I fail to see how google boosting its own search rankings is "evil".
Deep philosophical discussions about relativism and universal morality aside. The meaning of "evil" can have different meanings in different contexts. Google is in the game of trying to figure out a way to rank and display web pages. It is totally appropriate for Google to label practices as good, bad and evil. Good practices would be those that help the ranking process. Bad practices are those that get in the way (like putting a session id in a query string). Evil practices would be those intentionally designed to influence page rank or otherwise mislead the public.
Google's philosophy is based on and ideal of natural linking. They assume that all links appear on the web naturally. Anything that artificially creates links to influence google is a form of SE spam...evil.
The big problem is that Google's definition of evil is different from most web masters. My definition is that whatever properly represents my site in the search engine is good. For example, I have pages with a disclaimer on the page. The pages show up well for searches containing the words of the disclaimer, it does not show up well for the content of the site. I would love to simply not show that information to a Google search, but such action falls in Google's definition of "evil." Even though, I think the change would improve the quality of Google's listing.
There is, of course, a great deal of what could be described as true SE evil in the world. There are billions of web pages with duplicate or false content produced with the soul intent of manipulating Google results. A web master might randomly generate millions of pages with false key words for Google to injest. They then display whatever misleading media message they want to stuff down the gullets of Internet users.
So, we have a world where Google defines anything that varies from their ideal of natural linking as evil. We have webmasters who think greater control over their representation in Google would be good for the public. They get cast as evil. Finally, we have Spammers with a truly evil intent of misleading people by filling the internet with useless white noise. It is an interesting electronic study of human nature.
I have yet to write a piece of code that was more than a simple logical statement...so I pretty much fit in that latter category.
Multithreaded programs with semaphore hierarchies and asynchronous interfaces require comments to understand.
Seems ta me that, by definition, the complexity of semaphores, hierarchies and multithreaded programs all lie in the interface.
I openly admit I am a full of shit script kiddie. I have never written a single procedure that executes in more than one thread at a given time. When I've want multithreaded program, I've always copped out and used more than one procedure. I've never put a hierarchy in an object, although I have put objects in hierarchies. I've only used semaphores to communicate between objects.
Every program I've ever written has just been a string of simple logical statements. Being of a petty bourgeoisie mindset, I doubt I will ever write a program that is other than a string of logical statements. The nasty documentation needing stuff seems to happen when all the different programs talk to eachother.
I find it useful to tell why I am doing something.
The "whys" generally live in the design documents. Most all whys should be settled before coding begins. The problem with a methodology where the documentation lives in a different structured file than the code is that the two files are easily separated.
This problem is especially acute with open source development. Preparing code for publication is a completely different art than just coding for compilation. When I know that people are likely to support a particular piece of code, it gets a ton of documentation.
figuring out just why exactly it was that I did this, when this seems to be a better solution.
I do place comments on anything that is out of my standard coding style. Which gets back to why I was agreeing with the parent post to my first post. Before, I have an establishing coding style in a language, I usually leave more notes than when I have a good grasp of the language and an established style. This is contrary to the comments of the article that said the number of notes goes up as people gain proficiency in a language.
Now then, the article might be focusing on code written for publication. This guy is obviously reading code that was given to him so that he can read the code. A person with a ton of experience in a given language is likely to have more to say about what was done in a piece of code and why. When I give someone code to review or otherwise publish, I put in more comments.
In other words, experience does not lead to more comments. It leads to learning where comments help and where they are just wasted key strokes.
It seems to me that documation needs a structure. Structures like records of revision and design documents are useful. Free form comments in the code turn into white noise. Since I am far more interested in what a piece of code does, I pretty much ignore all documentation in the code. It seems like the majority of documentation in code becomes obsolete as people modify the code. For example, if a person has a problematic part in their code, they add copious notes document. When the problem finally clarifies in their mind and the find the code, they end up leaving obsolete documentation that just confuses people at a later date.
Personally, I think a person should document the interface, maintain a record of revision. The code itself should only be documented when the code is doing something out of the ordinary.
So, when I am learning a language, I put a great deal of notes in the code. As I learn the typical flow of the programs, I write less documentation in the code. When I have a strong feel for the language and reading the code is more informative than reading notes, my notes all but disappear. I've noticed many other programmers seem to have the same tendency. They write less documentation in code and they learn the language.
Having supported a large number of applications. I greatly appreciate good design documention, but discard notes in the code.
In the long term, I think it is inevitable that at least some blogs will be treated like established publishers, but it may be awhile.
I suspect that professional journalist who blog already have this protection.
It would be interesting to see a survey of how many established news sources are open to criticism of their own new organization by their own journalists.
Seems to me that there already is a big industry of publishing watch dogs, and the journalists have a love hate relation with critics. Journalists and publishers love the criticism (and resulting publicity) until someone manages to hit the wrong buttons.
When blogging, you play the roles of subject, writer, editor and publisher. The whistle blowing laws are probably the best recourse for a fired blogger; however, without an established publishing institution behind blogs, I doubt whistle blowing cases will succeed.
IANAL, but it seems to me that the whistle blowing laws pretty much assume a hapless employee blowing the whistle to an authority. Publishing your blog puts you in the compromised situation of being both the hapless whistle blower and the authority.
I think the main issue here is not about freedom of speech... but lack of right to job.
The problem with the current state of employment is that employees really don't build up any solid assets. If we were building assets while we work, we wouldn't be beholden to any particular employer.
I know nothing about the subject, but wouldn't there be more debris in a geosync orbit than one where the debris would either come crashing to earth or flung out into space?
The LoTR planting fake skeletons for gullible scientists to "discover" is the best movie marketing ploy since Mr. Arthur C. Clarke staging of a moon landing to sell his book "2001 a Space Oddyssey." But, I guess all of the people wanting a "scientific" explanation of this 6000 year old creation will fall for any marketing ploy planted by the Godless Left.
PS: Hobbits are fantasy. Trolls, however are real. we post on/. regularly.
Let's see. You run the grammar checker in Word. If your writing scores anything above the 3rd grade level, then it is by definition confusing. That means that pretty much all technical information is confusing.
Mr. Newton, Am I to understand that the apple accelerated at a constant rate but had a variable velocity as it fell from the tree? Well, I might just be a country bumkin. But I find your technical jargon confusing and hard to believe. Case dismissed.
Personally, though, I think the real reason that the judge let the spamming couple off was in response to the hundreds of thousands of letters the court received on behalf of the defendents.
I really don't think Apple, Napster or the other players in the music download business did that much market research on the price. The fixed $.99 price at all of the big music download sites is just a blatant demonstration that the record labels are opposed to the free market.
They have fallen out of favour because the establishment no longer actively promotes those ideas...
The word establishment is closer to what I was thinking about when referring to librarians. Librarians, bookstores, publishers and critics are all part of a system which has influences on what gets read. Many people take great pride in the amount of influence that they have on the climate of opinion of the day.
The author of today's article probably feels part of this great cultural filter than is challenged by the democratizing effects of blogs.
My point was that blogs are NOT a challenge to journalism. They ARE a challenge to the established filters that are in place. Blogs help determine which books and magazines people read, etc.. They do not replace journalism, but will affect the amount of public attention given to journalistic works. Blogs are a threat to the establishment. They are not a threat to scholarly research or journalism.
I suspect that the ideas of the young Franklin are much more in tune with the minds of today's bloggers than Marx. Marx is the hero of the centrallized intelligensia. Franklin is hero to independent thinkers.
Even in the U.S., the country most directly touched by Franklin's ideas, very few people actually read him and far fewer write books about him.
This has changed. I talk to older people. Franklin was widely read and admired up to the great social revolutions of 60s. I should have mentioned that the researcher I referred to had a different problem round about fifty years ago when he couldn't find books on Hegel or Marx and had to go to the library board to request to purchase such books. There was a completely different set of filters in place. The filters were more openly acknowledged.
Today, librarians work to deny the existence of filters. Librarians and bookstores have always had to run filters as their simply is not enough bookshelve space. Books go through all sorts of processes where they are reviewed and discussed before being put on the shelves. In the 60s and 70s we went through a period where books favorable to the founders of the US were filtered out.
There is much more to librarians and scholarly writing than card catalogs. I suspect that many librarians see the class of librarians as social structure charged with selecting filtering that ideas that will seep into the culture at large.
A great example of this filtering can be seen at University Libraries. A researcher pointed out to me that my local universities had almost two full bookcases dedicated to studies of Marx, and not a full shelve concerned with Benjamin Franklin. The researcher thought this odd for a library in the United States. Librarians take their filtering responsibilities seriously. Blogs, forums, online bookstores and whatnot pose the threat of democratizing the great filters librarians put in place.
The librarian article seems concerned with blogs v. the press. I never had the illusion that blogs would lead to the elimination of main stream press. Hell, a good third of all the blog posts in this world reference published article. Very few mainstream press articles point to blogs. This assymetry will always favor the press.
Blogs pose no threat to the press. They do pose a great threat to the cultural filters put in place by librarians.
The openly biased nature of blogs is a good antidote to the hidden bias of scholarly writing and journalism. Scholars who decide that everything can be explained through series of thesis, antithesis and catharsis have left extremely damaging legacy in their choice of theses and antitheses. Likewise journalists who consider themselves as unbiased for reporting the "two sides" of a story build in a bias by choosing just two facets of a multifaceted issue to be their "two sides."
The things that I have directly witnessed in life tend to be dramatically different than the "objective" reports I've read in the paper the next day. I fidn the open bias of blogs refreshing as it provides a clearer view of the author's perspective.
A great example of this is the way journalists toss out the words "conservative" and "liberal" as being the two sides of an issue. When bloggers try tackling complex issues, they quickly find that there is no consensus on the meaning of conservative or liberal.
... any idea can be proposed and defended.
I really don't think blogs should be considered in isolation. Any idea can be proposed, but the process of linking determines which ideas will rise to the surface and be given merit.
The primary means for having things surface to the top is through the process of linking. My linking to an article is a vote for that article. One problem is that there is only positive links in the process. My pointing out a fallacy of Chomsky just adds to the incredible number of links to his work. The linking process seems to elevate things that are provocative to the surface over those that are insightful.
It seems to me that blogs help people develop an understanding of the links between information. For that matter, I think the main value of blogs and homepages is the building of links between the blog and world at large. A well linked blog becomes a discussion with the world.
In someways, blogs are a welcome relief from published literature which can be a bit too introspective or polished. I do agree with the librarian who is dismayed at the hype given blogs. Everything in computers gets overhyped. Individual blogs like mine really mean nothing. In aggregation, they provide an interesting topology of the concerns of our culture.
If you include length of lines, then sparser areas would fair better. A larger country might have to bury more fiber to provide the broadband connections.
It seems to me that you would want to do something like comparing metro areas to metro areas, rural areas to rural areas. Even that doesn't work, as some countries have densely populated rural areas. The population distribution will be the single largest factor in determine broadband connections per person than any other factor.
must be about time that the US expanded the baseball to become the Universe Series, doesn't matter if the rest don't play it'll be just like the World Series now;)
Baseball on planets will a lesser mass might be fun. Play baseball on a really small moon or big asteroid and you will hear the announcer truthfully exclaim: "He put that one into orbit..."
I think 3 licenses might pass as a sort of Platonic ideal, but I can't really see that covering all needs in the real world.
Rather than having just three static licenses, I think it would be much better to have a structure for generating licenses that allowed people and companies to build licenses to fit their needs. The Creative Commons license is a little bit like this. Both OSI (and the patent system for that matter) seem to be based on the idea that there is an ideal that we can derive from the aether that will cover everything.
It seems to me that the much better approach to licensing would be to treat licenses like and object. You attach the object license to a piece of code. Building applications from such code would asemble the licenses along with the application.
Quite frankly I am surprised there is not a lot of talk among programmers to build licensing that follows Object Oriented design.
Any hidden filter meant to compare traffic on your account against profile of "normal" usage strikes me as both an invasion of privacy
This statement sounds very tinfoil hattish to me. There are many people who believe that a computer creating any sort of trace log is a violation of privacy. Personally, I find it good practice to record information about computer usage. For example, I usually record the incoming IP address of everyone who logs into a system. When dealing with critical information such as financial records or personnel files, I will keep a robust history of everyone who accessed a given record.
In one case, I designed a program for a call center. The call center would allow customer service agents access to a customer's credit card number. I recorded every time a customer service rep accessed a card number along with information on the call they were handling. The computer would report any abnormal behavior in the credit card number access to a supervisor.
Often the best way to improve your security is simply to provide your auditing information to your end users. For example, let's say I see a change in a behavior of a user...such as logging in from a different IP. I might make a program that informs the end user of this event. For example, if a person who usually logs in from Albany logs in from Kuala Lumpur, then I inform them of the event. IF they cannot remember traveling abroad recently, the change in behaviour just might be a security breach, requiring further investigation.
Imagine if your work computer reported the time from your last log in each time you accessed the system. So, you come in Monday morning and the system warns that you logged in during the weekend. Most workers would take something like this seriously as it implies someone was stealing their identity. Tin foil hatters would be livid that the system recorded the activities of the person who stole their identity.
You are right that mass market products will reach equilibrium. So, everyone is hoping for some little clever trick that will make them something special. Sadly, whenever you have a market condition where people feel they need to pull tricks for survival, you will create a market rife with scams.
Anyone with a defineable, replicable trick will probably end up selling out to the mass market fearing that their competition will sell out first.
Personally, I think the best hope against SEO tricks is for the market to have more independent directories and search engines with radically different algorithms and results. This world where your web site thrives or dwindles on the caprice of a single engine (google) or single directory (DMOZ) is far from ideal.
Self promoting sig: yes, I waste time making things like this page of Salt Lake Bands. I think others should waste time pounding out blogs and sites with things they think worthwhile.
why is it that Linux and Unix based systems (like Mac OS X) don't have problems with spyware and viruses?
The biggest difference is not technical, but about the end user and the sales channel that brought the computer to the end user. Most Linux machines have a technically savvy computer user somewhere close by. Either the owner of the machine takes great care of their hardware, or the person using the machine has a friend who installed Linux.
There is a large number of people who have both Linux and Microsoft machines in their family. A good question is how many of these people who have both types of machines get MS Spyware infections?
Now, I am little bit cynical. I suspect one of the reason that so many MS machines catch spyware is because the industry that is supplying PCs sees the machines the sell as ad delivery tools. A great deal of spyware activity was developed by computer manufacturers wanting to find a way to increase their profit margins. Most new computers seem to come with a large number of things that you can purchase after market. They will come with 90 days free virus protection which turns into an ad for McAfee, and there generally is preinstalled programs wanting to sell music subscriptions.
As Linux because more popular and we see more channels selling Linux boxes, we will start seeing manufacturers including such ads in their Linux configurations.
My post was an exploration of why someone might think that data written to disk was structured and not think of data in memory as structured.
First, you are correct. With operating systems, the actual layout of the disk is a mystery to the programmer. I use fopen(), but really don't know where the file is.
The layout of the file, however, is completely under my control. I often know the complete logical structure of the data in the file.
In early assembler type programming languages, the programmer would allocate and deallocate and directly access registers in memory. Just like a a file written to disk, the programmer would have intimate knowledge of the actual structure of the data stored in memory. An assembly programmer would actually visualize the memory accessed by their program. A c programmer would visualize an array as a large block of memory and they would access those pieces of memory with pointers.
The goal of OO languages like Java was to make the memory an abstraction. I tell java to create an array of objects, but I really haven't a clue what that array of objects looks like written in memory. Garbage collection is the ultimate abstraction. I stop using an object. Some time after I stop using the object, Java reallocates the memory. The layers of abstraction between us and the hardware changes the way that we look think about memory.
If our programming languages gave us direct access to large fields of on and off switches we would have a completely different impression of the way memory worked than we we create variables and objects.
This does not mean that Java is bad. It means that I see a different ways that we could have gone that would give us a different perception of memory. If we were working more directly in created the structures that exist in memory, then we would see it in the same light the we see the database file that we wrote to the disk.
The dropping cost of memory wipes out your practical concerns. You can have all of the logical correlations that you want in memory. We tend to think that we have to write data to disk to make it organized because today's operating systems and programming languages give us very little direct control of memory, but they give us a great deal of control over what we write to the disk.
If we had more operating systems that gave us direct control of memory, organizing memory would not seem so foreign. With programs like Java the allocation of memory and garbage collection are left a mystery to programmers. So the only time we see correlations is when we output to a disk or screen.
We will always be able to find a way for the data to support the theory that there is no global climate change. First of all, there is just is not enough data on record to say anything with absolute certainty.
Is this really drought, or are we returning to normal after a few good rain years?
You can also make the argument that you can't just look at areas labeled drought stricken, you have to look across the board at all the areas and counter those areas with below average precipitation with those areas that have more water than they can deal with. Why, if you include all of the water that's been washed up on shore since, say, the day after Christmas, why you would say there's been much more flooding than droughting. (I am practicing for my audition on the O'Reilly factor).
If you look at all of this a hundred years from now, would you say that these so called drought areas are experiencing drought, or would you say that the great midwestern desert, the great indo-European desert and the great Amazon plains desert are just normal and the way its always been.
BTW, one odd change. About 100 years ago, the "liberals" would have been the ones arguing that all changes are gradual in response to conservative nut cases talking great floods and cataclysmic events. Today, the conservatives seem to shut their eyes to the possibility of catastrophic changes, and the liberals are more likely to be talking about catastrophic change.
Slashdot Mirror
Deep philosophical discussions about relativism and universal morality aside. The meaning of "evil" can have different meanings in different contexts. Google is in the game of trying to figure out a way to rank and display web pages. It is totally appropriate for Google to label practices as good, bad and evil. Good practices would be those that help the ranking process. Bad practices are those that get in the way (like putting a session id in a query string). Evil practices would be those intentionally designed to influence page rank or otherwise mislead the public.
Google's philosophy is based on and ideal of natural linking. They assume that all links appear on the web naturally. Anything that artificially creates links to influence google is a form of SE spam...evil.
The big problem is that Google's definition of evil is different from most web masters. My definition is that whatever properly represents my site in the search engine is good. For example, I have pages with a disclaimer on the page. The pages show up well for searches containing the words of the disclaimer, it does not show up well for the content of the site. I would love to simply not show that information to a Google search, but such action falls in Google's definition of "evil." Even though, I think the change would improve the quality of Google's listing.
There is, of course, a great deal of what could be described as true SE evil in the world. There are billions of web pages with duplicate or false content produced with the soul intent of manipulating Google results. A web master might randomly generate millions of pages with false key words for Google to injest. They then display whatever misleading media message they want to stuff down the gullets of Internet users.
So, we have a world where Google defines anything that varies from their ideal of natural linking as evil. We have webmasters who think greater control over their representation in Google would be good for the public. They get cast as evil. Finally, we have Spammers with a truly evil intent of misleading people by filling the internet with useless white noise. It is an interesting electronic study of human nature.
I have yet to write a piece of code that was more than a simple logical statement...so I pretty much fit in that latter category.
Seems ta me that, by definition, the complexity of semaphores, hierarchies and multithreaded programs all lie in the interface.
I openly admit I am a full of shit script kiddie. I have never written a single procedure that executes in more than one thread at a given time. When I've want multithreaded program, I've always copped out and used more than one procedure. I've never put a hierarchy in an object, although I have put objects in hierarchies. I've only used semaphores to communicate between objects.
Every program I've ever written has just been a string of simple logical statements. Being of a petty bourgeoisie mindset, I doubt I will ever write a program that is other than a string of logical statements. The nasty documentation needing stuff seems to happen when all the different programs talk to eachother.
The "whys" generally live in the design documents. Most all whys should be settled before coding begins. The problem with a methodology where the documentation lives in a different structured file than the code is that the two files are easily separated.
This problem is especially acute with open source development. Preparing code for publication is a completely different art than just coding for compilation. When I know that people are likely to support a particular piece of code, it gets a ton of documentation.
I do place comments on anything that is out of my standard coding style. Which gets back to why I was agreeing with the parent post to my first post. Before, I have an establishing coding style in a language, I usually leave more notes than when I have a good grasp of the language and an established style. This is contrary to the comments of the article that said the number of notes goes up as people gain proficiency in a language.
Now then, the article might be focusing on code written for publication. This guy is obviously reading code that was given to him so that he can read the code. A person with a ton of experience in a given language is likely to have more to say about what was done in a piece of code and why. When I give someone code to review or otherwise publish, I put in more comments.
In other words, experience does not lead to more comments. It leads to learning where comments help and where they are just wasted key strokes.
It seems to me that documation needs a structure. Structures like records of revision and design documents are useful. Free form comments in the code turn into white noise. Since I am far more interested in what a piece of code does, I pretty much ignore all documentation in the code. It seems like the majority of documentation in code becomes obsolete as people modify the code. For example, if a person has a problematic part in their code, they add copious notes document. When the problem finally clarifies in their mind and the find the code, they end up leaving obsolete documentation that just confuses people at a later date.
Personally, I think a person should document the interface, maintain a record of revision. The code itself should only be documented when the code is doing something out of the ordinary.
So, when I am learning a language, I put a great deal of notes in the code. As I learn the typical flow of the programs, I write less documentation in the code. When I have a strong feel for the language and reading the code is more informative than reading notes, my notes all but disappear. I've noticed many other programmers seem to have the same tendency. They write less documentation in code and they learn the language.
Having supported a large number of applications. I greatly appreciate good design documention, but discard notes in the code.
I suspect that professional journalist who blog already have this protection.
Seems to me that there already is a big industry of publishing watch dogs, and the journalists have a love hate relation with critics. Journalists and publishers love the criticism (and resulting publicity) until someone manages to hit the wrong buttons.
When blogging, you play the roles of subject, writer, editor and publisher. The whistle blowing laws are probably the best recourse for a fired blogger; however, without an established publishing institution behind blogs, I doubt whistle blowing cases will succeed.
IANAL, but it seems to me that the whistle blowing laws pretty much assume a hapless employee blowing the whistle to an authority. Publishing your blog puts you in the compromised situation of being both the hapless whistle blower and the authority.
The problem with the current state of employment is that employees really don't build up any solid assets. If we were building assets while we work, we wouldn't be beholden to any particular employer.
I know nothing about the subject, but wouldn't there be more debris in a geosync orbit than one where the debris would either come crashing to earth or flung out into space?
The LoTR planting fake skeletons for gullible scientists to "discover" is the best movie marketing ploy since Mr. Arthur C. Clarke staging of a moon landing to sell his book "2001 a Space Oddyssey." But, I guess all of the people wanting a "scientific" explanation of this 6000 year old creation will fall for any marketing ploy planted by the Godless Left.
/. regularly.
PS: Hobbits are fantasy. Trolls, however are real. we post on
Let's see. You run the grammar checker in Word. If your writing scores anything above the 3rd grade level, then it is by definition confusing. That means that pretty much all technical information is confusing.
Mr. Newton, Am I to understand that the apple accelerated at a constant rate but had a variable velocity as it fell from the tree? Well, I might just be a country bumkin. But I find your technical jargon confusing and hard to believe. Case dismissed.
Personally, though, I think the real reason that the judge let the spamming couple off was in response to the hundreds of thousands of letters the court received on behalf of the defendents.
I really don't think Apple, Napster or the other players in the music download business did that much market research on the price. The fixed $.99 price at all of the big music download sites is just a blatant demonstration that the record labels are opposed to the free market.
The word establishment is closer to what I was thinking about when referring to librarians. Librarians, bookstores, publishers and critics are all part of a system which has influences on what gets read. Many people take great pride in the amount of influence that they have on the climate of opinion of the day.
The author of today's article probably feels part of this great cultural filter than is challenged by the democratizing effects of blogs.
My point was that blogs are NOT a challenge to journalism. They ARE a challenge to the established filters that are in place. Blogs help determine which books and magazines people read, etc.. They do not replace journalism, but will affect the amount of public attention given to journalistic works. Blogs are a threat to the establishment. They are not a threat to scholarly research or journalism.
I suspect that the ideas of the young Franklin are much more in tune with the minds of today's bloggers than Marx. Marx is the hero of the centrallized intelligensia. Franklin is hero to independent thinkers.
This has changed. I talk to older people. Franklin was widely read and admired up to the great social revolutions of 60s. I should have mentioned that the researcher I referred to had a different problem round about fifty years ago when he couldn't find books on Hegel or Marx and had to go to the library board to request to purchase such books. There was a completely different set of filters in place. The filters were more openly acknowledged.
Today, librarians work to deny the existence of filters. Librarians and bookstores have always had to run filters as their simply is not enough bookshelve space. Books go through all sorts of processes where they are reviewed and discussed before being put on the shelves. In the 60s and 70s we went through a period where books favorable to the founders of the US were filtered out.
There is much more to librarians and scholarly writing than card catalogs. I suspect that many librarians see the class of librarians as social structure charged with selecting filtering that ideas that will seep into the culture at large.
A great example of this filtering can be seen at University Libraries. A researcher pointed out to me that my local universities had almost two full bookcases dedicated to studies of Marx, and not a full shelve concerned with Benjamin Franklin. The researcher thought this odd for a library in the United States. Librarians take their filtering responsibilities seriously. Blogs, forums, online bookstores and whatnot pose the threat of democratizing the great filters librarians put in place.
The librarian article seems concerned with blogs v. the press. I never had the illusion that blogs would lead to the elimination of main stream press. Hell, a good third of all the blog posts in this world reference published article. Very few mainstream press articles point to blogs. This assymetry will always favor the press.
Blogs pose no threat to the press. They do pose a great threat to the cultural filters put in place by librarians.
The openly biased nature of blogs is a good antidote to the hidden bias of scholarly writing and journalism. Scholars who decide that everything can be explained through series of thesis, antithesis and catharsis have left extremely damaging legacy in their choice of theses and antitheses. Likewise journalists who consider themselves as unbiased for reporting the "two sides" of a story build in a bias by choosing just two facets of a multifaceted issue to be their "two sides."
The things that I have directly witnessed in life tend to be dramatically different than the "objective" reports I've read in the paper the next day. I fidn the open bias of blogs refreshing as it provides a clearer view of the author's perspective.
A great example of this is the way journalists toss out the words "conservative" and "liberal" as being the two sides of an issue. When bloggers try tackling complex issues, they quickly find that there is no consensus on the meaning of conservative or liberal.
I really don't think blogs should be considered in isolation. Any idea can be proposed, but the process of linking determines which ideas will rise to the surface and be given merit.
The primary means for having things surface to the top is through the process of linking. My linking to an article is a vote for that article. One problem is that there is only positive links in the process. My pointing out a fallacy of Chomsky just adds to the incredible number of links to his work. The linking process seems to elevate things that are provocative to the surface over those that are insightful.
It seems to me that blogs help people develop an understanding of the links between information. For that matter, I think the main value of blogs and homepages is the building of links between the blog and world at large. A well linked blog becomes a discussion with the world.
In someways, blogs are a welcome relief from published literature which can be a bit too introspective or polished. I do agree with the librarian who is dismayed at the hype given blogs. Everything in computers gets overhyped. Individual blogs like mine really mean nothing. In aggregation, they provide an interesting topology of the concerns of our culture.
If you include length of lines, then sparser areas would fair better. A larger country might have to bury more fiber to provide the broadband connections.
It seems to me that you would want to do something like comparing metro areas to metro areas, rural areas to rural areas. Even that doesn't work, as some countries have densely populated rural areas. The population distribution will be the single largest factor in determine broadband connections per person than any other factor.
Baseball on planets will a lesser mass might be fun. Play baseball on a really small moon or big asteroid and you will hear the announcer truthfully exclaim: "He put that one into orbit..."
I think the title should be changed to "Company patents web logs."
This is a bit hush hush. But I feel I strange need to tell the world. My employer is tossing in the paper work to patent eating soup with a spoon.
It seems to me that the much better approach to licensing would be to treat licenses like and object. You attach the object license to a piece of code. Building applications from such code would asemble the licenses along with the application.
Quite frankly I am surprised there is not a lot of talk among programmers to build licensing that follows Object Oriented design.
This statement sounds very tinfoil hattish to me. There are many people who believe that a computer creating any sort of trace log is a violation of privacy. Personally, I find it good practice to record information about computer usage. For example, I usually record the incoming IP address of everyone who logs into a system. When dealing with critical information such as financial records or personnel files, I will keep a robust history of everyone who accessed a given record.
In one case, I designed a program for a call center. The call center would allow customer service agents access to a customer's credit card number. I recorded every time a customer service rep accessed a card number along with information on the call they were handling. The computer would report any abnormal behavior in the credit card number access to a supervisor.
Often the best way to improve your security is simply to provide your auditing information to your end users. For example, let's say I see a change in a behavior of a user...such as logging in from a different IP. I might make a program that informs the end user of this event. For example, if a person who usually logs in from Albany logs in from Kuala Lumpur, then I inform them of the event. IF they cannot remember traveling abroad recently, the change in behaviour just might be a security breach, requiring further investigation.
Imagine if your work computer reported the time from your last log in each time you accessed the system. So, you come in Monday morning and the system warns that you logged in during the weekend. Most workers would take something like this seriously as it implies someone was stealing their identity. Tin foil hatters would be livid that the system recorded the activities of the person who stole their identity.
You are right that mass market products will reach equilibrium. So, everyone is hoping for some little clever trick that will make them something special. Sadly, whenever you have a market condition where people feel they need to pull tricks for survival, you will create a market rife with scams.
Anyone with a defineable, replicable trick will probably end up selling out to the mass market fearing that their competition will sell out first.
Personally, I think the best hope against SEO tricks is for the market to have more independent directories and search engines with radically different algorithms and results. This world where your web site thrives or dwindles on the caprice of a single engine (google) or single directory (DMOZ) is far from ideal.
Self promoting sig: yes, I waste time making things like this page of Salt Lake Bands. I think others should waste time pounding out blogs and sites with things they think worthwhile.
The biggest difference is not technical, but about the end user and the sales channel that brought the computer to the end user. Most Linux machines have a technically savvy computer user somewhere close by. Either the owner of the machine takes great care of their hardware, or the person using the machine has a friend who installed Linux.
There is a large number of people who have both Linux and Microsoft machines in their family. A good question is how many of these people who have both types of machines get MS Spyware infections?
Now, I am little bit cynical. I suspect one of the reason that so many MS machines catch spyware is because the industry that is supplying PCs sees the machines the sell as ad delivery tools. A great deal of spyware activity was developed by computer manufacturers wanting to find a way to increase their profit margins. Most new computers seem to come with a large number of things that you can purchase after market. They will come with 90 days free virus protection which turns into an ad for McAfee, and there generally is preinstalled programs wanting to sell music subscriptions.
As Linux because more popular and we see more channels selling Linux boxes, we will start seeing manufacturers including such ads in their Linux configurations.
My post was an exploration of why someone might think that data written to disk was structured and not think of data in memory as structured.
First, you are correct. With operating systems, the actual layout of the disk is a mystery to the programmer. I use fopen(), but really don't know where the file is.
The layout of the file, however, is completely under my control. I often know the complete logical structure of the data in the file.
In early assembler type programming languages, the programmer would allocate and deallocate and directly access registers in memory. Just like a a file written to disk, the programmer would have intimate knowledge of the actual structure of the data stored in memory. An assembly programmer would actually visualize the memory accessed by their program. A c programmer would visualize an array as a large block of memory and they would access those pieces of memory with pointers.
The goal of OO languages like Java was to make the memory an abstraction. I tell java to create an array of objects, but I really haven't a clue what that array of objects looks like written in memory. Garbage collection is the ultimate abstraction. I stop using an object. Some time after I stop using the object, Java reallocates the memory. The layers of abstraction between us and the hardware changes the way that we look think about memory.
If our programming languages gave us direct access to large fields of on and off switches we would have a completely different impression of the way memory worked than we we create variables and objects.
This does not mean that Java is bad. It means that I see a different ways that we could have gone that would give us a different perception of memory. If we were working more directly in created the structures that exist in memory, then we would see it in the same light the we see the database file that we wrote to the disk.
The dropping cost of memory wipes out your practical concerns. You can have all of the logical correlations that you want in memory. We tend to think that we have to write data to disk to make it organized because today's operating systems and programming languages give us very little direct control of memory, but they give us a great deal of control over what we write to the disk.
If we had more operating systems that gave us direct control of memory, organizing memory would not seem so foreign. With programs like Java the allocation of memory and garbage collection are left a mystery to programmers. So the only time we see correlations is when we output to a disk or screen.
We will always be able to find a way for the data to support the theory that there is no global climate change. First of all, there is just is not enough data on record to say anything with absolute certainty.
Is this really drought, or are we returning to normal after a few good rain years?
You can also make the argument that you can't just look at areas labeled drought stricken, you have to look across the board at all the areas and counter those areas with below average precipitation with those areas that have more water than they can deal with. Why, if you include all of the water that's been washed up on shore since, say, the day after Christmas, why you would say there's been much more flooding than droughting. (I am practicing for my audition on the O'Reilly factor).
If you look at all of this a hundred years from now, would you say that these so called drought areas are experiencing drought, or would you say that the great midwestern desert, the great indo-European desert and the great Amazon plains desert are just normal and the way its always been.
BTW, one odd change. About 100 years ago, the "liberals" would have been the ones arguing that all changes are gradual in response to conservative nut cases talking great floods and cataclysmic events. Today, the conservatives seem to shut their eyes to the possibility of catastrophic changes, and the liberals are more likely to be talking about catastrophic change.