It's not a conspiracy, Tod, just laziness on my part. I vary my signature on every post, that's all. Sometimes I point to my latest book, sometimes to my HTTP header tool, sometimes to my cereal box commentary, sometimes to nothing... It's just easier to cycle through them that way than changing the preferences all the time. Sheer laziness, which is kind of funny, because laziness is why signatures were invented in the first place... I guess I'll have to reform my ways...
This is just an evolutionary step. The application server was already free for production use (deployment, not just development). But yes, it would be a response to JBoss and others. Java app servers are pretty much a commodity at this stage, pushing vendors to release them for free and then sell expanded versions with additional bells and whistles.
It is small, but I wouldn't describe as being "fingertip" in size. Sure, it balances on your finger, but I've yet to see a fingertip of those proportions, The Thing's notwithstanding!
Well, it is titled "No Cookies Required" as opposed to "No Cookies Used": cookies are the default and embedded session IDs are the fallback. Cookies are useful when they're not misused.
there are methods other than cookies that work just as well
Indeed, session tracking without cookies is quite easy, see No Cookies Required for an example, and obviously useful for things like shopping carts. Most people probably don't mind session tracking via cookies. It's the permanent cookies that are more problematic.
I get asked that a lot (well, I guess it's no surprise, since my book is titled "Make Easy Money with Google") but there are no firm statistics anywhere. All I have to go on is gut feel, really, but I suspect that most sites are earning between $50 to $250 a month. Some sites go way beyond that, earning several hundred or even several thousand dollars per month. And some, especially the new ones, will earn less. However, it's easy enough to make enough income to pay back your hosting costs, which is the first step.
There's no real secret to this stuff. In the end, the secret "AdSense formula for making money" comes down to this:
earnings = number of clicks * average price per click
You can derive almost everything from this formula, as I described in the article The AdSense Formula.
Generally speaking, the sites making a lot of money from AdSense get (no surprise) a lot of traffic. That's the hardest part -- getting the traffic, especially the right traffic.
But there's nothing illegal about what this particular type of business is doing. It's not even immoral. Whether it's a "worthwhile" business would perhaps be a different story, but I suspect many businesses would fail those kinds of criteria.
Click fraud is a big problem and legitimate sites are running into it more and more often. Recently someone was targeting pay-per-click related ads on my sites (a lot of my content is related to that topic) and causing my earnings to skyrocket. But it was obviously illegitimate income. What you do is report your suspicions to Google and let them figure it out. I've always done this and kept on good terms with them.
Let's face it, no one forced you to sign up with Google's AdSense program. If you can't abide by the rules that they impose, you always have the option of finding another ad program to suit your needs.
That argument doesn't hold: if these "snatchers" are making money from those domain names, then they are in fact running "valid" businesses themselves. In other words, they're doing what all good businesses try to do: make money.
I'm not really sure why this is news. They should for sure exclude registrations that haven't passed their grace period when reporting activations... that's just common sense. A company can't fully book the revenue it receives if there's a return period. Same reasoning applies here.
my guess is that Google will ban sites not having any content/other/ than their ads
That's already the case -- you can't normally display AdSense ads on a site if the site doesn't have any content. If Google notices this or if someone reports it, they'll ask you to take off the ads or lose your AdSense account.
That said, Google and other third parties do offer domain parking facilities that explicitly allow you to show ads. But you have to explicitly sign up for that kind of program.
I don't know how any of this would be considered "illegitimate" use of domain names, though. It's the price you pay with an open market.
Truth be told, it sounds more like an instruction manual for God-like beings:
"Tired of creating the same old night sky? Want to dazzle and confuse your sentient beings? Astronomy Hacks give you the tips and tricks you need to succeed."
There are a large number of Watcom employees still at iAnywhere. We have a low turnover rate, generally, though a large part of the compiler team eventually decamped to RIM (they have their own homegrown Java intepreter and tools) and other places after Watcom C++ was EOL'ed. Most, but not all, of the engineering work at the Waterloo site these days focuses on SQL Anywhere, the descendant of Watcom SQL. (Other iAnywhere and Sybase products are also worked on there.)
Note that Watcom C/C++ and Watcom Fortran still live on as open source projects released by the Open Watcom organization.
No, it's not a simplified DIY copyright kit. Creative Commons is about simplified licensing of copyrighted works. One of the hardest things about getting permission to use someone else's copyrighted work (and Dvorak's arguments about fair use should be read in light of Ivan Hoffman's fair use article and the realization that "fair use" varies greatly from legal jurisdiction to legal jurisdiction) is actually tracking down the owner of the approriate rights in order to ask them for permission.
Don't believe me? Check out the copyright clearance section of Project Gutenberg. Who has control over which rights is not always clear, nor is it clear how to contact them. A Creative Commons or similar license removes the need (under appropriate conditions) for explicitly obtaining permission from the rights holder.
Now, it's true that the early CC site wasn't very clear as to the purpose and use of the CC licenses. But not anymore.
Absolutely, it's still being used. I still get requests from the occasional OS/2 user to open source or update our old VX-REXX product (from the days when we were Watcom -- now known as iAnywhere). Funny how OS/2 never quite goes away, even though I think IBM has tried hard to bury it.
No, I was just arguing against the assertion that authors and publishers are explicitly out to publish crap. I don't know of anyone in the business who wants to do anything but create a quality product. But not everyone agrees on what is crappy, do they? Someone's crap is someone else's manure.
You're a bit cynical, aren't you? Every author I know, including me, goes to great pains to write books that explain, not confuse. Sure, the publishers like to see books that can have "sequels" and "spin-offs" and other related books, but how is that different from (say) TV or film?
Also, not everything about the book is under the author's control unless they self-publish it. The title often isn't (I certainly didn't come up with "Make Easy Money with Google", my working title was quite uninspiring) and neither is the "trade dress" of the book (layout, colors, etc.).
Eric
Re:I for one do not welcome our advertising overlo
on
Don't Click on the Blue E
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Absolutely. No author I know likes bad reviews, but a reviewer that explains why they didn't like a book -- because they thought it was about X or it didn't talk enough about Y or it spent too much time on Z -- is providing useful information. Even a bad review can lead to a sale. It's the non-constructive reviews that blather on but really say nothing more than "this book sucks" that are (in my mind) unhelpful.
Look at the reviews on Amazon for Head First Java, which is definitely not your standard book. Generally great reviews, but occasionally someone doesn't like it. That's fine if they provide some details. I love this one:
If you are looking for a book to transition from one language to another this certainly is not it. It even says that in the introduction to the book.
At least we know the book writers had the right audience in mind. On the other hand, this review is a bit odd:
I think about reading it at night but fear that the pictures would haunt me in my dreams.
OK... (backing away slowly...)
Eric
Re:I for one do not welcome our advertising overlo
on
Don't Click on the Blue E
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Trust me, it's not easy to write a non-techie book. You may think there's no market for those kinds of books, but the fact that millions of copies of the "For Dummies" and "Complete Idiot's" series have been sold would indicate otherwise. You can't blame O'Reilly for jumping into the consumer market, it's a much larger pie than the techie market.
I am surprised to see a non-techie book reviewed here, though. Definitely not the intended audience! But then again, every techie I know has a non-techie spouse/friend/parent, so it's good to have books to recommend to them when you get tired of answering questions:-)
The rest of the talk seems to present like a substitute for the sort of things I would imagine should be taught in business schools, but probably isn't.
It's not. Business schools don't prepare you to be an entrepreneur. Neither do computer science schools. I'm not sure anything does. Yes, there are programs like Shad Valley that can help point you in the right direction, but in the end it's your inner drive to succeed that will get you there or not.
So, that is why you opted for the short non.com domain eh?
That was a bit of a struggle, actually. I couldn't find a good, short.com domain so I compromised on the title of the book. But then I had the problem that the URLs printed in the book would look horrible, so I also went and registered a short.com domain consisting of the first letters in each title word to get memwg.com as a shorthand for MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com. The shorthand form makes no sense unless you know the title of the book, but it made for reasonable URLs on the printed page.
I definitely recommend finding a.com domain first before using one of the other domains, though, unless your stuff is country-specific and you'll get a boost from having a country-code TLD. And, practically speaking, the.com domains tend be much cheaper than the country-code ones. If you're registering multiple domains, this can be important. It's just that finding an available domain.com related to your topic can be so incredibly hard.
There's no doubt that.com is a desirable domain. But there's also the fact that it's hard to find a good, short.com domain (witness mine!) these days.
As for your question, I think the country-code TLDs are important (i.e..ca,.fr,.de) and can make a lot of sense, especially for non-English sites. Actually, even corporate-owned sites can benefit from the different TLDs to put the proper locale spin on their sites.
And of course, there are TLDs that aren't open to just anyone, and so by their very nature they serve to differentiate their constituent domains.
I think Nvu is perfect for non-techies who are looking for a free tool to help them build Web pages. The non-techies aren't going to be looking at the generated HTML much initially, so what does it matter if it's not perfect? Most HTML isn't perfect, anyhow, and there is an option in Nvu to turn off the auto-formatting.
What I really like about Nvu is the built-in CSS integration, so that you can put most of the presentation details in the style sheet and stick to mostly structure in the HTML. I wrote a blog entry about it: Nvu makes creating Web sites easy. The fact that Nvu is cross-platform with binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux is a real bonus, too.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a conspiracy, Tod, just laziness on my part. I vary my signature on every post, that's all. Sometimes I point to my latest book, sometimes to my HTTP header tool, sometimes to my cereal box commentary, sometimes to nothing... It's just easier to cycle through them that way than changing the preferences all the time. Sheer laziness, which is kind of funny, because laziness is why signatures were invented in the first place... I guess I'll have to reform my ways...
different tools for different kinds of jobs
Pretty reasonable statement for an "uninformed" view. You're right, get ready for the flames...This is just an evolutionary step. The application server was already free for production use (deployment, not just development). But yes, it would be a response to JBoss and others. Java app servers are pretty much a commodity at this stage, pushing vendors to release them for free and then sell expanded versions with additional bells and whistles.
EricA blog about book publishing, making money, Google, etc.
It is small, but I wouldn't describe as being "fingertip" in size. Sure, it balances on your finger, but I've yet to see a fingertip of those proportions, The Thing's notwithstanding!
EricSee your HTTP headers, live!
Well, it is titled "No Cookies Required" as opposed to "No Cookies Used": cookies are the default and embedded session IDs are the fallback. Cookies are useful when they're not misused.
Ericthere are methods other than cookies that work just as well
Indeed, session tracking without cookies is quite easy, see No Cookies Required for an example, and obviously useful for things like shopping carts. Most people probably don't mind session tracking via cookies. It's the permanent cookies that are more problematic.
Erichow much can AdSense really earn you?
I get asked that a lot (well, I guess it's no surprise, since my book is titled "Make Easy Money with Google") but there are no firm statistics anywhere. All I have to go on is gut feel, really, but I suspect that most sites are earning between $50 to $250 a month. Some sites go way beyond that, earning several hundred or even several thousand dollars per month. And some, especially the new ones, will earn less. However, it's easy enough to make enough income to pay back your hosting costs, which is the first step.
There's no real secret to this stuff. In the end, the secret "AdSense formula for making money" comes down to this:
earnings = number of clicks * average price per click
You can derive almost everything from this formula, as I described in the article The AdSense Formula.
Generally speaking, the sites making a lot of money from AdSense get (no surprise) a lot of traffic. That's the hardest part -- getting the traffic, especially the right traffic.
EricBut there's nothing illegal about what this particular type of business is doing. It's not even immoral. Whether it's a "worthwhile" business would perhaps be a different story, but I suspect many businesses would fail those kinds of criteria.
Click fraud is a big problem and legitimate sites are running into it more and more often. Recently someone was targeting pay-per-click related ads on my sites (a lot of my content is related to that topic) and causing my earnings to skyrocket. But it was obviously illegitimate income. What you do is report your suspicions to Google and let them figure it out. I've always done this and kept on good terms with them.
Let's face it, no one forced you to sign up with Google's AdSense program. If you can't abide by the rules that they impose, you always have the option of finding another ad program to suit your needs.
EricRead about Alaska cruising
That argument doesn't hold: if these "snatchers" are making money from those domain names, then they are in fact running "valid" businesses themselves. In other words, they're doing what all good businesses try to do: make money.
EricI'm not really sure why this is news. They should for sure exclude registrations that haven't passed their grace period when reporting activations... that's just common sense. A company can't fully book the revenue it receives if there's a return period. Same reasoning applies here.
EricRead about click fraud
my guess is that Google will ban sites not having any content /other/ than their ads
That's already the case -- you can't normally display AdSense ads on a site if the site doesn't have any content. If Google notices this or if someone reports it, they'll ask you to take off the ads or lose your AdSense account.
That said, Google and other third parties do offer domain parking facilities that explicitly allow you to show ads. But you have to explicitly sign up for that kind of program.
I don't know how any of this would be considered "illegitimate" use of domain names, though. It's the price you pay with an open market.
EricTruth be told, it sounds more like an instruction manual for God-like beings:
"Tired of creating the same old night sky? Want to dazzle and confuse your sentient beings? Astronomy Hacks give you the tips and tricks you need to succeed."
EricWilliam Shatner likes his All-Bran
There are a large number of Watcom employees still at iAnywhere. We have a low turnover rate, generally, though a large part of the compiler team eventually decamped to RIM (they have their own homegrown Java intepreter and tools) and other places after Watcom C++ was EOL'ed. Most, but not all, of the engineering work at the Waterloo site these days focuses on SQL Anywhere, the descendant of Watcom SQL. (Other iAnywhere and Sybase products are also worked on there.)
Note that Watcom C/C++ and Watcom Fortran still live on as open source projects released by the Open Watcom organization.
EricNo, it's not a simplified DIY copyright kit. Creative Commons is about simplified licensing of copyrighted works. One of the hardest things about getting permission to use someone else's copyrighted work (and Dvorak's arguments about fair use should be read in light of Ivan Hoffman's fair use article and the realization that "fair use" varies greatly from legal jurisdiction to legal jurisdiction) is actually tracking down the owner of the approriate rights in order to ask them for permission.
Don't believe me? Check out the copyright clearance section of Project Gutenberg. Who has control over which rights is not always clear, nor is it clear how to contact them. A Creative Commons or similar license removes the need (under appropriate conditions) for explicitly obtaining permission from the rights holder.
Now, it's true that the early CC site wasn't very clear as to the purpose and use of the CC licenses. But not anymore.
EricAnother random blog to look at
Absolutely, it's still being used. I still get requests from the occasional OS/2 user to open source or update our old VX-REXX product (from the days when we were Watcom -- now known as iAnywhere). Funny how OS/2 never quite goes away, even though I think IBM has tried hard to bury it.
EricEricGiguere.com
so what purpose does the article serve, other than the rather mediocre instructional value?
It's a safety valve to ensure that the Slashdot signal-to-noise ratio remains constant.
EricFind out why I'm mad about click fraud
No, I was just arguing against the assertion that authors and publishers are explicitly out to publish crap. I don't know of anyone in the business who wants to do anything but create a quality product. But not everyone agrees on what is crappy, do they? Someone's crap is someone else's manure.
You're a bit cynical, aren't you? Every author I know, including me, goes to great pains to write books that explain, not confuse. Sure, the publishers like to see books that can have "sequels" and "spin-offs" and other related books, but how is that different from (say) TV or film?
Also, not everything about the book is under the author's control unless they self-publish it. The title often isn't (I certainly didn't come up with "Make Easy Money with Google", my working title was quite uninspiring) and neither is the "trade dress" of the book (layout, colors, etc.).
EricAbsolutely. No author I know likes bad reviews, but a reviewer that explains why they didn't like a book -- because they thought it was about X or it didn't talk enough about Y or it spent too much time on Z -- is providing useful information. Even a bad review can lead to a sale. It's the non-constructive reviews that blather on but really say nothing more than "this book sucks" that are (in my mind) unhelpful.
Look at the reviews on Amazon for Head First Java, which is definitely not your standard book. Generally great reviews, but occasionally someone doesn't like it. That's fine if they provide some details. I love this one:
At least we know the book writers had the right audience in mind. On the other hand, this review is a bit odd:
OK... (backing away slowly...)
EricTrust me, it's not easy to write a non-techie book. You may think there's no market for those kinds of books, but the fact that millions of copies of the "For Dummies" and "Complete Idiot's" series have been sold would indicate otherwise. You can't blame O'Reilly for jumping into the consumer market, it's a much larger pie than the techie market.
I am surprised to see a non-techie book reviewed here, though. Definitely not the intended audience! But then again, every techie I know has a non-techie spouse/friend/parent, so it's good to have books to recommend to them when you get tired of answering questions :-)
EricThe rest of the talk seems to present like a substitute for the sort of things I would imagine should be taught in business schools, but probably isn't.
It's not. Business schools don't prepare you to be an entrepreneur. Neither do computer science schools. I'm not sure anything does. Yes, there are programs like Shad Valley that can help point you in the right direction, but in the end it's your inner drive to succeed that will get you there or not.
EricSo, that is why you opted for the short non .com domain eh?
That was a bit of a struggle, actually. I couldn't find a good, short .com domain so I compromised on the title of the book. But then I had the problem that the URLs printed in the book would look horrible, so I also went and registered a short .com domain consisting of the first letters in each title word to get memwg.com as a shorthand for MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com. The shorthand form makes no sense unless you know the title of the book, but it made for reasonable URLs on the printed page.
I definitely recommend finding a .com domain first before using one of the other domains, though, unless your stuff is country-specific and you'll get a boost from having a country-code TLD. And, practically speaking, the .com domains tend be much cheaper than the country-code ones. If you're registering multiple domains, this can be important. It's just that finding an available domain .com related to your topic can be so incredibly hard.
EricThere's no doubt that .com is a desirable domain. But there's also the fact that it's hard to find a good, short .com domain (witness mine!) these days.
As for your question, I think the country-code TLDs are important (i.e. .ca, .fr, .de) and can make a lot of sense, especially for non-English sites. Actually, even corporate-owned sites can benefit from the different TLDs to put the proper locale spin on their sites.
And of course, there are TLDs that aren't open to just anyone, and so by their very nature they serve to differentiate their constituent domains.
EricI think Nvu is perfect for non-techies who are looking for a free tool to help them build Web pages. The non-techies aren't going to be looking at the generated HTML much initially, so what does it matter if it's not perfect? Most HTML isn't perfect, anyhow, and there is an option in Nvu to turn off the auto-formatting.
What I really like about Nvu is the built-in CSS integration, so that you can put most of the presentation details in the style sheet and stick to mostly structure in the HTML. I wrote a blog entry about it: Nvu makes creating Web sites easy. The fact that Nvu is cross-platform with binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux is a real bonus, too.
Eric