many of the professors had never worked in industry
This would in fact be true of most university professors, I'd say, because of the way the training is done. Most professors go immediately to grad school after the undergraudate degree and from there to teaching/research. Those who work for a while and then go back to university to get their PhD are a minority, for various reasons -- loss of income (could _you_ revert back to being a poor student?), family stability, etc.
Your goal at university should be to get an education, which is as much about learning how to learn as it is anything else. Then when you get to the "real" world you learn how it's done in the real world.
Most people don't realize how little authors make on their books. For a non-fiction, you're usually talking 10% of the net (wholesale) cover price. (For fiction, it's usually a smaller percentage of the cover price, which generally works out to about the same.) So for an average $40 tech book, the author might be getting 10% of $24, i.e. a couple bucks per book. If you only sell 5,000 books total (very common) then you can see that the numbers don't amount to much.
This is why more and more authors are starting to publish their books electronically as e-books, often becoming their own publishers. It's very similar to the way that musicians are exploring electronic distribution avenues for their work. But it's still an immature, emerging distribution model for both kinds of artists.
Like I've said before in my AdSense blog, it's not that hard to make some money using AdSense and blogs, i.e. enough to pay for your Internet costs plus a small profit. Making real money takes time and effort, and don't let anyone else tell you otherwise.
A lot of sites base their security, in part, on the idea that you can only access certain pages if you were referred to them by the same site
Security? Better to use a session variable accessed via a session ID passed around using cookies or URL rewriting than depend on the easily spoofed (and often disabled) "referer" header...
Advertisers use a bidding system to tell Google how much they're willing to pay and those who pay more get their ads shown more often. Kind of a free market system. But there are some dampening factors used to reduce the price they actually pay based on how well ads are doing, how reputable the site is, etc.
Not that anyone will dare discuss their Adsense earnings, for fear of having their account cancelled.
Actually, you're allowed to disclose information about your earnings now, you can't just disclose specific details about number of clicks and such. Initially, yes, there was a restriction against discussing anything at all about the earnings, but that was lifted a while back. Certainly if your site draws the right kind of crowd (especially a paying crowd) then the advertisers will spend more to advertise with you. That's what Google's "smart pricing" is really all about, for example.
Advertisers are willing to pay more for ads shown only on Google's search result pages or on specific sites that they target within the Google Network (which includes run-of-the-mill AdSense publishers but also AdSense Premium publishers and some other kinds of sites).
Advertisers are certainly facing more options for spending their money now that Yahoo! and MSN are offering or going to offer similar programs to AdWords.
You will find variants of Office on almost every Windows PC used in the business and academic worlds, so it's pretty important.
For me, one of the best features of OpenOffice is its ability to export documents as PDFs. Lovely, lovely feature for creating interoperable documents. Yeah, yeah, I know not everyone likes PDFs, but there are PDF readers for most platforms...
Nope, not me. My project was never released out in the wild, it was just an end-of-term "bonus" assignment for the comp graphics class. ("Bonus" because it wasn't worth anything marks-wise.)
Also, this reminds me of that show they used to have on CITY-TV where they'd take cameras through the streets (and the underground walkways) of Toronto late at night, all set to jazz music. It was simple yet mesmerizing... people would literally watch it for hours.
One of the best projects I did at school was a networked tank game in my computer graphics class, on (now quite ancient) IRIX workstations. Battlezone kind of game, very simple, but lots of fun to play -- especially when the professor was manning one of the tanks:-)
Simplicity is a virtue, and not just in coding. Now take this project and combine it with Google Maps and it could be very interesting...
Your stats generally agree with mine, though I hadn't realized the robots.txt issue -- I don't actually have anything to protect from crawling on my sites, so my robots.txt is a pretty simple "allow all". I was just pointing out some guidelines for figuring out when your site's being crawled and who is doing it. The truth is, there are crawlers out there who don't identify themselves as such and who misbehave (purposely or not) so you can't absolutely be sure, but Google does seem to respect all the rules, and I respect them in turn for doing so.
The bots are easy to spot if you log the User-Agent header, they identify themselves with unique UA strings. Also, they access your/robots.txt file before crawling.
All I said was that Yahoo! was more agressive at crawling, not that it returned better results...
The Yahoo! crawler (Slurp) is definitely more aggressive than the Googlebot. It comes knocking on my door several times a day, especially the blog pages. Google is more conservative and keeps things in a sandbox, too.
Interesting, indeed. My only experience with Amazon reviews has been with books, I don't shop on Amazon.com (actually, Amazon.ca) for anything else. It could be that there are different standards/review processes for different product categories. The same product on Amazon.com has several negative 1-star and 2-star reviews.
Also, there are many fewer reviews on Amazon.co.uk (and the other country-specific sites) in general than on the main Amazon.com site.
I don't know if Amazon actually does anything with reviews until someone complains about one, to be honest. It seems to me that there are just too many products on Amazon for them to review all the reviews manually before they're posted.
One thing I'd like to see on Amazon is a way to add comments that don't affect the review average. But you _have_ to select a star value, even if all you want to do is clarify/correct someone else's review. I'd do that for my latest book:-) (Mind you, I'm not sure how much they'd appreciate comments like "Of course you don't like the book, you ninny, it's for non-techies!")
I used to get upset over bad reviews, but the truth is that if there are _enough_ reviews attached to a book, even the bad ones can be useful if they're constructive, because they may convince someone that the book really is appropriate for them even if it wasn't the right one for the reviewer. But that only works when you have a dozen or more reviews, I think. Two of three "this book sucks" reviews on their own isn't a good sign!
Heh... don't forget that the definition of an antique car is any car over 25 years old. And surely you remember if Microsoft built cars. Ergo 25-year old code is definitely antique. Or something like that.
Slashdot Mirror
American "CND" == Canadian "CDN"... American "MM/DD/YY" == Canadian "DD/MM/YY"... Seems like par for the course!
EricSee your HTTP headers here
Hey, we take our maple syrup seriously, see Table 2 in Ticketable Offences Under the Farm Products Grades and Sales Act.
EricShould you truncate your feeds?
many of the professors had never worked in industry
This would in fact be true of most university professors, I'd say, because of the way the training is done. Most professors go immediately to grad school after the undergraudate degree and from there to teaching/research. Those who work for a while and then go back to university to get their PhD are a minority, for various reasons -- loss of income (could _you_ revert back to being a poor student?), family stability, etc.
Your goal at university should be to get an education, which is as much about learning how to learn as it is anything else. Then when you get to the "real" world you learn how it's done in the real world.
EricSee your HTTP headers here
Most people don't realize how little authors make on their books. For a non-fiction, you're usually talking 10% of the net (wholesale) cover price. (For fiction, it's usually a smaller percentage of the cover price, which generally works out to about the same.) So for an average $40 tech book, the author might be getting 10% of $24, i.e. a couple bucks per book. If you only sell 5,000 books total (very common) then you can see that the numbers don't amount to much.
This is why more and more authors are starting to publish their books electronically as e-books, often becoming their own publishers. It's very similar to the way that musicians are exploring electronic distribution avenues for their work. But it's still an immature, emerging distribution model for both kinds of artists.
Eric(who nevertheless has a conventional printed book to flog -- you can always hope!)
Like I've said before in my AdSense blog, it's not that hard to make some money using AdSense and blogs, i.e. enough to pay for your Internet costs plus a small profit. Making real money takes time and effort, and don't let anyone else tell you otherwise.
EricRead the free sample chapter from my AdSense book for more
I loved Computer Language in its heyday. Really fun stuff, wacko languages, programming problems, Ken and Barbie naked on the cover...
EricBlackBerry programming stuff
A lot of sites base their security, in part, on the idea that you can only access certain pages if you were referred to them by the same site
Security? Better to use a session variable accessed via a session ID passed around using cookies or URL rewriting than depend on the easily spoofed (and often disabled) "referer" header...
EricAre you sending a referer header?
AJAX = abrasive cleaner. Good name for this technology, alright!
EricMaking Google richer (summary of U. Vazirani's talk at UW)
Blogs are glorified web pages are they not?
They are systems of web pages. But yes, underlying it all are the same old Web standards we're familiar with.
EricHow to masquerade your browser
Advertisers use a bidding system to tell Google how much they're willing to pay and those who pay more get their ads shown more often. Kind of a free market system. But there are some dampening factors used to reduce the price they actually pay based on how well ads are doing, how reputable the site is, etc.
EricSee your HTTP headers here
Not that anyone will dare discuss their Adsense earnings, for fear of having their account cancelled.
Actually, you're allowed to disclose information about your earnings now, you can't just disclose specific details about number of clicks and such. Initially, yes, there was a restriction against discussing anything at all about the earnings, but that was lifted a while back. Certainly if your site draws the right kind of crowd (especially a paying crowd) then the advertisers will spend more to advertise with you. That's what Google's "smart pricing" is really all about, for example.
Advertisers are willing to pay more for ads shown only on Google's search result pages or on specific sites that they target within the Google Network (which includes run-of-the-mill AdSense publishers but also AdSense Premium publishers and some other kinds of sites).
Advertisers are certainly facing more options for spending their money now that Yahoo! and MSN are offering or going to offer similar programs to AdWords.
EricRead my interview (PDF) in The Record (now there's a scary picture...)
The chance it will work is around 50%
I'm not sure anymore, are we talking about face transplants or John Travolta's recent movie work?
EricSample chapter from my latest book
You will find variants of Office on almost every Windows PC used in the business and academic worlds, so it's pretty important.
For me, one of the best features of OpenOffice is its ability to export documents as PDFs. Lovely, lovely feature for creating interoperable documents. Yeah, yeah, I know not everyone likes PDFs, but there are PDF readers for most platforms...
EricJoin my mailing list and win a free book
Nope, not me. My project was never released out in the wild, it was just an end-of-term "bonus" assignment for the comp graphics class. ("Bonus" because it wasn't worth anything marks-wise.)
Also, this reminds me of that show they used to have on CITY-TV where they'd take cameras through the streets (and the underground walkways) of Toronto late at night, all set to jazz music. It was simple yet mesmerizing... people would literally watch it for hours.
One of the best projects I did at school was a networked tank game in my computer graphics class, on (now quite ancient) IRIX workstations. Battlezone kind of game, very simple, but lots of fun to play -- especially when the professor was manning one of the tanks :-)
Simplicity is a virtue, and not just in coding. Now take this project and combine it with Google Maps and it could be very interesting...
EricSee what your browser's sending with the HTTP header viewer
Your stats generally agree with mine, though I hadn't realized the robots.txt issue -- I don't actually have anything to protect from crawling on my sites, so my robots.txt is a pretty simple "allow all". I was just pointing out some guidelines for figuring out when your site's being crawled and who is doing it. The truth is, there are crawlers out there who don't identify themselves as such and who misbehave (purposely or not) so you can't absolutely be sure, but Google does seem to respect all the rules, and I respect them in turn for doing so.
The bots are easy to spot if you log the User-Agent header, they identify themselves with unique UA strings. Also, they access your /robots.txt file before crawling.
All I said was that Yahoo! was more agressive at crawling, not that it returned better results...
The Yahoo! crawler (Slurp) is definitely more aggressive than the Googlebot. It comes knocking on my door several times a day, especially the blog pages. Google is more conservative and keeps things in a sandbox, too.
Interesting, indeed. My only experience with Amazon reviews has been with books, I don't shop on Amazon.com (actually, Amazon.ca) for anything else. It could be that there are different standards/review processes for different product categories. The same product on Amazon.com has several negative 1-star and 2-star reviews.
Also, there are many fewer reviews on Amazon.co.uk (and the other country-specific sites) in general than on the main Amazon.com site.
EricI don't know if Amazon actually does anything with reviews until someone complains about one, to be honest. It seems to me that there are just too many products on Amazon for them to review all the reviews manually before they're posted.
One thing I'd like to see on Amazon is a way to add comments that don't affect the review average. But you _have_ to select a star value, even if all you want to do is clarify/correct someone else's review. I'd do that for my latest book :-) (Mind you, I'm not sure how much they'd appreciate comments like "Of course you don't like the book, you ninny, it's for non-techies!")
I used to get upset over bad reviews, but the truth is that if there are _enough_ reviews attached to a book, even the bad ones can be useful if they're constructive, because they may convince someone that the book really is appropriate for them even if it wasn't the right one for the reviewer. But that only works when you have a dozen or more reviews, I think. Two of three "this book sucks" reviews on their own isn't a good sign!
Ericwww.EricGiguere.com/books
Heh... don't forget that the definition of an antique car is any car over 25 years old. And surely you remember if Microsoft built cars. Ergo 25-year old code is definitely antique. Or something like that.
EricMy own blog^H^H^H^Hramblings
And in a similar vein, see the Open Watcom project for a different set of (not GPLed, but open sourced) compilers.
is there really a good reason to GPL this
As much of a reason (some would say more) as releasing personal ramblings that no one reads (most blogs) under the GFDL.
EricThe ANSI Standard: A Summary for C Programmers (old but oddly relevant)
Use my handy HTTP request header viewer tool to see what user-agent string your browser's currently sending.
Eric