As a small business owner, I bet you vote for the party that does though. That's disgusting. I've had enough of this kind of moral calculus: the kind of treatment works here receive is outright illegal in Western Europe. Society there hasn't collapsed: in fact, they're better off for it. So screw your pro-business rhetoric. There comes a point when being anti-business is also anti-people, but we're nowhere near that point.
Yeah. Again, it is good that you can't do those sorts of things. It is good that you have to treat your employees as, you know, human beings.
No one said they're not being treated as human beings. But the fact is businesses are not bottomless pits of money. When the economy is hard, it's hard on businesses just as much as it is individuals. So sometimes *not* doing the extra little things is what is necessary for the business to stay afloat.
Your mentality is the one that human kind is struggling to dig out from under and is the cause of almost all the violence and hatred in the world.
No. No it's not. Let me tell you that there's a lot of people in a lot of countries whose lives would drastically improve given the conditions you're whining about.
Once again, look at the recession. Businesses can all fail(well, at least if they aren't bailed out). We are not trying to "dig out" from that mindset, we're trying to get people jobs at livable wages so they can survive. The frills are going to have to come later. You're part of the problem, not the solution.
You feel that just because you and an employer you are entitled to treat employees however badly you want. You do realize that when you pass down that pay cut the
employee needs the money a LOT more than you do, right?
I beg to differ. First off, I treat my employees quite well (disclosure: I don't need too many, so it's not too hard to do so). But secondly, it's my money on the line every day. If I don't have money to take risks, the business doesn't grow. If the business doesn't grow, then no one is going to be making anything, because they'll all be out of the job.
I already give good benefits and wages that top my competitors by quite a bit. If I have to cut that back so the wages are only *slightly* beating my competitors, it's because I literally had to. Anyone that doesn't like it is free to leave.
You might be able to buy another yacht, but that is at the expense of your employees' kids' college money.
Yeah, because all business owners own Yachts. Get out of your dream world where we all make millions.
This mindset is psychopathy, plain and simple. All you see is your own greedy wants and the bottom line in a ledger book, but you are unable to see and feel the human cost of your decisions.
I'm incredibly aware of the human cost of my decisions. But sometimes those decisions are about making it so these people have a job at all a few months down the road. The "faceless corporation" isn't an accident. It's an intentional structure. Why? Because any business, in order to survive has to make decisions that few could make face to face.
I will be glad when the economy turns around and you can't randomly fire people for demanding fair treatment, or randomly cut pay by 20%.
It's not random you idiot. A stable business at it's heart is coldly logical. It's not a hostage situation. Businesses pay employees what they can and what they're worth. If you disagree about what the business can pay you, or what you're worth, leave.
If you're worth more, there will be demand. If not, the market has decided you're not worth more.
I would rather that you did these things on your own, that you would have a soul and a little bit of human decency, but I know that this is too much to ask. I will just be glad that you can be forced into treating people like humans, that is the way it should be.
No one's treating them like dogs.
I once thought exactly like you appear to be thinking here by the way. Then I had to run a business and got some perspective.
It's not that it kills off your soul or anything, but you're responsible for something more than yourself. You're respons
Places like the New York Times have put no decent effort into getting their internet traffic to back out. Their whining is getting ridiculous.
The cost per click of advertising on sites like the New York Times is pretty high. But they put their CPC ads below the fold where users won't click on them. They take the easy branding dollars for the top placements on CPM media buys. The problem with this is that most media buys are cheaper than paying per click(since it requires a high initial $$$ commitment), and are capped at 1 view/person/12 hours. So by the 10th pageview for someone, you're really down the crap inventory.
This is 100% the lazy way out. They should be making a self serve platform (to eliminate the 30%+ cut Google and other PPC companies take), and they should be aggressively looking for advertisers. Start tagging articles, have people bid on the tags themselves(to break down the different topics better).
Move the ads into more aggressive slots, and start putting non intrusive text ads on their mailing list. Quantcast shows them getting 66.5-79.5 million US pageviews a month, and quantcast is pretty conservative. So let's say they put 3 PPC ads in a decent position, and take the high number(79.5 million).
It's not unreasonable to guesstimate the adblock as a whole would get around a 2-3% click through ratio with good targetting. Even at 2%,that would be 1.59 million clicks to the ads per month. The prices would vary so much based on keyword that guessing past that is pointless, but suffice it to say most would be paying $0.75 on the cheaper end, and much more expensive for things about insurance, etc.
And that's just one adblock.
They've got the resources to monetize this, they just aren't. They'd prefer to use safe but low revenue CPM buys, and to let Google take a big chunk of their PPC revenue. Idiots.
Eh. If a domainer isn't taking you seriously they'll give you a "screw off" bid. Like $5,000 for a kinda crappy domain that the domainer truly doesn't expect to get over a few hundred for. The idea is that if the person doesn't buy (as expected) you can hold out for someone who wouldn't likely be a waste of time. On the other hand, every so often someone bites and pays the huge price.
IMO You want to appear to know what you're doing. Act like another domainer. Ask the type-in traffic, etc. When it's being evaluated based on that(which is typically low) it's going to constrain the price a bit.
Thank you!
Plus there's still fledgling services(like Hulu) which rely on contracts that require advertising, and cannot be easily replaced. These are services that I personally want to see succeed so other places follow their model.
I can't believe people are really arrogant enough to think it's ok to deny even the smallest benefit to someone giving them something for free, even if it costs them nothing. It's a slap in the face.
It's not democratic. It's another way for people who want something for nothing to remove ads.
I was onboard for trying to make information free. Well, now a large part of the information is and I'm not about to hurt the companies who embraced the "alternative business models" I supported.
I like their services, and would like them to be able to pay for the server.
Keep in mind if people can't pay via their advertising, they'll likely start charging again. Major step backwards.
Your issue with Chrome is that it isn't available for Mac?
I thought this was a privacy concern?
Chrome should be a dirty word to any privacy advocate/pornography watcher.
Ok. Botched that comment up.
Anyways, I know the two are related, but still resenting the implication. Damn.
Kinda loses the witty edge when I mess it up.
Will the anti-tax people please explain how to pay for two wars and a large military budget?
Right after you explain how they're related. Not everyone that likes low taxes supported the war in Iraq or anything like that.
In fact, some of us that want lower taxes want to distribute a fair amount of the money we DO take in into social programs and education.
Oh wait! I forgot I'm supposed to fit into a stereotype. I mean "screw the gays, close the border, etc". Whew. That was a close one.
If you have a call center(in India) you don't even pay that. When they're not picking up phones, they solve captchas.
Absolutely 0 cost since you'd need them there anyways.
You do give them too much credit. Google doesn't give a flying rats hindquarters about making the internet better.
They want informational sites to rise to the top of the results because informational sites often run adsense as a monetization method. Also, they know companies not ranking well will spend money on adwords to promote their site. As for their other services, they're all aimed around being able to collect more personal data on you, and (eventually) to try and connect online identities to real life ones.
They're a business, not a benevolent carebear spreading love and sunshine.
Other search engines have similar user satisfaction ratings as Google.(Source).
Yahoo is just too incompetent as a company to leverage it (try to advertise on Yahoo, and you'll see what I mean).
I can't believe Google will let the contract expire. If for no other reason because it would take one of their competitors and probably at least double their market share. And that's not even counting the loss of the incredible branding they get from Mozilla.
That has been true in the past, but nowadays it's largely "fast flux" hosting. Essentially just botnets where the name servers/web host change every X interval, so nothing can get shut down. If you tried, by the time you got off hold with the ISP and talked to a real human the website would be hosted elsewhere.
Shame on you for for believe the collection of shit that is this article. Yessir, a multi billion dollar company is getting bullied around by those mean ol' lobbyists:-(
I'm an advertiser with Google, and allow me to say that those companies do not need to "politically bully". There's plenty of grassroots hatred to go around.
Everyone still has this misguided notion that Google is out there helping them out despite all evidence to the opposite.
I advertise on Google, and I'm saying right now they've pretty much got a monopoly. They have no serious competition. MSN lacks an algorithm, and Yahoo lacks competence in the PPC department. Google doesn't have to 'crush' competitors in the same way MS has in the past because their fanatical userbase keeps the competition forever in obscurity. Beyond that, they're terribly difficult to deal with. They often selectively enforce irrational rules, have support staff that flat out lie, gouging margins where they can, etc.
So far the closer people I've met are to the big G, the more paranoid about it they are.
They're not a victim. They're the godamn boogeyman. And yes, they probably have your credit card.
In past years, they really exaggerated the sizes of botnets. They had a lot of trouble telling the different controllers and whatnot. This one, I have a feeling actually IS that large. Especially for a few worms, where different variants were released by different groups who bought the source code and modified it. This one quite possibly is that large. ALSO, 250,000 computers, while it is a massive botnet, is not truly excessive in regards to spam. Take a look at what is being filtered for nowadays. NJABL, DSBL, and the DROP Spamhaus list(ZEN too?) all take the various residential IP ranges out of the mix, or make it much harder to get inboxed with them. The XBL does a good job of listing bots as well. Some botnets that I have seen, there was 96% XBLed. The XBL is enough to doom a message in most cases. None of the dynamic/residential IP blacklists by themselves are enough to bulk folder a message on their own(with most configurations), but also the chances are that a IP that shows up in one, will show up in more than one. Also, on the off chance some administrator was ridiculous enough to use the APEWS list, entire ISPs also will throw a few extra points into the mix. All of this means that whatever numbers someone gets, are worth their time. For example, let's say 70% of this botnet is RBLed(which is possible, especially given the fact that spamhaus says that the storm worm DDOSed them, and I have trouble believing the logs of that did not factor into the RBL). That leaves 62,500 computers NOT xbled. Subtract another 5-10% for computers that cannot have outgoing port 25 connections. Subtract even more for computers listed in multiple dynamic IP/residential blocklists. THAT is why this botnet grew to the size that it did.
Slashdot Mirror
As a small business owner, I bet you vote for the party that does though. That's disgusting. I've had enough of this kind of moral calculus: the kind of treatment works here receive is outright illegal in Western Europe. Society there hasn't collapsed: in fact, they're better off for it. So screw your pro-business rhetoric. There comes a point when being anti-business is also anti-people, but we're nowhere near that point.
You are Completely wrong.
"Yes. This is a very good thing.
Tell that to General Motors.
Yeah. Again, it is good that you can't do those sorts of things. It is good that you have to treat your employees as, you know, human beings.
No one said they're not being treated as human beings. But the fact is businesses are not bottomless pits of money. When the economy is hard, it's hard on businesses just as much as it is individuals. So sometimes *not* doing the extra little things is what is necessary for the business to stay afloat.
Your mentality is the one that human kind is struggling to dig out from under and is the cause of almost all the violence and hatred in the world.
No. No it's not. Let me tell you that there's a lot of people in a lot of countries whose lives would drastically improve given the conditions you're whining about.
Once again, look at the recession. Businesses can all fail(well, at least if they aren't bailed out). We are not trying to "dig out" from that mindset, we're trying to get people jobs at livable wages so they can survive. The frills are going to have to come later. You're part of the problem, not the solution.
You feel that just because you and an employer you are entitled to treat employees however badly you want. You do realize that when you pass down that pay cut the employee needs the money a LOT more than you do, right?
I beg to differ. First off, I treat my employees quite well (disclosure: I don't need too many, so it's not too hard to do so). But secondly, it's my money on the line every day. If I don't have money to take risks, the business doesn't grow. If the business doesn't grow, then no one is going to be making anything, because they'll all be out of the job.
I already give good benefits and wages that top my competitors by quite a bit. If I have to cut that back so the wages are only *slightly* beating my competitors, it's because I literally had to. Anyone that doesn't like it is free to leave.
You might be able to buy another yacht, but that is at the expense of your employees' kids' college money.
Yeah, because all business owners own Yachts. Get out of your dream world where we all make millions.
This mindset is psychopathy, plain and simple. All you see is your own greedy wants and the bottom line in a ledger book, but you are unable to see and feel the human cost of your decisions.
I'm incredibly aware of the human cost of my decisions. But sometimes those decisions are about making it so these people have a job at all a few months down the road. The "faceless corporation" isn't an accident. It's an intentional structure. Why? Because any business, in order to survive has to make decisions that few could make face to face.
I will be glad when the economy turns around and you can't randomly fire people for demanding fair treatment, or randomly cut pay by 20%.
It's not random you idiot. A stable business at it's heart is coldly logical. It's not a hostage situation. Businesses pay employees what they can and what they're worth. If you disagree about what the business can pay you, or what you're worth, leave.
If you're worth more, there will be demand. If not, the market has decided you're not worth more.
I would rather that you did these things on your own, that you would have a soul and a little bit of human decency, but I know that this is too much to ask. I will just be glad that you can be forced into treating people like humans, that is the way it should be.
No one's treating them like dogs.
I once thought exactly like you appear to be thinking here by the way. Then I had to run a business and got some perspective. It's not that it kills off your soul or anything, but you're responsible for something more than yourself. You're respons
Places like the New York Times have put no decent effort into getting their internet traffic to back out. Their whining is getting ridiculous.
The cost per click of advertising on sites like the New York Times is pretty high. But they put their CPC ads below the fold where users won't click on them. They take the easy branding dollars for the top placements on CPM media buys. The problem with this is that most media buys are cheaper than paying per click(since it requires a high initial $$$ commitment), and are capped at 1 view/person/12 hours. So by the 10th pageview for someone, you're really down the crap inventory.
This is 100% the lazy way out. They should be making a self serve platform (to eliminate the 30%+ cut Google and other PPC companies take), and they should be aggressively looking for advertisers. Start tagging articles, have people bid on the tags themselves(to break down the different topics better).
Move the ads into more aggressive slots, and start putting non intrusive text ads on their mailing list. Quantcast shows them getting 66.5-79.5 million US pageviews a month, and quantcast is pretty conservative. So let's say they put 3 PPC ads in a decent position, and take the high number(79.5 million).
It's not unreasonable to guesstimate the adblock as a whole would get around a 2-3% click through ratio with good targetting. Even at 2%,that would be 1.59 million clicks to the ads per month. The prices would vary so much based on keyword that guessing past that is pointless, but suffice it to say most would be paying $0.75 on the cheaper end, and much more expensive for things about insurance, etc. And that's just one adblock. They've got the resources to monetize this, they just aren't. They'd prefer to use safe but low revenue CPM buys, and to let Google take a big chunk of their PPC revenue. Idiots.
I would love the fact if Facebook was being stingy with my information to advertisers, but they're not
A bit outdated...but behold the beauty of easily scrapable ajax ad interfaces.
Eh. If a domainer isn't taking you seriously they'll give you a "screw off" bid. Like $5,000 for a kinda crappy domain that the domainer truly doesn't expect to get over a few hundred for. The idea is that if the person doesn't buy (as expected) you can hold out for someone who wouldn't likely be a waste of time. On the other hand, every so often someone bites and pays the huge price. IMO You want to appear to know what you're doing. Act like another domainer. Ask the type-in traffic, etc. When it's being evaluated based on that(which is typically low) it's going to constrain the price a bit.
If it's overzealous don't use the site.
Either that or it's not the topic of the article.
Thank you! Plus there's still fledgling services(like Hulu) which rely on contracts that require advertising, and cannot be easily replaced. These are services that I personally want to see succeed so other places follow their model. I can't believe people are really arrogant enough to think it's ok to deny even the smallest benefit to someone giving them something for free, even if it costs them nothing. It's a slap in the face.
It's not democratic. It's another way for people who want something for nothing to remove ads. I was onboard for trying to make information free. Well, now a large part of the information is and I'm not about to hurt the companies who embraced the "alternative business models" I supported. I like their services, and would like them to be able to pay for the server. Keep in mind if people can't pay via their advertising, they'll likely start charging again. Major step backwards.
Your issue with Chrome is that it isn't available for Mac? I thought this was a privacy concern? Chrome should be a dirty word to any privacy advocate/pornography watcher.
Ok. Botched that comment up. Anyways, I know the two are related, but still resenting the implication. Damn. Kinda loses the witty edge when I mess it up.
Will the anti-tax people please explain how to pay for two wars and a large military budget?
Right after you explain how they're related. Not everyone that likes low taxes supported the war in Iraq or anything like that.
In fact, some of us that want lower taxes want to distribute a fair amount of the money we DO take in into social programs and education.
Oh wait! I forgot I'm supposed to fit into a stereotype. I mean "screw the gays, close the border, etc". Whew. That was a close one.
If you have a call center(in India) you don't even pay that. When they're not picking up phones, they solve captchas. Absolutely 0 cost since you'd need them there anyways.
You're nuts
No, I'm an advertiser who has to deal with Google on a daily basis.
You do give them too much credit.
Google doesn't give a flying rats hindquarters about making the internet better.
They want informational sites to rise to the top of the results because informational sites often run adsense as a monetization method. Also, they know companies not ranking well will spend money on adwords to promote their site. As for their other services, they're all aimed around being able to collect more personal data on you, and (eventually) to try and connect online identities to real life ones.
They're a business, not a benevolent carebear spreading love and sunshine.
Other search engines have similar user satisfaction ratings as Google.(Source).
Yahoo is just too incompetent as a company to leverage it (try to advertise on Yahoo, and you'll see what I mean).
I can't believe Google will let the contract expire. If for no other reason because it would take one of their competitors and probably at least double their market share. And that's not even counting the loss of the incredible branding they get from Mozilla.
That has been true in the past, but nowadays it's largely "fast flux" hosting. Essentially just botnets where the name servers/web host change every X interval, so nothing can get shut down. If you tried, by the time you got off hold with the ISP and talked to a real human the website would be hosted elsewhere.
Well, I suppose her pants were circumvented.
Shame on you for for believe the collection of shit that is this article. Yessir, a multi billion dollar company is getting bullied around by those mean ol' lobbyists :-(
I'm an advertiser with Google, and allow me to say that those companies do not need to "politically bully". There's plenty of grassroots hatred to go around.
Everyone still has this misguided notion that Google is out there helping them out despite all evidence to the opposite.
I advertise on Google, and I'm saying right now they've pretty much got a monopoly. They have no serious competition. MSN lacks an algorithm, and Yahoo lacks competence in the PPC department. Google doesn't have to 'crush' competitors in the same way MS has in the past because their fanatical userbase keeps the competition forever in obscurity. Beyond that, they're terribly difficult to deal with. They often selectively enforce irrational rules, have support staff that flat out lie, gouging margins where they can, etc.
So far the closer people I've met are to the big G, the more paranoid about it they are.
They're not a victim. They're the godamn boogeyman. And yes, they probably have your credit card.
Recent MSU student, confirming it is. MSU and the engineering department send out enough bullshit to make your inbox worthless as it is.
As soon as someone new throws out their mechanical toothbrush.
According to every single one of the cidr-reports referenced by that spamhaus article, all the blocks of IPs were "withdrawn" Example: http://cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS42811
...that the viruses using this attack were still easier to uninstall than RealPlayer itself.
In past years, they really exaggerated the sizes of botnets. They had a lot of trouble telling the different controllers and whatnot.
This one, I have a feeling actually IS that large.
Especially for a few worms, where different variants were released by different groups who bought the source code and modified it. This one quite possibly is that large.
ALSO, 250,000 computers, while it is a massive botnet, is not truly excessive in regards to spam. Take a look at what is being filtered for nowadays. NJABL, DSBL, and the DROP Spamhaus list(ZEN too?) all take the various residential IP ranges out of the mix, or make it much harder to get inboxed with them. The XBL does a good job of listing bots as well. Some botnets that I have seen, there was 96% XBLed. The XBL is enough to doom a message in most cases. None of the dynamic/residential IP blacklists by themselves are enough to bulk folder a message on their own(with most configurations), but also the chances are that a IP that shows up in one, will show up in more than one. Also, on the off chance some administrator was ridiculous enough to use the APEWS list, entire ISPs also will throw a few extra points into the mix. All of this means that whatever numbers someone gets, are worth their time.
For example, let's say 70% of this botnet is RBLed(which is possible, especially given the fact that spamhaus says that the storm worm DDOSed them, and I have trouble believing the logs of that did not factor into the RBL). That leaves 62,500 computers NOT xbled. Subtract another 5-10% for computers that cannot have outgoing port 25 connections. Subtract even more for computers listed in multiple dynamic IP/residential blocklists.
THAT is why this botnet grew to the size that it did.