Forget programming. It's not worth it. No one learns programming because they're bored. They learn it because a) they need it for a job or b) it's interesting. She clearly doesn't really have b and doesn't need it for a. What she need is a purpose.
Start her off with a blog. She can keep it as a diary and mark most of the entries as private if she wants and just mark certain ones public when they're notable, funny, or she has something worth sharing. When she realizes that it can't do everything exactly the way she wants, she'll get more sophisticated with HTML, Javascript, PHP, and whatever else she needs. She doesn't need to learn tools for the sake of learning tools -- she needs a purpose for using her computer. Nobody gives a shit about learning "Hello world" programs or even writing sophisticated encryption algorithms. They get excited when it makes their own lives easier. Or profiable.
If she's looking for trying out a few things to try to make a few bucks, she can join an affiliate program and get paid to learn how the web works. eBay has a great affiliate program that's free to join and pretty popular. As long as she's not doing it as a job, it could be a fun way for her to try to make a few bucks. There are some good guides out there to help web novices get started.
The point of the estimate is not to deduce exactly how many servers that Google has, because that figure surely changes from week to week. It's to show that the previous figures of 10k-15k servers is totally off base and that they've long exceeded the previously-thought figures. It's to show that it's simply a really big number.
An interesting paragraph-
"According to the filing, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt made $ 250,000 in salarly and got a $301,556 bonus last year, plus other compensation of $2,894. Co-founders Mr. Brin, now president of technology and Mr. Page, now president of products, both got salaries of $150,000 and bonuses of 206,556.".
And you can compare the pay with other US companies [aflcio.org]. Other companies can learn from google here.
The figures on CEO Watch include stock options exercised, which typically are much, much bigger than the actual salary. If you want to look at Eric Schmidt's actual compensation it's here:
Google CEO Eric Schmidt drew a $250,000 salary, while Brin and Page collected $150,000. As part of Schmidt's employment package, he was granted an option to buy more than 14 million class B common shares at an exercise price of 30 cents and was permitted to buy more than 426,000 of the series C preferred stock at $2.3425 per share.
He has a 6% stake in the company and the company can easily be worth $15B. That means his options will be worth $900M while the options will have cost him just $4.2M.
Most banner adds, these days, are Pay Per Lead, or Pay Per Sale. Cookies stay around for at least a couple of months, so the "proper" person is credited. half.com (part of eBay) was paying $5/per lead at one point.
eBay is still paying $5/lead... and that's the bottom of the scale. According to affiliates.ebay.com, they pay up to $16 per active registration. Obviously, there are a lot of people that do this professionally if one affiliate earned $1.3M in one month. You didn't think that all those eBay's ads were all over the Internet because they bought them all, did you?
Usability doesn't mean "avoids security." It means the interface is easy to use.
Actually, that's not sufficient. Usability means that people understand how to use it, and sometimes they don't even understand what's going on. Sometimes, users don't even understand that admins can read their email -- try explaining to these people what a root/admin user is on their very own machine and why they can't do what they want to do. They simply don't understand the concepts that an interface, no matter how good, just can't convey. And even if it can deliver it, you have to deliver an interface that is equally understandable for the basic users and advanced for the sophisticated ones. That's the true challenge of security and configuration.
It's meaningless to talk about marginal cost and marginal price when no one is going to pay the fixed cost and fixed price. Who paid $10M for a piece of consumer OS? I guess that the first Mercedes S500 to roll off the line should cost $100M and the rest should be available for less than a Honda Accord, right? After all, someone else paid for that first S500, right?
To be fair, you should include MSN"s search results for actual pages, not entire sites. MSN returns to you entire sites first, and then individual pages, in the belief that different sites of varying subject areas might get you to better stores of information. This is not a bad idea at all, since you might want to find different centers of high quality data rather than pages all about the same thing. For example, if you really were looking for the site about bagpipe songs and all you searched was "sco," you'd get a bunch of information that you didn't want. Both sites have its merits, but I do use Google for 99% of my queries. I'll have to re-evaluate after MSN releases its new search engine. Anyway, if you get down to indivdual pages, which is what Google does, the results are below.
27. The SCO Group | SCO Grows Your Business
28. the SCO v IBM info website
29. SCO | SCOsource
30. SCO | SCO Grows Your Business
31. OSI Position Paper on the SCO-vs.-IBM Complaint
32. SCO Unix Downloads
33. SCO |
34. The SCO Group | Scosource | SCOsource
35. Exploit world -- SCO including Openserver section
36. Ars Technica: The Nigerian SCO Connection - Page 1 - (8/2003)
Therein lies the flaw of "security through obscurity".
RTFA. Your statement is precisely why the security chief, Mr. Aucsmith, is urging "companies to keep up with patches because the time they had to react before hackers released exploits was shrinking." He is not at all saying that no one should talk about security exploits, as you suggest. With the vulnerability well-publicized, there's an opportunity for hackers to take advantage of a known problem with guaranteed results instead of hunting for an unknown one.
Downloading service packs are not required to fix security issues -- critical updates do that in just a few megabytes. Service packs are major bug fixes as well as feature upgrades. Using the Linux analogy, critical upgrades move from 2.4.x to 2.4.y, while service packs move from 2.x to 2.y. I do agree that the service packs are really large and can be painful to download over a modem, but it's not your only option. I do wish that it could get broken down a little bit more.
Did you read the article? Microsoft, among others, is exploring ways to actually turn up answers, not pages. If I want to know what kind of spark plugs I need to buy for my car, I want an answer, not a webpage with the answer.
Search sounds simple but the industry is complex and its potential is way bigger than you can imagine. Search is the only way people get around the web these days, and there's plenty of room for improvement. More importantly, search engines control e-commerce.
THANK YOU for posting. The parent obviously doesn't know what he's talking about. There's a combination of jealousy, ignorance, and nerdy hate-the-mainstream-at-all-costs thought there. Love them or hate them, Ferraris have to be respected and to dismiss them as being merely passe is ridiculous. You're right -- totally making arguments out of magazines, and poor ones, at that.
I think that I'm in agreement with you there... we're in a gray area that doesn't quite seem right. There's talk of "civil disobedience" and while I think that it may be an appropriate course of action under certain conditions, I don't think we're there. Where's the outrage against Stephen King books and U2 CDs? It sounds to me like it's selective protest because it's Microsoft that's involved. While there may be an issue regarding DMCA and DRM in general, I certainly don't think that civil disobedience of copyright law is the right way to approach it. It's a useful tool in the arsenal of the people, but now's not the time or place.
Microsoft is sooooo obviously trying to pull an SCO here.
This is the among the most ridiculous theories that I've ever read on Slashdot (and I've seen some doozies in the past several years). Why would Microsoft go about trying to pull off what SCO did? So it could a bunch of Linux users (a LIBERAL estimate of 100M) for a paltry $500 a pop... that's a mere $5B over the course of the next several years? Let's double it for a $1,000 each and it's still just $10B, nevermind all the expenses, including legal, to go about trying to collect something like that. Or, perhaps, they decide to go sue a handful of companies for a few billion dollars each after years of litigation and all kinds of negative PR. Microsoft's revenue was $34 billion for last year alone, $26B of it being profit.
SCO's actions are based on a company with little revenue, little cash, and nothing to lose. Microsoft has everything to lose. Say what you will about Microsoft, but they didn't get to where they are today with silly moves like that.
Actually, I think this isn't so much a move against Linux as it is an attempt to stem piracy, which is huge in Thailand. If Windows is available at relatively low cost, more people will buy legal copies of it. Right now, it's just the pirated version that remains the practical choice for the vast majority.
While Thai-language Linux may be relatively well developed, all of the international versions of Windows are quite well done and have been for a while now. While features alone may allow for a user to switch to Linux in English-speaking countries, localization completeness is high on the list in other countries.
Sounds like you picked a really popular keyword. Trying to add an ad for highly popular keywords with very high competition from other ads drives the price up. For example, trying to buy an ad for "online gambling" is going to get you buried unless it's really worth a lot to you. Five cents per click is nothing... that's the minimum and you gotta have some really obscure keywords to be getting ads served up for that amount. You should try out other keywords and ads -- keyword-targetted ads do work.
You're right -- relevant banner ads are just as effective, but the brilliance of Google AdWords is that anyone can deliver a targeted ad. Designing a creative and getting it onto an ad distribution network is significantly more difficult with other traditional forms of ad serving, where you need to open accounts.
Clippy is not a technology that people continue to use and it is not a technology that was superceded by a superior one. Most people didn't find it useful and they didn't use it; no further attempts have been made at software agents for the desktop... yet.
Aren't they going to need a court order to get TiVo's information in the first place? This is very similar to saying that Google's a privacy risk because they track IP addresses and queries, so the police can get a court order to get a list of IP addresses that searched for kiddie porn and that's enough to get a search warrant to bust down your door.
They can show that you selected a channel, but they can't prove that the channel change worked. The TiVo tells the satellite/cable descrambler to change to that channel. It doesn't know or care if the channel change worked (ask anyone who has a TiVo and a digital cable box about how pissed they get when the channel change fails). I can tell TiVo to change to an arbitary channel and it will do it. It may or may not have program information about it, but there's no proof that the channel you selected is the programming you got.
They can show that you tried to view channel 725, but they don't know that HBO is actually what was coming into the TiVo, since there's no descrambler built into the box. They just know that you tried to set it as the channel. The channel change may or may not have succeeded.
One of the things that I never understood about email clients was why they insisted on trying to store all of the contact information about a person. Who sends things to a snail mail address from an email client?
Well, where else are you going to store contact information? Are you going to run a separate "Snail Mail Address Book" that keeps all the email addresses? An email client has all the infrastructure for management of contacts through all available means -- it's a trivial step to add complete contact management.
Re:Stop with that tired, false statistic.
on
Google v. Microsoft
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, it's not the estimation that's incorrect. The first page tells you which sites (as a collection of pages) might be relevant to your query. Later pages will give you individual pages instead after you've decided you're not looking for a topic-based search but rather a particular page. The MSN search style allows you to pick subject area sites based on your query whereas Google gives you page after page of results. I think the former is better for generic searches (since the average query length is still under two words, many people are searching for just one word) whereas the latter is better for specific information. I prefer Teoma's method (among others) of refining search results by subject area rather than weeding through whole sites and, even worse, whole pages, when the query is really loose. That being said, I use Google 99% of the time.
They do use a spell checker, but I don't think it's quite as effective or aggressive about matching as a Google's. For example, eBay figures out that you've mis-spelled "compaq" as "compac" but doesn't catch the mis-spelling of "labtop" and recommend the correctly-spelled version. Google finds both of these.
Slashdot Mirror
Forget programming. It's not worth it. No one learns programming because they're bored. They learn it because a) they need it for a job or b) it's interesting. She clearly doesn't really have b and doesn't need it for a. What she need is a purpose.
Start her off with a blog. She can keep it as a diary and mark most of the entries as private if she wants and just mark certain ones public when they're notable, funny, or she has something worth sharing. When she realizes that it can't do everything exactly the way she wants, she'll get more sophisticated with HTML, Javascript, PHP, and whatever else she needs. She doesn't need to learn tools for the sake of learning tools -- she needs a purpose for using her computer. Nobody gives a shit about learning "Hello world" programs or even writing sophisticated encryption algorithms. They get excited when it makes their own lives easier. Or profiable.
If she's looking for trying out a few things to try to make a few bucks, she can join an affiliate program and get paid to learn how the web works. eBay has a great affiliate program that's free to join and pretty popular. As long as she's not doing it as a job, it could be a fun way for her to try to make a few bucks. There are some good guides out there to help web novices get started.
The point of the estimate is not to deduce exactly how many servers that Google has, because that figure surely changes from week to week. It's to show that the previous figures of 10k-15k servers is totally off base and that they've long exceeded the previously-thought figures. It's to show that it's simply a really big number.
It's meaningless to talk about marginal cost and marginal price when no one is going to pay the fixed cost and fixed price. Who paid $10M for a piece of consumer OS? I guess that the first Mercedes S500 to roll off the line should cost $100M and the rest should be available for less than a Honda Accord, right? After all, someone else paid for that first S500, right?
To be fair, you should include MSN"s search results for actual pages, not entire sites. MSN returns to you entire sites first, and then individual pages, in the belief that different sites of varying subject areas might get you to better stores of information. This is not a bad idea at all, since you might want to find different centers of high quality data rather than pages all about the same thing. For example, if you really were looking for the site about bagpipe songs and all you searched was "sco," you'd get a bunch of information that you didn't want. Both sites have its merits, but I do use Google for 99% of my queries. I'll have to re-evaluate after MSN releases its new search engine. Anyway, if you get down to indivdual pages, which is what Google does, the results are below.
27. The SCO Group | SCO Grows Your Business
28. the SCO v IBM info website
29. SCO | SCOsource
30. SCO | SCO Grows Your Business
31. OSI Position Paper on the SCO-vs.-IBM Complaint
32. SCO Unix Downloads
33. SCO |
34. The SCO Group | Scosource | SCOsource
35. Exploit world -- SCO including Openserver section
36. Ars Technica: The Nigerian SCO Connection - Page 1 - (8/2003)
Downloading service packs are not required to fix security issues -- critical updates do that in just a few megabytes. Service packs are major bug fixes as well as feature upgrades. Using the Linux analogy, critical upgrades move from 2.4.x to 2.4.y, while service packs move from 2.x to 2.y. I do agree that the service packs are really large and can be painful to download over a modem, but it's not your only option. I do wish that it could get broken down a little bit more.
Did you read the article? Microsoft, among others, is exploring ways to actually turn up answers, not pages. If I want to know what kind of spark plugs I need to buy for my car, I want an answer, not a webpage with the answer.
Search sounds simple but the industry is complex and its potential is way bigger than you can imagine. Search is the only way people get around the web these days, and there's plenty of room for improvement. More importantly, search engines control e-commerce.
THANK YOU for posting. The parent obviously doesn't know what he's talking about. There's a combination of jealousy, ignorance, and nerdy hate-the-mainstream-at-all-costs thought there. Love them or hate them, Ferraris have to be respected and to dismiss them as being merely passe is ridiculous. You're right -- totally making arguments out of magazines, and poor ones, at that.
I think that I'm in agreement with you there ... we're in a gray area that doesn't quite seem right. There's talk of "civil disobedience" and while I think that it may be an appropriate course of action under certain conditions, I don't think we're there. Where's the outrage against Stephen King books and U2 CDs? It sounds to me like it's selective protest because it's Microsoft that's involved. While there may be an issue regarding DMCA and DRM in general, I certainly don't think that civil disobedience of copyright law is the right way to approach it. It's a useful tool in the arsenal of the people, but now's not the time or place.
Can you expound on why you believe that copyright law is unjust?
LOL ... my math is completely wrong ... obviously, I meant "$50B over the next several years."
SCO's actions are based on a company with little revenue, little cash, and nothing to lose. Microsoft has everything to lose. Say what you will about Microsoft, but they didn't get to where they are today with silly moves like that.
Actually, I think this isn't so much a move against Linux as it is an attempt to stem piracy, which is huge in Thailand. If Windows is available at relatively low cost, more people will buy legal copies of it. Right now, it's just the pirated version that remains the practical choice for the vast majority.
While Thai-language Linux may be relatively well developed, all of the international versions of Windows are quite well done and have been for a while now. While features alone may allow for a user to switch to Linux in English-speaking countries, localization completeness is high on the list in other countries.
Sounds like you picked a really popular keyword. Trying to add an ad for highly popular keywords with very high competition from other ads drives the price up. For example, trying to buy an ad for "online gambling" is going to get you buried unless it's really worth a lot to you. Five cents per click is nothing ... that's the minimum and you gotta have some really obscure keywords to be getting ads served up for that amount. You should try out other keywords and ads -- keyword-targetted ads do work.
You're right -- relevant banner ads are just as effective, but the brilliance of Google AdWords is that anyone can deliver a targeted ad. Designing a creative and getting it onto an ad distribution network is significantly more difficult with other traditional forms of ad serving, where you need to open accounts.
But Clippy does refuse to die.
Aren't they going to need a court order to get TiVo's information in the first place? This is very similar to saying that Google's a privacy risk because they track IP addresses and queries, so the police can get a court order to get a list of IP addresses that searched for kiddie porn and that's enough to get a search warrant to bust down your door.
They can show that you selected a channel, but they can't prove that the channel change worked. The TiVo tells the satellite/cable descrambler to change to that channel. It doesn't know or care if the channel change worked (ask anyone who has a TiVo and a digital cable box about how pissed they get when the channel change fails). I can tell TiVo to change to an arbitary channel and it will do it. It may or may not have program information about it, but there's no proof that the channel you selected is the programming you got.
They can show that you tried to view channel 725, but they don't know that HBO is actually what was coming into the TiVo, since there's no descrambler built into the box. They just know that you tried to set it as the channel. The channel change may or may not have succeeded.
Actually, it's not the estimation that's incorrect. The first page tells you which sites (as a collection of pages) might be relevant to your query. Later pages will give you individual pages instead after you've decided you're not looking for a topic-based search but rather a particular page. The MSN search style allows you to pick subject area sites based on your query whereas Google gives you page after page of results. I think the former is better for generic searches (since the average query length is still under two words, many people are searching for just one word) whereas the latter is better for specific information. I prefer Teoma's method (among others) of refining search results by subject area rather than weeding through whole sites and, even worse, whole pages, when the query is really loose. That being said, I use Google 99% of the time.
They do use a spell checker, but I don't think it's quite as effective or aggressive about matching as a Google's. For example, eBay figures out that you've mis-spelled "compaq" as "compac" but doesn't catch the mis-spelling of "labtop" and recommend the correctly-spelled version. Google finds both of these.