Re:more censorship, unimpressed
on
Google TrustRank
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· Score: 1
Well, trust metrics work both ways, not just downstream. So, a reputable site A that links to a seedy site X, where X is also linked by a lot of other seedy sites, will reduce the trust metric of A, not increase the one of X. The problem of course will arise when you have walled-garden-type systems, where a good content-producing site has an exclusive partnership with a seedy one.
If that were true, Linux could also claim the history/legacy/support of Unix/Multics... and that pretty much goes back to the begining of time() (i.e. 1/1/70)
Sorry, OS X is a complete rewrite based on NextSTEP, it has nothing to do with "classic" Mac OS. IIRC NextSTEP started selling in 1989 (2 yrs before Linux), but the entire Cocoa layer of OSX and above and pretty much all of its apps were written for OSX not NextSTEP and those are much younger than Linux (or KDE or Gnome for that matter).
You're right; Linux was designed to kill Unix, not Windows --and it's doing pretty well in that regard.
But I disagree that Windows hasn't killed Linux: the war isn't over yet, but Windows *is* winning. Linux has been in the press and widely known for 6-7 years now (quite a bit longer than OS X for example) and it has only competed against Windows successfully in the low-end server and embedded markets --i.e. where customization and size-of-footprint, not to mention low price are the main criteria for choice. Windows still dominates the desktop and hence the consumer mindshare. Linux has barely made a dent and OS X, with a shorter history behind it, surpassed it easily.
So, why care? Simple; with consumer mindshare goes developer mindshare as well. We'll get new and improved sysadmin tech in Linux I am sure (how many switches can you add to grep and find though?) but the latest-and-greatest ideas and software will still be developed for Windows first. And if you think that's not important, ask those of us who used to use and love OS/2 or NextSTEP.
Agreed on wxPy, but you do know that SWT and Swing are scriptable from python thru Jython (or the Python-Java bridge project, forget the name right now)? IIRC there has also been an effort to wrap the native SWT widgets in python w/o going thru Java, which would be awesome.
But overall, I completely agree: the std python distro needs to standardize on wx, get rid of Tk and at least incorporate the win32all distribution in the win32 version (it just too nice to leave out).
My biggest peeve as a long-time pythonista (the newsbot in my sig is 25k+ LOC of pure Python) is the standard library: I can live w/o a CPAN-like repository (although that would rock), but for a language that used to boast that it comes "with batteries included" the std lib has gone downhill in the last few versions: too many overlapping or competing modules (why, why do we need httplib, httplib2 and urllib?? or getopt and optparse? and what are the differences between them?) and not enough attention into polishing the library into the fantastic toolkit that was around the 1.5 or early 2.1 series.
Someone, probably the BDFL, needs to stand up and take obsolete modules *out* of the standard library, so that the better ones can be improved even more, instead of having various tweaks and improvements going into overlapping modules. That's the point of having a *standard* library after all...
I'd rather have a good std lib than function decorators and other exotic language constructs...
Shameless plug ahead: my newsbot (which predates Google News BTW), has a text version which is not only geared for thin devices (PDAs/phones) but also links to news article versions that are also lightweight. Try it out.
So the article says that lower-pressure tests should be incorporated into the MCAT or GMAT... because of course that's what you want in your doctor or manager: someone who cracks under pressure and can't remember what he was taught.
Intelligence, like good science, is useless if it's not applied properly or at all. The same can be said for this article...
I admit it, I am biased, but memigo (my newsbot) let's you share news recommendations with a network of peers, or keep them to yourself --and it's been doing so for over 3 years... Either way, you reap the benefits of collaborative filtering and aggregation.
The results seem to be skewed when the search term is a person or character in the show: check out the search for Carson and notice how almost every result is the Carson Daily show with hardly any news on Johny Carson --because every second line in the closed captions is "Carson >".
Even if he had done so, there are tons of BT-compatible codebases out there (Azureus is in Java, BitComet in C++, libtorrent in C AFAIK); the license of the original Python client is not the issue. Unless of course you mean that Mr. Cohen should have either patented or claimed copyright on the BT protocol itself which is (to say the least) very much against the spirit of the GPL.
Re:The Interesting Bit is in the Last Paragraph
on
Low-bandwidth Net Radio
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· Score: 2, Interesting
A few reasons: first of all, it's not just a question of overall bandwidth: maybe you only want to give 64kbps out of your DSL connection to your streaming radio station and let the rest be used by BitTorrent. Second, if you listen internationally to US radio stations, as I do, aacPlus can be buffered more easily at 24kbps unlike MP3 at 128kbps, and because the traffic "weather" between here and the US can get very choppy during peak hours. Third, as the article points out, 24kbps can easily fit into a GPRS/UMTS connection and be streamed over a mobile phone.
Well, I am biased, but I think the future of news delivery is towards personalized news delivery, tailored to the interests of each reader. Memigo and Findory (no relation) are two examples of personalized news agents. MSN Newsbot is also going into that direction and I am betting Google will follow soon.
Aerospace technology has been commoditized: a) Rocket engine designs are more obtainable with more trained aero engineers are in the market (from Russia's crumbling industry or the American imploding one). b) Tools, such as super-computers to develop CFD models of engines and/or vehicles are quite affordable (tens or at most hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of millions).
These rich folks don't have any other better ideas to throw money at: no more internet thingies, or incumbators or other wild-eyed ideas to take over the world.
Worst case, these millionaires can write off these toys from their taxes. And in the order of things, the whole SpaceShipOne deal cost Paul Allenn less than *one* yaught. Pretty cheap.
The story is a dupe, but there's a question that stayed unanswered in the original: besides MythTV frontend, is there any media-center software for the Mac? i.e. anything along the lines of mediaportal or XBMC or MyHTPC?
Indeed; only an operating system can be tested for correctness by simply functioning, whereas an encyclopedia must be checked against historical facts or scientific knowledge. Not the same.
FYI, Lookout is an *excellent* product; it does a great job of indexing Outlook and does a decent (albeit klunky UI-wise) job of indexing arbitrary files (including Office files). And that from a 2-person company, before MS bought them out.
Secondly, the "brains" behind Lookout was the.NET port of the open-source Lucene search engine (originally built for Java). So, it's quite possible to rebuild Lookout-like capabilities in open source (and even under Linux), just noone has actually done it...
Not only that but the only proof the author offers that the plants are indeed not GMO, is that the one Colombian geneticist verified that they are not. The same guy who doesn't want his name used and who showed at the airport to greet the incoming journalist uninvited. The author just "decided to trust" this one scientist, instead of doing the smart thing and use another scientist as well and/or control samples...
I've been a huge fan of Lookout, an excellent search plugin for Outlook which got bought out by MS. So, here's my 5' review of Google Desktop Search:
Integration with Google proper kicks butt.
Searching the browser cache is a fantastic idea
Its integration with Outlook is kludgly (launches Outlook Reply/Forward operations through HTML links) but impressive
Obviously GMail integration is going to happen RSN
So far, indexing is much, much slower than Lookout. And Lookout is much nicer in letting you choose Outlook folders to index (Lookout also does Office docs and PDFs as well, so this is a 1:1 comparison). Lookout uses the Lucene.NET open-source engine, BTW.
Specifying exclusion paths and URLs through a web interface is horrible. That's why there are file selectors you know, Google...
So far, I am very impressed and it's definitely worth a look, but it needs to integrate more with Outlook to change my day-to-day usage...
I run a similar, albeit personalized service (which predates Google News actually) and I'll have to pipe in and say that I doubt that the real reason for the absense of ads on GN is that Google is afraid: first of all, GN drives traffic to news sites, and more traffic means more money for the originating site. Excluding yourself from GN is basically handing money to your competition.
I think the real problem with GN, is that context sensitive advertising does not work for news. I've been running AdSense ads on memigo.com for a while now and Google never managed to keep up: by the time they spidered the site, the content had changed. Now, let's assume that they can solve this problem since GN is their own site, and they can update immediately: which advertisers are going to rely on context ads for news items? Imagine a story popping up on the US feed about say a Ford Explorer flipping over, with nice big Ford ads next to it: a waste of money and space. And if you try to go the other way, showing ads only for positive pieces of news (hard, but let's say it's doable) you'll be accused of bias and selling out.
So, the only reasonable choice is to sell non-context ads on GN. It could happen, but I think Google likes a challenge; they'll mine GN clicks and probably do personalized ads before they go back to plain-old ads...
Well, maybe there were hidden APIs, but there was a control group, and that was (ironically) the Macintosh. On Macs, back in the mid-90s Word and Excel completely displaced Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3, and did so without the benefit of being tied to the underlying OS. Word and Excel were simply better.
Having achieved that, yes the feedback loop itself is abusive no disagreement there...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, trust metrics work both ways, not just downstream. So, a reputable site A that links to a seedy site X, where X is also linked by a lot of other seedy sites, will reduce the trust metric of A, not increase the one of X. The problem of course will arise when you have walled-garden-type systems, where a good content-producing site has an exclusive partnership with a seedy one.
Check out PDF Speedup (Win32): cuts those PDF launching times to a fraction (takes out plugins though).
If that were true, Linux could also claim the history/legacy/support of Unix/Multics... and that pretty much goes back to the begining of time() (i.e. 1/1/70)
Sorry, OS X is a complete rewrite based on NextSTEP, it has nothing to do with "classic" Mac OS. IIRC NextSTEP started selling in 1989 (2 yrs before Linux), but the entire Cocoa layer of OSX and above and pretty much all of its apps were written for OSX not NextSTEP and those are much younger than Linux (or KDE or Gnome for that matter).
You're right; Linux was designed to kill Unix, not Windows --and it's doing pretty well in that regard.
But I disagree that Windows hasn't killed Linux: the war isn't over yet, but Windows *is* winning. Linux has been in the press and widely known for 6-7 years now (quite a bit longer than OS X for example) and it has only competed against Windows successfully in the low-end server and embedded markets --i.e. where customization and size-of-footprint, not to mention low price are the main criteria for choice. Windows still dominates the desktop and hence the consumer mindshare. Linux has barely made a dent and OS X, with a shorter history behind it, surpassed it easily.
So, why care? Simple; with consumer mindshare goes developer mindshare as well. We'll get new and improved sysadmin tech in Linux I am sure (how many switches can you add to grep and find though?) but the latest-and-greatest ideas and software will still be developed for Windows first. And if you think that's not important, ask those of us who used to use and love OS/2 or NextSTEP.
Agreed on wxPy, but you do know that SWT and Swing are scriptable from python thru Jython (or the Python-Java bridge project, forget the name right now)? IIRC there has also been an effort to wrap the native SWT widgets in python w/o going thru Java, which would be awesome.
But overall, I completely agree: the std python distro needs to standardize on wx, get rid of Tk and at least incorporate the win32all distribution in the win32 version (it just too nice to leave out).
My biggest peeve as a long-time pythonista (the newsbot in my sig is 25k+ LOC of pure Python) is the standard library: I can live w/o a CPAN-like repository (although that would rock), but for a language that used to boast that it comes "with batteries included" the std lib has gone downhill in the last few versions: too many overlapping or competing modules (why, why do we need httplib, httplib2 and urllib?? or getopt and optparse? and what are the differences between them?) and not enough attention into polishing the library into the fantastic toolkit that was around the 1.5 or early 2.1 series.
Someone, probably the BDFL, needs to stand up and take obsolete modules *out* of the standard library, so that the better ones can be improved even more, instead of having various tweaks and improvements going into overlapping modules. That's the point of having a *standard* library after all...
I'd rather have a good std lib than function decorators and other exotic language constructs...
The problem is technical, and solvable: my newsbot for example offers a personalized list of top news articles formatted for PDA/mobiles. I am sure there are other services that go beyond news...
Shameless plug ahead: my newsbot (which predates Google News BTW), has a text version which is not only geared for thin devices (PDAs/phones) but also links to news article versions that are also lightweight. Try it out.
So the article says that lower-pressure tests should be incorporated into the MCAT or GMAT... because of course that's what you want in your doctor or manager: someone who cracks under pressure and can't remember what he was taught.
Intelligence, like good science, is useless if it's not applied properly or at all. The same can be said for this article...
I admit it, I am biased, but memigo (my newsbot) let's you share news recommendations with a network of peers, or keep them to yourself --and it's been doing so for over 3 years... Either way, you reap the benefits of collaborative filtering and aggregation.
The results seem to be skewed when the search term is a person or character in the show: check out the search for Carson and notice how almost every result is the Carson Daily show with hardly any news on Johny Carson --because every second line in the closed captions is "Carson >".
Even if he had done so, there are tons of BT-compatible codebases out there (Azureus is in Java, BitComet in C++, libtorrent in C AFAIK); the license of the original Python client is not the issue. Unless of course you mean that Mr. Cohen should have either patented or claimed copyright on the BT protocol itself which is (to say the least) very much against the spirit of the GPL.
A few reasons: first of all, it's not just a question of overall bandwidth: maybe you only want to give 64kbps out of your DSL connection to your streaming radio station and let the rest be used by BitTorrent. Second, if you listen internationally to US radio stations, as I do, aacPlus can be buffered more easily at 24kbps unlike MP3 at 128kbps, and because the traffic "weather" between here and the US can get very choppy during peak hours. Third, as the article points out, 24kbps can easily fit into a GPRS/UMTS connection and be streamed over a mobile phone.
Well, I am biased, but I think the future of news delivery is towards personalized news delivery, tailored to the interests of each reader. Memigo and Findory (no relation) are two examples of personalized news agents. MSN Newsbot is also going into that direction and I am betting Google will follow soon.
Just that there are few (as in less than a handful) of US aerospace firms left that do big aerospace projects.
Aerospace technology has been commoditized: a) Rocket engine designs are more obtainable with more trained aero engineers are in the market (from Russia's crumbling industry or the American imploding one). b) Tools, such as super-computers to develop CFD models of engines and/or vehicles are quite affordable (tens or at most hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of millions).
These rich folks don't have any other better ideas to throw money at: no more internet thingies, or incumbators or other wild-eyed ideas to take over the world.
Worst case, these millionaires can write off these toys from their taxes. And in the order of things, the whole SpaceShipOne deal cost Paul Allenn less than *one* yaught. Pretty cheap.
The story is a dupe, but there's a question that stayed unanswered in the original: besides MythTV frontend, is there any media-center software for the Mac? i.e. anything along the lines of mediaportal or XBMC or MyHTPC?
The NYTimes article on the deal says that IBM will continue providing support for its PCs.
Indeed; only an operating system can be tested for correctness by simply functioning, whereas an encyclopedia must be checked against historical facts or scientific knowledge. Not the same.
FYI, Lookout is an *excellent* product; it does a great job of indexing Outlook and does a decent (albeit klunky UI-wise) job of indexing arbitrary files (including Office files). And that from a 2-person company, before MS bought them out.
.NET port of the open-source Lucene search engine (originally built for Java). So, it's quite possible to rebuild Lookout-like capabilities in open source (and even under Linux), just noone has actually done it...
Secondly, the "brains" behind Lookout was the
Not only that but the only proof the author offers that the plants are indeed not GMO, is that the one Colombian geneticist verified that they are not. The same guy who doesn't want his name used and who showed at the airport to greet the incoming journalist uninvited. The author just "decided to trust" this one scientist, instead of doing the smart thing and use another scientist as well and/or control samples...
Integration with Google proper kicks butt.
Searching the browser cache is a fantastic idea
Its integration with Outlook is kludgly (launches Outlook Reply/Forward operations through HTML links) but impressive
Obviously GMail integration is going to happen RSN
So far, indexing is much, much slower than Lookout. And Lookout is much nicer in letting you choose Outlook folders to index (Lookout also does Office docs and PDFs as well, so this is a 1:1 comparison). Lookout uses the Lucene.NET open-source engine, BTW.
Specifying exclusion paths and URLs through a web interface is horrible. That's why there are file selectors you know, Google...
So far, I am very impressed and it's definitely worth a look, but it needs to integrate more with Outlook to change my day-to-day usage...
I run a similar, albeit personalized service (which predates Google News actually) and I'll have to pipe in and say that I doubt that the real reason for the absense of ads on GN is that Google is afraid: first of all, GN drives traffic to news sites, and more traffic means more money for the originating site. Excluding yourself from GN is basically handing money to your competition.
I think the real problem with GN, is that context sensitive advertising does not work for news. I've been running AdSense ads on memigo.com for a while now and Google never managed to keep up: by the time they spidered the site, the content had changed. Now, let's assume that they can solve this problem since GN is their own site, and they can update immediately: which advertisers are going to rely on context ads for news items? Imagine a story popping up on the US feed about say a Ford Explorer flipping over, with nice big Ford ads next to it: a waste of money and space. And if you try to go the other way, showing ads only for positive pieces of news (hard, but let's say it's doable) you'll be accused of bias and selling out.
So, the only reasonable choice is to sell non-context ads on GN. It could happen, but I think Google likes a challenge; they'll mine GN clicks and probably do personalized ads before they go back to plain-old ads...
Well, in that case you may ne interested in memigo; granted, it's not as customized as a home-brew solution, but it offers a boat-load of features including custom RSS feeds, RSS feeds of your browsing history, keyword searching of read articles, related news articles, PDA views, etc, etc, etc... check it out (end of shameless plug).
Well, maybe there were hidden APIs, but there was a control group, and that was (ironically) the Macintosh. On Macs, back in the mid-90s Word and Excel completely displaced Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3, and did so without the benefit of being tied to the underlying OS. Word and Excel were simply better.
Having achieved that, yes the feedback loop itself is abusive no disagreement there...