You could simply look and see if they filed patents for their taskbar improvements in 7.
Life is not that easy. You can look, but you won't see anything until the patent is published, which may not happen for a while. From wikipedia: "...Currently, the majority of U.S. patent applications are published within 18 months after the filing date..."
the middle east accounts for only about 15% of US oil imports; hardly an 'addiction'.
True, but very short-sighted. The oil reserves of the U.S. are tiny compared to the Middle East's, so we will be much more reliant on them in the future as our oil runs out. From this page:
Iraq and Kuwait sit upon 20 percent of the world's known oil; Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates sit upon another 25 percent; the U.S. upon only two percent. If U.S. oil consumption were to be supplied from U.S. production alone (which it couldn't be, because there are not enough pumps and pipelines to deliver it that fast), known U.S. reserves would last just over four years.
That's only true if the cars being turned in were being driven a lot. If retired people are trading in old cars that were only being driven once a week to go to the grocery store, this isn't helping the environment at all. In fact, it is hurting the environment because of the resources that went into manufacturing a new car that was unnecessary. That is why I have always advocated a substantial gas tax -- it creates an incentive to get a fuel-efficient car where the incentive is proportional to the environmental damage (and national security threat of relying on oil from the Middle East) that is actually being done. Further, the people doing damage are the ones that pay a penalty for it. The Cash for Clunkers program is not well aligned with improving the environment, and it rewards people for damaging the environment (i.e. those that bought inefficient cars) at the expense of those that were more responsible, since they will be paying more in taxes in order to pay for the clunkers being traded in.
The stats for MagPortal.com (should be fairly unbiased) are not showing a drop in MSIE of that magnitude. Here is a comparison going from the last week in May to the first week in July:
otherwise you have to spend a lot of time getting all of the items into the database and properly tagged and sorted
Document clustering software can make that less painful by giving an overview of what you have (possibly hierarchical), and allowing you to categorize dozens (or even thousands) of related documents with a single mouse click. Blatant plug: Clustify.
I heard that ODF documents created in, say, OpenOffice weren't entirely compatible with AbiWord.
Here is a simple study. Any spec is going to have some ambiguity about how things should be handled in some cases, so compatibility will always depend, to some degree, on whether or not software authors want to be compatible with other implementations. As ODF matures, more of the details will get nailed down, and there should be less compatibility wiggle-room.
You could also try waiting till the domain expires and they have to renew and try to register it then before they do. That takes time and cunning skills.
There are so many people lined up to buy expiring domains that you really have to pay fees to a service that can pound the system with purchase requests to get one that way.
I think they'll have headlines and perhaps a brief intro paragraph / one-line summary and then a "log in to view" for the remainder of the article. Google et al. will get enough out of that to provide search...
They might do that, but I doubt it. Feeding the full article to Googlebot (perhaps checking IP address to make sure it is really Googlebot and not an impostor) gives them a much better chance of coming up in search results. Combine that with the "noarchive" meta tag to keep Google from displaying a "cached" link, and Google is a nice advertising mechanism to help them sell subscriptions (i.e. easy to find stuff you can't read unless you pay). Several subscription sites have been doing this for years.
Do you think they will still allow Googlebot to crawl their web pages?
The sad thing is that they will probably only allow Googlebot to crawl them, thereby disadvantaging any upstart search engines that might want to compete with Google. As much as I like Google, the fact that they are so big creates a "we only need to worry about Googlebot" mentality among website operators that is similar to "we only need to worry about working with Internet Explorer."
I made an online purchase from Circuit City a couple of years ago, so I went to the link you provided and entered my email address to opt-out. It then told me the second step was to click a link that would be emailed to me immediately. I never got that email (it's been a few hours now, and I did check the spam dump). Disturbing. Anybody else have this happen?
I find it hard to see much success when you're selling a CD at twice the normal retail price.
From the article: "If one of Amazon's 80 million customers buys your 10-song CD on Amazon for $8.98, you'll receive $3.59." They are not selling the CDs at twice the normal price. The $31 is the annual fee the artist pays to be included on TuneCore, not the cost of a CD.
If attribution is required because (according to the TOS):
In many cases the data you are shown never existed before in exactly that way until you asked for it, so its provenance traces back both to underlying data sources and to the algorithms and knowledge built into the Wolfram|Alpha computational system. As such, the results you get from Wolfram|Alpha are correctly attributed to Wolfram|Alpha itself.
Does that mean that Wolfram|Alpha can be sued for slander if its algorithm generates a false statement about some individual or corporation by "misunderstanding" the data it is digesting? In other words, if the result is something uniquely generated by Wolfram|Alpha, deserving of attribution in the same way that an author of a book deserves attribution, do they also deserve to be held liable if the content they are generating is incorrect or slanderous?
My company links to articles on a lot of magazine websites, and I'm just amazed at how often the links become broken. Sites get redesigned and they don't bother redirecting the old URLs to the corresponding new locations. Or, even worse, they just discard all of the old articles, or random articles disappear or come up blank or mangled. Does it not occur to them that websites, search engines, and blogs are left with broken links? Do they not realize that people bookmark the articles?
Maybe you should take a lesson from the corporate litigation world where they have to review millions of documents hunting for evidence -- cluster related documents together to boost efficiency and improve consistency of review. If you don't have your own technology, try Clustify;-) </slashvertisement>
I didn't mean to imply that this made Mozy better than competing services. On the other hand, if the prevailing wisdom at the ABA was that "online backup should not be used by lawyers due to confidentiality or other reasons" or "Mozy (specifically) is not secure/reliable," I don't think the ABA would be associating their name with them.
Mozy (owned by EMC) has some sort of deal with the ABA to give members a discount, so I would take that to be somewhat of an endorsement for use by lawyers. I'm not affiliated with them in any way -- I just know about them because their booth was across from ours at the ABA TechShow.
Good point (assuming it isn't a dynamic page that checks for extraneous parameters), and yet another reason why search engines shouldn't be paying attention to anything in the URL other than the domain name -- the rest is too easy to manipulate.
i saw one site using a scheme of example.com/000000/articletitle.html where the numbers were the document ID and the article title could be any valid URL and get to that document
Yes, I've seen that before. Someday the people that do that will realize what a bad idea it is. They'll probably figure it out when people start linking to: example.com/000000/get+your+free+kiddie+porn+here.html and their pages start showing up in the search engines for things they don't want to be associated with.
The problem isn't bandwidth, it is that long URLs are a pain from a usability standpoint. They cause problems in any context where they are spelled out in plain text (instead of being hidden as a link). For example, they often get broken in two when sent in plain text email. When posting a URL into a simple forum that only accepts text (no markup), a long URL can blow-out the width of the page.
Where does this problem come from? It comes from SEO. Website operators realized that Google and other search engines were taking URLs into account, so CMSs and websites switched from using simple URLs (like a numeric document ID) to stuffing whole article titles into the URL to try to boost search rankings. One of the results of this is that when someone finds a typo in an article title and fixes it, the CMS either creates a duplicate page with a slightly different URL, or the URL with the typo ends up giving a 404 error and breaks any links that point to it.
What I don't understand is why search engines bother to look at anything beyond the domain name when determining how to rank search results. How often do you see anything useful in the URL that isn't also in the <title> tag or in a <h1> tag? If search engines would stop using URLs as a factor in ranking pages, people would use URLs that were efficient and useful instead of filling them with junk. The whole thing reminds me of <meta> keyword tags -- to the extent that users don't often look at URLs while search engines do, website operators have an opportunity to manipulate the search engines by stuffing them with junk.
Have we learned nothing from the recent "too big to fail" mess?
Obviously not, or one of the conditions for receiving government bailouts would have been that the companies break up into smaller pieces over some reasonable time frame, so they wouldn't be "too big to fail" in the future. Instead, it's business as usual.
In spite of what people are saying, I think you have a point, although perhaps only by accident.
total profit = N * P - C where N is the number of customers, P is the price charged to each customer, and C is the total cost of providing the service to all customers. N will depend on the price charged (increasing price causes you to lose customers). C will, in general, have a fixed component and a part that depends on the number of customers (customer support costs, billing costs, etc.). If you take the partial derivative with respect to price, P, and set it to zero to find the value of P that maximizes the total profit, the fixed component of the cost C will drop out. So, a change in fixed costs won't change the price that maximizes total profit. If the government charges a flat fee for the spectrum, rather than a per-user fee, it should not impact the price charged to consumers (assuming phone companies maximize profits). In contrast, if the government charges a per-user fee, that would be passed along (and possibly amplified) in the price charged to consumers if pricing is based on maximum profit.
Slashdot Mirror
2nd to last paragraph from TFA:
...It can be preconfigured with Windows Server or its HPC Server 2008, as well as Red Hat and SUSE Linux servers...
scumbags don't call me, but politicians do
You contradict yourself.
You could simply look and see if they filed patents for their taskbar improvements in 7.
Life is not that easy. You can look, but you won't see anything until the patent is published, which may not happen for a while. From wikipedia: "...Currently, the majority of U.S. patent applications are published within 18 months after the filing date..."
the middle east accounts for only about 15% of US oil imports; hardly an 'addiction'.
True, but very short-sighted. The oil reserves of the U.S. are tiny compared to the Middle East's, so we will be much more reliant on them in the future as our oil runs out. From this page:
Iraq and Kuwait sit upon 20 percent of the world's known oil; Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates sit upon another 25 percent; the U.S. upon only two percent. If U.S. oil consumption were to be supplied from U.S. production alone (which it couldn't be, because there are not enough pumps and pipelines to deliver it that fast), known U.S. reserves would last just over four years.
the fuel savings nationally should be measurable
That's only true if the cars being turned in were being driven a lot. If retired people are trading in old cars that were only being driven once a week to go to the grocery store, this isn't helping the environment at all. In fact, it is hurting the environment because of the resources that went into manufacturing a new car that was unnecessary. That is why I have always advocated a substantial gas tax -- it creates an incentive to get a fuel-efficient car where the incentive is proportional to the environmental damage (and national security threat of relying on oil from the Middle East) that is actually being done. Further, the people doing damage are the ones that pay a penalty for it. The Cash for Clunkers program is not well aligned with improving the environment, and it rewards people for damaging the environment (i.e. those that bought inefficient cars) at the expense of those that were more responsible, since they will be paying more in taxes in order to pay for the clunkers being traded in.
That's called the Dunning-Kruger effect
The stats for MagPortal.com (should be fairly unbiased) are not showing a drop in MSIE of that magnitude. Here is a comparison going from the last week in May to the first week in July:
MSIE: 66.10% -> 64.34%
Firefox: 25.71% -> 27.41%
Safari: 5.90% -> 5.61%
Chrome: 2.29% -> 2.65%
Parody of Microsoft's browser comparison
otherwise you have to spend a lot of time getting all of the items into the database and properly tagged and sorted
Document clustering software can make that less painful by giving an overview of what you have (possibly hierarchical), and allowing you to categorize dozens (or even thousands) of related documents with a single mouse click. Blatant plug: Clustify.
I heard that ODF documents created in, say, OpenOffice weren't entirely compatible with AbiWord.
Here is a simple study.
Any spec is going to have some ambiguity about how things should be handled in some cases, so compatibility will always depend, to some degree, on whether or not software authors want to be compatible with other implementations. As ODF matures, more of the details will get nailed down, and there should be less compatibility wiggle-room.
You could also try waiting till the domain expires and they have to renew and try to register it then before they do. That takes time and cunning skills.
There are so many people lined up to buy expiring domains that you really have to pay fees to a service that can pound the system with purchase requests to get one that way.
I think they'll have headlines and perhaps a brief intro paragraph / one-line summary and then a "log in to view" for the remainder of the article. Google et al. will get enough out of that to provide search...
They might do that, but I doubt it. Feeding the full article to Googlebot (perhaps checking IP address to make sure it is really Googlebot and not an impostor) gives them a much better chance of coming up in search results. Combine that with the "noarchive" meta tag to keep Google from displaying a "cached" link, and Google is a nice advertising mechanism to help them sell subscriptions (i.e. easy to find stuff you can't read unless you pay). Several subscription sites have been doing this for years.
Do you think they will still allow Googlebot to crawl their web pages?
The sad thing is that they will probably only allow Googlebot to crawl them, thereby disadvantaging any upstart search engines that might want to compete with Google. As much as I like Google, the fact that they are so big creates a "we only need to worry about Googlebot" mentality among website operators that is similar to "we only need to worry about working with Internet Explorer."
I made an online purchase from Circuit City a couple of years ago, so I went to the link you provided and entered my email address to opt-out. It then told me the second step was to click a link that would be emailed to me immediately. I never got that email (it's been a few hours now, and I did check the spam dump). Disturbing. Anybody else have this happen?
I find it hard to see much success when you're selling a CD at twice the normal retail price.
From the article: "If one of Amazon's 80 million customers buys your 10-song CD on Amazon for $8.98, you'll receive $3.59."
They are not selling the CDs at twice the normal price. The $31 is the annual fee the artist pays to be included on TuneCore, not the cost of a CD.
If attribution is required because (according to the TOS):
In many cases the data you are shown never existed before in exactly that way until you asked for it, so its provenance traces back both to underlying data sources and to the algorithms and knowledge built into the Wolfram|Alpha computational system. As such, the results you get from Wolfram|Alpha are correctly attributed to Wolfram|Alpha itself.
Does that mean that Wolfram|Alpha can be sued for slander if its algorithm generates a false statement about some individual or corporation by "misunderstanding" the data it is digesting? In other words, if the result is something uniquely generated by Wolfram|Alpha, deserving of attribution in the same way that an author of a book deserves attribution, do they also deserve to be held liable if the content they are generating is incorrect or slanderous?
My company links to articles on a lot of magazine websites, and I'm just amazed at how often the links become broken. Sites get redesigned and they don't bother redirecting the old URLs to the corresponding new locations. Or, even worse, they just discard all of the old articles, or random articles disappear or come up blank or mangled. Does it not occur to them that websites, search engines, and blogs are left with broken links? Do they not realize that people bookmark the articles?
Dear Google,
Maybe you should take a lesson from the corporate litigation world where they have to review millions of documents hunting for evidence -- cluster related documents together to boost efficiency and improve consistency of review. If you don't have your own technology, try Clustify ;-) </slashvertisement>
I didn't mean to imply that this made Mozy better than competing services. On the other hand, if the prevailing wisdom at the ABA was that "online backup should not be used by lawyers due to confidentiality or other reasons" or "Mozy (specifically) is not secure/reliable," I don't think the ABA would be associating their name with them.
Mozy (owned by EMC) has some sort of deal with the ABA to give members a discount, so I would take that to be somewhat of an endorsement for use by lawyers. I'm not affiliated with them in any way -- I just know about them because their booth was across from ours at the ABA TechShow.
you can already do that with a ? after the URL.
Good point (assuming it isn't a dynamic page that checks for extraneous parameters), and yet another reason why search engines shouldn't be paying attention to anything in the URL other than the domain name -- the rest is too easy to manipulate.
i saw one site using a scheme of example.com/000000/articletitle.html where the numbers were the document ID and the article title could be any valid URL and get to that document
Yes, I've seen that before. Someday the people that do that will realize what a bad idea it is. They'll probably figure it out when people start linking to:
example.com/000000/get+your+free+kiddie+porn+here.html
and their pages start showing up in the search engines for things they don't want to be associated with.
The problem isn't bandwidth, it is that long URLs are a pain from a usability standpoint. They cause problems in any context where they are spelled out in plain text (instead of being hidden as a link). For example, they often get broken in two when sent in plain text email. When posting a URL into a simple forum that only accepts text (no markup), a long URL can blow-out the width of the page.
Where does this problem come from? It comes from SEO. Website operators realized that Google and other search engines were taking URLs into account, so CMSs and websites switched from using simple URLs (like a numeric document ID) to stuffing whole article titles into the URL to try to boost search rankings. One of the results of this is that when someone finds a typo in an article title and fixes it, the CMS either creates a duplicate page with a slightly different URL, or the URL with the typo ends up giving a 404 error and breaks any links that point to it.
What I don't understand is why search engines bother to look at anything beyond the domain name when determining how to rank search results. How often do you see anything useful in the URL that isn't also in the <title> tag or in a <h1> tag? If search engines would stop using URLs as a factor in ranking pages, people would use URLs that were efficient and useful instead of filling them with junk. The whole thing reminds me of <meta> keyword tags -- to the extent that users don't often look at URLs while search engines do, website operators have an opportunity to manipulate the search engines by stuffing them with junk.
Have we learned nothing from the recent "too big to fail" mess?
Obviously not, or one of the conditions for receiving government bailouts would have been that the companies break up into smaller pieces over some reasonable time frame, so they wouldn't be "too big to fail" in the future. Instead, it's business as usual.
In spite of what people are saying, I think you have a point, although perhaps only by accident.
total profit = N * P - C
where N is the number of customers, P is the price charged to each customer, and C is the total cost of providing the service to all customers. N will depend on the price charged (increasing price causes you to lose customers). C will, in general, have a fixed component and a part that depends on the number of customers (customer support costs, billing costs, etc.). If you take the partial derivative with respect to price, P, and set it to zero to find the value of P that maximizes the total profit, the fixed component of the cost C will drop out. So, a change in fixed costs won't change the price that maximizes total profit. If the government charges a flat fee for the spectrum, rather than a per-user fee, it should not impact the price charged to consumers (assuming phone companies maximize profits). In contrast, if the government charges a per-user fee, that would be passed along (and possibly amplified) in the price charged to consumers if pricing is based on maximum profit.