I searched again "to be or not to be" - this time one link had the phrase "2Bee or Nottoobee" but otherwise it occurred on all pages.
We are of course assuming the results Google returns to you are the same ones it returns to me, which would depend on us having identical preferences amongst other things.
I usually go for "English" and "uncensored" (or whatever the phrase it), beyond that I don't recall what preferences I told Google, but every once in a while they seem to change them.
Google puts in the "only appears in links" phrase when the search terms aren't in the page, it doesn't mean it appeared in links to the page (at least links Google claims to know about), if Google returned that page for some other reason.
I usually have two copies of firefox open with about 5 tabs in each at work, I don't have the patience to hit alt-tab that often. Tabbed browsing is almost necessary in the ISP business, I can't imagine life without tabbed browsing and the web developer plugin.
In Firefox I'd like the search box to clear on opening a new tab, and maybe other times, it is still in memory if I start typing the first word for goodness sake.
Few people change their User Agent string, but it comes back to "Why?".
Unless your userbase is radically different from everyone elses, most will use IE, 8% will use Gecko based browsers, and a piddling amount will use something else. Similarly the vast majority will be using Windows, mostly XP, and a couple of % Linux or MacOSX. Unless you are a technical site the only use I could see in this information is to discover you broke something.
There are a zillion tools for discovering this, but unless you are running like linuxhq.org don't expect the stats to be hugely different.
Sure country can have some value, but if you don't offer prices in Euros/Pounds don't expect many Europeans to be interested in your ecommerce site. So it is self fulfilling, no Euro, no Europeans.
The most useful thing we see is Google referrals. And even this is usually pretty predictable.
Polls are easy - ask them something relevant to the business. Although remember some people just never take part in them.
Most cases time is better spent improving content, if you can use a tool that gathers basic stats quickly sure run it, but don't expect miracles from the output.
> A good example is a search on "to be or not to be". Even in quotes, 2 or so of the top 10 results are dross: they do not even contain the phrase.
Goodness Google fix things quick. I see the phrase in every result returned.
I'm not sure Google is broken at all, if someone (or many people) create a lot of links for a specific result then presumably there is some sort of democratic voice being heard (Google "banana republic" for an example).
Google do have some anti link farm systems, so I dare say they may automate certain kinds of response to this in time, should it become an a big enough issue.
I think there are bigger problems with modern search engines than Google bombing.
> and who knows, maybe in the future, software of other US companies
It was reported that IBM staff and resources were used in an attempt to disable computing facilities belonging to the former government of Iraq. Problem with these rumours of covert operations is you never know what to believe. One might also believe the DES is "just breakable enough" IBM/NSA story.
Similarly the Swedish government (IIRC) were disconcerted to discover their copy of Lotus Notes wasn't as secure as the CIAs copy. Of course then it was Lotus, not IBM.
I've no idea why Linux is singled out here, people could introduce deliberate flaws into any software, and not every Microsoft programmer is an American citizen, and not every American citizen is loyal. At least with free software you have a sporting chance of someone, outside Redmond, spotting it in the source code. The bigger risk is probably untrustworthy packaging and release people, who'll find it easier to put nasties in without leaving a trail of source code.
I need to learn more but having had a quick glance the constitution as it stands will confirm the powers of the council, and enshrine what is effectively an unelected house as the most powerful entity in the EU, chosen for being one member from each state or whatever the council wants.
In the UK we are still struggling to get more democracy into our second house, and the unelected trough feeding scum, religious bigots [bishops surely?] and others, out.
As it stands I can't see how I could vote yes. At least there is a simple "out" method at the moment, no negoiation needs we just repeal the legislation that bought us in.
Trade stuff is just a scare story, neither the EU or its member states would deny the UK open trade, and we'd just join NAFTA if they did, and sort out trade with the commonwealth, smaller EU states with less good relations with the USA might be more susceptible to pressure.
Wouter suggests those who oppose this sort of political move create a link for the phrase banana republic and point it at the ue.eu.int website.
Not sure this will make much difference, but it sounds a fun experiment in search engine confusion if nothing else. Just no one do it with more Google rank than me as I'm using it as an experiment in page rank.
Banana Republic will be mine, all mine, just as soon as I can prise rank #1 from bananarepublic.com. At least until it belongs to the EU.
Never willingly going to use another OS that doesn't have "apt" configured and running by default or something pretty close to it.
Today, editting web pages by hand (apparently I last updated the "last updated" tag in 2000), whoops no "tidy", "apt-get install tidy", whoops no "dos2unix", "apt-get install sysutils"
Not to mention the time I waste patching computers that don't just get all the updates overnight when apt-cron runs, be they from Redmund (no I mean properly patched, not just a handful of system updates with a random reboot, but every app and every security patch and scarcely a reboot in sight), or Redhat (like RH9 isn't that old).
Now all I need to do is resist the urge to check out what the upgrade to all my favourite time wasting games has done, and I'd be more productive.
MACs I plead I've never got along with, although MacOSX looks okay, I've not had the patience to persevere. Does it have "apt"?
KDE does something like this, it uses a central dictionary to spell check in all text areas, with the red underline clueing people in to their failings.
But in general I think your point is valid. User interfaces suck.
I was thinking of a similar issue with the trend to "indexing", ala Google's new desktop offering (and everyone elses "me too" offering).
Universally these are done badly, and they are done badly because they are extras, if someone had though of this from day one (and had resources to do it - real time spell check on a PDP7?) all apps would have the appropriate search hooks (not just IMAP4). For the same reason apps not designed for KDE may not do that spellcheck thing as well.
In principal full OO design might help address this, if only we hadn't started here, problem, but only if we started with the right set of objects, and everyone built with them.
Realistically I think it just reveals how hard good software is to write, and I don't have easy answers on that one.
There are several approaches.
The pragmatic one says the answer doesn't matter, the relative market share of products is what it is, if the security threat under Windows is too great (whether because it is market leader or because it is a pile of pants) switching is the right move.
The poster suggesting "throwing everything" at two "identical" boxes, misses the point market share may make one system have better tools against it.
It is also naive to think of GNU/Linux in the same way as Windows, even if it had a similar bottom line market share as Windows does now there is enough variation between distributions, and choices of kernel patches etc that it would still be effectively a much more diverse environment. Of course if everyone switched to Debian stable.....
If you work in IT you should have a pretty good idea what makes software products secure, and it is pretty obvious that IIS, IE, Outlook, Sendmail, old version of BIND (9), don't have it, and that retrofitting security rarely works.
Whilst I think popular GNU/Linux products are often more secure than comparable Microsoft products, I believe this is mostly due to application design failings on the part of Microsoft. Perhaps driven as Spafford suggests by a desire for features, and short time to market.
SUN and Digital both produced operating systems that I think it is safe to claim have historically had an edge security* wise over the mainstream GNU/Linux distributions and Microsofts operating system offerings. And these were not produced in a free software environment, but by focusing on traditional, often boring, and expensive software engineering techniques, solid design, and attention to detail.
The tension that reportedly arose in the Microsoft NT developers that had previously worked on VMS, perhaps reflects the culture difference that existed then between these organisations.
I think there is great complacency in some parts of the GNU/Linux camp, who look at currently widely deployed operating systems, and see a laughable level of security in the Microsoft OSes and assume this is somehow inherent in the process, and will never change.
I personally belong to the camp that says you'll never produce large secure computing environments in programming languages that allow programmers to shoot themselves in the foot quite so readily. Although this might be addressed by compiler or libraries and the like, I don't see widespread determination to adopt generally better tools and environments, so expect more of same indefinitely.
*Wheeler makes a good case for the GNU file utils having less bugs, but I believe Solaris has had more kernel level protection to protect against the effects of such bugs, at least compared to the default Linux Kernel. There is bugs, and then there is the severity of those bugs.
Oops ignore that one...
Although if the Intel website ever loads it explanation of Pentium 4 features......
I guess the browser warning telling me to upgrade to an older browser should have given away - page written by moron.
Not my area, but I understood DEP was "off by default" in SP2 - yet another suspect default setting from MS I fear.
Similar buffer checking features in the Linux kernel (if enabled) usually results in a ~7% performance hit, so I assume that is the issue here.
Did you actually read the barefeats review you linked to in full?
It seems to say the SATA was faster, a third of the price, and provided three times as much disk space, as the SCSI system.
Not my idea of SCSI spanking RAID;)
But even if the SCSI is marginally faster in the general case (i.e. not restricting the SATA to the fastest 1/3 of its disk), I'll buy three of the SATA arrays and for the same money, and outperform the SCSI with 9 times as much disk space to boot.
Okay - lets get this straight "anyone can use Microsoft software" - if that is the claim, they better make it so anyone can use it reasonably safely.
I know this Windows developer, he has been around computers as long as I have. He keeps abreast of developments as well as most, and in general if Microsoft documentation clearly states "do X" he will understand why, and do it reliably.
He is not an MCSE, or a system admin, but he does have a degree in computing, and he isn't your average user.
I had the pleasure of introducing him to the Office Update site (he missed those little buttons in Windows update), and was surprised to discover that Windows Update doesn't just fix all Microsoft Software. I suspect the peril is assuming Microsoft would do it the way he would have coded it.
He discovered his home PC (XP) riddled with spyware. I defy any users who isn't a security expert to properly secure IE (short of the old download another browser trick).
He didn't believe me when I told him Microsofts' security guru recommended disabling Javascript after a recent alert, and he couldn't readily find the tick box to do it, because it is now rebranded "Active Scripting" or some such marketing term.
If he can't use Microsoft software safely, and he develops software for it full-time, what hope the average Joe?
I know only too well that you can make some MS software reliable in some enviroments. I ran an Oracle database on NT that was rock solid till 4 days after I gave the administrator password to a colleague with an MCSE. But the point is in such environments *n.x servers stay reliable, where as MS Windows based systems usually just rot and decay due to lack of modularity in the OS.
Sure most Desktop users don't need crash proof systems, but not all users of MS software are using it to compose letters for overdue bills. My doctor still has some MS Windows boxes around for one...
Okay perhaps I should stop ranting here and write to the advertising standards authority.
Argh - we should ban any thread containing the phrase "Linux must become Easier to Install".
GNU/Linux is easy to install, I open the CD tray (or floppy in one case), insert CD, and power the machine on, in some cases I now answer a few questions typical of any OS install, in others it just works.
Usually the system is shortly in a state where it presents an interface that looks pretty much like CDE, and a familiar Unix like environment, allowing me to leverage many years experience of those systems.
The only time it gets more complex is when the hardware is not supported by the distro in question out of the box.
I suspect what people usually mean by this is "GNU/Linux should support the hardware I bought to run Windows on without me, or my hardware supplier, having to do all that complex integration work and testing that they do before shipping a Windows box."
Simon, whose laptop was "Designed for Windows 98", but seems much happier when booted to Debian unstable.
He'll already said that compiling Perl modules has proved problematic on Redhat, and that these are already built and packaged on Debian.
I know Debian saves time, despite mostly Redhat operational systems, I do all my testing and experimenting on Debian because it is easier and quicker to reconfigure Debian, despite me having less experience with it.
It maybe recent Redhat versions have improved things, but the very fact they are changing fundamental things to play "catch up" discourages me from choosing their distro.
> Maybe you can threaten the sales people to go to HP if they don't amend the support contract to include Debian. They probably will know you're bluffing, but it might help.
I found this a very successful ruse for escalating a support call on NFS once. Working at an organisation stuffed with HP-UX workstations, that couldn't mount a filesystem properly, and a couple of SUNs that could.
Bluff doesn't enter into it, I think the mere knowledge that HP can better satisfy your requirements is offensive to good IBM sales (and technical people).
Slashdot Mirror
"problems with FF 1.0.1 update"
apt-get upgrade ? Oh must be one of those legacy operating system user.
I searched again "to be or not to be" - this time one link had the phrase "2Bee or Nottoobee" but otherwise it occurred on all pages.
We are of course assuming the results Google returns to you are the same ones it returns to me, which would depend on us having identical preferences amongst other things.
I usually go for "English" and "uncensored" (or whatever the phrase it), beyond that I don't recall what preferences I told Google, but every once in a while they seem to change them.
Google puts in the "only appears in links" phrase when the search terms aren't in the page, it doesn't mean it appeared in links to the page (at least links Google claims to know about), if Google returned that page for some other reason.
What is IE supposed to do? Is it supposed to fix all the CSS hacks and break those pages that were depending on the hacks?
It is suppose to fix the hacks, and keep the old ones working.
Quirks mode anyone.
Whilst I sympathise,
I usually have two copies of firefox open with about 5 tabs in each at work, I don't have the patience to hit alt-tab that often. Tabbed browsing is almost necessary in the ISP business, I can't imagine life without tabbed browsing and the web developer plugin.
In Firefox I'd like the search box to clear on opening a new tab, and maybe other times, it is still in memory if I start typing the first word for goodness sake.
Few people change their User Agent string, but it comes back to "Why?".
Unless your userbase is radically different from everyone elses, most will use IE, 8% will use Gecko based browsers, and a piddling amount will use something else. Similarly the vast majority will be using Windows, mostly XP, and a couple of % Linux or MacOSX. Unless you are a technical site the only use I could see in this information is to discover you broke something.
There are a zillion tools for discovering this, but unless you are running like linuxhq.org don't expect the stats to be hugely different.
Sure country can have some value, but if you don't offer prices in Euros/Pounds don't expect many Europeans to be interested in your ecommerce site. So it is self fulfilling, no Euro, no Europeans.
The most useful thing we see is Google referrals. And even this is usually pretty predictable.
Polls are easy - ask them something relevant to the business. Although remember some people just never take part in them.
Most cases time is better spent improving content, if you can use a tool that gathers basic stats quickly sure run it, but don't expect miracles from the output.
Splashdot?
Oh look no one has letsbidforit.com yet?
> A good example is a search on "to be or not to be". Even in quotes, 2 or so of the top 10 results are dross: they do not even contain the phrase.
Goodness Google fix things quick. I see the phrase in every result returned.
I'm not sure Google is broken at all, if someone (or many people) create a lot of links for a specific result then presumably there is some sort of democratic voice being heard (Google "banana republic" for an example).
Google do have some anti link farm systems, so I dare say they may automate certain kinds of response to this in time, should it become an a big enough issue.
I think there are bigger problems with modern search engines than Google bombing.
Businesses can treat customers differently, especially where they have different pricing structures in place.
The DoD has had special purchasing arrangement with Microsoft, as with most other big software vendors, because it is big enough to negoiate them.
Indeed I believe several MS EULA explicitly mention different terms if you are a DoD customer.
I'm guessing your purchasing budget for software is several orders of magnitude less than the DoD.
> and who knows, maybe in the future, software of other US companies
It was reported that IBM staff and resources were used in an attempt to disable computing facilities belonging to the former government of Iraq. Problem with these rumours of covert operations is you never know what to believe. One might also believe the DES is "just breakable enough" IBM/NSA story.
Similarly the Swedish government (IIRC) were disconcerted to discover their copy of Lotus Notes wasn't as secure as the CIAs copy. Of course then it was Lotus, not IBM.
I've no idea why Linux is singled out here, people could introduce deliberate flaws into any software, and not every Microsoft programmer is an American citizen, and not every American citizen is loyal. At least with free software you have a sporting chance of someone, outside Redmond, spotting it in the source code. The bigger risk is probably untrustworthy packaging and release people, who'll find it easier to put nasties in without leaving a trail of source code.
... or maybe just their marketing department?
I need to learn more but having had a quick glance the constitution as it stands will confirm the powers of the council, and enshrine what is effectively an unelected house as the most powerful entity in the EU, chosen for being one member from each state or whatever the council wants.
In the UK we are still struggling to get more democracy into our second house, and the unelected trough feeding scum, religious bigots [bishops surely?] and others, out.
As it stands I can't see how I could vote yes. At least there is a simple "out" method at the moment, no negoiation needs we just repeal the legislation that bought us in.
Trade stuff is just a scare story, neither the EU or its member states would deny the UK open trade, and we'd just join NAFTA if they did, and sort out trade with the commonwealth, smaller EU states with less good relations with the USA might be more susceptible to pressure.
Wouter suggests those who oppose this sort of political move create a link for the phrase banana republic and point it at the ue.eu.int website.
Not sure this will make much difference, but it sounds a fun experiment in search engine confusion if nothing else. Just no one do it with more Google rank than me as I'm using it as an experiment in page rank.
Banana Republic will be mine, all mine, just as soon as I can prise rank #1 from bananarepublic.com. At least until it belongs to the EU.
Never willingly going to use another OS that doesn't have "apt" configured and running by default or something pretty close to it.
Today, editting web pages by hand (apparently I last updated the "last updated" tag in 2000), whoops no "tidy", "apt-get install tidy", whoops no "dos2unix", "apt-get install sysutils"
Not to mention the time I waste patching computers that don't just get all the updates overnight when apt-cron runs, be they from Redmund (no I mean properly patched, not just a handful of system updates with a random reboot, but every app and every security patch and scarcely a reboot in sight), or Redhat (like RH9 isn't that old).
Now all I need to do is resist the urge to check out what the upgrade to all my favourite time wasting games has done, and I'd be more productive.
MACs I plead I've never got along with, although MacOSX looks okay, I've not had the patience to persevere. Does it have "apt"?
KDE does something like this, it uses a central dictionary to spell check in all text areas, with the red underline clueing people in to their failings.
But in general I think your point is valid. User interfaces suck.
I was thinking of a similar issue with the trend to "indexing", ala Google's new desktop offering (and everyone elses "me too" offering).
Universally these are done badly, and they are done badly because they are extras, if someone had though of this from day one (and had resources to do it - real time spell check on a PDP7?) all apps would have the appropriate search hooks (not just IMAP4). For the same reason apps not designed for KDE may not do that spellcheck thing as well.
In principal full OO design might help address this, if only we hadn't started here, problem, but only if we started with the right set of objects, and everyone built with them.
Realistically I think it just reveals how hard good software is to write, and I don't have easy answers on that one.
There are several approaches. The pragmatic one says the answer doesn't matter, the relative market share of products is what it is, if the security threat under Windows is too great (whether because it is market leader or because it is a pile of pants) switching is the right move. The poster suggesting "throwing everything" at two "identical" boxes, misses the point market share may make one system have better tools against it. It is also naive to think of GNU/Linux in the same way as Windows, even if it had a similar bottom line market share as Windows does now there is enough variation between distributions, and choices of kernel patches etc that it would still be effectively a much more diverse environment. Of course if everyone switched to Debian stable..... If you work in IT you should have a pretty good idea what makes software products secure, and it is pretty obvious that IIS, IE, Outlook, Sendmail, old version of BIND (9), don't have it, and that retrofitting security rarely works. Whilst I think popular GNU/Linux products are often more secure than comparable Microsoft products, I believe this is mostly due to application design failings on the part of Microsoft. Perhaps driven as Spafford suggests by a desire for features, and short time to market. SUN and Digital both produced operating systems that I think it is safe to claim have historically had an edge security* wise over the mainstream GNU/Linux distributions and Microsofts operating system offerings. And these were not produced in a free software environment, but by focusing on traditional, often boring, and expensive software engineering techniques, solid design, and attention to detail. The tension that reportedly arose in the Microsoft NT developers that had previously worked on VMS, perhaps reflects the culture difference that existed then between these organisations. I think there is great complacency in some parts of the GNU/Linux camp, who look at currently widely deployed operating systems, and see a laughable level of security in the Microsoft OSes and assume this is somehow inherent in the process, and will never change. I personally belong to the camp that says you'll never produce large secure computing environments in programming languages that allow programmers to shoot themselves in the foot quite so readily. Although this might be addressed by compiler or libraries and the like, I don't see widespread determination to adopt generally better tools and environments, so expect more of same indefinitely. *Wheeler makes a good case for the GNU file utils having less bugs, but I believe Solaris has had more kernel level protection to protect against the effects of such bugs, at least compared to the default Linux Kernel. There is bugs, and then there is the severity of those bugs.
Oops ignore that one... Although if the Intel website ever loads it explanation of Pentium 4 features...... I guess the browser warning telling me to upgrade to an older browser should have given away - page written by moron.
If you're on a Pentium 4, then DEP won't do much anyway will it?!
Not my area, but I understood DEP was "off by default" in SP2 - yet another suspect default setting from MS I fear. Similar buffer checking features in the Linux kernel (if enabled) usually results in a ~7% performance hit, so I assume that is the issue here.
Did you actually read the barefeats review you linked to in full? It seems to say the SATA was faster, a third of the price, and provided three times as much disk space, as the SCSI system. Not my idea of SCSI spanking RAID ;)
But even if the SCSI is marginally faster in the general case (i.e. not restricting the SATA to the fastest 1/3 of its disk), I'll buy three of the SATA arrays and for the same money, and outperform the SCSI with 9 times as much disk space to boot.
Okay - lets get this straight "anyone can use Microsoft software" - if that is the claim, they better make it so anyone can use it reasonably safely. I know this Windows developer, he has been around computers as long as I have. He keeps abreast of developments as well as most, and in general if Microsoft documentation clearly states "do X" he will understand why, and do it reliably. He is not an MCSE, or a system admin, but he does have a degree in computing, and he isn't your average user. I had the pleasure of introducing him to the Office Update site (he missed those little buttons in Windows update), and was surprised to discover that Windows Update doesn't just fix all Microsoft Software. I suspect the peril is assuming Microsoft would do it the way he would have coded it. He discovered his home PC (XP) riddled with spyware. I defy any users who isn't a security expert to properly secure IE (short of the old download another browser trick). He didn't believe me when I told him Microsofts' security guru recommended disabling Javascript after a recent alert, and he couldn't readily find the tick box to do it, because it is now rebranded "Active Scripting" or some such marketing term. If he can't use Microsoft software safely, and he develops software for it full-time, what hope the average Joe? I know only too well that you can make some MS software reliable in some enviroments. I ran an Oracle database on NT that was rock solid till 4 days after I gave the administrator password to a colleague with an MCSE. But the point is in such environments *n.x servers stay reliable, where as MS Windows based systems usually just rot and decay due to lack of modularity in the OS. Sure most Desktop users don't need crash proof systems, but not all users of MS software are using it to compose letters for overdue bills. My doctor still has some MS Windows boxes around for one... Okay perhaps I should stop ranting here and write to the advertising standards authority.
Argh - we should ban any thread containing the phrase "Linux must become Easier to Install".
GNU/Linux is easy to install, I open the CD tray (or floppy in one case), insert CD, and power the machine on, in some cases I now answer a few questions typical of any OS install, in others it just works.
Usually the system is shortly in a state where it presents an interface that looks pretty much like CDE, and a familiar Unix like environment, allowing me to leverage many years experience of those systems.
The only time it gets more complex is when the hardware is not supported by the distro in question out of the box.
I suspect what people usually mean by this is "GNU/Linux should support the hardware I bought to run Windows on without me, or my hardware supplier, having to do all that complex integration work and testing that they do before shipping a Windows box."
Simon, whose laptop was "Designed for Windows 98", but seems much happier when booted to Debian unstable.
He'll already said that compiling Perl modules has proved problematic on Redhat, and that these are already built and packaged on Debian. I know Debian saves time, despite mostly Redhat operational systems, I do all my testing and experimenting on Debian because it is easier and quicker to reconfigure Debian, despite me having less experience with it. It maybe recent Redhat versions have improved things, but the very fact they are changing fundamental things to play "catch up" discourages me from choosing their distro.
> Maybe you can threaten the sales people to go to HP if they don't amend the support contract to include Debian. They probably will know you're bluffing, but it might help.
I found this a very successful ruse for escalating a support call on NFS once. Working at an organisation stuffed with HP-UX workstations, that couldn't mount a filesystem properly, and a couple of SUNs that could.
Bluff doesn't enter into it, I think the mere knowledge that HP can better satisfy your requirements is offensive to good IBM sales (and technical people).