You're missing by far the biggest intranet vendors. Verity is the king of this market, and have been since the mid-90s. They get a lot of mileage out of their OEM sales; it sounds simpler to a company if they hear that they "already have Verity" within Documentum or Cold Fusion or whatever.
It'll be very interesting to see what they do with the Inktomi purchase. (They bought the productized search before Yahoo snarfed up the external services.) Inktomi is IMHO the best intranet search engine right now. (I believe Verity is dropping the Inktomi name and is calling the tool Ultraseek, which goes back to Inktomi's acquisition of Intelliseek.) The purchase gave Verity yet another leg up with enterprise search, it'll be interesting to see if they leverage the technology or if they see this more as a marketing move.
Google is obviously a big player here too. Don't need to evangelize to the/. crowd on that. However Gooogle still has a way to go in understanding how to tackle enterprise search.
Autonomy is another big player in the enterprise, though I am less familiar with their tools.
Other interesting enterprise search vendors include FAST, Isys, and Divine/Northern Light (yes they're still around). Teoma/Ask Jeeves could get there if they productize their search tool. Lots of interesting approaches there but nobody who's quite moved up into the first tier.
Anyway, it's a messy space even with all the consolidation above. I have no idea whether Ovation will keep up their enterprise sales effort or not; I suppose it depends on how profitable that part of the business is. Guess we'll find out...
Well, I'd agree with you for your purchased software. Problem is, bnetd makes for an easy way to use pirated versions of the software. Even _that_ wasn't enough to get Vivendi to bring a suit... until people started pirating the WC III beta. Playing the beta thru bnetd kind of violates the whole point of having a beta in the first place, and (arguably) jeopardizes Blizzard's ability to bring the product to market. I can see why that'd be a big concern.
Hmm. I like having my desk next to a window, I bet you could see the LEDs on the switch and DSL modem from outside. So someone could be "Loughry/Umphress Phreaking" my data xfer.
On the other hand, the DSL connection is on an exposed box on the back of the house. So there are probably easier ways to do the same thing...
And where do you expect to find quality news for free? Someone is paying for it; at least when it's ad-supported, you *know* where the potential conflicts of interest are.
<cliche>There is no free lunch. You get what you pay for.</cliche>
If you don't like the ads, subscribe and poof! No more ads -- and you're directly supporting the editorial work. If you don't want to read it, fine. Just don't expect that you'll find a lasting free ride elsewhere.
Don't worry about looking for the "tail of the big dipper." You can see meteors all over the sky, so it doesn't matter where you look. The radiant point is just where they all appear to come from -- if you traced their lines back, you'd see them intersect in Bootes.
Your best bet for meteor watching is to find a comfortable chair and a place where you can watch a large part of the sky. And make sure to find the darkest skies possible. (Insert rant about light pollution here.) You might also want to make sure it's not cloudy.
It's not a bad idea in principle. Go to a site, see links to pages that deal with the concepts on the site. Browser-side control of how a site displays isn't anything new, and I think it's a bit disingenuous for/.ians to decry its ability to "re-edit anybody's site."
However...
The whole concept of just linking to MS sites is just ludicrous. I don't know of any one company that can provide good info on a wide range of topics. The right way to do this -- of course -- would be to offer a spec for creating your own list of word-link associtations, or even for pulling these from the net. Then the user could configure which list to use -- for instance, choosing between Websters or the Oxford English as your dictionary. But of course that's not what MS is doing. Instead, they assume that they can tell you everything you need to know about, well, everything.
No thanks. I'm not going to let any single source spoon-feed me information, let alone a company that's already demonstrated an amazing disinterest in serving my needs.
An article like that is just a response from someone who doesn't "get it" and feels obligated to defend himself for not being in the with-it crowd. Fine, he doesn't like the book, tastes differ. But it's funny to see the vitriol he pours on it's supposed geeky fans.
Sure, some of us are incredibly geeky, there's the whole D&D connection, etc. But you're just as likely to find tweedy academics or -- gosh -- just average plain John/Jane Doe folks who love the books as pale computer professionals.
Frankly I think he's just trying to get a rise out of the fandom. His ad hominem attacks don't even do a good job of masquerading as literary criticism.
There's only one way to effectively protest this kind of stuff... vote with your dollars. That would mean informing them of your intention to stop using thier service unless they change their plans.
I don't know if I could do that, though, if I didn't have an alternative to DSL. I have no interest in going back to the bad old modem days. That's a tough choice. It's like a drug dealer... first we'll get you hooked, then we'll take everything you've got.
Dammit, more to add to my reading list
on
American Gods
·
· Score: 2
I just got done reading Smoke and Mirrors, an excellent collection of Gaiman's short stories. He has an amazing way of telling stories that are at the same time both familiar and deeply strange. Definitely recommended.
That collection is somewhat focused on English myth, as much as anything. I kept wondering what he would do with American myth -- or the lack thereof. And now he's done just that. It's not like I don't have too much to read already...
You've got to learn that there's a such thing as diminishing returns.
Yeah, no kidding. I wonder when we'll reach a general threshold where people ignore advertising because it's become too pervasive, misleading, and just not useful. It's kind of an arms race -- viewers becoming more cynical and jaded, while advertisers become more sophisticated.
I know we're all waiting to see how the partial collapse of web advertising plays out. What's more interesting to me is to wonder what will happen if (when) we see a similar collapse in advertising in other media. Think about how much "stuff" is supported by advertising. Think about how much of your GDP (wherever you are) comes from the flow of advertising dollars. All that stems from a certain confidence in the success of advertising. If that confidence ever wavered, we would face major shifts in the operation of our economy. Whether or not you think that would be a good thing is a different question. =)
I worry that observers/media will sieze on this as another example of the problems with the space program. In reality, things don't always work. It even looks like it's operating as planned -- it's actually a backup system that's causing problems, the main works fine.
This stuff isn't easy, and if we only want to use technology that has 0% risk, we're going to sit on the ground for a long time. Hey, this is real life. Stuff happens, you change your plans, fix it, and move on.
I'll put my money on the AI doing a good job when they actually perfect filters back home.
Depends on what you're asking the filter to do. I can imagine, for instance, that NASA ends up with some number of corrupt images. Or perhaps it'll catch an image with a reflection from the sun in the frame, washing the rest out.
I would hope that NASA doesn't need a pr0n filter for its satellite cameras...
I've been doing an experiment with myself: don't watch any trailers and see if makes the movie better.
That just shows a lack of commitment. After all, you still know what the movie's about, right? You've seen ads and such, right? You know the title, right?
You should avoid all media that discuss movies (including/.). Have a friend blindfold you and drop you off at the theater. Buy a ticket randomly. ("I'll have whatever's in theater #6, please.") Keep the blindfold on until the movie starts -- wouldn't want to see any other trailers, right? =)
So this stuff happens at E3. So what? I don't buy games based on what goes on there.
I'm not sure what is supposed to happen if E3 becomes more "grown up". Is that the magic step to making games into "Big Business"? Games are already big enough business. Going more mainstream is not going to result in better games.
Airlines have done this extensively for years. The price of a ticket varies tremendously based on how full the flight is. The guy or gal sitting next to you may have paid twice what you did -- or half.
It is a bit of a different situation, since there's only X seats on a given flight. But still, I'm surprised that people don't find this objectionable. (Though I'm more surprised that TicketMaster hasn't started using this approach for concert tickets...)
I think what was ment by "...The ISS is _it_..." was that the ISS is the pinacle of what we will be able to achieve in space (not the best reusable launch platform) unless we get a more effecient / faster turn-around / simpler reusable
launch system.
That's what I meant, sorry if I was less than clear.
This isn't somebody's desktop computer, but rather is an extremely complicated and expensive piece of nearly irreplaceable hardware that will kill if not properly prepared.
That's my point. I'm not saying that we should take less time checking out the shuttle; we need reusable orbital transports that are one iteration less complicated, expensive, and irreplaceable.
A 747 turns around as fast as it does because many generations of aircraft preceded it, and billions of dollars and trillions of man hours in engineering, maintenance, and experience, have been spent to achieve those goals.
We can't get to the 747 level all at once. But we can at least iterate to the next generation. There's no doubt that getting stuff into orbit is a hell of a difficult job. But given the 20 years of learning we have on the shuttle, we could build something that's better. Not perfect, just better.
If you have to go through a 1.2M-item checklist before sending it up again, that's more like rebuildable than reusable.
If we are serious about having the ability to do interesting things off this planet, we need a reusable vehicle that can be turned around much more simply. The ISS is _it_ until we get a simpler way into orbit.
The (non-tech) people I talk to who have a choice seem to see it pretty much as a wash. They see the technical advantages of DSL but don't really think they'll see a difference (right or wrong). Pricing is the same either way.
So in the end, they seem to choose based upon which monopoly they hate the most -- the telco or the cable co. Kind of like voting for President.
Jobs is an odd guy. He's got a true love of technology; he likes doing things the right way, not the easy way. That's good. But he thinks his way is the only way, especially anything that has to do with design. That's bad.
This worked for 16 years because Mac OS was obscure enough that there wasn't a critical mass of hacking for it. With OS X now there's a whole new class of hackers interested in modding the OS. I fear we'll see Apple playing Whack-A-Mole with these kinds of projects for some time to come. Let's just hope they wise up sooner rather than later and realize this kind of project is exactly what will give the platform enough appeal to prosper.
Personally, if it's a service that's important to me, I'd rather know they're using a business model that a) will last and b) will reward them for providing good service. An ad-supported service is at the mercy of the advertisers. If they don't do well, then the site goes under. (Not to mention, that if you're beholden to the advertisers, you suddenly have a vested interest in not hosting content the advertisers don't like.)
But beyond that, an ad-supported site makes more money when it's better at getting ads in your face. It only needs to provide good enough service to keep eyeballs there. If they need to keep my $20/month or whatever, they're more motivated to make sure the thing works well.
Bottom line... I hope some of the sites I use -- including Yahoo -- start making more money directly off users and rely less on advertising. The only question is whether it will work. It'll be interesting to see how Salon's experiment works out.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing by far the biggest intranet vendors. Verity is the king of this market, and have been since the mid-90s. They get a lot of mileage out of their OEM sales; it sounds simpler to a company if they hear that they "already have Verity" within Documentum or Cold Fusion or whatever.
It'll be very interesting to see what they do with the Inktomi purchase. (They bought the productized search before Yahoo snarfed up the external services.) Inktomi is IMHO the best intranet search engine right now. (I believe Verity is dropping the Inktomi name and is calling the tool Ultraseek, which goes back to Inktomi's acquisition of Intelliseek.) The purchase gave Verity yet another leg up with enterprise search, it'll be interesting to see if they leverage the technology or if they see this more as a marketing move.
Google is obviously a big player here too. Don't need to evangelize to the /. crowd on that. However Gooogle still has a way to go in understanding how to tackle enterprise search.
Autonomy is another big player in the enterprise, though I am less familiar with their tools.
Other interesting enterprise search vendors include FAST, Isys, and Divine/Northern Light (yes they're still around). Teoma/Ask Jeeves could get there if they productize their search tool. Lots of interesting approaches there but nobody who's quite moved up into the first tier.
Anyway, it's a messy space even with all the consolidation above. I have no idea whether Ovation will keep up their enterprise sales effort or not; I suppose it depends on how profitable that part of the business is. Guess we'll find out...
What's the most unusual (hopefully amusing and not dangerous) encounter you've had with a fan?
Well, I'd agree with you for your purchased software. Problem is, bnetd makes for an easy way to use pirated versions of the software. Even _that_ wasn't enough to get Vivendi to bring a suit... until people started pirating the WC III beta. Playing the beta thru bnetd kind of violates the whole point of having a beta in the first place, and (arguably) jeopardizes Blizzard's ability to bring the product to market. I can see why that'd be a big concern.
Hmm. I like having my desk next to a window, I bet you could see the LEDs on the switch and DSL modem from outside. So someone could be "Loughry/Umphress Phreaking" my data xfer.
On the other hand, the DSL connection is on an exposed box on the back of the house. So there are probably easier ways to do the same thing...
Not Harlan Ellison, that was Orson Scott Card. But that's the right story...
"The law would have required minors to show parental consent before playing violent or sexually explicit video games in public arcades"
Try reading the article next time...
<cliche>There is no free lunch. You get what you pay for.</cliche>
If you don't like the ads, subscribe and poof! No more ads -- and you're directly supporting the editorial work. If you don't want to read it, fine. Just don't expect that you'll find a lasting free ride elsewhere.
Your best bet for meteor watching is to find a comfortable chair and a place where you can watch a large part of the sky. And make sure to find the darkest skies possible. (Insert rant about light pollution here.) You might also want to make sure it's not cloudy.
It's not a bad idea in principle. Go to a site, see links to pages that deal with the concepts on the site. Browser-side control of how a site displays isn't anything new, and I think it's a bit disingenuous for /.ians to decry its ability to "re-edit anybody's site."
However...
The whole concept of just linking to MS sites is just ludicrous. I don't know of any one company that can provide good info on a wide range of topics. The right way to do this -- of course -- would be to offer a spec for creating your own list of word-link associtations, or even for pulling these from the net. Then the user could configure which list to use -- for instance, choosing between Websters or the Oxford English as your dictionary. But of course that's not what MS is doing. Instead, they assume that they can tell you everything you need to know about, well, everything.
No thanks. I'm not going to let any single source spoon-feed me information, let alone a company that's already demonstrated an amazing disinterest in serving my needs.
An article like that is just a response from someone who doesn't "get it" and feels obligated to defend himself for not being in the with-it crowd. Fine, he doesn't like the book, tastes differ. But it's funny to see the vitriol he pours on it's supposed geeky fans.
Sure, some of us are incredibly geeky, there's the whole D&D connection, etc. But you're just as likely to find tweedy academics or -- gosh -- just average plain John/Jane Doe folks who love the books as pale computer professionals.
Frankly I think he's just trying to get a rise out of the fandom. His ad hominem attacks don't even do a good job of masquerading as literary criticism.
Yawn.
There's only one way to effectively protest this kind of stuff... vote with your dollars. That would mean informing them of your intention to stop using thier service unless they change their plans.
I don't know if I could do that, though, if I didn't have an alternative to DSL. I have no interest in going back to the bad old modem days. That's a tough choice. It's like a drug dealer... first we'll get you hooked, then we'll take everything you've got.
I just got done reading Smoke and Mirrors, an excellent collection of Gaiman's short stories. He has an amazing way of telling stories that are at the same time both familiar and deeply strange. Definitely recommended.
That collection is somewhat focused on English myth, as much as anything. I kept wondering what he would do with American myth -- or the lack thereof. And now he's done just that. It's not like I don't have too much to read already...
You've got to learn that there's a such thing as diminishing returns.
Yeah, no kidding. I wonder when we'll reach a general threshold where people ignore advertising because it's become too pervasive, misleading, and just not useful. It's kind of an arms race -- viewers becoming more cynical and jaded, while advertisers become more sophisticated.
I know we're all waiting to see how the partial collapse of web advertising plays out. What's more interesting to me is to wonder what will happen if (when) we see a similar collapse in advertising in other media. Think about how much "stuff" is supported by advertising. Think about how much of your GDP (wherever you are) comes from the flow of advertising dollars. All that stems from a certain confidence in the success of advertising. If that confidence ever wavered, we would face major shifts in the operation of our economy. Whether or not you think that would be a good thing is a different question. =)
I worry that observers/media will sieze on this as another example of the problems with the space program. In reality, things don't always work. It even looks like it's operating as planned -- it's actually a backup system that's causing problems, the main works fine.
This stuff isn't easy, and if we only want to use technology that has 0% risk, we're going to sit on the ground for a long time. Hey, this is real life. Stuff happens, you change your plans, fix it, and move on.
I'll put my money on the AI doing a good job when they actually perfect filters back home.
Depends on what you're asking the filter to do. I can imagine, for instance, that NASA ends up with some number of corrupt images. Or perhaps it'll catch an image with a reflection from the sun in the frame, washing the rest out.
I would hope that NASA doesn't need a pr0n filter for its satellite cameras...
That just shows a lack of commitment. After all, you still know what the movie's about, right? You've seen ads and such, right? You know the title, right?
You should avoid all media that discuss movies (including /.). Have a friend blindfold you and drop you off at the theater. Buy a ticket randomly. ("I'll have whatever's in theater #6, please.") Keep the blindfold on until the movie starts -- wouldn't want to see any other trailers, right? =)
Now that would be cool.
So this stuff happens at E3. So what? I don't buy games based on what goes on there.
I'm not sure what is supposed to happen if E3 becomes more "grown up". Is that the magic step to making games into "Big Business"? Games are already big enough business. Going more mainstream is not going to result in better games.
Airlines have done this extensively for years. The price of a ticket varies tremendously based on how full the flight is. The guy or gal sitting next to you may have paid twice what you did -- or half.
It is a bit of a different situation, since there's only X seats on a given flight. But still, I'm surprised that people don't find this objectionable. (Though I'm more surprised that TicketMaster hasn't started using this approach for concert tickets...)
I think what was ment by "...The ISS is _it_..." was that the ISS is the pinacle of what we will be able to achieve in space (not the best reusable launch platform) unless we get a more effecient / faster turn-around / simpler reusable launch system.
That's what I meant, sorry if I was less than clear.
This isn't somebody's desktop computer, but rather is an extremely complicated and expensive piece of nearly irreplaceable hardware that will kill if not properly prepared.
That's my point. I'm not saying that we should take less time checking out the shuttle; we need reusable orbital transports that are one iteration less complicated, expensive, and irreplaceable.
A 747 turns around as fast as it does because many generations of aircraft preceded it, and billions of dollars and trillions of man hours in engineering, maintenance, and experience, have been spent to achieve those goals.
We can't get to the 747 level all at once. But we can at least iterate to the next generation. There's no doubt that getting stuff into orbit is a hell of a difficult job. But given the 20 years of learning we have on the shuttle, we could build something that's better. Not perfect, just better.
If you have to go through a 1.2M-item checklist before sending it up again, that's more like rebuildable than reusable.
If we are serious about having the ability to do interesting things off this planet, we need a reusable vehicle that can be turned around much more simply. The ISS is _it_ until we get a simpler way into orbit.
Maybe they can beam back in time and kill off the crew of Voyager. And erase all the tapes of those episodes while they're at it.
The (non-tech) people I talk to who have a choice seem to see it pretty much as a wash. They see the technical advantages of DSL but don't really think they'll see a difference (right or wrong). Pricing is the same either way.
So in the end, they seem to choose based upon which monopoly they hate the most -- the telco or the cable co. Kind of like voting for President.
Jobs is an odd guy. He's got a true love of technology; he likes doing things the right way, not the easy way. That's good. But he thinks his way is the only way, especially anything that has to do with design. That's bad.
This worked for 16 years because Mac OS was obscure enough that there wasn't a critical mass of hacking for it. With OS X now there's a whole new class of hackers interested in modding the OS. I fear we'll see Apple playing Whack-A-Mole with these kinds of projects for some time to come. Let's just hope they wise up sooner rather than later and realize this kind of project is exactly what will give the platform enough appeal to prosper.
Personally, if it's a service that's important to me, I'd rather know they're using a business model that a) will last and b) will reward them for providing good service. An ad-supported service is at the mercy of the advertisers. If they don't do well, then the site goes under. (Not to mention, that if you're beholden to the advertisers, you suddenly have a vested interest in not hosting content the advertisers don't like.)
But beyond that, an ad-supported site makes more money when it's better at getting ads in your face. It only needs to provide good enough service to keep eyeballs there. If they need to keep my $20/month or whatever, they're more motivated to make sure the thing works well.
Bottom line... I hope some of the sites I use -- including Yahoo -- start making more money directly off users and rely less on advertising. The only question is whether it will work. It'll be interesting to see how Salon's experiment works out.
Cheers,
Dave