I wouldn't throw your article out - we certainly didn't disprove it as a methodology, but there are some business impacts that need to be planned for ahead of time.
At Yahoo! we tried this on a few projects and ended up calling it waterscrum. Wanting the dev flexibility of agile and the (perceived) business certainty of waterfall at the same time isn't really possible when it's not understood that the dev methodology has impacts outside of the tech organization. If you're doing agile dev, the marketing materials, sales collateral, etc are much more difficult to write and lock down when you're looking to make a splash in the market.
For agile to work the entire company needs to be okay with some level of uncertainty, or at least understand that for major market releases you still need to plan a date far in advance. Just because you're launching code doesn't mean you're launching a product, and getting materials locked down is harder to do when, by definition, changes happen more frequently.
School systems don't sacrifice the best to help the worst. Sacrificing the minority to help the majority is a more accurate description. If a uniform approach to education is to be taken, this is likely the best strategy for society.
I don't believe we should have a uniform approach for every student, but I also don't think a unique approach for every person is a good idea either. Finding some number of manageable types and creating programs for each (which is what we do today) is probably still the best framework. Finding ways to scale the number of manageable types is very important.
Our collective intelligence has developed over hundreds of years and cannot efficiently progress by just letting children explore. We've been exploring for hundreds of years and we must build on what others have discovered, defined, and proven. Little Johnny won't figure out the math to explain why his swing swings by swinging on a swing.
Exploration is incredibly important, but don't discount the languages, systems, and sciences needed to effectively explore, and what's necessary to effectively teach them to as many people as possible. As with almost everything, there is a balance here.
Actually I don't think that first page is sponsored listings, as the sponsored listings are called out in the right sidebar. If you look at the page source, you see that there are no redirects on that first page of main results (redirects are needed to track the clicks for revenue since MSN does not yet implement their own pay per click search product).
What we are probably seeing is a beta of Microsoft' s search product, followed by backfill from Inktomi (this is why the search counts differ).
This only seems to happen on "popular" search queries, like open source (74 msn, 8,013,904 backfill, 11,700,000 google), and baseball (1974 msn, , 20,500,000 google), and linux (365 msn, 16,291,540 backfill, 92,000,000 google). "Unpopular" terms like wax museum just get backfill (151,414 msn backfill, 282,000 google). By only appearing on select popular terms it gives them a chance to test their product on search queries that an immature search product is likely to have results on (or maybe all search queries go through this new search first, and terms like wax museum just don't have any hits yet forcing the backfill to page one).
However, you assertion that the author has no idea how MSN Search works is probably spot on (both the submitter to Slashdot and the referenced author). Whatever Microsoft's feelings are about open source solutions, they're smart enough to know that surpressing information in the free portion of search is a PR disaster waiting to happen.
Yahoo gets its search results from Google and Overture. The results are displayed as such:
1 Yahoo Listing 1 - 3 Overture Listings N Google Results
Since the bulk of Yahoo's listings are Google listings, I'm curious as to how they can not be considered "on par."
It is intersting to see people berate web search when in reality 85% of results come from Google, Overture, and Inktomi no matter what site you are searching on - i.e. web search is already ubiquitous. I suppose it is proof that people are very influenced by interface, hence the preference for using Google.
I wouldn't mind seeing more goals, and looking at the size of some of these goalies I may begin to agree that pads are getting too large. There is a difference between the size of the pad and it's ability to absorb the impact of a shot. Depending on body proportions I think size limits could be useful. With the advancements is padding technology a size cap should have no negative repercussions on the pad's ability to protect the goalie.
I must disagree with your statement that technology has negatively impacted hockey. I played goalie until I was 9 years old, and I stopped because getting hit with a puck hurts! With the advancement in goalie equiptment I was able to start playing goalie again this past year. The pads now are many times lighter, cover almost all of your body, and rely on many different impact absorbing techniques (as opposed to the 'ol leather and cotton pads).
Thus, advancements in technology have enabled me to start playing a sport I love recreationally again without the fear of being seriously hurt.
FYI - While I am sure that there are many ways Netscape is making money off of ads, I know for a fact that the banner ads displayed with their "advanced search" (when you select which search engines you
want results from) are the banners served from those search engines, generating revenue for themselves and not Netscape.
If you would prefer not see the banner ads, go to the/netscape/searchplugins directory and edit the.src files, removing the banner tags.
A lot of the "preferred" listings on search engines are paid for - that is the company who is at the end of a link is paying a certain amount per click through. GoTo, and I think Yahoo and About provide preferred search results to many sites such as Netscape search and AOL. So essentially, to get yourself to the top pay more $$$.
Now this is not a necessarily a horrific practice if you compare it to, say, how the yellow pages works. If you are looking for a plumber, chances are you are going to be drawn to the biggest ad on the page. And how does the plumber afford the biggest ad? - He must have a lot of business - which may infer that he has lots of happy customers (ok I know, I prefer the mom and pop businesses, but we are talking about the masses here). So I suppose relevance is determined by who can afford the most for advertising, and who can afford the most advertising is doing the most business, and they are doing the most business because they are obviously the best at what they do - ahhh, capitalism ladies and gentlemen...
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't throw your article out - we certainly didn't disprove it as a methodology, but there are some business impacts that need to be planned for ahead of time.
At Yahoo! we tried this on a few projects and ended up calling it waterscrum. Wanting the dev flexibility of agile and the (perceived) business certainty of waterfall at the same time isn't really possible when it's not understood that the dev methodology has impacts outside of the tech organization. If you're doing agile dev, the marketing materials, sales collateral, etc are much more difficult to write and lock down when you're looking to make a splash in the market. For agile to work the entire company needs to be okay with some level of uncertainty, or at least understand that for major market releases you still need to plan a date far in advance. Just because you're launching code doesn't mean you're launching a product, and getting materials locked down is harder to do when, by definition, changes happen more frequently.
School systems don't sacrifice the best to help the worst. Sacrificing the minority to help the majority is a more accurate description. If a uniform approach to education is to be taken, this is likely the best strategy for society.
I don't believe we should have a uniform approach for every student, but I also don't think a unique approach for every person is a good idea either. Finding some number of manageable types and creating programs for each (which is what we do today) is probably still the best framework. Finding ways to scale the number of manageable types is very important.
Our collective intelligence has developed over hundreds of years and cannot efficiently progress by just letting children explore. We've been exploring for hundreds of years and we must build on what others have discovered, defined, and proven. Little Johnny won't figure out the math to explain why his swing swings by swinging on a swing.
Exploration is incredibly important, but don't discount the languages, systems, and sciences needed to effectively explore, and what's necessary to effectively teach them to as many people as possible. As with almost everything, there is a balance here.
What we are probably seeing is a beta of Microsoft' s search product, followed by backfill from Inktomi (this is why the search counts differ).
This only seems to happen on "popular" search queries, like open source (74 msn, 8,013,904 backfill, 11,700,000 google), and baseball (1974 msn, , 20,500,000 google), and linux (365 msn, 16,291,540 backfill, 92,000,000 google). "Unpopular" terms like wax museum just get backfill (151,414 msn backfill, 282,000 google). By only appearing on select popular terms it gives them a chance to test their product on search queries that an immature search product is likely to have results on (or maybe all search queries go through this new search first, and terms like wax museum just don't have any hits yet forcing the backfill to page one).
However, you assertion that the author has no idea how MSN Search works is probably spot on (both the submitter to Slashdot and the referenced author). Whatever Microsoft's feelings are about open source solutions, they're smart enough to know that surpressing information in the free portion of search is a PR disaster waiting to happen.
Yahoo gets its search results from Google and Overture. The results are displayed as such:
1 Yahoo Listing
1 - 3 Overture Listings
N Google Results
Since the bulk of Yahoo's listings are Google listings, I'm curious as to how they can not be considered "on par."
It is intersting to see people berate web search when in reality 85% of results come from Google, Overture, and Inktomi no matter what site you are searching on - i.e. web search is already ubiquitous. I suppose it is proof that people are very influenced by interface, hence the preference for using Google.
I wouldn't mind seeing more goals, and looking at the size of some of these goalies I may begin to agree that pads are getting too large. There is a difference between the size of the pad and it's ability to absorb the impact of a shot. Depending on body proportions I think size limits could be useful. With the advancements is padding technology a size cap should have no negative repercussions on the pad's ability to protect the goalie.
I must disagree with your statement that technology has negatively impacted hockey. I played goalie until I was 9 years old, and I stopped because getting hit with a puck hurts! With the advancement in goalie equiptment I was able to start playing goalie again this past year. The pads now are many times lighter, cover almost all of your body, and rely on many different impact absorbing techniques (as opposed to the 'ol leather and cotton pads).
Thus, advancements in technology have enabled me to start playing a sport I love recreationally again without the fear of being seriously hurt.
FYI - While I am sure that there are many ways Netscape is making money off of ads, I know for a fact that the banner ads displayed with their "advanced search" (when you select which search engines you want results from) are the banners served from those search engines, generating revenue for themselves and not Netscape.
/netscape/searchplugins directory and edit the .src files, removing the banner tags.
If you would prefer not see the banner ads, go to the
A lot of the "preferred" listings on search engines are paid for - that is the company who is at the end of a link is paying a certain amount per click through. GoTo, and I think Yahoo and About provide preferred search results to many sites such as Netscape search and AOL. So essentially, to get yourself to the top pay more $$$. Now this is not a necessarily a horrific practice if you compare it to, say, how the yellow pages works. If you are looking for a plumber, chances are you are going to be drawn to the biggest ad on the page. And how does the plumber afford the biggest ad? - He must have a lot of business - which may infer that he has lots of happy customers (ok I know, I prefer the mom and pop businesses, but we are talking about the masses here). So I suppose relevance is determined by who can afford the most for advertising, and who can afford the most advertising is doing the most business, and they are doing the most business because they are obviously the best at what they do - ahhh, capitalism ladies and gentlemen...