I didn't say they sell ads. I said they sell information.
You don't really need to have a user sign in with name, address and ssn to get some sort of user profile together from the cookies and collate that information with that of other sites, not the least of all would be Yahoo's own cookies from using its mail, tv listings, and whatever else they offer. You don't need lunatic conspiracy theories to believe someone pays good money for data on user habits on the web, whether partially anonymized or not.
Surely, you don't think Yahoo invested all that money to be helpful to you out of the goodness of its heart, do you?
Put it another way: It's a gimmick to have to describe what your tastes and habits so that the owner of this public service can sell its profile of you to adverstisers.
The most insidious thing about all this is to discourage learning and discovery and all change -- all so retailers can make you the target of their ads. Do we really want to exist only in order to make purchases?
Maybe in the future politicians will say that it is indeed a little pointless to allocate 20% of the annual governmental budget to prevent 3000 terror-deaths, while the same money could save 100,000 in hospitals if it were to be spent on medicine rather than anti-terror measures. (But maybe that's just my wishful thinking).
Maybe this sounds rational to some people, but who says the U.S. spends 20% of the budget to prevent 3,000 terror deaths? Who are the 100,000 who would be saved in hospitals
This was written by someone who is absolutely certain that he will not be one of the 3,000 -- if indeed the terrorists who ever they may be are shooting for 3,000.
We should only talk about desktops in the home, for routine use, maybe home office. Because big business is a different thing. If their IT departments could figure out from getting out from under MS, they would save cash and aggravation, but that's another story. I don't think any big company has an IT department that is willing or able to cope with change. And then, games at home are a different thing. So, the 1% or 2% is in fact a little larger than the gross numbers make out.
But Linux still has a problem. It's not grandma and usability (whatever that is) as such but it's with software licensing and formats -- lawyer stuff.
I tried for two years to like the Mac. I bought a Mini and tried living with. Apple. It's not great. The hardware isn't so durable to be worth the premium they charge. The system is only perfect for Mac zealots, and impossible to alter for anyone else. The X-windows setup is awful.
But it does play mp3s and commercial dvds, and Safari opens 99.9% of all the web pages I've wanted to see. I just got tired of having my sound break with every other kernel update, and I know how to fix it. I can imagine that Linux is useless otherwise.
Still I went back to Linux on a new Desktop, but keep the Mini for music and movies via VNC -- the setup is probably not for everyone, but it works.
That's why I am preparing my $107 million lawsuit against BellSouth and my $384 million against GoDaddy for blocking my users' emails from time to time -- actually every time I've changed IP numbers. You know, guilty until proven innocent.
Valuation of damages are proportional to the time and trouble it took to get unblocked.
Years ago, I played poker and I found it was much easier to win when you were way ahead of everybody. You could outlast anyone. You can do all sorts of things when the others are at the brink.
I can't believe how these great publishers, billionaires at the top of the social heap, are so dumb that the strongest of them are so anxious to risk it all. Aren't they captains of industry? Don't they want to squeeze out the competition?
I believe that Murdoch and the NY Times (which will do this in a few months) will fail miserably and ruin their franchises. In the unlikely event that they succeed, they will just be leading the way for all the little guys, and their industry will be able to resume its slow fade.
What they do isn't worth £1 a day, or £2 a week, to many people. There's too much competition in news. Aggregators didn't invent copying -- newspapers did it first and continue to rewrite each other with abandon. But that does not mean they can be replaced by bloggers. It's too bad.
This was not a test of anything, since the local newspaper is owned by the local cable company and the cable company gives away a subscription to the online paper to every cable customer.
But still the mind reels at the thought the collective intelligence of top management who paid $4m to go fishing for a handful of nonreaders -- i.e. people without cable and without a habit of reading the physical paper product.
The businesses who see the Internet as a profit-making venture brought us much more than the ads.
They are turning the Internet into a giant shopping mall.
Microsoft and Apple and Intel and all those assemblers build commodities that are friendly to users and wide open to businesses that want to probe, prod and promote stuff to those happy consumer-users. Of course, they'd like to do something about the criminals who use the same techniques, but not if it gets in the way of their digital rights.
Condé Nast owns Ars; this is a company that would like to sell Vogue-like content to everyone. I get along with it. I'll get along without Ars Technica if it's necessary for them to make me watch gyrating office girls selling no-money-down mortgages and worthless college degrees.
On my own, my health insurance choice is a limited $1,500 a month plan and an average $2,500. Those are different companies, and the only ones selling insurance in my state (in the U.S.). I'd say Germany's plan looks OK to me.
Luckily there is a group for freelancers in my state, but keep in mind:
You have to be relatively successfully every year in order to qualify.
You have to do one of several types of job.
If you have no income (say 10% in the U.S.) or low income, you are screwed.
It's not a political problem here because 70% or so of the people are covered by employer plans that more or less support the entire wasteful system.
Vocalizing a sound is a mechanical activity directed by your brain.
Deciphering those directions to your vocal mechanics is a long way from deciphering the underlying representational system which you used to decide what to communicate. No one has a clue about that system or its logic.
I'll bet there were a lot of smug phone company executives who thought at the time of the breakup of old Ma Bell that there will never be anyone willing to lay down enough wire to seriously challenge them.
Then they got cable TV and wireless phones, but a lot of the data moving business is still in the hands of the Baby Bells.
This ought to cut them down a notch.
But then we'll need a new search engine. I won't search where my bandwidth comes from!
I'm sure your ISP is recording every move you make, and Google is recording half the stuff that moves on the web. A Google ISP brings the two together and will be a privacy nightmare.
The sad thing about office politics is that the people who are best at it often rise to the highest levels.
The trouble is inherent in the bureaucracy of big organizations. The company, government agency or whatever, is too big to be managed by one person, so the big boss has to rely on little bosses, and the little bosses who sound the best at meetings always win.
You, the little guy who hasn't risen to your level of incompetence cannot be caught making your little boss, or some other little boss on her way up, bad. They'll get even with you, and you'll never know how.
Complaints like this always bring legions of pompous schoolmarms out the woodwork with conflicting sets of rules and a copious amount of handwringing and finger-pointing.
The school-kid grammatical rules that everyone is complaining about here are a poor representation of the underlying mechanism we have in our brains that allows us to communicate. Those rules and intelligence do not form an equivalence class.
The ability to learn a couple of hundred of rules does not make a fluent speaker of a language, much less an intelligent speaker of a language. Every native speaker of English understands the meaning of every one of the mistakes people are citing here, and adult learners of English continue to struggle with comprehension of both standard and idiomatic English as they hang on to the leaky life raft of the rules they were taught in a school room.
Try an exercise. Read a few pages of Shakespeare without the footnotes, and report back on what it says. Then pick out of few pages of the King James Bible and diagram a few sentences. Tell us what you have learned about sentence structure.
If that seems too academic, try diagramming all the sentences in the 600 comments here.
In some fields, there are more and more conferences, and more and more papers. In mine, the quality varies a great deal. One friend loves to argue that paper selection is random. Success does follow from the patience and energy to keep submitting the same thing to different conferences. Some people have publications lists so long, you'd need a couple years to read all of them carefully and a couple lifetimes to duplicate the results. (I know grad students do the work.) Every moderately clever idea begets five or six nearly identical papers. It's a bigger problem that whose list is longest.
A long list of papers help people get academic appointments and grants, but then there are so many more grad students floating around... maybe it's a good thing.
In any numbers game, China's got a pretty good advantage, with India close behind, at three- or four-fold over the U.S., where by the way a lot of students stay away from the sciences because there is easier money to be made elsewhere.
So I won't be annoyed if you are gunned down in a robbery, killed by a drunken driver, poisoned by an untested pharmaceutical, buried in the collapse of a building erected without permits... or if you are done in by any number of crimes, not only terrorism. These are events of no importance to me and are no reason for society to restrict your freedom.
This thread is obscene. It is a perversion of statistics.
Please note this is not a comment on the efficacy of specific TSA rules, just the fact they in general might be a good idea.
Maybe all the studies about the danger of driving and cell phones could be used. You have to argue/show that listening in on a conversation is almost as bad as participating. I think it is. For a few years, I shared an office with someone who talked on the phone a lot. The only way to concentrate was music on headphones.
I think that human conversation is the most distracting thing around, and if other people talk as part of their jobs, earphones make you much more productive.
But bosses who issue edicts like that are idiots. And someone already suggested a new job.
The beauty of the web was that everything was available to everyone. It was free, as in speech and beer. But this is going fast. Google's effort to personalize search is only the lastest from the big corporations to turn the web into one long seemless commercial, and to turn the users into commodities.
I'd like to think that I can control my searching by altering my search terms. Google and Microsoft and many others would like to identify me and give me what sells best no matter what I ask for.
Their way of doing this is to find a way to describe me through my web history. I doubt that this is any more possible than the phrenology of a century ago, but I can't decide whether it's worse for them to keep trying and failing, or for them to actually figure out how the system work accurately. Either way, my search is poorer for being limited by their manipulations.
What a waste of time for a big-league newspaper to bother with strange foods readers have eaten! It's a stupid question, crying out for stupid answers, and then they pay someone to cull through them and classify different kinds of stupidity. The paper doesn't deserve the freedom of the press!
Maybe people have boot races. Everyone sits around and watches two machines race to get past the BIOS.
Maybe this is useful if you have an O.S. that crashes all the time, but how many ancient Windows PCs and Macs are there, and do their owners really care about a minute or two of boot time?
I reboot machines maybe once a month, so forget me. How about someone who reboots every day. Let's say they save a whole two minutes at boot time. By my arithmetic, this important advance saves them 0.001388ths of their computer time.
Just because spam is furtive, underhanded, ugly and distasteful, who will you appoint to be the decider of spam. Look at it this way: Who would George Bush have appointed to decide what emails are forbidden and what are not.
I see ads for something called "male enhancement" now on TV. Should we stop that? My post office mailbox fills with all sorts of crap even though that's expensive to print and send. Should we create a law to decide what people can send through the post office?
What of the high incidence of fraud? That's a tough one. Do you presume that all spam is criminal by the way it looks? Dangerous.
Look at the cheesy content of online ads now. These are not the old department stores of newspapers past; nor are the corporate image ads; nor are they the expensive TV ads of old for cars, booze and cigarettes. The big battle between advertisers and adblockers is in the long run just Betamax vs VHS.
Paid content is the only way to support the news
You can get the news from multiple places now only because multiple publishers and broadcasters are still wondering where their business went, hoping it isn't so. A few relatively big places have already given up.
Most newspapers and TV stations merely copy each other now
No small and mid-sized news organization do anything but "rip and read"; they tear off the wire stories and read it, or lay it out in between their own display ads. They do some intensely local stuff, but honestly, no one cares.
Citizen journalism is a sham.
It's one thing to grab a lucky photo with your cell phone, but quite another to devote days to finding out if anyone knows why plane crashed.
But I'm really hopeful about the future of the news. Most of the business will disappear in the near future. When the current publishers are mostly gone, these bloggers, aggregators and others will simply lose their free ride. Only a very small number of organizations will be able to support a news gathering operation. No more little papers, maybe no more little local TV news shows. Some of the big wire services might be superfluous. But some will survive, and anyone who wants to know what's happening will have to pay them. Right Rupert?
And while we're at it, let's bury map-reduce, too.
And we're surprised newspapers are going broke?
on
Data Center Overload
·
· Score: 1
Gee whiz.
Surely this isn't the stuff democracy can't live without.
Perhaps newspaper editors don't have a clue about what people need/want to read.
Project the level of sophistication shown in this article in the glamorous Times Magazine onto stuff reporters and editors are expected to know about. Imagine the dopey insight we get about the economy, nuclear proliferation, cultural trends.
Take the proportion of your conversation that is mathematical jargon, divide by the proportion of your conversation that is computer business jargon, and add the product of alpha and the number of years you spent in graduate school, where 0 1, you're a scientist.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say they sell ads. I said they sell information.
You don't really need to have a user sign in with name, address and ssn to get some sort of user profile together from the cookies and collate that information with that of other sites, not the least of all would be Yahoo's own cookies from using its mail, tv listings, and whatever else they offer. You don't need lunatic conspiracy theories to believe someone pays good money for data on user habits on the web, whether partially anonymized or not.
Surely, you don't think Yahoo invested all that money to be helpful to you out of the goodness of its heart, do you?
Put it another way: It's a gimmick to have to describe what your tastes and habits so that the owner of this public service can sell its profile of you to adverstisers.
The most insidious thing about all this is to discourage learning and discovery and all change -- all so retailers can make you the target of their ads. Do we really want to exist only in order to make purchases?
Maybe in the future politicians will say that it is indeed a little pointless to allocate 20% of the annual governmental budget to prevent 3000 terror-deaths, while the same money could save 100,000 in hospitals if it were to be spent on medicine rather than anti-terror measures. (But maybe that's just my wishful thinking).
Maybe this sounds rational to some people, but who says the U.S. spends 20% of the budget to prevent 3,000 terror deaths? Who are the 100,000 who would be saved in hospitals
This was written by someone who is absolutely certain that he will not be one of the 3,000 -- if indeed the terrorists who ever they may be are shooting for 3,000.
We should only talk about desktops in the home, for routine use, maybe home office. Because big business is a different thing. If their IT departments could figure out from getting out from under MS, they would save cash and aggravation, but that's another story. I don't think any big company has an IT department that is willing or able to cope with change. And then, games at home are a different thing. So, the 1% or 2% is in fact a little larger than the gross numbers make out.
But Linux still has a problem. It's not grandma and usability (whatever that is) as such but it's with software licensing and formats -- lawyer stuff.
I tried for two years to like the Mac. I bought a Mini and tried living with. Apple. It's not great. The hardware isn't so durable to be worth the premium they charge. The system is only perfect for Mac zealots, and impossible to alter for anyone else. The X-windows setup is awful.
But it does play mp3s and commercial dvds, and Safari opens 99.9% of all the web pages I've wanted to see. I just got tired of having my sound break with every other kernel update, and I know how to fix it. I can imagine that Linux is useless otherwise.
Still I went back to Linux on a new Desktop, but keep the Mini for music and movies via VNC -- the setup is probably not for everyone, but it works.
Exactly!
That's why I am preparing my $107 million lawsuit against BellSouth and my $384 million against GoDaddy for blocking my users' emails from time to time -- actually every time I've changed IP numbers. You know, guilty until proven innocent.
Valuation of damages are proportional to the time and trouble it took to get unblocked.
Years ago, I played poker and I found it was much easier to win when you were way ahead of everybody. You could outlast anyone. You can do all sorts of things when the others are at the brink.
I can't believe how these great publishers, billionaires at the top of the social heap, are so dumb that the strongest of them are so anxious to risk it all. Aren't they captains of industry? Don't they want to squeeze out the competition?
I believe that Murdoch and the NY Times (which will do this in a few months) will fail miserably and ruin their franchises. In the unlikely event that they succeed, they will just be leading the way for all the little guys, and their industry will be able to resume its slow fade.
What they do isn't worth £1 a day, or £2 a week, to many people. There's too much competition in news. Aggregators didn't invent copying -- newspapers did it first and continue to rewrite each other with abandon. But that does not mean they can be replaced by bloggers. It's too bad.
This was not a test of anything, since the local newspaper is owned by the local cable company and the cable company gives away a subscription to the online paper to every cable customer.
But still the mind reels at the thought the collective intelligence of top management who paid $4m to go fishing for a handful of nonreaders -- i.e. people without cable and without a habit of reading the physical paper product.
The businesses who see the Internet as a profit-making venture brought us much more than the ads.
They are turning the Internet into a giant shopping mall.
Microsoft and Apple and Intel and all those assemblers build commodities that are friendly to users and wide open to businesses that want to probe, prod and promote stuff to those happy consumer-users. Of course, they'd like to do something about the criminals who use the same techniques, but not if it gets in the way of their digital rights.
Condé Nast owns Ars; this is a company that would like to sell Vogue-like content to everyone. I get along with it. I'll get along without Ars Technica if it's necessary for them to make me watch gyrating office girls selling no-money-down mortgages and worthless college degrees.
On my own, my health insurance choice is a limited $1,500 a month plan and an average $2,500. Those are different companies, and the only ones selling insurance in my state (in the U.S.). I'd say Germany's plan looks OK to me.
Luckily there is a group for freelancers in my state, but keep in mind:
If you have no income (say 10% in the U.S.) or low income, you are screwed.
It's not a political problem here because 70% or so of the people are covered by employer plans that more or less support the entire wasteful system.
Again, the 30% are screwed.
Vocalizing a sound is a mechanical activity directed by your brain.
Deciphering those directions to your vocal mechanics is a long way from deciphering the underlying representational system which you used to decide what to communicate. No one has a clue about that system or its logic.
So, you're dreams are safe.
Unless you twitter them away.
A moral lesson for the deregulated.
I'll bet there were a lot of smug phone company executives who thought at the time of the breakup of old Ma Bell that there will never be anyone willing to lay down enough wire to seriously challenge them.
Then they got cable TV and wireless phones, but a lot of the data moving business is still in the hands of the Baby Bells.
This ought to cut them down a notch.
But then we'll need a new search engine. I won't search where my bandwidth comes from!
I'm sure your ISP is recording every move you make, and Google is recording half the stuff that moves on the web. A Google ISP brings the two together and will be a privacy nightmare.
The sad thing about office politics is that the people who are best at it often rise to the highest levels.
The trouble is inherent in the bureaucracy of big organizations. The company, government agency or whatever, is too big to be managed by one person, so the big boss has to rely on little bosses, and the little bosses who sound the best at meetings always win.
You, the little guy who hasn't risen to your level of incompetence cannot be caught making your little boss, or some other little boss on her way up, bad. They'll get even with you, and you'll never know how.
Complaints like this always bring legions of pompous schoolmarms out the woodwork with conflicting sets of rules and a copious amount of handwringing and finger-pointing.
The school-kid grammatical rules that everyone is complaining about here are a poor representation of the underlying mechanism we have in our brains that allows us to communicate. Those rules and intelligence do not form an equivalence class.
The ability to learn a couple of hundred of rules does not make a fluent speaker of a language, much less an intelligent speaker of a language. Every native speaker of English understands the meaning of every one of the mistakes people are citing here, and adult learners of English continue to struggle with comprehension of both standard and idiomatic English as they hang on to the leaky life raft of the rules they were taught in a school room.
Try an exercise. Read a few pages of Shakespeare without the footnotes, and report back on what it says. Then pick out of few pages of the King James Bible and diagram a few sentences. Tell us what you have learned about sentence structure.
If that seems too academic, try diagramming all the sentences in the 600 comments here.
In some fields, there are more and more conferences, and more and more papers. In mine, the quality varies a great deal. One friend loves to argue that paper selection is random. Success does follow from the patience and energy to keep submitting the same thing to different conferences. Some people have publications lists so long, you'd need a couple years to read all of them carefully and a couple lifetimes to duplicate the results. (I know grad students do the work.) Every moderately clever idea begets five or six nearly identical papers. It's a bigger problem that whose list is longest.
A long list of papers help people get academic appointments and grants, but then there are so many more grad students floating around ... maybe it's a good thing.
In any numbers game, China's got a pretty good advantage, with India close behind, at three- or four-fold over the U.S., where by the way a lot of students stay away from the sciences because there is easier money to be made elsewhere.
So I won't be annoyed if you are gunned down in a robbery, killed by a drunken driver, poisoned by an untested pharmaceutical, buried in the collapse of a building erected without permits ... or if you are done in by any number of crimes, not only terrorism. These are events of no importance to me and are no reason for society to restrict your freedom.
This thread is obscene. It is a perversion of statistics.
Please note this is not a comment on the efficacy of specific TSA rules, just the fact they in general might be a good idea.
Maybe all the studies about the danger of driving and cell phones could be used. You have to argue/show that listening in on a conversation is almost as bad as participating. I think it is. For a few years, I shared an office with someone who talked on the phone a lot. The only way to concentrate was music on headphones.
I think that human conversation is the most distracting thing around, and if other people talk as part of their jobs, earphones make you much more productive.
But bosses who issue edicts like that are idiots. And someone already suggested a new job.
The beauty of the web was that everything was available to everyone. It was free, as in speech and beer. But this is going fast. Google's effort to personalize search is only the lastest from the big corporations to turn the web into one long seemless commercial, and to turn the users into commodities.
I'd like to think that I can control my searching by altering my search terms. Google and Microsoft and many others would like to identify me and give me what sells best no matter what I ask for.
Their way of doing this is to find a way to describe me through my web history. I doubt that this is any more possible than the phrenology of a century ago, but I can't decide whether it's worse for them to keep trying and failing, or for them to actually figure out how the system work accurately. Either way, my search is poorer for being limited by their manipulations.
What a waste of time for a big-league newspaper to bother with strange foods readers have eaten! It's a stupid question, crying out for stupid answers, and then they pay someone to cull through them and classify different kinds of stupidity. The paper doesn't deserve the freedom of the press!
I don't get it.
Maybe people have boot races. Everyone sits around and watches two machines race to get past the BIOS.
Maybe this is useful if you have an O.S. that crashes all the time, but how many ancient Windows PCs and Macs are there, and do their owners really care about a minute or two of boot time?
I reboot machines maybe once a month, so forget me. How about someone who reboots every day. Let's say they save a whole two minutes at boot time. By my arithmetic, this important advance saves them 0.001388ths of their computer time.
Be careful what you wish for.
Just because spam is furtive, underhanded, ugly and distasteful, who will you appoint to be the decider of spam. Look at it this way: Who would George Bush have appointed to decide what emails are forbidden and what are not.
I see ads for something called "male enhancement" now on TV. Should we stop that? My post office mailbox fills with all sorts of crap even though that's expensive to print and send. Should we create a law to decide what people can send through the post office?
What of the high incidence of fraud? That's a tough one. Do you presume that all spam is criminal by the way it looks? Dangerous.
But I'm really hopeful about the future of the news. Most of the business will disappear in the near future. When the current publishers are mostly gone, these bloggers, aggregators and others will simply lose their free ride. Only a very small number of organizations will be able to support a news gathering operation. No more little papers, maybe no more little local TV news shows. Some of the big wire services might be superfluous. But some will survive, and anyone who wants to know what's happening will have to pay them. Right Rupert?
+1
And while we're at it, let's bury map-reduce, too.
Gee whiz.
Surely this isn't the stuff democracy can't live without.
Perhaps newspaper editors don't have a clue about what people need/want to read.
Project the level of sophistication shown in this article in the glamorous Times Magazine onto stuff reporters and editors are expected to know about. Imagine the dopey insight we get about the economy, nuclear proliferation, cultural trends.
Take the proportion of your conversation that is mathematical jargon, divide by the proportion of your conversation that is computer business jargon, and add the product of alpha and the number of years you spent in graduate school, where 0 1, you're a scientist.
Is it just me or is there something about the story that doesn't ring true?
Mega corporation, mega bucks but no sales?
Technology -- do you mean software that does something so groovy that Google/Microsoft/Apple/IBM/Oracle can't imagine how it's done?
Or is this some new website that will sell ads?
For now I'm holding on to my venture capital stash