Crap, they snagged my shortcut. I use command-space as a Snergy.app shortcut to toggle iTunes play and pause. Now every time I try to start and stop my music I'm going to get a spotlight search box, I guess, unless I can change that shortcut -- I doubt it.
Well, fortunately, I'm never first in line to upgrade my Mac anyway. It will probably be a few months for me. I should go ahead and change my Synergy shortcut now to start getting used to something new.
It was taken about as seriously as something like that could have been taken, without the hindsight that we now have. I grew up in the seventies and eighties, the infancy of Islamic hijacking. These guys were largely crybabies who made a stink and usually didn't get what they wanted, and were usually captured and/or killed after a standoff on the ground after the flight landed. Occassionaly a crew member or passenger would get injured or killed, always a tragedy but always of extremely limited scale. And these hijackings were really, really rare.
So, Osama wants to hijack a US aircraft. Interesting. Let me know when we know more. Let me know when he has guys living all over the US and taking flight lessons in preparation for a major attack on a beautiful September day when they'll do something we never friggin' dreamed of. Let me know something then.
Well then folks will say we should have dreamed of it, that's what we get paid for or something like that. Well, OK. Tell you what. We'll restrict airports. We'll close down the first 8 rows or so of parking at airport terminals, we'll eliminate non-passengers from getting through security, we'll confiscate boxcutters, check shoes, take your cigarette lighters, profile those paying with cash and buying one-way tickets. Heck, we might even do the really smart thing and racially profile, since the liklihood of the attackers being of a certain race is extremely likely.
Oh wait, we can't do that. Yeah, that's right, silly me. They'll nail us to a cross if we do all that. "Why the heck are you doing this? What's the threat?" We'll tell them that another Islamic Fundamentalist wacko that they can't even pick out of a line-up wants to hijack and airliner. Then they'll understand.
On September 12th, the job of handling National Security on September 11th became a lot easier, with the only remaining required skill being time travel. If you have that skill, the job is yours. Otherwise shut up about how easy it is to figure out what's going on in the terrorist's minds and to keep them from doing every single thing we never imagined.
It seems their biggest problem is getting a wireless carrier to support it. So how soon until Steve Jobs just buys a wireless carrier? That's an impulse buy, right?:)
That's an excellent point, though there's no evidence that the headline is a LIE -- but it's certainly inappropriate, inflamatory and incorrect.
Turns out this law is an expansion of existing auctioneering law, applying to auctioneers who only do business online. It makes sense that people who didn't want to go through the licensing process would just get some auction software and make a website, telling their seller and bidders, "sorry, I can't auction in person, or I would have to get a license". The internet has become a loophole for them and this law was intended to close that loophole.
Why license auctioneers in the first place? Well it's all about trust. The auctioneer markets himself as a liasion betweeen buyer and seller -- he doesn't buy your property from you and then sell it as his property. He represents you as an agent while the property is still yours. This is a legal relationship and it's important for auctioneers to understand their legal responsibilities to buyer and seller. I could understand unscrupulous people seeking to take advantage of that position of trust getting around licensing and bonding laws by conducting business only online.
Ah, but wait -- as is sometimes the case with laws, it might have had an unintended side effect -- the eBay seller. Are they or are they not an auctioneer. Well that depends. Most people selling on eBay are not an intermediary, but the seller. eBay is the auctioneer, bringing buyer and seller together and controlling the bidding.
But then there are those people who have found that they are pretty good at selling things on eBay, and there are people who will pay them to sell their stuff on eBay for them. eBay consignment shops -- you may have heard of them. Many of them have had a certain amount of success. And some of them have heard from their local businessmen and/or governments, who are upset that their business is being infringed upon and these eBay kids don't have to get licensed or bonded.
And obviously their relationship in the eBay picture is different -- they're not the seller and they're not the auctioneer. But they're definitely an agent of the seller and they can have significant impact on the result of the auction based on their actions. Hence they have similar legal responsibilities and perhaps licensing for these people should be looked at.
Then there's the obvious public reaction -- $50,000 to sell on eBay? Madness! And inflamatory headlines don't help, either on slashdot or in the mainstream media.
I think we're dealing with two extreme opinions, neither of which are entirely correct.
First, there's the literary purist... in this case, a library professional. You have to have a lot of respect for these folks, who were very good at the information retrieval game before many of us showed up. I can understand resentment that these people have when they hear silly claims about how the Internet will make physical libraries irrelevant and contain "all the world's knowledge," etc. I can also understand how that resentment can lead these purists to identify the many faults of the online community -- not just the bloggers that don't take much care in what they post, but also well-established and highly-respected members of the online community, such as Google.
I'm not sure if his description of Google's "notoriously inefficient search engine" referred to their main web search engine, or just the engine that searches the books. If referring to Google as a whole, I respectfully disagree with his description, as I have found Google's efficiency to be incredibly high.
He goes on to say that "Google is, in fact, the device that gives you thousands of 'hits' (which may or may not be relevant) in no very useful order". Well, as is the case with library research, it depends on the person doing the searching. If you walk into a library with no knowledge of how to use it, all you see is shelves and shelves of books, with no way of finding what you need. But when you know how to use the tools in the library, such as the card catalog and the periodals guide, and now, yes, even electronic search engines, finding what you need becomes very efficient.
By the same token, and uninformed or undermotivated user will not be tremendously successful in finding information that they need on Google. Yes, there are other search engines, but I'll stick to Google, since it's the current gold standard. But the more you learn about it, the better at it you become.
It's also important when dealing with Google to realize that it does not contain all the world's knowledge or all the world's books. Nothing does. Not even libraries. And there are some things that you're much better off looking for in a library. But let's realize that there is value to full-text searching of books, which is something that libraries can't provide.
Mr Gorman seems to discount speed entirely, stopping short of describing it as the opposite of accuracy. The balance between speed and accuracy is important and always has been. It is very useful to be able to use the internet to find infomation VERY quickly. But if speed was my ONLY criterion, I would always use Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which takes you directly to the first result. That would give Google the only and final responsibility in determining what I'm looking for, and I can't turn that responsibility over to Google, because I am the searcher. It is very common for the first result to be what I want, because I put in very good search criteria in most cases. It is also quite common for me to skip over many, many Google search results because I know they're not what I'm looking for.
And yes, it's also common for me to read books, and to visit libraries and book stores. I would never consider any formal research work to be complete before checking in actual books.
The bottom line is that the well-informed researcher uses all of the tools at their disposal, and the Internet (and Google) are incredibly useful tools.
Then there are the bloggers. The good thing about blogging is that you can post whatever is on your mind without delay or editing. The bad thing about blogging is also that you can post whatever is on your mind without delay or editing. It's shortsighted to criticize the entire blogging community because some (many, actually) bloggers post a neverending stream of useless drivel. There is very useful and entertaining blogging done and just because it's kind of hard to find doesn't make it nonexistent.
Sorry, my fault. I didn't realize that pop-up blockers were looking at HTML source and refusing to run certain types of code, making the next logical step for the enemy to just change their code to something more obfuscated.
I thought that pop-up blockers actually prevented a window from opening that wasn't a direct result of an explicit user action. For example, a window that opens as a result of an onLoad event handler cannot open, but a window that opens as a result of an onClick event handler is allowed to open. At least that's the way I thought they were doing it.
Now that I find that simple (and juvenile) obfuscation gets around most blockers, I'm shocked and amazed that I enjoyed a period of YEARS without being bothered by pop-ups on my Mac, first in Chimera, renamed to Camino, and then in Safari. Now suddenly they're back with a vengeance and I'm pissed.
Why am I replying to an Anonymous Coward? Not sure.
This is not really old technology. Pieces of it are old. What's new is the ability to really do it in the real world, thanks to some pretty decent standards support by all the major browsers, including the XMLHTTP object, which is what makes it possible to send a request dynamically.
The name Ajax? Well that's just what this guy is calling it, and it's not an altogether bad name. Call it whatever you want, but he's absolutely not wrong that this is a new way of doing web applications. I took notice of this not long after I started using Gmail and saw what they were doing, and I've played around with this type of development recently, and it's really great.
So don't go around anonymously claiming to be an old, experienced hand surrounded by morons when you don't seem to know what you're talking about.
They oughta really integrate this thing... "buy this song", or at least "add a stub of this song to my playlist so I can easily find it once I'm connected to the Internet through iTunes". You can't beat the listening to good, commercial-free radio with the option to easily buy songs you like.
Yeah, sometimes I feel like somebody who doesn't appreciate the awesome non-web-search stuff that Google is doing might feel like a fast-food manager I used to work for:
"If you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean."
I've recently seen in Waffle House they have a sign for the cook.. after the last order, "Kill the flame and GET IN THE GAME". Meaning to turn off the gas burner (they NEVER do) and to "walk the line," cleaning. Hey, remind me to never go back to a food service job, where the very idea that your work might be done and you might sit around for a minute or two is ludicrous. I can't believe I used to live like that.
My point is that some of these projects that come out, as cool as they are, seem extraneous, almost like they're SO BORED with web searching that they just come up with this stuff in their spare time.
"Oh, so I suppose that search code is BUG FREE, then??!?! Huh, Google?"
I love Google. Love 'em. The mapping is awesome, the mail is awesome -- I even love Google Sets, which seems to be perpetually in the lab.
Thanks, I think I'll wait for Steve Jobs to demo it on a Mac, at which point it will have been done right -- built into the OS, graceful, beautiful, helpful, etc...
It is an interesting idea (as it was when this story was FIRST posted a year ago or more). It seems they have a new version since then but it's not a new slashdot story.
That list is woefully misleading. Yeah, the censorship in China is amazing and its wrong, but the sheer length of that list (25,064 URLs when I checked) tells you something about Chinese censorship. But the list is padded with many duplications.
I quickly came up with 7,375 unique URLs, not counting things like variations in case.
Google along is duplicated over 5,000 times:) Playboy variations are duplicated over 700 times. Amnesty International, over 200 times. CNN almost 500. The list goes on and on, literally:)
Let's not go throwing the word "immortality" around when the thing that's being discussed is the natural aging process that eventually makes us all mortal, no matter how safe our lives might be previously.
This will do nothing to keep us from jumping or falling off buildings, dying from any kind of trauma, disease or freak medical event.
Also I noticed that both a thousand year lifespan and living forever are mentioned in the story. So which is it? Well maybe I should RTFA:) It sure is long, though.
Thank you very much for the review/comment. I actually have not yet bought an Xbox, but I must say that the release of Burnout 3 and the realization that it would not be released for the Gamecube definition made me starting thinking seriously again about getting an Xbox.
In fact, it is our plan to get an Xbox anyway, mainly because we're getting tired of feeling like we're on the stepchild system when looking at the rental shelves. I've also heard awesome things about the Xbox and like a lot of the games, etc, etc.
Anyway, had I still been thinking about getting an Xbox just to play Burnout 3 -- see, my son and I absolutely LOVE the first two Burnouts -- in fact, it will probably be the first game we get anyway. My point is that your review really hit on points that I needed to hear. They've sold the franchise up the river, apparently -- lousy music, too much loading, stupid "effects" like the fish-eye blur. The first Burnout was awesome, the second one took some getting used to but now I like it a lot also. Sounds like the third one will be a disappointment (like Star Wars and The Matrix and Back to the Future -- OK, I kind of liked the 3rd Back to the Future) -- oh, and the worst of all -- The Godfather Part III. Shudder.
Slashdot Mirror
... CEO Jon S. von Tetzchne continues to prepare to drown a ridiculous and cold death in the north Atlantic Ocean.
RP
Crap, they snagged my shortcut. I use command-space as a Snergy.app shortcut to toggle iTunes play and pause. Now every time I try to start and stop my music I'm going to get a spotlight search box, I guess, unless I can change that shortcut -- I doubt it.
Well, fortunately, I'm never first in line to upgrade my Mac anyway. It will probably be a few months for me. I should go ahead and change my Synergy shortcut now to start getting used to something new.
RP
Amazing spectacles like these?
I would highly encourage the Linux community to take part of this open source petition
:)
Then what are you doing here? Everybody knows Slashdot is a Mac site now
RP
It was taken about as seriously as something like that could have been taken, without the hindsight that we now have. I grew up in the seventies and eighties, the infancy of Islamic hijacking. These guys were largely crybabies who made a stink and usually didn't get what they wanted, and were usually captured and/or killed after a standoff on the ground after the flight landed. Occassionaly a crew member or passenger would get injured or killed, always a tragedy but always of extremely limited scale. And these hijackings were really, really rare.
So, Osama wants to hijack a US aircraft. Interesting. Let me know when we know more. Let me know when he has guys living all over the US and taking flight lessons in preparation for a major attack on a beautiful September day when they'll do something we never friggin' dreamed of. Let me know something then.
Well then folks will say we should have dreamed of it, that's what we get paid for or something like that. Well, OK. Tell you what. We'll restrict airports. We'll close down the first 8 rows or so of parking at airport terminals, we'll eliminate non-passengers from getting through security, we'll confiscate boxcutters, check shoes, take your cigarette lighters, profile those paying with cash and buying one-way tickets. Heck, we might even do the really smart thing and racially profile, since the liklihood of the attackers being of a certain race is extremely likely.
Oh wait, we can't do that. Yeah, that's right, silly me. They'll nail us to a cross if we do all that. "Why the heck are you doing this? What's the threat?" We'll tell them that another Islamic Fundamentalist wacko that they can't even pick out of a line-up wants to hijack and airliner. Then they'll understand.
On September 12th, the job of handling National Security on September 11th became a lot easier, with the only remaining required skill being time travel. If you have that skill, the job is yours. Otherwise shut up about how easy it is to figure out what's going on in the terrorist's minds and to keep them from doing every single thing we never imagined.
RP
And they still can't get their stupid links working on their site.
RP
It's not phishers... it's phishermen. Sheesh ;)
RP
Well it's actually not even terribly funny -- a little. But it definitely wasn't intended to be Interesting.
RP
Cue the John Williams music... and that cute little tutorial animation they had in the movie with the southern "dino-sars" guy narrating.
But I digress... I'll never forget what a friend of mine said after we saw the movie together:
"I wasn't impressed with the special effects. But the dinosaur training was awesome."
RP
It seems their biggest problem is getting a wireless carrier to support it. So how soon until Steve Jobs just buys a wireless carrier? That's an impulse buy, right? :)
RP
That's an excellent point, though there's no evidence that the headline is a LIE -- but it's certainly inappropriate, inflamatory and incorrect.
Turns out this law is an expansion of existing auctioneering law, applying to auctioneers who only do business online. It makes sense that people who didn't want to go through the licensing process would just get some auction software and make a website, telling their seller and bidders, "sorry, I can't auction in person, or I would have to get a license". The internet has become a loophole for them and this law was intended to close that loophole.
Why license auctioneers in the first place? Well it's all about trust. The auctioneer markets himself as a liasion betweeen buyer and seller -- he doesn't buy your property from you and then sell it as his property. He represents you as an agent while the property is still yours. This is a legal relationship and it's important for auctioneers to understand their legal responsibilities to buyer and seller. I could understand unscrupulous people seeking to take advantage of that position of trust getting around licensing and bonding laws by conducting business only online.
Ah, but wait -- as is sometimes the case with laws, it might have had an unintended side effect -- the eBay seller. Are they or are they not an auctioneer. Well that depends. Most people selling on eBay are not an intermediary, but the seller. eBay is the auctioneer, bringing buyer and seller together and controlling the bidding.
But then there are those people who have found that they are pretty good at selling things on eBay, and there are people who will pay them to sell their stuff on eBay for them. eBay consignment shops -- you may have heard of them. Many of them have had a certain amount of success. And some of them have heard from their local businessmen and/or governments, who are upset that their business is being infringed upon and these eBay kids don't have to get licensed or bonded.
And obviously their relationship in the eBay picture is different -- they're not the seller and they're not the auctioneer. But they're definitely an agent of the seller and they can have significant impact on the result of the auction based on their actions. Hence they have similar legal responsibilities and perhaps licensing for these people should be looked at.
Then there's the obvious public reaction -- $50,000 to sell on eBay? Madness! And inflamatory headlines don't help, either on slashdot or in the mainstream media.
Any way you slice it, it's an interesting story.
RP
I think we're dealing with two extreme opinions, neither of which are entirely correct.
First, there's the literary purist... in this case, a library professional. You have to have a lot of respect for these folks, who were very good at the information retrieval game before many of us showed up. I can understand resentment that these people have when they hear silly claims about how the Internet will make physical libraries irrelevant and contain "all the world's knowledge," etc. I can also understand how that resentment can lead these purists to identify the many faults of the online community -- not just the bloggers that don't take much care in what they post, but also well-established and highly-respected members of the online community, such as Google.
I'm not sure if his description of Google's "notoriously inefficient search engine" referred to their main web search engine, or just the engine that searches the books. If referring to Google as a whole, I respectfully disagree with his description, as I have found Google's efficiency to be incredibly high.
He goes on to say that "Google is, in fact, the device that gives you thousands of 'hits' (which may or may not be relevant) in no very useful order". Well, as is the case with library research, it depends on the person doing the searching. If you walk into a library with no knowledge of how to use it, all you see is shelves and shelves of books, with no way of finding what you need. But when you know how to use the tools in the library, such as the card catalog and the periodals guide, and now, yes, even electronic search engines, finding what you need becomes very efficient.
By the same token, and uninformed or undermotivated user will not be tremendously successful in finding information that they need on Google. Yes, there are other search engines, but I'll stick to Google, since it's the current gold standard. But the more you learn about it, the better at it you become.
It's also important when dealing with Google to realize that it does not contain all the world's knowledge or all the world's books. Nothing does. Not even libraries. And there are some things that you're much better off looking for in a library. But let's realize that there is value to full-text searching of books, which is something that libraries can't provide.
Mr Gorman seems to discount speed entirely, stopping short of describing it as the opposite of accuracy. The balance between speed and accuracy is important and always has been. It is very useful to be able to use the internet to find infomation VERY quickly. But if speed was my ONLY criterion, I would always use Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which takes you directly to the first result. That would give Google the only and final responsibility in determining what I'm looking for, and I can't turn that responsibility over to Google, because I am the searcher. It is very common for the first result to be what I want, because I put in very good search criteria in most cases. It is also quite common for me to skip over many, many Google search results because I know they're not what I'm looking for.
And yes, it's also common for me to read books, and to visit libraries and book stores. I would never consider any formal research work to be complete before checking in actual books.
The bottom line is that the well-informed researcher uses all of the tools at their disposal, and the Internet (and Google) are incredibly useful tools.
Then there are the bloggers. The good thing about blogging is that you can post whatever is on your mind without delay or editing. The bad thing about blogging is also that you can post whatever is on your mind without delay or editing. It's shortsighted to criticize the entire blogging community because some (many, actually) bloggers post a neverending stream of useless drivel. There is very useful and entertaining blogging done and just because it's kind of hard to find doesn't make it nonexistent.
Sorry, my fault. I didn't realize that pop-up blockers were looking at HTML source and refusing to run certain types of code, making the next logical step for the enemy to just change their code to something more obfuscated.
I thought that pop-up blockers actually prevented a window from opening that wasn't a direct result of an explicit user action. For example, a window that opens as a result of an onLoad event handler cannot open, but a window that opens as a result of an onClick event handler is allowed to open. At least that's the way I thought they were doing it.
Now that I find that simple (and juvenile) obfuscation gets around most blockers, I'm shocked and amazed that I enjoyed a period of YEARS without being bothered by pop-ups on my Mac, first in Chimera, renamed to Camino, and then in Safari. Now suddenly they're back with a vengeance and I'm pissed.
Just my USD 0.02
RP
Why am I replying to an Anonymous Coward? Not sure.
This is not really old technology. Pieces of it are old. What's new is the ability to really do it in the real world, thanks to some pretty decent standards support by all the major browsers, including the XMLHTTP object, which is what makes it possible to send a request dynamically.
The name Ajax? Well that's just what this guy is calling it, and it's not an altogether bad name. Call it whatever you want, but he's absolutely not wrong that this is a new way of doing web applications. I took notice of this not long after I started using Gmail and saw what they were doing, and I've played around with this type of development recently, and it's really great.
So don't go around anonymously claiming to be an old, experienced hand surrounded by morons when you don't seem to know what you're talking about.
RP
I, for one, strongly support Cascading Style Sheets and I think they ought to be supported by all DVD players
RP
while true; do echo "food" | cat; sleep 1; done
`cat` will never go hungry again
RP
All your bass are belong to us
RP
They oughta really integrate this thing... "buy this song", or at least "add a stub of this song to my playlist so I can easily find it once I'm connected to the Internet through iTunes". You can't beat the listening to good, commercial-free radio with the option to easily buy songs you like.
RP
Yeah, sometimes I feel like somebody who doesn't appreciate the awesome non-web-search stuff that Google is doing might feel like a fast-food manager I used to work for:
"If you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean."
I've recently seen in Waffle House they have a sign for the cook.. after the last order, "Kill the flame and GET IN THE GAME". Meaning to turn off the gas burner (they NEVER do) and to "walk the line," cleaning. Hey, remind me to never go back to a food service job, where the very idea that your work might be done and you might sit around for a minute or two is ludicrous. I can't believe I used to live like that.
My point is that some of these projects that come out, as cool as they are, seem extraneous, almost like they're SO BORED with web searching that they just come up with this stuff in their spare time.
"Oh, so I suppose that search code is BUG FREE, then??!?! Huh, Google?"
I love Google. Love 'em. The mapping is awesome, the mail is awesome -- I even love Google Sets, which seems to be perpetually in the lab.
RP
Thanks, I think I'll wait for Steve Jobs to demo it on a Mac, at which point it will have been done right -- built into the OS, graceful, beautiful, helpful, etc...
It is an interesting idea (as it was when this story was FIRST posted a year ago or more). It seems they have a new version since then but it's not a new slashdot story.
RP
What has he done for us LATELY?
Running the W3C, and we owe his as much thanks for that as for creating HTTP and HTML.
RP
Plan 9 has a LOT of really good ideas.
Yeah, apparently they're on their 9th.
RP
That list is woefully misleading. Yeah, the censorship in China is amazing and its wrong, but the sheer length of that list (25,064 URLs when I checked) tells you something about Chinese censorship. But the list is padded with many duplications.
:) Playboy variations are duplicated over 700 times. Amnesty International, over 200 times. CNN almost 500. The list goes on and on, literally :)
I quickly came up with 7,375 unique URLs, not counting things like variations in case.
Google along is duplicated over 5,000 times
RP
Let's not go throwing the word "immortality" around when the thing that's being discussed is the natural aging process that eventually makes us all mortal, no matter how safe our lives might be previously.
:) It sure is long, though.
This will do nothing to keep us from jumping or falling off buildings, dying from any kind of trauma, disease or freak medical event.
Also I noticed that both a thousand year lifespan and living forever are mentioned in the story. So which is it? Well maybe I should RTFA
RP
Thank you very much for the review/comment. I actually have not yet bought an Xbox, but I must say that the release of Burnout 3 and the realization that it would not be released for the Gamecube definition made me starting thinking seriously again about getting an Xbox.
In fact, it is our plan to get an Xbox anyway, mainly because we're getting tired of feeling like we're on the stepchild system when looking at the rental shelves. I've also heard awesome things about the Xbox and like a lot of the games, etc, etc.
Anyway, had I still been thinking about getting an Xbox just to play Burnout 3 -- see, my son and I absolutely LOVE the first two Burnouts -- in fact, it will probably be the first game we get anyway. My point is that your review really hit on points that I needed to hear. They've sold the franchise up the river, apparently -- lousy music, too much loading, stupid "effects" like the fish-eye blur. The first Burnout was awesome, the second one took some getting used to but now I like it a lot also. Sounds like the third one will be a disappointment (like Star Wars and The Matrix and Back to the Future -- OK, I kind of liked the 3rd Back to the Future) -- oh, and the worst of all -- The Godfather Part III. Shudder.
Anyway, thanks for the comment. I appreciated it.