1) What to do about the non-text media? Wikipedia says that some pictures are public domain and other have been released by the publisher just for use by Wikipedia. It does not indicate which rights apply to which picture and so we are left with their conclusion that copying is at your own risk. Something similar seems to apply for the sound fragments. Shouldn't Wikipedia have a strict PD or GPL license only policy in these areas? Or will it slowly eclipse the copy sites by depriving them of the multimedia files.
2) Is their a limit to the growth of the articles? As a webmaster for a classical music site I regularly check the pages with composer biographies and I have concluded that they keep growing. This leads me to question whether there is a limit to this process. Or will it go on until we have book size documents. More philosophical the question would be: does Wikipedia want to be just an encyclopedia online or does it have the higher goal of including all human knowledge.
Many opensource companies get part of their income from making closed source versions or add-on products. They can do this only if they own the source or if it is in the public domain.
As for commecial companies ripping off the source to make their own closed source version: I don't believe that is a real problem after 5 or 10 years. If the software hasn't been developed for so long it obviously has lost its appeal. If in that case a closed source company is making something from it, it clearly has added some new value to it and it is not just hiking on the success of the OS product. In that case it may actually stimulate the OS community by giving new directions for development.
I believe that the GPL should have a clause that 5 or 10 years after publication the software falls in the public domain. This is long enough that with normally maintained software nobody will run away with it and start his own version, while it gives users the benefit that if the software is negelected at some point someone else can take over on a commercial base.
Personally, I think Microsoft has fallen down by focusing too much on corporate America.
I agree. Microsoft tries time and again to lead in the business market, while in the end the new sources of growth are in the consumer market. See the browser, multimedia, the graphic user interface, the game stations (Xbox) and the handheld market (Palm, Blackberry). Phone operating systems are one of the few areas where they were present from the beginning.
The main benefits that Vista can have for business are stability and safety against intruders - features that will only become apparent when the software is released on the market. Microsoft has had several mediocre releases (Windows 98 and ME), so you cannot expect business to trust them that the next one will be a good one.
> If Google can detect fraudulent clicks, they should also be able to > b) tell you when and by what IP each fraudulent click has been committed.
No, they should not. Every strategy can be beaten. Including Google's strategy to find fraudulent clicks. So they intentionally keep this secret.
But of course some of the rejected tricks are known:
- Google is quite clear that texts like "click on my Google adds to sponsor my site" are not allowed
- if most clicks come from one or a few IP addresses the case is clear.
- with Google Analytics they can follow what happens with the click. If from your site 1 in 1000 clicks results in an order while other sites get 1 in 10 there is something fishy going on on your side.
- with Google being the main source of visitors for many sites they know your user demography. If you get visitors from the whole world but most of your clicks come from New York they may know enough.
I miss consistency. HTML, javascript and CSS should be part of one system. Now it is a bit of a mess.
Just take the simple background color:
- in old html it is bgcolor, in css this is transformed in background-color and in javascript this becomes backgroundColor.
- old html hasn't been integrated very well. bgcolor should have become a deprecated but supported synonym for background-color. Instead there are subtle differences in implementation, making the whole a bit inpredictable for the uninitiated.
Tellertest gives a good overview of alternative counters. Statcounter looks interesting, but I have to much pageviews for them. Now I am trying CountStat as a replacement for Nedstat.
I surely will try Google when it is working.
I found Google Analytics' information rather strange. It is all talk that seems directed at big budget companies about how they can help them to make money. And then when you register they are talking about non-commercial.
Well, I have nearly 200K visitors a month too and I can't even get a living for myself. So TRN isnt doing that bad. But their subject is of course more commercial than mine (free classical downloads).
That said I miss all the obvious advertising for an IT site (IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Dell, etc.). There is a lot money going around in IT, but you won't find it all with only Google Adsense. Maybe they should look at the more commercial IT sites to get an idea of which advertisements they are missing.
As it looks now Apple will have to switch twice: first to the present Intel offerings (probably 32 bits). And later on to the definitive version: 64 bits.
And that is the optimistic variant of the story. More probably Intel will enter some dead alleys before it finds the right formula for 64 bits.
Apple would have done better to wait for an appealing 64 bit architecture instead of buying into a vague plan.
I tried it with the subject of my website (classical mp3s). The Google results are quite good. Yahoo gives a first page that looks like Google would have given two years ago.
For example some websites refer for their content to mp3.com. As mp3.com is no longer the free music hosting site it once was these sites basically just contain dead links. Yet in Yahoo they still are ranked high.
If XHTML validity is your only argument you are going the wrong way.
I expect that XHTML will never become a real standard because it denies the fact that a webpage is a fusion of two trees (data and layout).
The W3C standard is designed by language purists. It doesn't take into account the most basic requirement: HTML is a language that should be usuable both for absolute beginners and for IT people.
People keep using tables, innerHTML and other "outdated" stuff because they are simple solid solutions to their problems. The "modern" alternatives are more complicated and less intuitive.
The W3C people might do better to provide real basic standardisation like making HTML, CSS and javascript use the same properties.
My statistics are even more extreme with Google over 95% and both Yahoo and MSN neglectable.
For Yahoo the main explanation seems to be that their search results are so old. They look very much like what Google might have given 3 years ago - including sites that are now dead or have moved. My site is younger so they largely overlook it.
When I compair the Amazon site with B&N for books Amazon has a bit more choice and gives more insight in second and and third party prices. But in most cases the B&N page is more informative about the book itself.
As an affiliate I find it rather sloppy that Amazon doesn't have a better integration for its national sites. You have to apply for each site seperately and you get your money seperately. And where Google adwords is advanced with bank transfers Amazon still pays with old fashioned checks. Affiliates are asked to get their product data from an XML database that quite often gives different results on availablity as the Amazon search engine.
All in all my impression is that execution is rather sloppy. It will not be easy but there definitely is room for competitors to improve on what Amazon offers.
In designing programming languages two things are key: simplicity and power. HTML lives up to that standard. A total amateur can within a day make quite nice pages.
Unfortunately all those modern standards do not live up to those basic requirements. They are much to complicated. Just make a basic page with some XHTML, CSS and javascript and you have three different incompatible languages. The standards world would need a dictator to finally force a harmonisation between those three.
Or take the DIV. This is an incomprehensible abstraction that is impossible to explain to the simple homepage hacker. There is a much more comprehensible alternative: the TABLE. But the language purists dislike it so much that they didn't even bother to make the two compatible.
The modern standards remind me of object oriented programming. It took may years of hype before you could expose its limitations without being ridiculed.
You exaggerate only a bit. The EU mandarins are on a crash course with the majority of their citizens on many fronts. Besides the software patents there are also the constitution, Turkey and its excess of regulations.
Microsoft has always been a nerd company. Their books about how to program and do a project are famous. Their organisation is top. Their people are top. They don't have the fast-growing shares and organisation of the past, but they are still very attractive.
They are weak on new ideas - they have always been. But when they take over an idea they do it with a perfectionist zeal that usually sooner or later leaves the competition in the dust.
At the moment they have a defensive period in which they have to invest much in making their products more secure. This won't bring them much money, but sooner or later they will find a new markets to grow in.
I still hope that some day a company will make a toolbar that offers cards, emoticons and all the other gadgets that seduce people to install those nasty adware products.
I have written in different languages, among them C, Basic and PHP. I believe in simplicity: I must be able to explain a friend who doesn't know how to program at all how the code works.
C++ never appealed to me because I found it too complicated. Except for the predefined window classes I seldom found a problem that couldn't better be solved with just functions. But maybe I didn't work on big enough projects.
When I started scripting for the web, I evaluated PERL, but I found it often obscure compared to PHP. At that time Python was still rather obscure, so I didn't give it a serious thought and PHP is now my main language.
It is not so much that I hate using complicated code (I do a lot with regular expressions), but I do hate waisting a lot of time understanding old code when it could have been "worded" in a more understandable way.
I am very curious how version 1.0 will work out. I guess we will first get a beta 1 version. Very probably the editors will be only a selected group and alongside you would still have the main Wiki where everybody can contribute.
At the sideline you would have a discussion board where everybody could place his comments about the beta, including remarks about partiality. It would probably take half a year to solve the main issues and one can declare version 1.0. However, all the thousands of small conflicts in the world (like a controversial extension to your city) can never be solved.
It is also nice to speculate how the Wikipedia will develop once there is a version 1 (V1) alongside the freely editable (FE) version. My guess would be that every new entry in the FE version will be compared to the V1 version. At that point the editor will make one of the following decisions:
- it makes the text worse: the FE text is set back to the V1 version
- no change in quality: nothing to do, the FE text will stay different from the V1 version
- it is an improvement. In this case the text might either be immediately included in the V1 version or it might me marked for later consideration.
This would make the version 1 a constant work in progress. You would have version 1.0.9999 at some time.
I remember some pop psychology book (author forgotten) with a story about some blind person getting vision when he was an adult. The problem was that he couldn't cope with it and got psychological problems. When his vision started deteriorating again he felt relieved.
My methods are:
- The webalizer weblogs provided by my hosting provider. Disadvantage is that they mostly provide top-10s. So I get no data on the other pages. Also you count a lot of bots.
- Google adwords and other advertisers with tracking pixels (like CJ). Problem is that if you compare them they give widely different values for the same page.
- Nedstat. I like the referer information. But I find it too much work to give every page its own counter.
- My own counter. Basically a piece of javascript that says "myimage.src=mycounter.php?url=theurl". It is primitive but it is my own so that I can easily extend it.
Next I also occasionally look to 404 errors that are generated on my site. Unfortunately nearly half of them come from Yahoo Slurp that finds it necessary to check for urls that haven't been on my site for nearly a year.
I have the dutch toolbar. In the past this just resulted in a setting of the default language to dutch without me being able to do much against it. Now it has become worse: when I type "www.google.com" I am automatically redirected to "www.google.nl".
We have seen several sentences in the US where Microsoft had to change the way it does business. They just kept fighting those rulings until they were made irrelevant by the passage of time.
With a fine this trick doesn't work, so I think that this is the first punishment that really hurts. OK, it is a tiny amount for Microsoft, but it sets the tune. Maybe the next time Microsoft is on trial in the US the US will consider a fine too.
I don't expect MS too raise prices for this. They set their prices at the level that they think the market can bear. That won't change, so the prices won't change.
First of all: computers is a profession for the young. In many IT jobs you are old at 40, both because you can't keep up with all the new technology that comes along and because you are less creative at the problem solving that is at the core of many IT jobs.
If I where in your place I would find some job at a company working somewhere in medicine. Maybe Hospital Information systems or (if you like hardware) NMR machines or so. There is enough IT in medicine nowadays to find a suitable job.
Don't go for a programmers job (you are probably to old for that anyway), but go for Information Analysis, Customer Support or something else that brings you in contact with medical people. That will give you a good entry into the the IT field and a good chance to find a job.
If you want something more technical go for the above mentioned job anyway. Then after some time make a switch inside the company to another kind of job.
As for skills: a bit of programming knowledge is always welcome. But for your job it would be better to have some course in information analysis. A more general business course might help too.
Slashdot Mirror
1) What to do about the non-text media?
Wikipedia says that some pictures are public domain and other have been released by the publisher just for use by Wikipedia. It does not indicate which rights apply to which picture and so we are left with their conclusion that copying is at your own risk. Something similar seems to apply for the sound fragments.
Shouldn't Wikipedia have a strict PD or GPL license only policy in these areas? Or will it slowly eclipse the copy sites by depriving them of the multimedia files.
2) Is their a limit to the growth of the articles?
As a webmaster for a classical music site I regularly check the pages with composer biographies and I have concluded that they keep growing. This leads me to question whether there is a limit to this process. Or will it go on until we have book size documents. More philosophical the question would be: does Wikipedia want to be just an encyclopedia online or does it have the higher goal of including all human knowledge.
Many opensource companies get part of their income from making closed source versions or add-on products. They can do this only if they own the source or if it is in the public domain.
As for commecial companies ripping off the source to make their own closed source version: I don't believe that is a real problem after 5 or 10 years. If the software hasn't been developed for so long it obviously has lost its appeal. If in that case a closed source company is making something from it, it clearly has added some new value to it and it is not just hiking on the success of the OS product. In that case it may actually stimulate the OS community by giving new directions for development.
I believe that the GPL should have a clause that 5 or 10 years after publication the software falls in the public domain. This is long enough that with normally maintained software nobody will run away with it and start his own version, while it gives users the benefit that if the software is negelected at some point someone else can take over on a commercial base.
Personally, I think Microsoft has fallen down by focusing too much on corporate America.
I agree. Microsoft tries time and again to lead in the business market, while in the end the new sources of growth are in the consumer market. See the browser, multimedia, the graphic user interface, the game stations (Xbox) and the handheld market (Palm, Blackberry). Phone operating systems are one of the few areas where they were present from the beginning.
The main benefits that Vista can have for business are stability and safety against intruders - features that will only become apparent when the software is released on the market. Microsoft has had several mediocre releases (Windows 98 and ME), so you cannot expect business to trust them that the next one will be a good one.
> If Google can detect fraudulent clicks, they should also be able to
> b) tell you when and by what IP each fraudulent click has been committed.
No, they should not. Every strategy can be beaten. Including Google's strategy to find fraudulent clicks. So they intentionally keep this secret.
But of course some of the rejected tricks are known:
- Google is quite clear that texts like "click on my Google adds to sponsor my site" are not allowed
- if most clicks come from one or a few IP addresses the case is clear.
- with Google Analytics they can follow what happens with the click. If from your site 1 in 1000 clicks results in an order while other sites get 1 in 10 there is something fishy going on on your side.
- with Google being the main source of visitors for many sites they know your user demography. If you get visitors from the whole world but most of your clicks come from New York they may know enough.
I miss consistency. HTML, javascript and CSS should be part of one system. Now it is a bit of a mess.
Just take the simple background color:
- in old html it is bgcolor, in css this is transformed in background-color and in javascript this becomes backgroundColor.
- old html hasn't been integrated very well. bgcolor should have become a deprecated but supported synonym for background-color. Instead there are subtle differences in implementation, making the whole a bit inpredictable for the uninitiated.
Tellertest gives a good overview of alternative counters. Statcounter looks interesting, but I have to much pageviews for them. Now I am trying CountStat as a replacement for Nedstat.
I surely will try Google when it is working.
I found Google Analytics' information rather strange. It is all talk that seems directed at big budget companies about how they can help them to make money. And then when you register they are talking about non-commercial.
Well, I have nearly 200K visitors a month too and I can't even get a living for myself. So TRN isnt doing that bad. But their subject is of course more commercial than mine (free classical downloads).
That said I miss all the obvious advertising for an IT site (IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Dell, etc.). There is a lot money going around in IT, but you won't find it all with only Google Adsense. Maybe they should look at the more commercial IT sites to get an idea of which advertisements they are missing.
As it looks now Apple will have to switch twice: first to the present Intel offerings (probably 32 bits). And later on to the definitive version: 64 bits.
And that is the optimistic variant of the story. More probably Intel will enter some dead alleys before it finds the right formula for 64 bits.
Apple would have done better to wait for an appealing 64 bit architecture instead of buying into a vague plan.
I tried it with the subject of my website (classical mp3s). The Google results are quite good. Yahoo gives a first page that looks like Google would have given two years ago.
For example some websites refer for their content to mp3.com. As mp3.com is no longer the free music hosting site it once was these sites basically just contain dead links. Yet in Yahoo they still are ranked high.
If XHTML validity is your only argument you are going the wrong way.
I expect that XHTML will never become a real standard because it denies the fact that a webpage is a fusion of two trees (data and layout).
The W3C standard is designed by language purists. It doesn't take into account the most basic requirement: HTML is a language that should be usuable both for absolute beginners and for IT people.
People keep using tables, innerHTML and other "outdated" stuff because they are simple solid solutions to their problems. The "modern" alternatives are more complicated and less intuitive.
The W3C people might do better to provide real basic standardisation like making HTML, CSS and javascript use the same properties.
My statistics are even more extreme with Google over 95% and both Yahoo and MSN neglectable.
For Yahoo the main explanation seems to be that their search results are so old. They look very much like what Google might have given 3 years ago - including sites that are now dead or have moved. My site is younger so they largely overlook it.
MSN search probably just has very few users...
When I compair the Amazon site with B&N for books Amazon has a bit more choice and gives more insight in second and and third party prices. But in most cases the B&N page is more informative about the book itself.
As an affiliate I find it rather sloppy that Amazon doesn't have a better integration for its national sites. You have to apply for each site seperately and you get your money seperately. And where Google adwords is advanced with bank transfers Amazon still pays with old fashioned checks. Affiliates are asked to get their product data from an XML database that quite often gives different results on availablity as the Amazon search engine.
All in all my impression is that execution is rather sloppy. It will not be easy but there definitely is room for competitors to improve on what Amazon offers.
In designing programming languages two things are key: simplicity and power. HTML lives up to that standard. A total amateur can within a day make quite nice pages.
Unfortunately all those modern standards do not live up to those basic requirements. They are much to complicated. Just make a basic page with some XHTML, CSS and javascript and you have three different incompatible languages. The standards world would need a dictator to finally force a harmonisation between those three.
Or take the DIV. This is an incomprehensible abstraction that is impossible to explain to the simple homepage hacker. There is a much more comprehensible alternative: the TABLE. But the language purists dislike it so much that they didn't even bother to make the two compatible.
The modern standards remind me of object oriented programming. It took may years of hype before you could expose its limitations without being ridiculed.
You exaggerate only a bit. The EU mandarins are on a crash course with the majority of their citizens on many fronts. Besides the software patents there are also the constitution, Turkey and its excess of regulations.
Microsoft has always been a nerd company. Their books about how to program and do a project are famous. Their organisation is top. Their people are top. They don't have the fast-growing shares and organisation of the past, but they are still very attractive.
They are weak on new ideas - they have always been. But when they take over an idea they do it with a perfectionist zeal that usually sooner or later leaves the competition in the dust.
At the moment they have a defensive period in which they have to invest much in making their products more secure. This won't bring them much money, but sooner or later they will find a new markets to grow in.
I still hope that some day a company will make a toolbar that offers cards, emoticons and all the other gadgets that seduce people to install those nasty adware products.
I have written in different languages, among them C, Basic and PHP. I believe in simplicity: I must be able to explain a friend who doesn't know how to program at all how the code works.
C++ never appealed to me because I found it too complicated. Except for the predefined window classes I seldom found a problem that couldn't better be solved with just functions. But maybe I didn't work on big enough projects.
When I started scripting for the web, I evaluated PERL, but I found it often obscure compared to PHP. At that time Python was still rather obscure, so I didn't give it a serious thought and PHP is now my main language.
It is not so much that I hate using complicated code (I do a lot with regular expressions), but I do hate waisting a lot of time understanding old code when it could have been "worded" in a more understandable way.
I am very curious how version 1.0 will work out. I guess we will first get a beta 1 version. Very probably the editors will be only a selected group and alongside you would still have the main Wiki where everybody can contribute.
At the sideline you would have a discussion board where everybody could place his comments about the beta, including remarks about partiality. It would probably take half a year to solve the main issues and one can declare version 1.0. However, all the thousands of small conflicts in the world (like a controversial extension to your city) can never be solved.
It is also nice to speculate how the Wikipedia will develop once there is a version 1 (V1) alongside the freely editable (FE) version. My guess would be that every new entry in the FE version will be compared to the V1 version. At that point the editor will make one of the following decisions:
- it makes the text worse: the FE text is set back to the V1 version
- no change in quality: nothing to do, the FE text will stay different from the V1 version
- it is an improvement. In this case the text might either be immediately included in the V1 version or it might me marked for later consideration.
This would make the version 1 a constant work in progress. You would have version 1.0.9999 at some time.
I remember some pop psychology book (author forgotten) with a story about some blind person getting vision when he was an adult. The problem was that he couldn't cope with it and got psychological problems. When his vision started deteriorating again he felt relieved.
Will this boy have the same problems?
My methods are:
- The webalizer weblogs provided by my hosting provider. Disadvantage is that they mostly provide top-10s. So I get no data on the other pages. Also you count a lot of bots.
- Google adwords and other advertisers with tracking pixels (like CJ). Problem is that if you compare them they give widely different values for the same page.
- Nedstat. I like the referer information. But I find it too much work to give every page its own counter.
- My own counter. Basically a piece of javascript that says "myimage.src=mycounter.php?url=theurl". It is primitive but it is my own so that I can easily extend it.
Next I also occasionally look to 404 errors that are generated on my site. Unfortunately nearly half of them come from Yahoo Slurp that finds it necessary to check for urls that haven't been on my site for nearly a year.
The genre-list of GarageBand.Com is very restricted. They don't even have the genre classical.
Compare that to the elaborate list of genres and sub-genres that mp3.com offered and GBC is no serious contender.
GBC shall also have the right to use the Material for the purpose of promoting GBC products and services.
This line seems rather innocent to me.
I would think that they need this legal stuff to mention you in their top-50s and other promotional gimmicks.
I have the dutch toolbar. In the past this just resulted in a setting of the default language to dutch without me being able to do much against it. Now it has become worse: when I type "www.google.com" I am automatically redirected to "www.google.nl".
Google, please stop playing Big Brother!
We have seen several sentences in the US where Microsoft had to change the way it does business. They just kept fighting those rulings until they were made irrelevant by the passage of time.
With a fine this trick doesn't work, so I think that this is the first punishment that really hurts. OK, it is a tiny amount for Microsoft, but it sets the tune. Maybe the next time Microsoft is on trial in the US the US will consider a fine too.
I don't expect MS too raise prices for this. They set their prices at the level that they think the market can bear. That won't change, so the prices won't change.
First of all: computers is a profession for the young. In many IT jobs you are old at 40, both because you can't keep up with all the new technology that comes along and because you are less creative at the problem solving that is at the core of many IT jobs.
If I where in your place I would find some job at a company working somewhere in medicine. Maybe Hospital Information systems or (if you like hardware) NMR machines or so. There is enough IT in medicine nowadays to find a suitable job.
Don't go for a programmers job (you are probably to old for that anyway), but go for Information Analysis, Customer Support or something else that brings you in contact with medical people. That will give you a good entry into the the IT field and a good chance to find a job.
If you want something more technical go for the above mentioned job anyway. Then after some time make a switch inside the company to another kind of job.
As for skills: a bit of programming knowledge is always welcome. But for your job it would be better to have some course in information analysis. A more general business course might help too.
Good luck!