While it it pretty obvious they didn't read your post but did stumble across an important truth: "they may be required to save all their mail"?
All means all. Audit requirements may mean absolutely no outbound or inbound e-mail that does not go through the corporate e-mail system for whatever compliance or confidentiality reasons there may be.
There is also the risk of letting something viral in via webmail. It may have got in via the corporate system anyway but this doesn't matter. You have an expectation of service from an internal AV system or from a bought service such as messagelabs, but absolutely none from Google or any other webmail service: you are not exercising due care and you are toast if it goes wrong. Especially with google - gmail is only a beta.
Now, you may be on slightly thicker ice if you let people use webmail and tell them to be careful, but if you give them something it is your responsibility. Never give people a tool that you cannot control the workings of if you can help it.
I know this seems overly ass-covering and paranoid, but, hey, welcome to modern business.
I've never had any problems with them. I had a power supply die after about four months. After fruitlessly trying to get a warranty replacement from the manufacturer I contacted Amazon UK, and the sent out (after a bit of a mix-up) a replacement power supply (but the model up from the one I had) to fix the problem and refunded the original purchase as apology for the mix-up.
I'm talking about Section III(D) of the antitrust judgement:
"Starting at the earlier of the release of Service Pack 1 for Windows XP or 12 months after the submission of this Final Judgment to the Court, Microsoft shall disclose to ISVs, IHVs, IAPs, ICPs, and OEMs, for the sole purpose of interoperating with a Windows Operating System Product, via the Microsoft Developer Network ("MSDN") or similar mechanisms, the APIs and related Documentation that are used by Microsoft Middleware to interoperate with a Windows Operating System Product (emphasis added)."
and to say that MS has been dragging their feet in providing this information is an understatement.
You have to have someone else let you into secure areas? This strikes me as very risky indeed - for your career that is. Among other things, the point of such systems is to audit who enters the areas, and you are circumventing it.
Get them to fix the system so it lets you in - don't put yourself at risk by breaking the rules.
I think the most realistic explanation is that they, like most of us, aren't 100% attentive at all times
Or that they are 100% inattentive all of the time.
We're not asking for attentitiveness - we aren't asking for anything actually. We do reserve the right to take the mickey out of the apparent complete inability to use a search engine.
being two that I can find, restricted as I am by non-subscriber status. There are plenty more - often I express astonishment that a marketing company (for that is their business) has what appears to be the blind adoration of geeks and nerds.
However I have no problem in giving credit where credit is due - others folded, they didn't; that is praiseworthy.
Actually I meant the potential customers (i.e. those who would consider subscribing if the site had more of a professional veneer).
It is possible that slashdot is going for the rather niche demographic of people who like grammar and spelling errors (and who would not subscribe if the articles were coherent and literate) but I doubt it. Tidying up the spelling and grammar can only, I believe, be positive in subscriber numbers. I certainly wouldn't dream of subscribing while the site is riddled with dupes, the articles that are posted are poorly written, and the articles are late - I have to say I don't often notice dupes now because I generally have read any biggies elsewhere and the rest aren't usually interesting enough to remember, or get filed under "it's just another apple/google/casemod story".
It does seem perverse, though, to both ignore a simple way of improving the business and to look like an someone who is saying to hubris "bring it on".
Ah - thanks for that. I was thinking that there was something wrong with the "It's my blog and I'll do what I want" argument. And, of course, slashdot is supplying a service (tech news and discussion website) that they try and charge for.
It's not a blog, it's a business. And the customers are disgruntled by the standard of spelling and grammar used in articles. This will have a negative impact on the bottom line as subscribers don't renew, and potential subscribers don't sign up at all, all due to the apparent lack of professionalism of the site's owners. Why sign up for late, repeated news that is badly presented (and occasionally so mangled to be incomprehensible)? It would be so easy to fix.
That - the policy, not your post - does not make sense.
If you are posting unacceptably under your username then why ban by IP in the first place? Then there is the inherent stupidity of the "policy" (I use the word loosely - "whim" is probably more accurate) where it is possible to have make a post, have it marked +5 interesting and still get banned for unacceptable posting.
Mind you, you used to be able to see the moderations applied to all posts - this was removed for some reason - one can only speculate why.
the article summaries are generally either poorly written, incorrect or confused
That is very unfair. Some manage to be all three.
But, in reply the the GPP, the reason that people get worked up is that it serves as a demonstration that the editors don't appear to care. They don't read the site, and they don't even bother to read the "problems with the article" e-mails that people send in. It is possible that dupes are a deliberate ploy to generate page hits - after all who can be that consistents careless - but this would be even worse. Or it could be just plain incompetence.
I remember the "Post of Doom" - a post that complained about something or other which was immediately modded to oblivion by an editor (Michael). The post was then remoderated back up to +5, down to -1 and so on until the post had several hundred moderations. Not to mention all the posts (hundreds in the end) that supported the post and were asking "WTF?" getting modded down, and up, and down. There must have been thousands of mods on that thread that day - IIRC I don't think I've ever had mod points since then.
Nearly 4 years ago I was surprised to find. It was not too long after this that the editors, in an effort to improve clarity in the site, removed from public display the actual number of moderations that a post received.
New site @ 1$ -> prolly about 15,000 clicks because the high price counteracts the newness
The point I was making is that it unlikely (but possible) that the site owner happened to pick the adword cost/click that counteracted the pagerank boost the old site got.
I even suggested how to test for it. Here's another one: setup two identical sites, advertise one with $0.25 and one with $1.00 per click for some suitable adword. See what the click rates are. Then change both to $0.50, and see what the click rates are. The only difference in the sites would be the adwords history. That would tell you if there was a mechanism for penalising people who drop their click prices.
The whole point of the article is that Google does not work on "the more you pay the more you get". When the test site was at $0.40 it was getting less than the site at $0.10. Now, it is just barely possible that this is purely related to pagerank, but it is unlikely. I have also suggested a test to determine is it is pagerank that is causing the difference.
The point is that the test site (at $1 per click) had similar ad word performance with the original site. When the adwords cost is dropped by a factor of two the effectiveness of the ad drops by an order of magnitude. Which seems a little weird.
There are two possible explanations here. The first is that by a pure fluke the tester managed to pick the adwords cost/click that exactly compensated for the newness of the site (as the performance of the test site and the adwords site was the same) and that when the price was reduced the ad went into a twilight zone of uselessness. The second is that google, as part of the algorithm to place adwords, punishes people who reduce their adwords cost/click.
I think the first is pretty unlikely.
The test that needs done is to start a third trial site at $0.40 and look at that - if it shows similar effectiveness as the $1 test site and $0.10 original site, then that would demonstrate reasonably convincingly that Google punishes people who reduce their adwords cost/click.
Ah - the little bit about the "Big O" notation on this page is, in fact, riddled with errors (despite being only two lines long). It says "It was first described in 1892 by the German number theorists Paul Bachmann and Edmund Landau; ". It was actually first described in 1894 by Paul Bachmann and then, in 1909, was adopted by Edmund Landau. But what is 17 years between friends? Amusingly they also get the name wrong - it should be "Landau symbol", not "Landau's symbol". The page's description of "compares the speed of growth of functions" isn't so much wrong as uselessly vague.
Must look up the wikipedia entries for Hubris and Irony.
He seems to think that because a work is put to paper that is must have more accuracy than a work such as wikipedia. I challenge this: Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia
This amuses me greatly, for several reasons.
Firstly there is the implicit message of "wikipedia is better than EB" that the page conveys. Oddly missing from wikipedia is a page listing all the errors that wiki has made but the EB has right. It would be a very, very large page.
Secondly, have you read the page? How is not mentioning something (Big O notation) an error? Lots of the errors are of the type "recent infomation has revealed that [previously accepted information is wrong] and EB haven't yet corrected their copy" (which pre-supposes that the new information is correct). Some of the errors pointed out are simply wrong (e.g. swim bladders in fish - the EB article is correct).
Finally some of the errors refer to entries that are no longer in the EB, which seems a rather strange gripe...
They are definitely copying. Part of their agreement with the University Libraries is the transfer of a copy of the work as payment for copying the work. In the contract with the University of Michigan they explicitly call it a digital copy.
What they are doing is copying works that are still under copyright, and claiming that because the service that is based on their "digital copy" (their words) complies with fair use, then the full digital copy they made complies with fair use. This is, to put it mildly, illogical.
spirit of a program which, in fact, will enhance the value of each copyright
Erm - they are not your copyrights to enhance. I don't care that, in your desire for shiny streets, you wax my car - it is my car, and you have no right to wax it, even if it does enhance the value of the car. (I think that fufills my obligation for car based analogies).
But, to the meat.
Even those critics who understand that copyright law is not absolute argue that making a full copy of a given work, even just to index it, can never constitute fair use. If this were so, you wouldn't be able to record a TV show to watch it later or use a search engine that indexes billions of Web pages.
Apart from the nasty little ad hom. attack at the start, lets have a look at this. He is comparing a single person time-shifting a TV broadcast to a multibillion dollar company trying to copy every book in existance. Your Supreme Court has explictly said that time-shifting is legal - I may have missed the bit in Sony vs Universal Studios that says copying everything in existance is also legal, but I rather suspect that it isn't there.
"Billions of Web pages". Slightly more interesting - the de facto way that the web works is by copying- you say to web server X "can I have a copy of this page". Stuff not freely available isn't indexed.
Essentially, as far as a commercial entity goes, indexing freely available stuff is OK (publically accessible web pages, out-of-copyright books) whereas indexing non-free stuff without permission (books in copyright, pay-access websites) is not OK is how I see it.
The aim of the Copyright Act is to protect and enhance the value of creative works in order to encourage more of them -- in this case, to ensure that authors write and publishers publish.
Woah! Let's have that again - "protect and enhance the value of creative works". Is that really the aim of the copyright act? I've just checked, and apparently not: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" as your constitution has it. The aim of copyright (and patents et al) is to promote the progress of science and useful arts by encouraging more works - nothing about enhancing the value of any individual work.
The mechanism is, of course, the granting of exclusive rights, tempered by the concept of fair use. Complaining that it would be better for all concerned if what Google was proposing was legal is an argument to try and get the law changed, not an argument for pretending it already has been changed.
The whole page boils down to "Things would be better for everybody if the law was different, so we'll act like the law was different".
Slashdot Mirror
While it it pretty obvious they didn't read your post but did stumble across an important truth: "they may be required to save all their mail"?
All means all. Audit requirements may mean absolutely no outbound or inbound e-mail that does not go through the corporate e-mail system for whatever compliance or confidentiality reasons there may be.
There is also the risk of letting something viral in via webmail. It may have got in via the corporate system anyway but this doesn't matter. You have an expectation of service from an internal AV system or from a bought service such as messagelabs, but absolutely none from Google or any other webmail service: you are not exercising due care and you are toast if it goes wrong. Especially with google - gmail is only a beta.
Now, you may be on slightly thicker ice if you let people use webmail and tell them to be careful, but if you give them something it is your responsibility. Never give people a tool that you cannot control the workings of if you can help it.
I know this seems overly ass-covering and paranoid, but, hey, welcome to modern business.
I've never had any problems with them. I had a power supply die after about four months. After fruitlessly trying to get a warranty replacement from the manufacturer I contacted Amazon UK, and the sent out (after a bit of a mix-up) a replacement power supply (but the model up from the one I had) to fix the problem and refunded the original purchase as apology for the mix-up.
I'm talking about Section III(D) of the antitrust judgement:
"Starting at the earlier of the release of Service Pack 1 for Windows XP or 12 months after the submission of this Final Judgment to the Court, Microsoft shall disclose to ISVs, IHVs, IAPs, ICPs, and OEMs, for the sole purpose of interoperating with a Windows Operating System Product, via the Microsoft Developer Network ("MSDN") or similar mechanisms, the APIs and related Documentation that are used by Microsoft Middleware to interoperate with a Windows Operating System Product (emphasis added)."
and to say that MS has been dragging their feet in providing this information is an understatement.
'Transparency is vitally important in what can be a very opaque process in Brussels
But apparently transparency is not vitally important for APIs.
What about the one that built your Mom's basement?
You have to have someone else let you into secure areas? This strikes me as very risky indeed - for your career that is. Among other things, the point of such systems is to audit who enters the areas, and you are circumventing it.
Get them to fix the system so it lets you in - don't put yourself at risk by breaking the rules.
I think the most realistic explanation is that they, like most of us, aren't 100% attentive at all times
Or that they are 100% inattentive all of the time.
We're not asking for attentitiveness - we aren't asking for anything actually. We do reserve the right to take the mickey out of the apparent complete inability to use a search engine.
Actually, if you have a browse of my comment history you will find that I am usually pretty cyncial of Google:
8 38422
2 62944
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165875&cid=13
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171242&cid=14
being two that I can find, restricted as I am by non-subscriber status. There are plenty more - often I express astonishment that a marketing company (for that is their business) has what appears to be the blind adoration of geeks and nerds.
However I have no problem in giving credit where credit is due - others folded, they didn't; that is praiseworthy.
I thought the two salient points from the article were
1) Google were resisting the subpoena
and
2) Others (unnamed) had complied with the subpoena
which is slightly worrying for those that use other search engines.
Actually I meant the potential customers (i.e. those who would consider subscribing if the site had more of a professional veneer).
It is possible that slashdot is going for the rather niche demographic of people who like grammar and spelling errors (and who would not subscribe if the articles were coherent and literate) but I doubt it. Tidying up the spelling and grammar can only, I believe, be positive in subscriber numbers. I certainly wouldn't dream of subscribing while the site is riddled with dupes, the articles that are posted are poorly written, and the articles are late - I have to say I don't often notice dupes now because I generally have read any biggies elsewhere and the rest aren't usually interesting enough to remember, or get filed under "it's just another apple/google/casemod story".
It does seem perverse, though, to both ignore a simple way of improving the business and to look like an someone who is saying to hubris "bring it on".
I'm not a paying subscriber.
Ah - thanks for that. I was thinking that there was something wrong with the "It's my blog and I'll do what I want" argument. And, of course, slashdot is supplying a service (tech news and discussion website) that they try and charge for.
It's not a blog, it's a business. And the customers are disgruntled by the standard of spelling and grammar used in articles. This will have a negative impact on the bottom line as subscribers don't renew, and potential subscribers don't sign up at all, all due to the apparent lack of professionalism of the site's owners. Why sign up for late, repeated news that is badly presented (and occasionally so mangled to be incomprehensible)? It would be so easy to fix.
That - the policy, not your post - does not make sense.
If you are posting unacceptably under your username then why ban by IP in the first place? Then there is the inherent stupidity of the "policy" (I use the word loosely - "whim" is probably more accurate) where it is possible to have make a post, have it marked +5 interesting and still get banned for unacceptable posting.
Mind you, you used to be able to see the moderations applied to all posts - this was removed for some reason - one can only speculate why.
the article summaries are generally either poorly written, incorrect or confused
That is very unfair. Some manage to be all three.
But, in reply the the GPP, the reason that people get worked up is that it serves as a demonstration that the editors don't appear to care. They don't read the site, and they don't even bother to read the "problems with the article" e-mails that people send in. It is possible that dupes are a deliberate ploy to generate page hits - after all who can be that consistents careless - but this would be even worse. Or it could be just plain incompetence.
None reflect well on the site.
I remember the "Post of Doom" - a post that complained about something or other which was immediately modded to oblivion by an editor (Michael). The post was then remoderated back up to +5, down to -1 and so on until the post had several hundred moderations. Not to mention all the posts (hundreds in the end) that supported the post and were asking "WTF?" getting modded down, and up, and down. There must have been thousands of mods on that thread that day - IIRC I don't think I've ever had mod points since then.
0 660&pid=2850660&threshold=-1&mode=nested&commentso rt=0&op=Change - The thread of doom
Nearly 4 years ago I was surprised to find. It was not too long after this that the editors, in an effort to improve clarity in the site, removed from public display the actual number of moderations that a post received.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=26315&cid=285
Final Moderation Totals: Offtopic=377, Flamebait=4, Troll=27, Redundant=5, Insightful=98, Interesting=205, Informative=49, Funny=12, Overrated=11, Underrated=63, Total=851.
Slightly sceptical of this, I thought I'd check slashdot.org via google:
e s+writes%22+site:slashdot.org&hl=en&lr=&start=10&s a=N - "Beatles-Beatles writes"
- Beatles+writes%22+site%3Aslashdot.org+scuttlemonke y&meta= - as above but with ScuttleMonkey in the page
- Beatles+writes%22+site%3Aslashdot.org+-scuttlemonk ey&meta= - as first but without ScuttleMonkey in the page.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22Beatles-Beatl
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22Beatles
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22Beatles
First - 126 hits: Second 125 hits: Third - 1 hit. Things that make you go "hmmmmmm....."
For the first time for may years I wish I had mod points. I've never heard the quote before but it is wonderful.
It's OK - I just editied the policy. Anonymously.
(No really - I did. I tidied up the rationale part, which was nearly painful to read.)
New site @ 1$ -> prolly about 15,000 clicks because the high price counteracts the newness
The point I was making is that it unlikely (but possible) that the site owner happened to pick the adword cost/click that counteracted the pagerank boost the old site got.
I even suggested how to test for it. Here's another one: setup two identical sites, advertise one with $0.25 and one with $1.00 per click for some suitable adword. See what the click rates are. Then change both to $0.50, and see what the click rates are. The only difference in the sites would be the adwords history. That would tell you if there was a mechanism for penalising people who drop their click prices.
The whole point of the article is that Google does not work on "the more you pay the more you get". When the test site was at $0.40 it was getting less than the site at $0.10. Now, it is just barely possible that this is purely related to pagerank, but it is unlikely. I have also suggested a test to determine is it is pagerank that is causing the difference.
The point is that the test site (at $1 per click) had similar ad word performance with the original site. When the adwords cost is dropped by a factor of two the effectiveness of the ad drops by an order of magnitude. Which seems a little weird.
There are two possible explanations here. The first is that by a pure fluke the tester managed to pick the adwords cost/click that exactly compensated for the newness of the site (as the performance of the test site and the adwords site was the same) and that when the price was reduced the ad went into a twilight zone of uselessness. The second is that google, as part of the algorithm to place adwords, punishes people who reduce their adwords cost/click.
I think the first is pretty unlikely.
The test that needs done is to start a third trial site at $0.40 and look at that - if it shows similar effectiveness as the $1 test site and $0.10 original site, then that would demonstrate reasonably convincingly that Google punishes people who reduce their adwords cost/click.
Ah - the little bit about the "Big O" notation on this page is, in fact, riddled with errors (despite being only two lines long). It says "It was first described in 1892 by the German number theorists Paul Bachmann and Edmund Landau; ". It was actually first described in 1894 by Paul Bachmann and then, in 1909, was adopted by Edmund Landau. But what is 17 years between friends? Amusingly they also get the name wrong - it should be "Landau symbol", not "Landau's symbol". The page's description of "compares the speed of growth of functions" isn't so much wrong as uselessly vague.
Must look up the wikipedia entries for Hubris and Irony.
He seems to think that because a work is put to paper that is must have more accuracy than a work such as wikipedia. I challenge this: Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia
This amuses me greatly, for several reasons.
Firstly there is the implicit message of "wikipedia is better than EB" that the page conveys. Oddly missing from wikipedia is a page listing all the errors that wiki has made but the EB has right. It would be a very, very large page.
Secondly, have you read the page? How is not mentioning something (Big O notation) an error? Lots of the errors are of the type "recent infomation has revealed that [previously accepted information is wrong] and EB haven't yet corrected their copy" (which pre-supposes that the new information is correct). Some of the errors pointed out are simply wrong (e.g. swim bladders in fish - the EB article is correct).
Finally some of the errors refer to entries that are no longer in the EB, which seems a rather strange gripe...
Oh - what a surprise. Modded down (as over-rated, natch) for expressing mild criticism of one of Slashdot's darlings. The hive mind strikes again.
They are definitely copying. Part of their agreement with the University Libraries is the transfer of a copy of the work as payment for copying the work. In the contract with the University of Michigan they explicitly call it a digital copy.
What they are doing is copying works that are still under copyright, and claiming that because the service that is based on their "digital copy" (their words) complies with fair use, then the full digital copy they made complies with fair use. This is, to put it mildly, illogical.
I read it - very unimpressive.
spirit of a program which, in fact, will enhance the value of each copyright
Erm - they are not your copyrights to enhance. I don't care that, in your desire for shiny streets, you wax my car - it is my car, and you have no right to wax it, even if it does enhance the value of the car. (I think that fufills my obligation for car based analogies).
But, to the meat.
Even those critics who understand that copyright law is not absolute argue that making a full copy of a given work, even just to index it, can never constitute fair use. If this were so, you wouldn't be able to record a TV show to watch it later or use a search engine that indexes billions of Web pages.
Apart from the nasty little ad hom. attack at the start, lets have a look at this. He is comparing a single person time-shifting a TV broadcast to a multibillion dollar company trying to copy every book in existance. Your Supreme Court has explictly said that time-shifting is legal - I may have missed the bit in Sony vs Universal Studios that says copying everything in existance is also legal, but I rather suspect that it isn't there.
"Billions of Web pages". Slightly more interesting - the de facto way that the web works is by copying- you say to web server X "can I have a copy of this page". Stuff not freely available isn't indexed.
Essentially, as far as a commercial entity goes, indexing freely available stuff is OK (publically accessible web pages, out-of-copyright books) whereas indexing non-free stuff without permission (books in copyright, pay-access websites) is not OK is how I see it.
The aim of the Copyright Act is to protect and enhance the value of creative works in order to encourage more of them -- in this case, to ensure that authors write and publishers publish.
Woah! Let's have that again - "protect and enhance the value of creative works". Is that really the aim of the copyright act? I've just checked, and apparently not: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" as your constitution has it. The aim of copyright (and patents et al) is to promote the progress of science and useful arts by encouraging more works - nothing about enhancing the value of any individual work.
The mechanism is, of course, the granting of exclusive rights, tempered by the concept of fair use. Complaining that it would be better for all concerned if what Google was proposing was legal is an argument to try and get the law changed, not an argument for pretending it already has been changed.
The whole page boils down to "Things would be better for everybody if the law was different, so we'll act like the law was different".