Your advice sounds logical and well thought out. But what are you basing it on? Your own understanding of how the Google search algorithm works? The details of that algorithm are a closely-held secret. I'm skeptical of any claim to have reverse-engineered Google's algorithm without analysis of a substantial fraction of search results. We're talking millions of web sites! Somehow, I don't think you've done that.
The whole idea of a "Google Hell" is really just an artifact of perception. Take this diamond merchant at the beginning of the Forbes article. (Note to Forbes.com: intrusive video ads are not a good way to attract traffic!) He wants to know why he no longer comes out on top in searches for "diamonds" — but it doesn't occur to him to ask why he came out on top in the first place. My answer to both questions? Pure blind luck.
Take the thousands of people trying to sell diamonds on the web. Add the millions of people linking them in web sites. Add Google's search algorithm, which (however it works) considers not just the popularity of the one guy's site, but the popularity of the folks who link to him, and so on. Put these things together, and what do you have? A huge, highly unpredictable system. One good word for it is "whimsical". A year ago, this particular guy had a top spot in Google's search results. Before him, somebody else did. Now somebody else does. Call it the Andy Warhol effect.
Throw a lot of random events at people, and they'll try to perceive patterns in them. Sometimes the patterns people see are real, but more often they see nonsense. That's why science is as much about verification through experiment as it is about theory. And when it comes to "explaining" Google results, I see a lot of theory, but very little verification.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that early laser development was funded by DoD people who were hoping it would make a good death ray. Of course, they were disappointed. I remember Arthur C. Clarke making a big thing out of the fact that nobody has ever managed to find a way to kill someone with a laser. Sort of sad that this particular technology has finally been robbed of its peacenik status.
Trekkies will recall that in the original pilot, Captain Pike and his crew brandished laser guns. The "phaser" was invented because they were afraid that by the time Star Trek came out, lasers would be so commonplace, they wouldn't look futuristic enough. The compulsive need to meet "audience expectation" about the future has always been Star Trek's weak point.
Computers don't exist simply to run Microsoft Office. Well mine doesn't, and yours doesn't, but most do. You go on to list a lot of applications you allege to be better for certain tasks than MO. Many people would disagree with you about some of them (I personally think that OpenOffice Writer is a sad piece of shit. I do think that OpenOffice Base is superior to Microsoft Access, but it's not nearly as good as FileMaker — which doesn't run on Linux.) But even if you were objectively correct, the productivity claims you assert are more than offset by the compatibility and changeover costs you get when you try to move away from MO.
We've had this argument over and over: Microsoft Office doesn't do some things as well as some alternatives — but it does them well enough to suit most people, who just aren't interested in all the extra work it would take to move away from this de facto standard. You may think I'm wrong (and I honestly wish I were) but the ultimate arbiter here is the marketplace — and it says I'm right.
For years now, I've been listening to arguments like yours. I even held down a job for several years (documenting development tools for desktop Linux applications) that was based on the assumption that people would use alternatives to Microsoftware if they were available. The logic of the marketplace has shot this argument down over and over and over. Yet zealots like you keep proposing it. Getting to be a bit of a bore really.
The only justification desktop Linux has for existing is as an alternative to Windows. Why should anyone except a hard-core hacker bother with an OS if it's harder to use and creates all sorts of compatibility problems with files shared with Windows users?
Linux will always be around as a server OS, as an embedded OS for devices and appliances, and as a toy for hackers. But Ubuntu (along with other desktop-oriented distros) wasn't developed for these purposes. It was developed to compete with Windows for ordinary computer users. If it can't do that, it's a failure.
Yeah, Windows only has 1 free version of Minesweeper, but Ubuntu has 34!
Come on, "lots of free software" is just not important to most computer users, who spend almost all their time on a few standard applications: Web browsing, e-mail, word processing, number/data crunching, and building presentations. And in this area, any OS not supported by Microsoft applications (that is, any OS except Windows and Mac OS) loses ground because of compatibility issues.
It's an interesting play because the Dems do have enough votes to impeach Cheney -- but the Senate would never find him guilty by a 2/3rd majority.
"Interesting play"? Give me a break. "The demos" have nothing to do with this. It's a bill backed solely by a single Congressman known for his fringe politics and his yawn-worthy presidential bids. The Democratic leadership in the House has no interest in impeaching anybody.
Impeaching the Veep is kind of silly anyway. Except for whatever W chooses to delegate to him, he has no official duties, except to preside over the Senate. What's the charge, that he banged the gavel too hard?
Instead of listening to the very small demographic of the hardcore gamers and hardcore developers whose world revolves around frames per second, polygon count, pixel shaders and rendering pipelines, they asked themselves (and probably lots of other people) what Joe and Jane want in a gaming console.
That "small demographic" had been buying 99% of the game consoles. Listening to it would seem to be common sense. Except that Nintendo was steadily losing that market to the other guys, so they decided they had to find new markets.
And that's where they got really smart. Not in listening to Joe and Jane, but figuring out who Joe and Jane are. Nintendo decided they were the great mass of people who had never played video games, who had no interest in sitting on a couch staring at fancy graphics and twitching their thumbs in response to some fantasy scenario.
And that was a good call. It isn't gamers that are driving those huge Wii sales, it's people who've never played video games before. People who like ordinary stuff.
The problem is that none of the game design studios thought Wii would take off. Now they're playing catchup. Give it a few months. And in the meantime, take up golf. I mean, what's the use of owning a groundbreaking, innovative game console if you're just going to use it to play the same old couch-potato crap?
Thing is, the pets.com sock puppet was so popular, he outlasted the company the company that invented him. You still seem him in ads now and then. He even wrote a book.
Now, I personally hate cutesy mascots. When I was helping revise the Java Tutorial, I wanted to barf every time I saw Duke. But there's no denying that they can be effective. Obnoxious marketing is often effective marketing, because it registers.
Also, you're overlooking the fact that deliberate irony is all the rage these days, not least in advertising. The sock puppet, obviously phony and done by a guy who couldn't be bothered to take off his wrist watch, buys into that. (Some of the mascots listed are ironic, but not intentionally.) A few years back, there was an ad campaign for 7-11 phone cards, features Simpsons characters. One sticker had Crusty saying "I heartily endorse this product or event!"
Come to think of it, there's a sort of apologetic subtext to this kind of irony. It's the advertiser's way of saying, "Yeah, we know you're sick of lame ad campaigns. We're sick of them too. But we gotta move the product."
(Snicker.) In the building where I work, there are special supply cabinets for nomadic employees who use the flex offices. These have signs on them saying "These supplies are for flexible employees only!" Every time I see one, I want to add an addendum: "Inflexible employees fuck off!"
Well, I wish you luck. But I hope you're in it for the money, because you're not establishing any kind of principle. You've only got this far because you've been willing to devote a lot of effort to this battle, and because you've been lucky enough not to trip over any legal land mines. Most people would have given up by now, or made a mistake that would have ended the whole shooting match. Which is why the kind of abusive litigation Vilenchik is throwing at you almost always works. That's not going to change, no matter what the outcome of your case.
But of course getting a fat settlement out of this guy ain't chopped liver, and would certainly repay all your hard work. Speaking of which, I do hope you given as much thought to collecting this judgment as you have to winning it!
Yeah, yeah. We all know that. The problem is, when somebody's suing you, you can't just say, "Oh, that's obviously wrong!" and ignore the situation. You've got to hire your own lawyer to straighten things out. If it's a weak case, a good lawyer can probably make it go away after spending a few thousand bucks of your money. If it's at all difficult to prove that "It's not libel because it's true" then you could easily spend more on legal fees than you'd spend making a settlement.
Stupid? Of course. But that's the way the system works. It's not a question of what justice says you deserve. It's a question of how much justice you can afford.
Theoretically, there are enough improvements in usability, security, and other stuff to attract a lot of upgrades. Making it hard to install malware was supposed to attract a lot of business users. I personally would very much like to upgrade: I own a tablet, and Vista contains important improvement to handwriting recognition. And I have to admit being intrigued by some of the GUI changes.
I'd upgrade in a heartbeat if it weren't for all the stories of bad performance, unstable systems, and XP applications that don't work under Vista. The cost would be minimal for me, because I bought the tablet just a couple months ago. But my tablet is something I use day to day, and I can't spare the down time for an upgrade, testing, and probable downgrade.
Of course, most people wouldn't upgrade even if Vista weren't a lemon. As you point out, there were serious improvements with XP over 98 and 2000. But that doesn't motivate upgrading the OS in place. Most people use a computer until it's clearly inadequate for the software they want to use, and then trade it in. I know lots of people who are still using 98 and 2K, and won't stop until their current computers die.
So even if Vista had lots of advantages and no downside, you probably wouldn't get a lot of upgrades. What's different this time is that people are balking at buying new machines with the new OS pre-installed. That's the latest of many signs that Vista is a failure.
I told you what I didn't like about POP. You want precise details. To give you that, I'd have to do some serious research (set up a POP account, configure a client to use it, try it out on a couple of computers to simulate real-world use) to recreate all the problems that drove me away from POP almost a decade ago. Casual discussion you get for free, but if you want serious technical research and writing, you'll have to pay my hourly rate. For this kind of work, I usually get $40/hr.
You're probably not up for that, so I'd suggest you get your hands dirty and compare the protocols yourself. That's assuming you're really interested in the practical differences between the two protocols. If, on the other hand, you just want to get in the last word, all you need to do is respond to this post with a cute remark, and we're all done.
Where do you think devils and demons come from? All of them started out as pagan gods. Classifying them as The Forces of Evil was how early Christians acknowledged competing religions without giving them equal status.
A scheduler is the piece of software that brings you the illusion of multi-tasking.
Hardly an illusions. I have dozens of tasks executing on my Pentium IV CPU as I'm writing this. One task is monitoring my keystrokes, another is looking after the ethernet connection, another is updating my display... It's perfectly true that at any given moment only one task has the current instruction. But that doesn't mean other tasks aren't active: they're all just waiting for a resource to come free, which is most of what a task does in any case, even when there are no other tasks.
There is an illusion in multitasking, but it's not multitasking itself. The illusion is that each task proceeds without interruption.
No nitpicks about multiple cores, please: there will always be more tasks than cores.
Dot cx (now CIIA) set a dangerous precedent in revoking the goatse domain, content regulation via DNS is nothing more than an abuse of power. cx domains are worthless, the registry has established it will pull domains if they don't like the content. Avoid.
Get. A. Life. CX is one of those useless little TLDs that nobody cares about. People who live on Christmas Island (which owns the domain) don't care about it, because they're really part of Australia — it's an accident of history that they have their own ISO code — and don't need their own national domain. Everybody else doesn't care about it because the fad for hosting your site on a confusing two-letter TLD ended years ago. If you want to get bent out of shape over something, try something that matters.
Slashdot Mirror
Your advice sounds logical and well thought out. But what are you basing it on? Your own understanding of how the Google search algorithm works? The details of that algorithm are a closely-held secret. I'm skeptical of any claim to have reverse-engineered Google's algorithm without analysis of a substantial fraction of search results. We're talking millions of web sites! Somehow, I don't think you've done that.
The whole idea of a "Google Hell" is really just an artifact of perception. Take this diamond merchant at the beginning of the Forbes article. (Note to Forbes.com: intrusive video ads are not a good way to attract traffic!) He wants to know why he no longer comes out on top in searches for "diamonds" — but it doesn't occur to him to ask why he came out on top in the first place. My answer to both questions? Pure blind luck.
Take the thousands of people trying to sell diamonds on the web. Add the millions of people linking them in web sites. Add Google's search algorithm, which (however it works) considers not just the popularity of the one guy's site, but the popularity of the folks who link to him, and so on. Put these things together, and what do you have? A huge, highly unpredictable system. One good word for it is "whimsical". A year ago, this particular guy had a top spot in Google's search results. Before him, somebody else did. Now somebody else does. Call it the Andy Warhol effect.
Throw a lot of random events at people, and they'll try to perceive patterns in them. Sometimes the patterns people see are real, but more often they see nonsense. That's why science is as much about verification through experiment as it is about theory. And when it comes to "explaining" Google results, I see a lot of theory, but very little verification.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/misrepresen t
Actually, Bluefish does run on Windows, if you have Cygwin.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that early laser development was funded by DoD people who were hoping it would make a good death ray. Of course, they were disappointed. I remember Arthur C. Clarke making a big thing out of the fact that nobody has ever managed to find a way to kill someone with a laser. Sort of sad that this particular technology has finally been robbed of its peacenik status.
Trekkies will recall that in the original pilot, Captain Pike and his crew brandished laser guns. The "phaser" was invented because they were afraid that by the time Star Trek came out, lasers would be so commonplace, they wouldn't look futuristic enough. The compulsive need to meet "audience expectation" about the future has always been Star Trek's weak point.
We've had this argument over and over: Microsoft Office doesn't do some things as well as some alternatives — but it does them well enough to suit most people, who just aren't interested in all the extra work it would take to move away from this de facto standard. You may think I'm wrong (and I honestly wish I were) but the ultimate arbiter here is the marketplace — and it says I'm right.
For years now, I've been listening to arguments like yours. I even held down a job for several years (documenting development tools for desktop Linux applications) that was based on the assumption that people would use alternatives to Microsoftware if they were available. The logic of the marketplace has shot this argument down over and over and over. Yet zealots like you keep proposing it. Getting to be a bit of a bore really.
Nice euphemism: "patience" for "hassle". Why do I need the extra hassle?
The only justification desktop Linux has for existing is as an alternative to Windows. Why should anyone except a hard-core hacker bother with an OS if it's harder to use and creates all sorts of compatibility problems with files shared with Windows users?
Linux will always be around as a server OS, as an embedded OS for devices and appliances, and as a toy for hackers. But Ubuntu (along with other desktop-oriented distros) wasn't developed for these purposes. It was developed to compete with Windows for ordinary computer users. If it can't do that, it's a failure.
Yeah, Windows only has 1 free version of Minesweeper, but Ubuntu has 34!
Come on, "lots of free software" is just not important to most computer users, who spend almost all their time on a few standard applications: Web browsing, e-mail, word processing, number/data crunching, and building presentations. And in this area, any OS not supported by Microsoft applications (that is, any OS except Windows and Mac OS) loses ground because of compatibility issues.
Impeaching the Veep is kind of silly anyway. Except for whatever W chooses to delegate to him, he has no official duties, except to preside over the Senate. What's the charge, that he banged the gavel too hard?
Never said it was. But lots of people seem to accept it.
Why do I sound like a consultant? My cynicism is pure lifer!
And that's where they got really smart. Not in listening to Joe and Jane, but figuring out who Joe and Jane are. Nintendo decided they were the great mass of people who had never played video games, who had no interest in sitting on a couch staring at fancy graphics and twitching their thumbs in response to some fantasy scenario.
And that was a good call. It isn't gamers that are driving those huge Wii sales, it's people who've never played video games before. People who like ordinary stuff.
The problem is that none of the game design studios thought Wii would take off. Now they're playing catchup. Give it a few months. And in the meantime, take up golf. I mean, what's the use of owning a groundbreaking, innovative game console if you're just going to use it to play the same old couch-potato crap?
Thing is, the pets.com sock puppet was so popular, he outlasted the company the company that invented him. You still seem him in ads now and then. He even wrote a book.
Now, I personally hate cutesy mascots. When I was helping revise the Java Tutorial, I wanted to barf every time I saw Duke. But there's no denying that they can be effective. Obnoxious marketing is often effective marketing, because it registers.
Also, you're overlooking the fact that deliberate irony is all the rage these days, not least in advertising. The sock puppet, obviously phony and done by a guy who couldn't be bothered to take off his wrist watch, buys into that. (Some of the mascots listed are ironic, but not intentionally.) A few years back, there was an ad campaign for 7-11 phone cards, features Simpsons characters. One sticker had Crusty saying "I heartily endorse this product or event!"
Come to think of it, there's a sort of apologetic subtext to this kind of irony. It's the advertiser's way of saying, "Yeah, we know you're sick of lame ad campaigns. We're sick of them too. But we gotta move the product."
(Snicker.) In the building where I work, there are special supply cabinets for nomadic employees who use the flex offices. These have signs on them saying "These supplies are for flexible employees only!" Every time I see one, I want to add an addendum: "Inflexible employees fuck off!"
Well, I wish you luck. But I hope you're in it for the money, because you're not establishing any kind of principle. You've only got this far because you've been willing to devote a lot of effort to this battle, and because you've been lucky enough not to trip over any legal land mines. Most people would have given up by now, or made a mistake that would have ended the whole shooting match. Which is why the kind of abusive litigation Vilenchik is throwing at you almost always works. That's not going to change, no matter what the outcome of your case.
But of course getting a fat settlement out of this guy ain't chopped liver, and would certainly repay all your hard work. Speaking of which, I do hope you given as much thought to collecting this judgment as you have to winning it!
Works fine in my browser (Firefox 2.0.0.3 on XP.) What version are you running?
Yeah, yeah. We all know that. The problem is, when somebody's suing you, you can't just say, "Oh, that's obviously wrong!" and ignore the situation. You've got to hire your own lawyer to straighten things out. If it's a weak case, a good lawyer can probably make it go away after spending a few thousand bucks of your money. If it's at all difficult to prove that "It's not libel because it's true" then you could easily spend more on legal fees than you'd spend making a settlement.
Folks who have been around Slashdot for a while already know this.
Stupid? Of course. But that's the way the system works. It's not a question of what justice says you deserve. It's a question of how much justice you can afford.
Well, I'm interested in Ruby because I'm sick of the whimsicalness of Perl, and Python is too ad hoc for my tastes.
Theoretically, there are enough improvements in usability, security, and other stuff to attract a lot of upgrades. Making it hard to install malware was supposed to attract a lot of business users. I personally would very much like to upgrade: I own a tablet, and Vista contains important improvement to handwriting recognition. And I have to admit being intrigued by some of the GUI changes.
I'd upgrade in a heartbeat if it weren't for all the stories of bad performance, unstable systems, and XP applications that don't work under Vista. The cost would be minimal for me, because I bought the tablet just a couple months ago. But my tablet is something I use day to day, and I can't spare the down time for an upgrade, testing, and probable downgrade.
Of course, most people wouldn't upgrade even if Vista weren't a lemon. As you point out, there were serious improvements with XP over 98 and 2000. But that doesn't motivate upgrading the OS in place. Most people use a computer until it's clearly inadequate for the software they want to use, and then trade it in. I know lots of people who are still using 98 and 2K, and won't stop until their current computers die.
So even if Vista had lots of advantages and no downside, you probably wouldn't get a lot of upgrades. What's different this time is that people are balking at buying new machines with the new OS pre-installed. That's the latest of many signs that Vista is a failure.
I told you what I didn't like about POP. You want precise details. To give you that, I'd have to do some serious research (set up a POP account, configure a client to use it, try it out on a couple of computers to simulate real-world use) to recreate all the problems that drove me away from POP almost a decade ago. Casual discussion you get for free, but if you want serious technical research and writing, you'll have to pay my hourly rate. For this kind of work, I usually get $40/hr.
You're probably not up for that, so I'd suggest you get your hands dirty and compare the protocols yourself. That's assuming you're really interested in the practical differences between the two protocols. If, on the other hand, you just want to get in the last word, all you need to do is respond to this post with a cute remark, and we're all done.
Where do you think devils and demons come from? All of them started out as pagan gods. Classifying them as The Forces of Evil was how early Christians acknowledged competing religions without giving them equal status.
There is an illusion in multitasking, but it's not multitasking itself. The illusion is that each task proceeds without interruption.
No nitpicks about multiple cores, please: there will always be more tasks than cores.
Dude, you need to learn the difference between a vulva and an anus. Getting them mixed up can really get you in trouble!