And you answered the second part with I'm merely looking for pages that contain these words, spelled as I specified them.
You're saying an 80% success rate, for a phrase that's both ubiquitous and composed entirely of very common words, isn't good enough??
In the search I used as above, of the two that didn't have the exact words, in order, one was because the URL was tobeornottobe.com, and the other was a play on words as described in another reply. I think I can live with both of those "false" leads...
Bottom line is, at the end of the day, any search engine is pretty much guaranteed to have soft spots. Google tends to have trouble with searches that have nothing but common words, ones with *only* very peculiar words (as GoogleWacking demonstrates), and longer phrases that simply aren't indexed (e.g. relatively obscure error messages that aren't discussed on indexed websites). It's pretty darn good at almost anything else.
You should post your exact search, and what exactly you're searching for, if you want some help on this. The entire first page of the search I linked was (arguably) useful.
Oh, and one detail about your original post: The bit about which pages are shown is a little backwards. Google ranks pages with your search on it based on how many other pages out there link to the candidate page (regardless of their content, or at least without specific respect to whether or not those pages contain the search terms). I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but that's the short version.
So, if you're searching for "Xentax", your top results will be pages with Xentax, which are heavily linked to from other indexed pages. It's good for finding *popular* pages relating to a search, moreso than finding obscure webpages (by design).
Actually, it's NOT about Googlewacking. It's about weird searches that only SHOW 1 result out of several thousand. A googlewack is a search with exactly one result, not one SHOWN result.
AND, as some people probably noticed, the second half of the article wasn't there when it first came up, notably including the GoogleWack link. Why they didn't add the latter part as an "Update:" is beyond the likes of me.
Hold him responsible, just like we should sue Nobel for inventing better explosives and Samuel Colt for a better pistol, right?
While I'm all for a researcher taking responsibility for what he's doing, most things people point to as ethical or moral failures just don't measure up. Freenet has a stronger position than most P2P networks as far as non-copyright-infringing uses goes.
In fairness, I know you're not saying he *should* be held responsible, just that others might well TRY to hold him liable.
It would be sad if a network designed to help protect anonymous free speech was being held back from full use because (or partly because) the devs were concerned about people trying to supress it...
1) Big enough to worry about getting busted with unlicensed (pirated and/or over-installed legal copies of) software, but 2) Unwilling to spend $x99.99 on Office per seat,
OpenOffice is a no-brainer alternative. Heck, Notepad is a better choice for some percentage of the staff, I'm sure.
It's pretty much inevitable -- good research becomes commoditized over time, everything from Velcro on the Space Shuttle to Spelling and Grammar checking in a Word Processor. I'm actually sort of surprised that it's taken this long for a Free office suite to start (more accurately, to be SEEN to be) really getting into mainstream commercial use.
Still, I think there will always be a percentage of people who want the latest and greatest features, and organizations that are willing to spend to provide them. And organizations with the money to spend will continue to standardize across their staff, etc.
IMHO, neither 'side' (MS, Oracle, etc. on one side and Linux, OpenOffice, MySQL etc. on the other) should really focus on 'winning'. Keep those core users, go after the others. MS is gradually learning to be competitive instead of anti-competitive, something that will benefit both sides in the long run.
Hmm. I still think there's a wider variety of responsibilities than you're assuming.
I'm coming from a software development perspective, where (as a developer and tester), I *have* to be the one to generate the raw data that ends up as the documentation.
It's often difficult to get even another developer to look at someone's code and understand it, let alone someone that doesn't necessarily have related programming experience. After all, that's why the documentation is being created to begin with.
So, maybe I'm the one making an overbroad generalization, and the story's different in other fields. But I don't see how a tech writer could really nail down the specific content for a software project on their own.
At least, not and get it *right*. I'm sure it was just a particularly bad experience, but I once had a tech writer take the documentation I produced once and just MANGLE it -- they didn't even understand the terminology to a sufficient degree, so they did things like replace the world "singleton" with "single" in a class description!
I guess, like many jobs these days, you can't just toss out a title like "Tech Writer" and expect it to mean the same thing to everyone. Sort of like "System Engineer" or even "Program Manager"...
I didn't mean you should *always* separate content from presentation. Particularly in the short/casual context of things like daily email exchanges. Having said that, I disable Word as the Outlook email editor but still use basic formatting features when appropriate, like bold. (As you've probably noticed, I often use shortcuts *like this* rather than resorting to HTML markup, though).
At the risk of making an overbroad assumption, the tech writer's MAIN job (in my experience) is to supply the presentation and formatting to largely-existing content. Obviously, yes, in that sort of situation the content and presentation have to be done simultaneously. But, because the whole point is to create that clarity, emphasis, and visual appeal, rather than to be creatively generating content, it's doable.
Surely you don't try to generate complete documentation -- for a non-trivial amount of information -- including both the content AND the finalized presentation all at once? Obviously you might want to create some basic/high-level formatting -- paragraph breaks, headers, basic emphasis, but I would think you'd go back when you're done and worry about consistent presentation, additional formatting, etc. The first stage doesn't need Word, at least, not the full feature set.
That might work in a non-domain environment, but there are risks and hassles associated with trying to use that approach in an environment where access permissions are tied to a domain user account.
I think most computer users went through, or will go through, a similar journey when they first start using a computer where they used to use paper and a pencil, pen, or typewriter.
The key as the author points out is to totally forget about presentation when you're *trying* to focus on content. That's why vi is better than Word when you're just trying to get ideas out and organized, why many of us prefer Notepad to FrontPage, etc.
It's similar to why teachers insist on writing drafts for essays -- get it OUT first, then get it organized, clean, etc. Similarly, get the content out first, THEN use a tool like Word to get it organized and presentable.
Tools like Word won't go away -- there will always be a need for ways to make documents that combine, organize, and display content. But I'm not sure even Microsoft claims it's necessarily the right choice for initially capturing creative content.
Having said that, it'd be nice if modern, abounding-with-features tools like Wordhad a... "lite" mode or something. Sure, you can do it yourself by turning off spell/grammar checking, etc., but it'd be nice if a single, built-in action could do it all for you...
I wonder if it's because the feature needs performance tuning, or if it simply hasn't been deployed to handle a Slashdotting's worth of load yet.
Either way, I'm sure it'll be a learning experience for the project team.
Given Google's amazing general search capability, though, I won't be prepared to call this new Location feature a comparable success until I can search for "winning lottery ticket" near my zip code and get driving directions...
Windows aren't *reasonably* expected to be bulletproof.
Large, public, commercial websites SHOULD be expected to be reasonably secure against unauthorized intrusion.
The argument I've seen of "now they have to go fix this and do that" and so on is INVALID. They *should* have had to do that kind of security checking and good housekeeping ALL ALONG, an intrusion like this is like shining a spotlight on an existing problem to a much greater extent than it is creating one from scratch.
It's a gray area to be sure -- if companies were more liable for such oversights, and if they responded positively to simply being told of vulnerabilities without having to have them exploited to take action -- then this kind of action would seem more over the top.
This is a flawed analogy, playing on the psychological aspects of a home invasion.
A more proper analogy would be to arrive at work one day, and find a note on the floor saying that the lock was picked and how, and that it needs fixing.
Well there's *literally* irreplaceable, and then there's "practically" irreplacable -- in that, the people involved in creating the original are more likely to simply accept the loss than re-create it.
Interplanetary probes are a good example -- more because of scheduling than production. I have trouble imagining them re-making the Hubble telescope (or it's upcoming replacements) if they were lost during launch, as well. I mean, *maybe* they would, but it's not guaranteed.
Conversely -- and this was the author's point -- losing a particular astronaut or astronauts (to anything, not just death during a mission) is far less impact, because there will *ALWAYS* be someone willing, and there are many people that (with training) are able.
Sounds like they're going to try to use a contrived example to try to scare other users, whose cases are not as related to SCO's claims as SCO would like them to think.
I'm betting the details of their first lawsuit will center more around SCO's claim to have revoked IBM's license for UNIX that lets them make and sell AIX. They'll naturally try to make it LOOK like a general Linux copyright issue to the media, since they know some percentage of the masses won't be smart enough, or thorough enough, to detect the difference.
As far as tampering goes, my answer is to make sure the power utilities are the ones installing this equipment (including the phase alignment or whatever solution is necessary as you pointed out), and let the fool who tries to tamper with his system get the Darwin Award he desperately deserves:)
Aren't transmission lines DC, with the AC conversion being done at the (local) transformer?
If so (and I'm really not 100% sure), then you just have to make sure the local storage returns surplus or reserve power in DC, "in front of" the transformer.
The thing that DOES bother me about this article -- it talks about everyone being a vendor and a consumer. That's a little confusing, IMHO -- it means everyone can be a supplier (of their surplus), but it DOES NOT mean everyone's suddenly a *producer* of electricity.
Basically, they're proposing to add a big battery backup for every house/office/whatever, and hopefully have it setup such that these batteries are all topped off, and can feed back into, the general grid, not just the locale that's housing them. The hydrogen fuel cell side of it is just an implementation detail (and a buzzword-friendly one, at that).
What a classicly misleading position. But I'll bite anyway.
We used DDT before we knew what sort of damage it could cause to the environment and people and animals within it. We stopped when we found out. Period.
The use of nuclear weapons in WW2 is definitely a gray area -- there are arguments that it lowered the total loss of life of the war (and counter-arguments that Japan would have folded anyway). Of course, as you said, that's Japanese civilian casualties to prevent -- well, American military and Japanese military and civilian casualties.
But, more importantly, it was to end the single most total worldwide war in human history. Using them in that situation was a tough call, but it's obviously not a choice for anything less serious. You won't find public support for their use in an Afghanistan or Iraq conflict.
In that little place called Theory, this might actually work.
But, it doesn't work that way in reality. The article mentioned this program started as a way to *store* energy, not as a weapon. I think it's safe to say a great many weapons programs start out as something that's not necessarily military in nature, and many end up having non-military uses or spin-offs (like the entire space program).
Very little (if any) science is inherently wrong or evil (IMHO) -- it's all a question of how it's applied.
I agree that this is not necessarily a technology we should look into putting into active deployment. But identifying the scope and nature of the technology is pretty important, since (now that the cat's out of the bag, a largely inevitable event) someone will undoubtedly be working on it as well, someone perhaps with perhaps little or no scruples about using it.
Right. I'm sure the President himself told the DOD to go spend money on more nuclear weapons.
Give it a rest.
The military is (and rightfully should be) interested in weaponry that focuses on several key factors, in roughly prioritized order from most to least important: 1) Damage potential (military reasons) 2) Minimizing risk to friendly forces and the delivery systems (political reasons) 3) Accuracy and Precision (cost and political/humane reasons) 4) Cost
This new weapon is a breakthrough in the #1 department, and may be a better technology in every category except for the "accuracy" category, due to the fallout factor. If they can figure out how to maximize the energy release (analagous to how complete the combustion is in a conventional fuel-air combustion), they may be able to bring this factor down to levels that equate it with (for example) using depleted uranium ammunition and armor.
Slashdot Mirror
I meant post your exact search like this.
And you answered the second part with I'm merely looking for pages that contain these words, spelled as I specified them.
You're saying an 80% success rate, for a phrase that's both ubiquitous and composed entirely of very common words, isn't good enough??
In the search I used as above, of the two that didn't have the exact words, in order, one was because the URL was tobeornottobe.com, and the other was a play on words as described in another reply. I think I can live with both of those "false" leads...
Bottom line is, at the end of the day, any search engine is pretty much guaranteed to have soft spots. Google tends to have trouble with searches that have nothing but common words, ones with *only* very peculiar words (as GoogleWacking demonstrates), and longer phrases that simply aren't indexed (e.g. relatively obscure error messages that aren't discussed on indexed websites). It's pretty darn good at almost anything else.
Xentax
You should post your exact search, and what exactly you're searching for, if you want some help on this. The entire first page of the search I linked was (arguably) useful.
Oh, and one detail about your original post: The bit about which pages are shown is a little backwards. Google ranks pages with your search on it based on how many other pages out there link to the candidate page (regardless of their content, or at least without specific respect to whether or not those pages contain the search terms). I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but that's the short version.
So, if you're searching for "Xentax", your top results will be pages with Xentax, which are heavily linked to from other indexed pages. It's good for finding *popular* pages relating to a search, moreso than finding obscure webpages (by design).
Xentax
Actually, it's NOT about Googlewacking. It's about weird searches that only SHOW 1 result out of several thousand. A googlewack is a search with exactly one result, not one SHOWN result.
AND, as some people probably noticed, the second half of the article wasn't there when it first came up, notably including the GoogleWack link. Why they didn't add the latter part as an "Update:" is beyond the likes of me.
Ass.
Xentax
Usually, when a googlewhack is posted, it is no longer a googlewhach, hence their rarity.
Hmm...but have you posted one on Slashdot before?
Xentax
At the risk of making you look bad, for phrase searches you have to put the phrase in quotes.
For example, I searched for "to be or not to be" phrase origin , and got what I consider to be useful results.
YMMV, of course.
Xentax
...of that point in time where people were trying to come up with two word searches that resulted in exactly one result.
The company I was with at the time must have lost a few hundred man hours of productivity to THAT little fad.
Xentax
Hold him responsible, just like we should sue Nobel for inventing better explosives and Samuel Colt for a better pistol, right?
While I'm all for a researcher taking responsibility for what he's doing, most things people point to as ethical or moral failures just don't measure up. Freenet has a stronger position than most P2P networks as far as non-copyright-infringing uses goes.
In fairness, I know you're not saying he *should* be held responsible, just that others might well TRY to hold him liable.
It would be sad if a network designed to help protect anonymous free speech was being held back from full use because (or partly because) the devs were concerned about people trying to supress it...
Xentax
something like Freenet would be the anemia (sp?)
I think the word you're looking for is "anathema".
Xentax
For those companies that are:
1) Big enough to worry about getting busted with unlicensed (pirated and/or over-installed legal copies of) software, but
2) Unwilling to spend $x99.99 on Office per seat,
OpenOffice is a no-brainer alternative. Heck, Notepad is a better choice for some percentage of the staff, I'm sure.
It's pretty much inevitable -- good research becomes commoditized over time, everything from Velcro on the Space Shuttle to Spelling and Grammar checking in a Word Processor. I'm actually sort of surprised that it's taken this long for a Free office suite to start (more accurately, to be SEEN to be) really getting into mainstream commercial use.
Still, I think there will always be a percentage of people who want the latest and greatest features, and organizations that are willing to spend to provide them. And organizations with the money to spend will continue to standardize across their staff, etc.
IMHO, neither 'side' (MS, Oracle, etc. on one side and Linux, OpenOffice, MySQL etc. on the other) should really focus on 'winning'. Keep those core users, go after the others. MS is gradually learning to be competitive instead of anti-competitive, something that will benefit both sides in the long run.
Hmm. I still think there's a wider variety of responsibilities than you're assuming.
I'm coming from a software development perspective, where (as a developer and tester), I *have* to be the one to generate the raw data that ends up as the documentation.
It's often difficult to get even another developer to look at someone's code and understand it, let alone someone that doesn't necessarily have related programming experience. After all, that's why the documentation is being created to begin with.
So, maybe I'm the one making an overbroad generalization, and the story's different in other fields. But I don't see how a tech writer could really nail down the specific content for a software project on their own.
At least, not and get it *right*. I'm sure it was just a particularly bad experience, but I once had a tech writer take the documentation I produced once and just MANGLE it -- they didn't even understand the terminology to a sufficient degree, so they did things like replace the world "singleton" with "single" in a class description!
I guess, like many jobs these days, you can't just toss out a title like "Tech Writer" and expect it to mean the same thing to everyone. Sort of like "System Engineer" or even "Program Manager"...
Xentax
I didn't mean you should *always* separate content from presentation. Particularly in the short/casual context of things like daily email exchanges. Having said that, I disable Word as the Outlook email editor but still use basic formatting features when appropriate, like bold. (As you've probably noticed, I often use shortcuts *like this* rather than resorting to HTML markup, though).
At the risk of making an overbroad assumption, the tech writer's MAIN job (in my experience) is to supply the presentation and formatting to largely-existing content. Obviously, yes, in that sort of situation the content and presentation have to be done simultaneously. But, because the whole point is to create that clarity, emphasis, and visual appeal, rather than to be creatively generating content, it's doable.
Surely you don't try to generate complete documentation -- for a non-trivial amount of information -- including both the content AND the finalized presentation all at once? Obviously you might want to create some basic/high-level formatting -- paragraph breaks, headers, basic emphasis, but I would think you'd go back when you're done and worry about consistent presentation, additional formatting, etc. The first stage doesn't need Word, at least, not the full feature set.
Xentax
That might work in a non-domain environment, but there are risks and hassles associated with trying to use that approach in an environment where access permissions are tied to a domain user account.
Xentax
I think most computer users went through, or will go through, a similar journey when they first start using a computer where they used to use paper and a pencil, pen, or typewriter.
... "lite" mode or something. Sure, you can do it yourself by turning off spell/grammar checking, etc., but it'd be nice if a single, built-in action could do it all for you...
The key as the author points out is to totally forget about presentation when you're *trying* to focus on content. That's why vi is better than Word when you're just trying to get ideas out and organized, why many of us prefer Notepad to FrontPage, etc.
It's similar to why teachers insist on writing drafts for essays -- get it OUT first, then get it organized, clean, etc. Similarly, get the content out first, THEN use a tool like Word to get it organized and presentable.
Tools like Word won't go away -- there will always be a need for ways to make documents that combine, organize, and display content. But I'm not sure even Microsoft claims it's necessarily the right choice for initially capturing creative content.
Having said that, it'd be nice if modern, abounding-with-features tools like Wordhad a
Xentax
That sure didn't take long.
I wonder if it's because the feature needs performance tuning, or if it simply hasn't been deployed to handle a Slashdotting's worth of load yet.
Either way, I'm sure it'll be a learning experience for the project team.
Given Google's amazing general search capability, though, I won't be prepared to call this new Location feature a comparable success until I can search for "winning lottery ticket" near my zip code and get driving directions...
Xentax
Windows aren't *reasonably* expected to be bulletproof.
Large, public, commercial websites SHOULD be expected to be reasonably secure against unauthorized intrusion.
The argument I've seen of "now they have to go fix this and do that" and so on is INVALID. They *should* have had to do that kind of security checking and good housekeeping ALL ALONG, an intrusion like this is like shining a spotlight on an existing problem to a much greater extent than it is creating one from scratch.
It's a gray area to be sure -- if companies were more liable for such oversights, and if they responded positively to simply being told of vulnerabilities without having to have them exploited to take action -- then this kind of action would seem more over the top.
Xentax
This is a flawed analogy, playing on the psychological aspects of a home invasion.
A more proper analogy would be to arrive at work one day, and find a note on the floor saying that the lock was picked and how, and that it needs fixing.
Xentax
Well there's *literally* irreplaceable, and then there's "practically" irreplacable -- in that, the people involved in creating the original are more likely to simply accept the loss than re-create it.
Interplanetary probes are a good example -- more because of scheduling than production. I have trouble imagining them re-making the Hubble telescope (or it's upcoming replacements) if they were lost during launch, as well. I mean, *maybe* they would, but it's not guaranteed.
Conversely -- and this was the author's point -- losing a particular astronaut or astronauts (to anything, not just death during a mission) is far less impact, because there will *ALWAYS* be someone willing, and there are many people that (with training) are able.
Xentax
Suing someone using AIX, Dynix, and Linux.
Sounds like they're going to try to use a contrived example to try to scare other users, whose cases are not as related to SCO's claims as SCO would like them to think.
I'm betting the details of their first lawsuit will center more around SCO's claim to have revoked IBM's license for UNIX that lets them make and sell AIX. They'll naturally try to make it LOOK like a general Linux copyright issue to the media, since they know some percentage of the masses won't be smart enough, or thorough enough, to detect the difference.
Xentax
K. I wouldn't have guessed.
:)
As far as tampering goes, my answer is to make sure the power utilities are the ones installing this equipment (including the phase alignment or whatever solution is necessary as you pointed out), and let the fool who tries to tamper with his system get the Darwin Award he desperately deserves
Xentax
Aren't transmission lines DC, with the AC conversion being done at the (local) transformer?
If so (and I'm really not 100% sure), then you just have to make sure the local storage returns surplus or reserve power in DC, "in front of" the transformer.
The thing that DOES bother me about this article -- it talks about everyone being a vendor and a consumer. That's a little confusing, IMHO -- it means everyone can be a supplier (of their surplus), but it DOES NOT mean everyone's suddenly a *producer* of electricity.
Basically, they're proposing to add a big battery backup for every house/office/whatever, and hopefully have it setup such that these batteries are all topped off, and can feed back into, the general grid, not just the locale that's housing them. The hydrogen fuel cell side of it is just an implementation detail (and a buzzword-friendly one, at that).
Xentax
Yeah, the shortcut on the Start Menu does at well.
This isn't really a big deal, IMHO...
Xentax
What a classicly misleading position. But I'll bite anyway.
We used DDT before we knew what sort of damage it could cause to the environment and people and animals within it. We stopped when we found out. Period.
The use of nuclear weapons in WW2 is definitely a gray area -- there are arguments that it lowered the total loss of life of the war (and counter-arguments that Japan would have folded anyway). Of course, as you said, that's Japanese civilian casualties to prevent -- well, American military and Japanese military and civilian casualties.
But, more importantly, it was to end the single most total worldwide war in human history. Using them in that situation was a tough call, but it's obviously not a choice for anything less serious. You won't find public support for their use in an Afghanistan or Iraq conflict.
Xentax
You sure? I coulda sworn they were Gamma Ray (outside of Sci-Fi, I'd heard them called that, along with a MASER term for Microwave-based technology).
Oh well.
Xentax
In that little place called Theory, this might actually work.
But, it doesn't work that way in reality. The article mentioned this program started as a way to *store* energy, not as a weapon. I think it's safe to say a great many weapons programs start out as something that's not necessarily military in nature, and many end up having non-military uses or spin-offs (like the entire space program).
Very little (if any) science is inherently wrong or evil (IMHO) -- it's all a question of how it's applied.
I agree that this is not necessarily a technology we should look into putting into active deployment. But identifying the scope and nature of the technology is pretty important, since (now that the cat's out of the bag, a largely inevitable event) someone will undoubtedly be working on it as well, someone perhaps with perhaps little or no scruples about using it.
Xentax
Right. I'm sure the President himself told the DOD to go spend money on more nuclear weapons.
Give it a rest.
The military is (and rightfully should be) interested in weaponry that focuses on several key factors, in roughly prioritized order from most to least important:
1) Damage potential (military reasons)
2) Minimizing risk to friendly forces and the delivery systems (political reasons)
3) Accuracy and Precision (cost and political/humane reasons)
4) Cost
This new weapon is a breakthrough in the #1 department, and may be a better technology in every category except for the "accuracy" category, due to the fallout factor. If they can figure out how to maximize the energy release (analagous to how complete the combustion is in a conventional fuel-air combustion), they may be able to bring this factor down to levels that equate it with (for example) using depleted uranium ammunition and armor.
Xentax