Well, actually, the Google post just says it will prevent spammers from benefiting by spamming blogs, it doesn't say that it will stop them from doing it. And just because Google doesn't follow the link doesn't mean there aren't other spiders (or humans) who won't follow it, so there's still benefits for spammers, just maybe not within Google. But people who thought this simple change would curb spammers must have been delusional, if a billion spam posts result in 20 penis pill sales then it's still worth it for them.
I read the linked article on Mirrordot and I have to say it's stultifying. Google added the "nofollow" tag to indicate that its crawler shouldn't follow the links on a given page. Some ignorant people apparently assumed that this would eliminate comment spam on blogs and other commentable media. When it became evident that it won't, it somehow became the fault of Google - their "embarrassing mistake." Spammers will continue to spam forever, there's no reason for them to stop. And this statement is even more stupifying:
Worse, nofollow has another, more pernicious effect, which is that it reduces the value of legitimate comments. Here's how:
Why should I bother entering a comment on your blog, after all? Well, I might comment because you're my friend. But I might also want some tiny little reward for participating in a discussion, contributing to the content on your site, and generally enhancing the value of the conversational Web. That reward? PageRank, baby. But if your blog uses the nofollow tag, you've just eliminated that tiny little bit of reciprocity. Thanks, but no thanks. I'd rather just comment on my own blog. And maybe, if you're lucky, I'll link back to you.
So people only post on web forums for "greedy" reasons? If that's your motivation then I'm glad you won't be posting anywhere. If your comment isn't worth making just for the point you're trying to convey then I'd rather you keep it to yourself than just post to boost your own PageRank... your post is only marginally better than the spam you're complaining about anyway.
Re:Internet Ad Market - don't we all block ads?
on
Battle of the Tech Titans
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The people who block ads account for maybe 5% of total web users. The market is enormous. Even if 90% of Slashdot readers actively block ads it's a drop in the bucket compared to the worldwide population of web users.
... and which sites they include in their search results (including news search) is totally up to them, and not an issue of censorship at all. I doubt the sits in question are concerned with the reasons they were removed from Google's results as much as they are with the effects - decreased ad revenue from fewer visitors.
I have to update my sig. I unblocked him last week. It was nice not seeing his stupid stories but it ended up causing me to miss entire days worth of stories on Slashdot. They seem to have expanded his editor duties since I first blocked him, and after all this time I think it may be worth another shot.
New TLDs really serve no purpose other than to enrich the organizations managing them. They don't expand the namespace in a meaningful way - even if you had the financial means to do so you couldn't register Yahoo.mobi or Yahoo.US or Yahoo.biz. So any trademarked term is already ruled out. That said, the pricing for common words is usually enormous - does anyone think they'll be able to purchase sex.mobi for the standard $9/year (or whatever it is)? So now common words are out. If you can't get common or popular words, why bother using.mobi at all when you'd have to come up with a name just as distinctive as if you'd registered a.com?
Frankly the only reason I can see for creating new TLDs is to force trademark holders to buy their trademarked terms defensively - that's probably a guaranteed instant 100k registrations. The whole thing just seems like a scam. If they'd at least gone with ".m" rather than ".mobi" then they could play the "simpler to type" angle, but ".mobi" is even longer than.com, making it even less useful for its intended task - being used on mobile devices - than.com.
I heartily recommend Isilon's storage system. It's expensive but the features are incredible. The killer feature for us was the ability to add more space without having to muck around with repartitioning or rebuilding arrays. Our system has 3 nodes each with 9 drives, we can lose a disk or an entire node and the system doesn't miss a beat, it begins restriping the data that was on the dead disk onto other free space. When you want to add another node to add more space, you basically plug it in and turn it on and your single NFS/cifs/ftp mount point just grew 2 TB. The speed is awesome too, they use gig-e or Infiniband on the backend.
No, actually I worked at a company whose purpose was loyalty rewards programs and the like, and the banks specifically said the currency had to be in points so that they wouldn't have any cash value and if they decided to lower the value of a point customers couldn't sue them.
I guess your post was tongue-in-cheek, but the domains are registered to the same physical address and the IPO is discussed in their press room on vonage.com.
1 point may be $1 today, but one of the main reasons for using a "point" system rather than a "dollar" system is that the person in charge can change the value of a point whenever they want. My bank's credit card rewards program issues 1 point per dollar charged to your card, which would seem to indicate $1 = 1 point, but when you redeem you find that's certainly not the case. After 4 years I accumulated 10,000 points and I was able to redeem my points for a shitty flatware set that retails at Target for like $50. Another card I have also accumulates points at 1/$1 but the redemption value is closer to 100/$1, whereas the first one's is like 200/$1.
If Google (which I love, BTW), doesn't like it, they can write their own browser and make Google the default search.
Can they also install it on an operating system they own that's installed on 95%+ of consumer PCs? Remember, being a monopoly isn't illegal, leveraging a monopoly in one market to dominate another is.
Java: BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("foo.in")); Python: in = open('foo.in') Ruby: in = File.open('foo.in') C++: ifstream in; in.open("foo.in");
Is the file being opened for reading or writing? Does it matter if we're writing characters or bytes? What encoding do we want to use? Are we intending to read the file in byte by byte or line by line? The Java version seems much clearer to me.
And a big item in the "pro" column for Java as far as I'm concerned is the Javadoc, rivaled only maybe by PHP's documentation.
I'm so glad they've found that you don't need to buy an "expensive" video card, just a $300 one. Personally I can't see spending over $150, and even that seems extreme to me now that my days of trying to eke out every frame in Q3 to hit the magic number have passed.
If people 10 years from now think mandatory embedded RFID tags are swell, the law will be repealed. To say nothing of the supremacy of Federal law over State law. The law is good for press I guess.
Overall, I find it odd that CmdrTaco complains about Digg censorship, when Slashdot itself has its own glaring examples.
To be fair, CmdrTaco didn't complain about Digg censorship at all, in fact he seemed rather reluctant to post the stories because he, like most mature adults, thinks a "site rivalry" is non-news. If you got bitchslapped by Michael Sims then that's a Michael Sims issue and not a CmdrTaco issue anyway. Michael was a cunt, I'm pleased he's gone.
I live in NY and there may as well not be a law. Every day I see people with their cell phone attached to their ears. And regardless of what they may say, it DOES make them drive poorly, especially when they try to make a turn at a stop light - the kind of maneuver that requires two hands. I've even seen bus drivers and cops driving with their phone to their ears. A couple of years ago I was at a stop light behind some clown in a Lincoln Navigator and I could see he was talking on his phone. The red light changed to a left-turn arrow and he stepped on the gas, plowing into the car in front of him. The first thing he did after smashing into the guy was hang up his phone, apparently he realized a bit too late that he shouldn't have been using it just then.
Anyway, I think it would be a beneficial law if it was actually observed.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, if only expresso existed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espresso
Well, actually, the Google post just says it will prevent spammers from benefiting by spamming blogs, it doesn't say that it will stop them from doing it. And just because Google doesn't follow the link doesn't mean there aren't other spiders (or humans) who won't follow it, so there's still benefits for spammers, just maybe not within Google. But people who thought this simple change would curb spammers must have been delusional, if a billion spam posts result in 20 penis pill sales then it's still worth it for them.
I guess I should start blocking Zonk again...
The people who block ads account for maybe 5% of total web users. The market is enormous. Even if 90% of Slashdot readers actively block ads it's a drop in the bucket compared to the worldwide population of web users.
I read the headline as Yahoo + Ebay + Google and instantly thought "YeBagle".
If you recall, Steve Jobs offered to license Mac OS X to this project for free and they refused.
... and which sites they include in their search results (including news search) is totally up to them, and not an issue of censorship at all. I doubt the sits in question are concerned with the reasons they were removed from Google's results as much as they are with the effects - decreased ad revenue from fewer visitors.
I have to update my sig. I unblocked him last week. It was nice not seeing his stupid stories but it ended up causing me to miss entire days worth of stories on Slashdot. They seem to have expanded his editor duties since I first blocked him, and after all this time I think it may be worth another shot.
New TLDs really serve no purpose other than to enrich the organizations managing them. They don't expand the namespace in a meaningful way - even if you had the financial means to do so you couldn't register Yahoo.mobi or Yahoo.US or Yahoo.biz. So any trademarked term is already ruled out. That said, the pricing for common words is usually enormous - does anyone think they'll be able to purchase sex.mobi for the standard $9/year (or whatever it is)? So now common words are out. If you can't get common or popular words, why bother using .mobi at all when you'd have to come up with a name just as distinctive as if you'd registered a .com?
.com, making it even less useful for its intended task - being used on mobile devices - than .com.
Frankly the only reason I can see for creating new TLDs is to force trademark holders to buy their trademarked terms defensively - that's probably a guaranteed instant 100k registrations. The whole thing just seems like a scam. If they'd at least gone with ".m" rather than ".mobi" then they could play the "simpler to type" angle, but ".mobi" is even longer than
Wouldn't Google have to do this to comply with the Eolas patent?
I heartily recommend Isilon's storage system. It's expensive but the features are incredible. The killer feature for us was the ability to add more space without having to muck around with repartitioning or rebuilding arrays. Our system has 3 nodes each with 9 drives, we can lose a disk or an entire node and the system doesn't miss a beat, it begins restriping the data that was on the dead disk onto other free space. When you want to add another node to add more space, you basically plug it in and turn it on and your single NFS/cifs/ftp mount point just grew 2 TB. The speed is awesome too, they use gig-e or Infiniband on the backend.
www.isilon.com
No, actually I worked at a company whose purpose was loyalty rewards programs and the like, and the banks specifically said the currency had to be in points so that they wouldn't have any cash value and if they decided to lower the value of a point customers couldn't sue them.
I guess your post was tongue-in-cheek, but the domains are registered to the same physical address and the IPO is discussed in their press room on vonage.com.
p ?PR=2006_05_08_0
http://whois.domaintools.com/vonageipo.com
http://whois.domaintools.com/vonage.com
http://www.vonage.com/corporate/press_releases.ph
http://earth.google.com/
The design of that page is pretty breathtaking!
1 point may be $1 today, but one of the main reasons for using a "point" system rather than a "dollar" system is that the person in charge can change the value of a point whenever they want. My bank's credit card rewards program issues 1 point per dollar charged to your card, which would seem to indicate $1 = 1 point, but when you redeem you find that's certainly not the case. After 4 years I accumulated 10,000 points and I was able to redeem my points for a shitty flatware set that retails at Target for like $50. Another card I have also accumulates points at 1/$1 but the redemption value is closer to 100/$1, whereas the first one's is like 200/$1.
Java: BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("foo.in"));
Python: in = open('foo.in')
Ruby: in = File.open('foo.in')
C++: ifstream in; in.open("foo.in");
Is the file being opened for reading or writing? Does it matter if we're writing characters or bytes? What encoding do we want to use? Are we intending to read the file in byte by byte or line by line? The Java version seems much clearer to me.
And a big item in the "pro" column for Java as far as I'm concerned is the Javadoc, rivaled only maybe by PHP's documentation.
I'm so glad they've found that you don't need to buy an "expensive" video card, just a $300 one. Personally I can't see spending over $150, and even that seems extreme to me now that my days of trying to eke out every frame in Q3 to hit the magic number have passed.
If people 10 years from now think mandatory embedded RFID tags are swell, the law will be repealed. To say nothing of the supremacy of Federal law over State law. The law is good for press I guess.
Do 8 & 10 gig flash media drives even exist at this time (or in the near future)?
According to this, the poster smokes "a lot of opium." Maybe that has something to do with his inability to apply for the job.
Overall, I find it odd that CmdrTaco complains about Digg censorship, when Slashdot itself has its own glaring examples.
To be fair, CmdrTaco didn't complain about Digg censorship at all, in fact he seemed rather reluctant to post the stories because he, like most mature adults, thinks a "site rivalry" is non-news. If you got bitchslapped by Michael Sims then that's a Michael Sims issue and not a CmdrTaco issue anyway. Michael was a cunt, I'm pleased he's gone.
I live in NY and there may as well not be a law. Every day I see people with their cell phone attached to their ears. And regardless of what they may say, it DOES make them drive poorly, especially when they try to make a turn at a stop light - the kind of maneuver that requires two hands. I've even seen bus drivers and cops driving with their phone to their ears. A couple of years ago I was at a stop light behind some clown in a Lincoln Navigator and I could see he was talking on his phone. The red light changed to a left-turn arrow and he stepped on the gas, plowing into the car in front of him. The first thing he did after smashing into the guy was hang up his phone, apparently he realized a bit too late that he shouldn't have been using it just then.
Anyway, I think it would be a beneficial law if it was actually observed.
$0.0005 Billion (of $500 million)
500 million is 0.5 billion...