This rush to legislate morality is the same thing that brought us the DMCA, US PATRIOT, etc.
Isn't every law a legislation of morality? I.e. the government telling you what is good/acceptable behavior and what is bad/unacceptable? I never quite understood why "legislating morality" was a bad thing. It seems to me to simply be the function of legislation itself.
As for jaywalking, I saw someone given a ticket for that on the corner of 7th ave and W 30th street just 3 weeks ago. The no-cellphones-while-driving law, however, seems to have been almost completely ignored. I wish I could give a "citizen's ticket" like the old "citizen's arrest" they had in Knight Rider or whatever. Or maybe just ram them with an old POS car as they chat away in their Land Rovers....
Ok, this is offtopic, but it's a pet peeve of mine.
People frequently use the word "wherefore" in an attempt to be poetic, inquiring where something is. Wherefore, however, does not mean "where", it means "why". When Juliet was lamenting "Wherefore art thou Romeo", she wasn't asking "Where are you, romeo?", she was asking "Why are you Romeo?", as in, "Why did you have to be a Montague, my family's sworn enemy?"
O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name; Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I'll no longer be a Capulet.
Windows 2000 (And I assume XP as well) allows you to encrypt the filesystem with NTFS partitions. Of course this is probably only as strong as the user's password, which hopefully is not blank.
Same with us, are you referring to the hotwired SEO article? When I started working here we were barely ranked at all in Google; now we are usually within the first page or two for any searches of our products. The problem we've been having is that Google links to the section that the product is in rather than to the product itself. This should be fixed the next time google's search index gets updated, however. I just wish Google's search index wasn't always 4-6 weeks old.
Yes, I've seen that before as well. However our site was already up and running, and rather than break every bookmark and existing hyperlink to our product catalog, I thought it would MUCH easier to use mod_rewrite. And it turned out I was correct, as once mod_rewrite was installed, the RewriteRule took about 90 seconds to write, which is much faster than it would have been to rewrite our application.
I get so pissed off at sights that hide the true URL of a document behind bullshit asp/pl/dynamic URLs. It is just so brain dead. I know all the arguments that people will come back with from the commercial to the "deep linking" to the ease of dynamics, but I just think it would be easier to write out a physical page once and then serve it from there. I mean a catalogue is the perfect example of this point.
I don't get what you're saying. Our product catalog is stored in an Oracle database. We don't have it in a CGI page because of "deep linking" or anything of the sort; we have dynamic URLs because our site content is dynamic. If you're implying that creating static pages for every single product would somehow be easier or better then I would have to ask if you know what you're talking about. If we want to change the price of an item now, we just change it in the DB and it takes 2 seconds. If we had 1,000 static HTML pages and we wanted to change the price of at item, obviously it would be way more involved.
Honestly I don't understand what exactly your pet peeve is. Even in the context of an online magazine, where an article would be generally static, there's tons of other content on the page that would need to change (banner ads, masthead, navigation, etc). The point of doing the stuff dynamically is so that when you want to make a change you don't have to whip out dreamweaver or a text editor and manually edit every single page.
Yahoo does not charge for submission, but you'll likely never make it into their db either, because everyone submits. If you pay them $200 then you're guaranteed that they will review your site within 2 weeks, though this does not guarantee you'll be in their directory.
It's also worthwhile to mention that Yahoo's not really a search engine in the sense of something that crawls the internet looking for info; they generally rely on submissions, with which they're surely inundated, and that tiny subset of the internet is what they search.
As for sponsored links, 75% of the "sponsored links" on search engines are culled from Overture (formerly goto.com). Goto took a lot of heat back in the day for selling search results, but they've found a market in selling these results to other engines. Until like 3 or 4 months ago, their results were on Yahoo, AOL, Netscape, Altavista, and most other search engines. Then Google got into the bid-for-keywords market with their Adwords Select program. Now in addition to searches on google.com, Google's adwords show up on searches on AOL, Earthlink, and a few others. The process is basically as you described - bidding for keywords. Usually it's not worth bothering unless you're in the top 3 for that keyword on Overture, as those are the ones that show up on Yahoo (I think #4 and #5 show up at the bottom of the page). On Google I've seen up to 8 ads for a given keyword (e.g. computers) but AOL only takes the top 3 for its "sponsored matches" as well.
On Google it's important to note that the sponsored sites and the real search results are completely separate (dependent on how much you trust google, of course, but they have a lot of karma built up), and google's results are gleaned from having their robot (Googlebot) crawl the web, not from submissions; and the algorithm that ranks sites is another matter entirely. E.g. a search for "ass grabbing computers" predictably has 0 results, but there are plenty of ads for the word 'computer' that pop up.
It's doubly important to note the above about google since many Yahoo searches fall through to google when there aren't any results in yahoo's (IMO Lame) directory, so the results from yahoo are not as paid-for as you seem to imply.
Well this is less so when one accounts for Google's limitations. The biggest of these, in my experience (as someone who works for a site whose google rank directly affects sales) is the fact that Google apparently rarely indexes URLs that contain 3 or more CGI parameters after the "?" character.
For example, a search on google for "plaid socks" yields only 1 or 2 sites out of 100 that have 3 or more CGI parameters, when I'm sure there are many sites using very complicated urls (with session IDs, etc). Sure, this is just anecdotal evidence, but as someone whose product catalog was listed by urls that had at least 3 CGI parameters (and sometimes 5 or 6 depending on the referring URL) I can say with 90% confidence that having a "complicated" URL severely hurt us. What I ended up doing recently was using mod_rewrite to change all the listed URLs on our site from site.com/product.cgi?sku=something§ion=2&style =4 to site.com/product/2/4/something.html, and lo and behold, the next time googlebot came by, those pages were indexed (I had verified that the problem was not that the pages had a low pagerank, but that they were not even being spidered at all).
What does this have to do with Google's relevance? Sure, they are returning relevant results when you search, but if they are arbitrarily not listing a site because its URL structure is too "complex" then there's a ton of possibly relevant content that they're missing. If you're someone who sells plaid socks for $10 less than your nearest competitor but Google isn't indexing your plaid socks page because of URL structure (exactly what was happening to us, except not for plaid socks) then you're really not getting the most relevant results. Which is not to say that what you DO see isn't relevant, it's just that there's possibly MORE relevant stuff that you won't ever see.
Fortunately Google has something in the works to cover this particular situation, but it doesn't really have anything to do with fixing their URL complexity policy.
Same with EverQuest. Honestly I'm glad they charge for it because otherwise people would be changing their name daily, which really makes it hard to keep track of who is who. $30 is enough that it would discourage people from doing it casually, but not so much that it would keep people who have a dumb name and are truly unhappy with it from availing themselves of the service.
Well I haven't been to NH in a few years. I went to college in Hanover, so maybe you should scope out that area and see if there's a market for cheaper cds. Though since there's a huge college dominating the town I don't know if they could be wooed away from MP3s.
In New York I've lived in Southampton and Queens (where I am currently), and both have had high prices. I've resorted to buy.com and amazon for most DVD/CD purchases. Btw, I don't think I've bought a CD for over $15-16 in the last 5-6 years. Basically the high prices have cut down on my buying drastically.
1. There are new 'developing artist' price points. A lot of pretty big name artists first came out at this pricepoint (Limp Bizkit's first album did, Godsmack's first, Avril Lavigne)... We (record stores) end up selling them for about 5.99 - 6.99 and they cost us about 5.75 to 6.50. 2. The superstar pricepoints cost us big bucks. The new springsteen album, for instance, costs just a tiny bit shy of 12 bucks. So we all sold it for 9.99 on the first day and, I'm not kidding, we lost about 2 bucks per CD sold.
I have to say that never, in my entire, have I seen a new CD sell for $6.99 retail. And I have also never seen a "hit" CD sell for below $14.00 within 6 months of its debut. I HAVE seen plenty of "hit" cds selling for $17-$19. Are you talking about US dollars? Or are your figures not adjusted for inflation or something? I've lived in New York and New Hampshire and both areas had similarly high prices on CDs.
Come to think of it, the only place I've ever seen any new CD sell for less than $10 was from cheap-cds.com. In any case, I find your numbers to be pretty wacky, and definitely out of line with my own experience. Maybe you need to charge more?
at least nine of Microsoft's major applications--including Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, DirectX, Messenger and Front Page--appear to incorporate borrowed code from the compression library and could be vulnerable to a similar attack.
When figuring cost, keep in mind that the PVRs are a device and subscription service wheras the PC solution is a one time investment.
You only have to subscribe if you want the program listing information. Without this, you're left with basically the same functionality as a VCR. With a PC the program info subscription is not even an option, which makes the PC about 100 times less useful for most people.
What next - a bill to disallow modifying your PC ?
Isn't this the purpose of the DMCA? To ensure that if "copyright protection measures" are included in your PC (or other "digital device"), it's illegal to remove them?
I agree; while I realize that Slashdot also pays for bandwidth, they're far better equipped to handle the millions of visitors who would be looking for this information. I wouldn't expect you to host a copy of the openssl source, but you could at least mirror the notice that there's a vulnerability. Especially when the submitter's writeup is completely devoid of content relating to the problem, like Pseud0's was this time. Really, you are doing a disservice to the community.
Obviously if you link to nytimes.com or cnet.com they're equipped to handle millions of visitors, but openssl.org? I doubt it very much.
I wonder if this is going to be the beginning of a new business model: threatening to go out of business and then watching the donations rolling in. It sort of reminds me of these old bands/musicians that have a farewell tour every year.
Yeah, what is up with that? And what does "Excellent" mean?
Why don't you RTF faq? This is all explained there. If people are complaining about the new system then it totally justifies the reason CmdrTaco changed it. Karma is just not something you should care about, and he's stated that displaying the Karma value was the worst mistake he's ever made with Slashdot. Personally I think the system's metrics should have been even more nebulous, such as:):| and:( . To emphasize how useless the number really is. Like I said, the fact that people would complain about such a minor change to something so irrelevant shows that there was a problem, and they are just trying to fix it.
There was probably no announcement because it is not important.
Ah, well, I assumed he meant he was setting up email aliases rather than separate POP3 mailboxes. I am limited to 5 POP3 boxes on my host, so I use aliases most of the time, so anything@myhost.com goes to me@myhost.com, which leaves you with the problem of not knowing the To: header. Having separate inboxes is more robust, but also probably a pain to manage, I would guess
Slashdot Mirror
This rush to legislate morality is the same thing that brought us the DMCA, US PATRIOT, etc.
Isn't every law a legislation of morality? I.e. the government telling you what is good/acceptable behavior and what is bad/unacceptable? I never quite understood why "legislating morality" was a bad thing. It seems to me to simply be the function of legislation itself.
As for jaywalking, I saw someone given a ticket for that on the corner of 7th ave and W 30th street just 3 weeks ago. The no-cellphones-while-driving law, however, seems to have been almost completely ignored. I wish I could give a "citizen's ticket" like the old "citizen's arrest" they had in Knight Rider or whatever. Or maybe just ram them with an old POS car as they chat away in their Land Rovers....
Ah, I can dream can't I?
People frequently use the word "wherefore" in an attempt to be poetic, inquiring where something is. Wherefore, however, does not mean "where", it means "why". When Juliet was lamenting "Wherefore art thou Romeo", she wasn't asking "Where are you, romeo?", she was asking "Why are you Romeo?", as in, "Why did you have to be a Montague, my family's sworn enemy?"
This is an error I see all the time, and it's understandable. I'm no Shakespearean scholar by any means, but it still irks me.
Windows 2000 (And I assume XP as well) allows you to encrypt the filesystem with NTFS partitions. Of course this is probably only as strong as the user's password, which hopefully is not blank.
Same with us, are you referring to the hotwired SEO article? When I started working here we were barely ranked at all in Google; now we are usually within the first page or two for any searches of our products. The problem we've been having is that Google links to the section that the product is in rather than to the product itself. This should be fixed the next time google's search index gets updated, however. I just wish Google's search index wasn't always 4-6 weeks old.
Yes, I've seen that before as well. However our site was already up and running, and rather than break every bookmark and existing hyperlink to our product catalog, I thought it would MUCH easier to use mod_rewrite. And it turned out I was correct, as once mod_rewrite was installed, the RewriteRule took about 90 seconds to write, which is much faster than it would have been to rewrite our application.
I get so pissed off at sights that hide the true URL of a document behind bullshit asp/pl/dynamic URLs. It is just so brain dead. I know all the arguments that people will come back with from the commercial to the "deep linking" to the ease of dynamics, but I just think it would be easier to write out a physical page once and then serve it from there. I mean a catalogue is the perfect example of this point.
I don't get what you're saying. Our product catalog is stored in an Oracle database. We don't have it in a CGI page because of "deep linking" or anything of the sort; we have dynamic URLs because our site content is dynamic. If you're implying that creating static pages for every single product would somehow be easier or better then I would have to ask if you know what you're talking about. If we want to change the price of an item now, we just change it in the DB and it takes 2 seconds. If we had 1,000 static HTML pages and we wanted to change the price of at item, obviously it would be way more involved.
Honestly I don't understand what exactly your pet peeve is. Even in the context of an online magazine, where an article would be generally static, there's tons of other content on the page that would need to change (banner ads, masthead, navigation, etc). The point of doing the stuff dynamically is so that when you want to make a change you don't have to whip out dreamweaver or a text editor and manually edit every single page.
Yahoo does not charge for submission, but you'll likely never make it into their db either, because everyone submits. If you pay them $200 then you're guaranteed that they will review your site within 2 weeks, though this does not guarantee you'll be in their directory.
It's also worthwhile to mention that Yahoo's not really a search engine in the sense of something that crawls the internet looking for info; they generally rely on submissions, with which they're surely inundated, and that tiny subset of the internet is what they search.
As for sponsored links, 75% of the "sponsored links" on search engines are culled from Overture (formerly goto.com). Goto took a lot of heat back in the day for selling search results, but they've found a market in selling these results to other engines. Until like 3 or 4 months ago, their results were on Yahoo, AOL, Netscape, Altavista, and most other search engines. Then Google got into the bid-for-keywords market with their Adwords Select program. Now in addition to searches on google.com, Google's adwords show up on searches on AOL, Earthlink, and a few others. The process is basically as you described - bidding for keywords. Usually it's not worth bothering unless you're in the top 3 for that keyword on Overture, as those are the ones that show up on Yahoo (I think #4 and #5 show up at the bottom of the page). On Google I've seen up to 8 ads for a given keyword (e.g. computers) but AOL only takes the top 3 for its "sponsored matches" as well.
On Google it's important to note that the sponsored sites and the real search results are completely separate (dependent on how much you trust google, of course, but they have a lot of karma built up), and google's results are gleaned from having their robot (Googlebot) crawl the web, not from submissions; and the algorithm that ranks sites is another matter entirely. E.g. a search for "ass grabbing computers" predictably has 0 results, but there are plenty of ads for the word 'computer' that pop up.
It's doubly important to note the above about google since many Yahoo searches fall through to google when there aren't any results in yahoo's (IMO Lame) directory, so the results from yahoo are not as paid-for as you seem to imply.
Well this is less so when one accounts for Google's limitations. The biggest of these, in my experience (as someone who works for a site whose google rank directly affects sales) is the fact that Google apparently rarely indexes URLs that contain 3 or more CGI parameters after the "?" character.
e =4 to site.com/product/2/4/something.html, and lo and behold, the next time googlebot came by, those pages were indexed (I had verified that the problem was not that the pages had a low pagerank, but that they were not even being spidered at all).
For example, a search on google for "plaid socks" yields only 1 or 2 sites out of 100 that have 3 or more CGI parameters, when I'm sure there are many sites using very complicated urls (with session IDs, etc). Sure, this is just anecdotal evidence, but as someone whose product catalog was listed by urls that had at least 3 CGI parameters (and sometimes 5 or 6 depending on the referring URL) I can say with 90% confidence that having a "complicated" URL severely hurt us. What I ended up doing recently was using mod_rewrite to change all the listed URLs on our site from site.com/product.cgi?sku=something§ion=2&styl
What does this have to do with Google's relevance? Sure, they are returning relevant results when you search, but if they are arbitrarily not listing a site because its URL structure is too "complex" then there's a ton of possibly relevant content that they're missing. If you're someone who sells plaid socks for $10 less than your nearest competitor but Google isn't indexing your plaid socks page because of URL structure (exactly what was happening to us, except not for plaid socks) then you're really not getting the most relevant results. Which is not to say that what you DO see isn't relevant, it's just that there's possibly MORE relevant stuff that you won't ever see.
Fortunately Google has something in the works to cover this particular situation, but it doesn't really have anything to do with fixing their URL complexity policy.
Same with EverQuest. Honestly I'm glad they charge for it because otherwise people would be changing their name daily, which really makes it hard to keep track of who is who. $30 is enough that it would discourage people from doing it casually, but not so much that it would keep people who have a dumb name and are truly unhappy with it from availing themselves of the service.
Don't you think it would be better to ask a doctor or other medical professional than a bunch of computer nerds?
from the get-yer-spell-check-on dept.
Oh, the sad irony of a Slashdot "editor" saying such a thing!
Well I haven't been to NH in a few years. I went to college in Hanover, so maybe you should scope out that area and see if there's a market for cheaper cds. Though since there's a huge college dominating the town I don't know if they could be wooed away from MP3s.
In New York I've lived in Southampton and Queens (where I am currently), and both have had high prices. I've resorted to buy.com and amazon for most DVD/CD purchases. Btw, I don't think I've bought a CD for over $15-16 in the last 5-6 years. Basically the high prices have cut down on my buying drastically.
1. There are new 'developing artist' price points. A lot of pretty big name artists first came out at this pricepoint (Limp Bizkit's first album did, Godsmack's first, Avril Lavigne)... We (record stores) end up selling them for about 5.99 - 6.99 and they cost us about 5.75 to 6.50.
2. The superstar pricepoints cost us big bucks. The new springsteen album, for instance, costs just a tiny bit shy of 12 bucks. So we all sold it for 9.99 on the first day and, I'm not kidding, we lost about 2 bucks per CD sold.
I have to say that never, in my entire, have I seen a new CD sell for $6.99 retail. And I have also never seen a "hit" CD sell for below $14.00 within 6 months of its debut. I HAVE seen plenty of "hit" cds selling for $17-$19. Are you talking about US dollars? Or are your figures not adjusted for inflation or something? I've lived in New York and New Hampshire and both areas had similarly high prices on CDs.
Come to think of it, the only place I've ever seen any new CD sell for less than $10 was from cheap-cds.com. In any case, I find your numbers to be pretty wacky, and definitely out of line with my own experience. Maybe you need to charge more?
Dracul writes: "Niven was a prophet, clearly this object is not a giant hamburger, but rather evidence that Homo Habilis really was Pak!"
That is the most nonsensical sentence I've heard in quite a while. I have never heard of niven nor pak! Except when referring to q3a files...
If you are going to use obscure references, maybe at the least you could link to some relevant information?
Maybe this is due to the Earth getting fatter?
When figuring cost, keep in mind that the PVRs are a device and subscription service wheras the PC solution is a one time investment.
You only have to subscribe if you want the program listing information. Without this, you're left with basically the same functionality as a VCR. With a PC the program info subscription is not even an option, which makes the PC about 100 times less useful for most people.
What next - a bill to disallow modifying your PC ?
Isn't this the purpose of the DMCA? To ensure that if "copyright protection measures" are included in your PC (or other "digital device"), it's illegal to remove them?
I agree; while I realize that Slashdot also pays for bandwidth, they're far better equipped to handle the millions of visitors who would be looking for this information. I wouldn't expect you to host a copy of the openssl source, but you could at least mirror the notice that there's a vulnerability. Especially when the submitter's writeup is completely devoid of content relating to the problem, like Pseud0's was this time. Really, you are doing a disservice to the community.
Obviously if you link to nytimes.com or cnet.com they're equipped to handle millions of visitors, but openssl.org? I doubt it very much.
On the heels of the story of LWN now taking donations, it look like Slashdot has begun selling classified ads as stories on the front page!
I wonder if this is going to be the beginning of a new business model: threatening to go out of business and then watching the donations rolling in. It sort of reminds me of these old bands/musicians that have a farewell tour every year.
Yeah, what is up with that? And what does "Excellent" mean?
:) :| and :( . To emphasize how useless the number really is. Like I said, the fact that people would complain about such a minor change to something so irrelevant shows that there was a problem, and they are just trying to fix it.
Why don't you RTF faq? This is all explained there. If people are complaining about the new system then it totally justifies the reason CmdrTaco changed it. Karma is just not something you should care about, and he's stated that displaying the Karma value was the worst mistake he's ever made with Slashdot. Personally I think the system's metrics should have been even more nebulous, such as
There was probably no announcement because it is not important.
just bundle a $20 3-button mouse with this $5000 app? Problem solved.
A somewhat helpful link would be the list of Apple retail stores. Looks like the one near me opens Thursday.
Ah, well, I assumed he meant he was setting up email aliases rather than separate POP3 mailboxes. I am limited to 5 POP3 boxes on my host, so I use aliases most of the time, so anything@myhost.com goes to me@myhost.com, which leaves you with the problem of not knowing the To: header. Having separate inboxes is more robust, but also probably a pain to manage, I would guess