I think something like the Apple App Store is what we'll eventually get for books. A source of easy browsing/buying of eBooks where authors can easily self publish. Like Apple they would test for minimal quality levels and allow user ratings. I'd expect about the same arrangement of 2/3 for the author and 1/3 for the seller.
I'd venture to guess that if Apple releases a tablet designed well for reading (I hope they do because that is something I struggle using the iPod Touch for) that they may add eBook's to their store. If eBooks were priced realistically (~$2.99 for a novel) I'd buy a lot of books.
Some authors may want to stick with what they know but I think many would be interested in self publishing. I think established authors would be the ones to benefit the most as they probably need advances and editorial help the least. I also think that a strong self publishing option would allow authors to pressure for better deals from publishers. Maybe they'd still use a publisher with the associated benefits but they'd get higher royalties from their eBook sales.
As for basics you'd think would come from publishers I've noticed most the books I've purchased in the past couple years were just full of spelling and grammar issues. IMO editing should have caught these but for eBooks I'd be glad to report the problems to the author and have the corrected version download as the author fixed things.
It's obvious that these pages are just part of the built-in search and will return for any
random search terms. They're not doing anything suspicious. The only odd thing is that Google is somehow indexing the pages. It's more likely a bug in Google or someone somewhere thought it'd be amusing to create a bunch of links to Target for random search terms.
Could be although I'd think that kind of thing would leave a trail and not be overly beneficial. My guess would be someone else was trying to create some sort of mashup or steal content or some such or that Google is experimenting with indexing content hidden behind form submissions. (Bing does this.)
I wonder if this could have something to do with behavior I've seen from Bing. They create thousands of searches based on some keyword matrix related to other content on your site and feed them to your site as if they were real searches (but without identifying themselves in the user agent although it comes rapidly right after a hit from msnbot/Bing and from the same IP). Could Bing be generating crappy links somewhere or could Google be trying to do the same thing and getting confused when the Target site tries to handle the bad searches?
The link isn't to pages for products. It's a link to search result pages. I'm sure Target has had 14 million people search for things. There isn't a thing wrong with a search returning no results when people search for things they don't sell.
There is nothing wrong with having a page not return results to a search. There isn't anything wrong with responding to the search terms from a referer. As far as I can tell they aren't hiding anything or participating in any kind of link scheme.
The only issue would be if Target is somehow tricking Google into going to these pages for select terms. More than anything this seems like a bug in Google's algorithm.
Looks like they finally have multiple backgrounds working. Will have to test if it's fixed the other places it was lacking but is a good sign. Have been looking for it since 10.
His coders probably got more done too. I often avoid working in the office because I waste the majority of my time helping people with minor issues. Often these people aren't even (or shouldn't be) involved in development. I have to tell my people to grin and nod and keep working on what their project is when they are bothered by these management people. It's a stupid waste of time.
Meetings are another pet peeve. Recently we had a couple six hour long meetings where everyone sat there and watched as a couple people in management clicked through the project making minor comments and questions. Wouldn't it have been better to examine things on their own and just sent me a list of questions and comments? Why waste developer time?
In most cases none of these issues really matter much. Most pages are cached in memory which is plenty fast regardless of the APC/Memcache issues. Most websites don't need to do anything fancy with databases and most should be caching most their data in memory. Wasted memory might be a slight issue but it rarely becomes an issue in my experience. When it does you rewrite that code in Java or Python or C. The only time this is really an issue is when doing large data crunching functions that really shouldn't be done in PHP. I'd be surprised if Facebook is doing that in PHP.
So you're probably correct about these issues but the practical impact is small I think. I would like to see PHP sped up and use less memory but I wouldn't even consider switching to C++ because of these issues.
If you don't think C/C++ is harder to write and maintain than PHP then you're delusional. I've been coding for decades and started off in assembler and C and usually consider my code to be far cleaner and better written than most code.
Sure you can write good C reasonably easy but it certainly does have a lot more gotchas than PHP. Discipline helps but in the end the language is still more likely to suffer bugs due to it's design. With C you have to think about more than the logic of your program. You have to worry about memory and buffers and lots of fun stuff like that.
I will agree that many PHP programmers don't write very good code but I think that is hardly unique to PHP. I've seen plenty of really bad C. One of the biggest issues I've seen with C programmers is the insistence of writing code in C that shouldn't be in C. Then instead of having badly written easy to work with code you have badly written difficult to work with code. A great improvement.
I'd argue that well made systems in PHP aren't that much less efficient than C++. The language is less important than good caching and good code design. Most of the heavy work takes place in the database and in backend code anyway. Backend processing usually takes place in apps already written in C and maybe more efficient mid-level languages such as Python and Java.
Any sane coder doesn't write whole apps in C/C++ anymore than they do in Asm. If something needs a boost you rewrite that small part into C. Write the majority of code in an easier to write and maintain language.
I block most ads but I certainly wouldn't want to block the ads that show up in my Google search results. I wouldn't even think of Related Products as ads (and I use that feature in all my sites). I don't see how blocking ads hurts the sites I visit because I won't buy their products anyway. I advertise for my own sites and I seldom bother with ads in content sites because the click thru rate is low and the conversion rate is super low. Those ads are almost always a waste of money. It's ads in search results that have the highest conversion rate and are the least annoying so that's what I use and what I don't block.
I agree - there is no regulation needed. There is no reason televisions should not have this feature built-in. For a while they did (early 90's?) but stopped - pressure from advertisers I'd guess.
What I would like is better content control of ads. I wish they'd go back to not allowing ads for prescription drugs and would get rid of sexual content. I see a huge amount of ads for chat lines and the ads are very distasteful. I also see a lot of ads for Viagra and Smiling Bob. I don't want to explain any of that crap to my toddler. I don't mind their advertising so much as the lewdness of the ads. Or they could just tag the content of ads to make filtering easy.
But then television manufacturers aren't making equipment do these things and consumer choices don't really exist. Can we compel them to add these features without laws? Maybe give a tax break to manufacturers that sell x # of units in the US with these features by y date?
My parents live in the boonies. They can get 768k DSL but it costs as much as 15 meg cable does here and is constantly down. I think the American public should demand our money back from the telcos that were supposed to get broadband to everyone.
To bad they still can't render pages correctly. I guess they do way better than IE though. I keep waiting for their long promised new rendering engine.
You still use dial-up? Almost nobody does anymore. All my websites show something less than 1% use dial-up. Any reason why other than to inflict suffering on yourself?
3.6 is due out soon. Switch to that. It has some nice technology updates that will make it render pages nicer. Hopefully it'd also fix whatever is unhappy about 3.5.
I'm more worried about the messages I want to keep but that it decides to blindly delete anyway when a folder goes over 2GB in size. Did they fix that bug yet? IMO any product that knows it has that serious a bug - for years - and does nothing is not trustworthy enough to use.
Almost anything is faster than PHP. Java runs a little faster than Python but not a lot if the code is of comparable quality and similar JITs are used. Java usually takes a little longer to launch also so not really good for short programs.
My biggest complaint though is that programming in Java is frequently retarded. The need for generics is a good example of adding complexity to try to fix bad language design and it still sucks sometimes. Upcasting and downcasting has serious issues that make certain certain common patterns a pain to implement. Regular expressions are implemented oddly too. The code isn't as bad as C as to the amount of bookkeeping code that makes it harder to follow the actual logic but it's quite a bit more than languages like PHP or Python.
Slashdot Mirror
I think something like the Apple App Store is what we'll eventually get for books. A source of easy browsing/buying of eBooks where authors can easily self publish. Like Apple they would test for minimal quality levels and allow user ratings. I'd expect about the same arrangement of 2/3 for the author and 1/3 for the seller. I'd venture to guess that if Apple releases a tablet designed well for reading (I hope they do because that is something I struggle using the iPod Touch for) that they may add eBook's to their store. If eBooks were priced realistically (~$2.99 for a novel) I'd buy a lot of books. Some authors may want to stick with what they know but I think many would be interested in self publishing. I think established authors would be the ones to benefit the most as they probably need advances and editorial help the least. I also think that a strong self publishing option would allow authors to pressure for better deals from publishers. Maybe they'd still use a publisher with the associated benefits but they'd get higher royalties from their eBook sales. As for basics you'd think would come from publishers I've noticed most the books I've purchased in the past couple years were just full of spelling and grammar issues. IMO editing should have caught these but for eBooks I'd be glad to report the problems to the author and have the corrected version download as the author fixed things.
Why would you use a 404 for a search the doesn't find anything? Does Google return a 404 if you search for something that finds nothing?
Brilliant to send everyone to a page that doesn't really convert many visitors. That way nobody will catch on.
It's obvious that these pages are just part of the built-in search and will return for any random search terms. They're not doing anything suspicious. The only odd thing is that Google is somehow indexing the pages. It's more likely a bug in Google or someone somewhere thought it'd be amusing to create a bunch of links to Target for random search terms.
Could be although I'd think that kind of thing would leave a trail and not be overly beneficial. My guess would be someone else was trying to create some sort of mashup or steal content or some such or that Google is experimenting with indexing content hidden behind form submissions. (Bing does this.)
I wonder if this could have something to do with behavior I've seen from Bing. They create thousands of searches based on some keyword matrix related to other content on your site and feed them to your site as if they were real searches (but without identifying themselves in the user agent although it comes rapidly right after a hit from msnbot/Bing and from the same IP). Could Bing be generating crappy links somewhere or could Google be trying to do the same thing and getting confused when the Target site tries to handle the bad searches?
The link isn't to pages for products. It's a link to search result pages. I'm sure Target has had 14 million people search for things. There isn't a thing wrong with a search returning no results when people search for things they don't sell.
Did you read the article?
There is nothing wrong with having a page not return results to a search. There isn't anything wrong with responding to the search terms from a referer. As far as I can tell they aren't hiding anything or participating in any kind of link scheme.
The only issue would be if Target is somehow tricking Google into going to these pages for select terms. More than anything this seems like a bug in Google's algorithm.
Of pages that aren't there? That'd be rather suspicious.
The big question is how are these pages getting indexed? Generating them isn't wrong but there should be no links to them.
Looks like they finally have multiple backgrounds working. Will have to test if it's fixed the other places it was lacking but is a good sign. Have been looking for it since 10.
Yeh. Really sucked. Was without prior notice too so we just got pulled in to a surprise meeting that never ends. Fun.
His coders probably got more done too. I often avoid working in the office because I waste the majority of my time helping people with minor issues. Often these people aren't even (or shouldn't be) involved in development. I have to tell my people to grin and nod and keep working on what their project is when they are bothered by these management people. It's a stupid waste of time.
Meetings are another pet peeve. Recently we had a couple six hour long meetings where everyone sat there and watched as a couple people in management clicked through the project making minor comments and questions. Wouldn't it have been better to examine things on their own and just sent me a list of questions and comments? Why waste developer time?
In most cases none of these issues really matter much. Most pages are cached in memory which is plenty fast regardless of the APC/Memcache issues. Most websites don't need to do anything fancy with databases and most should be caching most their data in memory. Wasted memory might be a slight issue but it rarely becomes an issue in my experience. When it does you rewrite that code in Java or Python or C. The only time this is really an issue is when doing large data crunching functions that really shouldn't be done in PHP. I'd be surprised if Facebook is doing that in PHP.
So you're probably correct about these issues but the practical impact is small I think. I would like to see PHP sped up and use less memory but I wouldn't even consider switching to C++ because of these issues.
If you don't think C/C++ is harder to write and maintain than PHP then you're delusional. I've been coding for decades and started off in assembler and C and usually consider my code to be far cleaner and better written than most code.
Sure you can write good C reasonably easy but it certainly does have a lot more gotchas than PHP. Discipline helps but in the end the language is still more likely to suffer bugs due to it's design. With C you have to think about more than the logic of your program. You have to worry about memory and buffers and lots of fun stuff like that.
I will agree that many PHP programmers don't write very good code but I think that is hardly unique to PHP. I've seen plenty of really bad C. One of the biggest issues I've seen with C programmers is the insistence of writing code in C that shouldn't be in C. Then instead of having badly written easy to work with code you have badly written difficult to work with code. A great improvement.
I'd argue that well made systems in PHP aren't that much less efficient than C++. The language is less important than good caching and good code design. Most of the heavy work takes place in the database and in backend code anyway. Backend processing usually takes place in apps already written in C and maybe more efficient mid-level languages such as Python and Java.
Any sane coder doesn't write whole apps in C/C++ anymore than they do in Asm. If something needs a boost you rewrite that small part into C. Write the majority of code in an easier to write and maintain language.
I block most ads but I certainly wouldn't want to block the ads that show up in my Google search results. I wouldn't even think of Related Products as ads (and I use that feature in all my sites). I don't see how blocking ads hurts the sites I visit because I won't buy their products anyway. I advertise for my own sites and I seldom bother with ads in content sites because the click thru rate is low and the conversion rate is super low. Those ads are almost always a waste of money. It's ads in search results that have the highest conversion rate and are the least annoying so that's what I use and what I don't block.
I'm willing to pay for VLC/Handbrake to be maintained. Dropping support is dumb before pitching to users to pay to keep someone on the job.
I agree - there is no regulation needed. There is no reason televisions should not have this feature built-in. For a while they did (early 90's?) but stopped - pressure from advertisers I'd guess.
What I would like is better content control of ads. I wish they'd go back to not allowing ads for prescription drugs and would get rid of sexual content. I see a huge amount of ads for chat lines and the ads are very distasteful. I also see a lot of ads for Viagra and Smiling Bob. I don't want to explain any of that crap to my toddler. I don't mind their advertising so much as the lewdness of the ads. Or they could just tag the content of ads to make filtering easy.
But then television manufacturers aren't making equipment do these things and consumer choices don't really exist. Can we compel them to add these features without laws? Maybe give a tax break to manufacturers that sell x # of units in the US with these features by y date?
My parents live in the boonies. They can get 768k DSL but it costs as much as 15 meg cable does here and is constantly down. I think the American public should demand our money back from the telcos that were supposed to get broadband to everyone.
To bad they still can't render pages correctly. I guess they do way better than IE though. I keep waiting for their long promised new rendering engine.
You still use dial-up? Almost nobody does anymore. All my websites show something less than 1% use dial-up. Any reason why other than to inflict suffering on yourself?
3.6 is due out soon. Switch to that. It has some nice technology updates that will make it render pages nicer. Hopefully it'd also fix whatever is unhappy about 3.5.
I'm more worried about the messages I want to keep but that it decides to blindly delete anyway when a folder goes over 2GB in size. Did they fix that bug yet? IMO any product that knows it has that serious a bug - for years - and does nothing is not trustworthy enough to use.
Almost anything is faster than PHP. Java runs a little faster than Python but not a lot if the code is of comparable quality and similar JITs are used. Java usually takes a little longer to launch also so not really good for short programs.
My biggest complaint though is that programming in Java is frequently retarded. The need for generics is a good example of adding complexity to try to fix bad language design and it still sucks sometimes. Upcasting and downcasting has serious issues that make certain certain common patterns a pain to implement. Regular expressions are implemented oddly too. The code isn't as bad as C as to the amount of bookkeeping code that makes it harder to follow the actual logic but it's quite a bit more than languages like PHP or Python.