However, there is some nudging to be made. Google alerts the user when results are being ommitted. Nothing peaks one's interest more than "There's something here they don't want you to see".
People keep saying this, but it is not (AFAICT) true: Google.cn inserts a boilerplate notice at the bottom of every page that results may be censored. It does not provide any specific information about the extent or details of censorship.
More to the point, shouldn't "BBCWatcher" be quoting... I dunno... the BBC and not some mouth-frothing from a blogoloony bin? I demand that he be re-nicked.
That business with Apple (at least as described in the Slashdot link) is simply insane. I doubt it's generalizable to anything, although your distinction between telecommuting and outsourcing is obviously correct.
Well, there's an enormous difference between religion and politics attempting to decree scientific fact (Galileo, creationism) and religion and politics attempting to define biomedical ethics (eugenics, stem cells, euthanasia).
But as the quote a few stories down, praising Michael Bloomberg for "It is impressive how he very directly demonizes those that would politicize stem cell research, global warming, Terry Schaivo, and evolution" demonstrates -- the lure of conflating them in order to reduce everything to A War On Science is irresistible to a lot of lazy thinkers.
(I love, by the way, the notion that "demonizing" ideas marks one as an advocate of science against religion.)
Those popup ads that the Times of India link is spraying, that aren't blocked by Javascript window suppression in Firefox or Mozilla -- is there a way to get rid of them?
I've seen them elsewhere (interestingly, always on foreign newspaper sites) but web searches only turn up people complaining about them, only to have jackasses insist that they must be spyware-infected because Firefox is infallible. (As I type this I'm realizing what answer I'm likely to receive, but nonetheless...)
Others denounced the university for not expelling him, with one poster saying it should be "bombed by Iranian missiles." Many others, meanwhile, said the student should be beaten or beheaded, or that he and the married woman should be put in a "pig cage" and drowned.
Well, they definitely sound ready for blogging! Too bad the story says the government has just blocked Technorati.
Actually, the most interesting bit in there was about the plagiarism case. Too bad they didn't provide more detail -- I hadn't heard about that angle before.
Thanks! I know that (and have some more specific stations, as well) but I like to have one giant station because a) I like the variety and b) I'd like to give the algorithm as much to work with as possible to try to find new genres of interest. (Essentially, the opposite of the OP's desire.) Thanks, though!
One of the things I like about Pandora (although it probably won't solve your problem) is that you can have it tell you why it chose a particular song. If you're really looking to outsmart it, you can take a look at those and try to finetune your preferences.
My one gripe is that it pulls multiple similar songs -- I have one station with all my likes tossed together, and it always plays fou or five dancehall songs followed by four or five hair metal songs followed by.... I suppose it's some sort of optimization to reduce the number of queries, or something like that.
By the way, does Pandora actually have advertising? I've never heard any. Have they not brought it online yet?
If this happened on a Un*x machine (Sun, HP, Linux, BSD), the damage would be confined and limited to what the user had unprotected. It would be highly unusual for a Un*x user hit with a StarOffice macro exploit to have enough exposure to compromise the system.
We have this discussion all the time, but once more can't hurt: on single-user Linux systems or Unix workstations, losing $HOME is far more serious than losing system files.
If he built a successful business around a piece of software, the chances are good he's smart enough to listen to rational arguments.
Better yet, given that he's built a succesful business by writing version 1 in VB and that you don't actually have any rational arguments, why not defer to his judgment? The worst that can happen is that the next time this question comes up, you'll have a useful opinion instead of just vague concern that VB isn't 1337 enough.
In Mediterranean countries with antiquities everywhere (Israel, Greece, Turkey), all children are taught that if you find any artifact, bones, cave or whatever, you don't touch it and you inform someone so experts can be brought in. It's like "Don't get into strangers' cars!" in other countries -- they have public service announcements about archeology during cartoons.
Ummm, Roger Tinkoff -- you might want to wear rubber gloves befor wiping up some random weirdo's blood...
Anyway, my favorite part is the two professors eagerly spouting theories about "fight clubs" as though they'd ever heard of this before the USA Today reporter came calling.
No, my real favorite part is:
Five-year fight club veteran Dinesh Prasad, 32, a heavily tattooed Santa Clara engineer, said he once broke a rib in a match but never complained to his fellow combatants. He also recently skipped his first wedding anniversary to attend a fight rather than drive to Los Angeles, where his wife is finishing law school.
Yeah, I'd noticed the "insulting China" bit also. I think one of the posts here hit it on the nose -- the issue is a grievance over alleged improprieties in the standards review process, nothing more.
Here's a more helpful link, that also a) isn't a verbatim AFP story with irritating advertising "links" and b) doesn't have a current forum thread on "The future and the ways of the "Jew"" (which is even more moronic than it sounds -- how dimwitted do you have to be to spell "rich" with a "t"?).
In general, a lot of these responses come down to "The most obscure thing I know is the most important thing everyone must know!" Whether it's installing Gentoo, coding in assembler or studying automata theory -- that becomes the dividing line between the unwashed masses and the computing elite.
Lotus Notes has got to have a place on that list -- hell, it should be on the list of The 1 Worst Tech Product Of All Time. And if you weight items by the number of people forced to use them, it'd be even more dominant.
Microsoft Bob continues to take a beating that I think is unfair. (I wonder how many of the people who talk about it have ever seen it.) It was pretty useless, true, but it was also an attempt to be genuinely innovative, and deserves credit for failing while trying to do something really new.
As long as they're all running Windows with the highest access levels (admin), they're potentially missing serious security problems.
They're not all running with admin access, as I understood the story, just the developers. The whole thing sounds like the usual struggle between programmers and engineers wanting everything exactly the way they want it the moment they want it, and the sysadmins who want to keep them from breaking things. You get that on Macs, Unix, VMS, or anything else.
Your first point is a non-sequitur (the appearance of source code was treated as big news, open-source or not, when source code has been available for years; the second (like pretty much everything that begins with "Repeat after me:") is simply nonsense.
I'm not familiar with the book you're linking, but presumably its title is itself a reference to the Sherlock Holmes story where Holmes notes the significance of the dog that didn't bark in the night. Maybe Stallman is honoring Conan Doyle's birthday?
Incidentally, why have we suddenly started commemorating Sir Arthur's birthday this year? I can't recall anyone ever mentioning it before.
Honestly, this story got so much hype because a) The Community is too dense to grasp that Java source code has been available for years, no matter how many times it's explained to them and b) Stallman's musing that "Perhaps because people do not read these announcements carefully." applies to, say, editors at various open-source news outlets at least as much as to "people" in general.
Slashdot Mirror
People keep saying this, but it is not (AFAICT) true: Google.cn inserts a boilerplate notice at the bottom of every page that results may be censored. It does not provide any specific information about the extent or details of censorship.
More to the point, shouldn't "BBCWatcher" be quoting ... I dunno ... the BBC and not some mouth-frothing from a blogoloony bin? I demand that he be re-nicked.
I plan to, also, but his point is still a valid one...
That business with Apple (at least as described in the Slashdot link) is simply insane. I doubt it's generalizable to anything, although your distinction between telecommuting and outsourcing is obviously correct.
But as the quote a few stories down, praising Michael Bloomberg for "It is impressive how he very directly demonizes those that would politicize stem cell research, global warming, Terry Schaivo, and evolution" demonstrates -- the lure of conflating them in order to reduce everything to A War On Science is irresistible to a lot of lazy thinkers.
(I love, by the way, the notion that "demonizing" ideas marks one as an advocate of science against religion.)
I've seen them elsewhere (interestingly, always on foreign newspaper sites) but web searches only turn up people complaining about them, only to have jackasses insist that they must be spyware-infected because Firefox is infallible. (As I type this I'm realizing what answer I'm likely to receive, but nonetheless...)
Actually, the most interesting bit in there was about the plagiarism case. Too bad they didn't provide more detail -- I hadn't heard about that angle before.
Thanks! I know that (and have some more specific stations, as well) but I like to have one giant station because a) I like the variety and b) I'd like to give the algorithm as much to work with as possible to try to find new genres of interest. (Essentially, the opposite of the OP's desire.) Thanks, though!
GarageBand will do that, with a bit of manual intervention.
My one gripe is that it pulls multiple similar songs -- I have one station with all my likes tossed together, and it always plays fou or five dancehall songs followed by four or five hair metal songs followed by.... I suppose it's some sort of optimization to reduce the number of queries, or something like that.
By the way, does Pandora actually have advertising? I've never heard any. Have they not brought it online yet?
We have this discussion all the time, but once more can't hurt: on single-user Linux systems or Unix workstations, losing $HOME is far more serious than losing system files.
Better yet, given that he's built a succesful business by writing version 1 in VB and that you don't actually have any rational arguments, why not defer to his judgment? The worst that can happen is that the next time this question comes up, you'll have a useful opinion instead of just vague concern that VB isn't 1337 enough.
In Mediterranean countries with antiquities everywhere (Israel, Greece, Turkey), all children are taught that if you find any artifact, bones, cave or whatever, you don't touch it and you inform someone so experts can be brought in. It's like "Don't get into strangers' cars!" in other countries -- they have public service announcements about archeology during cartoons.
Anyway, my favorite part is the two professors eagerly spouting theories about "fight clubs" as though they'd ever heard of this before the USA Today reporter came calling.
No, my real favorite part is:
Fast forward to Marital Fight Club...Yeah, I'd noticed the "insulting China" bit also. I think one of the posts here hit it on the nose -- the issue is a grievance over alleged improprieties in the standards review process, nothing more.
Here's a more helpful link, that also a) isn't a verbatim AFP story with irritating advertising "links" and b) doesn't have a current forum thread on "The future and the ways of the "Jew"" (which is even more moronic than it sounds -- how dimwitted do you have to be to spell "rich" with a "t"?).
In general, a lot of these responses come down to "The most obscure thing I know is the most important thing everyone must know!" Whether it's installing Gentoo, coding in assembler or studying automata theory -- that becomes the dividing line between the unwashed masses and the computing elite.
Speaking of Lotus Notes, I only just got around to reading yesterday's Daily WTF...
Microsoft Bob continues to take a beating that I think is unfair. (I wonder how many of the people who talk about it have ever seen it.) It was pretty useless, true, but it was also an attempt to be genuinely innovative, and deserves credit for failing while trying to do something really new.
Now the EU is moving in on our American urban legends!
They're not all running with admin access, as I understood the story, just the developers. The whole thing sounds like the usual struggle between programmers and engineers wanting everything exactly the way they want it the moment they want it, and the sysadmins who want to keep them from breaking things. You get that on Macs, Unix, VMS, or anything else.
If you have a desktop icon for the CD drive, right-click on it. Or use "Play->DVD, VCD or CD Audio".
Your first point is a non-sequitur (the appearance of source code was treated as big news, open-source or not, when source code has been available for years; the second (like pretty much everything that begins with "Repeat after me:") is simply nonsense.
Incidentally, why have we suddenly started commemorating Sir Arthur's birthday this year? I can't recall anyone ever mentioning it before.
Honestly, this story got so much hype because a) The Community is too dense to grasp that Java source code has been available for years, no matter how many times it's explained to them and b) Stallman's musing that "Perhaps because people do not read these announcements carefully." applies to, say, editors at various open-source news outlets at least as much as to "people" in general.