Bonus points for sounding well educated, but I hope you realize that you've basically discovered the principle that companies strive to improve profits. Anything less would be bizarre.
Google has achieved its remarkable success by focusing on customer satisfaction and the end user experience. The whole reason they are so powerful is because the average joe trusts them to do a lot of filtering and ranking so as to provide valuable search results.
That's a very simple point, and I didn't use any fancy "functions of self interest," but a lot of people seem to have a hard time understanding it. This situation is similar to the hypothetical case where Roger Ebert stops reviewing movies from, say, MGM, because they start providing him with different versions of the movies than they actually release. In that case, he'd have every right to say "because I can't accurately review the content which is delivered to my audience, I won't review it at all."
Google is a company (wow!). They want to achieve profits and shareholder value (oh no!). So far, they have accomplished those by offering a customer experience that is superior to their competitors, thereby gaining more eyeballs and ad revenue. This bit of news is exactly in line with what they've always done, albeit more high profile, and seems to indicate that they value the quality of their DB above, say, ad revenue from a gigantic company (should BMW choose to boycott ads).
I found your "discovery" that "over the next few years" Google will have self-interest as a priority, and the implied derision baseless. Can you elaborate on why that's a bad or surprising thing? What, exactly, do they owe you that you think they won't deliver?
When we do so, we'll disclose this to users, just as we already do in those rare instances where we alter results in order to comply with local laws in France, Germany and the U.S
Can someone point me to a google query that indicates that its results were filtered in accordance wuth US laws? Or am I misreading that?
Not in my experience. I've worked with many, many systems over the years, and I'd say that about half of the time a drive in an array failed, at least one other one went with it either simultaneously or shortly thereafter.
Sometimes the failed drive has literally melted, putting great load on the power supply and taking one or more other drives out at the same time. In arrays that stripe error-recovery information across multiple disks (RAID 5, etc), I've had the additional load be the final straw for a second drive. I've had hot spares that died the moment they were asked to actually do something.
It may be that the chances of losing two out of three disks at once are slim. But I can tell you that the odds of losing two out of twenty disks at once are not slim at all. Either that or God just hates me. In either case (he may hate you, too), it's best to plan for multiple drive failures and at least one power supply and one SCSI bus failure happening at once.
I totally agree with your point, but in all fairness an argument can be made that Latin and Greek were more useful to someone looking to get ahead in the world 100 years ago than they are now. Back then, it opened educational and social doors, and provided access to much knowledge that was locked up in (at best public) libraries.
And, on the flip side, how was Graves at understanding technology? That's probably the single biggest (but not only!) indicator of future success for today's youth. I don't mean assembly language, I mean understanding, in broad terms, how tech works and what it does.
I mostly share the original article's dismay at the functional illiteracy the study turned up, and I totally agree with your point about declining educational standards... I just think that a return to the old standards is neither possible nor desirable.
I mean, who cares if 5% of high school students can't understand how credit cards work? And tipping cows is discouraged, anyway, so it's not like we really want to educate them about that anyway. Checking books out from libraries is obsolete anyway, so it's not like they'll need that life skill.
Oh my god! I just discovered that "mean" and "nice" technically mean *exactly the opposite* of how most people use them. Wow, all of those people who thought Mr. Rogers was "nice" actually disliked him, without even knowing it!
And news bulletin: "flammable" and "inflammable" mean the same thing these days. Horror of horrors! Can you believe what these rubes are doing to our elegantly designed langauge?
Cheers -b
PS: English is a living, evolving language. Get used to it.
(total number of users) * (% of users using browser) = # of users who you won't be supporting.
We have a two-tired philosophy: we don't test with browsers that have 5% market share, because we're a small business with limited resources. However, if a user reports a problem in a 5% browser that's easy to fix, we'll fix it. If it's a fundamental issue (lack of CSS support, etc), we'll just say "sorry, can't do it."
If it's not fundamental but not easy to fix, we'll consider the direction that the browser's market share is going in. An IE 4 problem that would take a lot of time to fix is not as important as an Opera problem that will take a lot of time to fix, because any work we do to support IE 4 is less and less valuable every day; Opera work should be worth more or less the same in a year that it is now (yeah yeah, it may gain another.5% of total market share, but you get my point).
As you get more users, that threshold drops. If you've got a million revenue-generating users, it only takes a fraction of a percentage drop in revenue to justify the resources needed to support an old browser.
Fortunately for you, Slashdot does promise to save everything, come hell, high water, nuclear war, or a buyout. So your thoughts and words here are safe forever!
The government just wants to be able to say "The term 'britney spears naked' was searched for 3 billion times in that week, and of the results that came up, 2.8 billion were porn sites. Therefore, we need to make it illegal to put porn on the internet."
Yes, the statistics are useless in the traditional sense, but for PR value for the anti-porn crusade, they're invaluable.
Or at least the government thinks so; me, I think it may backfire. Part of the whole power the anti-porn lobby enjoys is the traditional stigma associated with sex. People fall all overthemselves to distance themselves from porn, and many a juror has turned in a "guilty" verdict as a way of demonstrating that (fictional) distance.
But if the government really makes a big deal out of just how big porn is on the internet, there's a reasonable chance that it will reduce the stigma ("everyone's doing it"), and therefore the power of the censorship brigade.
It's stupid, no matter how you look at it. Good for Google, regardless of their motives.
No matter what clever escaping you do, there is no excuse for building sql queries using user input to make a string. Bad, bad, bad idea. Bad for security, bad for encoding problems, bad for performance, bad for readability, bad for reusability, bad for baby jesus.
The only reasonable argument I can think of is that a new document format will be a hassle / expense for smaller companies who contract with the state. Their ancient versions of Word, etc, won't support ODF, so they'll be forced to upgrade. And that means expense, training, etc. In short, it's a major shakeup of the status quo, and companies who are not technology-centric may find it expensive and challenging.
That said, government does the same thing all the time when it changes building codes, tax codes, etc. If you work with the government, just like any other large client, you should be prepared to conform to its process. And this is definitely a case where one large, sudden pain and expense will significantly reduce the ongoing pain and expense of using and paying for MS products.
Me, I'm for the change. But I think there is a reasonable argument against it. It's just that the argument, to my mind, isn't strong enough to somehow make this A Bad Thing.
Parent is quite right. Count(*) is expensive, especially on big tables, so it's handy to have a quicker way that's not as accurate. MSSQL has it, too: select rows from sysindexes where [id]=object_id('tablename') and indid2...basically, you're querying the table that the query optimizer uses, asking for how many rows it thinks there are in the primary key.
Nothing wrong with that not being accurate. It's much faster than counting every row, and if all you care about is whether there are less than 1,000,000 rows or something, it's fine. If you care about exact numbers, use count(*), which IS accurate on MySQL.
Even the crippled versions of DB2, Oracle, and MSSQL still have the underpinings for advanced features that MySQL doesn't support. From real replication to actual performance monitoring (all three of the big guys provide detailed hooks into the guts of the DB) to support for multiple filegroups and indexes and databases spread across filegroups, the big DB's have features that are important but impact performance.
Heck, you want to see MySQL get its ass kicked on performance? Run a test on a filesystem against MySQL.
Comparing performance among databases is only meaningful if all of the candidates have the features you need. MySQL has come a long way, and I use it in production every day, but this is kind of a silly comparison. The free versions of the big DB's are meant to provide an easy migration path to more feature-complete versions; if you use SQL Server Express and want to upgrade to something that that supports clustering and log shipping, you may your money and get your features. With MySQL, if you outgrow it, you either need to start writing code, migrating to something else, or sitting on your hands waiting for it to get there.
Recap, for those who won't RTFC and want to slag me: I like MySQL. I use it for mission critical purposes in production environments. However, comparing a simpler product's performance to (crippled versions of) more robust products is silly.
Funny thing is, a single drive can take a RAID down. The data is still there on the other drives, but a misbehaving/fried drive can trash the SCSI bus and bring down the entire thing.
The answer, of course, is a seperate controller per drive, with logic on the host to close down a controller that's gone berzerk because of bad input from the drive (electrical or logical). But that's not the way the fast majority of RAID systems work, and therefore, it's not all that uncommon to crash a server when a single drive fails. Heck, I've had hot spares fail and crash an array (crash = lock up, not lose data). The humorous irony is usually not really appreciated until days later.
...at least he didn't lie about get a blow job from an intern. Now, *that* would be an outrage. This piddly stuff about secretly expanding the role of the police in the state is trivial compared to serious stuff like that.
Consumers are clearly demonstrating that the $0.99/song model doesn't work. Educated by **AA's anti-piracy campaigns, consumers realize that Apple's business model is unfair to the artists who create the songs they listen to. This is clearly a groundswell of public opinion whereby customers are telling Apple "If you continue to release Ms. Spears' latest single for $0.99, you are robbing her of her compensation as an artist, and we won't stand for it anymore."
I don't think Apple has any choice: in the face of this consumer backlash against affordable music, they'll have talk the labels into allowing them to raise prices on the most artistic material (that which is in the highest demand, that is). If they charge, say, $2.99 for the latest Britney Spears single, consumers will once again be able to purchase from iTunes with a clear conscience, and not worry that they're contributing to a young artist being taken advantage of by a huge corporation.
Wow. You got that my philosohpy is "humans are no better than animals" because I suggested that the concept of intrinsic value is illusory. No wonder you don't have time for people like me; you're too busy building straw men. How in the world do you get some kind of moralistic good/evil and individualism vs. collective good moral out of a post that essentially says that things are worth what peopl ewill pay for them?
Perhaps you should consider responding to actual points rather than wild characterizations that justify demonization. Er, nevermind. The world -- and McDonalds especially -- needs people like you.
I won't call you names, as much as you seem to be into that kind of thing. Apparently you're a pretty miserable, angry person, and that's good enough for me. Enjoy the stew!
Oh, you "anyone who has a good point must actually be stupid" people are so cute. Well, actually not.
So I'm hypcritical and stupid? Please demonstrate. I will cheerfully admit either or both when you point out where exactly I've contradicted myself or indicated stupidity.
As for stupid, you've indicated a belief in intrinsic value, but given nothing to back up *why* you believe in it. Because it "should" exist? If so, who should set the values? In the absence of a market, is an apple worth more or less than an orange?
And if you want hypocritical, you've just posted that you have better things to do with your time than posting responses to me.
You can set me to "foe"; that's fine. I figure I'll be joining lots of people whose valid points you can't be bothered to articulately disagree with. Me, I welcome debate with people who disagree with me. Heck, I've even been known to be convinced in the face of argument. "You stupid hypocrit" doesn't really count as an argument, though.
Ah, you "intrinsic value" people are so cute. So convinced that goods and services are somehow worth some abitrary values based on what they should be worth, as opposed to what people are willing to pay for them.
If chinese Rolex knockoffs are achieving market parity with real Rolexes, it's because, for the people buying them, they're the same thing. Or, at least, the people buying them have decided they'd rather have 1,000 chinese "rolexes" over their lifetime than a single real thing.
When you say the market is "broken," what you really mean is that the market is, well, the market. And that some (most) people disagree with your estimations of intrinsic value. In reality, the market can't be "broken" any more than the weather can be "broken" -- it's a complex system that may evolve in ways we don't like, but if people really didn't like it, they'd change their behavior and the market/weather would trend back to what people consider "normal."
Might as well declare that sports, music, or academia is "broken." Large, complex systems tend to evolve. Deal with it. Or at least realize that your ideas of intrinsic value may not be shared by all 5 billion other people on the planet.
Having worked both in the tech press and the SEO-needy internet world, I can say that the article is interesting, but based on a fundamentally flawed premise.
Search engine rankings are not, and should not be, based on popularity. When you type "britney spears naked" into a search engine, you don't care about how many people have clicked on the resulting links. You're looking for *relevance*, which is entirely separate from popularity.
TFA is interesting, but that flawed presence really hurts it. SEO's don't try to convince SE's that a site is more popular (well, there's backlinks, but that's a whole different story). Instead, they try to convince SE's that a site is more relevant. The use of backlinks, etc, is entirely secondary to that purpose.
Me, I'm all for Google and other SE's efforts to negate the effects of SEO by detecting and penalizing SEO behavior (gateway pages, bogus backlinks, etc). SE's may be wrong about what a surfer wants, but intentionally trying to *make* them wrong us abusive to surfers and ultimately makes SE's less useful.
After all, if I have the biggest and best widgets site and try to trick SE's to linking to me for searches on "wodgets," it's only reasonable to expect that people who make "wodgets" will try to SEO "widgets". Customers end up not being able to find what they want, and SE traffic is devalued for everyone.
It's just too bad that the RIAA and MPAA weren't more vigilant back in 1979 or so. A few lawsuits and threats here and there, and they could have kept this whole Internet fiasco from happening. You just know that someone back then was using UUCP email to trade bootlegged concert tapes, or something.
The next time some "Microsoft is 100% evil" or "IBM is 100% benign" topic shows up, can we all remember this?
Companies are staffed by people, some of whom are bright, some of whom are stupid, and some of whom either get or don't get the way the world works.
In short: a lot of people running companies, or purporting to run companies, are no more mature or adult than your average 3am slashdot reader (hey, wait, that's me!). Look at what they've done here: picked a fight they can't win, gotten more press for their company's nature as a spyware "vendor", and turned a lot of very knowledgeable, sometimes-irrational geeks (that's you, slashdot) against themselves.
I'm with you in principle, but like they say, the devil is in the details.
How would you handle private investigators? Should I be able to contract someone to watch what you have for breakfast and report back to me? How about paying a waiter at the restaurant to tell me what you had for breakfast?
I'm all for personal privacy, and I would have a big grin on my face if a meteor hit the ChoicePoint offices. However, I'm wary of the knee-jerk "we need legislation to combat this scourge" response. Are we talking about outlawing the collection of information, or the dissemination of it, or both? And where do you draw the line?
If we're outlawing the collection of information, a whole lot of things get a lot mroe complicated (medical records, for instance). If we're outlawing the dissemination, even more things get complicated (you'd better not tell *anyone* *anything* about *anyone* you know, or it's the pokey for you).
My personal hope is that the market catches up and realizes that vendors like ChoicePoint are 1) inaccurate, and 2) a leading cause of the problems that they purport to solve. I'm skeptical that will happen, but I can hope. And, as more people become aware of the problem, maybe consumers will help the market by providing economic incentive to companies not to sell info.
But I'm very skeptical of any kind of legislative solution that limits peoples' ability to either collect information or sell collections of information. Because that's what we're talking about, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Bonus points for sounding well educated, but I hope you realize that you've basically discovered the principle that companies strive to improve profits. Anything less would be bizarre.
Google has achieved its remarkable success by focusing on customer satisfaction and the end user experience. The whole reason they are so powerful is because the average joe trusts them to do a lot of filtering and ranking so as to provide valuable search results.
That's a very simple point, and I didn't use any fancy "functions of self interest," but a lot of people seem to have a hard time understanding it. This situation is similar to the hypothetical case where Roger Ebert stops reviewing movies from, say, MGM, because they start providing him with different versions of the movies than they actually release. In that case, he'd have every right to say "because I can't accurately review the content which is delivered to my audience, I won't review it at all."
Google is a company (wow!). They want to achieve profits and shareholder value (oh no!). So far, they have accomplished those by offering a customer experience that is superior to their competitors, thereby gaining more eyeballs and ad revenue. This bit of news is exactly in line with what they've always done, albeit more high profile, and seems to indicate that they value the quality of their DB above, say, ad revenue from a gigantic company (should BMW choose to boycott ads).
I found your "discovery" that "over the next few years" Google will have self-interest as a priority, and the implied derision baseless. Can you elaborate on why that's a bad or surprising thing? What, exactly, do they owe you that you think they won't deliver?
Cheers
-b
From Google's response
Can someone point me to a google query that indicates that its results were filtered in accordance wuth US laws? Or am I misreading that?
Cheers
-b
Not in my experience. I've worked with many, many systems over the years, and I'd say that about half of the time a drive in an array failed, at least one other one went with it either simultaneously or shortly thereafter.
Sometimes the failed drive has literally melted, putting great load on the power supply and taking one or more other drives out at the same time. In arrays that stripe error-recovery information across multiple disks (RAID 5, etc), I've had the additional load be the final straw for a second drive. I've had hot spares that died the moment they were asked to actually do something.
It may be that the chances of losing two out of three disks at once are slim. But I can tell you that the odds of losing two out of twenty disks at once are not slim at all. Either that or God just hates me. In either case (he may hate you, too), it's best to plan for multiple drive failures and at least one power supply and one SCSI bus failure happening at once.
Cheers
-b
I totally agree with your point, but in all fairness an argument can be made that Latin and Greek were more useful to someone looking to get ahead in the world 100 years ago than they are now. Back then, it opened educational and social doors, and provided access to much knowledge that was locked up in (at best public) libraries.
And, on the flip side, how was Graves at understanding technology? That's probably the single biggest (but not only!) indicator of future success for today's youth. I don't mean assembly language, I mean understanding, in broad terms, how tech works and what it does.
I mostly share the original article's dismay at the functional illiteracy the study turned up, and I totally agree with your point about declining educational standards... I just think that a return to the old standards is neither possible nor desirable.
Cheers
-b
I mean, who cares if 5% of high school students can't understand how credit cards work? And tipping cows is discouraged, anyway, so it's not like we really want to educate them about that anyway. Checking books out from libraries is obsolete anyway, so it's not like they'll need that life skill.
-b
No, it's just typing that's irrelevant :)
Oh my god! I just discovered that "mean" and "nice" technically mean *exactly the opposite* of how most people use them. Wow, all of those people who thought Mr. Rogers was "nice" actually disliked him, without even knowing it!
And news bulletin: "flammable" and "inflammable" mean the same thing these days. Horror of horrors! Can you believe what these rubes are doing to our elegantly designed langauge?
Cheers
-b
PS: English is a living, evolving language. Get used to it.
(total number of users) * (% of users using browser) = # of users who you won't be supporting.
.5% of total market share, but you get my point).
We have a two-tired philosophy: we don't test with browsers that have 5% market share, because we're a small business with limited resources. However, if a user reports a problem in a 5% browser that's easy to fix, we'll fix it. If it's a fundamental issue (lack of CSS support, etc), we'll just say "sorry, can't do it."
If it's not fundamental but not easy to fix, we'll consider the direction that the browser's market share is going in. An IE 4 problem that would take a lot of time to fix is not as important as an Opera problem that will take a lot of time to fix, because any work we do to support IE 4 is less and less valuable every day; Opera work should be worth more or less the same in a year that it is now (yeah yeah, it may gain another
As you get more users, that threshold drops. If you've got a million revenue-generating users, it only takes a fraction of a percentage drop in revenue to justify the resources needed to support an old browser.
Cheers
-b
Fortunately for you, Slashdot does promise to save everything, come hell, high water, nuclear war, or a buyout. So your thoughts and words here are safe forever!
Oh, wait...
-b
Well, but if you can't trust the government, who can you trust? They're here to help us, right?
-b
The government just wants to be able to say "The term 'britney spears naked' was searched for 3 billion times in that week, and of the results that came up, 2.8 billion were porn sites. Therefore, we need to make it illegal to put porn on the internet."
Yes, the statistics are useless in the traditional sense, but for PR value for the anti-porn crusade, they're invaluable.
Or at least the government thinks so; me, I think it may backfire. Part of the whole power the anti-porn lobby enjoys is the traditional stigma associated with sex. People fall all overthemselves to distance themselves from porn, and many a juror has turned in a "guilty" verdict as a way of demonstrating that (fictional) distance.
But if the government really makes a big deal out of just how big porn is on the internet, there's a reasonable chance that it will reduce the stigma ("everyone's doing it"), and therefore the power of the censorship brigade.
It's stupid, no matter how you look at it. Good for Google, regardless of their motives.
Cheers
-b
Can we mod the parent up to 11, please?
No matter what clever escaping you do, there is no excuse for building sql queries using user input to make a string. Bad, bad, bad idea. Bad for security, bad for encoding problems, bad for performance, bad for readability, bad for reusability, bad for baby jesus.
Don't do it. Ever.
-b
The only reasonable argument I can think of is that a new document format will be a hassle / expense for smaller companies who contract with the state. Their ancient versions of Word, etc, won't support ODF, so they'll be forced to upgrade. And that means expense, training, etc. In short, it's a major shakeup of the status quo, and companies who are not technology-centric may find it expensive and challenging.
That said, government does the same thing all the time when it changes building codes, tax codes, etc. If you work with the government, just like any other large client, you should be prepared to conform to its process. And this is definitely a case where one large, sudden pain and expense will significantly reduce the ongoing pain and expense of using and paying for MS products.
Me, I'm for the change. But I think there is a reasonable argument against it. It's just that the argument, to my mind, isn't strong enough to somehow make this A Bad Thing.
-b
Parent is quite right. Count(*) is expensive, especially on big tables, so it's handy to have a quicker way that's not as accurate. MSSQL has it, too: ...basically, you're querying the table that the query optimizer uses, asking for how many rows it thinks there are in the primary key.
select rows from sysindexes where [id]=object_id('tablename') and indid2
Nothing wrong with that not being accurate. It's much faster than counting every row, and if all you care about is whether there are less than 1,000,000 rows or something, it's fine. If you care about exact numbers, use count(*), which IS accurate on MySQL.
-b
Even the crippled versions of DB2, Oracle, and MSSQL still have the underpinings for advanced features that MySQL doesn't support. From real replication to actual performance monitoring (all three of the big guys provide detailed hooks into the guts of the DB) to support for multiple filegroups and indexes and databases spread across filegroups, the big DB's have features that are important but impact performance.
Heck, you want to see MySQL get its ass kicked on performance? Run a test on a filesystem against MySQL.
Comparing performance among databases is only meaningful if all of the candidates have the features you need. MySQL has come a long way, and I use it in production every day, but this is kind of a silly comparison. The free versions of the big DB's are meant to provide an easy migration path to more feature-complete versions; if you use SQL Server Express and want to upgrade to something that that supports clustering and log shipping, you may your money and get your features. With MySQL, if you outgrow it, you either need to start writing code, migrating to something else, or sitting on your hands waiting for it to get there.
Recap, for those who won't RTFC and want to slag me: I like MySQL. I use it for mission critical purposes in production environments. However, comparing a simpler product's performance to (crippled versions of) more robust products is silly.
Cheers
-b
Funny thing is, a single drive can take a RAID down. The data is still there on the other drives, but a misbehaving/fried drive can trash the SCSI bus and bring down the entire thing.
The answer, of course, is a seperate controller per drive, with logic on the host to close down a controller that's gone berzerk because of bad input from the drive (electrical or logical). But that's not the way the fast majority of RAID systems work, and therefore, it's not all that uncommon to crash a server when a single drive fails. Heck, I've had hot spares fail and crash an array (crash = lock up, not lose data). The humorous irony is usually not really appreciated until days later.
Cheers
-b
...at least he didn't lie about get a blow job from an intern. Now, *that* would be an outrage. This piddly stuff about secretly expanding the role of the police in the state is trivial compared to serious stuff like that.
Cheers
-b
Consumers are clearly demonstrating that the $0.99/song model doesn't work. Educated by **AA's anti-piracy campaigns, consumers realize that Apple's business model is unfair to the artists who create the songs they listen to. This is clearly a groundswell of public opinion whereby customers are telling Apple "If you continue to release Ms. Spears' latest single for $0.99, you are robbing her of her compensation as an artist, and we won't stand for it anymore."
I don't think Apple has any choice: in the face of this consumer backlash against affordable music, they'll have talk the labels into allowing them to raise prices on the most artistic material (that which is in the highest demand, that is). If they charge, say, $2.99 for the latest Britney Spears single, consumers will once again be able to purchase from iTunes with a clear conscience, and not worry that they're contributing to a young artist being taken advantage of by a huge corporation.
Cheers
-b
Wow. You got that my philosohpy is "humans are no better than animals" because I suggested that the concept of intrinsic value is illusory. No wonder you don't have time for people like me; you're too busy building straw men. How in the world do you get some kind of moralistic good/evil and individualism vs. collective good moral out of a post that essentially says that things are worth what peopl ewill pay for them?
Perhaps you should consider responding to actual points rather than wild characterizations that justify demonization. Er, nevermind. The world -- and McDonalds especially -- needs people like you.
I won't call you names, as much as you seem to be into that kind of thing. Apparently you're a pretty miserable, angry person, and that's good enough for me. Enjoy the stew!
-b
Oh, you "anyone who has a good point must actually be stupid" people are so cute. Well, actually not.
So I'm hypcritical and stupid? Please demonstrate. I will cheerfully admit either or both when you point out where exactly I've contradicted myself or indicated stupidity.
As for stupid, you've indicated a belief in intrinsic value, but given nothing to back up *why* you believe in it. Because it "should" exist? If so, who should set the values? In the absence of a market, is an apple worth more or less than an orange?
And if you want hypocritical, you've just posted that you have better things to do with your time than posting responses to me.
You can set me to "foe"; that's fine. I figure I'll be joining lots of people whose valid points you can't be bothered to articulately disagree with. Me, I welcome debate with people who disagree with me. Heck, I've even been known to be convinced in the face of argument. "You stupid hypocrit" doesn't really count as an argument, though.
Cheers
-b
Ah, you "intrinsic value" people are so cute. So convinced that goods and services are somehow worth some abitrary values based on what they should be worth, as opposed to what people are willing to pay for them.
If chinese Rolex knockoffs are achieving market parity with real Rolexes, it's because, for the people buying them, they're the same thing. Or, at least, the people buying them have decided they'd rather have 1,000 chinese "rolexes" over their lifetime than a single real thing.
When you say the market is "broken," what you really mean is that the market is, well, the market. And that some (most) people disagree with your estimations of intrinsic value. In reality, the market can't be "broken" any more than the weather can be "broken" -- it's a complex system that may evolve in ways we don't like, but if people really didn't like it, they'd change their behavior and the market/weather would trend back to what people consider "normal."
Might as well declare that sports, music, or academia is "broken." Large, complex systems tend to evolve. Deal with it. Or at least realize that your ideas of intrinsic value may not be shared by all 5 billion other people on the planet.
-b
Having worked both in the tech press and the SEO-needy internet world, I can say that the article is interesting, but based on a fundamentally flawed premise.
Search engine rankings are not, and should not be, based on popularity. When you type "britney spears naked" into a search engine, you don't care about how many people have clicked on the resulting links. You're looking for *relevance*, which is entirely separate from popularity.
TFA is interesting, but that flawed presence really hurts it. SEO's don't try to convince SE's that a site is more popular (well, there's backlinks, but that's a whole different story). Instead, they try to convince SE's that a site is more relevant. The use of backlinks, etc, is entirely secondary to that purpose.
Me, I'm all for Google and other SE's efforts to negate the effects of SEO by detecting and penalizing SEO behavior (gateway pages, bogus backlinks, etc). SE's may be wrong about what a surfer wants, but intentionally trying to *make* them wrong us abusive to surfers and ultimately makes SE's less useful.
After all, if I have the biggest and best widgets site and try to trick SE's to linking to me for searches on "wodgets," it's only reasonable to expect that people who make "wodgets" will try to SEO "widgets". Customers end up not being able to find what they want, and SE traffic is devalued for everyone.
Cheers
-b
It's just too bad that the RIAA and MPAA weren't more vigilant back in 1979 or so. A few lawsuits and threats here and there, and they could have kept this whole Internet fiasco from happening. You just know that someone back then was using UUCP email to trade bootlegged concert tapes, or something.
Cheers
-b
The next time some "Microsoft is 100% evil" or "IBM is 100% benign" topic shows up, can we all remember this?
Companies are staffed by people, some of whom are bright, some of whom are stupid, and some of whom either get or don't get the way the world works.
In short: a lot of people running companies, or purporting to run companies, are no more mature or adult than your average 3am slashdot reader (hey, wait, that's me!). Look at what they've done here: picked a fight they can't win, gotten more press for their company's nature as a spyware "vendor", and turned a lot of very knowledgeable, sometimes-irrational geeks (that's you, slashdot) against themselves.
Duh.
-b
I'm with you in principle, but like they say, the devil is in the details.
How would you handle private investigators? Should I be able to contract someone to watch what you have for breakfast and report back to me? How about paying a waiter at the restaurant to tell me what you had for breakfast?
I'm all for personal privacy, and I would have a big grin on my face if a meteor hit the ChoicePoint offices. However, I'm wary of the knee-jerk "we need legislation to combat this scourge" response. Are we talking about outlawing the collection of information, or the dissemination of it, or both? And where do you draw the line?
If we're outlawing the collection of information, a whole lot of things get a lot mroe complicated (medical records, for instance). If we're outlawing the dissemination, even more things get complicated (you'd better not tell *anyone* *anything* about *anyone* you know, or it's the pokey for you).
My personal hope is that the market catches up and realizes that vendors like ChoicePoint are 1) inaccurate, and 2) a leading cause of the problems that they purport to solve. I'm skeptical that will happen, but I can hope. And, as more people become aware of the problem, maybe consumers will help the market by providing economic incentive to companies not to sell info.
But I'm very skeptical of any kind of legislative solution that limits peoples' ability to either collect information or sell collections of information. Because that's what we're talking about, right?
Cheers
-b