Unique users are not counted by user id. That's registered users, and IIRC that figure is less than 1/4 the unique users figure. The "unique users" figure is based on standard external audit processes. You can question it's accuracy, but it's as accurate as any other site's figures.
As for the number of unique users on the Internet, the estimates I've seen put it at ~1 billion, which means roughly half of them visit Yahoo once a month (the "unique visitors" figure is always couched in the context of "per month"), which is consistent with what the audits turn up.
Where do they come up with this 500 million users rubbish? If Yahoo has that many than I would guesstimate that Google has 1.8 billion users, closing in on 6 billion very fast.
Yes, that makes sense. Surely Google has more people than actually use the Internet....;-)
Seriously, Yahoo is rated (by third parties) as having more traffic than any other site (the home page used to be #1, by has been eclipsed by MySpace, and yes, that means both get more traffic than Google's home page). Most of Yahoo's services are in the top 3 online, and more than a few of them are #1. Google may have the market lead in search, and now video thanks to the acquisition of YouTube, but most of their other forays haven't yet achieved much in the way of market share. So, it's not surprising that Yahoo has more users than anyone else.
Of course, this is actually good news for Google share holders, as it'd be hard for them to sustain their growth rate if they actually already had 1.8 billion users.
But whatever, last time I went to yahoo to get some email, it was very difficult to actually find the "mail" link... it's so cluttered with media & celebrity bullshit.. a painful experience.
I'm starting to think we have a case of PEBKAC here... First the weird notions about how many users Google has, and now there is this inability to find the mail link from the home page.
If you check out the current interface, you'll find a big button that says "My Mail" right under the giant Yahoo logo in the top left of the screen (not to mention the link in the personalized area if you have that set up). That whole bar has links in it for My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Search, and Yahoo Answers, and really only a little bit of space is allocated for Answers. The old interface also had a link to Yahoo Mail just to the right of the giant Yahoo logo. Seriously, it's got to be their most popular service, so they make it really easy to find.
Till GMAIL introduced the increased storage limits the yahoos who run Yahoo was sleeping. The interface of Yahoo Mail is the worst. The standard webmail interface of my company is better designed.
I think it's fair to say that the gmail move caught everyone by surprise. That said Yahoo responded with increased limits within a month (which is very impressive if you consider they had to scale up to *100 million users* having that increased storage in that time, while gmail still doesn't have to worry about that level of a storage). There is now a new version of the Yahoo mail interface, which meets and exceeds gmail's AJAX-iness, but a lot of users (not surprisingly) actually prefer the old interface. What's nice is that at least for now you have a choice.
I didn't read TFA, but the summary says a "square 265 miles on a side" - that's 70225 sq. miles, not 265. For comparison purposes, that's an area roughly the size of North Dakota (which is 70,762 sq miles).
Yeah, I realized my mistake right after I hit post. Damn Slashdot for not having an edit button.
Only destroying North Dakota would be a net improvement over the ecological damage we currently do to harvesting and refining fossil fuels. Of course, there's a fair bit of ecological damage during the manufacturing of these panels I suspect, so that may make the matter a bit muddier.
As others have pointed out, there are problems with going solar in northern states, although it is a good options for places like Southern California, Arizona and New Mexico.
Yeah. I think the main point of the "how much space do you need to supply all the earth's energy with solar power" is not to suggest supplying all the earth's energy from a single method (probably not a wise idea by any measure), but rather to counter the argument that you can't actually use solar energy to replace a significant chunk of our current energy budget. This is in fact a pretty good argument against biofuels as a replacement (aside from growing seaweed in the ocean, most methods seem likely to consume so much arable land and water that they'd create as many problems as they'd solve), and up until this development it seemed at least like a significant drawback to solar power as well.
Given how much of the earth is already covered with buildings, asphalt, etc., it seems like losing 265 squared of the earth's surface to solar cells would be a fair trade off (particularly if you assume that innovations along the way will probably bring that number down even more) for a fully renewable energy source with comparatively limited ecological impact.
In reality, what you'd probably move to is a lot of the northeast being powered by hydro, the northwest getting a fair bit from a mix of hydro and wind, the south being a net exporter thanks to wind, hydro, solar, *and* fossil fuels. You'd probably have a combination of nuclear and fossil fuels filling out the gaps, particularly as you go further north. You'd see the same kind of trade offs going on elsewhere. I mean, you can't reasonably expect Japan to cover it's energy budget with anything we've got now other than nuclear and fossil fuel imports (just not enough land for anything else... maybe eventually they can try to pull in energy from tidal forces or biofuel grown in the ocean, but that road is far from clear).
Nobody is implying they don't have an ecosystem. If you consider the amount of damage being done to ecosystems to provide the world's current energy supplies, entirely destroying 265 square miles to provide the world's energy would be an improvement.
I don't think anyone sane was suggesting all the world's energy actually be produced in one place. It just provides people with an idea of the minimum amount of land needed if the whole world used solar energy.
You can do better than 50 miles (keep in mind that states in the western US provide a lot of power for California, and you know that a chunk of that energy is being burned along the California coast), but yeah, you don't even think about sending it to the other side of the planet.
Well, if you're limited to 50 miles away, that kind of limits one's ability to sell power on the grid eh?;-)
right, 500 million unique users? I'm surprised they didn't claim to still be the world's most popular search engine, surely they would with those figures.
That's a real number. Yahoo actually has some fairly strict auditing process for calculating those numbers. Why doesn't this make them the most popular search engine? The reasons are many:
Many of Yahoo's visitors are using services other than search (I believe the home page, mail, and my yahoo service all have more visitors, not to mention all the other services like chat, messenger, news, finance, personals, hot jobs, games, etc. which collectively might add up to a good chunk of those visitors.
Search engine popularity tends to be measured by number of searches, rather than unique visitors. If someone uses Yahoo once for every thousand times they use Google, that hardly gives Yahoo an equivalent share to Google.
Unique users is useful in an advertising context (although traffic is still pretty important even in that context), but it is a lousy measure of popularity.
I believe folks who just go to the home page still count as a unique user, and that page was, up until recently, the highest traffic page on the Internet. That's a lot of unique users right there.
Free services can be quite profitable, and if you think you can't make money selling ads for an audience that is interested in financial news, you're an idiot.
Honestly, I'd say the Foundation series isn't a good example. The series was never meant to be serial, so it was perfectly okay (and even expected) for it to reach a definitive conclusion, and the second foundation was originally that definitive conclusion. After the fact he came up with an idea for a story that explored the gaia hypothesis, played on the notion of the secret society operating under the influence of another even more secret society, and also kind of sentimentally/nostalgically tied together some of his other work.
The problem is more when you go this route with an episodic work that isn't intended to have a definitive end (well, until the show gets cancelled;-).
The cost of aquiring Lighthouse was worse than that. If you'll recall Schwartz was put in charge of their startup investing. Not only did he bomb out big time on those investments, but he also invested under his own name and lost such a huge bundle he was going to be forced to declare bankrupcy.... until Sun bailed out his debts (I forget how much, but it was several million). For his fantastic investment insight.... he was promoted.
As the "fellow co-founder" line points out, this guy is an excellent self-promoter. Hopefully for Sun, he'll be just as effective promoting the company.
Perhaps this is true about the public's perception of global warming, but there is a lot of data behind global warming. It's fair to argue that people's models are wrong, or that the data points to a different set of conclusions than global warming (or more accurately global climate change), but there is a fair bit of real science to this stuff.
Much of it comes from socialist desires to control large corporations
Methinks someone's be swallowing too much propoganda. Global climate change only predicts outcomes and talks about causes. Politics might dictate how one responds to change outcomes, but any viable political system should be cable of responding to serious threats that will effect an entire community. Perhaps the voices of socialists are being heard more than other groups, but that is a separate matter.
-- "why not make cars more fuel efficient?" Well, you end up making them less safe in collisions, too.
Not true. Certainly some ways of making vehicles more fuel efficent makes them less safe ("hey, this bumper is adding weight, let's ditch it?"), but you can also find other approaches which make the vehicle less comfortable ("hey, this air conditioner is sucking up power, let's ditch it!"), more expensive to manufacture ("hey, let's build a car frame out of carbon fiber tubes"), etc. Lots of other solutions actually have more upsides than downsides. The trick to fuel efficiency is the trade offs, and the more important you make some things (like fuel efficiency and safety) the more other things are going to be effected (like development costs and manufacturing costs). If safety is the thing being compromised, that tells you something about priorities.
In the long run, it's been argued (fairly effectively) that making vehicles fuel efficient ends up being a net loss for climate change, because vehicles are used more and more as use costs go down. If it cost me $100 to drive to a restaurant, I'll start thinking about walking or biking. If I can drive as much as I like for $10/month, I'll start driving across the street.
Even if you do decide that improved fuel efficiency is the solution, alternative approaches that follow much more non-socialist approaches include things like removing all subsidies from the oil & gas industry (drives up price and without increasing exploration which constrains supply, this leads to more fuel efficient cars through market forces).
"Why not curtail smokestacks?" Because other countries won't, and you'll lose jobs on top of jobs (this is already evident).
I think most socialists have called for a solution that is global in nature, which would preclude this possibility. More importantly, the usual way to reduce waste (thereby reducing the need for smokestacks) is to make things more efficient, which tends to have a net positive economic impact.
Sigh, this is nothing more than a non-redundant store. Very similar to stuff already offered by a number of vendors, even Microsoft. The "fast way to know what's already on disk" is just to store hashes of the data in an index. Move along, nothing to see here......
I'm sorry, but Apple's customer service moves are weak at best. I get my best customer service if I go to an Apple-certified store (yeah, those stores that Apple seems to be trying to run out of business). If I go to an Apple store, I have to pay for membership in some service program if I want to avoid waiting an hour to talk to one of their "Genius's". Once I finally get a chance to talk to them they look at the machine for a couple of minutes, and then tell me that they'll have to ship it at headquarters for someone to figure out what if anything is wrong with it. Oh, and by the way, if I want to have any kind of guarantee that I'll see my data again, I have to pay like $100 to have my hard drive backed up, even if they never touch the hard drive (what's so hard about charging me to back up the hard drive only if they need to replace it?). Then I have to wait at least 3 days to find out what, if anything, is wrong with my machine. Even if I have AppleCare there is no replacement machine offered. They have a short warrantee and charge an arm and a leg for AppleCare, which only covers manufacturer's defects (for the same price I can get a complete insurance package from Dell that provides a "no questions asked" free repair). More often than not their inflated labor costs make it so that almost any repair costs more than just replacing the hardware. Seriously, I get better customer service from basically every other vendor I've worked with.
Nah, this is a puff piece trying to improve Apple's image, and it's pretty shameful that slashdot is falling for it.
HeHe. Kind of funny how the young 'uns quote Stephenson instead of his predecessors. Herbert's Lazarus Effect comes to mind immediately, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't the first to think along these lines.
So, aside from reading books on Information Retrieval and Data Mining, the other easily available reference are open source search engines. In particular, look at the Nutch project, which is actually a pretty high quality search engine implementation. Even better: start contributing to the project.
Something I once heard from a contractor: IBM bought Informix in hopes of merging the Informix technology into DB/2... but found that Informix was so far ahead of them that there was no way they could do it without a full rewrite.
That seems more than a bit unlikely. Informix Dynamic Server just went in a different direction from DB/2, and that did indeed make it difficult to merge the two technologies. That said, prior to the buyout by IBM, the general feeling I got from people who knew better was that IBM pretty much had the lead in RDBMS technology (yes, definitely ahead of Oracle). Informix's DataBlade's were where they were ahead (DB/2 had something similar, but it was definitely trailing Informix).
I don't know about you, but that doesn't look like a declaratino of war to me.
Perhaps it's technically not a declaration of war, but it authorizes the President to use his war making powers. It'll be interesting to see if the Supreme Court considers this a meaningful distinction. I'm guessing not.
And the 15 days should be up any time now...
The 15 day clause is very poorly worded and subject to two interpretations, one being the 15 days clock is on a per wiretap basis. Absent a legal challenge to clarify this, it seems like a perfectly reasonable and legal interpretation.
I don't see any other Amendment that give the president the right to violate the 4th amendment, do you?
No ammendment was necessary, as the constitution gives the president these powers as part of his/her war making authority. This is why FISA specifically has an exception for times of war.
A RESOLUTION authorizing the use of military force is not a declaration of war, nor does it carry any legal weight.
That's one legal opinion, but there appear to be a lot of opinions to the contrary. Certainly, based on your interpretation the War Powers Resolution really doesn't do anything. VP Cheney might agree with you, but Nixon who vetoed it and the Congress that ratified it anyway seem to think it was of some signifigance.
A DECLARATION OF WAR requires an act of congress.
In what way is this not an "act of congress"?
This was just congresss saying "Sure, we agree with you, go ahead and invade Iraq. We can't stop you and we don't plan to try."
The notion that they can't do anything to stop the President derives from the notion that the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional. Even if that were true, the Congress clearly has the ability to force the Executive branch to make that case to the Judicial branch to strike down the act.
Slashdot Mirror
Unique users are not counted by user id. That's registered users, and IIRC that figure is less than 1/4 the unique users figure. The "unique users" figure is based on standard external audit processes. You can question it's accuracy, but it's as accurate as any other site's figures.
As for the number of unique users on the Internet, the estimates I've seen put it at ~1 billion, which means roughly half of them visit Yahoo once a month (the "unique visitors" figure is always couched in the context of "per month"), which is consistent with what the audits turn up.
Yes, that makes sense. Surely Google has more people than actually use the Internet....
Seriously, Yahoo is rated (by third parties) as having more traffic than any other site (the home page used to be #1, by has been eclipsed by MySpace, and yes, that means both get more traffic than Google's home page). Most of Yahoo's services are in the top 3 online, and more than a few of them are #1. Google may have the market lead in search, and now video thanks to the acquisition of YouTube, but most of their other forays haven't yet achieved much in the way of market share. So, it's not surprising that Yahoo has more users than anyone else.
Of course, this is actually good news for Google share holders, as it'd be hard for them to sustain their growth rate if they actually already had 1.8 billion users.
I'm starting to think we have a case of PEBKAC here... First the weird notions about how many users Google has, and now there is this inability to find the mail link from the home page.
If you check out the current interface, you'll find a big button that says "My Mail" right under the giant Yahoo logo in the top left of the screen (not to mention the link in the personalized area if you have that set up). That whole bar has links in it for My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Search, and Yahoo Answers, and really only a little bit of space is allocated for Answers. The old interface also had a link to Yahoo Mail just to the right of the giant Yahoo logo. Seriously, it's got to be their most popular service, so they make it really easy to find.
I think it's fair to say that the gmail move caught everyone by surprise. That said Yahoo responded with increased limits within a month (which is very impressive if you consider they had to scale up to *100 million users* having that increased storage in that time, while gmail still doesn't have to worry about that level of a storage). There is now a new version of the Yahoo mail interface, which meets and exceeds gmail's AJAX-iness, but a lot of users (not surprisingly) actually prefer the old interface. What's nice is that at least for now you have a choice.
Yeah, I realized my mistake right after I hit post. Damn Slashdot for not having an edit button.
Only destroying North Dakota would be a net improvement over the ecological damage we currently do to harvesting and refining fossil fuels. Of course, there's a fair bit of ecological damage during the manufacturing of these panels I suspect, so that may make the matter a bit muddier.
Yeah. I think the main point of the "how much space do you need to supply all the earth's energy with solar power" is not to suggest supplying all the earth's energy from a single method (probably not a wise idea by any measure), but rather to counter the argument that you can't actually use solar energy to replace a significant chunk of our current energy budget. This is in fact a pretty good argument against biofuels as a replacement (aside from growing seaweed in the ocean, most methods seem likely to consume so much arable land and water that they'd create as many problems as they'd solve), and up until this development it seemed at least like a significant drawback to solar power as well.
Given how much of the earth is already covered with buildings, asphalt, etc., it seems like losing 265 squared of the earth's surface to solar cells would be a fair trade off (particularly if you assume that innovations along the way will probably bring that number down even more) for a fully renewable energy source with comparatively limited ecological impact.
In reality, what you'd probably move to is a lot of the northeast being powered by hydro, the northwest getting a fair bit from a mix of hydro and wind, the south being a net exporter thanks to wind, hydro, solar, *and* fossil fuels. You'd probably have a combination of nuclear and fossil fuels filling out the gaps, particularly as you go further north. You'd see the same kind of trade offs going on elsewhere. I mean, you can't reasonably expect Japan to cover it's energy budget with anything we've got now other than nuclear and fossil fuel imports (just not enough land for anything else... maybe eventually they can try to pull in energy from tidal forces or biofuel grown in the ocean, but that road is far from clear).
That's a real number. Yahoo actually has some fairly strict auditing process for calculating those numbers. Why doesn't this make them the most popular search engine? The reasons are many:
s/Yahoo Finance/Google Search/
Oh, and just 'cause it's bugging me: s/then/than/
Free services can be quite profitable, and if you think you can't make money selling ads for an audience that is interested in financial news, you're an idiot.
I am the only one who found it ridiculously transparent that this was a puff piece for eBlaste?
Hehe... So that'd put both of them as imitators of Konfabulator (now Yahoo Widgets).
Honestly, I'd say the Foundation series isn't a good example. The series was never meant to be serial, so it was perfectly okay (and even expected) for it to reach a definitive conclusion, and the second foundation was originally that definitive conclusion. After the fact he came up with an idea for a story that explored the gaia hypothesis, played on the notion of the secret society operating under the influence of another even more secret society, and also kind of sentimentally/nostalgically tied together some of his other work.
;-).
The problem is more when you go this route with an episodic work that isn't intended to have a definitive end (well, until the show gets cancelled
The cost of aquiring Lighthouse was worse than that. If you'll recall Schwartz was put in charge of their startup investing. Not only did he bomb out big time on those investments, but he also invested under his own name and lost such a huge bundle he was going to be forced to declare bankrupcy.... until Sun bailed out his debts (I forget how much, but it was several million). For his fantastic investment insight.... he was promoted.
As the "fellow co-founder" line points out, this guy is an excellent self-promoter. Hopefully for Sun, he'll be just as effective promoting the company.
With more and more scientific studies paid for out of public dollars
Where did you get the idea that that was happening? More like the reverse.
Perhaps this is true about the public's perception of global warming, but there is a lot of data behind global warming. It's fair to argue that people's models are wrong, or that the data points to a different set of conclusions than global warming (or more accurately global climate change), but there is a fair bit of real science to this stuff.
Much of it comes from socialist desires to control large corporations
Methinks someone's be swallowing too much propoganda. Global climate change only predicts outcomes and talks about causes. Politics might dictate how one responds to change outcomes, but any viable political system should be cable of responding to serious threats that will effect an entire community. Perhaps the voices of socialists are being heard more than other groups, but that is a separate matter.
-- "why not make cars more fuel efficient?" Well, you end up making them less safe in collisions, too.
"Why not curtail smokestacks?" Because other countries won't, and you'll lose jobs on top of jobs (this is already evident).
I think most socialists have called for a solution that is global in nature, which would preclude this possibility. More importantly, the usual way to reduce waste (thereby reducing the need for smokestacks) is to make things more efficient, which tends to have a net positive economic impact.
Sigh, this is nothing more than a non-redundant store. Very similar to stuff already offered by a number of vendors, even Microsoft. The "fast way to know what's already on disk" is just to store hashes of the data in an index. Move along, nothing to see here......
I'm sorry, but Apple's customer service moves are weak at best. I get my best customer service if I go to an Apple-certified store (yeah, those stores that Apple seems to be trying to run out of business). If I go to an Apple store, I have to pay for membership in some service program if I want to avoid waiting an hour to talk to one of their "Genius's". Once I finally get a chance to talk to them they look at the machine for a couple of minutes, and then tell me that they'll have to ship it at headquarters for someone to figure out what if anything is wrong with it. Oh, and by the way, if I want to have any kind of guarantee that I'll see my data again, I have to pay like $100 to have my hard drive backed up, even if they never touch the hard drive (what's so hard about charging me to back up the hard drive only if they need to replace it?). Then I have to wait at least 3 days to find out what, if anything, is wrong with my machine. Even if I have AppleCare there is no replacement machine offered. They have a short warrantee and charge an arm and a leg for AppleCare, which only covers manufacturer's defects (for the same price I can get a complete insurance package from Dell that provides a "no questions asked" free repair). More often than not their inflated labor costs make it so that almost any repair costs more than just replacing the hardware. Seriously, I get better customer service from basically every other vendor I've worked with.
Nah, this is a puff piece trying to improve Apple's image, and it's pretty shameful that slashdot is falling for it.
HeHe. Kind of funny how the young 'uns quote Stephenson instead of his predecessors. Herbert's Lazarus Effect comes to mind immediately, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't the first to think along these lines.
Yeah, but is it GSM or CDMA? It looks like GSM but I couldn't find details anywhere (perhaps I'm blind).
Do any of these Linux phones work with the services in the US? I haven't seen any being offered by the carriers themselves.
Nutch is written by the Lucene guys. Lucene really isn't designed to be a full fledged search engine. It's more like a site indexer.
So, aside from reading books on Information Retrieval and Data Mining, the other easily available reference are open source search engines. In particular, look at the Nutch project, which is actually a pretty high quality search engine implementation. Even better: start contributing to the project.
Something I once heard from a contractor: IBM bought Informix in hopes of merging the Informix technology into DB/2... but found that Informix was so far ahead of them that there was no way they could do it without a full rewrite.
That seems more than a bit unlikely. Informix Dynamic Server just went in a different direction from DB/2, and that did indeed make it difficult to merge the two technologies. That said, prior to the buyout by IBM, the general feeling I got from people who knew better was that IBM pretty much had the lead in RDBMS technology (yes, definitely ahead of Oracle). Informix's DataBlade's were where they were ahead (DB/2 had something similar, but it was definitely trailing Informix).
Other than that, I agree with a lot of what you say.
I don't know about you, but that doesn't look like a declaratino of war to me.
Perhaps it's technically not a declaration of war, but it authorizes the President to use his war making powers. It'll be interesting to see if the Supreme Court considers this a meaningful distinction. I'm guessing not.
And the 15 days should be up any time now...
The 15 day clause is very poorly worded and subject to two interpretations, one being the 15 days clock is on a per wiretap basis. Absent a legal challenge to clarify this, it seems like a perfectly reasonable and legal interpretation.
I don't see any other Amendment that give the president the right to violate the 4th amendment, do you?
No ammendment was necessary, as the constitution gives the president these powers as part of his/her war making authority. This is why FISA specifically has an exception for times of war.
A RESOLUTION authorizing the use of military force is not a declaration of war, nor does it carry any legal weight.
That's one legal opinion, but there appear to be a lot of opinions to the contrary. Certainly, based on your interpretation the War Powers Resolution really doesn't do anything. VP Cheney might agree with you, but Nixon who vetoed it and the Congress that ratified it anyway seem to think it was of some signifigance.
A DECLARATION OF WAR requires an act of congress.
In what way is this not an "act of congress"?
This was just congresss saying "Sure, we agree with you, go ahead and invade Iraq. We can't stop you and we don't plan to try."
The notion that they can't do anything to stop the President derives from the notion that the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional. Even if that were true, the Congress clearly has the ability to force the Executive branch to make that case to the Judicial branch to strike down the act.