Quick Note: You can find me as TNLNYC on slashdot (for some reason my browser was logged out and didn't realize it when I posted the above comment). A simple googling beyond my site might give you more info on what I've done for the net, including how how I made it possible for you to continue flaming individuals in places like slashdot.
While I am sure the privacy concerns are going to continue, I'm also trying to look at it from another angle. Google may be trying to set itself up as an infrastructure play so it can start indexing the Deep Web.
One of the best way to test this would be to take a page (create a page with some stuff that would come from a search with no existing results. For example, "The Slashdot I Love Microsoft and Hate Linux Page") and put the same HTML file on an IIS server and on apache. Submit the site to both google and MSN, submitting the apache one first then followed by the IIS one) and see how the pages rank. This could confirm whether one is prefered or note.
Now, is there anyone out there with an ISS server interested in trying this out?
I was wondering the same thing so I started looking at the product lines and blogged my thoughts on this. I suspect all the web stuff stays on the Macromedia side but all the non-web products are wins for Adobe. As far as anyone interested in picking a fight with Adobe, how about Microsoft? They could, sometimes in the future...
20 years ago, the idea was to put a dumb terminal in every home. The French built such a system and it failed.
Could you please back up your assertion that the minitel was a failure. From everything I've read and seen of it, it looks like a cateegorical success, having permeated society to its core (and, sadly, it slowed internet adoption as a result).
Robert Scoble points to MSDN having issues with full entry RSS. What it comes down to is a capacity planning exercise.
In his note, he says that RSS is broken. I personally believe that at issue is not whether RSS is working or not. RSS is working but it has complicated the bandwidth issue. At issue is the fact that RSS feeds are generally generating more traffic to a site. Because RSS readers are polling the site to check if a feed has been updated, the traffic patterns change, with increased numbers of spikes on a hourly basis. This is similar to some of the issues network administrators started facing when Pointcast first appeared.
There are a number of ways to mitigate the issue.
HTTP Conditional GET for RSS First of all, one of the things to consider when using RSS is to create conditional HTTP headers on RSS feeds. This helps mitigate some of the impact by ensuring that feeds are only served if the content has changed.
Feed Compression The next item to think of is to use compression when serving feeds. By doing so, one reduces the size of the payload, which ends up being much better in terms of managing bandwidth. In my own experience, because RSS is primarily text, I've seen a reduction of 80% of the bandwidth when delivering RSS feeds in a compressed format. That represents a fairly large gain in bandwidth that can then accommodate more users.
Change the polling schedule The RSS 2.0 specification already offers a number of optional elements to give RSS readers a better idea as to when to get content. For example, the pubDate element offers information as to when a feed was last published, as does the lastBuildDate one. ttl (aka. time to live) can also be used to indicate to the software that this feed should live for a certain amount of time. Finally, skipHours and skipDays offers more pointers as to when RSS reader software should not poll. With all those mechanisms in place, it looks like a lot of flexibility exists in the format to accommodate scalability.
When all else fails, reduce If all of the above still fail, RSS publishers should look at reducing the size of their feeds. There are two ways you can do this. First, you can just say that you're not going to offer full-text feeds. This seems to be the option that Scoble hates. Another way to do things is to offer both abbreviated feeds and full-text feeds or offer more detailed feeds, as I do on TNL.net.
An important consideration when doing something like this is how to address them. By default, users who just use the RSS autodiscovery feature will only get the abbreviated feed. However, they still have the option to go and get the full-text version. The compromise here is that users who just want to subscribe quickly can do so at a lower bandwidth costs, while power users can seek out the fuller feed and subscribe to that. The result, in my experience, is that most people use the autodiscovery feature, grabbing the smaller feed. Some power users do seek out the fuller feed and subscribe to that instead (based on the numbers, I'm seeing a 5% usage of the full-text feed as opposed to the default abbreviated one. This is a compromise solution that seems to accomodate everyone involved to date.
Final considerations When publishing RSS feeds, your audience grows, which results in traffic growth too. One of the thing to realize is that RSS feeds are generally stickier than the rest of a site. What this means is that, for every new subscriber you get, you will see an on-going increase in your overall site traffic stats. This is not a bad thing as messages emanating from your site do get a higher passive readership. One of the thing that new syndication standards should consider is a follow-up on this. While RSS publisher know how many feeds are being pushed out, there is littl
Looks like Rackable is selling a system that does 88 machines per rack: the C1000 series. They list Google as a customer so I'm assuming that that may be it...
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the original analysis.
It's true and that's why I went with the low-medium-high approach. Even if they get a discount, you can still go with the high estimate and assume that other costs (desktops, routers, firewalls, etc...) is being discounted. The point of the analysis was to get a new watermark for where google stands machine-wise. I think the general agreement is more than 10k. The question is how much more. Care to offer a better approach at guessing this info?
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the original analysis
Cool... Real info... I've learned from another thread that they seem to be using machines from rackable. Based on the info on the rackable site, it looks like they are using C2000 series. If you get a chance, could you check out if that assumption is correct (disclaimer, I'm the author of the estimates listed at the top of the post:) )
Boo.com did have many failure and, as a former employee, I am aware of many of the excesses but I think a lot of the picture was not fully painted (I've covered many of the accomplishments in an article for Business 2.0) but I have one thing to say about the google remark: Boo.com built up and failed before google became the dominant search engine. At the time, Yahoo was the king of search.
At this rate, this little track may end up making more money than the movie it's associated with:) Well, not quite but considering how quickly the auction is going up...
Interesting stuff in this thread. If you read closely, technically, what he's doing is perfectly legal and covered under section 3 (transfer) of the Itunes license you posted since no other contract is covering transfer issues.
There are a number of components to this
on
The "Techie" Vote?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It seems that our voice could become more important over the next year. I've written about this on my site. Basically, we are seeing a confluence of different interesting trends:
Weblogs and blog software are making it easier for both geeks and non-geeks to post online
Social networks like Friendster, Tribes.net, Ryze, etc... are making it easier to link to thousands of people very quickly. Look at how quickly flashmobs are getting organized
A number of policies (PATRIOT Act, The Bono Act, etc...) are starting to affect us negatively
I think all those are contributing to geeks thinking a little more about the impact of politics on the net. Now that more people are aware, it's only a matter of time before they start acting.
I suspect that we are going to see more and more action from geeks over the 2004 campaign.
Free World Dialup has offered the same service for several years, but for free. Maybe it's just me but it looks like the service is just an extension of that model. Or am I missing something?
That's what I thought too (I'm the one starting this) and was surprised that no one else had taken the job. Now to answer some questions.
Some people have asked why not use Apple's or *gasp* Microsoft's. Well, we can use some of their stuff but ultimately, I suspect that we can come up with something even better. There are a few things that people have complained about in terms of MS or Apple's stuff. However, I'm sure there are some common elements that could be reused.
My view is that there's a lot of innovation happening in OSS. Some of it can't be done using Apple's or MS's stuff. Some of it can. I'd like to give Kudos to the folks at the Gnome project, for example, for starting to look at good UI. Similarly, Lindows is working on simplifying things... From all of those efforts, we can prbaobly come up with a set of generally accepted guidelines that we can use as a shortcut.
On the dumbability of interface. Usability does not necessarily mean dumbing things down. One of the things I believe is that there can be some work done to accomodate both beginners and superusers. It may require extra work (some of the thing I'm thinking about are things like a setting in a pref's screen that would move a program from dumb user mode to superuser mode (like the Safari Enhancer, which unlocks Safari's extra features) or the advanced prefs tool for Mozilla.
There's much to do but I think that we can probably get some good stuff going if we start looking at this as a subset. I believe very strongly that the usability challenge is the last one we need to overcome in order to make inroads on the desktop. If an OSS OS (*hey, that sounds cool!*) is easier to use than OSX or Windows and costs less (FREE!!!) people will just jump to it:)
Hopefully, that's what THE SIMS Online will evolve into. Maybe eventually, as a player, you can move to the Mayor level and be responsible for a village or city and get more (or less) popular as time goes on. You would then have the sims players vote once every few months.
A good example of US-based cities where cars are not necessary is New York (where I live). There are few people with cars living in Manhattan. The reason: Public Transportation. While there are street everywhere (it's a small island), it would be interesting to have simcity had a bus service and taxi licenses to the mix of public transportation options. You could set up bus stop, subways and trains stations, as well as zone bike lanes. You would also have taxi licenses and the taxis would be free-roaming agents moving about town on their own (one can assume that their pattern would be based on where the middle to high income residents want to go).
The other thing would be to not necessarily require that all zones (resident, commercial, industrial). I've been trying to build a city with no industry for a while and Sim2K allowed for that through the taxes module. However, if you were to add something like service (ie education, museums, etc... run for profit) to the menu of zones, it could get even more interesting:)
I used to keep some litterature from multiple religions with me for the same purpose when I was in N.C. That way, when either a Jeovah's Witness or some other religious group knocked on my door to raise fund for their cause (which happened a lot in Chapel Hill, NC), I would invite them in and tell them that I was "worried about their soul". After that, I would give them brochures from another religion than theirs and they would be a hasty retreat. After a while, most of them started avoiding my house:)
Slashdot Mirror
Quick Note: You can find me as TNLNYC on slashdot (for some reason my browser was logged out and didn't realize it when I posted the above comment). A simple googling beyond my site might give you more info on what I've done for the net, including how how I made it possible for you to continue flaming individuals in places like slashdot.
While I am sure the privacy concerns are going to continue, I'm also trying to look at it from another angle. Google may be trying to set itself up as an infrastructure play so it can start indexing the Deep Web.
Shameless self-promotion link: I've posted an entry on this on my site last night.
One of the best way to test this would be to take a page (create a page with some stuff that would come from a search with no existing results. For example, "The Slashdot I Love Microsoft and Hate Linux Page") and put the same HTML file on an IIS server and on apache. Submit the site to both google and MSN, submitting the apache one first then followed by the IIS one) and see how the pages rank. This could confirm whether one is prefered or note.
Now, is there anyone out there with an ISS server interested in trying this out?
I was wondering the same thing so I started looking at the product lines and blogged my thoughts on this. I suspect all the web stuff stays on the Macromedia side but all the non-web products are wins for Adobe. As far as anyone interested in picking a fight with Adobe, how about Microsoft? They could, sometimes in the future...
Could you please back up your assertion that the minitel was a failure. From everything I've read and seen of it, it looks like a cateegorical success, having permeated society to its core (and, sadly, it slowed internet adoption as a result).
I'm reproducing this article from my own site (all the links are on the site):
Capacity planning and RSS
September 9, 2004
Robert Scoble points to MSDN having issues with full entry RSS. What it comes down to is a capacity planning exercise.
In his note, he says that RSS is broken. I personally believe that at issue is not whether RSS is working or not. RSS is working but it has complicated the bandwidth issue. At issue is the fact that RSS feeds are generally generating more traffic to a site. Because RSS readers are polling the site to check if a feed has been updated, the traffic patterns change, with increased numbers of spikes on a hourly basis. This is similar to some of the issues network administrators started facing when Pointcast first appeared.
There are a number of ways to mitigate the issue.
HTTP Conditional GET for RSS
First of all, one of the things to consider when using RSS is to create conditional HTTP headers on RSS feeds. This helps mitigate some of the impact by ensuring that feeds are only served if the content has changed.
Feed Compression
The next item to think of is to use compression when serving feeds. By doing so, one reduces the size of the payload, which ends up being much better in terms of managing bandwidth. In my own experience, because RSS is primarily text, I've seen a reduction of 80% of the bandwidth when delivering RSS feeds in a compressed format. That represents a fairly large gain in bandwidth that can then accommodate more users.
Change the polling schedule
The RSS 2.0 specification already offers a number of optional elements to give RSS readers a better idea as to when to get content. For example, the pubDate element offers information as to when a feed was last published, as does the lastBuildDate one. ttl (aka. time to live) can also be used to indicate to the software that this feed should live for a certain amount of time. Finally, skipHours and skipDays offers more pointers as to when RSS reader software should not poll. With all those mechanisms in place, it looks like a lot of flexibility exists in the format to accommodate scalability.
When all else fails, reduce
If all of the above still fail, RSS publishers should look at reducing the size of their feeds. There are two ways you can do this. First, you can just say that you're not going to offer full-text feeds. This seems to be the option that Scoble hates. Another way to do things is to offer both abbreviated feeds and full-text feeds or offer more detailed feeds, as I do on TNL.net.
An important consideration when doing something like this is how to address them. By default, users who just use the RSS autodiscovery feature will only get the abbreviated feed. However, they still have the option to go and get the full-text version. The compromise here is that users who just want to subscribe quickly can do so at a lower bandwidth costs, while power users can seek out the fuller feed and subscribe to that. The result, in my experience, is that most people use the autodiscovery feature, grabbing the smaller feed. Some power users do seek out the fuller feed and subscribe to that instead (based on the numbers, I'm seeing a 5% usage of the full-text feed as opposed to the default abbreviated one. This is a compromise solution that seems to accomodate everyone involved to date.
Final considerations
When publishing RSS feeds, your audience grows, which results in traffic growth too. One of the thing to realize is that RSS feeds are generally stickier than the rest of a site. What this means is that, for every new subscriber you get, you will see an on-going increase in your overall site traffic stats. This is not a bad thing as messages emanating from your site do get a higher passive readership. One of the thing that new syndication standards should consider is a follow-up on this. While RSS publisher know how many feeds are being pushed out, there is littl
Thanks for the catch, I corrected the figures :)
Looks like Rackable is selling a system that does 88 machines per rack: the C1000 series. They list Google as a customer so I'm assuming that that may be it...
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the original analysis.
It's true and that's why I went with the low-medium-high approach. Even if they get a discount, you can still go with the high estimate and assume that other costs (desktops, routers, firewalls, etc...) is being discounted. The point of the analysis was to get a new watermark for where google stands machine-wise. I think the general agreement is more than 10k. The question is how much more. Care to offer a better approach at guessing this info?
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the original analysis
Cool... Real info... I've learned from another thread that they seem to be using machines from rackable. Based on the info on the rackable site, it looks like they are using C2000 series. If you get a chance, could you check out if that assumption is correct (disclaimer, I'm the author of the estimates listed at the top of the post :) )
... today...
Has anyone checked out LightScribe. While the Apple deal is interesting, I think the LightScribe story should get more play...
Boo.com did have many failure and, as a former employee, I am aware of many of the excesses but I think a lot of the picture was not fully painted (I've covered many of the accomplishments in an article for Business 2.0) but I have one thing to say about the google remark: Boo.com built up and failed before google became the dominant search engine. At the time, Yahoo was the king of search .
I've just blogged this. The most interesting part is that:
Back when the patent was issued, Mike Doyle of EOLAS said in a message to www-talk, a W3C mailing list that:
Please note from our Web site that, in almost all cases, Eolas' Weblet-related technologies will be licensed free of charge for noncommercial use.
Well, looking at this, Mozilla could be in a very good position as the only browser currently not infringing.
At this rate, this little track may end up making more money than the movie it's associated with :) Well, not quite but considering how quickly the auction is going up...
Interesting stuff in this thread. If you read closely, technically, what he's doing is perfectly legal and covered under section 3 (transfer) of the Itunes license you posted since no other contract is covering transfer issues.
- Weblogs and blog software are making it easier for both geeks and non-geeks to post online
- Social networks like Friendster, Tribes.net, Ryze, etc... are making it easier to link to thousands of people very quickly. Look at how quickly flashmobs are getting organized
- A number of policies (PATRIOT Act, The Bono Act, etc...) are starting to affect us negatively
I think all those are contributing to geeks thinking a little more about the impact of politics on the net. Now that more people are aware, it's only a matter of time before they start acting.I suspect that we are going to see more and more action from geeks over the 2004 campaign.
Free World Dialup has offered the same service for several years, but for free. Maybe it's just me but it looks like the service is just an extension of that model. Or am I missing something?
I'll try to make it prettier... This was a quick fix :)
No problem... It was to be expected :) After all, I shouldn't try to do something like this when my own site has its own usability problems...
:)
BTW, if anyone finds any other usability issues with TNL.net, don't hesitate to point them out. Might as well improve my own site in the process
TNL
Who knew that the best way to do usability testing was to get slashdotted :)
:)
The problem should now be fixed.
As far as being a usability expert, I don't make that claim. I'm not but I hope that together, we can do something about usability in OSS software
TNL
That's what I thought too (I'm the one starting this) and was surprised that no one else had taken the job. Now to answer some questions.
:)
Some people have asked why not use Apple's or *gasp* Microsoft's. Well, we can use some of their stuff but ultimately, I suspect that we can come up with something even better. There are a few things that people have complained about in terms of MS or Apple's stuff. However, I'm sure there are some common elements that could be reused.
My view is that there's a lot of innovation happening in OSS. Some of it can't be done using Apple's or MS's stuff. Some of it can. I'd like to give Kudos to the folks at the Gnome project, for example, for starting to look at good UI. Similarly, Lindows is working on simplifying things... From all of those efforts, we can prbaobly come up with a set of generally accepted guidelines that we can use as a shortcut.
On the dumbability of interface. Usability does not necessarily mean dumbing things down. One of the things I believe is that there can be some work done to accomodate both beginners and superusers. It may require extra work (some of the thing I'm thinking about are things like a setting in a pref's screen that would move a program from dumb user mode to superuser mode (like the Safari Enhancer, which unlocks Safari's extra features) or the advanced prefs tool for Mozilla.
There's much to do but I think that we can probably get some good stuff going if we start looking at this as a subset. I believe very strongly that the usability challenge is the last one we need to overcome in order to make inroads on the desktop. If an OSS OS (*hey, that sounds cool!*) is easier to use than OSX or Windows and costs less (FREE!!!) people will just jump to it
For those of you who want more pictures, I found that there are a few of those up for sale on Ebay with a nice collection of pictures
Hopefully, that's what THE SIMS Online will evolve into. Maybe eventually, as a player, you can move to the Mayor level and be responsible for a village or city and get more (or less) popular as time goes on. You would then have the sims players vote once every few months.
A good example of US-based cities where cars are not necessary is New York (where I live). There are few people with cars living in Manhattan. The reason: Public Transportation. While there are street everywhere (it's a small island), it would be interesting to have simcity had a bus service and taxi licenses to the mix of public transportation options. You could set up bus stop, subways and trains stations, as well as zone bike lanes. You would also have taxi licenses and the taxis would be free-roaming agents moving about town on their own (one can assume that their pattern would be based on where the middle to high income residents want to go).
:)
The other thing would be to not necessarily require that all zones (resident, commercial, industrial). I've been trying to build a city with no industry for a while and Sim2K allowed for that through the taxes module. However, if you were to add something like service (ie education, museums, etc... run for profit) to the menu of zones, it could get even more interesting
I used to keep some litterature from multiple religions with me for the same purpose when I was in N.C. That way, when either a Jeovah's Witness or some other religious group knocked on my door to raise fund for their cause (which happened a lot in Chapel Hill, NC), I would invite them in and tell them that I was "worried about their soul". After that, I would give them brochures from another religion than theirs and they would be a hasty retreat. After a while, most of them started avoiding my house :)