You're right, of course, that learning is a process, and that going to college is neither sufficient nor (mathematically) necessary. But being motivated can be easier for some people in an environment where others are too, and it can be easier to learn how to learn when you're surrounded by other people doing it, and teaching it. It does depend a lot on the university, of course, as well as the individual, and the company you keep:-)
Yes, you'll see people who didn't make good use of their time at college, and you'll see people who did make good use of it. It's getting the opportunity that matters:-)
When I went to university the tuition, food and housing were all paid for by the government. Probably I wouldn't have gone, otherwise. You have to look at the promotion issue holistically -- we need to reduce the cost of education so that a greater proportion of people can benefit from it. Fighting the "old boy network" and the idea that you have to have a degree to join the Middle Management Union (or whatever) is also good, but very difficult to do in larger companies. In some cases it can take law suits, and for rules like this there's a danger that you'll lose and create a precedent. Even if you win you won't be welcome at that company any more, of course. Some reforms have to come from the top down, or through carefully organised conflict.
In any case, for the poster who wanted to be a computer security expert, yes, go get a degree, no, don't bother with certification in the first instance, and yes, learn everything you can, and make contacts. Yes, a few famous people became security consultants because they went to prison for "hacking" or otherwise gained notoriety, but most people can't be the first to be imprisoned for breaking and entering...
A good university degree should help you to learn and reason, and will teach you stuff you don't want to learn but that will later turn out to be useful.
In some jobs, especially in larger companies, there's a ceiling, you can't be promoted above a certainl level without a degree.
And yes, if you want to be a consultant, the contacts and the prestige of being associated with a well-known university are worth an awful lot, like it or not.
In computer security you need to stay ahead. Certifications use a course curriculum which was set maybe a year, two years, even three or more years ago and updated; with a certification you'll always be behind the curve, ever so slightly. You need to learn how to be on top of reasearch, be comfortable reading research reports and know how to follow and understand citations. So there's a whole cultural thing that you may need to be part of.
Yes, all if this is vague and hazy, and all of it is long term. By the time there's a concrete need for it, by the time you lose out on a contract or are passed over for promotion, and realize you needed a degree, you won't have one:-)
I routinely scan pages of old books (and other documents) for my Web site, from old books. I use an Epson Expression 10000 XL, which, as someone else noted, isn't cheap, but it does A3/11x17/tabloid at 2800dpi. At 400dpi grayscale it can scan a regular page in a few seconds.
I've also used a Casio Exilim camera to photograph pages.
The way that it's done for archival purposes is to have a mount that holds a book and also holds a medium-format camera about four feet away. To get good resolution for OCR you'll need something that's about an 11 megapixel camera or more, for a full page at (say) 7x10 inches of actual text. Hugin and ptstitcher and friends, the panorama tools, include software to correct for lens distortion. Phase One sells a camera mount (in Canada you can get it from Vistek, together with their 40 megapixel back end for a medium-format camera. Or you could make a suitable mount yourself. The trick is that it holds the book open half-way (or less, using mirrors) so that you don't get as much page distortion. Holding the book and the camera rock steady is absolutely necessary if you are photographing text.
For small items like a cheque (say), use a flatbed scanner, and scann at 400dpi grayscale. Project Gutenberg's guidelines are outdated (they use 300dpi black and white as I recall) and don't get such good results. If you go much higher than 400dpi, the OCR software starts having tantrums at you and the quality may actually degrade.
The best OCR software on the market today as far as I can tell is Abbyy Finereader. I tried several, and found this had, for example, at least two orders of magnitudes fewer errors than the GNU OCR package. You should expect errors, though, especially in digits.
Frankly I'd go with a scanner just because they're designed for this application, and you have less hassle. Transferring images from the camera to the computer twenty minutes after taking the photo means you need to keep a separate log of where each photo came from, or you'll muddle them up. I save images with filenames like Ball-Sussex/086-Pevensey-Castle.png so that the page number is in the filename. And the image quality with even a low-end scanner is much higher than you can get in practice with a camera without an elaborate set-up, and reliably better, comes out every time regardless of lighting, camera settings, wobbly hands, etc.
Having said all that, I do photograph pages sometimes to make manual transcriptions. Afterwards I do careful proof-reading against the original.
A colleague here at the World Wide Web Consortium (Dave Raggett) wrote a JavaScript-based tool called Slidy to do presentations; it degrades to plain HTML without JavaScript/ECMAScript support. Changing the style involves putting some CSS in your HTML file, but it's fairly clearly documented. Most of us use it for our talks now.
If you put the talk up on the Web before the conference, you aren't tied to using your own laptop to present, which can be useful if you're sufficiently prepared. I rarely am, since I like to tailor a talk to the audience.
See for example First Things First, a graphic design manifesto first published in 1964 and re-issued 25 years later in 1989/2000 with 33 signatories. Here is a quote:
We do not advocate the abolition of high pressure consumer advertising: this is not feasible. Nor do we want to take any of the fun out of life. But we are proposing a reversal of priorities in favour of the more useful and more lasting forms of communication. We hope that our society will tire of gimmick merchants, status salesmen and hidden persuaders, and that the prior call on our skills will be for worthwhile purposes. With this in mind we propose to share our experience and opinions, and to make them available to colleagues, students and others who may be interested.
I don't know the particular people Google have hired to work for them. Most marketing firms do work they are paid to do -- it takes an awful lot of strength to go against that in a Capitalist world, especially when marketing is seen as the driving force behind sales and growth, and when continuous corporate growth is seen as so critical to success, e.g. by the stock market.
I remember playing "adventure" on the console of a PDP-11 in the early 1980s!
You are in a forest, the teletype printed, and I had to enter "N" for "go North"!
Later, computer consoles were sometimes screens, and you could go into the machine room and play rogue or "larn" or "trek" or whatever, with the disk drives making noises and sometimes wobbling like washing machines with an unblanced spin, and the tape drives sometimes clicking and whirring. You could play until your feet got cold from the air conditioning!
Is there a holding page there now? If so, what google pagerank does it have? If it has a pagerank of 0, and does not show up in google searches for text that's on the page, don't go near it: if it's in what Google calls a "bad neighbourhood", they won't list it or let you use AdSense ads on it until you've demonstrated in some way to them that it has changed. E.g. perhaps if it had porn ads on it, or used to be part of a "black-hat SEO link rink".
On the other hand, if it has pagerank of, say, 5 or more, or if there's some reason why you're set on that name, go ahead. Yes, once you get a few decent incoming links you'll get even a new domain to have good search results, especially with a simple (but syntactically correct) "home page" that doesn't rely on Flash, and has some content. Buying the domain name is either getting you a tiny jump start, or is getting something easy for people to remember.
If $1500 is a lot of money to you, offer them $500 and stop buying those expensive shoes:-) A startup is unlikely to get far in under two years (on average in most Western countries), so you need to have funds to go without other income and pay all your bills for at least that long.
You can try downloading the Google toolbar for Firefox (there's a link on my Website and thousands of others, or go to google.com) and it'll show you the pagerank of sites you visit. The numbers go from 0 (it goes last in search results or is not in the index) to 10 (pretty much always on top of the results; there are only a very few "10" sites).
Google pagerank isn't the only metric, especially as Microsoft starts to enter the search market, but right now it's at least half of it, and if you don't show up on the top half of the first page of google results (once you have some content) you'll be invisible to much of the world. Do a search for (1) your proposed company name, including with likely spelling mistakes, and (2) for the products, e.g. "lemon flavour socks", and then look at the first ten or so results in some detail. Are they high pagerank sites on Google? If they're, say, 7 or higher, you'll have a hard time displacing them. If they're large companies, or in a lucrative business (e.g. lawyers looking for people with scars from lemon picking seeking workers' compensation!) you won't compete well. Look also at who is sponsoring ads.
Of course, you can repeat this on Yahoo and MSN.
If you pick a name that has very few matches, but is memorable, $1500 is not very much to pay.
Thanks for replying. Unfortunately that's not what I've seen in practice: at least enough forged mail pretending to come from w3.org (where I work) gets through to spamcop, so that they frequently block us.
Maybe some of the forgeries are geeting smarter and adding our IP addresses in Received-by headers or something.
The more widely known your email address becomes, the greater the chance that some zombie or virus will see it in someone's address book and send spam pretending to come from you. Spamcop will generally believe that you sent the spam, as far as I can tell.
They routinely list w3.org (W3C) as a source of spam for this (incorrect) reason.
Spamcop says you should not use their results as authoratative, but only as one factor to consider, but in practice a number of large companies blacklist anyone listed by spamcop automatically.
If you are going to automate submissions to spamcop, please at least use SPF to verify that the sender was in fact associated with that domain, where SPF records are available.
As with most things, it's not really that one package is "better" than another so much as that one might be more useful to you at any given time.
I use my own package when a Web site is smaller (say, below a million hits per month) because I would rather sample some actual sessions and see where people went and what they were searching for than get an overview. If you see people are searching for Argyle Socks and are finding your page about the Duke of Argyll, you might want to add an extra page and link to it, "if you were looking for...".
The statistic you most want is the things people looked for that might have reached your Web site and didn't, and that's the one you can't easily find!
For a site getting under 1,000 hits per day, look at the server logs in detail at least once a week, and make navigation easier, add more content where it looks promising, think about why some areas don't get traffic, etc etc.
When you're getting 10,000 hits/day, unless most of them are for graphics, the data can become overwhelming. And if you're over 100,000 hits per day you probably need to go to the sorts of reports that give you a very broad overview.
Oh -- for anyone interested, although I do have hololog set up on for example my words and pictures from old books Web site (in a private directory, sorry), the sourceforge page doesn't have a download, mea culpa. If it looks useful to anyone I've shared copies of "hololog" in the past. It could do with some cleaning up, alas!
I found that development was fast (although I already knew both XQuery and XML in general) and that once my XML Query expressions passed through the compiler (static type checking is your friend) they mostly worked first time, so that I had something working in an hour and a reasonably robust site within a day.
Using XML as an integration language, and either XQuery or XSLT to generate HTML where needed, really does help to enforce separation. An advantage of XQuery is that the implementations are getting pretty fast, and are beginning to use indexes for multiple files or database access.
Disclaimer: I work full-time for W3C, and we publish both XML and XQuery:-)
Another point is that if you refer someone to Google Adsense, you get $100 when that person's account reaches $100, so clearly there are collusion possibilities: I could get my friends to sign up and we could click on each other's ads.
So I would expect Google to check more carefully just before the first $100, when you're about to cost them money.
Having said that, I expect before long there will be moves to legislate the internet ad industry, and that advertisers and Web publishers will oppose this.
It takes a long time for legislation to sit well with technology, so I'm also not sure it'll be a good thing. It might be that voluntary practices about openness will happen in order to head off legislation, though.
There are so many factors here that focusing on one probably isn't sensible.
Some examples:
Even DSL users can often keep an IP address for several weeks, depending on the ISP.
On the other hand, any sensibly configured home network (OK, that's almost none of them perhaps) has a hardware firewall, or has multiple users with "connection sharing", so multiple users per IP.
Most offices use a firewall with NAT, so all of $BIG_COMPANY appears to be one IP address.
Some ISPs run an HTTP proxy -- AOL is one example -- so that static pages will only be fetched once per Expiry period (or once per day) even if everyone on AOL looks at them.
In any case, numbers of users is not the same thing as number of IP addresses; sites are reporting based on cookies or on login codes.
small numbers like 10 sometimes take on different values. Er, OK, no they don't but I'm bored.
I don't really know why it matters in any case. For advertising, clickthrough rate is more important than number of users, and they are not very closely related. Sadly, the poorer your site's navigation the higher the clickthrough rate (and the fewer pages on your site people will see each visit, as the ads take them away sooner).
I get about $200 to $300 per month with Google AdSense (the terms and conditions let me say that but not give you the click-through rate) from http://www.fromoldbooks.org/ -- it's been rising slightly each month over the past year. Since it's an image site, there's a relatively high bandwidth use, and this does pay for the hosting.
It's a trade-off. The Google text-only ads are not too distracting, and are relatively well targeted so they might actually be interesting. I've tried other advertising programmes, but those were best so far.
In many ways, like you, I'd rather not have ads at all. But it needs to cover its costs, I couldn't afford to run the Web site otherwise.
The people who say, ask the community, if it's community-run, are onto the right track. Of course, most of the people clicking on the ads will likely be visitors not part of the community, and the members will quickly learn to ignore the ads, as long as they are not too disruptive.
Google adsense is easier than having a shopping cart that accepts credit card payments for membership, and you don't have the trust issues. But if you already accept payments over SSL, you should consider "no ad" subscriptions. You could also consider saying that anyone who has been registered more than 3 months (say), or who has more than 6 gigapoints, or posts more than 30 times a day, or however you mark More Valued Contributors, doesn't need to see ads. They are busily making pages for you that will have ads on them and bring in revenue, so that's enough. And that way you encourage participation without charging anyone.
Freespire will come in two flavors: a completely open source version and a version that includes all of the fully-licensed proprietary apps, drivers, and codecs in Linspire
Well, maybe, but they're hardly the first to do that: Mandriva (Mandrake) has been doing it for a long time, with the commercial version including extra drivers as well as applications. Probably others have too.
What makes a community effort stand or fall is how well the outside people are integrated, and how much voice they have.
One reason I the distribution I do is that it attracts both seasoned programmers and newcomers, and there's a good chance I can show my laptop to people and say, here, this is what it's like, you can use the same as me. It's not clear that I'll be doing that with Linspire, nor that a community-based version that's not as good will in fact help me. Who will it help?
It might be worth considering the cost of reverse-engineering the format compared with the cost of the licences. Or paying someone else to do it. The down side is that proprietary CAD formats can be arbitrarily complex, though. There might also be other packages that can read (and maybe write) the same format. But in the end, yes, you're stuck.
Sometimes standardization can help -- e.g. you might be able to ask for ISO CGM files. Or even W3C SVG:-)
If Novell want people - especially corporate users - to move to their Linux distribution instead of using MacOS or MS Windows, then yes, identify the things that are blocking them, and then identify alternatives.
If someone says they need to run Adobe Creative Studio (say), you have three choices:
(1) see if it's possible to give them Linux with some combination of open source/Libre software, and have them be as effective. In a corporate environment this will probably involve training.
(2) see if you can get Adobe Creative Suite (or whatever it is they say they need) to run on Linux, either via a system like WINE or by arranging for the software to be ported.
(3) arrange for the corporation to employ someone else.
People's needs and people's beliefs are not the same. It's not sufficient to say "you could actually work in this totally different way with these tools that are totally unknown to you" because that just creates anxiety, nervousness and distrust. You have to be gentler than that.
There's also motivation -- people may perceive it to be easier to get a job using PhotoShop than a job using GIMP (I am not saying whether it is true or not, but only that people may have this belief).
The hardest place to make changes is at the periphery of an organisation - the people who deal with other groups. For example, the person who receives AutoCAD files from external engineering companies, or the person who works with print firms and ad agencies who say "send me the Quark file and the PSDs for your images", or the external copy editor who says "send me the Microsoft Word file and I'll use Word's revision control to mark all the changes", there are a great many examples. You can't generally get outside organisations to change unless you are a major customer and they are a small firm, but when they are using high end CAD packages licensed at $30,000 per user (yes, that's a real figure) and they have spent, say, $150,000 on training in the past three years, they aren't about to change.
Instead, Novell needs to demonstrate that they have a viable platform for a lot of use cases, and it's clear today that for many people that this means running some existing commercial applications. And furthermore that it isn't only about features of those applications, or which is "better".
When I was a student at Warwick, I lived on campus, but after finishing I lived in a student house in Coventry for a couple of years.
We did switch to Economy 7 for the electric hot water heater, and I bought a timer so that it heated the water at night. We didn't have television or telephone, and spent a lot of our time on campus rather than at home.
Others have said a lot of things that make sense, at least if you ignore the stuff about cooling the house / air conditioning, and about "small fridges" -- a regular US fridge is larger than a typical UK village:-)... Putting sheets of thick polythene over the windows can make a huge difference, as can putting tin foil (shiny side out) on the windows, although it looks ugly. If you have radiators, get a bleed key from any DIY or plumbing shop, and let the air out so they are hot all the way to the top. You mention electric heat I think; that's pretty expensive. Check to see how much it'd cost to get connected to gas and get a gas fireplace, or, if you have a gas oven/hob, that gives off quite a bit of heat.
My mother used to keep some old telephone books in the freezer, if it wasn't full of space, to reduce the fuel bill. Keep the coils at the back of the fridge free of dust (be careful not to damage them, though, and move the fridge gently, as sudden jerking movements can cause them to stop working).
Do not try to save money on food at the expense of being unhealthy. Take a vitamin C (at least 600mg, and the ester form is best) and a multi-vitamin tablet each day.
Find the low-cost auction houses and junk shops rather than spending money at expensive furniture places. But always decide, is this thing I am buying something that will last as long as I am a student, or longer, or will it fall apart tomorrow? Something cheap that falls apart can work out more expensive than something that lasts.
You can save money on shoes by living barefoot, but that does get harder in the winter and it's not for everyone:-) but don't buy cheap shoes that fall apart after three months, as you end up spending more in the end (as Terry Pratchett pointed out...)
You can save even more money by borrowing text-books fron the library or by checking to see if the student union or the university bookstore makes used books available. For many courses you may find you don't need the books they say you need, but if the lecturer reads out loud each week from a book he wrote, you obviously need to read it very carefully, even if you don't agree with what it says:-)
Find a low-cost photocopier, or buy a cheap scanner yourself, and copy chapters you need for your own use. Yes, it's legal, although it can wreck cheap bindings.
Your university library might have a subscription to something like O'Reilly Safari, which has a lot of online text-books you can read online. This often works by IP; since you have computers, maye you're studying CS, in which case you might be able to get a machine colocated, or to be able to run a proxy somewhere, so you can be at home and still access online journals and books from a Campus IP address. I do this sometimes at MIT, but I'm on the staff rather than a student, and of course have the necessary permission:-)
If you're not from the UK, and are moving there to study, note that you probably won't need a car. You may, owever, need a student bus pass.
If your landlord is willing to chip in, solar panels on the roof can reduce hot water bills in the summer, and might even help with heating in the winter, believe it or not. Our landlord installed central heating, because he was planning on selling the house after we left.
Not sure there's much more to say that other students won't help with, so final thing is to befriend some older students and see what they do to save money!
Wintel has been just as good for graphics design for years from a speed perspective...
It's not about performance (although you can certainly find Macintosh enthusiasts who will say otherwise). In the past it has been that Apple provided the necessary infrastructure for things like automatic central font management, image replacement and asset management, monitor and printer colour calibration and correction, 72dpi screens, and of course for a long time there were typesetters (high-resolution printers, if you like) that crashed if you sent TrueType fonts to them...
These days, yes, you can use a PC running Microsoft Windows and do pretty much everything, although because Apple is so entrenched in the graphic design community you may still find programs that are Mac-only. Things like various pre-flight checkers to make sure you've packaged everything up correctly to send to the printing house, including the right under-colour removal, trapping, and maximum ink density, and will warn you if you've chosen colours that won't reproduce or might make the press have problems. And then there are graphic design magazines from Applied Arts here in Canada to Print or Communication Arts that review new Mac hardware and addons and have columns with tips for Mac users...
So it's not entirely an empty prejudice that Macs are more likely to be used in graphic design, just as it's not entirely an empty prejudice that Unix (including Linux, Solaris, etc.) is more likely to be used on a Web server than Microsoft Windows. The prejudice, I think, is to assume it's only about performance:-)
At any rate, when I made the comment I was trying to describe what I have seen.
Many large organizations (say, with tens of thousands of desktops) are cross-platform, e.g. with mostly PCs running Microsoft Windows with a few Apple macintosh systems scattered around for graphic design.
They use Microsoft Office everywhere because then all their users can edit documents.
Of course, all here doesn't always include Unix users, and those people sometimes have two desktop computers.
If Microsoft were to drop support for the Mac, a lot of large organizations would consider switching to OpenOffice (or StarOffice, or some other solution).
When I worked at a software company that made SGML software some 10 years ago, we could sell 30,000 desktop licences to someone only because 300 of those would be able to run on the Macintosh (the others were HP/UX and Windows). They required cross-platform support on everything.
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You're right, of course, that learning is a process, and that going to college is neither sufficient nor (mathematically) necessary. But being motivated can be easier for some people in an environment where others are too, and it can be easier to learn how to learn when you're surrounded by other people doing it, and teaching it. It does depend a lot on the university, of course, as well as the individual, and the company you keep :-)
Liam
Yes, you'll see people who didn't make good use of their time at college, and you'll see people who did make good use of it. It's getting the opportunity that matters :-)
When I went to university the tuition, food and housing were all paid for by the government. Probably I wouldn't have gone, otherwise. You have to look at the promotion issue holistically -- we need to reduce the cost of education so that a greater proportion of people can benefit from it. Fighting the "old boy network" and the idea that you have to have a degree to join the Middle Management Union (or whatever) is also good, but very difficult to do in larger companies. In some cases it can take law suits, and for rules like this there's a danger that you'll lose and create a precedent. Even if you win you won't be welcome at that company any more, of course. Some reforms have to come from the top down, or through carefully organised conflict.
In any case, for the poster who wanted to be a computer security expert, yes, go get a degree, no, don't bother with certification in the first instance, and yes, learn everything you can, and make contacts. Yes, a few famous people became security consultants because they went to prison for "hacking" or otherwise gained notoriety, but most people can't be the first to be imprisoned for breaking and entering...
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
Oh I don't know, "certified insane" seems pretty important too :-)
A good university degree should help you to learn and reason, and will teach you stuff you don't want to learn but that will later turn out to be useful.
:-)
In some jobs, especially in larger companies, there's a ceiling, you can't be promoted above a certainl level without a degree.
And yes, if you want to be a consultant, the contacts and the prestige of being associated with a well-known university are worth an awful lot, like it or not.
In computer security you need to stay ahead. Certifications use a course curriculum which was set maybe a year, two years, even three or more years ago and updated; with a certification you'll always be behind the curve, ever so slightly. You need to learn how to be on top of reasearch, be comfortable reading research reports and know how to follow and understand citations. So there's a whole cultural thing that you may need to be part of.
Yes, all if this is vague and hazy, and all of it is long term. By the time there's a concrete need for it, by the time you lose out on a contract or are passed over for promotion, and realize you needed a degree, you won't have one
I routinely scan pages of old books (and other documents) for my Web site, from old books. I use an Epson Expression 10000 XL, which, as someone else noted, isn't cheap, but it does A3/11x17/tabloid at 2800dpi. At 400dpi grayscale it can scan a regular page in a few seconds.
I've also used a Casio Exilim camera to photograph pages.
The way that it's done for archival purposes is to have a mount that holds a book and also holds a medium-format camera about four feet away. To get good resolution for OCR you'll need something that's about an 11 megapixel camera or more, for a full page at (say) 7x10 inches of actual text. Hugin and ptstitcher and friends, the panorama tools, include software to correct for lens distortion. Phase One sells a camera mount (in Canada you can get it from Vistek, together with their 40 megapixel back end for a medium-format camera. Or you could make a suitable mount yourself. The trick is that it holds the book open half-way (or less, using mirrors) so that you don't get as much page distortion. Holding the book and the camera rock steady is absolutely necessary if you are photographing text.
For small items like a cheque (say), use a flatbed scanner, and scann at 400dpi grayscale. Project Gutenberg's guidelines are outdated (they use 300dpi black and white as I recall) and don't get such good results. If you go much higher than 400dpi, the OCR software starts having tantrums at you and the quality may actually degrade.
The best OCR software on the market today as far as I can tell is Abbyy Finereader. I tried several, and found this had, for example, at least two orders of magnitudes fewer errors than the GNU OCR package. You should expect errors, though, especially in digits.
Frankly I'd go with a scanner just because they're designed for this application, and you have less hassle. Transferring images from the camera to the computer twenty minutes after taking the photo means you need to keep a separate log of where each photo came from, or you'll muddle them up. I save images with filenames like Ball-Sussex/086-Pevensey-Castle.png so that the page number is in the filename. And the image quality with even a low-end scanner is much higher than you can get in practice with a camera without an elaborate set-up, and reliably better, comes out every time regardless of lighting, camera settings, wobbly hands, etc.
Having said all that, I do photograph pages sometimes to make manual transcriptions. Afterwards I do careful proof-reading against the original.
Liam
A colleague here at the World Wide Web Consortium (Dave Raggett) wrote a JavaScript-based tool called Slidy to do presentations; it degrades to plain HTML without JavaScript/ECMAScript support. Changing the style involves putting some CSS in your HTML file, but it's fairly clearly documented. Most of us use it for our talks now.
If you put the talk up on the Web before the conference, you aren't tied to using your own laptop to present, which can be useful if you're sufficiently prepared. I rarely am, since I like to tailor a talk to the audience.
Liam
I don't know the particular people Google have hired to work for them. Most marketing firms do work they are paid to do -- it takes an awful lot of strength to go against that in a Capitalist world, especially when marketing is seen as the driving force behind sales and growth, and when continuous corporate growth is seen as so critical to success, e.g. by the stock market.
I remember playing "adventure" on the console of a PDP-11 in the early 1980s!
You are in a forest, the teletype printed, and I had to enter "N" for "go North"!
Later, computer consoles were sometimes screens, and you could go into the machine room and play rogue or "larn" or "trek" or whatever, with the disk drives making noises and sometimes wobbling like washing machines with an unblanced spin, and the tape drives sometimes clicking and whirring. You could play until your feet got cold from the air conditioning!
Yay for console games!
On the other hand, if it has pagerank of, say, 5 or more, or if there's some reason why you're set on that name, go ahead. Yes, once you get a few decent incoming links you'll get even a new domain to have good search results, especially with a simple (but syntactically correct) "home page" that doesn't rely on Flash, and has some content. Buying the domain name is either getting you a tiny jump start, or is getting something easy for people to remember.
If $1500 is a lot of money to you, offer them $500 and stop buying those expensive shoes
You can try downloading the Google toolbar for Firefox (there's a link on my Website and thousands of others, or go to google.com) and it'll show you the pagerank of sites you visit. The numbers go from 0 (it goes last in search results or is not in the index) to 10 (pretty much always on top of the results; there are only a very few "10" sites).
Google pagerank isn't the only metric, especially as Microsoft starts to enter the search market, but right now it's at least half of it, and if you don't show up on the top half of the first page of google results (once you have some content) you'll be invisible to much of the world. Do a search for (1) your proposed company name, including with likely spelling mistakes, and (2) for the products, e.g. "lemon flavour socks", and then look at the first ten or so results in some detail. Are they high pagerank sites on Google? If they're, say, 7 or higher, you'll have a hard time displacing them. If they're large companies, or in a lucrative business (e.g. lawyers looking for people with scars from lemon picking seeking workers' compensation!) you won't compete well. Look also at who is sponsoring ads.
Of course, you can repeat this on Yahoo and MSN.
If you pick a name that has very few matches, but is memorable, $1500 is not very much to pay.
Some other useful Google-related links:
I'm saying all this because it seems to me that more people follow links or use search engines than type stuff speculatively into the address bar.
Unfortunately it's not us that's doing something weird - it's other people either forwarding mail to spamcop or relying on their judgement.
I'm guessing that the problem case is if you delete the middle Received-By header in your example.
At any rate, I really just wanted to warn people not to ignore spamcop's advice in beleiving their list to be 100% accurate.
Liam
Thanks for replying. Unfortunately that's not what I've seen in practice: at least enough forged mail pretending to come from w3.org (where I work) gets through to spamcop, so that they frequently block us.
Maybe some of the forgeries are geeting smarter and adding our IP addresses in Received-by headers or something.
Liam
The more widely known your email address becomes, the greater the chance that some zombie or virus will see it in someone's address book and send spam pretending to come from you. Spamcop will generally believe that you sent the spam, as far as I can tell.
They routinely list w3.org (W3C) as a source of spam for this (incorrect) reason.
Spamcop says you should not use their results as authoratative, but only as one factor to consider, but in practice a number of large companies blacklist anyone listed by spamcop automatically.
If you are going to automate submissions to spamcop, please at least use SPF to verify that the sender was in fact associated with that domain, where SPF records are available.
As with most things, it's not really that one package is "better" than another so much as that one might be more useful to you at any given time.
I use my own package when a Web site is smaller (say, below a million hits per month) because I would rather sample some actual sessions and see where people went and what they were searching for than get an overview. If you see people are searching for Argyle Socks and are finding your page about the Duke of Argyll, you might want to add an extra page and link to it, "if you were looking for...".
The statistic you most want is the things people looked for that might have reached your Web site and didn't, and that's the one you can't easily find!
For a site getting under 1,000 hits per day, look at the server logs in detail at least once a week, and make navigation easier, add more content where it looks promising, think about why some areas don't get traffic, etc etc.
When you're getting 10,000 hits/day, unless most of them are for graphics, the data can become overwhelming. And if you're over 100,000 hits per day you probably need to go to the sorts of reports that give you a very broad overview.
A link checker and a 404 report can be useful -- Cool URIs don't change!
Oh -- for anyone interested, although I do have hololog set up on for example my words and pictures from old books Web site (in a private directory, sorry), the sourceforge page doesn't have a download, mea culpa. If it looks useful to anyone I've shared copies of "hololog" in the past. It could do with some cleaning up, alas!
Liam
I used XML Query templates for a project recently (there are quite a few implementations of XQuery, both proprietary and open source).
:-)
I found that development was fast (although I already knew both XQuery and XML in general) and that once my XML Query expressions passed through the compiler (static type checking is your friend) they mostly worked first time, so that I had something working in an hour and a reasonably robust site within a day.
There's a page about the image search in particular at http://www.fromoldbooks.org/Search/about.html although it's fairly high level.
Using XML as an integration language, and either XQuery or XSLT to generate HTML where needed, really does help to enforce separation. An advantage of XQuery is that the implementations are getting pretty fast, and are beginning to use indexes for multiple files or database access.
Disclaimer: I work full-time for W3C, and we publish both XML and XQuery
Another point is that if you refer someone to Google Adsense, you get $100 when that person's account reaches $100, so clearly there are collusion possibilities: I could get my friends to sign up and we could click on each other's ads.
So I would expect Google to check more carefully just before the first $100, when you're about to cost them money.
Having said that, I expect before long there will be moves to legislate the internet ad industry, and that advertisers and Web publishers will oppose this.
It takes a long time for legislation to sit well with technology, so I'm also not sure it'll be a good thing. It might be that voluntary practices about openness will happen in order to head off legislation, though.
Some examples:
I don't really know why it matters in any case. For advertising, clickthrough rate is more important than number of users, and they are not very closely related. Sadly, the poorer your site's navigation the higher the clickthrough rate (and the fewer pages on your site people will see each visit, as the ads take them away sooner).
I get about $200 to $300 per month with Google AdSense (the terms and conditions let me say that but not give you the click-through rate) from http://www.fromoldbooks.org/ -- it's been rising slightly each month over the past year. Since it's an image site, there's a relatively high bandwidth use, and this does pay for the hosting.
It's a trade-off. The Google text-only ads are not too distracting, and are relatively well targeted so they might actually be interesting. I've tried other advertising programmes, but those were best so far.
In many ways, like you, I'd rather not have ads at all. But it needs to cover its costs, I couldn't afford to run the Web site otherwise.
The people who say, ask the community, if it's community-run, are onto the right track. Of course, most of the people clicking on the ads will likely be visitors not part of the community, and the members will quickly learn to ignore the ads, as long as they are not too disruptive.
Google adsense is easier than having a shopping cart that accepts credit card payments for membership, and you don't have the trust issues. But if you already accept payments over SSL, you should consider "no ad" subscriptions. You could also consider saying that anyone who has been registered more than 3 months (say), or who has more than 6 gigapoints, or posts more than 30 times a day, or however you mark More Valued Contributors, doesn't need to see ads. They are busily making pages for you that will have ads on them and bring in revenue, so that's enough. And that way you encourage participation without charging anyone.
Freespire will come in two flavors: a completely open source version and a version that includes all of the fully-licensed proprietary apps, drivers, and codecs in Linspire
Well, maybe, but they're hardly the first to do that: Mandriva (Mandrake) has been doing it for a long time, with the commercial version including extra drivers as well as applications. Probably others have too.
What makes a community effort stand or fall is how well the outside people are integrated, and how much voice they have.
One reason I the distribution I do is that it attracts both seasoned programmers and newcomers, and there's a good chance I can show my laptop to people and say, here, this is what it's like, you can use the same as me. It's not clear that I'll be doing that with Linspire, nor that a community-based version that's not as good will in fact help me. Who will it help?
It might be worth considering the cost of reverse-engineering the format compared with the cost of the licences. Or paying someone else to do it. The down side is that proprietary CAD formats can be arbitrarily complex, though. There might also be other packages that can read (and maybe write) the same format. But in the end, yes, you're stuck.
:-)
:-)
Sometimes standardization can help -- e.g. you might be able to ask for ISO CGM files. Or even W3C SVG
Disclaimer: I work full-time for W3C
Liam
no problem :D
Did you read the rest of my comment? :-) I think we actually are not disagreeing. Maybe I wasn't very clear, though.
Thanks for replying,
Liam
If Novell want people - especially corporate users - to move to their Linux distribution instead of using MacOS or MS Windows, then yes, identify the things that are blocking them, and then identify alternatives.
If someone says they need to run Adobe Creative Studio (say), you have three choices:
(1) see if it's possible to give them Linux with some combination of open source/Libre software, and have them be as effective. In a corporate environment this will probably involve training.
(2) see if you can get Adobe Creative Suite (or whatever it is they say they need) to run on Linux, either via a system like WINE or by arranging for the software to be ported.
(3) arrange for the corporation to employ someone else.
People's needs and people's beliefs are not the same. It's not sufficient to say "you could actually work in this totally different way with these tools that are totally unknown to you" because that just creates anxiety, nervousness and distrust. You have to be gentler than that.
There's also motivation -- people may perceive it to be easier to get a job using PhotoShop than a job using GIMP (I am not saying whether it is true or not, but only that people may have this belief).
The hardest place to make changes is at the periphery of an organisation - the people who deal with other groups. For example, the person who receives AutoCAD files from external engineering companies, or the person who works with print firms and ad agencies who say "send me the Quark file and the PSDs for your images", or the external copy editor who says "send me the Microsoft Word file and I'll use Word's revision control to mark all the changes", there are a great many examples. You can't generally get outside organisations to change unless you are a major customer and they are a small firm, but when they are using high end CAD packages licensed at $30,000 per user (yes, that's a real figure) and they have spent, say, $150,000 on training in the past three years, they aren't about to change.
Instead, Novell needs to demonstrate that they have a viable platform for a lot of use cases, and it's clear today that for many people that this means running some existing commercial applications. And furthermore that it isn't only about features of those applications, or which is "better".
Liam
When I was a student at Warwick, I lived on campus, but after finishing I lived in a student house in Coventry for a couple of years.
:-) ... Putting sheets of thick polythene over the windows can make a huge difference, as can putting tin foil (shiny side out) on the windows, although it looks ugly. If you have radiators, get a bleed key from any DIY or plumbing shop, and let the air out so they are hot all the way to the top. You mention electric heat I think; that's pretty expensive. Check to see how much it'd cost to get connected to gas and get a gas fireplace, or, if you have a gas oven/hob, that gives off quite a bit of heat.
:-) but don't buy cheap shoes that fall apart after three months, as you end up spending more in the end (as Terry Pratchett pointed out...)
:-)
:-)
:-) :-)
We did switch to Economy 7 for the electric hot water heater, and I bought a timer so that it heated the water at night. We didn't have television or telephone, and spent a lot of our time on campus rather than at home.
Others have said a lot of things that make sense, at least if you ignore the stuff about cooling the house / air conditioning, and about "small fridges" -- a regular US fridge is larger than a typical UK village
My mother used to keep some old telephone books in the freezer, if it wasn't full of space, to reduce the fuel bill. Keep the coils at the back of the fridge free of dust (be careful not to damage them, though, and move the fridge gently, as sudden jerking movements can cause them to stop working).
Do not try to save money on food at the expense of being unhealthy. Take a vitamin C (at least 600mg, and the ester form is best) and a multi-vitamin tablet each day.
Find the low-cost auction houses and junk shops rather than spending money at expensive furniture places. But always decide, is this thing I am buying something that will last as long as I am a student, or longer, or will it fall apart tomorrow? Something cheap that falls apart can work out more expensive than something that lasts.
You can save money on shoes by living barefoot, but that does get harder in the winter and it's not for everyone
You can save even more money by borrowing text-books fron the library or by checking to see if the student union or the university bookstore makes used books available. For many courses you may find you don't need the books they say you need, but if the lecturer reads out loud each week from a book he wrote, you obviously need to read it very carefully, even if you don't agree with what it says
Find a low-cost photocopier, or buy a cheap scanner yourself, and copy chapters you need for your own use. Yes, it's legal, although it can wreck cheap bindings.
Your university library might have a subscription to something like O'Reilly Safari, which has a lot of online text-books you can read online. This often works by IP; since you have computers, maye you're studying CS, in which case you might be able to get a machine colocated, or to be able to run a proxy somewhere, so you can be at home and still access online journals and books from a Campus IP address. I do this sometimes at MIT, but I'm on the staff rather than a student, and of course have the necessary permission
If you're not from the UK, and are moving there to study, note that you probably won't need a car. You may, owever, need a student bus pass.
If your landlord is willing to chip in, solar panels on the roof can reduce hot water bills in the summer, and might even help with heating in the winter, believe it or not. Our landlord installed central heating, because he was planning on selling the house after we left.
Not sure there's much more to say that other students won't help with, so final thing is to befriend some older students and see what they do to save money!
Good luck -- and have fun
Wintel has been just as good for graphics design for years from a speed perspective...
:-)
It's not about performance (although you can certainly find Macintosh enthusiasts who will say otherwise). In the past it has been that Apple provided the necessary infrastructure for things like automatic central font management, image replacement and asset management, monitor and printer colour calibration and correction, 72dpi screens, and of course for a long time there were typesetters (high-resolution printers, if you like) that crashed if you sent TrueType fonts to them...
These days, yes, you can use a PC running Microsoft Windows and do pretty much everything, although because Apple is so entrenched in the graphic design community you may still find programs that are Mac-only. Things like various pre-flight checkers to make sure you've packaged everything up correctly to send to the printing house, including the right under-colour removal, trapping, and maximum ink density, and will warn you if you've chosen colours that won't reproduce or might make the press have problems. And then there are graphic design magazines from Applied Arts here in Canada to Print or Communication Arts that review new Mac hardware and addons and have columns with tips for Mac users...
So it's not entirely an empty prejudice that Macs are more likely to be used in graphic design, just as it's not entirely an empty prejudice that Unix (including Linux, Solaris, etc.) is more likely to be used on a Web server than Microsoft Windows. The prejudice, I think, is to assume it's only about performance
At any rate, when I made the comment I was trying to describe what I have seen.
Best,
Liam
Many large organizations (say, with tens of thousands of desktops) are cross-platform, e.g. with mostly PCs running Microsoft Windows with a few Apple macintosh systems scattered around for graphic design.
They use Microsoft Office everywhere because then all their users can edit documents.
Of course, all here doesn't always include Unix users, and those people sometimes have two desktop computers.
If Microsoft were to drop support for the Mac, a lot of large organizations would consider switching to OpenOffice (or StarOffice, or some other solution).
When I worked at a software company that made SGML software some 10 years ago, we could sell 30,000 desktop licences to someone only because 300 of those would be able to run on the Macintosh (the others were HP/UX and Windows). They required cross-platform support on everything.