Re:Is google becoming a central point of failure?
on
HotBot Returns
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· Score: 5, Insightful
What's more scary than a DOS of Google is a false Google. If Google's database were to be comproimised with false data, it would have a huge effect of directing traffic to and away from sites accross the board.
Google's selling point is it's "PageRank Technology" which is a formula primarily based on the theory that the best sites are the sites that are linked to by other high-rated sites. This has been a great advancement over the serarches that ranked only by the number of times the search words appeared on the page, which frequenly returned garbage results.
The problem is that as we get more dependant on Google, we are ignoring the sites that Google chooses to low-rank. This promotes a "rich get richer" attiude, as the top rated sites for any given keywords on Google get a lot of free traffic as a result.
To put it another way, since TechTV.com is linked to by many people, links on that site carry more weight in Google than a link in the average person's blog. Therefore, the selection of Site of the Nite and Download of the Day from the crew on "The Screen Savers" and resulting link boosts the PageRank value of the site being linked to. However, since Megan Morrone and Martin Sarget use Google to find the sites and programs they'll recommend, a loop is created.
Slashdot suffers from the same problem. A linked-to story on Slashdot gets a Pagerank boost, how many/.'ers find the stories they submit, or the sites with which to look for stories to submit, via Google?
Google's sources for what to consider the top links are influenced by what are presently the top links.
Re:too slow?
on
HotBot Returns
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
But why would you visit HotBot.com to use Google when it's still directly there at Google.com?
This site seems to be a "keep-alive" of the hotbot.com domain name, rather than a serious attempt at creating a useful site. Lycos is just hoping to get a little money out of the fact that people still have bookmarks to hotbot.com from back in the day.
Still, can we expect the editors to RTFA like we insist anybody who posts a comment is supposed to do? They don't have to read everything, just the links within the stories they're about to post.
And can we ask the editors to at least read the story summaries that have been posted by the other editors since last they worked. Just a simple scan to make sure they know what's been posted the last couple days. That won't totally eliminate dupes, but at least make a noticable cutback in them.
I don't think this is too much to ask...
I think this problem shows up in a good number of open source projects. They're programed by programmers for programmers, users sometime become an afterthought.
It's not true that anyone can look at and edit the code of a GPL product. It's anyone who knows how to program in the language in which the producted was written in who can work with the code. "If a feature you want isn't there, add it yourself" is not a model that can go very far.
Those who try to commecialize GPL products, such as Red Hat and Lindows, act as a bridge between the common user and the programmer's universe. If it weren't for the people who are motivated by money do dumb things down to the lowest common denominator, would anybody who can't program in C be able to use Linux?
The problem is, the 64,247 per day stat was a purely-virtual number that was computed by somebody a few replies up the chain.
That number only has meaning if they were working all the burners they had around the clock. That's highly unlikely, so the only actual count of copyright violations is the number of pirated CDs they actually made. Any other number is purely spin-based.
No, but what boss is entitled to the ability to spend company funds on bobblehead dolls of himself, and then can honestly turn to the employees and tell them that times are tough?
It's hard for a leader to ask his followers to do anything that he isn't willing to do himself.
How can a CEO credibily cut costs at the company when his own pay is $65 million and he's destributing bobbleheads of himself? Couldn't he live on the still-large pay of $45 million and reallocate the $20 million to softening (not eliminating, just softening) the blow to the rest of the company?
Or have companies given up on trying to get employees to be loyal anymore?
Distributing a bobblehead of the CEO is self-serving of the CEO rather than anything that is of value to the employees.
Whatever they spent on the design and making of such thing has to be seen as wasted spending. It did not relate the the product of the company, and it likely hurt the company's ability to retain employees.
The Christmas bonus is a concept in which the owners of the company give to the employees money that they don't have to because that giving inspires goodwill between the employees and the company. Employees who like their present employer are less likely to start looking for ways to jump to the competition or into another field.
For the company to say "Sorry, times are tough, we can't afford a bonus/party/gift" is acceptable if it's true. For the CEO to flaunt his ability to spend company money on his own image while saying that times are tough is an action that is so loud it drowns out his words.
But having the ability to make 64,247 CDs per day is not illegal. Making 64,247 CDs per day is not illegal. Making 64,247 copyrighted CDs per day is not even against the law. It's only illegal when you are making CDs to which you do not have copyright permission and then distributing them.
It seems like the RIAA wants the CD burner to be equated with piracy, because they want to be the only ones who can legally make CDs of any kind, forgetting that other people can create and release music content too.
Yes, but the story here is that the RIAA would rather charge them with having more CD burners than they actually did, rather than charge then with distributing n pirated CDs.
CD burners are not a unit by which you can measure piracy, nevermind inflated "equal to" units of CD burners. The RIAA's purpose was to put the confusing math in the press release, so that hopefully dumb reporters would report that they had "over 400 CD burners" in their operation, rather than print the rather unimpressive number of CDs they distributed.
Software is going to have to get a lot more dumb for this sort of thing to work.
And why shouldn't it?
Having the ability to view VBA-enabled e-mail in Outlook is a feature that few office workers appreciate, but enables so many headache-causing virus situations.
Having a 20 GB HD on everybody's desk allows them to save their data locally intead of on network shares where it is easier to back up. HD failures are much easier to abstract when their is a RAID system running in the back room instead of a HD on every desk.
In fact, how many clock cycles is the average company wasting by having a gigahertz chip on every desk? Wouldn't it be easier if all the high-powered chips were in the data center, timeshared among those who need them at the moment?
Re:solution for one of the problems..
on
The New IT Crisis
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Why don't we just go back to the mainframe way of doing things?
When users had dumb terminals on their desk, they had the illision of a full power computer, but it was actually a small box with few moving parts that was linked to high-powered computers (or cluster of computers) who were actually doing the heavy lifting. Since all of the functional components were in the Computer Room, there was rarely a need for tech staff to touch the dumb terminals, and the tech people could work in their own distraction-free environment.
What's more, failures could sometimes be abstracted away from users. Hard drive failures happen, that's a fact of the technology. However, if a HD fails on a user's desk, it means that user has lost the use of their computer until it's fixed. If an HD fails in the datacenter, there's usually a backup of the data which can be put into play immediately by mounting the backup on a good drive that's already spinning. To the users, the disk crash can be practically invisible.
There's already tech technologies such as X-Windows and Windows Terminal Service with which to create GUIs on a dumb terminals. Why does the common secretary need a full-powered PC on her desk anyway?
Re:I always just "look" busy
on
The New IT Crisis
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If you're doing an IT system properly, whoever's assigned to supporting it should have some of those "Maytag Repairman" moments where they have nothing better to do than surf the web just to stay alert. This isn't because he's goofing off, it's just that he's done everything on the preventative maintenence checklist, and during his time alloted to responding to crisis, there is no crisis to deal with. The system is working, nobody is complaining of a downtime or slowdown.
What you're really doing is not wasting time, you're sitting in an "on call" position waiting for your phone to ring with the next big crisis. If that call never comes, then you must have been doing something right when you were working hard.
An accross the board problem in business these days, not just in IT, is that bosses refuse to spend money on anything that does not have a direct effect on the bottom line. Things like IT cost money, but don't directly add revenues to anything. IT is an overhead cost.
The financial rewards of having a good IT department cannot be expresed in real numbers. The cost of a downtime that didn't happen is impossible to accurately measure, while it's easy to measure the cost of having a quality IT team working to prevent downtimes rather than to fix them.
Managers need to understand that cutting their IT department will cause lost productivity in other departments in small units. Those 10 minutes of work time Sally loses while trying to find an admin to remind her what her password is, the lost sales that result when e-mail goes down and customers instead turn to your competitor, the custom product that has to be thrown out because a wrong quanity made it on the paperwork that went down the production floor, etc.
In the end, the business that "don't get it" will slowly become victims of natural selection and close their doors.
The USA definitely has the technology to shoot down any Chinese or EU attempt to do anything in space that we see as a threat to our national security.
The only thing China or the EU could do is threaten us in the business world with new innovations... but they already do that earth-bound.
That fact alone means that Al Quieda will never invest in a space program. They know if they launch even a small satellite, the USA has the ability to shoot it down. The moon will never be used as a weapons base with which to threaten America.
It's certainly within reason to expect that a multi-use shuttle-like vehicle optimised for moon use could be developed if need be... but I think the reason why there's been no investment in such an effort is because there isn't a pressing need to go back to the moon to do anything.
There is no forseeable need to go back to the moon in the immediate future.
The point of the original "space race" was a competition between the USA and Russia for "control of space". In that, to say, in a war between the superpower the moon would have been a dangerous site if one side were able to place milliles on it. For that reason, it was essential we demonstrate our ability to reach the moon whenever we want to. Now, if anybody attempts to "take over" the moon, we are confident we have the ability to send up people to shut down that operation if need be.
In its modern form, the reason why the US Government funds NASA is because in solving the problems faced by space missions, solutions are developed that have practical earth-bound operations. NASA's doesn't just do research for research's sake, they're doing research to hopefully discover things that improve the American way of life. Experiments that require microgravity can be done in earth orbit, why do we need to go back to the moon?
While going to the moon is a cool idea, the idea turning the moon into a Disney-like tourist trap for the common man is something many earthlings find repulsive. Let's leave the moon alone and not mess with it when we don't need to.
Writing your own AOL-like dialer interface is expensive. Writing a program that looks like you have your own dialer, but really is just quitely going down the the Windows Registry and setting up DUN/RAS connections is easy.
The dialer program is really designed to cut down on the number of "how do I set this thing up?" tech support calls. Speaking of tech support, notice how they're not exactly blasting an easy to remember 1-800 number like "1-800-PRODIGY" that they had before.
What, Amazon needs piano tuners? I know they've got a big line of products, but shipping on pianos has goto to be expensive!
Oh, we're not talking about Amazon.com?
It all went downhill when Gene died
on
Critics Pan Nemesis
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
There's a rather clear and definable moment where Star Trek's quality suffered a containment breach. The moment Gene Roddenberry died.
The original series was a classic, and he led TNG well. However, after his death Deep Space Nine spun out of control, Voyager was an ugly stepchild from the start, and now Enterprise can't keep its story consistant with the events of the Kirk era that happen 100 years later.
Big problem in that... the HDTV spectrum is a subset of the existing spectum.
What you're seeing now is a shift. Your former channel 5 that is now digital channel 40 is actually broadcasting on the same frequency range as any analog channel 40s, just broadcasting in the digital codec so your analog TV interprets it as seemingly random noise.
This means if this proposal were to go into force, members of the public would have to be mindful of not just the analog TV stations they watch, but the digital stations they don't yet have the equipement to decode.
Slashdot Mirror
What's more scary than a DOS of Google is a false Google. If Google's database were to be comproimised with false data, it would have a huge effect of directing traffic to and away from sites accross the board.
Google's selling point is it's "PageRank Technology" which is a formula primarily based on the theory that the best sites are the sites that are linked to by other high-rated sites. This has been a great advancement over the serarches that ranked only by the number of times the search words appeared on the page, which frequenly returned garbage results.
/.'ers find the stories they submit, or the sites with which to look for stories to submit, via Google?
The problem is that as we get more dependant on Google, we are ignoring the sites that Google chooses to low-rank. This promotes a "rich get richer" attiude, as the top rated sites for any given keywords on Google get a lot of free traffic as a result.
To put it another way, since TechTV.com is linked to by many people, links on that site carry more weight in Google than a link in the average person's blog. Therefore, the selection of Site of the Nite and Download of the Day from the crew on "The Screen Savers" and resulting link boosts the PageRank value of the site being linked to. However, since Megan Morrone and Martin Sarget use Google to find the sites and programs they'll recommend, a loop is created.
Slashdot suffers from the same problem. A linked-to story on Slashdot gets a Pagerank boost, how many
Google's sources for what to consider the top links are influenced by what are presently the top links.
But why would you visit HotBot.com to use Google when it's still directly there at Google.com?
This site seems to be a "keep-alive" of the hotbot.com domain name, rather than a serious attempt at creating a useful site. Lycos is just hoping to get a little money out of the fact that people still have bookmarks to hotbot.com from back in the day.
Still, can we expect the editors to RTFA like we insist anybody who posts a comment is supposed to do? They don't have to read everything, just the links within the stories they're about to post. And can we ask the editors to at least read the story summaries that have been posted by the other editors since last they worked. Just a simple scan to make sure they know what's been posted the last couple days. That won't totally eliminate dupes, but at least make a noticable cutback in them. I don't think this is too much to ask...
I think this problem shows up in a good number of open source projects. They're programed by programmers for programmers, users sometime become an afterthought.
It's not true that anyone can look at and edit the code of a GPL product. It's anyone who knows how to program in the language in which the producted was written in who can work with the code. "If a feature you want isn't there, add it yourself" is not a model that can go very far.
Those who try to commecialize GPL products, such as Red Hat and Lindows, act as a bridge between the common user and the programmer's universe. If it weren't for the people who are motivated by money do dumb things down to the lowest common denominator, would anybody who can't program in C be able to use Linux?
The problem is, the 64,247 per day stat was a purely-virtual number that was computed by somebody a few replies up the chain.
That number only has meaning if they were working all the burners they had around the clock. That's highly unlikely, so the only actual count of copyright violations is the number of pirated CDs they actually made. Any other number is purely spin-based.
No, but what boss is entitled to the ability to spend company funds on bobblehead dolls of himself, and then can honestly turn to the employees and tell them that times are tough?
It's hard for a leader to ask his followers to do anything that he isn't willing to do himself. How can a CEO credibily cut costs at the company when his own pay is $65 million and he's destributing bobbleheads of himself? Couldn't he live on the still-large pay of $45 million and reallocate the $20 million to softening (not eliminating, just softening) the blow to the rest of the company? Or have companies given up on trying to get employees to be loyal anymore?
Distributing a bobblehead of the CEO is self-serving of the CEO rather than anything that is of value to the employees.
Whatever they spent on the design and making of such thing has to be seen as wasted spending. It did not relate the the product of the company, and it likely hurt the company's ability to retain employees.
The Christmas bonus is a concept in which the owners of the company give to the employees money that they don't have to because that giving inspires goodwill between the employees and the company. Employees who like their present employer are less likely to start looking for ways to jump to the competition or into another field.
For the company to say "Sorry, times are tough, we can't afford a bonus/party/gift" is acceptable if it's true. For the CEO to flaunt his ability to spend company money on his own image while saying that times are tough is an action that is so loud it drowns out his words.
But having the ability to make 64,247 CDs per day is not illegal. Making 64,247 CDs per day is not illegal. Making 64,247 copyrighted CDs per day is not even against the law. It's only illegal when you are making CDs to which you do not have copyright permission and then distributing them.
It seems like the RIAA wants the CD burner to be equated with piracy, because they want to be the only ones who can legally make CDs of any kind, forgetting that other people can create and release music content too.
Yes, but the story here is that the RIAA would rather charge them with having more CD burners than they actually did, rather than charge then with distributing n pirated CDs.
CD burners are not a unit by which you can measure piracy, nevermind inflated "equal to" units of CD burners. The RIAA's purpose was to put the confusing math in the press release, so that hopefully dumb reporters would report that they had "over 400 CD burners" in their operation, rather than print the rather unimpressive number of CDs they distributed.
Software is going to have to get a lot more dumb for this sort of thing to work.
And why shouldn't it?
Having the ability to view VBA-enabled e-mail in Outlook is a feature that few office workers appreciate, but enables so many headache-causing virus situations.
Having a 20 GB HD on everybody's desk allows them to save their data locally intead of on network shares where it is easier to back up. HD failures are much easier to abstract when their is a RAID system running in the back room instead of a HD on every desk.
In fact, how many clock cycles is the average company wasting by having a gigahertz chip on every desk? Wouldn't it be easier if all the high-powered chips were in the data center, timeshared among those who need them at the moment?
Why don't we just go back to the mainframe way of doing things?
When users had dumb terminals on their desk, they had the illision of a full power computer, but it was actually a small box with few moving parts that was linked to high-powered computers (or cluster of computers) who were actually doing the heavy lifting. Since all of the functional components were in the Computer Room, there was rarely a need for tech staff to touch the dumb terminals, and the tech people could work in their own distraction-free environment.
What's more, failures could sometimes be abstracted away from users. Hard drive failures happen, that's a fact of the technology. However, if a HD fails on a user's desk, it means that user has lost the use of their computer until it's fixed. If an HD fails in the datacenter, there's usually a backup of the data which can be put into play immediately by mounting the backup on a good drive that's already spinning. To the users, the disk crash can be practically invisible.
There's already tech technologies such as X-Windows and Windows Terminal Service with which to create GUIs on a dumb terminals. Why does the common secretary need a full-powered PC on her desk anyway?
If you're doing an IT system properly, whoever's assigned to supporting it should have some of those "Maytag Repairman" moments where they have nothing better to do than surf the web just to stay alert. This isn't because he's goofing off, it's just that he's done everything on the preventative maintenence checklist, and during his time alloted to responding to crisis, there is no crisis to deal with. The system is working, nobody is complaining of a downtime or slowdown.
What you're really doing is not wasting time, you're sitting in an "on call" position waiting for your phone to ring with the next big crisis. If that call never comes, then you must have been doing something right when you were working hard.
An accross the board problem in business these days, not just in IT, is that bosses refuse to spend money on anything that does not have a direct effect on the bottom line. Things like IT cost money, but don't directly add revenues to anything. IT is an overhead cost.
The financial rewards of having a good IT department cannot be expresed in real numbers. The cost of a downtime that didn't happen is impossible to accurately measure, while it's easy to measure the cost of having a quality IT team working to prevent downtimes rather than to fix them.
Managers need to understand that cutting their IT department will cause lost productivity in other departments in small units. Those 10 minutes of work time Sally loses while trying to find an admin to remind her what her password is, the lost sales that result when e-mail goes down and customers instead turn to your competitor, the custom product that has to be thrown out because a wrong quanity made it on the paperwork that went down the production floor, etc.
In the end, the business that "don't get it" will slowly become victims of natural selection and close their doors.
The USA definitely has the technology to shoot down any Chinese or EU attempt to do anything in space that we see as a threat to our national security.
The only thing China or the EU could do is threaten us in the business world with new innovations... but they already do that earth-bound.
Would you trade another September 11-sized attack for the ability to put another manned mission on the moon?
Time to get your priorities straight... we're gonna get nothing done if we're not safe first.
We can go to the moon any time we want to.
That fact alone means that Al Quieda will never invest in a space program. They know if they launch even a small satellite, the USA has the ability to shoot it down. The moon will never be used as a weapons base with which to threaten America.
It's certainly within reason to expect that a multi-use shuttle-like vehicle optimised for moon use could be developed if need be... but I think the reason why there's been no investment in such an effort is because there isn't a pressing need to go back to the moon to do anything.
There is no forseeable need to go back to the moon in the immediate future.
The point of the original "space race" was a competition between the USA and Russia for "control of space". In that, to say, in a war between the superpower the moon would have been a dangerous site if one side were able to place milliles on it. For that reason, it was essential we demonstrate our ability to reach the moon whenever we want to. Now, if anybody attempts to "take over" the moon, we are confident we have the ability to send up people to shut down that operation if need be.
In its modern form, the reason why the US Government funds NASA is because in solving the problems faced by space missions, solutions are developed that have practical earth-bound operations. NASA's doesn't just do research for research's sake, they're doing research to hopefully discover things that improve the American way of life. Experiments that require microgravity can be done in earth orbit, why do we need to go back to the moon?
While going to the moon is a cool idea, the idea turning the moon into a Disney-like tourist trap for the common man is something many earthlings find repulsive. Let's leave the moon alone and not mess with it when we don't need to.
Writing your own AOL-like dialer interface is expensive. Writing a program that looks like you have your own dialer, but really is just quitely going down the the Windows Registry and setting up DUN/RAS connections is easy.
The dialer program is really designed to cut down on the number of "how do I set this thing up?" tech support calls. Speaking of tech support, notice how they're not exactly blasting an easy to remember 1-800 number like "1-800-PRODIGY" that they had before.
Too good a service and too good a price, hence the money-losing company that had to be shut down.
What, Amazon needs piano tuners? I know they've got a big line of products, but shipping on pianos has goto to be expensive!
Oh, we're not talking about Amazon.com?
There's a rather clear and definable moment where Star Trek's quality suffered a containment breach. The moment Gene Roddenberry died.
The original series was a classic, and he led TNG well. However, after his death Deep Space Nine spun out of control, Voyager was an ugly stepchild from the start, and now Enterprise can't keep its story consistant with the events of the Kirk era that happen 100 years later.
Big problem in that... the HDTV spectrum is a subset of the existing spectum.
What you're seeing now is a shift. Your former channel 5 that is now digital channel 40 is actually broadcasting on the same frequency range as any analog channel 40s, just broadcasting in the digital codec so your analog TV interprets it as seemingly random noise.
This means if this proposal were to go into force, members of the public would have to be mindful of not just the analog TV stations they watch, but the digital stations they don't yet have the equipement to decode.