Oh.. almost forgot to mention -- to respond to Page Rank
First tell them the SEO consultant they hired is an idiot (did he graduate from DeVry and have his CNA? - I don't think so) and he is most likely trying to defraud the company and that they should stop payment on his check.
Changing your page rank # is easy there are lots of articles on the web how to do it, but basically you can simply do it with Meta tags ex:.. if you want a page rank of 12 then just change the 7 to a 12 - it's easy.
If they don't believe you they can look it up on their Inter-web. There are lots of websites which explain that Google's spider crawls meta-tags to index the site and determine page rank. (At this point their head will hurt from all the technical mumbo jumbo)
In 60 days when it doesn't work, tell them that it's because your website is too slow and Google probably can't crawl it fast enough, use that to justify a OC48 to your desktop so you can make faster and more frequent site updates. Now yur l337 bcuz u can pwned newb's in PvP huh?
When the OC48 doesn't work, suggest the problem could be that Google found out you're spending too much time with Alexa (a Google competitor) and traffic isn't being seen by Google's routers and so Google is penalizing you.
At that point I suggest using similar tactics to Alexa.
By the time you get a couple of those six digit payouts to bribe key employees in Alexa/Google, then you won't need to work there anymore. Leave and start your own company.
Let me save you some breath, I deal with non-technical small online business owners all day, every day, and I have for the last 7 years - they are obviously concerned with Alexa rankings.
I *HAVE* been telling them that the stats are bullshit, not only for the reasons listed above but a few others - but eventually I gave up and developed a better strategy:
Don't bother explaining highly technical concepts to a monkey, it frustrates you and annoys the monkey.
If your pointy haired boss wants your Alexa ranking to improve I would suggest you: 1) Call a meeting, invite as many department heads as you can. 2) Make the problem your own, and phrase it as *MASSIVE*, *DIRE*, *EXTREME* (e.g. if we don't fix this, we could all be out of a job soon) 3) Suggest IMMEDIATE ACTION be taken, suggest hiring an offshore team of workers (China $0.37/hr) to install the Alexa toolbar and surf around your site. 4) Recommend that the company consider an immediate payout a Ukranian hacker with mob ties named "Ivan" who will pwn machines and install alexa and then randomly pop your site on his botnet for a reasonable fee. 5) Finally tell them that bribes to key employees in Alexa may be necessary - tell them you may have a contact and tell them to be ready to authorize six digit sums of money in a 24 hour period if necessary. [this can be useful for other reasons]
Trust me - as soon as the first mention of money (and specifically who's budget it will come out of) is made the general attitude toward how important Alexa is will change. They'll backpedal, claim you're being overly-proactive. They'll produce some rant they found on a website called dot-slash saying how Alexa rankings aren't important.
Tell them it's all propaganda, proceed to ignore whatever they say -- pronounce your undying love for Alexa - and it's relevance to the web. DEMAND THEY RESPECT YOUR AUTHORITY. IDENTIFY YOURSELF AS THE BIG DOG OF TECHNOLOGY. ASK WHO ELSE GRADUATED FROM DEVRY LIKE YOU DID? WHO ELSE IN THE ROOM IS A CERTIFIED NOVELL ADMINISTRATOR? IF CHALLENGED BY ANYONE TAUNT THEM AND SAY THEY PROBABLY DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND BIG "NETWORKING" CONCEPTS LIKE SECURE SOCKETS LAYER, TRANSPORT CONTROL PROTOCOL, AND.NET FRAMEWORK. Then proceed to tell them that (in your professional opinion) your company won't be able to recruit good people because of your poor Alexa ranking. Tell them that search engines will stop spidering your site, and eventually your traffic will drop to zero. Without a good alexa ranking your email will get caught in more spam filters and you'll appear on blacklists and phishing filters more frequently. That means the SSL locks won't show up on browsers anymore. This will cause packet loss on your routers to increase. If it's not fixed immediately it's possible eventually your domain won't even work if somebody enters it directly into their browser. ALEXA IS THE MASTER OF THE INTERNET THEY ARE ALL KNOWING WE MUST SERVE THEM WITHOUT QUESTION.
ps> I *seriously* did have one customer who hired an offshore Indian firm to boost they're rankings (no bullshit) - feel free to mention that your competitors are already doing this, and the clock is ticking. WE NEED A DECISION NOW.
The next topic: PAGE RANK (umm.. wash, rinse, repeat)
As an employer I would give additional points to anybody who responded with read slashdot. In fact the Customer service manager for our company responded that way in his initial interview as I recall.
Wha?? Because.. 1. it tells me your telling the truth - don't lie in interviews just to get the job, it won't work for you or me. 2. it shows me you like to stay informed, be aware of what is going on, I won't be expected to spoon-feed you stuff or wonder if you'll be able to stay current with tech. 3. *I* read slashdot, and that means you and I have something in common, we share interests -- and that makes you more likely to get the job.
I think the best answer could be something like:
I read slashdot.org, an IT news site to exercise my brain while I finishing sucking down my starbucks mocha thingy and let the combination of sugar and caffeine percolate through my body until my heart-rate begins pumping enough blood to my head to make good decisions. Then I read my email, check the ticket queue, review recent code submissions, blah blah blah..
Anybody you *WANT* to work for will give you bonus points for a qualified, honest answer. REMEMBER: Always be yourself in an interview, otherwise you'll be one of those dweebo waistoids who is ranting on slashdot about how your job sucks -- it's usually because you pretended to be somebody your not in the interview.
http://www.zoovy.com/ Zoovy.com is an e-commerce provider that requires all customers using their mail service to use restricted SPF records for their domains. This has cut down on our SPAM being sent both to and more importantly *from* our domains by spammers considerably.
The problem is most ISP's and other hosting providers don't control the entire e-mail application stack enough to implement it without an army of technical support people, it's just not economical. That and diagnosing mail problems is too freaking difficult for low level helpdesk people.
It's like credit card fraud, the entire system will need to be retrofitted before it can be significantly reduced or even eliminated, but the short term of cost of dealing with fraud outweights the long term upfront cost of retrofitting billions of dollars worth of swipes, magstrip readers, and point of sale systems.
Eventually the problem will get bad enough and/or a big mail provider (hotmail, gmail, yahoo) will grow a pair and start flagging email that arrives at domains without SPF as spam. Either that or something like Y2K will happen again and require everybody to update to stuff that supports SPF, this could be as soon as 2010 when we run out of IP addresses.
Wouldn't hold my breath though... my prediction is it will probably happen sometime after IPv6 is rolled out.
I dont underestimate the iPhone's impact, rather I disagree with most people posting here about how either won't matter, or will require every custom U/I Web 2.0 site be rethought immediately.
While it's true that it's Apple's responsibility to ensure compatibility - can we all be honest and say "they won't." Apples image is all about being edgy and fun, and DIFFERENT and if that means that some conformist IE "tested" sites don't work, it's not their problem. Apple has a track record of introducing disruptive products, so I don't think breaking a few websites will cause them to lose any sleep.
The reality is that the Web 2.0+AJAX is around to stay, and big popular sites offering "rich content" which utilize the latest and greatest technology to deliver a better experience will end up with more users, regardless of their impact of the iPhone. If your site gets enough traffic, you can afford to detect the browser type (even if it's just Safari in general and screw the rest of the mac population - let 'em use firefox) and then redirect + downgrade the experience e.g. http://www.safari.domain.com/ -- this will be necessary in order to monetize the most traffic possible - it's just common business sense.
If you run an e-commerce site, looking into a platform that offers a CMS (Content Management System) that allows you to have one product & content database, with multiple different websites is certainly what you're looking for if you want to maximize your revenue. Platforms like Zoovy http://www.zoovy.com/ offer the ability to display different sites to different users pretty easily, in addition to being able to do very cool A/B multi-variable testing. This makes supporting everything between Web 2.0/AJAX &.mobi domains incredibly easy. I'm not sure if anybody else in the e-commerce industry does that yet. ??
But having multiple websites built from the same content is relatively easy. Hope that helps.
If you're looking for something next generation then your best fit is probably http://www.zoovy.com/Zoovy.com.
Pros: Both a.Net desktop client (Vista friendly!) specifically for order entry and warehouse management, as well as a very powerful website hosting content engine that is fully AJAX / Web 2.0.
Remote staff can also login to the web interface which is Web 2.0/Ajax to manage orders and do other tasks such as update the website.
Also works with Amazon, GoogleBase, eBay, etc. to increase your visibility online. Been in business for 7 years, and keeps current - subscription model, no upgrade fees to stay on top of the latest and greatest.
Cons: Closed source, but with plenty of developer hooks via REST/SOAP. Certainly not free (as some of the other solutions here are) but has good support.
Okay so a 64 bit key has 18446744073709551616 possible combinations (2 ^ 64). A 128 bit key has (2 ^ 128) has roughly 3,402,823,669,209,384,634,633,746,074,317,700,000, 000 combinations
encrypting a 64 bit file TWICE means you get 2^64 * 2 = or 36893488147419103232 Effectively -- 65 bit encryption.
Albiet this is dramatically oversimplifying the type of attacks, etc. I feel dumber for even reading this question.
RE: Driving. I get it -- you probably don't have a car. You don't have to drive to the store, they will ship it to you - if you want, but most people (myself included) are impatient, I have a BMW and enjoy driving and I want my new LCD screen right now, not tomorrow and I don't want to risk it getting banged up in shipping or stolen off my doorstep (less insurance!) Even if you have it shipped - it will come from local inventory it will be cheaper, it will arrive in one day via ground (cheaper shipping).
RE: Sales Tax -- Yes, you have to pay sales tax EITHER WAY. A lot of online users make the assumption that there is no sales tax on the Internet -- this is NOT TRUE. If you're a company you have to report the sales tax right now. I expect within 2-3 years the that the states will have set aside their petty differences and figured out an Internet sales tax. There is just too much money on the table (and that number is growing everyday)
RE: Salespeople -- It's very likely that there will be some sort of feedback mechanism, so if the salesperson is rude then it's likely google would stop sending business there - they don't want to alienate customers at any price, it's just not worth it. However as far as "pushy" salespeople -- like it or not, they do generate results, the companies which employ them generate more money, and can afford to do more marketing and give out more loss leaders. Welcome to business 101.
First off, I'm totally close to this business - and this was an anticipated move, predicted it almost 2 years ago now. eBay needs to protect their business for the upcoming storm. I fully expect eBay to be remembered in a few years similarly to the Modem (remember those?).. yeah people still use 'em, but most everybody's got a broadband connection.
Google isn't going to release auctions, auctions are so 2001. NOBODY WANTS TO BID. The stuff you bid on is used crap, and honestly even then it falls into the "Working crap" and "broke crap". eBay is transitioning to a fixed price marketplace, so is Google. (Don't believe me, check out eBay express)
It doesn't matter where you buy online -- the price battles online are over, they were over last year, price differentials are minimal. If anything eBay sellers are at a disadvantage due to all the fees they incurr and the higher overhead from the resulting support cost. The next frontier is mobile commerce, or perhaps more appropriately "local commerce" -- which is where Google is clearly headed. All the analysts seem to miss that Google has a really clear 3 year plan, and it's pretty freaking awesome - here's how it goes:
1. Online prices are too similar, they are irrelvant. 2. Who has a product closest to me, and is reliable, lets buy it from them. 3. Will Google allow a local retailer to match "best price", or perhaps even come close -- you betcha.
Within two years -- i'll be able to buy an 19" LCD monitor for $99 from GoogleBase, after it negotiates the best price for me, then tells me to go pick it up at the local circuit city or fry's, where I pay via Google Payments when I arrive to pick it up (probably via my phone). Yupe, it's right around the corner. The store will try to upsell me on other items while i'm there. Google will get a cut of the entire sale, in exchange they'll be more likely to send more buyers to that store. The stores that do the poorest job upselling, will see less buyers (think Adwords).
This is brilliant!!! No seriously, i'm routinely pissed off at the limited number of domains which correctly implement SPF. Fear is a great motivator. Hopefully now we'll see increased SPF adoption among major ISP's.
ATTENTION FLAMERS/TROLLS: I'm not an idiot - I realize that SPF doesn't actually help avoid this problem, and subsequently keep your mailserver off black lists. But it does bring the topic "hiring a secure+competent DNS/mailserver" into the forefront. It seems to me that if your nameserver, and your mail server resolve to the same IP address - then you're cruisin for a bruisin, because you probably don't have a terribly competent mail/dns host.
I'm not a lawyer - but it seems here in the US - it allows ISP's that host spammers and thus have their customers domains blacklisted to be LIABLE for damages (the fines that go-daddy levies, plus lost revenue). Even if the ISP has a terms of service, blah blah.. commerce law is pretty straightforward: if I pay you to do a service (host my website), and a lack of competence in your service results in damages (domain name being suspended), you are liable for those -- so either have me sign a waiver stating "i know you're incompetent", get insurance to deal with it, or hire competent administrators in the first place.
So I guess we can all expect to be signing competency waivers for most ISP's in the near future.
Open source software sucks and the mentality of their developers sucks. Perhaps we would suck less, if you were to/blow/ more.
If you are going to do it for free then don't half-ass it, do it right the first time. I never half-ass it, I always FULL-ASS it.
I'm tired of coming across something that won't compile correctly or encountering a bug. Then when you research it you come across 100 posts of people asking the same question and getting the same response of fix it yourself or do a search the answer is already here.
Exactly what i'm saying!!! You're clearly too smart, or at least smarter than us open source developers. I wish we could be as smart as you and all the other geniuses / mensa candidates who absolutely over-thinking thinking the problem, and can jump straight to a conclusion without following the steps.
See.. Silly us, we made it for dumber people, see we put the notes about how to compile the software and that you needed xyz library in a file we thought was obvious -- we called it: README
Tell you what, we can solve this -- so whats your name?? Jim? perhaps next time we'll name the file: "HEY_JIM_READTHIS_OR_THIS_WONT_COMPILE_CORRECTLY_Y OU_DUMBASS.TXT"
You know what? I've got a job that pays money, I'm not about to waste my time trying to learn the code base for a one off project that looked interesting.
Hey Jim, wow.. thats terrific, i'm glad you've got a job that pays money. See, it shows how smart you are. I really want to help you, since you've demonstrated how superior you are to us -- if you still can't get it compile after reading the file above: 1. You are probably still overthinking the issue, try beating your head against the desk until you are semi-conscious, then try starting over and reading the docs. Let us know if that fixes the problem. 2. Send me your computer, you only need to pay the postage one way. Make sure you do any upgrades to the computer you want to before you send it to me. Also if you've got any good games, be sure to include the CD's, license keys and manuals.
Re:Oh .. I get it. ($Rant++)
on
The CVS Cop-Out
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· Score: 1
Hey, while i'm ranting.. REMEMBER: YOU CAN'T MAKE THE DAMN USERS HAPPY.
I do work for a commercial software company, which offers our service as an ASP platform. It's cheap (almost Free - but we have to eat) and we employ agile/xp programming to do daily, or sometimes even hourly builds as bugs are reported and things are fixed, or features are added. We have been in business for 6 years, the platform is almost 2 million lines of code, we interface with systems that change continually, so new stuff is always coming out and changing.
ANYWAY - MY POINT IS: DAILY BUILDS JUST SPOIL THE USERS EVEN MORE. Not only do they get it FREE, GOOD AND INSTANTLY.. now they think we've got nothing better to do but sit around and implement features for them. (Since they have no bugs, they don't care that anybody else does).
First it makes the damn user assume that everything can be done in some arbitrary unit of time, something reasonable, for most people it's around 6 hours. It doesn't matter what it is, fix a bug, convert 3rd party library from Perl to VB.net, write a new device driver for a buggy USB device -- according to the user it should take about 6 hours, although it could take less if we had more people working on it. (Which we would, *IF* it was our top priority)
Thank you sir, may I have another???
Anyway, since everything should take about 6 hours, they put in 2-4 requests per day, so that way they don't overwhelm us, you know, but just enough to remind us exactly how brilliant they actually are. I especially love when they remind me that if only wanted to learn how to program, they would clearly dwarf our intellect and we would all worship them because they are so smart and know so much more about topic xyz. Of course they're too dumb to realize that they're filing bug reports for what are clearly feature/ehancement requests and of course they piss and moan when I tell them that:
1. It's not a bug -- just because it doesn't work they way you think it should. Your too smart, try thinking differently, more like a dumb person. If you can't do that, try banging your head against the desk till your semi-conscious, and try again, let me know when you've finished and if that fixes the problem.
2. Contrary to popular belief, we do have other customers, you are not the only one, and most of the others are smarter than you and have better ideas for features than you do.
3. Why don't you try actually using the software for what it does, instead of crying about what it doesn't do. I wish I had software that did something useful like perform a blowjob, or bake me a pannini. Why don't you try doing something useful?
4. No matter how much you whine, I can't re-architect the Internet. If you don't like how this Internet works, find another one.
5. Asking to speak to my manager/supervisor about my attitude does not get your feature implemented faster, it just pisses me off. Sorry boss -- I gotta go fix a real nasty data corruption bug. Hey let me check your account, what was your username again? Clickty Click.
(Speaking on behalf of open source developers everywhere)
You're right, next time we'll respond with "Screw you, if it's really that important -- fix it yourself and provide binaries to everybody on the Internet"
First they want free software. Then they want good software. Now they want good, free, software - instantly.
I always choose the one with the coolest name, that's probably the best. If both projects have cool names, then the one with the most bitchen logo. If both projects have cool names, and bitchen logos, then I usually try and use both since that will make my program even more cool and bitchen.
Umm... ironically there's another article on slashdot today about how IBM's via-voice can automatically subtitle foreign films, it stands to reason that creating text transcripts from a lecture (single speaker) is probably reasonably simple.
Now if somebody could only circumvent the iTunes DRM into a format supported by viavoice -- oh wait, that'd be illegal, damn.
But any alien spaceship with proper shielding wouldn't be affected by this junk.:)
You clearly don't know much about evil aliens with advanced weaponry. Advanced weaponry is only susceptible to three things:
1. Jeff Goldblum 2. Avian Flu 3. Other low tech technologies which their shields have no defenses for (How else did Luke Skywalker blow up the death star?? How did the ewoks beat the storm troopers? huh? huh? huH??)
I just need to let you all know that those alien stooges from the homeland security department already showed up and took my chickens. I guess now our only hope is jeff goldblum. I hope he still keeps in contact with that little girl from Jusassic park who knows how use a unix.
First off it makes us look like a poorer planet, I mean honestly who wants to conquer a home with a trans-am up on blocks in the front driveway and thousands of beer cans strewn about the lawn?? Sorry little green guys, we already stripmined this place!
But it's also practical -- long before the impending alien invasion can occur, they'll need to clean up the space junk before they can place their ships in near earth orbit. As soon as the space junk is gone, then there is really nothing to stop them from enslaving us and using us as a food source (mmm.. protein)
As far as i'm concerned space junk is one of the few things keeping us safe, that -- and of course the avian flu. (I'm harboring infected chickens in my cellar just in case one of those little green men shows up at my door)
Pratically speaking: If building a backdoor into an operating system, especially one as complex as windows - you wouldn't comment your code with/* BEGIN BACKDOOR CODE */.. too many eyes on the code. You'd bury backdoors in a series of smaller innocuous subsytems.
Specifically - you would place a series of exploitable "steps" you needed to execute in order to fully and REMOTELY compromise a system. Ideally those steps could be used interchangibly -
some steps to remotely get a payload onto the computer and others to remotely execute the payload (or put the payload in a place where it would be executed)
Hey Mr. ISP - no problem, you want to start regulating which sites we get good service at, and which sites we get bad service at? No problem, i'll certainly be happy to pay more for a faster service -- but make no mistake, once you start to regulate you jeapordize that all-so-important "Hey we're only a venue" ruling..
Go head.. give P2P applications more traffic, and then watch who the RIAA+MPAA turns on!!!!! Oh, how i'd love to see the Smackdown between the RIAA+MPAA vs. The Bells -- bring it on!
btw> I suggested to our Colo provider a few months ago that they introduce a new two tier, high speed, reduced latency service for AJAX applications (which are highly sensitive to latency)
I suspect Jimbo is probably just a little shell shocked from all the attention he's been getting lately. Whatever Slashdot picks up today could be mainstream news tomorrow, a lot of journalists read this to get perspective and whatnot so they can seem educated. (Yes I know how scary this is)
Yeah, it's not bookmarkable, it's doesn't work for the kids on the short yellow bus, and it doesn't print well --- hey Wait a Second!!!! Are we talking about Flash or AJAX here?
AJAX is nothing more than a non-plugin required, much lighter and more flexible, non-modal, proper font-rendering replacement for Adobe Flash.
You can expect people to come up with innovative solutions to the majority of the usability concerns addressed in this article. Also aside from the bookmark/back button argument the majority of the gripes the author has here are really with DHTML/CSS not AJAX at all.
Yes, i'm doing the same thing right now [pre-computing results]. Built a dictionary of commonly searched for terms, those are the only ones which appear on the autocomplete. Cache the list, change the AJAX call so it references a static list (basically a two layer alphanumeric hashing structure).. but it pulls the file statically.
The only problem is that all the lame-o ajax frameworks cropping up don't offer that type of flexability without being considered bloatware. I did finally manage to implement it using Perl+HTML::Prototype.
Bottom line we serve out around 15rps across 25 servers, so anythign which can be precomputed must be - saves a lot of clock cycles and provides faster results.
Ajax is also highly sensitive to latency - so the time involved in doing a database and doing any type of select will make the application feel slower. Every millisecond counts!
Slashdot Mirror
What we really need are more hygiene tips for current LUG members.
How many people have actually been to a LUG? Raise your hand.
If so then you know what I'm talking about, the distinct odor of penguin love.
Oh.. almost forgot to mention -- to respond to Page Rank
.. if you want a page rank of 12 then just change the 7 to a 12 - it's easy.
First tell them the SEO consultant they hired is an idiot (did he graduate from DeVry and have his CNA? - I don't think so) and he is most likely trying to defraud the company and that they should stop payment on his check.
Changing your page rank # is easy there are lots of articles on the web how to do it, but basically you can simply do it with Meta tags ex:
If they don't believe you they can look it up on their Inter-web. There are lots of websites which explain that Google's spider crawls meta-tags to index the site and determine page rank.
(At this point their head will hurt from all the technical mumbo jumbo)
In 60 days when it doesn't work, tell them that it's because your website is too slow and Google probably can't crawl it fast enough, use that to justify a OC48 to your desktop so you can make faster and more frequent site updates. Now yur l337 bcuz u can pwned newb's in PvP huh?
When the OC48 doesn't work, suggest the problem could be that Google found out you're spending too much time with Alexa (a Google competitor) and traffic isn't being seen by Google's routers and so Google is penalizing you.
At that point I suggest using similar tactics to Alexa.
By the time you get a couple of those six digit payouts to bribe key employees in Alexa/Google, then you won't need to work there anymore. Leave and start your own company.
Have FuN!
Let me save you some breath, I deal with non-technical small online business owners all day, every day, and I have for the last 7 years - they are obviously concerned with Alexa rankings.
.NET FRAMEWORK.
I *HAVE* been telling them that the stats are bullshit, not only for the reasons listed above but a few others - but eventually I gave up and developed a better strategy:
Don't bother explaining highly technical concepts to a monkey, it frustrates you and annoys the monkey.
If your pointy haired boss wants your Alexa ranking to improve I would suggest you:
1) Call a meeting, invite as many department heads as you can.
2) Make the problem your own, and phrase it as *MASSIVE*, *DIRE*, *EXTREME* (e.g. if we don't fix this, we could all be out of a job soon)
3) Suggest IMMEDIATE ACTION be taken, suggest hiring an offshore team of workers (China $0.37/hr) to install the Alexa toolbar and surf around your site.
4) Recommend that the company consider an immediate payout a Ukranian hacker with mob ties named "Ivan" who will pwn machines and install alexa and then randomly pop your site on his botnet for a reasonable fee.
5) Finally tell them that bribes to key employees in Alexa may be necessary - tell them you may have a contact and tell them to be ready to authorize six digit sums of money in a 24 hour period if necessary. [this can be useful for other reasons]
Trust me - as soon as the first mention of money (and specifically who's budget it will come out of) is made the general attitude toward how important Alexa is will change. They'll backpedal, claim you're being overly-proactive. They'll produce some rant they found on a website called dot-slash saying how Alexa rankings aren't important.
Tell them it's all propaganda, proceed to ignore whatever they say -- pronounce your undying love for Alexa - and it's relevance to the web.
DEMAND THEY RESPECT YOUR AUTHORITY.
IDENTIFY YOURSELF AS THE BIG DOG OF TECHNOLOGY.
ASK WHO ELSE GRADUATED FROM DEVRY LIKE YOU DID?
WHO ELSE IN THE ROOM IS A CERTIFIED NOVELL ADMINISTRATOR?
IF CHALLENGED BY ANYONE TAUNT THEM AND SAY THEY PROBABLY DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND BIG "NETWORKING" CONCEPTS LIKE SECURE SOCKETS LAYER, TRANSPORT CONTROL PROTOCOL, AND
Then proceed to tell them that (in your professional opinion) your company won't be able to recruit good people because of your poor Alexa ranking. Tell them that search engines will stop spidering your site, and eventually your traffic will drop to zero. Without a good alexa ranking your email will get caught in more spam filters and you'll appear on blacklists and phishing filters more frequently. That means the SSL locks won't show up on browsers anymore. This will cause packet loss on your routers to increase. If it's not fixed immediately it's possible eventually your domain won't even work if somebody enters it directly into their browser. ALEXA IS THE MASTER OF THE INTERNET THEY ARE ALL KNOWING WE MUST SERVE THEM WITHOUT QUESTION.
ps> I *seriously* did have one customer who hired an offshore Indian firm to boost they're rankings (no bullshit) - feel free to mention that your competitors are already doing this, and the clock is ticking. WE NEED A DECISION NOW.
The next topic: PAGE RANK (umm.. wash, rinse, repeat)
As an employer I would give additional points to anybody who responded with read slashdot. In fact the Customer service manager for our company responded that way in his initial interview as I recall.
..
Wha?? Because
1. it tells me your telling the truth - don't lie in interviews just to get the job, it won't work for you or me.
2. it shows me you like to stay informed, be aware of what is going on, I won't be expected to spoon-feed you stuff or wonder if you'll be able to stay current with tech.
3. *I* read slashdot, and that means you and I have something in common, we share interests -- and that makes you more likely to get the job.
I think the best answer could be something like:
I read slashdot.org, an IT news site to exercise my brain while I finishing sucking down my starbucks mocha thingy and let the combination of sugar and caffeine percolate through my body until my heart-rate begins pumping enough blood to my head to make good decisions.
Then I read my email, check the ticket queue, review recent code submissions, blah blah blah..
Anybody you *WANT* to work for will give you bonus points for a qualified, honest answer.
REMEMBER: Always be yourself in an interview, otherwise you'll be one of those dweebo waistoids who is ranting on slashdot about how your job sucks -- it's usually because you pretended to be somebody your not in the interview.
http://www.zoovy.com/ Zoovy.com is an e-commerce provider that requires all customers using their mail service to use restricted SPF records for their domains. This has cut down on our SPAM being sent both to and more importantly *from* our domains by spammers considerably.
... my prediction is it will probably happen sometime after IPv6 is rolled out.
The problem is most ISP's and other hosting providers don't control the entire e-mail application stack enough to implement it without an army of technical support people, it's just not economical. That and diagnosing mail problems is too freaking difficult for low level helpdesk people.
It's like credit card fraud, the entire system will need to be retrofitted before it can be significantly reduced or even eliminated, but the short term of cost of dealing with fraud outweights the long term upfront cost of retrofitting billions of dollars worth of swipes, magstrip readers, and point of sale systems.
Eventually the problem will get bad enough and/or a big mail provider (hotmail, gmail, yahoo) will grow a pair and start flagging email that arrives at domains without SPF as spam. Either that or something like Y2K will happen again and require everybody to update to stuff that supports SPF, this could be as soon as 2010 when we run out of IP addresses.
Wouldn't hold my breath though
I dont underestimate the iPhone's impact, rather I disagree with most people posting here about how either won't matter, or will require every custom U/I Web 2.0 site be rethought immediately.
.mobi domains incredibly easy. I'm not sure if anybody else in the e-commerce industry does that yet. ??
While it's true that it's Apple's responsibility to ensure compatibility - can we all be honest and say "they won't." Apples image is all about being edgy and fun, and DIFFERENT and if that means that some conformist IE "tested" sites don't work, it's not their problem. Apple has a track record of introducing disruptive products, so I don't think breaking a few websites will cause them to lose any sleep.
The reality is that the Web 2.0+AJAX is around to stay, and big popular sites offering "rich content" which utilize the latest and greatest technology to deliver a better experience will end up with more users, regardless of their impact of the iPhone. If your site gets enough traffic, you can afford to detect the browser type (even if it's just Safari in general and screw the rest of the mac population - let 'em use firefox) and then redirect + downgrade the experience e.g. http://www.safari.domain.com/ -- this will be necessary in order to monetize the most traffic possible - it's just common business sense.
If you run an e-commerce site, looking into a platform that offers a CMS (Content Management System) that allows you to have one product & content database, with multiple different websites is certainly what you're looking for if you want to maximize your revenue. Platforms like Zoovy http://www.zoovy.com/ offer the ability to display different sites to different users pretty easily, in addition to being able to do very cool A/B multi-variable testing. This makes supporting everything between Web 2.0/AJAX &
But having multiple websites built from the same content is relatively easy.
Hope that helps.
If you're looking for something next generation then your best fit is probably http://www.zoovy.com/Zoovy.com.
.Net desktop client (Vista friendly!) specifically for order entry and warehouse management, as well as a very powerful website hosting content engine that is fully AJAX / Web 2.0.
Pros: Both a
Remote staff can also login to the web interface which is Web 2.0/Ajax to manage orders and do other tasks such as update the website.
Also works with Amazon, GoogleBase, eBay, etc. to increase your visibility online.
Been in business for 7 years, and keeps current - subscription model, no upgrade fees to stay on top of the latest and greatest.
Cons:
Closed source, but with plenty of developer hooks via REST/SOAP.
Certainly not free (as some of the other solutions here are) but has good support.
Is everybody here retarded?
, 000
Okay so a 64 bit key has 18446744073709551616 possible combinations (2 ^ 64).
A 128 bit key has (2 ^ 128) has roughly 3,402,823,669,209,384,634,633,746,074,317,700,000
combinations
encrypting a 64 bit file TWICE means you get
2^64 * 2 = or 36893488147419103232
Effectively -- 65 bit encryption.
Albiet this is dramatically oversimplifying the type of attacks, etc. I feel dumber for even reading this question.
RE: Driving.
I get it -- you probably don't have a car. You don't have to drive to the store, they will ship it to you - if you want, but most people (myself included) are impatient, I have a BMW and enjoy driving and I want my new LCD screen right now, not tomorrow and I don't want to risk it getting banged up in shipping or stolen off my doorstep (less insurance!)
Even if you have it shipped - it will come from local inventory it will be cheaper, it will arrive in one day via ground (cheaper shipping).
RE: Sales Tax --
Yes, you have to pay sales tax EITHER WAY. A lot of online users make the assumption that there is no sales tax on the Internet -- this is NOT TRUE.
If you're a company you have to report the sales tax right now.
I expect within 2-3 years the that the states will have set aside their petty differences and figured out an Internet sales tax. There is just too much money on the table (and that number is growing everyday)
RE: Salespeople --
It's very likely that there will be some sort of feedback mechanism, so if the salesperson is rude then it's likely google would stop sending business there - they don't want to alienate customers at any price, it's just not worth it.
However as far as "pushy" salespeople -- like it or not, they do generate results, the companies which employ them generate more money, and can afford to do more marketing and give out more loss leaders. Welcome to business 101.
First off, I'm totally close to this business - and this was an anticipated move, predicted it almost 2 years ago now. eBay needs to protect their business for the upcoming storm. I fully expect eBay to be remembered in a few years similarly to the Modem (remember those?) .. yeah people still use 'em, but most everybody's got a broadband connection.
Google isn't going to release auctions, auctions are so 2001. NOBODY WANTS TO BID. The stuff you bid on is used crap, and honestly even then it falls into the "Working crap" and "broke crap". eBay is transitioning to a fixed price marketplace, so is Google. (Don't believe me, check out eBay express)
It doesn't matter where you buy online -- the price battles online are over, they were over last year, price differentials are minimal. If anything eBay sellers are at a disadvantage due to all the fees they incurr and the higher overhead from the resulting support cost. The next frontier is mobile commerce, or perhaps more appropriately "local commerce" -- which is where Google is clearly headed. All the analysts seem to miss that Google has a really clear 3 year plan, and it's pretty freaking awesome - here's how it goes:
1. Online prices are too similar, they are irrelvant.
2. Who has a product closest to me, and is reliable, lets buy it from them.
3. Will Google allow a local retailer to match "best price", or perhaps even come close -- you betcha.
Within two years -- i'll be able to buy an 19" LCD monitor for $99 from GoogleBase, after it negotiates the best price for me, then tells me to go pick it up at the local circuit city or fry's, where I pay via Google Payments when I arrive to pick it up (probably via my phone). Yupe, it's right around the corner.
The store will try to upsell me on other items while i'm there.
Google will get a cut of the entire sale, in exchange they'll be more likely to send more buyers to that store. The stores that do the poorest job upselling, will see less buyers (think Adwords).
This is brilliant!!! No seriously, i'm routinely pissed off at the limited number of domains which correctly implement SPF. Fear is a great motivator.
.. commerce law is pretty straightforward: if I pay you to do a service (host my website), and a lack of competence in your service results in damages (domain name being suspended), you are liable for those -- so either have me sign a waiver stating "i know you're incompetent", get insurance to deal with it, or hire competent administrators in the first place.
Hopefully now we'll see increased SPF adoption among major ISP's.
ATTENTION FLAMERS/TROLLS: I'm not an idiot - I realize that SPF doesn't actually help avoid this problem, and subsequently keep your mailserver off black lists. But it does bring the topic "hiring a secure+competent DNS/mailserver" into the forefront.
It seems to me that if your nameserver, and your mail server resolve to the same IP address - then you're cruisin for a bruisin, because you probably don't have a terribly competent mail/dns host.
I'm not a lawyer - but it seems here in the US - it allows ISP's that host spammers and thus have their customers domains blacklisted to be LIABLE for damages (the fines that go-daddy levies, plus lost revenue).
Even if the ISP has a terms of service, blah blah
So I guess we can all expect to be signing competency waivers for most ISP's in the near future.
Rock on GoDaddy!
Open source software sucks and the mentality of their developers sucks. /blow/ more.
.. Silly us, we made it for dumber people, see we put the notes about how to compile the software and that you needed xyz library in a file we thought was obvious -- we called it: README
Y OU_DUMBASS.TXT"
Perhaps we would suck less, if you were to
If you are going to do it for free then don't half-ass it, do it right the first time.
I never half-ass it, I always FULL-ASS it.
I'm tired of coming across something that won't compile correctly or encountering a bug. Then when you research it you come across 100 posts of people asking the same question and getting the same response of fix it yourself or do a search the answer is already here.
Exactly what i'm saying!!! You're clearly too smart, or at least smarter than us open source developers. I wish we could be as smart as you and all the other geniuses / mensa candidates who absolutely over-thinking thinking the problem, and can jump straight to a conclusion without following the steps.
See
Tell you what, we can solve this -- so whats your name?? Jim? perhaps next time we'll name the file:
"HEY_JIM_READTHIS_OR_THIS_WONT_COMPILE_CORRECTLY_
You know what? I've got a job that pays money, I'm not about to waste my time trying to learn the code base for a one off project that looked interesting.
Hey Jim, wow.. thats terrific, i'm glad you've got a job that pays money. See, it shows how smart you are. I really want to help you, since you've demonstrated how superior you are to us -- if you still can't get it compile after reading the file above:
1. You are probably still overthinking the issue, try beating your head against the desk until you are semi-conscious, then try starting over and reading the docs. Let us know if that fixes the problem.
2. Send me your computer, you only need to pay the postage one way. Make sure you do any upgrades to the computer you want to before you send it to me. Also if you've got any good games, be sure to include the CD's, license keys and manuals.
Hey, while i'm ranting..
.. now they think we've got nothing better to do but sit around and implement features for them. (Since they have no bugs, they don't care that anybody else does).
REMEMBER: YOU CAN'T MAKE THE DAMN USERS HAPPY.
I do work for a commercial software company, which offers our service as an ASP platform. It's cheap (almost Free - but we have to eat) and we employ agile/xp programming to do daily, or sometimes even hourly builds as bugs are reported and things are fixed, or features are added. We have been in business for 6 years, the platform is almost 2 million lines of code, we interface with systems that change continually, so new stuff is always coming out and changing.
ANYWAY - MY POINT IS: DAILY BUILDS JUST SPOIL THE USERS EVEN MORE.
Not only do they get it FREE, GOOD AND INSTANTLY
First it makes the damn user assume that everything can be done in some arbitrary unit of time, something reasonable, for most people it's around 6 hours.
It doesn't matter what it is, fix a bug, convert 3rd party library from Perl to VB.net, write a new device driver for a buggy USB device -- according to the user it should take about 6 hours, although it could take less if we had more people working on it. (Which we would, *IF* it was our top priority)
Thank you sir, may I have another???
Anyway, since everything should take about 6 hours, they put in 2-4 requests per day, so that way they don't overwhelm us, you know, but just enough to remind us exactly how brilliant they actually are.
I especially love when they remind me that if only wanted to learn how to program, they would clearly dwarf our intellect and we would all worship them because they are so smart and know so much more about topic xyz.
Of course they're too dumb to realize that they're filing bug reports for what are clearly feature/ehancement requests and of course they piss and moan when I tell them that:
1. It's not a bug -- just because it doesn't work they way you think it should. Your too smart, try thinking differently, more like a dumb person.
If you can't do that, try banging your head against the desk till your semi-conscious, and try again, let me know when you've finished and if that fixes the problem.
2. Contrary to popular belief, we do have other customers, you are not the only one, and most of the others are smarter than you and have better ideas for features than you do.
3. Why don't you try actually using the software for what it does, instead of crying about what it doesn't do. I wish I had software that did something useful like perform a blowjob, or bake me a pannini. Why don't you try doing something useful?
4. No matter how much you whine, I can't re-architect the Internet. If you don't like how this Internet works, find another one.
5. Asking to speak to my manager/supervisor about my attitude does not get your feature implemented faster, it just pisses me off. Sorry boss -- I gotta go fix a real nasty data corruption bug. Hey let me check your account, what was your username again? Clickty Click.
(Speaking on behalf of open source developers everywhere)
You're right, next time we'll respond with "Screw you, if it's really that important -- fix it yourself and provide binaries to everybody on the Internet"
First they want free software.
Then they want good software.
Now they want good, free, software - instantly.
F*cking users.
I always choose the one with the coolest name, that's probably the best.
If both projects have cool names, then the one with the most bitchen logo.
If both projects have cool names, and bitchen logos, then I usually try and use both since that will make my program even more cool and bitchen.
Yet another reason i'm glad our IT department decided to standardize on open office. Doesn't appear opendoc files are targeted.
Umm... ironically there's another article on slashdot today about how IBM's via-voice can automatically subtitle foreign films, it stands to reason that creating text transcripts from a lecture (single speaker) is probably reasonably simple.
Now if somebody could only circumvent the iTunes DRM into a format supported by viavoice -- oh wait, that'd be illegal, damn.
But any alien spaceship with proper shielding wouldn't be affected by this junk. :)
You clearly don't know much about evil aliens with advanced weaponry. Advanced weaponry is only susceptible to three things:
1. Jeff Goldblum
2. Avian Flu
3. Other low tech technologies which their shields have no defenses for (How else did Luke Skywalker blow up the death star?? How did the ewoks beat the storm troopers? huh? huh? huH??)
I just need to let you all know that those alien stooges from the homeland security department already showed up and took my chickens. I guess now our only hope is jeff goldblum. I hope he still keeps in contact with that little girl from Jusassic park who knows how use a unix.
I like space junk - it keeps the aliens away.
First off it makes us look like a poorer planet, I mean honestly who wants to conquer a home with a trans-am up on blocks in the front driveway and thousands of beer cans strewn about the lawn?? Sorry little green guys, we already stripmined this place!
But it's also practical -- long before the impending alien invasion can occur, they'll need to clean up the space junk before they can place their ships in near earth orbit. As soon as the space junk is gone, then there is really nothing to stop them from enslaving us and using us as a food source (mmm.. protein)
As far as i'm concerned space junk is one of the few things keeping us safe, that -- and of course the avian flu. (I'm harboring infected chickens in my cellar just in case one of those little green men shows up at my door)
Pratically speaking: /* BEGIN BACKDOOR CODE */ .. too many eyes on the code. You'd bury backdoors in a series of smaller innocuous subsytems.
If building a backdoor into an operating system, especially one as complex as windows - you wouldn't comment your code with
Specifically - you would place a series of exploitable "steps" you needed to execute in order to fully and REMOTELY compromise a system. Ideally those steps could be used interchangibly -
some steps to remotely get a payload onto the computer and others to remotely execute the payload (or put the payload in a place where it would be executed)
Hey Mr. ISP - no problem, you want to start regulating which sites we get good service at, and which sites we get bad service at? No problem, i'll certainly be happy to pay more for a faster service -- but make no mistake, once you start to regulate you jeapordize that all-so-important "Hey we're only a venue" ruling ..
.. give P2P applications more traffic, and then watch who the RIAA+MPAA turns on!!!!! Oh, how i'd love to see the Smackdown between the RIAA+MPAA vs. The Bells -- bring it on!
Go head
btw> I suggested to our Colo provider a few months ago that they introduce a new two tier, high speed, reduced latency service for AJAX applications (which are highly sensitive to latency)
I suspect Jimbo is probably just a little shell shocked from all the attention he's been getting lately. Whatever Slashdot picks up today could be mainstream news tomorrow, a lot of journalists read this to get perspective and whatnot so they can seem educated. (Yes I know how scary this is)
I think the world needs more Jimbo Wales.
Yeah, it's not bookmarkable, it's doesn't work for the kids on the short yellow bus, and it doesn't print well --- hey Wait a Second!!!! Are we talking about Flash or AJAX here?
AJAX is nothing more than a non-plugin required, much lighter and more flexible, non-modal, proper font-rendering replacement for Adobe Flash.
You can expect people to come up with innovative solutions to the majority of the usability concerns addressed in this article. Also aside from the bookmark/back button argument the majority of the gripes the author has here are really with DHTML/CSS not AJAX at all.
Yes, i'm doing the same thing right now [pre-computing results]. .. but it pulls the file statically.
Built a dictionary of commonly searched for terms, those are the only ones which appear on the autocomplete. Cache the list, change the AJAX call so it references a static list (basically a two layer alphanumeric hashing structure)
The only problem is that all the lame-o ajax frameworks cropping up don't offer that type of flexability without being considered bloatware. I did finally manage to implement it using Perl+HTML::Prototype.
Bottom line we serve out around 15rps across 25 servers, so anythign which can be precomputed must be - saves a lot of clock cycles and provides faster results.
Ajax is also highly sensitive to latency - so the time involved in doing a database and doing any type of select will make the application feel slower. Every millisecond counts!
275 million lines of C .. so what is that roughly translated to?
probably about 27,500,000,000 lines of quick basic?
or roughly 10 lines of Perl.