I don't know if this was once true but is no longer, is FUD or what but I actually did a site that was Flash only with just the standard HTML wrapper file & it ended up top of all the search engines for the site's name. I did no search engine submitting or anything--the spiders just found it, indexed it & it ended up ranking #1. I should add the site title is a fairly unique word (not in the dictionary but combining two words) and two sites, a couple of barely read blogs have links to it.
So I can only conclude that having witnessed it with my own eyes that your statement that "This means your site is irrelevent in search engine results" is factually untrue.
While you do make some valid points, and I wholeheartedly agree that flash really shouldn't be used in places where textual information is critical, by making the claim that "you don't contribute to the web in a meaningful way" is BS and undermines your credibility. There is nothing wrong with delivering games & other visual entertainment or storytelling via the web. While important informational sites should use due diligence towards accessibility for as wide of audience as possible, the web is like a billion channels of television--if you don't like a channel, don't watch it.
This reminds me of an article I recently read about the difficulty in releasing TV shows on DVDs because the rights for the music used in the episodes needes to be re-negotiated all over again. The thing most of the people who want their cut don't seem to get is that they make nothing at all if nothing is released. Me personally, I'd rather have a penny for every thing sold than nothing at all. But most of parties involved want hundreds of times that or it to be killed completely.
Valid points. But ultimately, I don't believe everyone reading all EULAs is the final goal rather it's a short term goal or means to an end. IF everyone actually read all of the EULAs, there would be much more widespread understanding of the issues and there would actually be support for the drastic reform that is needed.
Which is all well and good--R&D costs money, we all get that. The problem is the cost of this should be tacked onto the printers, not the ink cartridges. Instead, the manfacturers use a different model--in part because the true costs to the consumers are hidden. Personally I think it's a deceptive business practice. The automotive industry might be a good model--the auto parts market is mature and very competitive. If an auto maker requires replacement parts to be their brand only, they can't inflate the cost to the consumer. If printer makers choose to sell printers at less than cost, I really don't feel the least bit sorry for them.
As far as the expiring of the cartridges--I might be willing to buy your explanation except for the fact that these companies past behavior has done nothing for me to merit giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Which is fine so long as we can turn it back around again so that I can see the information ChoicePoint (and others) have on me. It's the old "Who's watching the watchers?" I can accept the whole database nation as long as individuals can see what data companies have on them and can force inaccurate data to be corrected. Somehow, legislation passed allowing/requiring free credit reports annually from the big three agencies. I see no reason this couldn't be expanded to all companies who hold personal information in a database--it should just be a cost of their doing that line of business.
That's a good logical next question about monitoring kid's usage.
It's also a very good point you make about the difference between illegal and inadmissable. As far as admissability, I would think it should be highly questionable as well--if there were some way to provide indisputable evidence that it was the person doing it that might be different. Otherwise, it's just too easy for one person to do it & frame the other.
That being said, I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who is cheating on their spouse. Get a divorce if you don't want to be with your spouse anymore but don't cheat.
Most businesses are well aware of this, and will pull the plug as soon as it looks like a project is uneconomical. Governments, because they have to keep voters and oversight committees happy, are not so free to act.
I would say "Most businesses" is a bit too broad. Most successful, well run or small businesses do this. At least in my experience, large corporations tend to behave more like governments.
What it comes down to this this: if a major government project is canned because of failure, it's a *good* thing. Failing projects need to be abandoned. It's the ones that drag on for years and become fiscal black holes that are bad.
Not disagreeing totally, but I wouldn't call it a good thing. It's a less bad thing than continuing to blow more money & resources but certainly not good. As a taxpayer or stockholder in a company, if some one screws up & millions of dollars get spent without any or very little end result, either way I want some one fired.
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.
This 12.5% is for Social Security alone, not services rendered. There's a whole other chunk taken out for the general services. If you want to talk about the legal rights of the government to take funds from us for services rendered then how about the repsonsibility of the government to not waste so much. The federal government has grown so large that no one even knows where all the money goes--the levels of beauracracy, the individuals and companies getting fat while providing nothing of value boggle the mind. I'm not against giving the government some of my hard earned money to provide services, I just happen to believe (as did the founding fathers) that local government should provide the majority of the services. It is the lack of transparency and responsibility by the government resulting in excessive spending that has caused the deficit, not advocates of lower taxes.
The opportunity probably won't get any better. Bush doesn't have to worry about an election and has show tremendous resolve or stubborness depending on your viewpoint. Also, there is still time to fix SS without putting an excessive burden on anyone. But most importantly, almost no one under 30 or so actually expects to receive any money from SS when they retire. It is that expectation that makes a major reform feasible. Think about it for a second--we actually expect to pay in for the rest of our working lives and get nothing in return! Gradually return Social Security to the role it originally had--as a safety net for only the worst case scenarios--people with really bad luck or not bright enough to make intelligent financial plans with insurance and retirement savings. Follow through on the promise to the boomers who actually believed SS would be there for them & phase it down from there.
How about a bowling analogy? Lousy bowlers aim for the pins. Ok bowlers aim for the arrows a third of the way down the lane. Good bowlers aim for the small dots just a little bit beyond the foul line.
I guess there are some semantics--there's nothing wrong with generally wanting wide popularity but if that is what you are aiming for day in and day out, you'll most likely fail. It's just too broad and far out. Using popularity as a short term goal ultimately ends up adding more and more features to grab a smaller and smaller chunk of people. Make a great piece of software & if necessary, market it well. If you build it they will come.
As you say, Firefox has done so well because it's better--way better. The focus was on building a fast, stable & (relatively) standard compliant brower. Popularity is a byproduct.
I agree with your reasoning that recongnizing ending the 5 day limit is a relatively recent thing. That said, I think the parent post you replied to makes an exellent point--by virtue of him playing for as long as he did, the experience and practice itself gives him a signifigant advantage even if there are others who are as smart. Certainly not insurmountable but as he said others will probably have to be more than a little smarter to beat him.
Finally, aside from being an exellent competitor because of his timing with the button, wagering (though to some extent that became an amusing diversion on its own) & general strategy, what always impressed me most about him was the breadth of his trivia knowledge and deductive reasoning. Generally there are people who know literature really well, people who know science really well, people who can deductively solve problems that they may not actually specifically know/remember. Obviously this is a generalization and such abilities aren't strictly mutually exclusive but human nature seems to be to gravitate towards things we have ability and enjoy and away from others. I watched a fair amount of Jeopardy and haven't seen another constestent who answered as many questions correctly in as many different categories as Jennings. Jeopardy's producers do an exellent job at trying to balance subject matters but ultimately, the categories and types of answers on double and final jeopardy will play a big role in determining the winner. If critical answers come up that other contestants are particularly expert in, Ken most definitely could lose. But he does have to be a pretty signifigant favorite to win.
I mean, this is Slashdot after all, so if we're already entered the land of make believe where readers actually have wives, then the extra step to wives who like porn is no big deal.
Wow, that was fantastic. I've struggled with the question of whether Wikipedia should be cited or not. Ultimately, for me it serves a much greater purpose than being authoritative--it just scratches me when I itch. I know of no other place to go where I can get broad explanation of a general knowledge topic I just need to learn about. Certainly there are points and even entire articles that are incorrect. But on the whole, I find the articles try earnestly to be fair and present multiple valid points of view even though not all of them can be right. Most often, I'm able to decide for myself, or follow the links to further information.
the schools with the highest scores get the most funding (seems backwards to me),
This is a tough problem. Does it make any more sense to give the administrations that are least successful more money? If you give additional funding to schools for every failing student, it now makes it in the school's financial interests to have more failing students. Rewarding failure is bad news. Both ways of looking at it have some merit and some problems.
I'm generally in favor of standardized tests because there needs to be some way to evaluate how effective teachers and schools are at educating the kids. To just ignore it and pretend that all teachers and schools are doing a good job is criminal. Maybe the specifics of the tests need work and for certain, they should be kept from secret so the teachers can't teach the tests but rather have to cover a broad range of material. For example in my AP US History class, the teacher essentially focused the whole semester on preparing us for the AP test. Yet since he didn't know what questions were going to be on it, we covered as much as we could of what might be on it.
Ultimately, while I think that the best way to fix things is that there needs to be pressure to succeed on both teachers and administrators. Bad teachers need to be fired, not protected by their unions. Good teachers should be paid more. Deciding how "good" & "bad" are determined is most certainly a difficult thing, but pretending they're all the same only makes things worse.
We have a conservitive government who for decades have said "deregulation is the key to success" who have regulated research in this area. I guess they meant "deregulation is the key to success unless we don't agree with it."
There are two points you're missing. First is something people get confused on all the time--the government not funding something is different than not allowing it. The federal government is not regulating embryonic stem cell research, only limiting federal funding to existing lines. While this may be because the Bush Administration is influenced too much by the reglious right, it is not inconsistent with deregulation or smaller government philosophy. (There are however numerous other examples of where Bush has been inconsistent.) There are no barriers to you, I or any other individual or company preventing us from doing whatever research we want.
Second, and even more importantly, you've missed a critical detail to this story. The stem cells used to treat this woman which led to the amazing recovery were from cord blood and are adult stem cells, not embryonic stem cells. While embryonic stem cells have much potential, adult stem cells are currently providing successful results today. From what I've read, the very quality of embryonic stem cells that gives them so much potential--the ability to change into the most different types of cells--also makes them more difficult to actually use successfully. If anything, the success of the South Korean woman in the article should show that using stem cells from cord blood is providing real breakthroughs where embryonic are still mostly "potential" right now. It certainly doesn't detract from the potential of embryonic cells--but hopefully it will generate more attention to the less controversial form.
I loved that site too--in particular, their discussion on the worst program I've ever had the pain of being forced to use, Lotus Notes:
"We wish we found IBM's Lotus Notes a long time ago. This single application could have formed the basis for the entire site. The interface is so problematic, one might reasonably conclude that the designers had previously visited this site, and misread "Hall of Shame" as "Hall of Fame". Lotus Notes 4.6 contains almost every example of inefficient design illustrated thoughout the entire Hall of Shame site."
Here's more investigation...I couldn't help but have to check this out. We actually have 2 color lasers--a Tektronix Phaser 780 and a Xerox/Tektronix Phaser 790. The 780 came out before Xerox bought out Tektronix. The 780 does not have this device while the 790 does. The dots are in patterns and at least on ours, about every inch would be fairly accurate. Vertically, the dots are nealy continuous--and spaced so there's about 15-20 per inch. Horizontally, they're a little more spread out--maybe every inch and a half to two inches. Oh and rough estimate, I'd say that the dots are between 1/10 and 1/20 a milimeter. But I have to stop now--the combination of squiting through a loop and the brightness of the blue tinted LED have given me a headache.
Lifting 100lbs in the form of something like a barbell is entirely different that lifting 100lbs in the form of a thousand dollar television. Granted I guess they've dropped the size down some too, but when we moved, I wouldn't dare lift my 32 inch tube without help. The amount of weight I could throw around no problem but the thing is bulky as hell and there's no damn handles or really anything to get a remotely decent grip.
VSO Software has a preview release of a program called DIVX to DVD which will astoninshingly enough, convert a DIVX AVI file to either DVD files or burn them directly if you have the right burning software. While there are still some little things, for the most part, I've been happy with it. Actually either impressively for the software or disappointingly for my the quality of my Time Warner cable, I've found that I can download the DIVX AVI, use the software to convert it to DVD and play it back on my set top DVD player and it looks much much better than if I watch it during it's original broadcast. And don't even get me started about how much the quality drops off when I record a broadcast to my Scientific Atlanta DVR.
On can be intelligent enough to understand the distiinction between criminalizing skipping commercials and failing to make it legal--yet still come to the rational conclustion that the end result is the same. Copyright laws which originally had a balance between the rights of the creators and the public have gotten progressively more slanted towards the creators--or more appropriately content owners because they are increasingly two different entities. Ultimately if this law doesn't preserve the right to skip commercials, many of us are pretty convinced that the next law will criminalize it.
Which is not to say I disagree with your assessment of the Wired author & article.
I have two brothers who both recently went through the hiring process to get jobs teaching in public schools. From their experience, I don't really think the problem is that there aren't enough teachers. Though one of them had pick of a few job offers (he happens to be a tech ed. teacher which are in realtively short supply) the other had a really fantastic resume, excellent work experience & references & still found himself among sometimes hundreds of other solid candidates. Granted my state has a really good public school, but at least for most of the subjects, the competition here is very fierce. While I'd still like to see teachers get paid more, I don't think it's at all necessary. The biggest problems are:
administrators make bad hiring decisions
it's too difficult to fire bad teachers (especially older ones who get paid well over $50,000)
hypersensitivity to offending anyone
long-timer syndrome & the buddy system
Like I said, I'd like to see teachers be paid very well, but throwing more money at things won't fix the problems. While there certainly are gray areas, but I think teaching is treated way too much as if it is a magical art that can't be quantified. Making standardized test the be-all, end-all is definitely the other estreme but some middle ground needs to be found as a means to rate performance in such a way that bad teachers can be fired. There's more than enough quality people looking for the jobs, it's just that too many jobs are locked up for life by incompetent, lazy, untalented or just plain bad teachers.
I think you hit the nail on your head about MP3 players in general focusing too much on skins and Jobs has been consistently great at simplifying things and focusing on what's really important
But I have to disagree your characterization of the Panic guy's views. While he mentions the interface was a major differentiator, especially the alpha part, for the most part, they did those things without losing sight of the big picture--making a clean, Mac-like interface. And he explicitly shows his lament for the time they placed too much emphasis on skinning:
"The Faces War of 2001 had reached a stalemate, but not without some casualties. And by casualties, I mean, er, overall improvements to both products."
I think you may have been too close to things or maybe just missed that quote, but it seems that it pretty much discounts your last point.
Slashdot Mirror
So I can only conclude that having witnessed it with my own eyes that your statement that "This means your site is irrelevent in search engine results" is factually untrue.
While you do make some valid points, and I wholeheartedly agree that flash really shouldn't be used in places where textual information is critical, by making the claim that "you don't contribute to the web in a meaningful way" is BS and undermines your credibility. There is nothing wrong with delivering games & other visual entertainment or storytelling via the web. While important informational sites should use due diligence towards accessibility for as wide of audience as possible, the web is like a billion channels of television--if you don't like a channel, don't watch it.
This reminds me of an article I recently read about the difficulty in releasing TV shows on DVDs because the rights for the music used in the episodes needes to be re-negotiated all over again. The thing most of the people who want their cut don't seem to get is that they make nothing at all if nothing is released. Me personally, I'd rather have a penny for every thing sold than nothing at all. But most of parties involved want hundreds of times that or it to be killed completely.
Valid points. But ultimately, I don't believe everyone reading all EULAs is the final goal rather it's a short term goal or means to an end. IF everyone actually read all of the EULAs, there would be much more widespread understanding of the issues and there would actually be support for the drastic reform that is needed.
What church would that be? I've been thinking it's about time I found the God. Or at least, appreciated the beauty of his creations.
As far as the expiring of the cartridges--I might be willing to buy your explanation except for the fact that these companies past behavior has done nothing for me to merit giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Which is fine so long as we can turn it back around again so that I can see the information ChoicePoint (and others) have on me. It's the old "Who's watching the watchers?" I can accept the whole database nation as long as individuals can see what data companies have on them and can force inaccurate data to be corrected. Somehow, legislation passed allowing/requiring free credit reports annually from the big three agencies. I see no reason this couldn't be expanded to all companies who hold personal information in a database--it should just be a cost of their doing that line of business.
It's also a very good point you make about the difference between illegal and inadmissable. As far as admissability, I would think it should be highly questionable as well--if there were some way to provide indisputable evidence that it was the person doing it that might be different. Otherwise, it's just too easy for one person to do it & frame the other.
That being said, I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who is cheating on their spouse. Get a divorce if you don't want to be with your spouse anymore but don't cheat.
I would say "Most businesses" is a bit too broad. Most successful, well run or small businesses do this. At least in my experience, large corporations tend to behave more like governments.
What it comes down to this this: if a major government project is canned because of failure, it's a *good* thing. Failing projects need to be abandoned. It's the ones that drag on for years and become fiscal black holes that are bad.
Not disagreeing totally, but I wouldn't call it a good thing. It's a less bad thing than continuing to blow more money & resources but certainly not good. As a taxpayer or stockholder in a company, if some one screws up & millions of dollars get spent without any or very little end result, either way I want some one fired.
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.
This 12.5% is for Social Security alone, not services rendered. There's a whole other chunk taken out for the general services. If you want to talk about the legal rights of the government to take funds from us for services rendered then how about the repsonsibility of the government to not waste so much. The federal government has grown so large that no one even knows where all the money goes--the levels of beauracracy, the individuals and companies getting fat while providing nothing of value boggle the mind. I'm not against giving the government some of my hard earned money to provide services, I just happen to believe (as did the founding fathers) that local government should provide the majority of the services. It is the lack of transparency and responsibility by the government resulting in excessive spending that has caused the deficit, not advocates of lower taxes.
The opportunity probably won't get any better. Bush doesn't have to worry about an election and has show tremendous resolve or stubborness depending on your viewpoint. Also, there is still time to fix SS without putting an excessive burden on anyone. But most importantly, almost no one under 30 or so actually expects to receive any money from SS when they retire. It is that expectation that makes a major reform feasible. Think about it for a second--we actually expect to pay in for the rest of our working lives and get nothing in return! Gradually return Social Security to the role it originally had--as a safety net for only the worst case scenarios--people with really bad luck or not bright enough to make intelligent financial plans with insurance and retirement savings. Follow through on the promise to the boomers who actually believed SS would be there for them & phase it down from there.
How about a bowling analogy? Lousy bowlers aim for the pins. Ok bowlers aim for the arrows a third of the way down the lane. Good bowlers aim for the small dots just a little bit beyond the foul line. I guess there are some semantics--there's nothing wrong with generally wanting wide popularity but if that is what you are aiming for day in and day out, you'll most likely fail. It's just too broad and far out. Using popularity as a short term goal ultimately ends up adding more and more features to grab a smaller and smaller chunk of people. Make a great piece of software & if necessary, market it well. If you build it they will come. As you say, Firefox has done so well because it's better--way better. The focus was on building a fast, stable & (relatively) standard compliant brower. Popularity is a byproduct.
Finally, aside from being an exellent competitor because of his timing with the button, wagering (though to some extent that became an amusing diversion on its own) & general strategy, what always impressed me most about him was the breadth of his trivia knowledge and deductive reasoning. Generally there are people who know literature really well, people who know science really well, people who can deductively solve problems that they may not actually specifically know/remember. Obviously this is a generalization and such abilities aren't strictly mutually exclusive but human nature seems to be to gravitate towards things we have ability and enjoy and away from others. I watched a fair amount of Jeopardy and haven't seen another constestent who answered as many questions correctly in as many different categories as Jennings. Jeopardy's producers do an exellent job at trying to balance subject matters but ultimately, the categories and types of answers on double and final jeopardy will play a big role in determining the winner. If critical answers come up that other contestants are particularly expert in, Ken most definitely could lose. But he does have to be a pretty signifigant favorite to win.
And she likes it.
I mean, this is Slashdot after all, so if we're already entered the land of make believe where readers actually have wives, then the extra step to wives who like porn is no big deal.
Wow, that was fantastic. I've struggled with the question of whether Wikipedia should be cited or not. Ultimately, for me it serves a much greater purpose than being authoritative--it just scratches me when I itch. I know of no other place to go where I can get broad explanation of a general knowledge topic I just need to learn about. Certainly there are points and even entire articles that are incorrect. But on the whole, I find the articles try earnestly to be fair and present multiple valid points of view even though not all of them can be right. Most often, I'm able to decide for myself, or follow the links to further information.
This is a tough problem. Does it make any more sense to give the administrations that are least successful more money? If you give additional funding to schools for every failing student, it now makes it in the school's financial interests to have more failing students. Rewarding failure is bad news. Both ways of looking at it have some merit and some problems.
I'm generally in favor of standardized tests because there needs to be some way to evaluate how effective teachers and schools are at educating the kids. To just ignore it and pretend that all teachers and schools are doing a good job is criminal. Maybe the specifics of the tests need work and for certain, they should be kept from secret so the teachers can't teach the tests but rather have to cover a broad range of material. For example in my AP US History class, the teacher essentially focused the whole semester on preparing us for the AP test. Yet since he didn't know what questions were going to be on it, we covered as much as we could of what might be on it.
Ultimately, while I think that the best way to fix things is that there needs to be pressure to succeed on both teachers and administrators. Bad teachers need to be fired, not protected by their unions. Good teachers should be paid more. Deciding how "good" & "bad" are determined is most certainly a difficult thing, but pretending they're all the same only makes things worse.
There are two points you're missing. First is something people get confused on all the time--the government not funding something is different than not allowing it. The federal government is not regulating embryonic stem cell research, only limiting federal funding to existing lines. While this may be because the Bush Administration is influenced too much by the reglious right, it is not inconsistent with deregulation or smaller government philosophy. (There are however numerous other examples of where Bush has been inconsistent.) There are no barriers to you, I or any other individual or company preventing us from doing whatever research we want.
Second, and even more importantly, you've missed a critical detail to this story. The stem cells used to treat this woman which led to the amazing recovery were from cord blood and are adult stem cells, not embryonic stem cells. While embryonic stem cells have much potential, adult stem cells are currently providing successful results today. From what I've read, the very quality of embryonic stem cells that gives them so much potential--the ability to change into the most different types of cells--also makes them more difficult to actually use successfully. If anything, the success of the South Korean woman in the article should show that using stem cells from cord blood is providing real breakthroughs where embryonic are still mostly "potential" right now. It certainly doesn't detract from the potential of embryonic cells--but hopefully it will generate more attention to the less controversial form.
Here's more investigation...I couldn't help but have to check this out. We actually have 2 color lasers--a Tektronix Phaser 780 and a Xerox/Tektronix Phaser 790. The 780 came out before Xerox bought out Tektronix. The 780 does not have this device while the 790 does. The dots are in patterns and at least on ours, about every inch would be fairly accurate. Vertically, the dots are nealy continuous--and spaced so there's about 15-20 per inch. Horizontally, they're a little more spread out--maybe every inch and a half to two inches. Oh and rough estimate, I'd say that the dots are between 1/10 and 1/20 a milimeter. But I have to stop now--the combination of squiting through a loop and the brightness of the blue tinted LED have given me a headache.
Lifting 100lbs in the form of something like a barbell is entirely different that lifting 100lbs in the form of a thousand dollar television. Granted I guess they've dropped the size down some too, but when we moved, I wouldn't dare lift my 32 inch tube without help. The amount of weight I could throw around no problem but the thing is bulky as hell and there's no damn handles or really anything to get a remotely decent grip.
VSO Software has a preview release of a program called DIVX to DVD which will astoninshingly enough, convert a DIVX AVI file to either DVD files or burn them directly if you have the right burning software. While there are still some little things, for the most part, I've been happy with it. Actually either impressively for the software or disappointingly for my the quality of my Time Warner cable, I've found that I can download the DIVX AVI, use the software to convert it to DVD and play it back on my set top DVD player and it looks much much better than if I watch it during it's original broadcast. And don't even get me started about how much the quality drops off when I record a broadcast to my Scientific Atlanta DVR.
Which is not to say I disagree with your assessment of the Wired author & article.
Like I said, I'd like to see teachers be paid very well, but throwing more money at things won't fix the problems. While there certainly are gray areas, but I think teaching is treated way too much as if it is a magical art that can't be quantified. Making standardized test the be-all, end-all is definitely the other estreme but some middle ground needs to be found as a means to rate performance in such a way that bad teachers can be fired. There's more than enough quality people looking for the jobs, it's just that too many jobs are locked up for life by incompetent, lazy, untalented or just plain bad teachers.
True. But do you buy a house to sell it or do you buy a house for shelter, confort and even enjoyment.
But I have to disagree your characterization of the Panic guy's views. While he mentions the interface was a major differentiator, especially the alpha part, for the most part, they did those things without losing sight of the big picture--making a clean, Mac-like interface. And he explicitly shows his lament for the time they placed too much emphasis on skinning:
I think you may have been too close to things or maybe just missed that quote, but it seems that it pretty much discounts your last point.This is Microsoft we're talking about. That train left the station years ago.