Great article (hope it doesn't get/.'d). While they seem to be working on large-scale room features (wall, door, floor, ceiling), I can see the next step being an autonomous robot that can find and identify such basics as a light switch and a power (mains) outlet.
I remember years and years ago, a robot had been developed that could optically recognize a power outlet and plug itself in... but I don't think it did much else. This would have been early 80s, probably, so we're talking Z-80 vs. Pentium.
Future recognition goals:
* Refrigerator door (fetch beer, please) * Small child (danger! sticky fingers! run away!) * Other robots for romantic interludes: (IF Query(Other_Bot, EXCHANGE_CODE) == TRUE Extend_Programming_Probe(Other_Bot))
Did you hear that IRS, I donated the $36 million dollars! It was me!
That brings up a good point... somebody is getting a whopping tax deduction for their gift. While that's perfectly appropripate, we have three problems.
One, the citizens of Georgia are going to be contributing another few million bucks for the project. Don't they deserve to know where their matching funds are coming from?
Two, I and my fellow Americans will be contributing indirectly, via the charitable deduction the person or company is going to receive. Don't I deserve to know whose tax break I'm going to be offsetting?
Three, while there are plenty of true philanthropists, that kind of cash usually comes from someone with a dog in the fight. Bill Gates "generously donates" Windows PCs to schools like a drug dealer "donating" crack behind the bleachers. As an investor, don't I deserve to know if company X just put $36 million into a technology that will benefit it? Don't I deserve to know that company Y *isn't* investing in the future?
From the article: Space weather forecasters say this spate of strong solar flares is not consistent with normal solar behavior. The sun, which follows an 11-year activity cycle, has been quieting down since the last peak in 2000.
Although we humans have been looking at the sun since before we climbed out of the trees (and our moms have been telling us not to even longer), it's almost silly to say that any observation of our local star is "not consistent with normal solar behavior." Just how many of those 11-year cycles have been recorded?
If the ancient Chinese were using pinhole solar viewers to count sunspots for the past 5000 years, that would be one thing. But as has been posted in every Slashdot story on the subject, we have maybe 200 years of scientific data (of varying quality) out of the sun's five billion year history. Even W's pollsters would tell you that sample size is too small.
frankly, I'm wondering how they'd stop a hydrogen buildup similar to a sonic boom from forming and causing some real damage to the systems they're travelling to or past
What episode of TNG was it where it was discovered that high warp speeds *did* cause permanent damage to interstellar "ecosystems"? As I recall, it was an interesting allegory of "freedom fighter" vs. "terrorist", with the planet's scientists (all two of them, as usual) split on how to convince Federation starships to slow the hell down.
In the end, one of the scientists demonstrated the problem the hard way, blowing himself up in the process, and the Federation imposed a speed limit (warp 5, wasn't it?) unless there were a lights-and-sirens emergency. I always wondered how the Federation would enforce such a limit, especially on folks like the Klingons and Borg who never showed much use for the Federation's benign dictatorship.
Isn't the point of evolution to become MORE advanced? I mean, Janeway and Paris turned into freaking LIZARDS!
Indeed, they were lizards with their freak ON, if I remember correctly. What are the ethical considerations of leaving your offspring to fend for themselves like that -- even if they're post-mammalian reptilians?
(Or am I remembering the episode totally wrong? I had mammalian offspring of my own distracting me at the time.)
Wow, tell me what kind of cereal box contains a model of the Enterprise and i'm all over it!
Well, I may have exaggerated, or taken poetic license. I mentioned later on about the snow globe option... this was from personal experience.
My mother bought my wife and I a huge snow globe of the Enterprise (classic '60s version) one Christmas. We put it up in the closet until the kids got old enough to be interested. The next step is sadly inevitable: a busted snow globe and a cheap plastic model of the Enterprise that doesn't look nearly as cool as it did through the curved glass (now in a puddle of water on the floor).
I suspect that a similar situation may have offered up the candidate for the wind tunnel test. Note the big horizontal seam in the model -- I think my "model" may have been built the same way.
Allow me to begin the second phase of stock Slashdot comments. Phase I has already taken place: "what a waste of taxpayer/foundation/whatever dollars!" Phase II begins now:
Lighten up! It is clear from a very quick look at the rest of the site that the "Enterprise" simulation is just a fun application of some very serious science. It's clear that no special apparatuses (apparati?) were constructed to provide a real simulation of the Enterprise -- in fact, it's pretty obvious that the model used came out of a cereal box, or something.
Day in and day out, it looks like these guys are engaged in cutting-edge wind tunnel science, testing object against forces so strong, they can only be simulated for tiny fractions of a second. This means that someone spends hours setting up everything within rigorous parameters, then pushes a button. "Bam!", and it's over. If the object under test was mispositioned by a fraction of a millimeter, the team gets to do it all over again.
Once -- just once -- they'd like to have a chance to do something fun with the equipment. Someone has an old Enterprise model (actually, it may be from a snow globe). After a long day (probably unpaid) of testing the frontiers of science and boredom, they load up the (already warmed up) machine and have a little fun.
Thanks to the 'net, we get to share their fun. And in another few decades, we may get to enjoy the results of their hard work when we book that vacation on Luna.
For once, a patent would appear to be supporting innovation. An individual with an idea sees the potential, files a patent, and goes on a quest to commercialize the product. There could be no better case study of how patent law is supposed to encourage innovation.
But alas, it's not to be. From the article: The patent on tagatose as an additive expires in 2006, the two patents on production methods a few years later. [Inventor Gilbert] Levin hopes to see his sugar substitute flood the market before then.
Meanwhile, the current silliness at the patent office will help ensure that Levin will join the legions of brilliant inventors with "died nearly destitute" included somewhere in their epitaphs. Instead of an individual getting his due from an actual original thought, big corporations are set to reap millions from ridiculous "business method" patents. Again, from the article: Kellogg's obtained a patent in 2002 to use tagatose in "improved sucrose-free, noncarcinogenic, reduced-calorie, insulin-independent" sweet cereals. Wrigley and Kraft have patents of their own.
It's situations like this that make me glad to be a wage slave, with all my original ideas signed over to my own^h^h^hemployer.
If some of you don't buy this, just google "plasma burn-in"
That Google search looked pretty useless at first due to spam, but I found a great FAQ from Gateway:
Q: How do I correct burn-in on the 42 or 50-inch Plasma TV? A: Note: This function only works on part number 2800308 - Gateway 42-Inch Viewable Area Plasma TV R1.
On the remote control, press the left arrow button for more than 5 seconds, and then release.
Press the right arrow button for more than 5 seconds, and then release.
Press the Favorite Channel (FAV. CH.) button, and then release.
A bright white eraser screen appears. This eraser screen refreshes the Plasma screen and reduces the visual effect of burn-in.
Note: The eraser screen needs to remain active for a period of time. The more severe the burn-in, the longer the eraser screen needs to be left active. A light burn-in can be taken care of in about 12 hours. A heavy burn-in may require up to 50 hours. The test can be tailored by running the test for a given number of hours, and then making a judgment. If the result does not seem good enough, run the test again until satisfactory results are attained.
To shut down the eraser screen, press the Favorite Channel button, and then release it. If necessary, repeat this step until the white screen disappears.
Great! Not only do the instructions sound like DDR cheats, but Gateway is telling me to fight burn-in by burning in the whole screen for 50 hours! A few "masterpieces" later, and you've got a $10,000 night light.
Maybe, but I would think they might also be looking for "shady" spiders that ignored robots.txt. I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't a few honeypot pages in there too.
Oh, crap. I just plugged in/firstlady/images/iraq, and now you tell me I'd better watch out. Damn this static IP address!
Quick, Slashdot that link before the Agents get to my cube!
I mean, really, when Kevin Mitnick is mysteriously elected governor of Minnesota in a write-in vote and NORML supporters sweep the legislative elections in nine states, somebody's going to start asking questions...
I know what question I'd ask... "hey, when are you going to implement those machines here in Texas? Willie Nelson for Governor!"
Seriously, though, I've been an opponent of electronic voting systems since my first experience with them during early voting. The interface was total crap -- a pain for me, and I'm a programmer. The idea that there would be no paper trail just makes me shake my head.
So why is everyone so defensive of the Chinese, and so desperate to avoid the issue, lowering themselves to flaming and personal attacks, rather than *gasp* saying something as simple as "I don't know"?
I suspect the reason people aren't saying "I don't know" in response to your interesting proposition is pretty simple: they do know, and you were wrong. It happens to all of us, though most often to myself.
I agree that your initial posting deserves better moderation, but I don't think the moderation cabal is after you for political reasons. I suspect someone came across your sometimes-inflamatory replies, didn't get the joke (if any), and *then* followed the thread to the top and modded you down. Not fair, but understandable.
I'll see what I can do in M2, though the chance of running across any related moderations is a value of x where x < slim and x > none.
Where's George enthusiasts are aggressively analysing the new bill with regards to writing adverts on any cash they come across
As an active Georger myself, I'd like to make one correction to your statement. We're not "advertising" anything. We're simply tracking the bills. Advertising on a bill treads just a bit closer to the border between "fun" and "defacement". As an example of what happens when you get too close to the border, Hank (the WG? webmaster) was "urged" by the Feds to stop selling "Where's George?" rubber stamps on wheresgeorge.com, to avoid the appearance that the stamp was intended to push stamp sales.
No "your homeland security department at work" rants, please -- this was long before 9/11. Besides, the paranoid would see WG? as yet another tracking system, and would avoid such marked bills like alien death rays.
From the Wired article: "We needed something to stem the flow. We were spending too much time tracking people down," said Robert Bird, supervisor of network services for the UF department of housing.
So a guy named Bird creates (read: has some overworked grad student create) a program called Icarus to "bring down" file sharers. I guess he imagined his program being like the sun melting the wax on the mythical Icarus' wings and sending him crashing back to earth. And Bird himself, of course, would be the sun-wary Daedelus, who after trying out flight himself, hung up his wings as an offering to Apollo.
I guess he's now a flightless Bird. The old story about the ostrich sticking his head in the sand comes to mind.
Too bad - I'd love to hang up such an (otherwise ignored) invoice here in my office.
That's a great idea! It would go great with those framed Enron stock certificates, and you could really complete the "look" with various states' marijuana tax stamps!
I guess the need to brown-nose Congress for funding is an ongoing part of any government space program... but statements like this (from the article) really worry me:
How much will this next generation vehicle cost? The budget goes first to the White House for approval, then to Congress. The final design will be announced in August 2004.
The way this is worded, it sounds like they're implying "the project will cost as much as you'll let us spend." I'm really leaning toward the view (often expressed by Slashdotters) that the government needs to move from a leading role to a supporting role in space technology. And note that in the term "government", I include the big government contractors like Boeing & co, whose corporate inertia is no better than government bureaucracy.
Give the funding to outfits like Armadillo and the rest of the X-Prize competitors. Why not a government-sponsored X-Prize competition, with the winner getting a juicy government contract?
But this current path -- fuzzy requirements, a budget subject to political whim, and a culture where "[acknowledgement of] failure is not an option" -- seems doomed to mediocrity.
Amazon already bought an e-commerce search company for over $100 Million.
And boy, were they excited:
"PlanetAll is the most innovative use of the Internet I've seen," said Amazon's founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. "It's simply a breakthrough in doing something as fundamental and important as staying in touch."
"This is a significant opportunity for all of us at Junglee to extend our technology well beyond our current base," said Ram Shriram, president and COO of Junglee. "With Amazon.com, we can address the larger challenges of e-commerce sooner--and on a broader scale--than we could have done alone."
I guess the technology Amazon obtained for "equity valued at approximately $280 million" has gone to good use. Hard to tell, though, since bothpartners' websites have gone up in smoke. I wonder if Amazon will even bother to renew the domains, which expire in May and October 2004?
For some reason, I don't see much of a future for the A9 project anymore -- as if I ever really did...
I'm running Opera 7.11 (fr), 100 results per page, Language = Elmer Fudd, and it still shows up. But to their credit, it's at #30, so most people won't see it on their first or second page.
You know, 29 out of 30 relevant results is pretty good, all things considered... a lot better than I can get anywhere else, last time I checked. OTOH, I rarely check anywhere else... which I guess is the best indicator of how I really feel about Google's service.
From the article: Unlike Google, A9 isn't trying to develop an all-purpose search engine that indexes billions of Web pages. The startup instead is zeroing on a one of search engines' sweet spots -- e-commerce.
"Sweet spot" for advertisers... "Crap that clutters my search" to me. Google has done a pretty good job of keeping the e-commerce sites out of my listings, and as a result, I really do click on the sponsored links when they're relevant. But they've been slipping... a search on Electric Fencing returns mostly people selling the product, but adding keywords (Electric Fencing Installation) helps.
More articley goodness: As more consumers have become comfortable with the Internet, a growing number are using search engines to review products and compare prices.
Review != Purchase. When I look up a product, I'm usually looking for complaints. Before I signed up for Netflix, I examined the complaints and decided I could live with the reported problems. I decided against GreenCine in part because subscribers report low supplies despite an excellent selection. You get the idea.
Hopefully, if Amazon focuses on the e-commerce angle, Google can focus on the information angle. I'll go to Google to find out how to install an electric fence, and perhaps I'll go to Amazon to find an electric fence supplier. But more likely, I'll click on a Google AdWords partner.
Google's biggest problem right now: Crapflooding, which will continue to be a whack-a-mole problem on any search site. When I do a search on Toothpick Bridge for my daughter's science class and see a URL of "www.hdlac.org/mom-daughter-incest.htm", I know that the spammer/scammer community has scored again.
After reading the article I realized that I must be doing something wrong. I always click on every link in every email I get but still (1) my penis hasn't gotten bigger, (2) I don't have a horde of horny teens after me and (3) I'm not rich.
In my observations, you need to achieve goal (3) first. This will lead to goal (2), which in turn will generally result in goal (1).
There may be some magical solution to this, but it looks to me as if color is very, very much more difficult than mono.
I'd suggest that reaching perfection with a color page/screen is a false goal. When I'm reading a book, I don't get upset that the page doesn't have web-style [font color=x backcolor=y] attributes, especially when x=RED and y=BLUE. In fact, the last thing I want in an eBook is something like this!
Yes, there's surely a need for fully illustrated books. But I won't be terribly upset if the first commercial applications are simple black and white. Heck, I'm doing just fine with green and black with my Palm Pilot.
Slashdot Mirror
Great article (hope it doesn't get /.'d). While they seem to be working on large-scale room features (wall, door, floor, ceiling), I can see the next step being an autonomous robot that can find and identify such basics as a light switch and a power (mains) outlet.
I remember years and years ago, a robot had been developed that could optically recognize a power outlet and plug itself in... but I don't think it did much else. This would have been early 80s, probably, so we're talking Z-80 vs. Pentium.
Future recognition goals:
* Refrigerator door (fetch beer, please)
* Small child (danger! sticky fingers! run away!)
* Other robots for romantic interludes:
(IF Query(Other_Bot, EXCHANGE_CODE) == TRUE Extend_Programming_Probe(Other_Bot))
Did you hear that IRS, I donated the $36 million dollars! It was me!
That brings up a good point... somebody is getting a whopping tax deduction for their gift. While that's perfectly appropripate, we have three problems.
One, the citizens of Georgia are going to be contributing another few million bucks for the project. Don't they deserve to know where their matching funds are coming from?
Two, I and my fellow Americans will be contributing indirectly, via the charitable deduction the person or company is going to receive. Don't I deserve to know whose tax break I'm going to be offsetting?
Three, while there are plenty of true philanthropists, that kind of cash usually comes from someone with a dog in the fight. Bill Gates "generously donates" Windows PCs to schools like a drug dealer "donating" crack behind the bleachers. As an investor, don't I deserve to know if company X just put $36 million into a technology that will benefit it? Don't I deserve to know that company Y *isn't* investing in the future?
From the article:
Space weather forecasters say this spate of strong solar flares is not consistent with normal solar behavior. The sun, which follows an 11-year activity cycle, has been quieting down since the last peak in 2000.
Although we humans have been looking at the sun since before we climbed out of the trees (and our moms have been telling us not to even longer), it's almost silly to say that any observation of our local star is "not consistent with normal solar behavior." Just how many of those 11-year cycles have been recorded?
If the ancient Chinese were using pinhole solar viewers to count sunspots for the past 5000 years, that would be one thing. But as has been posted in every Slashdot story on the subject, we have maybe 200 years of scientific data (of varying quality) out of the sun's five billion year history. Even W's pollsters would tell you that sample size is too small.
frankly, I'm wondering how they'd stop a hydrogen buildup similar to a sonic boom from forming and causing some real damage to the systems they're travelling to or past
What episode of TNG was it where it was discovered that high warp speeds *did* cause permanent damage to interstellar "ecosystems"? As I recall, it was an interesting allegory of "freedom fighter" vs. "terrorist", with the planet's scientists (all two of them, as usual) split on how to convince Federation starships to slow the hell down.
In the end, one of the scientists demonstrated the problem the hard way, blowing himself up in the process, and the Federation imposed a speed limit (warp 5, wasn't it?) unless there were a lights-and-sirens emergency. I always wondered how the Federation would enforce such a limit, especially on folks like the Klingons and Borg who never showed much use for the Federation's benign dictatorship.
Isn't the point of evolution to become MORE advanced? I mean, Janeway and Paris turned into freaking LIZARDS!
Indeed, they were lizards with their freak ON, if I remember correctly. What are the ethical considerations of leaving your offspring to fend for themselves like that -- even if they're post-mammalian reptilians?
(Or am I remembering the episode totally wrong? I had mammalian offspring of my own distracting me at the time.)
Wow, tell me what kind of cereal box contains a model of the Enterprise and i'm all over it!
Well, I may have exaggerated, or taken poetic license. I mentioned later on about the snow globe option... this was from personal experience.
My mother bought my wife and I a huge snow globe of the Enterprise (classic '60s version) one Christmas. We put it up in the closet until the kids got old enough to be interested. The next step is sadly inevitable: a busted snow globe and a cheap plastic model of the Enterprise that doesn't look nearly as cool as it did through the curved glass (now in a puddle of water on the floor).
I suspect that a similar situation may have offered up the candidate for the wind tunnel test. Note the big horizontal seam in the model -- I think my "model" may have been built the same way.
Allow me to begin the second phase of stock Slashdot comments. Phase I has already taken place: "what a waste of taxpayer/foundation/whatever dollars!" Phase II begins now:
Lighten up! It is clear from a very quick look at the rest of the site that the "Enterprise" simulation is just a fun application of some very serious science. It's clear that no special apparatuses (apparati?) were constructed to provide a real simulation of the Enterprise -- in fact, it's pretty obvious that the model used came out of a cereal box, or something.
Day in and day out, it looks like these guys are engaged in cutting-edge wind tunnel science, testing object against forces so strong, they can only be simulated for tiny fractions of a second. This means that someone spends hours setting up everything within rigorous parameters, then pushes a button. "Bam!", and it's over. If the object under test was mispositioned by a fraction of a millimeter, the team gets to do it all over again.
Once -- just once -- they'd like to have a chance to do something fun with the equipment. Someone has an old Enterprise model (actually, it may be from a snow globe). After a long day (probably unpaid) of testing the frontiers of science and boredom, they load up the (already warmed up) machine and have a little fun.
Thanks to the 'net, we get to share their fun. And in another few decades, we may get to enjoy the results of their hard work when we book that vacation on Luna.
For once, a patent would appear to be supporting innovation. An individual with an idea sees the potential, files a patent, and goes on a quest to commercialize the product. There could be no better case study of how patent law is supposed to encourage innovation.
But alas, it's not to be. From the article:
The patent on tagatose as an additive expires in 2006, the two patents on production methods a few years later. [Inventor Gilbert] Levin hopes to see his sugar substitute flood the market before then.
Meanwhile, the current silliness at the patent office will help ensure that Levin will join the legions of brilliant inventors with "died nearly destitute" included somewhere in their epitaphs. Instead of an individual getting his due from an actual original thought, big corporations are set to reap millions from ridiculous "business method" patents. Again, from the article:
Kellogg's obtained a patent in 2002 to use tagatose in "improved sucrose-free, noncarcinogenic, reduced-calorie, insulin-independent" sweet cereals. Wrigley and Kraft have patents of their own.
It's situations like this that make me glad to be a wage slave, with all my original ideas signed over to my own^h^h^hemployer.
That Google search looked pretty useless at first due to spam, but I found a great FAQ from Gateway:Great! Not only do the instructions sound like DDR cheats, but Gateway is telling me to fight burn-in by burning in the whole screen for 50 hours! A few "masterpieces" later, and you've got a $10,000 night light.
No wonder they call it the "bleeding edge"...
I guess if you've shelled out $3k (more like $5-10k) for a freakin' television, another $500 isn't much more of a bite.
But for crying out loud, I could buy an entire collection of truly fine art for less than $500, and still have enough left over for the kids' room!
Maybe, but I would think they might also be looking for "shady" spiders that ignored robots.txt. I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't a few honeypot pages in there too.
/firstlady/images/iraq, and now you tell me I'd better watch out. Damn this static IP address!
Oh, crap. I just plugged in
Quick, Slashdot that link before the Agents get to my cube!
I mean, really, when Kevin Mitnick is mysteriously elected governor of Minnesota in a write-in vote and NORML supporters sweep the legislative elections in nine states, somebody's going to start asking questions...
I know what question I'd ask... "hey, when are you going to implement those machines here in Texas? Willie Nelson for Governor!"
Seriously, though, I've been an opponent of electronic voting systems since my first experience with them during early voting. The interface was total crap -- a pain for me, and I'm a programmer. The idea that there would be no paper trail just makes me shake my head.
So why is everyone so defensive of the Chinese, and so desperate to avoid the issue, lowering themselves to flaming and personal attacks, rather than *gasp* saying something as simple as "I don't know"?
I suspect the reason people aren't saying "I don't know" in response to your interesting proposition is pretty simple: they do know, and you were wrong. It happens to all of us, though most often to myself.
I agree that your initial posting deserves better moderation, but I don't think the moderation cabal is after you for political reasons. I suspect someone came across your sometimes-inflamatory replies, didn't get the joke (if any), and *then* followed the thread to the top and modded you down. Not fair, but understandable.
I'll see what I can do in M2, though the chance of running across any related moderations is a value of x where x < slim and x > none.
Where's George enthusiasts are aggressively analysing the new bill with regards to writing adverts on any cash they come across
As an active Georger myself, I'd like to make one correction to your statement. We're not "advertising" anything. We're simply tracking the bills. Advertising on a bill treads just a bit closer to the border between "fun" and "defacement". As an example of what happens when you get too close to the border, Hank (the WG? webmaster) was "urged" by the Feds to stop selling "Where's George?" rubber stamps on wheresgeorge.com, to avoid the appearance that the stamp was intended to push stamp sales.
No "your homeland security department at work" rants, please -- this was long before 9/11. Besides, the paranoid would see WG? as yet another tracking system, and would avoid such marked bills like alien death rays.
From the Wired article:
"We needed something to stem the flow. We were spending too much time tracking people down," said Robert Bird, supervisor of network services for the UF department of housing.
So a guy named Bird creates (read: has some overworked grad student create) a program called Icarus to "bring down" file sharers. I guess he imagined his program being like the sun melting the wax on the mythical Icarus' wings and sending him crashing back to earth. And Bird himself, of course, would be the sun-wary Daedelus, who after trying out flight himself, hung up his wings as an offering to Apollo.
I guess he's now a flightless Bird. The old story about the ostrich sticking his head in the sand comes to mind.
Too bad - I'd love to hang up such an (otherwise ignored) invoice here in my office.
That's a great idea! It would go great with those framed Enron stock certificates, and you could really complete the "look" with various states' marijuana tax stamps!
How ironic, that the HTML-ized file on Google is available from Yahoo!...
I guess the need to brown-nose Congress for funding is an ongoing part of any government space program... but statements like this (from the article) really worry me:
How much will this next generation vehicle cost? The budget goes first to the White House for approval, then to Congress. The final design will be announced in August 2004.
The way this is worded, it sounds like they're implying "the project will cost as much as you'll let us spend." I'm really leaning toward the view (often expressed by Slashdotters) that the government needs to move from a leading role to a supporting role in space technology. And note that in the term "government", I include the big government contractors like Boeing & co, whose corporate inertia is no better than government bureaucracy.
Give the funding to outfits like Armadillo and the rest of the X-Prize competitors. Why not a government-sponsored X-Prize competition, with the winner getting a juicy government contract?
But this current path -- fuzzy requirements, a budget subject to political whim, and a culture where "[acknowledgement of] failure is not an option" -- seems doomed to mediocrity.
Amazon already bought an e-commerce search company for over $100 Million.
And boy, were they excited:
"PlanetAll is the most innovative use of the Internet I've seen," said Amazon's founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. "It's simply a breakthrough in doing something as fundamental and important as staying in touch."
"This is a significant opportunity for all of us at Junglee to extend our technology well beyond our current base," said Ram Shriram, president and COO of Junglee. "With Amazon.com, we can address the larger challenges of e-commerce sooner--and on a broader scale--than we could have done alone."
I guess the technology Amazon obtained for "equity valued at approximately $280 million" has gone to good use. Hard to tell, though, since both partners' websites have gone up in smoke. I wonder if Amazon will even bother to renew the domains, which expire in May and October 2004?
For some reason, I don't see much of a future for the A9 project anymore -- as if I ever really did...
all wooden bridges
I'm running Opera 7.11 (fr), 100 results per page, Language = Elmer Fudd, and it still shows up. But to their credit, it's at #30, so most people won't see it on their first or second page.
You know, 29 out of 30 relevant results is pretty good, all things considered... a lot better than I can get anywhere else, last time I checked. OTOH, I rarely check anywhere else... which I guess is the best indicator of how I really feel about Google's service.
From the article:
Unlike Google, A9 isn't trying to develop an all-purpose search engine that indexes billions of Web pages. The startup instead is zeroing on a one of search engines' sweet spots -- e-commerce.
"Sweet spot" for advertisers... "Crap that clutters my search" to me. Google has done a pretty good job of keeping the e-commerce sites out of my listings, and as a result, I really do click on the sponsored links when they're relevant. But they've been slipping... a search on Electric Fencing returns mostly people selling the product, but adding keywords (Electric Fencing Installation) helps.
More articley goodness:
As more consumers have become comfortable with the Internet, a growing number are using search engines to review products and compare prices.
Review != Purchase. When I look up a product, I'm usually looking for complaints. Before I signed up for Netflix, I examined the complaints and decided I could live with the reported problems. I decided against GreenCine in part because subscribers report low supplies despite an excellent selection. You get the idea.
Hopefully, if Amazon focuses on the e-commerce angle, Google can focus on the information angle. I'll go to Google to find out how to install an electric fence, and perhaps I'll go to Amazon to find an electric fence supplier. But more likely, I'll click on a Google AdWords partner.
Google's biggest problem right now: Crapflooding, which will continue to be a whack-a-mole problem on any search site. When I do a search on Toothpick Bridge for my daughter's science class and see a URL of "www.hdlac.org/mom-daughter-incest.htm", I know that the spammer/scammer community has scored again.
For those like me who do not wish to register with NYT
Here's the NYT story itself (I think), for those who don't want to register and don't mind hacking around a bit. Fight the Man!
Googly Link
After reading the article I realized that I must be doing something wrong. I always click on every link in every email I get but still (1) my penis hasn't gotten bigger, (2) I don't have a horde of horny teens after me and (3) I'm not rich.
In my observations, you need to achieve goal (3) first. This will lead to goal (2), which in turn will generally result in goal (1).
Of course, YMMV.
There may be some magical solution to this, but it looks to me as if color is very, very much more difficult than mono.
I'd suggest that reaching perfection with a color page/screen is a false goal. When I'm reading a book, I don't get upset that the page doesn't have web-style [font color=x backcolor=y] attributes, especially when x=RED and y=BLUE. In fact, the last thing I want in an eBook is something like this!
Yes, there's surely a need for fully illustrated books. But I won't be terribly upset if the first commercial applications are simple black and white. Heck, I'm doing just fine with green and black with my Palm Pilot.
Boring...they had all that in Harry Potter two years ago, and oil paintings that talk ;-)
Which I guess proves the old saying that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Or in this case, any sufficiently advanced CGI is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology.