I think it's better to see all levels of the tree at once, because the navigational structure obstructs the information desired. That's why we use search engines instead of chasing 2000 links in a row to find what we want. One branch of the tree may take one link to get a topical page; another may take five or ten, with the intermediate nodes having little or no information.
Ideally, one could have different views: chronological (a preorder traversal of the tree), tree, sorted, searched, etc.
The OS/2 web map was apparently the first to have this structure. It was just an html page generated by wrapping the history links in html. I imagine it took about twenty minutes to implement, although the tree-structured history infrastructure is a bit more work.
Ditto; it was a tree structure stored as an html page.
One could save an entire session just by bringing up the tree in a browser window and saving it. That meant that, for instance, one could work through search results or links on a page one-by-one, hitting "back" one each page, and end up with a storable record of everything visited.
Those were the days, when web browsing was considered something more than a Markov process.
I came up with an approach for combining categories and link ranking over a year ago. Unfortunately I gave the idea to Looksmart's management, who gave me a severance check a month or two later.
There are a number of ways in which "known good" listings can be combined with crawled sites using link ranking. One is simply to give the listed sites a high static ranking, putting them before any crawled sites in the search results. If the crawled sites are being supplied on a pay-per-search basis (such as when Google or Inktomi are supplying the "backfill" on a CPM basis), this approach can save a good deal of money, and it's simple enough for management to understand.
Another is to give the listed sites an artificially high pagerank, and allow it to percolate out to linked pages, thereby boosting not only listed homepages, but deeper links in the same site, and nearby linked pages as well. This method leverages the labor of human-ranking pages, yielding a large number of related pages which are probably also on-topic and of decent quality. Kleinberg proposed something similar when he designed the HITS algorithm, as a method of automatically populating web directory categories.
Ask Jeeves realized its search technology didn't work, and bought Teoma. Looksmart, now a "search placement" provider, realized no one would look at its commercial listings if they didn't give users some non-commercial search content as well. Yahoo seems to have come to the same conclusion, after farming out to google, etc. If they want to make revenue, they seem to have realized that they have to invest in some original technology.
The description of HD's IT shop reminds me of a question that went through my head a while ago, when I read a story about how some small-time crooks defrauded HD out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The system they used was simple: HD had very liberal return policies, so the crooks would get a particular expensive bathroom faucet off the shelf, put a fake barcode on it, copied from a lower-priced faucet, pay the lower price at the cashier, and then return it for a cash refund at the higher price.
Now, at this point one is saying "yes, but they always bought the same faucet, so I'm sure the dozens of returns involving the same product must have set off some bells pretty quickly". That's what I thought, too.
But apparently they went on with this scam for more than a year, making thousands of purchases, and they were caught by (a) police (b) store security waiting for them, (c) a special fraud detection program, or (d) a cashier who recognized one of them from when he was caught switching tags a couple of years before. Did you guess (d)? That's about as intelligent as HD gets, apparently.
10. Lose your keys, Poindexter brings them back the next day. 9. To stop brute-force attacks, first names like "John0xF8A94388xyzzytangoalpha" become common. 8. Get a free battery after ten trips abroad. 7. World's richest man, John Doe, sets world record for simultaneous grocery transactions. 6. To avoid long check-in lines, precision guided smart luggage becomes popular. 5. Free CueCat with every truckload of fertilizer. 4. Oliver North's credit cards cancelled. 3. Radio Shack wins contract for immigration. 2. Missiles 30% cheaper with frequent-shopper card. 1. Terrorist operations disrupted by flood of Penis Enlargement spam.
The general idea is that the identifiers are one-way hashed using a public algorithm, so that the same ID will be encrypted to the same value on all systems that use the method.
Aggregation by customer ID, or into different customer segments, is no different than with unencrypted ID's, except that the ID doesn't trace back to a known person.
Whether this method is immune to brute-force attacks is another matter.
I suspect this is a test. Users who actually read both copies of each story will be exempted from the normal ad rotation, so that the site can maximize its revenue by showing the same banner over and over.
"Wow, an X-10 camera!" (click)
"Wow, an X-10 camera!" (click)
"Looks like Redhat 4 is out already!" (click)...
A few hundred repetitions of this, and the money really starts to add up.
If you look at the guy's subject header list, and change the encoding to EUC-KR, you can see that the subject of each Korean message identifies itself as spam. Look for this string (this page also in EUC-KR):
±í [ÎÆͱ] an advertisement; ad; an advert; [¾Ë] a notice; an announcement; [¼±Àü] advertising; publicity.
I primarily use MySQL and Progress, so a book explaining SQL fundamentals applied to Access and Oracle isn't going to help me unless I specifically take on projects which use these particular databases.
A statement like this needs a bit of support. Does the book use proprietary features of Oracle and Access? Most of the basic parts of SQL are the same on all platforms.
While we're here, check out San Francisco's crackpot candidate for Supervisor. This guy has actually built models of his tunnel and tetrahedron projects. If we act quickly we may be able to get him to adopt the vacuum idea before he gets elected Tuesday.
I am an officer at a large American software company, in charge of shipping software to our customers overseas. Unfortunately, one of these customers, a US Special Forces Commando, paid a large sum for our Office 2000 product, but passed away without naming an heir to receive this valuable software. According to company regulations, I cannot keep this software for myself, but if a suitable foreign customer (such as yourself) is found, I will be able to transfer the sale to you with no cost, in order to meet our company's stringent quarterly profit goals. If you are willing to receive this software confidentially, we will both benefit, but we must act quickly to meet our sales deadline.
All that I need from you to accomplish this sale is the presentation of your Windows 2000 licenses, as the original contract requires. If you do not possess these, I can assist you in acquiring them for a modest sum.
Yours Truly,
Mr. Ferreira Chief Ethics Officer Foreign Floppy Disk Desk Microsoft Corporation
A woman in my ex-girlfriend's office used to wear the same clothes to work every day. In fact I don't remember her name, because she was referred to as "the woman who wears the same clothes to work every day". They were completely appropriate business attire, and I think she cleaned them somehow every night, but she always wore the same clothes. It drove them crazy.
Arguably the most dangerous machine ever fabricated at SRL. Going by the inocuous title of the Pitching Machine, this device when it was originally built, launched 6 foot 2"x4"s at a velocity of 120 mph. This provides a calculated range of 800 ft. It is equipped with an automatic loading system holding 20 boards and is powered by a 500 cubic inch Eldorado engine.
It has since been modified to discharge 2x4s at 200mph.
After being laid off from one such dotcom mudpit, I came up with the "Compost Model" to describe what I saw at my former employer. Perhaps "The Mythical Manager-Month" would be a good title for it as well; the engineering dept. rounded out at about 35% managers.
The "Compost Company" is characterized by the frequent addition of fresh, green layers of management on top, in the hopes that something useful will form at the bottom. Appointments of Senior Managers and Vice Presidents who have never worked for the company, "acquisitions" where managers of failed companies get senior appointments (to "save" the company from its own employees), and a general feeling that experience and technical skills are irrelevant are hallmarks of this type of organization.
"Demote from within" is the rule here, where experienced employees gradually lose standing and are pushed out. Perhaps the only promotion from within that I saw in several years was one of the ops people to manage the group because no one else would or could do it; he now has a fresh, green VP above him who wants to move all hosting onsite(!).
Dead layers are left to rot, perhaps due to the principle that managers never get fired. Simply adding an additional layer during each reorganization is the norm.
I lasted through several waves of this pattern, but when I eventually ended up working, four or five levels down from the CEO, for someone who hadn't been with the company for more than six months, with ten other people on a project that didn't require more than three, I could see the severance check coming.
When I wanted to look up Jeff Ullman's home page, I used to go to google and type "ullman" and he would come up first. I assumed that being a Stanford professor guaranteed a number one ranking, but now he's slipped a notch, and some company that makes sails is in his slot.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's better to see all levels of the tree at once, because the navigational structure obstructs the information desired. That's why we use search engines instead of chasing 2000 links in a row to find what we want. One branch of the tree may take one link to get a topical page; another may take five or ten, with the intermediate nodes having little or no information.
Ideally, one could have different views: chronological (a preorder traversal of the tree), tree, sorted, searched, etc.
The OS/2 web map was apparently the first to have this structure. It was just an html page generated by wrapping the history links in html. I imagine it took about twenty minutes to implement, although the tree-structured history infrastructure is a bit more work.
Ditto; it was a tree structure stored as an html page.
One could save an entire session just by bringing up the tree in a browser window and saving it. That meant that, for instance, one could work through search results or links on a page one-by-one, hitting "back" one each page, and end up with a storable record of everything visited.
Those were the days, when web browsing was considered something more than a Markov process.
I came up with an approach for combining categories and link ranking over a year ago. Unfortunately I gave the idea to Looksmart's management, who gave me a severance check a month or two later.
There are a number of ways in which "known good" listings can be combined with crawled sites using link ranking. One is simply to give the listed sites a high static ranking, putting them before any crawled sites in the search results. If the crawled sites are being supplied on a pay-per-search basis (such as when Google or Inktomi are supplying the "backfill" on a CPM basis), this approach can save a good deal of money, and it's simple enough for management to understand.
Another is to give the listed sites an artificially high pagerank, and allow it to percolate out to linked pages, thereby boosting not only listed homepages, but deeper links in the same site, and nearby linked pages as well. This method leverages the labor of human-ranking pages, yielding a large number of related pages which are probably also on-topic and of decent quality. Kleinberg proposed something similar when he designed the HITS algorithm, as a method of automatically populating web directory categories.
Search engines are being bought up left and right, and the price keeps going up.
Teoma bought by Ask Jeeves ($4M).
Wisenut bought by Looksmart ($9M).
Inktomi bought by Yahoo ($235M).
Ask Jeeves realized its search technology didn't work, and bought Teoma. Looksmart, now a "search placement" provider, realized no one would look at its commercial listings if they didn't give users some non-commercial search content as well. Yahoo seems to have come to the same conclusion, after farming out to google, etc. If they want to make revenue, they seem to have realized that they have to invest in some original technology.
The description of HD's IT shop reminds me of a question that went through my head a while ago, when I read a story about how some small-time crooks defrauded HD out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The system they used was simple: HD had very liberal return policies, so the crooks would get a particular expensive bathroom faucet off the shelf, put a fake barcode on it, copied from a lower-priced faucet, pay the lower price at the cashier, and then return it for a cash refund at the higher price.
Now, at this point one is saying "yes, but they always bought the same faucet, so I'm sure the dozens of returns involving the same product must have set off some bells pretty quickly". That's what I thought, too.
But apparently they went on with this scam for more than a year, making thousands of purchases, and they were caught by (a) police (b) store security waiting for them, (c) a special fraud detection program, or (d) a cashier who recognized one of them from when he was caught switching tags a couple of years before. Did you guess (d)? That's about as intelligent as HD gets, apparently.
Ollie deals strictly in cash from here on out.
10. Lose your keys, Poindexter brings them back the next day.
9. To stop brute-force attacks, first names like "John0xF8A94388xyzzytangoalpha" become common.
8. Get a free battery after ten trips abroad.
7. World's richest man, John Doe, sets world record for simultaneous grocery transactions.
6. To avoid long check-in lines, precision guided smart luggage becomes popular.
5. Free CueCat with every truckload of fertilizer.
4. Oliver North's credit cards cancelled.
3. Radio Shack wins contract for immigration.
2. Missiles 30% cheaper with frequent-shopper card.
1. Terrorist operations disrupted by flood of Penis Enlargement spam.
The general idea is that the identifiers are one-way hashed using a public algorithm, so that the same ID will be encrypted to the same value on all systems that use the method.
Aggregation by customer ID, or into different customer segments, is no different than with unencrypted ID's, except that the ID doesn't trace back to a known person.
Whether this method is immune to brute-force attacks is another matter.
Great, a doll of Larry where the head goes up and down. Too bad Larry is too busy on his yacht to give those cash bonuses he was planning.
I used to be a very motivated Oracle developer. Then I saw Larry speak in person, and I lost interest somehow.
That would be the PowerMac 7200, wouldn't it?
I suspect this is a test. Users who actually read both copies of each story will be exempted from the normal ad rotation, so that the site can maximize its revenue by showing the same banner over and over.
...
"Wow, an X-10 camera!" (click)
"Wow, an X-10 camera!" (click)
"Looks like Redhat 4 is out already!" (click)
A few hundred repetitions of this, and the money really starts to add up.
A friend of ours used to have a snack cake collection. In the original packaging.
I can see this on "Antiques Roadshow" in a few years.
While we're here, check out San Francisco's crackpot candidate for Supervisor. This guy has actually built models of his tunnel and tetrahedron projects. If we act quickly we may be able to get him to adopt the vacuum idea before he gets elected Tuesday.
Closed loop wind tunnels are massive energy consumers.
Dear Mr. Jomen,
I am an officer at a large American software company, in charge of shipping software to our customers overseas. Unfortunately, one of these customers, a US Special Forces Commando, paid a large sum for our Office 2000 product, but passed away without naming an heir to receive this valuable software. According to company regulations, I cannot keep this software for myself, but if a suitable foreign customer (such as yourself) is found, I will be able to transfer the sale to you with no cost, in order to meet our company's stringent quarterly profit goals. If you are willing to receive this software confidentially, we will both benefit, but we must act quickly to meet our sales deadline.
All that I need from you to accomplish this sale is the presentation of your Windows 2000 licenses, as the original contract requires. If you do not possess these, I can assist you in acquiring them for a modest sum.
Yours Truly,
Mr. Ferreira
Chief Ethics Officer
Foreign Floppy Disk Desk
Microsoft Corporation
A woman in my ex-girlfriend's office used to wear the same clothes to work every day. In fact I don't remember her name, because she was referred to as "the woman who wears the same clothes to work every day". They were completely appropriate business attire, and I think she cleaned them somehow every night, but she always wore the same clothes. It drove them crazy.
Sample episode:
After being laid off from one such dotcom mudpit, I came up with the "Compost Model" to describe what I saw at my former employer. Perhaps "The Mythical Manager-Month" would be a good title for it as well; the engineering dept. rounded out at about 35% managers.
The "Compost Company" is characterized by the frequent addition of fresh, green layers of management on top, in the hopes that something useful will form at the bottom. Appointments of Senior Managers and Vice Presidents who have never worked for the company, "acquisitions" where managers of failed companies get senior appointments (to "save" the company from its own employees), and a general feeling that experience and technical skills are irrelevant are hallmarks of this type of organization.
"Demote from within" is the rule here, where experienced employees gradually lose standing and are pushed out. Perhaps the only promotion from within that I saw in several years was one of the ops people to manage the group because no one else would or could do it; he now has a fresh, green VP above him who wants to move all hosting onsite(!).
Dead layers are left to rot, perhaps due to the principle that managers never get fired. Simply adding an additional layer during each reorganization is the norm.
I lasted through several waves of this pattern, but when I eventually ended up working, four or five levels down from the CEO, for someone who hadn't been with the company for more than six months, with ten other people on a project that didn't require more than three, I could see the severance check coming.
Just get a Waterford and put a Schwinn head badge on it.
Until Lotus won't run.
Oh, but this is google so it's OK.
Ebay is advertising for a Risk Analyst; it must be the tight labor market that's keeping them from filling this position.
He still beats Tracey Ullman, though.