Search for "nigritude ultramarine" (remember that?) yielded 310,385 results on MSN, -vs- 235,000 on Google. MSN took 0.16 seconds, Google took 0.08.
I performed a few query comparisons and observed that in most cases Google would have a larger answer set. In the few exceptions where MSN was larger, Google had eliminated from the count "word spam sites" (such as long lists of words in alphabetical order) and MSN had not. Worse, some of those word spam sites were coming up ahead of revelant pages.
MSN search looks interesting, for now. But I'm not giving up my Google anytime soon.
MSN had declared publicly their desire for their first release to be a "better than Google" search engine by Q3-2004 (IIRC a VP said so in a tradeshow). From the looks of it they've released a decent but slightly inferior SE than Google in the begining of Q5-2005. An upgrade version is not likely until quite a bit later this year.
Knowing Microsoft, they are a fearsome competitor, they eventually will get it right and kill the competition, even if it takes several iterations:
(i) Win 2, Win 3, Win 3.11, Win 95, Win 98, Win 2000 -- this was decent, (ii) Word 1, Word 2, Word 3,...., Word 6 - this was decent (iii) IE 1, IE 2, IE 3-this was decent.
If they're "rarely used", then they can't possibly increase workload very much
Easy: if an operation is sufficiently expensive, the actual cost is noticeable, even when rare. This is known as heavy tail meaning that "a relatively small number of very high cost events skews a mean calculation".
Somewhat like the situation in the US these past few years, yes?
I don't think that is what he said. India, like the US, is a democracy. If Bush policies end up costing us our status as dominant power, then we all share the blame for that to a certain extent (some more than others).
Of course, it is always someone else's fault: the jews, the immigrants, the bourgeois class, those cheap Indian laborers stealing our jobs, those prison camp Chinese working for free, the great satan, the Turks, the yankees.
Oneself is always blameless, after all what control do we have over our own life and country?
I actually have first hand data on this, this isn't just speculation. They are rarely used, they generally increase the size of the result set, and they increase the workload substantially.
No internet application for linux (that i'm aware of) has this built in potential disaster.
CGI scripts, as first implemented, were as open as ActiveX. Its just that the hole got plugged earlier in *nix than in Windows, thanks to Apache Server (hence the name, remember: a patchy server).
Twenty years ago Unix was known for its lax security. You couldn't even dream of selling a unix box for enterprise software back then. Newbies think linux/unix is secure because in contrast to Windows 95/98 it is way better.
Let's not forget either that the first Internet virus ran on unix and took all of an hour to bring the network down. Just ten years ago, Berkeley grads got a hold of root password for every unix box on campus in a few hours.
Even today, compromising your user directory is rather trivial. The technique is the same as with windows: send an email that causes buffer overflow.
Getting a hold of root is a tad more difficult, but not by much. One could write a tool that systematically tests for vulnerabilities. Let's call it backGnurifice. It would try the standard sendmail/redcarpet/cgi scripts/NFS/password cracking techniques, and succeed as often as similar tools do in the windows world.
- Get the patient to take the antibiotic all the way through
Is it really the case that patients do not finish their prescription or is this just an urban legend?
I can believe this might have been true in the old days when medicine tasted awful or even today in poor parts of the world, where you can turn around and sell the remaining pills. But nowadays in rich countries I'd think people would be likely to continue to take whatever it is that made them feel better in the first place until they finish bottle.
The review, and the book state that people aren't seeking out knowledge, yet clearly they are...
You really have to read the book. One of the points it makes is that Discovery-like TV is actually very low content. It creates the illusion that you learned lots because you see plenty of pretty pictures, but in reality the entire content would have fitted in a three minute classic chalkboard-based presentation.
I don't want a smaller answer set, I want a bigger one.
Maybe you do, but most users don't. Less than 30% click next page.
Reading on, I think what you mean to say is that you would like the answer to be selected from a larger set expanded perhaps to include stemming. In principle that sounds fine, in practice a decent answer is almost always contained in the 31 million+ pages that google returned.
The problem was that google didn't understand that in the search for "tree" the user meant binary search tree, and hence the first ranked answer set was about a phylogenic tree project.
Remember the smaller the answer set we get, the more time we have to rank each page.
Now, if they will just accept regular expressions.
Classic newbie mistake. The biggest problem with search engines is that they return too many answers not too few. Adding regular expressions or stemming makes your answer set even bigger.
However how do you explain the success of channels like "The History Channel?"
Since when popularity became a measure of academic content?
(By the by, since the review is not mine, I won't debate it. You can read other reviews at Amazon or better yet, read the book and reach your own conclusions. I stand by the recommendation, btw).
I think the researchers should read "Amusing ourselves to death" by Neil Postman.
In it he discusses the expectation that education should be entertaining. Here's a review from Amazon.com:
Reviewer: Nicholas Carroll
Although this book was written in 1984, the ideas in it are still relevant to today's world, even moreso now than back then. This is one book that I wish he would update with new chapters, because a lot of the critiques he made when he wrote this have taken on new meaning in the events of just this new century alone. For instance, his main critique is how entertainment has infiltrated our culture with a focus on trivia rather than substance. No where is this more apparent than a state recalling a governor a year after he had won reelection by a significant number, and that such a governor was run out of office in favor of an ACTOR, who many hope the U.S. Constitution will be amended so he can seek even higher office! This, despite the number of conservatives who tell Hollywood actors to shut up about politics in the run up to the Iraq war. Politics used to be showbusiness for ugly people, but now its nothing more than an extension of showbusiness. Even televangelists are critiqued in Postman's book because of the lack of sacred boundaries that television does not have as compared to a place of worship.
When I read this book, I can see examples that have cropped up in the 1990s that have proven his thesis true. Cell phones is one example. Ever eavesdrop on another person's public cell phonecall? I'm shocked at the trivial minutaie that people discuss with whomever they are speaking to, as if what they are doing at that moment matters to another person. What we get in a society that always seeks amusement for fear of boredom is a constant barrage of images and distractions that don't really mean anything in the end. The way we teach our children in schools to study for the multiple guess tests instead of teaching them interconnected facts that build a story, a history, an appreciation for the interconnectedness of our planet. So, we end up with people who can pull facts out of their rears to succeed on gameshows like "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?", where one question and answer doesn't relate to the next one. No wonder why people can't see a connection between our war in Iraq and our consumption of oil.
Postman is right...a society that seeks one entertaining thrill after another cannot survive and endure history's challenges for very long. When many people in the world haven't had their basic living needs met (food, water, shelter) while we are looking for the next entertaining thrill, what does that say about us? Why has amusement become such a huge, moneymaking value to our culture? When will we learn to balance entertainment with relevant issues that require serious study and attention? Why is our thirst for entertainment so unquenchable that now we're not satisfied with Hollywood's outpouring, but we expect entertainment from our politicians as well? These are questions that inevitably came up as I read this book. I really hope that Neil Postman will write a follow-up or update this book with minor changes (substituting references like "The A Team" and "Dallas" for "CSI" and "Desperate Housewives" for instance) and new chapters (like the phenomenon of Jesse Ventura and Schwartzenegger as governors; the use of cell phones for minutaie details; and the proliferation of reality television shows). But despite that, this is worth a serious read and discussion.
They dropped because the stock market crashed and wages for the richest folks crashed with 'em.
This is irrelevant. The original poster claimed revenues had "INCREASED!" [sic] when they had not.
None of which is related to the fact that steal 12.5% of my money just isn't fair.
They are not stealing it. We the people have freely granted the right to the government to take a portion of our incomes to pay for services rendered.
Currently we are not even covering that, as we are running a deficit. In a sense it is you, me and the rest of this generation who is walking out of the restaurant without having paid the bill. Try that in a restaurant and see who is called a robber.
Taxes are payment for monies owed for services provided by the government. The government has the legal right to (a) render services as seen fit by congress and (b) take money in form of taxes for compensation, hence tax money it is not stolen money, as simple as that.
The only real growth area of the airplane manufacturing business is these jumbo jets, as their sheer volume (with the 555 seats) allows them to keep individual prices lower given the cut-throat pricing that discount airlines can provide.
Actually this remains to be seen. In fact US airlines (both the profitable no-frills as well as the non-profitable full-fares) have yet to comit to the airbus giant. Only Asian airlines, whose main routes are crossing the pacific ocean have commited to them.
Boeing in particular believes that the future of travel in NorthAmerica is point-to-point, particularly after we do away with the sky-highway system we have right now.
Ah, a GNU groupie confusing the terms free (beer) and free (freedom). Opera is free/gratis, but not free/freedom.
By the by this move by Opera reeks of desperation in their losing the battle against Firefox. Wouldn't it be ironic if Firefox only slightly dented IE but killed Opera and Safari?
As an example, the tie-breaking mechanism in years past consisted in leaving one team alone in the pitch and testing if it could score on the opponent's goal.
Having the full blown soccer competition from inception was akin to JFK saying "we'll launch a manned rocket to the moon every month until we land one there" instead of "we'll design a program so that by the end of the decade we'll have a man on the moon".
A less snake-oil-ish approach would have been to set out more or less achievable tasks and start with those as competitions, e.g. dribbling, penalty kicking (without goalie, simply to understand the mechanics of ball control).
An even better approach would have been to avoid the publicity seeking soccer competition altogether and use more wortwhile tasks such as search and rescue among the rubble or a robot server in a restaurant (as in fact they did in IJCAI 2003).
Yet another product release by the Snake Oil corporation otherwise known as AI.
Content-free statements like the 2050 press release is what gives AI a bad name. Serious AI researchers would be well advised to ostracized people who make such half hazardly statements, yet they seem to embrace them: the overly (and misguidedly) ambitious robot soccer competition is part of the main conference in the field (IJCAI).
However, I have to say as a piece of advice, that you are wasting your time going to grad school in CS unless your intent is to be a professor or a heavy researcher.
There are other very good reasons. For one, a Masters in CS is the right time to learn about the parts of CS *you* care about. Do you want to become a hotshot Linux kernel guy? A masters in systems would be a great way to get upto speed with the lattest job scheduling techniques. Would you like to do the next great thing for Google? do a masters in algorithms/information retrieval...
Also studies have shown that if you take 18-24 months to do a masters and then you apply for a job will out-earn the programmers in your class who went to work two years ago (even making an allowance for two years lost wages).
Other reasons? Staying in school longer... Waiting for your GF to finish (ok, delete that one).
I learnt very little doing my BSc in Computer Science.
Then either you were not paying attention or you went to a bad school. I can give you four packed sheets of paper of useful day to day stuff that I learned in one course *alone*.
Slashdot Mirror
Search for "nigritude ultramarine" (remember that?) yielded 310,385 results on MSN, -vs- 235,000 on Google. MSN took 0.16 seconds, Google took 0.08.
...., Word 6 - this was decent
I performed a few query comparisons and observed that in most cases Google would have a larger answer set. In the few exceptions where MSN was larger, Google had eliminated from the count "word spam sites" (such as long lists of words in alphabetical order) and MSN had not. Worse, some of those word spam sites were coming up ahead of revelant pages.
MSN search looks interesting, for now. But I'm not giving up my Google anytime soon.
MSN had declared publicly their desire for their first release to be a "better than Google" search engine by Q3-2004 (IIRC a VP said so in a tradeshow). From the looks of it they've released a decent but slightly inferior SE than Google in the begining of Q5-2005. An upgrade version is not likely until quite a bit later this year.
Knowing Microsoft, they are a fearsome competitor, they eventually will get it right and kill the competition, even if it takes several iterations:
(i) Win 2, Win 3, Win 3.11, Win 95, Win 98, Win 2000 -- this was decent,
(ii) Word 1, Word 2, Word 3,
(iii) IE 1, IE 2, IE 3-this was decent.
If I were Google, I'd be very concerned.
If they're "rarely used", then they can't possibly increase workload very much
Easy: if an operation is sufficiently expensive, the actual cost is noticeable, even when rare. This is known as heavy tail meaning that "a relatively small number of very high cost events skews a mean calculation".
No contradiction there.
But that is because you are a girl. The average man on the other hand changes channels an average of 8 times per minute.
Somewhat like the situation in the US these past few years, yes?
I don't think that is what he said. India, like the US, is a democracy. If Bush policies end up costing us our status as dominant power, then we all share the blame for that to a certain extent (some more than others).
The British Empire did cream off a lot of the wealth of India.
The same can be said about many other former colonies (Australia, Canada), yet those are back on their feet and doing quite well.
We are not poor due to our stupidity.
Of course, it is always someone else's fault: the jews, the immigrants, the bourgeois class, those cheap Indian laborers stealing our jobs, those prison camp Chinese working for free, the great satan, the Turks, the yankees.
Oneself is always blameless, after all what control do we have over our own life and country?
I actually have first hand data on this, this isn't just speculation. They are rarely used, they generally increase the size of the result set, and they increase the workload substantially.
No internet application for linux (that i'm aware of) has this built in potential disaster.
CGI scripts, as first implemented, were as open as ActiveX. Its just that the hole got plugged earlier in *nix than in Windows, thanks to Apache Server (hence the name, remember: a patchy server).
Twenty years ago Unix was known for its lax security. You couldn't even dream of selling a unix box for enterprise software back then. Newbies think linux/unix is secure because in contrast to Windows 95/98 it is way better.
Let's not forget either that the first Internet virus ran on unix and took all of an hour to bring the network down. Just ten years ago, Berkeley grads got a hold of root password for every unix box on campus in a few hours.
Even today, compromising your user directory is rather trivial. The technique is the same as with windows: send an email that causes buffer overflow.
Getting a hold of root is a tad more difficult, but not by much. One could write a tool that systematically tests for vulnerabilities. Let's call it backGnurifice. It would try the standard sendmail/redcarpet/cgi scripts/NFS/password cracking techniques, and succeed as often as similar tools do in the windows world.
You forgot
- Get the patient to take the antibiotic all the way through
Is it really the case that patients do not finish their prescription or is this just an urban legend?
I can believe this might have been true in the old days when medicine tasted awful or even today in poor parts of the world, where you can turn around and sell the remaining pills. But nowadays in rich countries I'd think people would be likely to continue to take whatever it is that made them feel better in the first place until they finish bottle.
The review, and the book state that people aren't seeking out knowledge, yet clearly they are...
You really have to read the book. One of the points it makes is that Discovery-like TV is actually very low content. It creates the illusion that you learned lots because you see plenty of pretty pictures, but in reality the entire content would have fitted in a three minute classic chalkboard-based presentation.
I don't want a smaller answer set, I want a bigger one.
Maybe you do, but most users don't. Less than 30% click next page.
Reading on, I think what you mean to say is that you would like the answer to be selected from a larger set expanded perhaps to include stemming. In principle that sounds fine, in practice a decent answer is almost always contained in the 31 million+ pages that google returned.
The problem was that google didn't understand that in the search for "tree" the user meant binary search tree, and hence the first ranked answer set was about a phylogenic tree project.
Remember the smaller the answer set we get, the more time we have to rank each page.
Now, if they will just accept regular expressions.
A sources=Web).
Classic newbie mistake. The biggest problem with search engines is that they return too many answers not too few. Adding regular expressions or stemming makes your answer set even bigger.
What we need is ways to make the answer set smaller, not larger. Hence the benefit of clustering, for example (see for example http://vivisimo.com/search?query=search+trees&v%3
However how do you explain the success of channels like "The History Channel?"
Since when popularity became a measure of academic content?
(By the by, since the review is not mine, I won't debate it. You can read other reviews at Amazon or better yet, read the book and reach your own conclusions. I stand by the recommendation, btw).
I think the researchers should read "Amusing ourselves to death" by Neil Postman.
/ 104-9479439-5627925
In it he discusses the expectation that education should be entertaining. Here's a review from Amazon.com:
Reviewer: Nicholas Carroll
Although this book was written in 1984, the ideas in it are still relevant to today's world, even moreso now than back then. This is one book that I wish he would update with new chapters, because a lot of the critiques he made when he wrote this have taken on new meaning in the events of just this new century alone. For instance, his main critique is how entertainment has infiltrated our culture with a focus on trivia rather than substance. No where is this more apparent than a state recalling a governor a year after he had won reelection by a significant number, and that such a governor was run out of office in favor of an ACTOR, who many hope the U.S. Constitution will be amended so he can seek even higher office! This, despite the number of conservatives who tell Hollywood actors to shut up about politics in the run up to the Iraq war. Politics used to be showbusiness for ugly people, but now its nothing more than an extension of showbusiness. Even televangelists are critiqued in Postman's book because of the lack of sacred boundaries that television does not have as compared to a place of worship.
When I read this book, I can see examples that have cropped up in the 1990s that have proven his thesis true. Cell phones is one example. Ever eavesdrop on another person's public cell phonecall? I'm shocked at the trivial minutaie that people discuss with whomever they are speaking to, as if what they are doing at that moment matters to another person. What we get in a society that always seeks amusement for fear of boredom is a constant barrage of images and distractions that don't really mean anything in the end. The way we teach our children in schools to study for the multiple guess tests instead of teaching them interconnected facts that build a story, a history, an appreciation for the interconnectedness of our planet. So, we end up with people who can pull facts out of their rears to succeed on gameshows like "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?", where one question and answer doesn't relate to the next one. No wonder why people can't see a connection between our war in Iraq and our consumption of oil.
Postman is right...a society that seeks one entertaining thrill after another cannot survive and endure history's challenges for very long. When many people in the world haven't had their basic living needs met (food, water, shelter) while we are looking for the next entertaining thrill, what does that say about us? Why has amusement become such a huge, moneymaking value to our culture? When will we learn to balance entertainment with relevant issues that require serious study and attention? Why is our thirst for entertainment so unquenchable that now we're not satisfied with Hollywood's outpouring, but we expect entertainment from our politicians as well? These are questions that inevitably came up as I read this book. I really hope that Neil Postman will write a follow-up or update this book with minor changes (substituting references like "The A Team" and "Dallas" for "CSI" and "Desperate Housewives" for instance) and new chapters (like the phenomenon of Jesse Ventura and Schwartzenegger as governors; the use of cell phones for minutaie details; and the proliferation of reality television shows). But despite that, this is worth a serious read and discussion.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140094385
This is irrelevant. Previous poster claimed that tax receipts had "INCREASED!" [sic]. Figures provided showed that it hadn't.
They dropped because the stock market crashed and wages for the richest folks crashed with 'em.
This is irrelevant. The original poster claimed revenues had "INCREASED!" [sic] when they had not.
None of which is related to the fact that steal 12.5% of my money just isn't fair.
They are not stealing it. We the people have freely granted the right to the government to take a portion of our incomes to pay for services rendered.
Currently we are not even covering that, as we are running a deficit. In a sense it is you, me and the rest of this generation who is walking out of the restaurant without having paid the bill. Try that in a restaurant and see who is called a robber.
Taxes are payment for monies owed for services provided by the government. The government has the legal right to (a) render services as seen fit by congress and (b) take money in form of taxes for compensation, hence tax money it is not stolen money, as simple as that.
Rather than looking at forcasts, if you look at the decrease in revenues, you'll find that that after the Bush tax cuts they INCREASED!
/ is _2004_April/ai_n6094611/pg_3
Wrong. Federal tax receipts have dropped from $2.05 trillion in the last Clinton year to $1.85 trillion in 2003.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1ECO
The only real growth area of the airplane manufacturing business is these jumbo jets, as their sheer volume (with the 555 seats) allows them to keep individual prices lower given the cut-throat pricing that discount airlines can provide.
Actually this remains to be seen. In fact US airlines (both the profitable no-frills as well as the non-profitable full-fares) have yet to comit to the airbus giant. Only Asian airlines, whose main routes are crossing the pacific ocean have commited to them.
Boeing in particular believes that the future of travel in NorthAmerica is point-to-point, particularly after we do away with the sky-highway system we have right now.
This is the default behavior in Firefox.
This wasn't the default behaviour in some of the earliest versions. He must be running an old version of FF.
Ah, a GNU groupie confusing the terms free (beer) and free (freedom). Opera is free/gratis, but not free/freedom.
By the by this move by Opera reeks of desperation in their losing the battle against Firefox. Wouldn't it be ironic if Firefox only slightly dented IE but killed Opera and Safari?
and competing entries have performed quite well.
As an example, the tie-breaking mechanism in years past consisted in leaving one team alone in the pitch and testing if it could score on the opponent's goal.
Having the full blown soccer competition from inception was akin to JFK saying "we'll launch a manned rocket to the moon every month until we land one there" instead of "we'll design a program so that by the end of the decade we'll have a man on the moon".
A less snake-oil-ish approach would have been to set out more or less achievable tasks and start with those as competitions, e.g. dribbling, penalty kicking (without goalie, simply to understand the mechanics of ball control).
An even better approach would have been to avoid the publicity seeking soccer competition altogether and use more wortwhile tasks such as search and rescue among the rubble or a robot server in a restaurant (as in fact they did in IJCAI 2003).
Yet another product release by the Snake Oil corporation otherwise known as AI.
Content-free statements like the 2050 press release is what gives AI a bad name. Serious AI researchers would be well advised to ostracized people who make such half hazardly statements, yet they seem to embrace them: the overly (and misguidedly) ambitious robot soccer competition is part of the main conference in the field (IJCAI).
However, I have to say as a piece of advice, that you are wasting your time going to grad school in CS unless your intent is to be a professor or a heavy researcher.
There are other very good reasons. For one, a Masters in CS is the right time to learn about the parts of CS *you* care about. Do you want to become a hotshot Linux kernel guy? A masters in systems would be a great way to get upto speed with the lattest job scheduling techniques. Would you like to do the next great thing for Google? do a masters in algorithms/information retrieval...
Also studies have shown that if you take 18-24 months to do a masters and then you apply for a job will out-earn the programmers in your class who went to work two years ago (even making an allowance for two years lost wages).
Other reasons? Staying in school longer... Waiting for your GF to finish (ok, delete that one).
I learnt very little doing my BSc in Computer Science.
Then either you were not paying attention or you went to a bad school. I can give you four packed sheets of paper of useful day to day stuff that I learned in one course *alone*.