since microsoft office is a stagnant target (not too many innovations left to be made in word and excel), it is only a matter of time for openoffice to catch up - with the huge base of motivated programmers, they may even surpass ms office.
you should check out nesstags... its a suggestion for a simple improvement to tagging systems.
basically, tags are given a one-digit score (1 low to 9 high) which informs the system how much a given item belongs to that tag.
so when bookmarking slashdot, for example, you might give it the following tags: news4 geek9
this means that slashdot is a 4 on the newsness scale, but 9 on the geekness scale. this sort of quantification would really come in handy for searches. when you search for "news," slashdot would be displayed lower in the results than nytimes, for example.
it is super easy for the tagger to include the scoring, and the improvement to the system could be immense.
for those that jump on the adblock bandwagon, i hope you are realizing a long term effect of your behavoir. publishing good content costs money, and many sites are funded via adsesne. if you keep blocking ads publishers will either stop publishing or start making money in a different way.
whether you realize it or not, adsense is the first mainstream micropayment system. with the proliferation of ad blocking comes the next gen internet when you have to pay 5 cents to view some page etc. are targeted text ads really that annoying?
while this might not be too practical right now, consider what happens when WiMax becomes available almost anywhere. no need for a separate internet and cellphone account - its integrated!
Vonage seems to be planting the seeds so they are ready when wireless internet is available anwhere.
right now you might pay for a phone line, a fax line, a cellphone, cable tv and internet.
there are lots of convergences going on, but this is a big one. the day may be coming when you spend 1/4 or 1/3 of what you are paying now for the whole suite of pipes.
the highlight of the page is the story way down at the bottom... apparently one of the sculptures ran into a kid who fell over and started to yell "i'm going to die"... the paramedics came, the kid was fine.
i am not arguing that google is bad for the web (on the contrary), but that google suggest is bad for the web.
of course google allows users to find what they are looking for, but google suggest tends to direct them to the POPULAR destinations (which appear at the top of the results of popular searches) which may or may not be the most RELEVANT destinations.
here's what i mean... suppose a group of three people were interested in some information on a widget, but when they search for it, they might search for slightly different variations, ie one would search for "widgets with ice" another would search for "widgets history" and another would search for just "widgets". each of these searches would turn up different results in google, and different websites would get traffic. with google suggest, as the user is typing away, google suggests the most POPULAR search queries, thereby directing all three users to the same set of results, and therefore the same websites. so the popular sites get more popular and the peripheral sites (that may have been more relavent) become less popular, and that is bad for the internet, IMO.
in the early days of the internet, people were posting all sorts of websites on all sorts of topics. as the web became more commercialized, most geeks were (rightfully) worried that major commercial hubs would be created that would attract the majority of attention and dilute the importance of the more peripheral areas of the web. this trend is already underway, and tools such as google suggest will hasten the decline.
users will be directed to the areas that most people are already going, thereby increasing the traffic to portals and decreasing traffic to niche or enthusiast sites. in my opinion, google suggest is ANTI-internet.
i think your comments would be salient if they were going to scan the documents and the BURN the originals. putting massive content on the web for free is the best way to push content all over the world.
some internet user in sri lanka doesn't have the bandwidth to download images of the pages, and would never have the opportunity to view the actual documents in a library at harvard.
if everyone digitized all the valuable content (and i presume that much of the content in harvar's libraries are valuable), and made it freely available, the world would be a much better place.
would you be satisfied if there was a link on each page to view an image of the actual page?
in the end, we need to make some policies regarding this issue. without them, some over-zealous scientists will go too far.
but that something is "outright revolting" isn't going to cut it. you need to use that "reason" that separates us from other species, and come up with actual arguments.
if "outright revolting" or "disturbs me to the deepest roots of my being" is the test, then we would have a big problem on our hand. some people find interracial marriage to be "outright revolting", and others find that consumption of meat "disturbs [them] to the deepest roots of [their] being".
with the reasoning you employ, we should ban meat consumption, interracial marriage and who knows what else.
valid arguments (or the closest we can come to them) can be the only 'unit of analysis' in such matters.
for those worried about being surrounded by planeful of people talking on their phones - bring an portable mp3 player, or some noise-cancelling headphones.
i dont see any difference between this proposed type of censorship and censoring media coverage after a more traditional terrorist attack. although there are clear benefits to the proposal, the public has a right and needs to know when it is being attacked.
tabbed browsing was a good leap forward for browsers, but i think we are ready for one more leap. i set up a large set of tabs as my homepage so when i begin an internet session, all the important pages are open for me.
if i could walk firefox through each login procedure for each site (perhaps with a wizard-type interface) and grab content from these various sources and then create a page for me.
how much time would you save if on one dynamically generated page you could have:
headlines/weather/sports from a customized set of sites.
all new email from your online accounts
check to see if the sites you are the admin of are responding
check how much ad revenue your site(s) have generated
list of new orders from your ecommerce site.
was their a price drop for a product you are monitoring
what is the amazon salesrank of a book you are monitoring
etc!
i suppose you can think of this idea as an all-internet myYahoo
i am heading over to mojave... anybody have any ideas about a large sign using the letters CNN in an acronym. perhaps something with a message like "compete with this, NASA"
Why can't they just sue the company who's purchasing the ad, instead of suing Google?
someone that performs a search for "AXA" is probably searching for information regarding the company. we can be relatively confident that this search query was brought about by AXAs financial investments in developing its name.
for those who suggest that Google shouldn't be the target of the lawsuit, please keep in mind that google actually profits when AXA's competitor's ads are clicked, and that is why i think both google and the competitor are culpable.
it gets a little complicated when the search query is for "AXA competitor"
so you dont have to pay them as much, and they don't require large cubes. in the eyes of management, a midget programmer would be best, they could work for pennies in a shoebox on the shelf!
according to the article, they are achieving the gains, not by more efficient conversion of solar power into electricity, but by making the cells more inexpensive. they are about 1/2 as efficient as silicon-based solar cells. so if my math is correct, you would need twice as much surface area to generate the same power as a silicon cell - which may be fine for a rooftop, but i doubt this is acceptible for a space craft that is launched by a rocket - to keep the weight and size down, they use the most efficient cells possible.
a no-tax system would the internet an unfair advantage over business who use mail-order catalogs for example. AFAIK, all businesses (online and offline) currently have to charge sales tax for purchases within their state. if this legislation passes, it seems that the pendulum would swing the other way, giving a distinct disadvantage to internet retailers.
whatever is decided - it should be the same for all types of business, online or not.
there are a handful of people that i know that dont use the internet frequently, and i find that its not that they could not benefit much from the internet, its that they dont know what it offers and how to use it efficiently.
part of the problem is they dont know the breadth of information that is available.
and secondly, even though google makes internet search easy, many people arent in the habit of searching for answers to their questions. they are so used to proceeding with their lives without information.
it takes time to learn that you can find the answer to virtually any question that you have, and other information that you would benefit from.
so its not only using the internet whenever you have a question, its a mentality change that requires you to find all the areas in your knowledge that are incomplete and filling them. those of us that use the internet frequently are used to living in this way.
my mom, for example, went to a museum recently. they got partially lost on the way, arrived at the destination late (left only a few hours for museum browsing), didnt know of a good restaurant to go to afterwards, missed seeing the most important painting at the museum, paid more for parking than they needed to etc. all of these things could have been avoided with a 10 minute session on the internet, but it didnt even occur to her to do a search.
even if she called the musuem in advance, i doubt that the receptionist would have told her all of this information, because my mom wouldnt have realized all the questions she should ask - but of course, a visit to the museum's website would have provided all of this relevant information.
equating a 25% caloric reduction with a 25% lower quality-of-life is simply shocking. if the equation is so linear for you, i bet you could consume 200% to perhaps 300% more calories than you are eating now, thereby creating a 200 - 300% increase in quality of life!
i think the mistake is your equation. food is enjoyable, but that doesnt mean that more food is more enjoyable. i love classical music. but i think if you put my living quarters in a concert hall, and i was to listen to live performances all day long, everyday, would my life be better? actually it would probably get terribly annoying. does that mean that i dont really like classical music? no. pleasures are not linear in this way.
i think i could have just as much pleasure as you visiting a restaurant and eating about half of the plate (standard portion sizes are absurdly large) while you ate the whole thing, and spent the rest of the night in a overstuffed stupor.
i think the most critical components to getting a micropayment system off the ground are:
seamless integration with web-browsing experience
trusted intermediary handling the payments
i think that google is perefectly situated at the moment to use its widespread goodwill for this purpose. the micropayment system could be integrated into the google toolbar. users would prepay a certain amount to google that would reside in their account (google would keep a commission, say 10%). the balance on your account would be listed right on the toolbar, and whenever you visited a site requesting a micropayment, a message would appear on the toolbar (not an annoying dialog box) providing you with the following options: 1) never pay micropayments on this site 2) pay this site this time but ask me again next time 3) always pay micropayments for this site (unless the publisher changes the price required).
the amounts being charged would always be displayed, as would the running balance of your account.
Slashdot Mirror
since microsoft office is a stagnant target (not too many innovations left to be made in word and excel), it is only a matter of time for openoffice to catch up - with the huge base of motivated programmers, they may even surpass ms office.
you should check out nesstags... its a suggestion for a simple improvement to tagging systems.
basically, tags are given a one-digit score (1 low to 9 high) which informs the system how much a given item belongs to that tag.
so when bookmarking slashdot, for example, you might give it the following tags: news4 geek9
this means that slashdot is a 4 on the newsness scale, but 9 on the geekness scale. this sort of quantification would really come in handy for searches. when you search for "news," slashdot would be displayed lower in the results than nytimes, for example.
it is super easy for the tagger to include the scoring, and the improvement to the system could be immense.
for those that jump on the adblock bandwagon, i hope you are realizing a long term effect of your behavoir. publishing good content costs money, and many sites are funded via adsesne. if you keep blocking ads publishers will either stop publishing or start making money in a different way.
whether you realize it or not, adsense is the first mainstream micropayment system. with the proliferation of ad blocking comes the next gen internet when you have to pay 5 cents to view some page etc. are targeted text ads really that annoying?
while this might not be too practical right now, consider what happens when WiMax becomes available almost anywhere. no need for a separate internet and cellphone account - its integrated! Vonage seems to be planting the seeds so they are ready when wireless internet is available anwhere.
right now you might pay for a phone line, a fax line, a cellphone, cable tv and internet.
there are lots of convergences going on, but this is a big one. the day may be coming when you spend 1/4 or 1/3 of what you are paying now for the whole suite of pipes.
the highlight of the page is the story way down at the bottom... apparently one of the sculptures ran into a kid who fell over and started to yell "i'm going to die"... the paramedics came, the kid was fine.
i am not arguing that google is bad for the web (on the contrary), but that google suggest is bad for the web. of course google allows users to find what they are looking for, but google suggest tends to direct them to the POPULAR destinations (which appear at the top of the results of popular searches) which may or may not be the most RELEVANT destinations. here's what i mean... suppose a group of three people were interested in some information on a widget, but when they search for it, they might search for slightly different variations, ie one would search for "widgets with ice" another would search for "widgets history" and another would search for just "widgets". each of these searches would turn up different results in google, and different websites would get traffic. with google suggest, as the user is typing away, google suggests the most POPULAR search queries, thereby directing all three users to the same set of results, and therefore the same websites. so the popular sites get more popular and the peripheral sites (that may have been more relavent) become less popular, and that is bad for the internet, IMO.
in the early days of the internet, people were posting all sorts of websites on all sorts of topics. as the web became more commercialized, most geeks were (rightfully) worried that major commercial hubs would be created that would attract the majority of attention and dilute the importance of the more peripheral areas of the web. this trend is already underway, and tools such as google suggest will hasten the decline. users will be directed to the areas that most people are already going, thereby increasing the traffic to portals and decreasing traffic to niche or enthusiast sites. in my opinion, google suggest is ANTI-internet.
why isnt janet jackson classified into the 'women' category?
i think your comments would be salient if they were going to scan the documents and the BURN the originals. putting massive content on the web for free is the best way to push content all over the world. some internet user in sri lanka doesn't have the bandwidth to download images of the pages, and would never have the opportunity to view the actual documents in a library at harvard. if everyone digitized all the valuable content (and i presume that much of the content in harvar's libraries are valuable), and made it freely available, the world would be a much better place. would you be satisfied if there was a link on each page to view an image of the actual page?
will there be ads for particle accelerators, scanning tunneling microscopes and tokamaks in the margins?
in the end, we need to make some policies regarding this issue. without them, some over-zealous scientists will go too far.
but that something is "outright revolting" isn't going to cut it. you need to use that "reason" that separates us from other species, and come up with actual arguments.
if "outright revolting" or "disturbs me to the deepest roots of my being" is the test, then we would have a big problem on our hand. some people find interracial marriage to be "outright revolting", and others find that consumption of meat "disturbs [them] to the deepest roots of [their] being".
with the reasoning you employ, we should ban meat consumption, interracial marriage and who knows what else.
valid arguments (or the closest we can come to them) can be the only 'unit of analysis' in such matters.
for those worried about being surrounded by planeful of people talking on their phones - bring an portable mp3 player, or some noise-cancelling headphones.
i dont see any difference between this proposed type of censorship and censoring media coverage after a more traditional terrorist attack. although there are clear benefits to the proposal, the public has a right and needs to know when it is being attacked.
tabbed browsing was a good leap forward for browsers, but i think we are ready for one more leap. i set up a large set of tabs as my homepage so when i begin an internet session, all the important pages are open for me.
if i could walk firefox through each login procedure for each site (perhaps with a wizard-type interface) and grab content from these various sources and then create a page for me.
how much time would you save if on one dynamically generated page you could have:
i suppose you can think of this idea as an all-internet myYahoo
i am heading over to mojave... anybody have any ideas about a large sign using the letters CNN in an acronym. perhaps something with a message like "compete with this, NASA"
Why can't they just sue the company who's purchasing the ad, instead of suing Google?
someone that performs a search for "AXA" is probably searching for information regarding the company. we can be relatively confident that this search query was brought about by AXAs financial investments in developing its name.
for those who suggest that Google shouldn't be the target of the lawsuit, please keep in mind that google actually profits when AXA's competitor's ads are clicked, and that is why i think both google and the competitor are culpable.
it gets a little complicated when the search query is for "AXA competitor"
it seems that optical discs would be protected from such microwave blasts, so it might behoove all of us to back up iimportant data to CDs and DVDs.
so you dont have to pay them as much, and they don't require large cubes. in the eyes of management, a midget programmer would be best, they could work for pennies in a shoebox on the shelf!
wanted: programmer with extensive experience in C++. applicants under 5' 2" a plus.
according to the article, they are achieving the gains, not by more efficient conversion of solar power into electricity, but by making the cells more inexpensive. they are about 1/2 as efficient as silicon-based solar cells. so if my math is correct, you would need twice as much surface area to generate the same power as a silicon cell - which may be fine for a rooftop, but i doubt this is acceptible for a space craft that is launched by a rocket - to keep the weight and size down, they use the most efficient cells possible.
a no-tax system would the internet an unfair advantage over business who use mail-order catalogs for example. AFAIK, all businesses (online and offline) currently have to charge sales tax for purchases within their state. if this legislation passes, it seems that the pendulum would swing the other way, giving a distinct disadvantage to internet retailers.
whatever is decided - it should be the same for all types of business, online or not.
there are a handful of people that i know that dont use the internet frequently, and i find that its not that they could not benefit much from the internet, its that they dont know what it offers and how to use it efficiently.
part of the problem is they dont know the breadth of information that is available.
and secondly, even though google makes internet search easy, many people arent in the habit of searching for answers to their questions. they are so used to proceeding with their lives without information.
it takes time to learn that you can find the answer to virtually any question that you have, and other information that you would benefit from.
so its not only using the internet whenever you have a question, its a mentality change that requires you to find all the areas in your knowledge that are incomplete and filling them. those of us that use the internet frequently are used to living in this way.
my mom, for example, went to a museum recently. they got partially lost on the way, arrived at the destination late (left only a few hours for museum browsing), didnt know of a good restaurant to go to afterwards, missed seeing the most important painting at the museum, paid more for parking than they needed to etc. all of these things could have been avoided with a 10 minute session on the internet, but it didnt even occur to her to do a search.
even if she called the musuem in advance, i doubt that the receptionist would have told her all of this information, because my mom wouldnt have realized all the questions she should ask - but of course, a visit to the museum's website would have provided all of this relevant information.
equating a 25% caloric reduction with a 25% lower quality-of-life is simply shocking. if the equation is so linear for you, i bet you could consume 200% to perhaps 300% more calories than you are eating now, thereby creating a 200 - 300% increase in quality of life!
i think the mistake is your equation. food is enjoyable, but that doesnt mean that more food is more enjoyable. i love classical music. but i think if you put my living quarters in a concert hall, and i was to listen to live performances all day long, everyday, would my life be better? actually it would probably get terribly annoying. does that mean that i dont really like classical music? no. pleasures are not linear in this way.
i think i could have just as much pleasure as you visiting a restaurant and eating about half of the plate (standard portion sizes are absurdly large) while you ate the whole thing, and spent the rest of the night in a overstuffed stupor.
- seamless integration with web-browsing experience
- trusted intermediary handling the payments
i think that google is perefectly situated at the moment to use its widespread goodwill for this purpose. the micropayment system could be integrated into the google toolbar. users would prepay a certain amount to google that would reside in their account (google would keep a commission, say 10%). the balance on your account would be listed right on the toolbar, and whenever you visited a site requesting a micropayment, a message would appear on the toolbar (not an annoying dialog box) providing you with the following options: 1) never pay micropayments on this site 2) pay this site this time but ask me again next time 3) always pay micropayments for this site (unless the publisher changes the price required).the amounts being charged would always be displayed, as would the running balance of your account.