Yes, even their Search Engine wasn't really that novel.
Actually it was. Well, not in technology but in presentation. While AltaVista and Yahoo were busily making their results load slower and slower, burdened with popups, animations, and ever-encroaching side, top and bottom bars full of ads, google offered a greatly simplified presentation---one well-contained banner ad at the top, and maybe a couple, well-identified sponsored results. The result was extremely usable when the industry trend was in the opposite direction.
Unfortunately, they have since begun a slow amble down the same path as past search engines, not necessarily purely in ad density, but nevertheless packing more and more useless crap and visual bling into the search results. An essential difference, however, is that despite having bloated up the loading of results with dozens of ajax callbacks, they've invested in an extensive and truly impressive infrastructure that can keep up with the weighty result pages they end up creating. At least so far.
Hmm, let's compare that to the good 'ol days of just buying a game that didn't have ridiculous DRM, or at worst did a CD check:
Steam is all the opposite of that. They get insane rebates you'll never see in stores.
But not as good as buying a used copy.
They let you play offline, redownload countless times,
Almost as good as having the CD! Well, except for the bandwidth usage.
they have automated patching of games which is worth gold, gone are the days of waiting on gamespy servers and going through hoops becasue the publishers will make you go to shady ad infested download sites with their "wait half an hour or pay for a gold memebership" crap.
What?
They even have plus values such as notification of new video cards drivers and it can even patch it for you (opt-in)
A plus or a minus; I like to control what gets installed.
Really, beyond being an online store, steam mainly just gives you back a few of the things taken away from you by the DRM-freaks that invaded the games industry. Which is nice, less regressive than most DRM, but it's still not progress.
The only thing I hate is that I can't be logged in from several computer at once on the same account,
Tsk tsk..you really should pay twice for that feature!
"Hybrid SUV"...well, there's the problem. I'm guessing that's the same group of people who would buy low-calorie candy bars, and then be disappointed to find out they're still fat.
A simple but effective metric: how many citations do their publication get, on average, and how does that compare to prominent researchers in their field of research?
Well, as long as you're willing to wait arbitrarily long to find the number of citations you can get some signal from that. Keep in mind that a log-rolling effect will kick on too... Overall counting citations ends up as a variation on the H-index, a well ridiculed metric (at least when not evaluated by bureaucrats).
Universities should be paying the cost of hosting research papers instead of paying for subscriptions to journals, and they should be making those papers available to anyone who wishes to read them.
Those are called technical reports, and already exist. Someone has to manage and filter the peer-reviewing though, and without that publications end up as little more than vanity press.
I fully agree that the academic publishing system needs an extensive overhaul. It's just that every system I've thought of or heard of is not necessarily any better.
Wait, electric razors are permitted? Why? Do you really, _really_ need to shave during that 1-5 minute take-off/landing window? I thought there were two main reasons for this rule---interference, and potential for projectiles. The interference argument is probably weak for most devices, but the potential to act as unintended projectiles is real, and a limitation that makes very good sense to me.
Really people, just put back in the back for that period, you can survive without it for a few minutes: just talk to someone near you, stare vacantly and think of your next twinkie fix, whatever, just leave the heavy metal items in the bag.
I don't see how a two-minute call at a reasonable volume to let someone know when I'll be home is a public nuisance.
Except "reasonable volume" is a judgement call, and one which is apparently quite tricky when using a phone. Many cell-phone users tend to talk much louder than is actually required, due to a variety of misperceptions, including the need to hear their own voice and the feeling that they have to drown out other local noises, as well as that thick-skinned social bubble that forms around cell-phone users as they become engrossed in conversation and oblivious to the world actually around them.
Note that it is not that it is impossible to be a non-nuisance with a cell-phone. I visited Japan, admittedly a long time ago: cell-phone use was rampant, but there was also strong social pressure to not be annoying to others in a public space. Audible rings were almost never heard, and those speaking into cell-phones did so discretely and quietly. It was not annoying in the least. In contrast, in the US people yell into their phones and ignore the impact on everyone around them.
The thin edge of the wedge here is in the definition of a "critical system". Things important to sustaining lives and ensuring national security make sense from a high-level perspective, but the grey areas around that can be extended to fit the goals of whoever is in control of the definition.
No more than the display of a web page should be entirely up the client. Often the style is not all that relevant, but sometimes fonts, spacing, line-breaks, placement of images, etc are important to the author intent.
According to wikipedia at least, there is only one fully non-optional point at which chrome contacts its masters, and that's a unique token generated during install to count unique installs. After that you can avoid any info being sent back to google by turning off settings for instant search, not agreeing to send crash reports, not using google search, disabling auto-updates, and never mistyping a page name and getting a server not found error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#Usage_tracking
It is more effort than is required with FF, and although they've _promised_ not to be evil it is wise to be wary of evolving intentions and what will become of all the info they collect. But note that use of instant google search and auto-suggest and the safe-search settings send info to google when using FF as well, so that's not much different.
Umm, a moving camera just has changing dead angles over a span of time. If that was the concern then using more cameras would be a better and cheaper solution.
A better question is to ask what evidence is there that it is surely safe? Let's consider those facts with the opposing bias:
- Frequencies used in security applications have a water penetration depth of on average 0.3mm. While this should result in damage mainly to surface layers of skin, the damage caused by further penetration when individual and localized exposure exceeds the average, or from repeated and long-term exposure is unknown.
- A purely mathematical model suggests that photon energies involved have a potential to break bonds in the localized sites of the DNA helix which may interfere with RNA transcription. No practical experiments have been done to show this is safe or desirable.
- The probability of these photon interactions is non-0 and represents a risk that is likely small, but nevertheless uncertain.
- While your body is exposed to orders of magnitude more radiation cosmic and terrestrial sources daily, there is no rational necessity to add anything to that exposure merely to satisfy demonstrably ineffective security theater.
But can you avoid steam during activation too? I'd like to play skyrim, I don't want to pirate it, I'd like a legitimate copy that I can patch etc. But I don't want to create a steam account or run steam software, even for installation. Is that a possibility?
'Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it's jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.'
The spoons/shovels thing is just a reductionist argument. In the end we want both 'canals' and jobs don't we---both products, productivity, and the means to distribute the resulting goods, services in a way that scales to the contribution given in creating them. Too much in either direction is silly.
If authors would simply ONLY submit their works to open access journals and publications, the parasites would disappear.
The problem here is that someone needs to organize these things. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth, buy and run the servers, spend effort soliciting reviewers, run the reviewing software, respond to questions, request ISBNs, submit the work to indexing sites, etc etc etc..
Open access journals address this by having a publication fee, or by advertising, or by seeking volunteers and asking for charity. Paying for publication gets blurry with vanity press, and advertising ends up sucking up to the advertisers. Volunteering and charity seem wonderful, but have to compete with lots of other worthy causes.
In CS, most of the major publishers allow you to post a copy of your paper on your personal website (as long as you also link to the official version). Finding papers outside of the paywalls is only difficult when the authors are in industry (but those aren't the publicly funded papers you're talking about anyway).
In my experience, professors have often suggested that students run their papers through these engines before turning them in, to ensure that the percentage of work done by students is adequate before they turn it in. There's nothing shady about that.
Yes, yes there is. The purpose of an educational assignment is voided if you think of it as a game---the point is to do it and learn from that experience, not just "pass" it. If your professors are encouraging you to do that they are fools, and if you think learning is about achieving an "adequate percentage of work done" you do yourself (and your future employers) no service.
It's just supply and demand. About 1/3 of the people I see on my daily commute have headphones on, and most of them are almost certainly too loud. This has been going on since the walkman appeared in the mid/late 80's, so those early adopters are now leading the pack in early adoption of hearing aids.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, even their Search Engine wasn't really that novel.
Actually it was. Well, not in technology but in presentation. While AltaVista and Yahoo were busily making their results load slower and slower, burdened with popups, animations, and ever-encroaching side, top and bottom bars full of ads, google offered a greatly simplified presentation---one well-contained banner ad at the top, and maybe a couple, well-identified sponsored results. The result was extremely usable when the industry trend was in the opposite direction.
Unfortunately, they have since begun a slow amble down the same path as past search engines, not necessarily purely in ad density, but nevertheless packing more and more useless crap and visual bling into the search results. An essential difference, however, is that despite having bloated up the loading of results with dozens of ajax callbacks, they've invested in an extensive and truly impressive infrastructure that can keep up with the weighty result pages they end up creating. At least so far.
What a stupid idea. Who the hell wants to carry around a cadaver's arm just to use their electronics?
Steam is all the opposite of that. They get insane rebates you'll never see in stores.
But not as good as buying a used copy.
They let you play offline, redownload countless times,
Almost as good as having the CD! Well, except for the bandwidth usage.
they have automated patching of games which is worth gold, gone are the days of waiting on gamespy servers and going through hoops becasue the publishers will make you go to shady ad infested download sites with their "wait half an hour or pay for a gold memebership" crap.
What?
They even have plus values such as notification of new video cards drivers and it can even patch it for you (opt-in)
A plus or a minus; I like to control what gets installed.
Really, beyond being an online store, steam mainly just gives you back a few of the things taken away from you by the DRM-freaks that invaded the games industry. Which is nice, less regressive than most DRM, but it's still not progress.
The only thing I hate is that I can't be logged in from several computer at once on the same account,
Tsk tsk..you really should pay twice for that feature!
"Hybrid SUV"...well, there's the problem. I'm guessing that's the same group of people who would buy low-calorie candy bars, and then be disappointed to find out they're still fat.
Mr. Schneier will not testify at Monday's hearing (UPDATE: 3/23/12)
A simple but effective metric: how many citations do their publication get, on average, and how does that compare to prominent researchers in their field of research?
Well, as long as you're willing to wait arbitrarily long to find the number of citations you can get some signal from that. Keep in mind that a log-rolling effect will kick on too... Overall counting citations ends up as a variation on the H-index, a well ridiculed metric (at least when not evaluated by bureaucrats).
Universities should be paying the cost of hosting research papers instead of paying for subscriptions to journals, and they should be making those papers available to anyone who wishes to read them.
Those are called technical reports, and already exist. Someone has to manage and filter the peer-reviewing though, and without that publications end up as little more than vanity press.
I fully agree that the academic publishing system needs an extensive overhaul. It's just that every system I've thought of or heard of is not necessarily any better.
Wait, electric razors are permitted? Why? Do you really, _really_ need to shave during that 1-5 minute take-off/landing window? I thought there were two main reasons for this rule---interference, and potential for projectiles. The interference argument is probably weak for most devices, but the potential to act as unintended projectiles is real, and a limitation that makes very good sense to me.
Really people, just put back in the back for that period, you can survive without it for a few minutes: just talk to someone near you, stare vacantly and think of your next twinkie fix, whatever, just leave the heavy metal items in the bag.
why would anyone use a service that forced them to pay to skip ads
You mean like slashdot subscriptions?
It seems pretty clear they meant Planck's Consonant. Some argued it was "P" but they've now verified that it's an "h".
Blocked destinations:
Haven't these people made enough money from donation?
I don't see how a two-minute call at a reasonable volume to let someone know when I'll be home is a public nuisance.
Except "reasonable volume" is a judgement call, and one which is apparently quite tricky when using a phone. Many cell-phone users tend to talk much louder than is actually required, due to a variety of misperceptions, including the need to hear their own voice and the feeling that they have to drown out other local noises, as well as that thick-skinned social bubble that forms around cell-phone users as they become engrossed in conversation and oblivious to the world actually around them.
Note that it is not that it is impossible to be a non-nuisance with a cell-phone. I visited Japan, admittedly a long time ago: cell-phone use was rampant, but there was also strong social pressure to not be annoying to others in a public space. Audible rings were almost never heard, and those speaking into cell-phones did so discretely and quietly. It was not annoying in the least. In contrast, in the US people yell into their phones and ignore the impact on everyone around them.
The thin edge of the wedge here is in the definition of a "critical system". Things important to sustaining lives and ensuring national security make sense from a high-level perspective, but the grey areas around that can be extended to fit the goals of whoever is in control of the definition.
Oh yes, please, please, _please_ start the war on social media and make drugs, poverty and terrorism legal.
No more than the display of a web page should be entirely up the client. Often the style is not all that relevant, but sometimes fonts, spacing, line-breaks, placement of images, etc are important to the author intent.
According to wikipedia at least, there is only one fully non-optional point at which chrome contacts its masters, and that's a unique token generated during install to count unique installs. After that you can avoid any info being sent back to google by turning off settings for instant search, not agreeing to send crash reports, not using google search, disabling auto-updates, and never mistyping a page name and getting a server not found error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#Usage_tracking
It is more effort than is required with FF, and although they've _promised_ not to be evil it is wise to be wary of evolving intentions and what will become of all the info they collect. But note that use of instant google search and auto-suggest and the safe-search settings send info to google when using FF as well, so that's not much different.
Well said...in 114 characters.
Umm, a moving camera just has changing dead angles over a span of time. If that was the concern then using more cameras would be a better and cheaper solution.
But can you avoid steam during activation too? I'd like to play skyrim, I don't want to pirate it, I'd like a legitimate copy that I can patch etc. But I don't want to create a steam account or run steam software, even for installation. Is that a possibility?
'Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it's jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.'
The spoons/shovels thing is just a reductionist argument. In the end we want both 'canals' and jobs don't we---both products, productivity, and the means to distribute the resulting goods, services in a way that scales to the contribution given in creating them. Too much in either direction is silly.
If authors would simply ONLY submit their works to open access journals and publications, the parasites would disappear.
The problem here is that someone needs to organize these things. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth, buy and run the servers, spend effort soliciting reviewers, run the reviewing software, respond to questions, request ISBNs, submit the work to indexing sites, etc etc etc..
Open access journals address this by having a publication fee, or by advertising, or by seeking volunteers and asking for charity. Paying for publication gets blurry with vanity press, and advertising ends up sucking up to the advertisers. Volunteering and charity seem wonderful, but have to compete with lots of other worthy causes.
In CS, most of the major publishers allow you to post a copy of your paper on your personal website (as long as you also link to the official version). Finding papers outside of the paywalls is only difficult when the authors are in industry (but those aren't the publicly funded papers you're talking about anyway).
In my experience, professors have often suggested that students run their papers through these engines before turning them in, to ensure that the percentage of work done by students is adequate before they turn it in. There's nothing shady about that.
Yes, yes there is. The purpose of an educational assignment is voided if you think of it as a game---the point is to do it and learn from that experience, not just "pass" it. If your professors are encouraging you to do that they are fools, and if you think learning is about achieving an "adequate percentage of work done" you do yourself (and your future employers) no service.
It's just supply and demand. About 1/3 of the people I see on my daily commute have headphones on, and most of them are almost certainly too loud. This has been going on since the walkman appeared in the mid/late 80's, so those early adopters are now leading the pack in early adoption of hearing aids.
Yes, we realize that a filter list is not going to stop inappropriate words
Inway actfay, itway ontway oday uckfay allway.