I have to agree with some of the comments in the linked article. Even with 10-15% click fraud, the marketing impact of Internet ads is far more measurable than the traditional media. What percentage of the time are people paying attention to the barrage of TV, radio and print ads we are exposed to every day? How do you know? Just look at the description (in the article) of the statistics that the owner of MostChoice has compiled about people clicking on his ads! Location, how long they looked at the site, whether they became a customer, etc, etc. Being able to measure your marketing has its advantages too, even if you have to deal with click fraud. (The mute button and the bathroom break have not destroyed TV ads yet.)
What this really about is companies have paid for advertising assuming near 100% valid clicks, and upon discovering that they in fact only get 85% valid clicks, feel they have paid too much. The natural result, then, is going to be a 15% drop in the cost per click, both to ad purchasers, and in payout to affiliate websites which display them. Or maybe a segmented price scheme, where sites more likely to experience useless clicks will cost less per ad. The people setting up bogus ad-filled sites will see their revenue drop proportionate with their "success" at attracting bogus clicks.
Don't get me wrong. The more effective Google and Yahoo can be at eliminating fraudlent clicks, the better. But there is going to be some point of diminishing return when deciding what is a bogus click is not worth the effort, and you will just have to lower the price or risk losing ad-business.
A great way to make money during the various gold rushes in the West was to sell people the prospecting tools. Less profit per transaction, but you made money whether they succeeded or not...
If the problem is so bad, maybe Americans should be supplied with passports disguised as 'insert country of choice', and all given elocution lessons before they leave the US?
Right, because we all want to spend the time to read the 150 comments posted under every story. Crawling the internet yourself is also a good way to find interesting articles rather than submitting to the tyranny of the editors.
Along those lines, I think this is one of the neater ideas I've seen: FPGA for Socket 940
Plugging a FPGA directly into the Hypertransport bus on a multisocket mobo sounds like a fantastic idea. It's not quite as easy to scale as coprocessors that live on PCI cards, but the bandwidth benefit should be huge. The downer is that these chips cost $4500 now, so the performance improvement would have to be pretty tremendous to be cost effective.
This was my first thought when I first stumbled on the PhysX a year ago. A decent coprocessor for doing Monte Carlo simulations of a detector (which is a lot of vector arithmetic and 3d geometry calculation) could be very handy. Unfortunately, the website is 100% targeted at game developers with lots of information about their Windows SDK, and no low level chip info. I have no idea what the actual hardware does, and no way to interface with it from our Linux applications. I sent a question to their sales email address asking what their plans were regarding hardware specs and scientific computing, but got no reply. I'm not surprised since I am just some random guy not in their target market.
Given the size of the gaming market, I don't even think someone saying "I'm building a 5000 node compute cluster and want to investigate using your PPU" would register with Ageia. Too bad...
Re:Holy Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Batman!
on
Gadgets, Then & Now
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah, it's a near certainty that scientific computation will expand to fill the storage and CPU limits of current technology. The only constant is the patience of the computer operator...:)
You know, I was really disappointed when I found out my phone had this tracking capability, but there was no way to actually display my coordinates on the phone. Then at least I would get something out of this even if I'm not having an emergency.
That's formally the rule, but patents still get issued, since the patent examiners do not have enough time to carefully evaluate every patent. It also doesn't help that the job of the patent writer is to torture English to its breaking point while describing their invention.
See the end of this section for links to recent perpetual motion machine patents.
If people want to pay $750 + lawyer fees to patent objects which don't work, that's fine by me. A hundred perpetual motion machine patents won't stop anyone from doing anything useful.:)
Uh, then they get lost. You don't lose any money, since nothing is deducted until the check is cashed by the party listed on the check. You will of course have to deal with the late fee from the company you were supposed to be paying. Mail lossage is pretty rare, except for localized incidents of mail theft from personal mailboxes. I've been dropping checks into the sturdy blue US Postal Service mailboxes for years now, and I haven't had a single one get lost. Ever.
It is also quite possible that for any given article, you are more likely to hear from people who want to complain. Sure, lots of people hold contradictory opinions. However, any given set of slashdot comments represents a tiny fraction of the entire community, and is extremely non-random.
Some fraction of the absurdity you perceive is because bashing is more fun than praising.
You need to convert the AC to DC, but then you also need to output several different DC voltages. Motherboards expect +/-12V, +/-5V, and +3.3V. If you can provide this device with a single, stable 12V source, it will do the rest. That's useful.
And the result of that irritating comment system is that the average comment is utterly retarded. Take every thing that's ever annoyed you here, and multiply it by 10x.
The biggest problem for me is the upload speed. Download speeds on my cable modem often exceed 300 kBytes/sec (and sometimes hit 500+), which is good enough for most of my data-moving needs. However, the upload speed is capped at 40 kBytes/sec. This is extremely frustrating as it makes it nearly impossible to back up my home computers to a remote site in a timely fashion. Even with rsync, it can take a day to fully synchronize with the remote server, given the amount of data I routinely generate when working.
I've looked around for faster home broadband connections, but getting much beyond 40-60 kB/sec is difficult without jumping to commercial connections that cost double what I'm currently paying just to get the same speed. I'm not a business, and don't need the better reliability of a commercial link. I just want something a little closer to symmetric with my download speed.
I'm confused why they are asking or even need to "rearchitect" the Internet to do this. Can't they just use some QoS features of their router hardware to give packets for "partners" higher priority? Lower latency, more bandwidth, etc, etc. What other power is needed?
I was flipping through a book on business ethics at the bookstore the other day, and the author summarized the point in a way I hadn't thought of before.
In the short term, "good" business is frequently what most people would call unethical. Double-billing clients, manipulating financial reports to avoid devaluing stock, and stingy benefits for employees all "help" the immediate bottom line in one way or another. In the long term, it will usually catch up with you. People, whether they be customers, employees, or shareholders, are going to notice that doing business with you is not in their best interest, and move on. (That is assuming the unethical behavior isn't also illegal, in which case you will probably also be saying hello to a judge.)
So a sustainable business has to find a way to benefit owners, employees, and customers in the long term, or pretty soon they will be without one of those things. And without capital, labor and income, you are nothing more than a line item at a liquidation auction.
I've seen more than one person suggest a filter which would junk messages which contain more than X% (say 2-5%) misspellings. This would not only eliminate all that foreign spam which you can't read anyway, but a great many "English" spams which contain all sorts of garbage to fool keyword filters. Of course, spammers will compensate by padding emails with 98% Shakespeare, so that advantage won't last long.
As a fringe benefit it will also filter out anyone who can't be bothered to spell most of their email correctly, which might be handy for those who receive crazy rants due to their online postings.:)
...while regular multiprocessor have to use the FSB (or HyperThreading for AMD's Opterons) link, and therefore have to compete with every other device using said FSB/HT (on top of getting much higher latencies)
That's not quite true either. Each Opteron has a separate memory controller (dual-channel), which means that each CPU can have its own pipe to a bank of memory. So if the CPU needs to access memory in its banks, it will not have to contend with the other CPU over the HT link. A NUMA-aware OS will try to schedule processes on the same CPU which controls the process's allocated memory. If your programs can fit in one CPU's memory bank, then you can get bus contention down pretty low.
This is why SMP makers are going nuts over the Opteron. Your effective memory bandwidth scales linearly with the number of processors, assuming your processes partition nicely.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree with some of the comments in the linked article. Even with 10-15% click fraud, the marketing impact of Internet ads is far more measurable than the traditional media. What percentage of the time are people paying attention to the barrage of TV, radio and print ads we are exposed to every day? How do you know? Just look at the description (in the article) of the statistics that the owner of MostChoice has compiled about people clicking on his ads! Location, how long they looked at the site, whether they became a customer, etc, etc. Being able to measure your marketing has its advantages too, even if you have to deal with click fraud. (The mute button and the bathroom break have not destroyed TV ads yet.)
What this really about is companies have paid for advertising assuming near 100% valid clicks, and upon discovering that they in fact only get 85% valid clicks, feel they have paid too much. The natural result, then, is going to be a 15% drop in the cost per click, both to ad purchasers, and in payout to affiliate websites which display them. Or maybe a segmented price scheme, where sites more likely to experience useless clicks will cost less per ad. The people setting up bogus ad-filled sites will see their revenue drop proportionate with their "success" at attracting bogus clicks.
Don't get me wrong. The more effective Google and Yahoo can be at eliminating fraudlent clicks, the better. But there is going to be some point of diminishing return when deciding what is a bogus click is not worth the effort, and you will just have to lower the price or risk losing ad-business.
A great way to make money during the various gold rushes in the West was to sell people the prospecting tools. Less profit per transaction, but you made money whether they succeeded or not...
That's called the CIA.
No kidding. This title is from the Zero Wing school of sentence construction.
Right, because we all want to spend the time to read the 150 comments posted under every story. Crawling the internet yourself is also a good way to find interesting articles rather than submitting to the tyranny of the editors.
This is required by the Central Hype-Limit Theorem:
FPGA for Socket 940
Plugging a FPGA directly into the Hypertransport bus on a multisocket mobo sounds like a fantastic idea. It's not quite as easy to scale as coprocessors that live on PCI cards, but the bandwidth benefit should be huge. The downer is that these chips cost $4500 now, so the performance improvement would have to be pretty tremendous to be cost effective.
Given the size of the gaming market, I don't even think someone saying "I'm building a 5000 node compute cluster and want to investigate using your PPU" would register with Ageia. Too bad...
Yeah, it's a near certainty that scientific computation will expand to fill the storage and CPU limits of current technology. The only constant is the patience of the computer operator... :)
You know, I was really disappointed when I found out my phone had this tracking capability, but there was no way to actually display my coordinates on the phone. Then at least I would get something out of this even if I'm not having an emergency.
See the end of this section for links to recent perpetual motion machine patents.
If people want to pay $750 + lawyer fees to patent objects which don't work, that's fine by me. A hundred perpetual motion machine patents won't stop anyone from doing anything useful. :)
Uh, then they get lost. You don't lose any money, since nothing is deducted until the check is cashed by the party listed on the check. You will of course have to deal with the late fee from the company you were supposed to be paying. Mail lossage is pretty rare, except for localized incidents of mail theft from personal mailboxes. I've been dropping checks into the sturdy blue US Postal Service mailboxes for years now, and I haven't had a single one get lost. Ever.
Some fraction of the absurdity you perceive is because bashing is more fun than praising.
You need to convert the AC to DC, but then you also need to output several different DC voltages. Motherboards expect +/-12V, +/-5V, and +3.3V. If you can provide this device with a single, stable 12V source, it will do the rest. That's useful.
And the result of that irritating comment system is that the average comment is utterly retarded. Take every thing that's ever annoyed you here, and multiply it by 10x.
I've looked around for faster home broadband connections, but getting much beyond 40-60 kB/sec is difficult without jumping to commercial connections that cost double what I'm currently paying just to get the same speed. I'm not a business, and don't need the better reliability of a commercial link. I just want something a little closer to symmetric with my download speed.
BTW, that's originally from the Onion, though it seems to be unreachable via their current online archives.
I'm confused why they are asking or even need to "rearchitect" the Internet to do this. Can't they just use some QoS features of their router hardware to give packets for "partners" higher priority? Lower latency, more bandwidth, etc, etc. What other power is needed?
In the short term, "good" business is frequently what most people would call unethical. Double-billing clients, manipulating financial reports to avoid devaluing stock, and stingy benefits for employees all "help" the immediate bottom line in one way or another. In the long term, it will usually catch up with you. People, whether they be customers, employees, or shareholders, are going to notice that doing business with you is not in their best interest, and move on. (That is assuming the unethical behavior isn't also illegal, in which case you will probably also be saying hello to a judge.)
So a sustainable business has to find a way to benefit owners, employees, and customers in the long term, or pretty soon they will be without one of those things. And without capital, labor and income, you are nothing more than a line item at a liquidation auction.
As a fringe benefit it will also filter out anyone who can't be bothered to spell most of their email correctly, which might be handy for those who receive crazy rants due to their online postings. :)
Yay for b0redatwork!
This is why SMP makers are going nuts over the Opteron. Your effective memory bandwidth scales linearly with the number of processors, assuming your processes partition nicely.