Google is so large, so good, and so dominant that outside of specific topic search engines, there is really no choice. As such, altering the ranking of a site on Google will affect the monetary valuation of a business tied to that site.
VHS and Microsoft are but two examples of technology that got to be the dominant force in their respective markets not due to superior technology, but due to crafty licensing, fraud, anti-competitive behaviour, marketting, and legal wrangling.
Google is but one example of a technology that got to be the dominant force in its market because it's the best.
To that end, one of the primary advantages of Google is the unbiased approach to page rankings (by Google themselves). Companies quickly came to realize that it does them no good to have their site returned first for a number of queries if the visitors don't click through on the grounds that the returned link is irrelevant.
Google's statement of integrity clearly spells out the fact that they strive to make human tampering with their results difficult, and if that is the only basis of SearchKing's lawsuit, then I hope it's thrown out of court before a judge even has to waste time sitting in a court room.
Not to sully google's name or image, but that statement means exactly nothing.
It means something when they stand by it. They fought severe legal pressure from the church of Scientology to remove all links to Xenu.Net, and their results continue to be relevant pages to my query; not to their pocket books. Sometimes I'll click on one of their sponsored links because it's what I'm looking for, sometimes just to help Google out.
Judging from the sheer number of not-for-profit or open source, or charitable links I've seen returned in the first page of many of my Google searches, I'd say they're standing by their statemeny of integrity and that it means a whole lot more than the paper it's printed on.
Exactly. I still wonder why telemarketing is still so big in the US. "But it works" say the marketing people, but yet the only thing everybody agrees on is that it sucks.
If it didn't work (telemarketting or SPAMming), people wouldn't do it. I make a point of both ignoring all such intrusions into my life by these people, but I try to educate all my family and friends about doing the same thing. Nothing drives me more insane than when my mother or sister forward one of these nonsensical e-mails on to me, except maybe when I see their entire address books in the To: or CC: fields.
Up until a couple weeks ago, my mother was convinced that Bill Gates would, in fact, send her a cheque for $240 (or so) for every e-mail she forwarded, in the interests of beta-testing a new version of Outlook Express - when she doesn't even USE Outlook Express!
I know some people may feel bad about it ("They're just trying to make a living!" they tell me - well, I'm sorry, but I make a decent enough living without professionally annoying hundreds of people per day), but I try my best to make telemarketers actually feel bad about themselves. I talk down to them, I insult them, I chastize them, and then I demand that they remove me from their calling lists and threaten them with the CRTC (Americans; think FCC).
Your machine boots in 10 seconds?? Damn, how'd you manage to pull that off?
I've been in PC repair for so long I unconsciously look for the keyboard init (three LEDs flashing briefly). If I don't see it, I quickly examine why. Usually I turn it off before the POST is completed.
Of course, if the computer has "Halt on Keyboard" enabled, that's a sure-fire way of discovering the problem.
I must have hot-plugged keyboards (both kinds) and PS/2 mice about 10 thousand times in my life, and never saw one get damaged because of that.
Just like I told him; it only takes once.
Grounded wrist straps are a bit extreme (I ground myself against the power supply - ie; grounded metal, and our carpet isn't very succeptable to static build up at all), but remembering not to plug/unplug a keyboard while the computer is powered is simple and requires little or no effort on your part. Why do something that's potentially dangerous - just because you can?
For the record, I have fried the keyboard controller on a motherboard by plugging in the keyboard while it was powered, and we have a motherboard on ice right now with blown PS/2 ports because the owner unplugged the keyboard before it was powered off.
Isn't the extra 10 seconds worth saving an hour's labour and the cost of a new motherboard? Come on; use a little common sense.
If you ever found a bug in code optimized to that degree you would NOT want to fix it as it could require a complete rewrite from scratch.
You sound like Ford Motor Company back when the Pinto was causing {eh-hem} problems. They decided that it would cost less to handle the lawsuits than the recall.
I'm a geek type with a little(very little) experience programming, and I'm competent with linux... what/how exactly could I help beta test a kernel? what does it entail? I'm guessing it's more than just compiling it on my system and going "ok, it worked!" Perhaps someone can give me some pointers so "people like me" can help too.
Compile the kernel, boot the kernel, report what breaks. If something either breaks or significantly slows down (performance loss), report it with great details to the appropriate places.
See the file REPORTING-BUGS in the Linux kernel source directory for more information.
Make sure to power down the motherboard first. ADB and PS/2 keyboards are not hot pluggable; horror stories of fried controller chips are common.
I just finished telling our co-op student that very thing. He's convinced that since he's done it before with no problems, that it's perfectly ok. He remained steadfast until I told him he would be on the hook for any motherboard that got damaged in doing it.:)
If programmers all started poring over their code to the degree that they were shaving off bits and bytes around every corner, chances are they'd become so completely familiar with every nook and cranny of their code that duplication of effort would be eliminated (an obvious benefeit), but also that the codebase could shrink and bugs could be easier to zoom in on. A world in which bugs are fixed before they're reported is my idea of computer utopia.
But given that, in most cases, disk space is vast, and memory is plentiful, there isn't much in the way of usefulness. Maybe in some niche' applications running on tight hardware... but running Linux.
Consider for a moment what the GNU world would be like if every byte, primarily of our base system, was accounted for. Imagine a Linux distribution on the shelf with a "Zero Overhead" label on it - and be able to mean it!
Consider Linux 2.4.x running on a 486 with 16MB of RAM - and having 14 of it free for applications even with init and Bash running.
Now expand the concept to GUI applications, XFree86, etc. and think of how blazingly FAST the entire Linux experience would be, even on the most mediocre hardware. People would get a CPU upgrade and their systems would boot to KDM as if it was already loaded.
Considering too the fact that every (assuming based on my own HDDs and limited knowledge of IDE transfer code) 8KB of program code requires a separate disk read operation to load to cache. Every 8KB that's shaved off an application's startup routines is one less disk read, which means those dusty old ATA33 hard drives would suddenly seem a lot more worthwhile to keep around (not to mention they'd be big enough, what with reduced size constraints) - an especially Good Thing<TM> considering recent changes in manufacturer policy where new drives are concerned.
The excuse that CPU/RAM/HDD is inexpensive is a lousy one at best. It's cheap because bloated programs and operating systems have driven up demand, which has caused a surge in supply, which has dropped the prices. Imagine a world though where it was only the Windows weenies who had to trundle out to their resident computer store every other month to accomodate their latest cabre of software updates? We'd be able to laugh at them, knowing full-well that our K62-400s were smoking their brand-new P4-3.0GHz super-screamer systems.
Eudora has the offensiveness meter, if you use aggress phrases or outright offensive words it gets a rating, and suggests you reread what you wrote, or delays the sending for a while and such stuff. They really played it up like it was great, I was like, WTF? who needs this, but now I know.
Sounds like something I'd quickly disable. If I'm 'telling someone off', as it were, I tend to try to do so tactfully. It doesn't do me any justice to tell a person to go f@%$ themselves; it only makes me look like a simpleton.
The only time I generally use offensive words and phrases is with my good friends (or close family), but that's (almost;) ) always in jest, so I surely wouldn't want an e-mail client telling me off for it.
Remember that the most hurtful words are often the most common, just put together in a particular way meant to offend. Simply telling a person you've lost respect for them can, in some cases, be devastating.
Cat the mailbox, pipe through grep. awk/sed scripts for trimming/whacking mailspool come for the asking.
This is half on-topic, and half off, so pardon me for the duality.;)
Firstly, while I understand that employees, in general, don't have complete rights to privacy at their workplace (in so long as a 'you will be monitored' agreement has been given/understood by the employee), I think the sysadmin should, at the very least, let the CEO know that this is a one time thing and that he/she should, in future, think before hitting the send button. All too often people are calous where e-mail is concerned; sending diatribes in haste, and a lot of stuff that they'd never, ever say in real life (or over a telephone) to another person.
Now, to the other purpose of my message - you mention awk/sed scripts to run across a mail spool, do you happen to know of any that would run across a spool and remove messages by age? I maintain several (RFC822) spools for use in my IMAP clients at all my various locations, mostly mailing lists, digests, etc. and have searched Google in vain for a script that will parse out old messages. The only other viable solution I've found is to simply bulk-archive the entire spool at xxx interval, which is, to say the least, an imperfect solution. I'd write it myself, but I'm not quite comfortable enough with sed/awk to prune entire messages, and I'd likely wind up going through a hundred test spools before I got it right.:) Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
BTW, does anyone know what W.D. is charging for their "extended" warranty? The problem I've immediately run into, is that most of the systems I support can't handle those huge HDs, so buying an enterprise-class drive that comes with the 3 yr warranty isn't even an option.
I believe (from what I recall of reading their site) that it's $19.99USD for the extended (original) warranty. They accept all sorts of credit cards, but it's only being offered for retail-packaged drives.
A simple way would be to write the data to disc, and use annother program to follow behind it. I.e. use some program to record the stream, and then 6 secconds later set winamp on the still recording stream, that should work, but no promises.
I was thinking exactly that. DarkIce is probably exactly what the submitter wants. It has a built-in delay function which would do exactly what he's looking for.
Record the radio via the Line-In, set it to stream with a 5 second delay. Send the stream through IceCast and connect with XMMS/WinAmp and away you go. Heck, you could even use one of these and connect your soundcard's line out to your television and control the whole she-bang with your remote control.
It seems as if two moderators have seen fit to mod me down for my (parent) post. Well I'm sorry, but if anything I think it's stating the obvious. If someone has found a way to gain entry to your computer, you should investigate how they got in, not shut off the message that's telling you that they were there.
This is why firewalls exist. Block all, allow some. For starters, block ports 135 and 137:139. These are ports that have been so readily available, and so frequently abused that many major broabdand ISPs in North America have taken to blocking them at all client access points.
These SPAMmers, if anything, are doing people a FAVOUR, and my point was simply that instead of stopping the 'annoying message', you could take it appropriately as a 'heads up' to the fact that you are running a vulnerable system and do something about it.
I apologize if some of you consider statement of the obvious as flamebait, but I gess as they say 'Common sense isn't very common.'
Throw in costs for babysitting vs. watching a movie with the kids (obviously does not apply to, um, all kinds of movies), and the price points get a quite a bit bigger.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of the "leave the kids in the car for three hours" trick myself. Makes movie-theatre going far more bearable.
In Durham Region (southern Ontario, Canada) we now have some 300 new screens. There are atleast two major theatres in every city with population +30k people, and it seems that there is atleast one major theatre in most cities +10k. Some cities have as many as 4+ theatres, each typically with 8-12 screens. The GTA is even worse, with 30-screen monstogoogolplexes springing up everywhere. I think there's one aptly named the "Pantheon" (moreso for the size and shape...)
If these guys are going bankrupt, I'd sure like to join them.
Yet another example of ignorant capitalist consumers taking what they are being fed. The light bulb companies are making what people are buying, nothing more or less. I have no pity for people that spend money in ignorance.
I presume you know the make and model of the everlasting light-bulbs? Now I'm not talking about "long-life" models - I'm talking about the ones that are guaranteed to be glowing from now until my feuneral, and that I can pass down to my children, and children's children.
Or, do you know the location of the survey being done where they're asking customers whether or not they'd buy these products?
Thanks in advance for educating another poor, ignorant consumer!
What you're saying reminds me of buying lightbulbs. I recently bought new bulbs for almost every room in my house at a whopping $10 each. They are guarranteed to last eight years and consume about a fourth of the electricity of normal bulbs. So, my recurring costs are less and I don't have to buy new bulbs until at least 2010.
There's a saying that goes;
"You could build lightbulbs that lasted forever; but why would you?"
Mr. Edison's lightbulbs are still burning (at, I believe, the Smithsonian). These throw-away WalMart Specials that last for 3000 hours are pure garbage. It's yet another example of a capitalist company ensuring itself future business by selling garbage.
I don't know about you, but I still have 2 300GL's and 2 Intelstation e-Pro's at home crunching Distributed Net (moooo), and they've been working for 3 years.
We had constant problems with CDROM and floppy drives. Riser boards would fail every now and again (had about half-dozen of them out of a couple hundred). The newer models they dubbed "NetVista" were just plain sheite straight out of the carton. We had problems imaging them and discovered that the onboard ATA controllers of many of them were simply non-functional. Of course, those machines weren't terribly suited for classrom/lab deployment anyways - within about 30 seconds a person could strip the HDD, CDROM, floppy, RAM, video card, NIC, and CPU. If they had 5 minutes they could also grab the motherboard.
Sorry, but you are just a little off on this one. Western Digital's Special Edition line starts at 40GB.
No, I said "they're not pushing 20-40GB drives in their "special" series" - what I was referring to was the fact that they're not selling "special" drives in their consumer-level series'. Our average customers don't want 40, 60, 80, or 120GB drives - they want something smaller, because they know they'll never utilize even 50% of a 20GB drive, so the extra is just wasted space. 60 year old single mothers working 40 hour weeks don't tend to play Quake, or Commanche III, or Final Fantasy, or anything else that might require five GB of installed space on their drive.
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Google is but one example of a technology that got to be the dominant force in its market because it's the best.
To that end, one of the primary advantages of Google is the unbiased approach to page rankings (by Google themselves). Companies quickly came to realize that it does them no good to have their site returned first for a number of queries if the visitors don't click through on the grounds that the returned link is irrelevant.
Google's statement of integrity clearly spells out the fact that they strive to make human tampering with their results difficult, and if that is the only basis of SearchKing's lawsuit, then I hope it's thrown out of court before a judge even has to waste time sitting in a court room.
Judging from the sheer number of not-for-profit or open source, or charitable links I've seen returned in the first page of many of my Google searches, I'd say they're standing by their statemeny of integrity and that it means a whole lot more than the paper it's printed on.
Up until a couple weeks ago, my mother was convinced that Bill Gates would, in fact, send her a cheque for $240 (or so) for every e-mail she forwarded, in the interests of beta-testing a new version of Outlook Express - when she doesn't even USE Outlook Express!
I know some people may feel bad about it ("They're just trying to make a living!" they tell me - well, I'm sorry, but I make a decent enough living without professionally annoying hundreds of people per day), but I try my best to make telemarketers actually feel bad about themselves. I talk down to them, I insult them, I chastize them, and then I demand that they remove me from their calling lists and threaten them with the CRTC (Americans; think FCC).
First you get the Viagra.
Then your penis 'enlarges' ...
I don't know about you, but if I had to keep up with the energy of several wet, horny teens I'd probably drop my spare tire in a big hurry!
What with all the intellectual discourse you'll be having with these teens, a diploma should be a breeze!
Diploma = money. Like, duh?
Of course, if the computer has "Halt on Keyboard" enabled, that's a sure-fire way of discovering the problem.
Grounded wrist straps are a bit extreme (I ground myself against the power supply - ie; grounded metal, and our carpet isn't very succeptable to static build up at all), but remembering not to plug/unplug a keyboard while the computer is powered is simple and requires little or no effort on your part. Why do something that's potentially dangerous - just because you can?
For the record, I have fried the keyboard controller on a motherboard by plugging in the keyboard while it was powered, and we have a motherboard on ice right now with blown PS/2 ports because the owner unplugged the keyboard before it was powered off.
Isn't the extra 10 seconds worth saving an hour's labour and the cost of a new motherboard? Come on; use a little common sense.
See the file REPORTING-BUGS in the Linux kernel source directory for more information.
If programmers all started poring over their code to the degree that they were shaving off bits and bytes around every corner, chances are they'd become so completely familiar with every nook and cranny of their code that duplication of effort would be eliminated (an obvious benefeit), but also that the codebase could shrink and bugs could be easier to zoom in on. A world in which bugs are fixed before they're reported is my idea of computer utopia.
Consider Linux 2.4.x running on a 486 with 16MB of RAM - and having 14 of it free for applications even with init and Bash running.
Now expand the concept to GUI applications, XFree86, etc. and think of how blazingly FAST the entire Linux experience would be, even on the most mediocre hardware. People would get a CPU upgrade and their systems would boot to KDM as if it was already loaded.
Considering too the fact that every (assuming based on my own HDDs and limited knowledge of IDE transfer code) 8KB of program code requires a separate disk read operation to load to cache. Every 8KB that's shaved off an application's startup routines is one less disk read, which means those dusty old ATA33 hard drives would suddenly seem a lot more worthwhile to keep around (not to mention they'd be big enough, what with reduced size constraints) - an especially Good Thing<TM> considering recent changes in manufacturer policy where new drives are concerned.
The excuse that CPU/RAM/HDD is inexpensive is a lousy one at best. It's cheap because bloated programs and operating systems have driven up demand, which has caused a surge in supply, which has dropped the prices. Imagine a world though where it was only the Windows weenies who had to trundle out to their resident computer store every other month to accomodate their latest cabre of software updates? We'd be able to laugh at them, knowing full-well that our K62-400s were smoking their brand-new P4-3.0GHz super-screamer systems.
</RANT>
The only time I generally use offensive words and phrases is with my good friends (or close family), but that's (almost ;) ) always in jest, so I surely wouldn't want an e-mail client telling me off for it.
Remember that the most hurtful words are often the most common, just put together in a particular way meant to offend. Simply telling a person you've lost respect for them can, in some cases, be devastating.
Once again, on behalf of all of Canada, I am sorry.
Firstly, while I understand that employees, in general, don't have complete rights to privacy at their workplace (in so long as a 'you will be monitored' agreement has been given/understood by the employee), I think the sysadmin should, at the very least, let the CEO know that this is a one time thing and that he/she should, in future, think before hitting the send button. All too often people are calous where e-mail is concerned; sending diatribes in haste, and a lot of stuff that they'd never, ever say in real life (or over a telephone) to another person.
Now, to the other purpose of my message - you mention awk/sed scripts to run across a mail spool, do you happen to know of any that would run across a spool and remove messages by age? I maintain several (RFC822) spools for use in my IMAP clients at all my various locations, mostly mailing lists, digests, etc. and have searched Google in vain for a script that will parse out old messages. The only other viable solution I've found is to simply bulk-archive the entire spool at xxx interval, which is, to say the least, an imperfect solution. I'd write it myself, but I'm not quite comfortable enough with sed/awk to prune entire messages, and I'd likely wind up going through a hundred test spools before I got it right. :) Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
100BaseTX is so passee...
Record the radio via the Line-In, set it to stream with a 5 second delay. Send the stream through IceCast and connect with XMMS/WinAmp and away you go. Heck, you could even use one of these and connect your soundcard's line out to your television and control the whole she-bang with your remote control.
This is why firewalls exist. Block all, allow some. For starters, block ports 135 and 137:139. These are ports that have been so readily available, and so frequently abused that many major broabdand ISPs in North America have taken to blocking them at all client access points.
These SPAMmers, if anything, are doing people a FAVOUR , and my point was simply that instead of stopping the 'annoying message', you could take it appropriately as a 'heads up' to the fact that you are running a vulnerable system and do something about it.
I apologize if some of you consider statement of the obvious as flamebait, but I gess as they say 'Common sense isn't very common.'
If these guys are going bankrupt, I'd sure like to join them.
Or, do you know the location of the survey being done where they're asking customers whether or not they'd buy these products?
Thanks in advance for educating another poor, ignorant consumer!
"You could build lightbulbs that lasted forever; but why would you?"
Mr. Edison's lightbulbs are still burning (at, I believe, the Smithsonian). These throw-away WalMart Specials that last for 3000 hours are pure garbage. It's yet another example of a capitalist company ensuring itself future business by selling garbage.