Google can't rest on its successes
on
Search Beyond Google
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Google has had the last few years virtually unchallenged as the #1 search engine, because nobody has yet come out with anything that's better than PageRank.
But, five years is a long time to sit on an innovation without making it better. It gives the competition time to catch up. Furthermore, since PageRank doesn't seem to have seriously changed much, it's actually slipped backwards a bit as more and more people have figured out how to "beat the system" by posting nonsense sites with links to the site they want on top. Google's clearly trying to fight this, but that's an uphill battle.
Meanwhile, Yahoo now owns three distinct web-crawl based search engines, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and Inktomi. They also own Overture, which begain life as GoTo.com who was the first to associate real search results with targetted ads. Put all these pieces together. Yahoo also has the original mega-directory site, which Google tries to duplicate by presenting the Open Directory Project on their site. In short, Yahoo's got all the resources to launch a brand with everything that Google has going for it... and when you look at AltaVista and AllTheWeb they feel quite a bit like Google already. Clearly, Yahoo's gearing up to issue a challenge to Google.
It really seems like Yahoo is making sure they have all the tech in place right now. When they're sure that they're better to Google, I fully expect to see a marketing campaign claiming that and inviting people to do head-to-head searches.
Google, as it stands now, is going to look pale in such showdowns. They've got to seriously modify PageRank so that the link spammers get downranked before Yahoo issues that challenge, or else Yahoo could reclaim the search market under it's "Google-killer" product line, and then direct people back to the original Yahoo site for their other portal needs.
Actually, you got the premium install from Comcast it seems. The only difference between their premium install and their standard one is the software-for-the-clueless package they give you on that CD.
The fact that Dell is one of the top 3 computer makers and that this call center is setting up to take over for calls that have to be handled elsewhere right now, leads me to start thinking that this call center will be where your calls to Dell are going to be routed soon...
One thing I've noticed recently is whenever I get connected to a foriegn-accented call center, all they can do is read the manual to me. If I actually have a broken part, they have to send me back to the USA to speak to someone authorized to get the part, usually by requiring me to call another number altogether.
I guess we shouldn't be too scared of tech support being sent offshore... those aren't the knowlegable people anyway, so they're not exactly taking our job.
"Well, what do we do if SCO does win the Novell suit and the IBM suit and the Red Hat suit?"
Business people don't like risks they're not protected from. It's not likely that the warehouse is going to burn down, but they keep it insured just so that they don't have to run the financial risks associated with that happening. They're not going to take "That won't happen." for an answer, they're going to want a plan for the "What if...".
If you have a disaster recovery plan for an earthquake but you're not in California... your PHB is going to want you to have a recovery plan for SCO too.
By way of example - if you buy a car and it turns out that it was stolen ( assuming you reasonably had no idea) you have NO LIABILITY - you do have to give the car to its rightful owner (ie stop using it)
Apply that to a business-critcal IT system. If SCO wins, any end-user company has some rather bleak options:
A: Pay SCO... shudder. B: Halt business until the system can be rebuilt SCO-free... that's lost revenue, and the risk that the company will never be able to restart at all because their competitors absorb all the customers while they're down. C: Cut over to the SCO-free fallback plan... but that assumes you've got one. Building such a plan costs money in the here in now that's wasted in the more likely situation that SCO doesn't win.
It's not so much legal copyright liability, but the liability that comes from the risk that a business might be disrupted by a calamity. Most businesses like to have some sort of insurance that tells them they'll be okay in the event of such a disaster.
The fact that SCO's FUD has reached the point of 10-Q filings is a milestone marker of how seriously they're being taken. Sure, it's a low threshold to get into that list of worries, but they've made it and it means the worry-obsessive business people are now starting to buy the FUD.
Has anybody bothered to compute the business damage to the economy if SCO were to win? The remote possiblity that we could land in the warped world in which that happens just might talk some people into buying SCOX as purely a hedge play. If SCO wins, then the SCOX stock shoots up to cover what's sure to be massive losses elsewhere in the portfolio. If SCO loses, it's just treated like an insurance premium for a year that the house didn't burn down.
It seems like what people are most worried about is the unlikely situation in which SCO's claims hold up in courts, and theyfore somebody's going to have to pay. For those who have billion dollar businesses on the line, even a slight risk of something this huge still has to be accounted for.
The odds of SCO's success at this point are hard to compute. It's not quite zero yet, as much as we'd like it to be. When you multiply those odds by what's at stake for a business with deep pockets, you end up with a pretty sizable sum that the business most likely will be willing to part with as an insurance premium for somebody else to assume the risk.
Gotta wonder if there's any betting window in Vegas that's trading the odds on SCO doing anything...
Understanding the past is a key to ruling the future.
It's just like how American-Indian "Windtalkers" could befudle opposing intercepters simply by speaking their native language. It's really hard to crack a code when you don't know what the encoding process used was in the first place. You can't brute force guess keys until you know what you're supposed to do with them.
The thing is, a 1000 rotor system of used for binary usage would result in a key that's 256,000 bytes long, and each message would reqire 1000 bytes of information as to where to start each wheel.
Then again, what better way to remind people that longer keys equals more power?
If an e-mail message were to be encoded using Enigma, does there exist any modern-era software for cracking it? Or would the US Government be forced to pull out the vacuum tubes and crack it the way they did in WWII again?
Enigma was an interesting development in cryptography because the rotating wheels caused the crypto output to be evenly distributed accross the alphabet. Therefore, it couldn't be solved by the typical letter replacement cypher techniques of assuming the most used letter in the code stands for "E" until proven otherwise, and working from there.
An Enigma-based crypto engine for binary data might be quite the interesting modern update. Especially because a brute force guessing of a 256-byte wheel would take a long time, and three wheels on top of each other would send the probablities of guessing your way into it into the stratosphere.
Yep. Right now, there are three major single-sign-on systems. Microsoft Passport which works on the Microsoft owned networked of sites and a few other places, AOL ScreenName which works on all Time Warner web properties and the free AIM service, and Yahoo who reposts content from many providers into the yahoo.com domain name. All three these networks have news portals, a free e-mail service, useless games to play, and an IM tool.
The big players are already lined up just waiting for this to catch on...
Lexis-Nexis is an archive site--they don't author news stories.
But the point is, those that author news stories get paid by Lexis-Nexis for providing their content to them. If a newspaper were to put its entire back archive freely searchable on the web, nobody would look for that paper's content in Lexis-Nexis anymore, and therefore the paper would lose their cut of the revenue from Lexis-Nexis.
So, basically, anything that competes with the pay-for archives is something newspapers want no part of because it'll just come back to bite them in the end.
Same reason why CC hasn't gone buying up full power NPR affiliates. LPFM stations by definition are all non-commercial. Without the ability to play full-strength commericals, Clear Channel sees no reason to care...
Clear Channel's modus operandi doesn't exactly call for a political view or day-to-day control over anything, they just want all the profits. They distribute a wide range of radio personalites including Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, Art Bell, Jim Rome, Carson Daly, Rick Dees and Ryan Seacrest among the biggest names.
The only reason why right-wing talkers outnumber left-wing talkers is simply because the right-wingers tend to get better ratings. (That doesn't need to mean people agree with the right-wingers... a talk show host who says stupid things argues with all of the tons of callers telling him he's wrong can still be a ratings hit.)
Clear Channel is unabashed in what they do. They're not here to inform. They're not here to entertain. They're here to get people to listen to ads, get people to look at their outdoor billboards, and get people to buy tickets to their concerts. The company exists to make money, and that's the bottom line.
NPR talk shows tend to lean left, but NPR's jazz and classical music offerings tend to stay out of politics. School stations tend to take the music offerings and leave the news stuff to the same non-profits who run the local PBS station.
2. What the FCC is proposing is already status quo in the U.S., albeit with a catch. Translator stations - signals of up to 250 watts that are only allowed to relay other stations and cannot originate their own programming - are governed by a different set of rules that allow them, in some cases, to nestle up as close as second-adjacent to (0.4 MHz away from) full-power signals. And the FCC recently had a filing window in which it received several thousand applications for such translators, the vast majority of them from a small handful of religious broadcasting networks that will feed them by satellite from Idaho and California. How does this benefit local listeners? You tell me...
So as much as it's cool to bash a mega-company on this site, it's not really Clear Channel who is trying to kill off LPFM, it's the religious broadcasters who are booking up all of the free slots on the dial so that LPFM can't get them.
Clear Channel really doesn't have to lift a finger. These religious groups are doing everything it takes to kill off LPFM all by themselves.
Having a link to illegal pirate station in the past is actually cause for the FCC to deny an LPFM application in the areas that they are handing them out.
Oh, you can, you just have to pay statutory royalties based on a formula laid out in the law. Since it's a statutory license, the copyright owner doesn't get any say, that performance is authorized.
And another funny little quirk. If you truely have no listners, then the statutory license is free because it'd produce a multiplication by zero in the formula.:)
A: The NPR outlet owned by the school, and therefore expresses the views of the administration or nearly no views at all.
B: The freeform station that is a legally distinct entity from the school, which gets its funding either on its own or from the student government.
The reason there's such a thick line between these two kinds of things is liability. If the school has any ownership in the radio station, they must tightly control it because they're on the hook for any FCC fines or slander lawsuits. Because most colleges have endowments, they're the ultimate deep pockets.
If it's a distinct entity, then the school has no control over it, and if they get into trouble, then they can go bankrupt without any risk to the school.
Yes, but your DVD-R drive has no hope of creating a double-layered DVD like the kind Hollywood makes, so there's no way to put that image back into your standard DVD player with consumer equipment.
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Google has had the last few years virtually unchallenged as the #1 search engine, because nobody has yet come out with anything that's better than PageRank.
But, five years is a long time to sit on an innovation without making it better. It gives the competition time to catch up. Furthermore, since PageRank doesn't seem to have seriously changed much, it's actually slipped backwards a bit as more and more people have figured out how to "beat the system" by posting nonsense sites with links to the site they want on top. Google's clearly trying to fight this, but that's an uphill battle.
Meanwhile, Yahoo now owns three distinct web-crawl based search engines, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and Inktomi. They also own Overture, which begain life as GoTo.com who was the first to associate real search results with targetted ads. Put all these pieces together. Yahoo also has the original mega-directory site, which Google tries to duplicate by presenting the Open Directory Project on their site. In short, Yahoo's got all the resources to launch a brand with everything that Google has going for it... and when you look at AltaVista and AllTheWeb they feel quite a bit like Google already. Clearly, Yahoo's gearing up to issue a challenge to Google.
It really seems like Yahoo is making sure they have all the tech in place right now. When they're sure that they're better to Google, I fully expect to see a marketing campaign claiming that and inviting people to do head-to-head searches.
Google, as it stands now, is going to look pale in such showdowns. They've got to seriously modify PageRank so that the link spammers get downranked before Yahoo issues that challenge, or else Yahoo could reclaim the search market under it's "Google-killer" product line, and then direct people back to the original Yahoo site for their other portal needs.
Actually, you got the premium install from Comcast it seems. The only difference between their premium install and their standard one is the software-for-the-clueless package they give you on that CD.
The fact that Dell is one of the top 3 computer makers and that this call center is setting up to take over for calls that have to be handled elsewhere right now, leads me to start thinking that this call center will be where your calls to Dell are going to be routed soon...
I didn't see any forced ad viewing?
Seems like the first two paragraphs is all the article-reading you can stand...
One thing I've noticed recently is whenever I get connected to a foriegn-accented call center, all they can do is read the manual to me. If I actually have a broken part, they have to send me back to the USA to speak to someone authorized to get the part, usually by requiring me to call another number altogether.
I guess we shouldn't be too scared of tech support being sent offshore... those aren't the knowlegable people anyway, so they're not exactly taking our job.
The problem is some PHB is going to ask...
"Well, what do we do if SCO does win the Novell suit and the IBM suit and the Red Hat suit?"
Business people don't like risks they're not protected from. It's not likely that the warehouse is going to burn down, but they keep it insured just so that they don't have to run the financial risks associated with that happening. They're not going to take "That won't happen." for an answer, they're going to want a plan for the "What if...".
If you have a disaster recovery plan for an earthquake but you're not in California... your PHB is going to want you to have a recovery plan for SCO too.
By way of example - if you buy a car and it turns out that it was stolen ( assuming you reasonably had no idea) you have NO LIABILITY - you do have to give the car to its rightful owner (ie stop using it)
Apply that to a business-critcal IT system. If SCO wins, any end-user company has some rather bleak options:
A: Pay SCO... shudder.
B: Halt business until the system can be rebuilt SCO-free... that's lost revenue, and the risk that the company will never be able to restart at all because their competitors absorb all the customers while they're down.
C: Cut over to the SCO-free fallback plan... but that assumes you've got one. Building such a plan costs money in the here in now that's wasted in the more likely situation that SCO doesn't win.
It's not so much legal copyright liability, but the liability that comes from the risk that a business might be disrupted by a calamity. Most businesses like to have some sort of insurance that tells them they'll be okay in the event of such a disaster.
The fact that SCO's FUD has reached the point of 10-Q filings is a milestone marker of how seriously they're being taken. Sure, it's a low threshold to get into that list of worries, but they've made it and it means the worry-obsessive business people are now starting to buy the FUD.
Has anybody bothered to compute the business damage to the economy if SCO were to win? The remote possiblity that we could land in the warped world in which that happens just might talk some people into buying SCOX as purely a hedge play. If SCO wins, then the SCOX stock shoots up to cover what's sure to be massive losses elsewhere in the portfolio. If SCO loses, it's just treated like an insurance premium for a year that the house didn't burn down.
It seems like what people are most worried about is the unlikely situation in which SCO's claims hold up in courts, and theyfore somebody's going to have to pay. For those who have billion dollar businesses on the line, even a slight risk of something this huge still has to be accounted for.
The odds of SCO's success at this point are hard to compute. It's not quite zero yet, as much as we'd like it to be. When you multiply those odds by what's at stake for a business with deep pockets, you end up with a pretty sizable sum that the business most likely will be willing to part with as an insurance premium for somebody else to assume the risk.
Gotta wonder if there's any betting window in Vegas that's trading the odds on SCO doing anything...
Understanding the past is a key to ruling the future.
It's just like how American-Indian "Windtalkers" could befudle opposing intercepters simply by speaking their native language. It's really hard to crack a code when you don't know what the encoding process used was in the first place. You can't brute force guess keys until you know what you're supposed to do with them.
The thing is, a 1000 rotor system of used for binary usage would result in a key that's 256,000 bytes long, and each message would reqire 1000 bytes of information as to where to start each wheel.
Then again, what better way to remind people that longer keys equals more power?
If an e-mail message were to be encoded using Enigma, does there exist any modern-era software for cracking it? Or would the US Government be forced to pull out the vacuum tubes and crack it the way they did in WWII again?
Enigma was an interesting development in cryptography because the rotating wheels caused the crypto output to be evenly distributed accross the alphabet. Therefore, it couldn't be solved by the typical letter replacement cypher techniques of assuming the most used letter in the code stands for "E" until proven otherwise, and working from there.
An Enigma-based crypto engine for binary data might be quite the interesting modern update. Especially because a brute force guessing of a 256-byte wheel would take a long time, and three wheels on top of each other would send the probablities of guessing your way into it into the stratosphere.
which one will the FPS gamer want?
:)
Bluetooth mouse, WUSB mouse, or standard wireless mouse??
They'll want a standard wired mouse, thank you very much. All others risk downtime for battery changes.
Yep. Right now, there are three major single-sign-on systems. Microsoft Passport which works on the Microsoft owned networked of sites and a few other places, AOL ScreenName which works on all Time Warner web properties and the free AIM service, and Yahoo who reposts content from many providers into the yahoo.com domain name. All three these networks have news portals, a free e-mail service, useless games to play, and an IM tool.
The big players are already lined up just waiting for this to catch on...
Lexis-Nexis is an archive site--they don't author news stories.
But the point is, those that author news stories get paid by Lexis-Nexis for providing their content to them. If a newspaper were to put its entire back archive freely searchable on the web, nobody would look for that paper's content in Lexis-Nexis anymore, and therefore the paper would lose their cut of the revenue from Lexis-Nexis.
So, basically, anything that competes with the pay-for archives is something newspapers want no part of because it'll just come back to bite them in the end.
Same reason why CC hasn't gone buying up full power NPR affiliates. LPFM stations by definition are all non-commercial. Without the ability to play full-strength commericals, Clear Channel sees no reason to care...
Long time fan, Scott... maybe you should link to a few of your back columns where you document just where the LPFM applications have come from.
Clear Channel's modus operandi doesn't exactly call for a political view or day-to-day control over anything, they just want all the profits. They distribute a wide range of radio personalites including Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, Art Bell, Jim Rome, Carson Daly, Rick Dees and Ryan Seacrest among the biggest names.
The only reason why right-wing talkers outnumber left-wing talkers is simply because the right-wingers tend to get better ratings. (That doesn't need to mean people agree with the right-wingers... a talk show host who says stupid things argues with all of the tons of callers telling him he's wrong can still be a ratings hit.)
Clear Channel is unabashed in what they do. They're not here to inform. They're not here to entertain. They're here to get people to listen to ads, get people to look at their outdoor billboards, and get people to buy tickets to their concerts. The company exists to make money, and that's the bottom line.
NPR talk shows tend to lean left, but NPR's jazz and classical music offerings tend to stay out of politics. School stations tend to take the music offerings and leave the news stuff to the same non-profits who run the local PBS station.
2. What the FCC is proposing is already status quo in the U.S., albeit with a catch. Translator stations - signals of up to 250 watts that are only allowed to relay other stations and cannot originate their own programming - are governed by a different set of rules that allow them, in some cases, to nestle up as close as second-adjacent to (0.4 MHz away from) full-power signals. And the FCC recently had a filing window in which it received several thousand applications for such translators, the vast majority of them from a small handful of religious broadcasting networks that will feed them by satellite from Idaho and California. How does this benefit local listeners? You tell me...
So as much as it's cool to bash a mega-company on this site, it's not really Clear Channel who is trying to kill off LPFM, it's the religious broadcasters who are booking up all of the free slots on the dial so that LPFM can't get them.
Clear Channel really doesn't have to lift a finger. These religious groups are doing everything it takes to kill off LPFM all by themselves.
Having a link to illegal pirate station in the past is actually cause for the FCC to deny an LPFM application in the areas that they are handing them out.
Oh, you can, you just have to pay statutory royalties based on a formula laid out in the law. Since it's a statutory license, the copyright owner doesn't get any say, that performance is authorized.
:)
And another funny little quirk. If you truely have no listners, then the statutory license is free because it'd produce a multiplication by zero in the formula.
There are two types of college radio stations:
A: The NPR outlet owned by the school, and therefore expresses the views of the administration or nearly no views at all.
B: The freeform station that is a legally distinct entity from the school, which gets its funding either on its own or from the student government.
The reason there's such a thick line between these two kinds of things is liability. If the school has any ownership in the radio station, they must tightly control it because they're on the hook for any FCC fines or slander lawsuits. Because most colleges have endowments, they're the ultimate deep pockets.
If it's a distinct entity, then the school has no control over it, and if they get into trouble, then they can go bankrupt without any risk to the school.
Yes, but your DVD-R drive has no hope of creating a double-layered DVD like the kind Hollywood makes, so there's no way to put that image back into your standard DVD player with consumer equipment.