accordingly.
David Hasslehof was TEN YEARS AGO! Are we Germans ever going to be forgiven for that? Or are we forever doomed to be the nation that assists foreigners whose names begin with H in committing unimaginable horrors?
The point is that if you get an email claiming to come from a superior office, you cannot (unless authentification technology is used) really be certain whether this is, in fact, the case. Just like you cannot be sure whether an email claiming to come from your bank is not from some fraudster.
It's really the same thing. And the morale should be: if ANYONE asks you via email to do something that could be problematic, better get confirmation personally.
"well, it depends" is usually the most truthful answer - no matter what the question is. If it is accompanied by a good explanation on WHAT "it" depends, it is usually also the most useful answer.
Obviously, it is not the most simple answer. Unfortunately, most people prefer simple but misleading (or downright wrong) answers to correct ones.
Which explains two things better than the received wisdom.
No, it doesn't
1) Why aren't we all HIV positive yet?
Because HIV is pretty hard to catch and thus easy to avoid. Don't have unprotected sex, don't let other people's blood into your own bloodstream, and you won't get it.
2) Why is the disease profile so very different in third world countries?
Because the people there generally are not as well-educated about how HIV can be avoided, and additionally poverty forces many to disregard safety measures (prostitutes cannot afford to turn down clients who want unprotected sex, hospitals cannot afford to do thorough HIV testing of blood conserves, etc.). As for why people die of HIV more quickly than in the first world: poverty causes an unhealthy lifestyle in many aspects, thus putting additional constant strain on the immune system and causing AIDS to manifest earlier.
Re:If it's a business model, where's the underwear
on
Ending Spam
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Just as a mosquito is merely a tool the malarial parasite uses to spread itself.
Except that spam does not use zombies to spread itself, SPAMMERS use zombies to spread spam.
Your analogy is simply flawed. Spam is NOT an organism. It does NOT "survive" somewhere, adapt and spread from the places where it survived.
And we certainly DO go for "species extinction", by eliminating the conditions that make spam practicable and profitable. You enumerate some of those conditions yourself in the end.
Re:Is spam a parasitic malady and, if so, what nex
on
Ending Spam
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
No, because the anti-spam measures do not aim to kill those people, only to make them stop sending spam. Furthermore, spammers are not a separate species and do not reproduce (as spammers).
I have never typed in a search (Google or Yahoo) and decided that because it returned more than 1000 pages, I won't bother looking at any of them.
That's my point - the survey discussed here did exactly that, it completely disregarded any search terms with more than 1000 results. Thus it is rather dubious whether the survey's results say anything at all about the relative usefulness of the two engines in general (since most searches use terms that produce more than 1000 results) or their index sizes.
Here ya go. Basically, it seems that Google puts an extraordinarily high weight on link texts used to link to a document, so that a few hundred people linking to the Bush bio with the words "miserable failure" cause Google to think it's a top search result for those words - completely independent of the actual content of the document itself. The small number of pages involved is IMO the main argument against the theory that the google result accurately represents the "actual state of the web".
Re:If it's a business model, where's the underwear
on
Ending Spam
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It does, in some cases, actually "survive" in certain computers, which are spam zombies that spew out spam from a spam source
That's not survival in the "organism" analogy, since a zombie will not send spam without a source, which will be gone when the business model is not workable, and especially not cause new source to appear.
like the malarial mosquito, spam uses those responders (infected persons) to download more spam zombie software, since they tend not to be technical enough to remove the infection.
You're mixing up the spreading of "zombie" software that is used to send spam with the spreading of spam itself.
I totally agree that computer worms/viruses work very much like an infectious disease. But they are merely one tool that spammers use, not identical with the phenomenon of spam as such.
Actually, their decision to throw out any queries resulting in more than 1000 pages returned seems very logical to me. How many times have you typed in a search, perused through the 1000 pages and felt like you just needed more options?
You don't seem to have understood what it really implies. It's more like "How many times have you typed in a search, seen that there are more than 1000 results, and then decided not to look at any of the results and instead look for something different instead.".
Basically, they limited their survey on only pretty obscure search terms. That's a pretty significant limitation. It's perfectly possible that Yahoo uses a method of gathering data that somehow skews towards content containing popular search terms, thus returning more results for such search terms, and quite probably also more relevant results at the top.
True, I don't think this is very likely, but it's possible.
it is the reality of state of the Web. At least as far as Google's formula ranks/weights pages/links.
That second part is the important one. If search results can be manipulated by relatively small groups of people, this can be abused, e.g. for search engine spamming, thereby limiting the usefulness of the search engine.
Re:Is spam a parasitic malady and, if so, what nex
on
Ending Spam
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Bad analogy. Spam is not an organism or infection. It is a business model. It does not "survive" in computers, but in a combination of economical, technical and legal conditions. Once those conditions become strongly unfavorable to the business model, there isn't really much that adaption can do. Selling "snake-oil" wonder cures used to be a really big, widespread business model. Better-informed consumers and increased regulation of the market for medicine have all but eradicated this practice. It survives, but in a much-changed and diminished form.
The cost of sending spam is essentially zero. Sure, you may have to switch ISP once in a while, register some new domains, invest in some CDs with email-addresses, buy some software or consultants to infect machines, etc... But it really doesn't matter. Even with todays hostility towards spammers, the cost is still essentially zero.
That's nonsense. You're enumerating some costs yourself, so the cost is very obviously NOT zero and your assertion that nothing can be done about the cost side therefore false. The cost per spam sent may be very low, but there's a HUGE conceptual difference between "very low" and zero, especially since there are also fixed costs.
Both filtering and anti-spam legislation drive up the costs in various ways - more effort (=work) needs to be invested in circumventing filters, spam-friendly ISPs become harder to find and/or want more money, legal safeguards need to be more complex, etc. It all adds up. Of course, it may really only ever add up enough to make small-scale spamming unprofitable due to large fixed costs. But even that is a very good thing, because a few big spammers are an easier target for further countermeasures than countless small ones.
Of course, but try to find such a thing. I haven't seen one. (Only looked at consumer-end offerings)
Well, I didn't have any problems finding such models for my last 2 digicams, but maybe I was lucky.
Probably it's a "unholy power-waster", but one of the nice things of a digital camera is the fact that you can see the picture on the screen and decide if it's worth keeping. That wastes power.... A lot of it. I know that my moms camera lasted only halfway my wedding evening. (Whole day of picture taking) Of course, I foresaw that and took the battery of my wifes camera so that my mom could keep on taking pics. The battery may be crap, but it's what came with the Canon. We most certainly turn it off when not in use, but the display is used. You probably turn off the display, so yes, then the thing will probably last waaaaaay longer. It just removes one of the great features of a digital camera.
No, I keep the display on as well, I just turn off the entire camera whenever it seems I won't be taking a shot in the next minute or so. Of course, it's not one of those super-mini cameras, and about a third of its volume is made up of the 4 AA batteries.
Another reason why I try to avoid custom batteries is that they're usually Li-ion, in order to get decent capacity in a very small volume. The problem is that in my experience Li-ion batteries tend to degrade very quickly, sometimes losing half of their capacity within a year. Maybe that's why yours run out so quickly.
And they's usually very expensive, if you can get a replacement at all.
Well, analog camera has one big advantage over digital camera: independent of power.
That's why I would never buy a digicam that uses some sort of stupid custom battery. The only type of batteries I will accept in a digicam are standard AA or AAA, so I can use relatively cheap rechargeables and, in a pinch, can buy non-rechargeable stand-ins just about everywhere.
My wifes digital camera comes with one plug and I have no idea if the adapter does different Voltage/Hz.
It should say so both in the manual and on the adapter itself.
it most certainly has to be recharged at least every day
Then that camera is an unholy power-waster, the battery is crap, or you keep it turned on all the time. My digicam lasts about a week of intensive usage on one set of batteries.
Humans have NOT been around for "millions of years", nor are we likely to be around for such an amount of time - at least not in a form we today would recognize as human.
Re:Won't somebody please think of the ATM machines
on
IBM Officially Kills OS/2
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I programmed ATMs in my last job, and actually, the ATM OSes are usually not stripped of anything but quite complete, at least when it's Windows. They just have a lot of functions disabled via registry. However, you're right in that the biggest source of problems are the drivers for the special hardware - or the interaction between the drivers and the ATM app. There is a standard for these things (WOSA XFS), but it's the most badly-defined and badly-supported standard I've ever seen.
Ultraliberals rule supreme! The "right to make a profit" is now a fundamental right enshrined in the constitution, at a higher level that the right to speak one's mind.
You just confused the heck out of all American readers. To them, "liberal" means nearly the opposite than what it means to Europeans (and, I think, the rest of the world), because it is linked to the traditional stance of the Democrat party to support civil rights (thus, "liberal") but also regulation of business and strong social security.
The problem is that it's just that industry that you propose we let "work something out" that's shitting on "starving indie artists". NOT the law. The law makes no difference whatsoever between enthusiastic-garage-band-No-3692 and Britney Spears - the industry does.
Slashdot Mirror
it doesn't say anything of the reasons why it is so - it might as well be a largely sociological effect.
Or, just as likely, test bias.
On my last flight from Germany to Japan with a Scandinavian airline, the in-flight entertainment system had a trivia quiz game very obviously implemented by an American company. The questions were so USA-centric, it nearly had an entertainment value of its own. The sports questions were nearly all about (US) baseball or ice hockey, the science questions nearly all of the form "who invented X", with the answere being some American guy. I won't even talk about the history and music questions.
All in all, anyone who didn't grow up in the USA had very little chance of managing the 50% correct answers required for the first level.
I see your Simpsons and raise you one Azumanga Daioh!
Yomi: It's so great here. You just want to stay here and never go home.
Chiyo: That's right. But if possible, I want to go home - alive!
Yomi: The Yukari-mobile?
Chiyo: I'm no good at rock-paper-scissors!!
Actually, a simple check on the global email address book that each miltary email system accesses would have told them if and who the said Colonel was.
Not good enough. In this case, it would have told them that there's no person with that name and rank at the academy, but a real attacker would probably be smart enough to use an authentic name and forge the From: address accordingly.
David Hasslehof was TEN YEARS AGO! Are we Germans ever going to be forgiven for that? Or are we forever doomed to be the nation that assists foreigners whose names begin with H in committing unimaginable horrors?
The point is that if you get an email claiming to come from a superior office, you cannot (unless authentification technology is used) really be certain whether this is, in fact, the case. Just like you cannot be sure whether an email claiming to come from your bank is not from some fraudster.
It's really the same thing. And the morale should be: if ANYONE asks you via email to do something that could be problematic, better get confirmation personally.
"well, it depends" is usually the most truthful answer - no matter what the question is. If it is accompanied by a good explanation on WHAT "it" depends, it is usually also the most useful answer.
Obviously, it is not the most simple answer. Unfortunately, most people prefer simple but misleading (or downright wrong) answers to correct ones.
You forgot to mention that this singing crocodile for kids then proceeded to become the No.1 in Germany's music charts for many weeks...
Which explains two things better than the received wisdom.
No, it doesn't
1) Why aren't we all HIV positive yet?
Because HIV is pretty hard to catch and thus easy to avoid. Don't have unprotected sex, don't let other people's blood into your own bloodstream, and you won't get it.
2) Why is the disease profile so very different in third world countries?
Because the people there generally are not as well-educated about how HIV can be avoided, and additionally poverty forces many to disregard safety measures (prostitutes cannot afford to turn down clients who want unprotected sex, hospitals cannot afford to do thorough HIV testing of blood conserves, etc.). As for why people die of HIV more quickly than in the first world: poverty causes an unhealthy lifestyle in many aspects, thus putting additional constant strain on the immune system and causing AIDS to manifest earlier.
Just as a mosquito is merely a tool the malarial parasite uses to spread itself.
Except that spam does not use zombies to spread itself, SPAMMERS use zombies to spread spam.
Your analogy is simply flawed. Spam is NOT an organism. It does NOT "survive" somewhere, adapt and spread from the places where it survived.
And we certainly DO go for "species extinction", by eliminating the conditions that make spam practicable and profitable. You enumerate some of those conditions yourself in the end.
No, because the anti-spam measures do not aim to kill those people, only to make them stop sending spam. Furthermore, spammers are not a separate species and do not reproduce (as spammers).
I have never typed in a search (Google or Yahoo) and decided that because it returned more than 1000 pages, I won't bother looking at any of them.
That's my point - the survey discussed here did exactly that, it completely disregarded any search terms with more than 1000 results. Thus it is rather dubious whether the survey's results say anything at all about the relative usefulness of the two engines in general (since most searches use terms that produce more than 1000 results) or their index sizes.
Here ya go. Basically, it seems that Google puts an extraordinarily high weight on link texts used to link to a document, so that a few hundred people linking to the Bush bio with the words "miserable failure" cause Google to think it's a top search result for those words - completely independent of the actual content of the document itself. The small number of pages involved is IMO the main argument against the theory that the google result accurately represents the "actual state of the web".
It does, in some cases, actually "survive" in certain computers, which are spam zombies that spew out spam from a spam source
That's not survival in the "organism" analogy, since a zombie will not send spam without a source, which will be gone when the business model is not workable, and especially not cause new source to appear.
like the malarial mosquito, spam uses those responders (infected persons) to download more spam zombie software, since they tend not to be technical enough to remove the infection.
You're mixing up the spreading of "zombie" software that is used to send spam with the spreading of spam itself.
I totally agree that computer worms/viruses work very much like an infectious disease. But they are merely one tool that spammers use, not identical with the phenomenon of spam as such.
Actually, their decision to throw out any queries resulting in more than 1000 pages returned seems very logical to me. How many times have you typed in a search, perused through the 1000 pages and felt like you just needed more options?
You don't seem to have understood what it really implies. It's more like "How many times have you typed in a search, seen that there are more than 1000 results, and then decided not to look at any of the results and instead look for something different instead.".
Basically, they limited their survey on only pretty obscure search terms. That's a pretty significant limitation. It's perfectly possible that Yahoo uses a method of gathering data that somehow skews towards content containing popular search terms, thus returning more results for such search terms, and quite probably also more relevant results at the top.
True, I don't think this is very likely, but it's possible.
it is the reality of state of the Web. At least as far as Google's formula ranks/weights pages/links.
That second part is the important one. If search results can be manipulated by relatively small groups of people, this can be abused, e.g. for search engine spamming, thereby limiting the usefulness of the search engine.
Bad analogy. Spam is not an organism or infection. It is a business model. It does not "survive" in computers, but in a combination of economical, technical and legal conditions. Once those conditions become strongly unfavorable to the business model, there isn't really much that adaption can do. Selling "snake-oil" wonder cures used to be a really big, widespread business model. Better-informed consumers and increased regulation of the market for medicine have all but eradicated this practice. It survives, but in a much-changed and diminished form.
The cost of sending spam is essentially zero. Sure, you may have to switch ISP once in a while, register some new domains, invest in some CDs with email-addresses, buy some software or consultants to infect machines, etc... But it really doesn't matter. Even with todays hostility towards spammers, the cost is still essentially zero.
That's nonsense. You're enumerating some costs yourself, so the cost is very obviously NOT zero and your assertion that nothing can be done about the cost side therefore false. The cost per spam sent may be very low, but there's a HUGE conceptual difference between "very low" and zero, especially since there are also fixed costs.
Both filtering and anti-spam legislation drive up the costs in various ways - more effort (=work) needs to be invested in circumventing filters, spam-friendly ISPs become harder to find and/or want more money, legal safeguards need to be more complex, etc. It all adds up. Of course, it may really only ever add up enough to make small-scale spamming unprofitable due to large fixed costs. But even that is a very good thing, because a few big spammers are an easier target for further countermeasures than countless small ones.
Of course, but try to find such a thing. I haven't seen one. (Only looked at consumer-end offerings)
Well, I didn't have any problems finding such models for my last 2 digicams, but maybe I was lucky.
Probably it's a "unholy power-waster", but one of the nice things of a digital camera is the fact that you can see the picture on the screen and decide if it's worth keeping. That wastes power.... A lot of it. I know that my moms camera lasted only halfway my wedding evening. (Whole day of picture taking) Of course, I foresaw that and took the battery of my wifes camera so that my mom could keep on taking pics. The battery may be crap, but it's what came with the Canon. We most certainly turn it off when not in use, but the display is used. You probably turn off the display, so yes, then the thing will probably last waaaaaay longer. It just removes one of the great features of a digital camera.
No, I keep the display on as well, I just turn off the entire camera whenever it seems I won't be taking a shot in the next minute or so. Of course, it's not one of those super-mini cameras, and about a third of its volume is made up of the 4 AA batteries.
Another reason why I try to avoid custom batteries is that they're usually Li-ion, in order to get decent capacity in a very small volume. The problem is that in my experience Li-ion batteries tend to degrade very quickly, sometimes losing half of their capacity within a year. Maybe that's why yours run out so quickly.
And they's usually very expensive, if you can get a replacement at all.
Well, analog camera has one big advantage over digital camera: independent of power.
That's why I would never buy a digicam that uses some sort of stupid custom battery. The only type of batteries I will accept in a digicam are standard AA or AAA, so I can use relatively cheap rechargeables and, in a pinch, can buy non-rechargeable stand-ins just about everywhere.
My wifes digital camera comes with one plug and I have no idea if the adapter does different Voltage/Hz.
It should say so both in the manual and on the adapter itself.
it most certainly has to be recharged at least every day
Then that camera is an unholy power-waster, the battery is crap, or you keep it turned on all the time. My digicam lasts about a week of intensive usage on one set of batteries.
Humans have NOT been around for "millions of years", nor are we likely to be around for such an amount of time - at least not in a form we today would recognize as human.
I programmed ATMs in my last job, and
actually, the ATM OSes are usually not stripped of anything but quite complete, at least when it's Windows. They just have a lot of functions disabled via registry. However, you're right in that the biggest source of problems are the drivers for the special hardware - or the interaction between the drivers and the ATM app. There is a standard for these things (WOSA XFS), but it's the most badly-defined and badly-supported standard I've ever seen.
the government, through BBC, is using their tax dollars
Those would be tax pounds, yes?
Ultraliberals rule supreme! The "right to make a profit" is now a fundamental right enshrined in the constitution, at a higher level that the right to speak one's mind.
You just confused the heck out of all American readers. To them, "liberal" means nearly the opposite than what it means to Europeans (and, I think, the rest of the world), because it is linked to the traditional stance of the Democrat party to support civil rights (thus, "liberal") but also regulation of business and strong social security.
Hey look, what's that?
Is it a bird? Is it a plane?
No, it's irony flying way over your head!
The problem is that it's just that industry that you propose we let "work something out" that's shitting on "starving indie artists". NOT the law. The law makes no difference whatsoever between enthusiastic-garage-band-No-3692 and Britney Spears - the industry does.