The problem on wikipedia is not with the big articles that a lot of people read it's with the fringe articles. In Britanica the less referenced articles generally have a comparable accuracy with the highly referenced articles. On wikipedia, it is my experience, that the less well read articles can be highly inaccurate and reflect the authors view.
That would make sense. While Google were making enough money off him they a willing to turn a blind eye. Perhaps, though, the duplicate filter is expensive to run and a huge drop in what he was willing to pay was enough to trigger it to run. My guess is stepping away from the average is the quickest way to get Google to black list you. I know one of the sites I run swithed from php to jsp and the number of clicks went through the floor. I put this down to google getting scared that the site had been taken over by undesirables. It's back to what it was and more now though.
The problem with this choice is that it is fundamentally different to the choice that is actually being offered. With this question you are offering a sure fire cast iron guarantee that you can stop a terrorist attack by using limited (time and scope) infringements of a limited number of peoples freedoms and privacy. If this was the case then everyone would vote to stop the attack.
The real choice being offered, however, is this: wide spread infringement of liberty for a (possibly) reduced risk of a future unknown terrorist attack. If this choice was offered to you would you opt for it? We don't know that there is even going to be another terrorist attack (although I think it's likely). We don't know where a future attack would take place. We don't know when a future attack would take place. There are so many variables that it is absurd to even think we can stop a terrorist if they really wanted to blow something up. It might be possible to lock down the airports and the subways but is it possible to lock down all the shopping centers, petrol stations, football stadiums, rock concerts, churches, theaters, etc, etc. There are just too many places to blow people up. Even if you did manage to secure all of those what about the roads. A terrorist willing to die for his cause could case havoc simply by deliberately crashing his car on a motorway.
.... if this guy didn't trip over a duplicate content filter. I would be very surprised if Google didn't check to make sure it wasn't being fed the same content from multiple sources. From Googles point of view checking for duplicates is a good thing. They don't want their natural listings (or ad listings I imagine) to be filled with hundreds of copies of exactly the same site.
I would have been more interested to see the results of a test that modified the wording of ads and how that affects placement.
Finally, I wish I was getting 15000 click throughs a day. Sigh.
I think you miss the point. It could cause the end of civilization as we know it. Certainly it could be the end of some developed countries. At first it would be fine because the systems wouldn't be very good but imagine if we developed them to the point where they were they were indistinguishable from real life.
The first machines would be seen as harmless. They wouldn't be good enough to hold peoples attention and only a few people would use them extensivly. Later machines would be better and more people would become interested in trying them out. The next generation of machines are almost able to simulate real life. By this point there is a huge number of users that want the next great thing. They are addicted to the games.
The final version of the machines are able to simulate real life to the point where we can't tell the difference between the game and real life. Actually, perhaps we could tell the difference - real life is boring in comparison. Most people would become addicted.
If you don't think this could happen just look at the way computer games have grown in popularity. They started off as just geek toys now every kid plays them and quite a few adults. Current games aren't even close to simulating reality yet there are plenty of people spending several hours a day playing them. Further more, imagine a "game" where you could do anything, be anyone, act out any fantasy. Why would you ever want to come back to the real world? The only thing that might save us is that you would need to experience the real world for the virtual world to seem amazing.
For all your "it wouldn't happen to me" posturing I am pretty sure that it would. Even if it didn't how are you going to live in a world where half or more of the population is stuck in or addicted to a virtual world?
It's so much easier to just bury our collective heads in the sand than be proactive it's small wonder things always blow up in our faces. The problem, or at least one of them, is that no one really scores any points for stopping a problem before it happens. The public, for the most part, are unable or unwilling to see that this will be a (morla) problem in the future. As such our law makers would win no lime light for passing laws and creating guidelines now. In the future, however, when it is a problem and the great uneducated masses are whipped up into a frenzy our law makers can score a ton of points by passing the same (or more draconian) legislation.
Still, I'm pretty amazed at how far we have come. I wouldn't be surpirsed if there are still some very difficult technical problems to solve however.
As amazing as this may sound not every couple in the world makes a big thing of the anniversary of when they got together / got married. I know that for some it is a really special occasion but for us it's pretty much just another day. We do try and have the night off from other things so that we can watch a film and share a bottle of wine but that's about it. Maybe if it wasn't so close to christmas we would do more about it. I don't know.
I think, therefore, we agree. I almost always choose to use the site designers recommended font. There are times, however, when I have chosen a different font for readability.
My biggest gripe, though, is with designers that want to choose the size of the font and force me to use it. I have perfect vision but I find that many sites have fonts that are hard to read becaus they are to small (perhaps I shouldn't run my monitor at 1600x1200). With px specified fonts it's a royal pain in the rear to make the text bigger.
While I generally agree with you that a user should be able to choose the font they want to view a page in I don't agree that a website has no business specifying a font. Presentation, to most people, is an important part of the experience when viewing a web page or any other content. While some people like to view their content devoid of all but the most basic formating (GNU Pages) others (I would argue the majority) like the additional formatting and styling.
When a designer creates a page (or whole site) he is aiming for a particular response and feeliing. By removing the designers ability to set the font you are removing one of his primary tools.
Finally, the content is paid for by the designer or the person paying the designer. If they want to make it practically unreadable through a poor choice of font it is up to them. You have then have the choice of whether you use that content. Hopefully, if the content is good, you will use it. If the content is bad don't use it and maybe the content provider will change the content to better suit your needs.
Actually, I have a GF as well (12 years today IIRC) but the stereo type is easy to make fun of and we all know someone like it.
As for the stereo type being false I think it is, for the most part, but in some places it is 100% true. When I worked in industry most of the developers were fairly normal average people with a mixture of married and attached people with a couple of odd balls that you get every where. I then made the mistake of moving back into academia and it was like stepping into another world. I could count the number of married people on one hand. Most of the guys were just strange to say the very least. A few had partners but the relationships were anything but main stream. I'm not knocking them for beign different - the world is make from all sorts - but the stereo type isn't totally false.
I can see it now. The human race slowly becoming extinct because everyone would rather hump a perfect digital partner in VR than interact with a real person. Perhaps we will have developed technology to the point where we can make babies in a tank though.
Funny thing is though, I know several guys that are probably never going to get a partner let alone have children simply because they have set their sights way to high. They want a perfect woman or nothing. In two cases it is perfect looks that they require and in another it's the perfect little obedient house wife (that last guy makes me cringe everytime we talk). I can't help feeling that there are a lot of guys out there that have lost touch with reality due to constantly having "beautiful" women displayed to them.
This is about the only way most/.ians will ever get a girl. Now we just need half way decent VR and a "touch suit" (I should TM that name) and were well away.
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
on
Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 1
You were doing really well up till number 6. Dump Eclipse and go for NetBeans. It's much better for developing web apps (well IMHO anyway). I'd wait a month or two and try 5.0 (I'd avoid the beta versions they are a bit flakey this time round).
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
on
Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 1
I fear you are wasting you breath. As my wise old mum used to say: There are none so deaf as those that won't hear.
I can't help feeling that a lot of the Java bashing is because the first couple of versions (e.g. pre 1.2) were pretty poor. I, personally, don't think the language started getting good until 1.3. 5.0 is fantastic though, it's really made me believe that they can keep growing Java.
It's going to take a seriously big "big new thing" (TM) to make be put down my Java compiler.
Imagine a world where kids need an imagination. Sigh. Perhaps I am getting old but with every passing day it feels like there are fewer and fewer reasons for kids to pick up a book and exercise their imagination. Perhaps I'm horribly off topic but I think I preferred films with poor special effects because it made me fill in the gaps. When I watch things now that I watched as a child I cringe at how bad the effects (and often acting) are but my memory of them is quite different.
Anyway, I hope they haven't wrecked the story. I was never really into childrens stories but I though TLTWATW was actually pretty good.
I like the look of Web 2.0 (from what I have read about it) but I some how doubt we will be using it anytime soon and the reason: M$. Unless they start updating IE on a fairly regular basis Web 2.0 will just never take off. Yeah there will be implimentations of it (probably FF and Opera) but it won't get to got truly mainstream. M$ are playing catch-up with the release of IE7 but I don't see a big driving force for them to then produce an IE8 with Web 2.0 and other new technology. The browser wars are over there just isn't really all that much to fight over any more.
Personally, I'm more interested in Web Forms 2.0 that represents some really needed technology.
I assume that they will be able to get that failure rate down to a couple of percent or lower (I hope) but with failure rates so low on CD's and DVD's will this make next gen DVD to expensive for most things for years to come? More worrying though is what will the life expectance be of these disks. CD's are pretty tough, DVD's are fairly tough but moderatly suseptable to damage. If next gen disks are much worse than DVD's they won't be worth using. If failure rates are around 15% does this mean that a good portion of disks are close to failing as soon as they come off the production line?
Well you have the drop on me there. I'm not, and never claimed to be, a virus researcher so I'm hardly likely to be up on the "latest thing" or even nearly the latest. thing. Interesting looking paper though I'll have a proper read later.
Perhaps a hacked together virus is good enough but why stop at good enough. These people want to own 10000 machines. That requires some management. Why not make that management simple by writting a decent worm? AFAIK there isn't a virus that forms it's own (distributed) network to ward against counter attacks by, for instance, going quiet for a while.
Why didn't he just come out and say what he really wanted to say:
"Just prison time! That's not enough! These low life scum deserve nothing more than to be stoned to death (women aren't allowed to partake in the stoning, of course). They have stolen food from the mouths of hungry little children and strangled kittens. Well they would strangle kittens if they could. There probably terrorists as well you know!"
Will common sense ever return to the world? I think not with people like this running things.
Yeah, kind of lucky the world works that way for the most part. Touble is it only takes one person to let the cat out of the bag. The virus design in my initial post would be easy enough to stop on individual machines but, like type 1 herpes simplex (the virus that causes cold sores in humans), there would always be an unreachable portion of machines that can't be disinfected so the virus can re-emerge from these (the herpes virus lies dormant in the nerves where there is no immune response). It's an interesting problem to try and solve. I certainly can't think of a good solution.
May the V2V network use some form of anonymizing network technology then - it's slow but what would the virus author care. Digitally sign the updates, as well, so the virus only accepts updates from the real author. The technology is there and just waiting to be exploited.
Yeah when I saw that I thought my payers had been answered only to find it didn't work in IE. Sigh. Personally, I don't really care what (within reason) language is chosen just as long as it works the same in all browsers. I hate to think of the number of hours I have wasted trying to get things to look / work the same across multiple browsers. It's seriously not funny if you are a one man band operation.
Couldn't agree more. PAL looks fine (if you have a half way decent signal). Since TV's are only maybe 50" tops (for most people) and you generally sit a decent distance from them I don't see a lot to be gained by HDTV. For me, and maybe I'm in the minority, the content is a lot more important than the quality of the picture. Yes I like to be able to make out what is going on but a good story / show is 1*10^6 times more important than a good picture.
I don't want next gen DVD either. I can't see anything wrong with current generations of DVD. 5.1 sound is ample and the picture (even in out home cinima with a 7' screen) is next to perfect. I can sometimes see artifacts if I pause the movie and look for them but how many times do people watch movies one frame at a time?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem on wikipedia is not with the big articles that a lot of people read it's with the fringe articles. In Britanica the less referenced articles generally have a comparable accuracy with the highly referenced articles. On wikipedia, it is my experience, that the less well read articles can be highly inaccurate and reflect the authors view.
That would make sense. While Google were making enough money off him they a willing to turn a blind eye. Perhaps, though, the duplicate filter is expensive to run and a huge drop in what he was willing to pay was enough to trigger it to run. My guess is stepping away from the average is the quickest way to get Google to black list you. I know one of the sites I run swithed from php to jsp and the number of clicks went through the floor. I put this down to google getting scared that the site had been taken over by undesirables. It's back to what it was and more now though.
The problem with this choice is that it is fundamentally different to the choice that is actually being offered. With this question you are offering a sure fire cast iron guarantee that you can stop a terrorist attack by using limited (time and scope) infringements of a limited number of peoples freedoms and privacy. If this was the case then everyone would vote to stop the attack.
The real choice being offered, however, is this: wide spread infringement of liberty for a (possibly) reduced risk of a future unknown terrorist attack. If this choice was offered to you would you opt for it? We don't know that there is even going to be another terrorist attack (although I think it's likely). We don't know where a future attack would take place. We don't know when a future attack would take place. There are so many variables that it is absurd to even think we can stop a terrorist if they really wanted to blow something up. It might be possible to lock down the airports and the subways but is it possible to lock down all the shopping centers, petrol stations, football stadiums, rock concerts, churches, theaters, etc, etc. There are just too many places to blow people up. Even if you did manage to secure all of those what about the roads. A terrorist willing to die for his cause could case havoc simply by deliberately crashing his car on a motorway.
... after 3 weeks of wearing this watch your hand goes black and drops off.
.... if this guy didn't trip over a duplicate content filter. I would be very surprised if Google didn't check to make sure it wasn't being fed the same content from multiple sources. From Googles point of view checking for duplicates is a good thing. They don't want their natural listings (or ad listings I imagine) to be filled with hundreds of copies of exactly the same site.
I would have been more interested to see the results of a test that modified the wording of ads and how that affects placement.
Finally, I wish I was getting 15000 click throughs a day. Sigh.
I think you miss the point. It could cause the end of civilization as we know it. Certainly it could be the end of some developed countries. At first it would be fine because the systems wouldn't be very good but imagine if we developed them to the point where they were they were indistinguishable from real life.
The first machines would be seen as harmless. They wouldn't be good enough to hold peoples attention and only a few people would use them extensivly. Later machines would be better and more people would become interested in trying them out. The next generation of machines are almost able to simulate real life. By this point there is a huge number of users that want the next great thing. They are addicted to the games.
The final version of the machines are able to simulate real life to the point where we can't tell the difference between the game and real life. Actually, perhaps we could tell the difference - real life is boring in comparison. Most people would become addicted.
If you don't think this could happen just look at the way computer games have grown in popularity. They started off as just geek toys now every kid plays them and quite a few adults. Current games aren't even close to simulating reality yet there are plenty of people spending several hours a day playing them. Further more, imagine a "game" where you could do anything, be anyone, act out any fantasy. Why would you ever want to come back to the real world? The only thing that might save us is that you would need to experience the real world for the virtual world to seem amazing.
For all your "it wouldn't happen to me" posturing I am pretty sure that it would. Even if it didn't how are you going to live in a world where half or more of the population is stuck in or addicted to a virtual world?
It's so much easier to just bury our collective heads in the sand than be proactive it's small wonder things always blow up in our faces. The problem, or at least one of them, is that no one really scores any points for stopping a problem before it happens. The public, for the most part, are unable or unwilling to see that this will be a (morla) problem in the future. As such our law makers would win no lime light for passing laws and creating guidelines now. In the future, however, when it is a problem and the great uneducated masses are whipped up into a frenzy our law makers can score a ton of points by passing the same (or more draconian) legislation.
Still, I'm pretty amazed at how far we have come. I wouldn't be surpirsed if there are still some very difficult technical problems to solve however.
As amazing as this may sound not every couple in the world makes a big thing of the anniversary of when they got together / got married. I know that for some it is a really special occasion but for us it's pretty much just another day. We do try and have the night off from other things so that we can watch a film and share a bottle of wine but that's about it. Maybe if it wasn't so close to christmas we would do more about it. I don't know.
I think, therefore, we agree. I almost always choose to use the site designers recommended font. There are times, however, when I have chosen a different font for readability.
My biggest gripe, though, is with designers that want to choose the size of the font and force me to use it. I have perfect vision but I find that many sites have fonts that are hard to read becaus they are to small (perhaps I shouldn't run my monitor at 1600x1200). With px specified fonts it's a royal pain in the rear to make the text bigger.
While I generally agree with you that a user should be able to choose the font they want to view a page in I don't agree that a website has no business specifying a font. Presentation, to most people, is an important part of the experience when viewing a web page or any other content. While some people like to view their content devoid of all but the most basic formating (GNU Pages) others (I would argue the majority) like the additional formatting and styling.
When a designer creates a page (or whole site) he is aiming for a particular response and feeliing. By removing the designers ability to set the font you are removing one of his primary tools.
Finally, the content is paid for by the designer or the person paying the designer. If they want to make it practically unreadable through a poor choice of font it is up to them. You have then have the choice of whether you use that content. Hopefully, if the content is good, you will use it. If the content is bad don't use it and maybe the content provider will change the content to better suit your needs.
Actually, I have a GF as well (12 years today IIRC) but the stereo type is easy to make fun of and we all know someone like it.
As for the stereo type being false I think it is, for the most part, but in some places it is 100% true. When I worked in industry most of the developers were fairly normal average people with a mixture of married and attached people with a couple of odd balls that you get every where. I then made the mistake of moving back into academia and it was like stepping into another world. I could count the number of married people on one hand. Most of the guys were just strange to say the very least. A few had partners but the relationships were anything but main stream. I'm not knocking them for beign different - the world is make from all sorts - but the stereo type isn't totally false.
I can see it now. The human race slowly becoming extinct because everyone would rather hump a perfect digital partner in VR than interact with a real person. Perhaps we will have developed technology to the point where we can make babies in a tank though.
Funny thing is though, I know several guys that are probably never going to get a partner let alone have children simply because they have set their sights way to high. They want a perfect woman or nothing. In two cases it is perfect looks that they require and in another it's the perfect little obedient house wife (that last guy makes me cringe everytime we talk). I can't help feeling that there are a lot of guys out there that have lost touch with reality due to constantly having "beautiful" women displayed to them.
This is about the only way most /.ians will ever get a girl. Now we just need half way decent VR and a "touch suit" (I should TM that name) and were well away.
You were doing really well up till number 6. Dump Eclipse and go for NetBeans. It's much better for developing web apps (well IMHO anyway). I'd wait a month or two and try 5.0 (I'd avoid the beta versions they are a bit flakey this time round).
I fear you are wasting you breath. As my wise old mum used to say: There are none so deaf as those that won't hear.
I can't help feeling that a lot of the Java bashing is because the first couple of versions (e.g. pre 1.2) were pretty poor. I, personally, don't think the language started getting good until 1.3. 5.0 is fantastic though, it's really made me believe that they can keep growing Java.
It's going to take a seriously big "big new thing" (TM) to make be put down my Java compiler.
I'll second that. Damn old people!
Imagine a world where kids need an imagination. Sigh. Perhaps I am getting old but with every passing day it feels like there are fewer and fewer reasons for kids to pick up a book and exercise their imagination. Perhaps I'm horribly off topic but I think I preferred films with poor special effects because it made me fill in the gaps. When I watch things now that I watched as a child I cringe at how bad the effects (and often acting) are but my memory of them is quite different.
Anyway, I hope they haven't wrecked the story. I was never really into childrens stories but I though TLTWATW was actually pretty good.
I like the look of Web 2.0 (from what I have read about it) but I some how doubt we will be using it anytime soon and the reason: M$. Unless they start updating IE on a fairly regular basis Web 2.0 will just never take off. Yeah there will be implimentations of it (probably FF and Opera) but it won't get to got truly mainstream. M$ are playing catch-up with the release of IE7 but I don't see a big driving force for them to then produce an IE8 with Web 2.0 and other new technology. The browser wars are over there just isn't really all that much to fight over any more.
Personally, I'm more interested in Web Forms 2.0 that represents some really needed technology.
I assume that they will be able to get that failure rate down to a couple of percent or lower (I hope) but with failure rates so low on CD's and DVD's will this make next gen DVD to expensive for most things for years to come? More worrying though is what will the life expectance be of these disks. CD's are pretty tough, DVD's are fairly tough but moderatly suseptable to damage. If next gen disks are much worse than DVD's they won't be worth using. If failure rates are around 15% does this mean that a good portion of disks are close to failing as soon as they come off the production line?
Well you have the drop on me there. I'm not, and never claimed to be, a virus researcher so I'm hardly likely to be up on the "latest thing" or even nearly the latest. thing. Interesting looking paper though I'll have a proper read later.
Perhaps a hacked together virus is good enough but why stop at good enough. These people want to own 10000 machines. That requires some management. Why not make that management simple by writting a decent worm? AFAIK there isn't a virus that forms it's own (distributed) network to ward against counter attacks by, for instance, going quiet for a while.
Why didn't he just come out and say what he really wanted to say:
"Just prison time! That's not enough! These low life scum deserve nothing more than to be stoned to death (women aren't allowed to partake in the stoning, of course). They have stolen food from the mouths of hungry little children and strangled kittens. Well they would strangle kittens if they could. There probably terrorists as well you know!"
Will common sense ever return to the world? I think not with people like this running things.
Yeah, kind of lucky the world works that way for the most part. Touble is it only takes one person to let the cat out of the bag. The virus design in my initial post would be easy enough to stop on individual machines but, like type 1 herpes simplex (the virus that causes cold sores in humans), there would always be an unreachable portion of machines that can't be disinfected so the virus can re-emerge from these (the herpes virus lies dormant in the nerves where there is no immune response). It's an interesting problem to try and solve. I certainly can't think of a good solution.
May the V2V network use some form of anonymizing network technology then - it's slow but what would the virus author care. Digitally sign the updates, as well, so the virus only accepts updates from the real author. The technology is there and just waiting to be exploited.
Yeah when I saw that I thought my payers had been answered only to find it didn't work in IE. Sigh. Personally, I don't really care what (within reason) language is chosen just as long as it works the same in all browsers. I hate to think of the number of hours I have wasted trying to get things to look / work the same across multiple browsers. It's seriously not funny if you are a one man band operation.
Couldn't agree more. PAL looks fine (if you have a half way decent signal). Since TV's are only maybe 50" tops (for most people) and you generally sit a decent distance from them I don't see a lot to be gained by HDTV. For me, and maybe I'm in the minority, the content is a lot more important than the quality of the picture. Yes I like to be able to make out what is going on but a good story / show is 1*10^6 times more important than a good picture.
I don't want next gen DVD either. I can't see anything wrong with current generations of DVD. 5.1 sound is ample and the picture (even in out home cinima with a 7' screen) is next to perfect. I can sometimes see artifacts if I pause the movie and look for them but how many times do people watch movies one frame at a time?