This is not the only non-open Google product to date. Pretty much all of Google's portfolio that doesn't come in or out of the main search page is closed-standard. Google Maps is one of the rare recent shining examples of openness, but Maps as a resource in itself was orphaned by Google when it stuffed and devalued it into Google Local.
In the meantime... Google Earth, Picasa, Google Talk, Google Desktop, Google Deskbar, and now Google DRM Video are notoriously limited to commercial platforms and/or tools. So much for Google being the preferred choice of the O/S world.
I mean, I guess it is an Apple story from the perspective that Steve Jobs made the announcement, and it is Apple hardware and software being showcased.
But the real star of the story is the Intel chip, who has broken through the Apple-Motorola-IBM blue wall of the PowerPC.
Intel breaking into the Apple market is a bigger story than Apple bowing to Intel market pressure.
My car has none of those systems, and I drive 20-25K miles a year. And I don't encounter those sorts of problems under typical conditions, which for my current area includes copious amounts of rain.
Then again, I don't drive an unstable, top-heavy, gas-guzzling status symbol.
''Should part of this process be checking the URL of the submitter to make sure that it is legitimate?''
You're fuckin' right, it should. Not doing that sort of basic validity checking is why Slashdot is just the world's most famous blog instead of a trusted news site.
That was with Faradic, and was a similar case. This was my personal website, I had a quotes page full of tidbits from famous people, friends, and random people on the Web and USENET. Since not everyone had a handle or used a real name on USENET, some quotes were attributed to their email address.
Then a harvester bot came across that page looking for bites. It slurped up every email address on the page. This harvester, as it turned out, was used by someone who tries to sell you page ranking services (or something page related). So everyone whose email address was on that page -- which did not include me -- got an email from someone saying "We can make www.keithtyler.com soar" or whatever.
So one of these people got such an email and, through some form of idiocy, the web address (my web address) in the spam was looked up and the hosting company was notified that, basically, someone received a spam with my web address in it. Naturally I had something to do with it.
Well, that's what the spam nazi at Faradic thought, anyway, and my account was immediately suspended for spamming. This brilliant egg either didn't know how to read, or didn't read the spam. Or didn't care. I played email and phone tag with this person until I reached someone sensible at Faradic, who happily reopened my account, but my dealings with the spam nazi continued, who was urging me to repent for my sins.
When I finally got a copy of the sent to me, I figured it all out within minutes. My conclusions did not phaze the Faradic spam nazi, who didn't care, and insisted that I had received a one-time reprieve, and that if I ever spammed again, I would have to pay a "$500 cleanup fee".
I believe I told the spam nazi to fuck himself (in politer terms), and shortly thereafter moved to a new host (not my current host), who provided me with much less grief for the same price.
FWIW this was years ago, and before that point I'd had no problems with Faradic. But there was no way in hell I was going to risk a second "offense" in the eyes of their unreasonable spam nazi at the time.
When I was a sysadm, I was a sensible one. Eventually I was laid off. One wonders how the world continues to operate when sensible admins are terminated, and nonsensible ones get to unilaterally shut down people's accounts and charge them half a G.
PS: Of course, I also immediately spam-proofed the email addresses on my entire website from simple harvesting. This is probably a Good Idea.
Remember when Republicans eschewed taxes as an undue punishment on trade and wealth? Remember when the Republican Party was committed to cutting taxes? And now a fully Republican/conservative US government wants to implement what would be the biggest tax since excise tax?
A lot of people, including, damningly, many Wikipedia admins, believe for some strange reason that there is a Wikipedia policy against editing entries about yourself.
This is false. It persists because people allow it to persist, and because people with influence over the system (i.e. the admins) allow it to persist, in the face of a lack of consensus on the issue.
The concept of not editing articles about yourself is only a guideline, and not hard policy. The page outlining this policy says this. Regardless, plenty of people in WP who wish to define policy insist on calling it and treating it as a strict policy.
This may, in fact, show just how hopeless and useless it is to compile and communicate correct information. People will continue to push their agendas with their own version of the facts, whether its about Wikipedia policy or WMD.
But yes, that is going be a shitload of data. Yes, that is a technical term. It means "more than the customer will ever be prepared to allocate".
And for those of you in data mining in that market: Better beg for more hardware, cause if the customer's going to be legally forced to store all that data, they're going to start wanting to make it useful.
"People who are liked by people who like computers and the Internet are very happy about web pages that post stories that are chosen without a lot of good reasons."
Bleh. I think I'll save that for the kindergarteners and ESL students.
By supporting my point, the article is depressing.:)
But I can't support the notion of hierarchially controlled information. It's at odds with every notion of free speech, freedom, democracy, and egalitarianism that I seek (and I don't think I'm alone among geeks,/. troll accounts notwithstanding).
The conundrum is: I'd rather see content be promoted according to its fundamental objective merit, but circles of elité are notoriously bad at performing such a task, as are computers.
When an entire castle worth of geeks stands at quiet attention to hear Rob go on about how bad his Perl code is, that means he's made geek culture elite. I don't know what other criteria you need. But since you're busy putting left-field words in my mouth, you probably haven't had time to think of any of your own.
Anyone who hasn't noticed this already either is already in the elite, or is content being a fanboy:
The digerati are cheering the blogosphere, hailing it as the falling of the final barrier to the open public medium that the Internet was supposed to be -- in much the same way that the creation of the Wiki is seen as the long-awaited achievement of the knowledge-network that the hypertexted Web was supposed to be.
But of course the digerati are cheering the blogosphere -- it's their personal domain.
As the theory goes, the blogosphere makes it so anyone at all can put their interests, views, and discoveries on their blog, some portion of the Internet masses (especially blog-readers) will see it, share it, spread it around. Each person can be their own broadcast tower, theoretically equal in visibility and reach potential to anyone else.
Except it's not quite like that (bandwidth and space limitations being only part of the antithesis). There is a subtle, unspoken but implicit "popular Darwinism" that occurs in this process. As it is the digerati that does much of the reading and spreading, it is the digerati that ends up doing the saying of what gets read and spread.
Certainly a few well-placed blogs have launched otherwise typical netizens into the ranks of the digerati -- Rob Malda, Philip Kaplan, Drew Curtis to name a few off the top of my head. And to some extent, they deserve some sort of recognition of being the first to come up with certain online concepts.
As a result, though, they also each help hold the keys to the gate of the blogosphere. And despite being independent, free-willed individuals, capable of making their own value judgements, a barrier to entry into the slipstream of the blogosphere manages to form among them. Despite being controlled in only limited amounts by individual people, only certain elements make it through this cultural elite.
Of course, not all of the "blogerati" are on the mountain because of their blogging pluck; some are there because they have always been there, in the digerati circles, which is doubly reflexive: being in the digerati means, by definition, that they will try to be on top of any new "hip" Net development; and by being digerati, they will get an boosted amount of attention when they do so.
It would be wonderful if the blogosphere was truly an open community. The thought that there really could be an open exchange of information (casual or otherwise) that people could contribute to, and that information be assessed and categorized, and be available to those who were looking for it or had an interest in it, is one that brings forth feelings of true community, egalitarianism, and diversity. Instead, it is a sort of random quasi-natural selection, where some are in, and some are out, and there is no real reason to it.
You had a better chance to get read in 1997 by posting to Usenet than you do in 2005 posting to Slashdot.
At first I thought this was an acceptable idea, now I feel it's pointless. There's nothing in MW or WP to prevent you from creating troll accounts. Account creation doesn't add any real accountability. You don't have to give an email address at all.
In fact, creating such an account makes it harder to discover your IP. An anonymous contributor is known by their IP; a registered user's IP is a secret known only to admins and others with database access, and there are strong policies against looking those IPs up casually.
What Wikipedia, and the Web, really needs, is to rein in its motley crew of anonymous content providers, and limit the transmission of information only by those people who have vested interests and/or are part of a social elite that circle-jerks each other's senses of literary value.
Now the whole world thinks that John K. Singelthaler or whoever he is, was maybe thought by someone once to be involved with the Kennedy assassination and that he at one time lived in a foreign country. Just think of the piles of hate mail and death threats he is likely to receive by the half dozen people who wandered onto that Wikipedia article about him between May and October.
Slashdot Mirror
You're welcome. If you weren't anonymous, I'd mod you -5 pointless.
You know, any geek worth his salt has heard of the importance of redundancy in a high-dependency system.
This is not the only non-open Google product to date. Pretty much all of Google's portfolio that doesn't come in or out of the main search page is closed-standard. Google Maps is one of the rare recent shining examples of openness, but Maps as a resource in itself was orphaned by Google when it stuffed and devalued it into Google Local.
In the meantime... Google Earth, Picasa, Google Talk, Google Desktop, Google Deskbar, and now Google DRM Video are notoriously limited to commercial platforms and/or tools. So much for Google being the preferred choice of the O/S world.
I mean, I guess it is an Apple story from the perspective that Steve Jobs made the announcement, and it is Apple hardware and software being showcased.
But the real star of the story is the Intel chip, who has broken through the Apple-Motorola-IBM blue wall of the PowerPC.
Intel breaking into the Apple market is a bigger story than Apple bowing to Intel market pressure.
My car has none of those systems, and I drive 20-25K miles a year. And I don't encounter those sorts of problems under typical conditions, which for my current area includes copious amounts of rain.
Then again, I don't drive an unstable, top-heavy, gas-guzzling status symbol.
''Should part of this process be checking the URL of the submitter to make sure that it is legitimate?''
You're fuckin' right, it should. Not doing that sort of basic validity checking is why Slashdot is just the world's most famous blog instead of a trusted news site.
That was with Faradic, and was a similar case. This was my personal website, I had a quotes page full of tidbits from famous people, friends, and random people on the Web and USENET. Since not everyone had a handle or used a real name on USENET, some quotes were attributed to their email address.
Then a harvester bot came across that page looking for bites. It slurped up every email address on the page. This harvester, as it turned out, was used by someone who tries to sell you page ranking services (or something page related). So everyone whose email address was on that page -- which did not include me -- got an email from someone saying "We can make www.keithtyler.com soar" or whatever.
So one of these people got such an email and, through some form of idiocy, the web address (my web address) in the spam was looked up and the hosting company was notified that, basically, someone received a spam with my web address in it. Naturally I had something to do with it.
Well, that's what the spam nazi at Faradic thought, anyway, and my account was immediately suspended for spamming. This brilliant egg either didn't know how to read, or didn't read the spam. Or didn't care. I played email and phone tag with this person until I reached someone sensible at Faradic, who happily reopened my account, but my dealings with the spam nazi continued, who was urging me to repent for my sins.
When I finally got a copy of the sent to me, I figured it all out within minutes. My conclusions did not phaze the Faradic spam nazi, who didn't care, and insisted that I had received a one-time reprieve, and that if I ever spammed again, I would have to pay a "$500 cleanup fee".
I believe I told the spam nazi to fuck himself (in politer terms), and shortly thereafter moved to a new host (not my current host), who provided me with much less grief for the same price.
FWIW this was years ago, and before that point I'd had no problems with Faradic. But there was no way in hell I was going to risk a second "offense" in the eyes of their unreasonable spam nazi at the time.
When I was a sysadm, I was a sensible one. Eventually I was laid off. One wonders how the world continues to operate when sensible admins are terminated, and nonsensible ones get to unilaterally shut down people's accounts and charge them half a G.
PS: Of course, I also immediately spam-proofed the email addresses on my entire website from simple harvesting. This is probably a Good Idea.
If only.
Remember when Republicans eschewed taxes as an undue punishment on trade and wealth? Remember when the Republican Party was committed to cutting taxes? And now a fully Republican/conservative US government wants to implement what would be the biggest tax since excise tax?
Do parties even mean anything anymore?
A lot of people, including, damningly, many Wikipedia admins, believe for some strange reason that there is a Wikipedia policy against editing entries about yourself.
This is false. It persists because people allow it to persist, and because people with influence over the system (i.e. the admins) allow it to persist, in the face of a lack of consensus on the issue.
The concept of not editing articles about yourself is only a guideline, and not hard policy. The page outlining this policy says this. Regardless, plenty of people in WP who wish to define policy insist on calling it and treating it as a strict policy.
This may, in fact, show just how hopeless and useless it is to compile and communicate correct information. People will continue to push their agendas with their own version of the facts, whether its about Wikipedia policy or WMD.
Actually, if AOL becomes 5% good, then Google only becomes 2%*95% evil, and in turn, AOL only becomes 5%*2%*95% good, and so on.
God dammit, I think this is starting to turn into a calculus problem.
If Google = Good and AOL = Evil, then AOL is now 5% good and Google is now 2% evil.
Entropy dictates that over time, the goodness and evilness of both will continue towards each other until they reach stability.
Dammit, you beat me to it.
But yes, that is going be a shitload of data. Yes, that is a technical term. It means "more than the customer will ever be prepared to allocate".
And for those of you in data mining in that market: Better beg for more hardware, cause if the customer's going to be legally forced to store all that data, they're going to start wanting to make it useful.
Dammit, if I wanted to watch idiots being fooled by a large corporation, couldn't I just go to the mall?
Oh good, I can put all that experience at Simple English Wikipedia to good use.
"People who are liked by people who like computers and the Internet are very happy about web pages that post stories that are chosen without a lot of good reasons."
Bleh. I think I'll save that for the kindergarteners and ESL students.
Three cheers for an evolving language!
By supporting my point, the article is depressing. :)
/. troll accounts notwithstanding).
But I can't support the notion of hierarchially controlled information. It's at odds with every notion of free speech, freedom, democracy, and egalitarianism that I seek (and I don't think I'm alone among geeks,
The conundrum is: I'd rather see content be promoted according to its fundamental objective merit, but circles of elité are notoriously bad at performing such a task, as are computers.
Gah, that's why I don't get modded up! My 10-letter-word count is too high for 7th grade reading levels!
When an entire castle worth of geeks stands at quiet attention to hear Rob go on about how bad his Perl code is, that means he's made geek culture elite. I don't know what other criteria you need. But since you're busy putting left-field words in my mouth, you probably haven't had time to think of any of your own.
Yay, your meritless snarky retort wins!
/., a long time ago.
Actually I've gotten about half a dozen stories posted to
So... insert another 25 cents.
Anyone who hasn't noticed this already either is already in the elite, or is content being a fanboy:
The digerati are cheering the blogosphere, hailing it as the falling of the final barrier to the open public medium that the Internet was supposed to be -- in much the same way that the creation of the Wiki is seen as the long-awaited achievement of the knowledge-network that the hypertexted Web was supposed to be.
But of course the digerati are cheering the blogosphere -- it's their personal domain.
As the theory goes, the blogosphere makes it so anyone at all can put their interests, views, and discoveries on their blog, some portion of the Internet masses (especially blog-readers) will see it, share it, spread it around. Each person can be their own broadcast tower, theoretically equal in visibility and reach potential to anyone else.
Except it's not quite like that (bandwidth and space limitations being only part of the antithesis). There is a subtle, unspoken but implicit "popular Darwinism" that occurs in this process. As it is the digerati that does much of the reading and spreading, it is the digerati that ends up doing the saying of what gets read and spread.
Certainly a few well-placed blogs have launched otherwise typical netizens into the ranks of the digerati -- Rob Malda, Philip Kaplan, Drew Curtis to name a few off the top of my head. And to some extent, they deserve some sort of recognition of being the first to come up with certain online concepts.
As a result, though, they also each help hold the keys to the gate of the blogosphere. And despite being independent, free-willed individuals, capable of making their own value judgements, a barrier to entry into the slipstream of the blogosphere manages to form among them. Despite being controlled in only limited amounts by individual people, only certain elements make it through this cultural elite.
Of course, not all of the "blogerati" are on the mountain because of their blogging pluck; some are there because they have always been there, in the digerati circles, which is doubly reflexive: being in the digerati means, by definition, that they will try to be on top of any new "hip" Net development; and by being digerati, they will get an boosted amount of attention when they do so.
It would be wonderful if the blogosphere was truly an open community. The thought that there really could be an open exchange of information (casual or otherwise) that people could contribute to, and that information be assessed and categorized, and be available to those who were looking for it or had an interest in it, is one that brings forth feelings of true community, egalitarianism, and diversity. Instead, it is a sort of random quasi-natural selection, where some are in, and some are out, and there is no real reason to it.
You had a better chance to get read in 1997 by posting to Usenet than you do in 2005 posting to Slashdot.
At first I thought this was an acceptable idea, now I feel it's pointless. There's nothing in MW or WP to prevent you from creating troll accounts. Account creation doesn't add any real accountability. You don't have to give an email address at all.
In fact, creating such an account makes it harder to discover your IP. An anonymous contributor is known by their IP; a registered user's IP is a secret known only to admins and others with database access, and there are strong policies against looking those IPs up casually.
What Wikipedia, and the Web, really needs, is to rein in its motley crew of anonymous content providers, and limit the transmission of information only by those people who have vested interests and/or are part of a social elite that circle-jerks each other's senses of literary value.
Now the whole world thinks that John K. Singelthaler or whoever he is, was maybe thought by someone once to be involved with the Kennedy assassination and that he at one time lived in a foreign country. Just think of the piles of hate mail and death threats he is likely to receive by the half dozen people who wandered onto that Wikipedia article about him between May and October.
EyeToy: Play2 for the Playstation has an air guitar game.
And a drum game, and a boxing game, and a bunch of others.
Drat, already been done.
All that blather, just to be told in the end to write my Congressman and give to the EFF. Well gee, thanks.
Save your frigging breath (and my time) next time.