"Invisible text works just fine, in this case I was referring to text that would be covered by the image, and thus would be treated identically to the text you propose using."
Riiight. That makes a lot more sense. I assumed by "invisible text" you meant setting the foreground text to the same colour as the background - the technique that every beginner SEOer reads about. This has been detected by Googlebot (and several other search engines) for years, and (because it's only ever really used for gaming the search engines) reduces the attractiveness of your site to them.
When this became well-known to blackhat SEOs, the usual technique changed to including text in a block-level element, but use CSS to set its X or Y co-ordinates to negative (or large positive) values.
I should mention that my current knowledge is a good couple of months out of date, but last I heard Google was also likely (everything in SEO is a bit vague, because the search engines modify their algorithms so frequently to avoid gaming them) downgrading keywords found in display:none or visibility:hidden text, for similar reasons.
Think about it - you're a search engine, and your one job is to maximise relevent results and minimize spam.
Your readers are viewing what's shown on the page, so this is only what's of interest to you. You can either treat invisible text as normal text (for no gain either way), or you can downgrade the importance of hidden text, slightly or a lot.
If you downgrade hidden text, you score some (but, to be fair, very few) "legitimate" pages slightly lower than they would otherwise be if all instances of their keywords were taken into account. However, spam pages (which typically use large amounts of hidden text, certainly compared to legitimate uses like custom "tooltips" or navigation menus) loose out a lot... a net gain in relevancy for your results.
Remember, Google isn't trying to maximise the number of results it returns for a given keyword, it's trying to differentiate between the relevant and spammy pages. Frankly, you could probably ignore all text with visibility:hidden or display:none, and still see a large jump in relevance.
"But of course you only advocate CSS, you don't actually have any clue how to use it."
Aaaah, baseless abuse. Constructive and persuasive.
"There are dozens of ways to make search engines see text that most browsers don't display, and most of them still work great."
There are indeed many ways of rendering text invisible that, as far as we know, don't hurt your rankings (or the text's value) in Google and other search engines.
Some, like setting foreground_colour=background_colour are already detected and penalised. Some, like visibility:hidden or display:none may or may not be penalised, or may only be penalised slightly since they have non-illicit uses.
However, the fact remains there are techniques which will flag your page as "spammy". Not every use of even one of these techniques will shitlist a page, but when enough (varies by search engine, but under 10) are used together, your page will be flagged and either reduced drastically in ranking, or de-listed altogether.
I'd love to point you at some beginner SEO resources, but there aren't many that are both comprehensive and up-to-date. SEOing is presently an industry dominated by charlatans and con-men, and anyone who knows anything about it (white or black-hat) is getting paid big bucks to do it, and has little or no interest in sharing the information since as soon as any given trick becomes public knowledge the search engines change their algorithms to prevent it working.
All I can recommend is that you read SEO "industry" forums like www.webmasterworld.com or blogs like GoogleGuySays . Oh, and also to not let your knee-jerk hatred of XHTML bigots lead you into arguments on subjects you obviously know little about...;-)
"Ok, you have succeeded in convincing me. There is no clearer way for me to say THEY GET THE EXACT SAME RESULTS. If you cannot grasp this, and are too stupid to try it and see for yourself, then there is no point talking to you."
If you are incapable of providing any supporting evidence for your assertion, there is no point in listening.
Seriously - what leads you to believe that ALT text is exactly as important as content-text? Everything I've read and heard in a year or two of professional SEOing indicates the opposite.
You haven't offered one reason (or piece of evidence) yet - you've just re-iterated your position and added invective each time.
"Google for GD."
Brilliant! So, instead of text titles and a sprinkling of CSS, you're advocating dynamically generating or resizing images on the server-side and passing them to a browser whose dimensions you may not even know accurately.
Apart from the extra infrastructure, the extra server overhead and the extra download time that's still unnecessarily complicated and pointless.
Let me be clear: in certain situations, you might well want to have images generated server-side, but since you can't reliably and verifiably find out the browser dimensions[1], it's still pretty pointless to do it for this purpose, and certainly an enormously over-engineered solution for the website we're discussing.
[1] Even an AJAX call with the window dimensions won't work on mobile devices that don't support javascript, or on desktops where javascript is disabled, or...
"I am not asserting that at all. I am asserting that its a waste of time, gets you nothing, and makes your site uglier. And if alt tags don't help for google, then stick invisible text in there, who cares?"
1) Taking the time to correctly form and SEO your code is never a waste of time when "higher search rankings" are your aim. Neither is actually bothering to spend time on SEO message boards and watch people chipping away new bits of info from Google after every monthly reshuffle or few-monthly algorithm change, rather than blindly re-iterating your personal belief without actually providing a shred of evidence to support it.
2) It's certainly no more of a waste of time than generating at least two more server-round-trips per title, wasting more time per request on the server generating the images and yet more time downloading the images. Plus all the time to set up the additional back-end infrastructure for a site which really, really doesn't need such an over-complicated solution.
3) Images rarely work well for mobile browsing. Say you've got a cool font for a title that occupies 1/4 of your screen width, and it looks great on your 1600x1200 desktop screen. Now view your site on a mobile phone, with as little as 128 pixels across the screen. The title in your sexy "just gotta look right" font now occupies not 400 pixels, but 32, and is completely illegible. And before you dismiss the entire mobile sector out of hand, recall that decent websites aren't supposed to need recoding from scratch every year or two, and that by the end of the decade mobiles are expected to be the majority platform for web browsing.
4) Text/CSS doesn't have to make your site uglier. In fact, it's possible to make beautiful sites which use text for titles, and pictures for, y'know, pictures. Pop quiz - do the majority of sites on the web use images for titles? No, obviously not, and so using text sensibly for titles will make your page not "ugly", but "average" at worst. And with creative CSS it'll take it from "average" to "pretty".
5) Nobody said ALT text didn't help at all, merely that it wasn't given exactly the same weight as "natural" text. You're the one who wouldn't have it that it was given anything but identical importance.
6) Sticking invisible text into pages is one of the oldest known blackhat SEO tricks, and hasn't worked with any major se
"Search engines do not give a rats ass if your site is xhtml or not. Its really annoying seeing people constantly giving ridiculous reasons to move to xhtml that are complete nonsense."
Go read a fucking SEO book. Search engines do care if your site:
Validates according to a DOCTYPE, rather than is a mess of tag-soup. Although it's perfectly possible to code validating sites in HTML, it's easier to do it in XHTML (with all the formatting in CSS) than in plain HTML with mixed CSS and formatting markup. One of the design requirements of XHTML was that it promote well-formedness, a concept HTML 4- barely even has.
Is in semantic HTML rather than formatting-tag-soup. Search engines supposedly slightly prefer sparse markup and low-markup-to-content ratios over higher markup-to-content ratio pages, and the preference will only get stronger in the future, as major sites convert and more semantic markup becomes the norm.
Is in XHTML. SEO is a notoriously closedmouthed field, but there has been some evidence that search engines prefer XHTML to HTML 4.x, and search engine employees have dropped hints about it becoming more important in the future.
Go read a book. I do this for a job.
"Uh, images get alt tags. Google can index text in alt tags, so replacing images with text for SEO purposes is complete nonsense."
Except that some search engines give less weight to alt tags than regular text, because it's so easy for blackhat SEOers to stuff alt tags with keywords without affecting the readability of their pages.
And adding images with alt tags (rather than text with separate CSS file) increases the markup:content ratio, which can hurt your page rankings. Depending on how different engines calculate it, it may also reduce your keyword density, making the whole page that little bit less attractive to them.
I get the impression that you're some kind of rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth anti-XHTML bigot (or possibly, anti-bigot), and apologies if my advice triggered an episode. I agree that XHTML isn't the cure to all life's problems, but may I recommend in future you confine your frothing to situations where it's actually warranted, to save a lot of embarrassment?
Oh, and for heaven's sake strap down that jerking knee before you do yourself a mischief...
Disclaimer: I'm no Google fanboy (in fact, I can be downright wary about them at times), but this post has several problems and incorrect assumptions:
"Most people know how overrated google has become. Why then do we keep writting about only the good things?"
Maybe it's because (less a certain section of the Slashdot audience where it's trendy to bash Google), "most people" (you know, the 90% of people on the internet who barely know which way round a mouse goes) find Google works perfectly well for them. And from personal subjective experience, it's a lot better than the majority of other search engines out there, and vastly better than the state the search industry was in before Google came along.
And, to be fair, they are extremely innovative as a company - look at the sheer number of products launched (even if they are beta)... can you name many other companies who even beta-release quite such a number of products with quite such regularity? Google also have a good track record of entering a moribund field (search, webmail, etc) and kicking the already-entrenched players up the arse.
They've mastered the Richard Branson/Virgin technique of analyzing an industry, working out what's wrong with every offering out there, and offering something which fixes it. It's not always disruptive tech, but can sometimes merely be disruptive feature-offerings.
"I don't read Cringely very often, but I've never seen even him have anything really negative to say about google. What's up with this? Is it just because they put out some nifty tools that raise large amounts of privacy concerns? Is it because it was ONCE a killer search engine?"
Well, Cringely's a bit of a fanboy, but I've seen him post a few less-than-glowing things about Google before.
"Why aren't poor search results being reported? For example, in the city of Vallejo, CA we are the only facilities based DSL provider and we even own vallejodsl.com, but up until today (which is the first time I've done this search in 2 months) we weren't even on the first 5 pages."
So what? Did you ever think that the website of a single local DSL operator in rural america might not be especially interesting to an audience spread across the entire globe?
You also don't say what search terms you were chasing, which makes this entire statement non-operative in terms of judging Google's performance.
By giving this example you also raise the possibility of the usual scenario - someone who's pissed off with Google because they can't get good rankings for their own pet site, not because it's generally poor at search.
"I've been given huge amounts of excuses for why that could be, but when 80% of the results were blackhat SEO tactics that shoved us back I could care less about them."
Well, you very obviously haven't got good advice. Might I suggest you start by updating the site to XHTML 1.0 (ideally Strict, Transitional will do), and make sure the code validates. If you haven't done this you haven't even taken the first steps you should have taken.
You should also take a lot of that text on the site out of images and put it in lovely plain (but styled) HTML. Google can't index text in images - this is pretty much SEO Baby-Steps lesson #2.
"We are a well established company (15 years in business) and there should be no reason why we should have been so low on the results. We have plenty of backlinks but google only lists like 36 while others list as many 3000. We stood in that "state" for well over 2 years regardless of what we did on our end."
Yes, there is a good reason: your website is crap and hasn't been SEOed at all. Apologies for being harsh, but you need to realise there's a buttload of things you could (and should) be doing, rather than just sitting there blaming the seearch engines.
"It is true that Microsoft is behaving monopolistically with Exchange and Windows Mobile, but that's an issue for regulators and the market to worry about."
Because they've been doing such a bang-up job so far, right?
US keeps control of the root DNS servers, citing the wish to keep them un-regulated by any government.
Next thing you hear, FCC is talking about regulating "the internet", because it's possible to write software that uses the net to perform one function that's functionally quite similar to their existing balliwick?
Sounds fishy to me.
Or, y'know, the original article's author is full of shit and speculating wildly and infeasibly about something he knows nothing about...
"I was wondering if using google now required an extremely crappy browser, a popup laden program installed permanently on your machine making it crawl, and a service which is free for the first 3 months, then too expensive for the bandwidth provided."
"but for beginners a tools like Dreamweaver or Mozilla Composer or its next version nvu might be a good place to start."
No no no, no nono, nonono.;-)
If you learn using a WYSIWYG editor you learn to use the editor - you don't learn to code websites. Learning to write code by hand is slightly more time-consuming while you're learning, but you're learning the skill you need to do the job, not learning how to instruct one of a selection of flaky, inconsistent, inefficient tools that, imperfectly, do the job for you.
"With NVU / Mozilla Composer, if you need something special in your source, you can switch to source-edit-mode and change or insert it."
Indeed. But how many users who learn using a WYSIWYG editor ever go on to properly learn the code that it writes for you? Almost none, comparatively - people are lazy.
Generalising wildly for a moment, I know two types of web designers: those who learned by hacking code, and those who learned by using Frontpage or HoTMetaL or Dreamweaver.
The ones who learned by writing code may subsequently use Dreamweaver or the like to quickly prototype pages, but they almost always end up dropping back into the code and optimising it by hand (especially with XHTML and semantic markup, which visually-oriented HTML editors almost by definition can't do for you).
The ones who learned by using an HTML editor use the editor, but it's because they find writing code difficult or frustrating, not generally through choice. It also means that when you want to do something unusual and you're forced to drop into the code-view, it's ten times harder because you aren't already familiar with the structure of the code in the way you would be if you'd written it yourself from first principles. And this is without even touching on the more advanced issues of bloated, tautological, machine-written code, or the undue influence on your design process of the visual angle over the semantic/navigational/informatics angles.
X/HTML isn't hard - it's not nearly as complicated as even the most basic programming language, and it doesn't come with all sorts of overhead and boilerplate code-cruft that makes using an IDE of any kind worthwhile (unlike, say, Java or Visual C++).
Short version: if a programming language requires three pages of boilerplate on every task, or you just want to get a job done quick 'n' dirty, use a visual editor.
If you want to learn a useful skill, and do the job right, use a text editor with syntax highlighting and a good reference resource.
Editors start you off quicker, but later on actively hamper your development into a coder. And by the time you've learned all the quirks and weird bits of a particular editor, I can guarantee you'll have less motivation to learn the actual stuff you need to know.
In my experience you'll get more instant return using Adwords, but it can be expensive to chase too many keywords, and it only gets more expensive.
Seeking natural listings is much harder, but ultimately cheaper. And as long as you've got a good webmaster who's prepared to stay up-to-date on the subject, it doesn't really get more expensive as time goes on.
So, short-term expensive boost, or longer (but free) slog? Personally I'd be tempted to start an Adwords campaign and follow it up with some serious SEOing of your site. The only trouble is, once you start an AW campaign it'll be very hard to give up those lovely reliable site hits, so you may find yourself suckered into carrying on with it, and suffering the rising expense.
First off I'd start asking for advice (and posting borderline adverts) on SEO messageboards, rather than asking on unrelated boards, especially ones populated chiefly by people who think SEOers are scumbags.
(Disclaimer: there were SEO elements to my last job - I stayed strictly white-hat, but will still agree that most SEOers (outside of those who simply "design a site properly"), as fucking scumbags who will quite happily piss in the communal well for their own selfish gain.)
Secondly, if you want your site to succeed improve your pagerank and advertise. You're like a runner asking "should I try to run faster or bother doing up my shoelaces?". Do both, or you aren't doing a proper job...
Shhhh! Don't go polluting the right-wing libertarian fuck-the-other-guy rhetoric with any of that vile, hippy reality or (hackcoughspit) commie empathy, y'hear?
America was built on fucking over the weak and powerless - first black slaves, then Mexican immigrants, now those in poverty (and, increasingly, normal voters). So refusing to help anyone else not fortunate enough to be born inside the USA's borders by pure, dumb luck is positively patriotic.
And if you don't agree, well, you're clearly a terrorist sympathiser.
"The last I checked, Linus moved to the U.S. many years ago, and large quantities of Linux have been developed by people from the U.S. and others funded by U.S. companies. Then of course there are the actual web clients used by people, versus say the work of Tim Burners Lee."
So what you're saying is that the US should retain absolute control of the internet because they invented it, and non-americans (who still played a great part in making the internet the truly ubiquitous, world-spanning network it is today), can go whistle.
On the other hand, US citizens should be allowed to use Linux because they played a great part in making it truly useful and wide-spread, even though Finland actually "invented" it?
I'm not saying for a second that anyone's "taking my toys and going home" position is anything but fucking retarded, but I just wanted to be clear on your incredibly consistent position and reasoning...;-p
Since 12 parsecs is a measure of distance (not speed), you wouldn't expect it to change.
(Less stellar drift/varying relative velocities, etc, but they shouldn't count for much on the scale of parsecs, unless "a long time ago" is of the order of millions of years).
"With generally good, but less than perfect accuracy. Wikipedia is not the best source of information on a subject this hotly debated."
Of course I accept that Wikipedia isn't perfect, but with the greatest respect I don't think you can make a case that exit polls aren't:
i) Used the world over to predict election results, or ii) Trusted by the majority of democratic processes as at least a good guide to election results.
Fact: Almost every major democratic election in the majority of democratic countries uses exit polls.
Fact: Exit polls have been trusted, ever since they were first invented, as a useful and accurate predictive tool to election results.
Fact: Since the 2000 presidential election, and increasingly, elections results have diverged from the exit-poll predictions. These divergences have closely paralleled the uptake of Diebold (specifically) electronic voting machines.
Fact: The 2000 and (specifically) 2004 elections favoured a party whose popularity was dropping. This is the same party with strong links to the Diebold and ES&S corporations, and the same party that's pushing to have electronic voting machines adopted more widely, while fighting to avoid them having to preserve a paper audit-trail.
Fact: The party pushing for a lack of audit-trail is also the one most opposed to releasing the source-code for the machines, when a right to examine the process by which an election is counted should be you inalienable democratic right to ensure fair play. You can inspect paper-vote counting (in fact, I believe it's required), but not electronic counting?
"Tha's somewhat oversimplified, There are -without doubt- problems. The immediate leap to deliberate tampering is not the only explanation, especially in light of historical incompetence of election workers. The reality is that finding, training, and supervising the volunteers who do the work is a large task filled with problems.
Many of the inaccuracies cited in Florida and Ohio in particular are not evidence of election tampering as much as evidence of the fact that election jobs are handed out to party hacks who aren't competent to do any real work.
Many pollsters are changing their methodologies to deal with problems that have been affecting accuracy for some time."
Granted, it could conceivably be lack of education or training, however:
Since the 2000 elections there hasn't been a radical change in the training processes of exit-pollsters, so the exit polls are unlikely to have suddenly become more or less accurate, meaning the election process itself is somehow at fault.
Given elections using Diebold machines statistically distinctly favour the Republican party, this introduces a party-specific bias which wouldn't be explained by anything to do with the election officials generally, unless Republicans were somehow infiltrating even Democrat-run areas and influencing people's votes somehow. TBH, if this was the case it more like specific and deliberate corruption than incompetence.
Even if pollsters are "changing their methodologies" (Source? Evidence?), the fact remains that nothing happened since 2000 that would cause the exit polls to suddenly (and increasingly) become innacurate compared to a fair, real vote. The only single significant change since then has been the introduction (and increasing adoption) of electronic voting machines, and again, they show a distinct statistical perference for republican wins.
"The problem is that they can only be used to support a -charge- that the election was botched. They can provide no value in determining the cause of inaccuracies, or determining culpability."
Indeed. However, an indication that something's badly wrong should be followed up, not ignored or played down, even by the party in power. And "any indication that something's wrong" is better than "no indication at all", which is what the current right is pushing for by campaigning against
"Uhmm, how is your lack of experience something that should be remedied by your potential employer?"
Because, y'know, if everyone wants 2+ years' commercial experience and nobody wants raw grads, eventually you'll have a situation like in the UK in the early 2000s, where there will be no-one but inexperienced unemployed ex-grads, because nobody will give them commercial experience.
Maybe it's different over here in the UK, but there's a big difference between "commercial experience" and "non-commercial experience". Commercial experience (doing it full-time, for a job) is what employers want, and while (all things being equal) NCE might swing the balance in your favour, turning up to a job that specifies "2+ years experience" and saying "Hey, yeah, I've been sat in my bedroom writing Perl and PHP for a hobby for three years" won't impress anyone.
Obviously an enlightened employer will look at what you were actually doing, not whether or not you were getting paid to do it professionally, but enlightened employers are hard to find in some areass of the UK, and the USA, too.
Oh, and recent UK grads? It's still worth applying for those "2+ years (commercial) experience" jobs, even with only non-commercial experience. If the employer's a good one they'll still be interested, and if they aren't there's a good chance they aren't the kind of employer you'd want to work for anyway.
Be fair - it's not "someone" saying this... from the look of it, it's everyone.
"I don't think it's that dire, though."
With respect, you appear to be in the minority. As your problems hiring someone for this money would also tend to indicate.
"I'm the CEO of the company and my salary is less than $60K/year. My techs are paid hourly -- sometimes, during rough periods, they get paid more than I do. I maanage to live just fine here in San Jose on a $50K/year salary."
Funny thing - you're starting out on a new(ish) business. You admit you still aren't profitable. You (presumably) own the business, you have something invested in it, therefore you should accept lower wages since you're making an investment for the future. Your employees (from the sound of it) do not have any investment, therefore they do not stand to benefit substantially from your business growing, therefore they will require their motivation in decent wages and good working conditions, not in jam-tomorrow "if the company grows we all benefit" rhetoric.
The dotcom era is over. People no longer trust an entrepreneur with big ideas and a business plan that leads to staggering profits in five years, and certainly won't exchange their present comfort for what amounts to a bet on your success as a businessperson.
If people don't own part of the business, they won't be willing to trade present wages for future success. And frankly, even if you offer stock options or some other method of "ownership", you'll still have to find someone who really, really believes that you're going to be successful.
And, not to be rude, but you aren't Google, or Friends Reunited, where you could secure venture capital, grow exponentially and those stock options end up worth a lot. You're an ISP - essentially a commodity vendor, and one who could even ultimately end up being squeezed out by something like municipal wi-fi access.
"The highest salary I've ever had here in the Bay Area working for another company was $49,500. It wasn't easy to live on, but I did it."
Well then - there you go $50,000 wasn't easy to live on, and from the sound of it $60,000 still isn't easy to live on now. And how long ago was it that you were living on $49,500? Don't forget to factor in inflation...
"I'm a little bit better off now that I have my own business, but the fact is that most of my business's revenue gets reinvested into the business. That's what we have to work with. Sorry, folks.:)"
Indeed, and this is the proper method for someone who owns a small business (I do too, so don't think I'm just talking out of my arse about this). However, you aren't going to find employees who are willing to take the same risk as you without the possibility of the same reward as you.
The company is your baby, so you'll make sacrifices to help it grow. Either make the company your employees' baby too, or make the pay for babysitting worthwhile.
The 2000 and 2004 elections were widely suspected to have been corrupt, and there's a positive litany of discrepancies, sketchy behaviour and incredibly convenient "co-incidences" around the personnel involved and results obtained. Then, after these useful and reliable exit polls disagree strongly with the "official" result, the administration says it doesn't want to do exit polls any more?
Have exit polls returned perfectly usable, useful results for the overwhelming majority of the time they've been used? Yes.
If "exit polls" had suddenly and spontaneously broken in this one case, does that justify not using them in the future? No, because statistical outliers aside, in general they're still very good.
Have we discovered any new maths, or a statistical theory that suddenly proves exit polls are dangerously misleading? No.
Were the exit polls wrong disproportionately more often in districts where Diebold machines were used? Yes.
So we have a single event where the long-working exit polls (which are normally accurate) are suddenly and significantly different from the final official tally. This could be written off as a statistical fluke, but the Diebold and ES&S machines are already suspected of widespread insecurity and/or deliberate tampering, and then when it all hits the media the administration announces it won't be conducting exit polls any more?
Why, when they've been used for decades without problem, are exit polls suddenly considered dangerous or misleading? Apart from, that is, their potential to provide an indication of election-tampering?
The internet is only as good as the information on it, which in turn is only as impartial as those putting the information there.
Google hard enough and you can find pages and pages of spurious "facts" supporting any position you like, from partisan/amateur bloggers, on-line tabloids, etc.
Of course, you'll also find a lot of credible stuff debunking that position, so ultimately it really depends on who you believe, which is a judgement call based on (you guessed it) your existing personal prejudices.
What all this fundamentally means is that the intelligent, enlightened self-questioning people will constantly check their opinions, and likely be right. The fat, stupid, bigoted, prejudiced ignoramuses will merely continue to believe whatever they like, and justify it by cheerry-picking the sources that agree with them.
Sure, in the future I sincerely hope there's some kind of impartial reputation system that would differentiate worthless or inaccurate information from respected, researched and evidence-based stuff, but I have no idea how it would work, or how it would be protected from common misconceptions of the majority...
Short version - yes, I'd love to see this, and it could help reduce the influence of fuckwits the world over. However, I think in reality it'll just change politicians from "liars" to "misrepresenters of statistics"... which is pretty much what they're all about now (less some members of the Bush administration, who apparently can't do anything as complicated as "spin", and so settle for just lying through their teeth).
Of course it's important - we're in so much danger it's amazing we make it through each day without being shot, stabbed, infected, exploded or bum-raped to death in an alleyway somewhere, and anyone who says differently is a loony liberal, terrorist sympathiser or against our boys in Iraq.
I really hope you are joking (as the modding suggests).
However, just in case you aren't:
"You can't update Microsoft's software on 3rd party platforms!"
Third-party nothing. They can either provide a separate Windows patching service that doesn't run on their hideous, insecure implementation of open standards (HTTP, HTML, ECMAScript, etc), or they can produce one which conforms to the standards and works on anyone's browser.
Frankly, it was a fucking stupid idea to ever run Windows Update through IE ("hey, let's deliberately give the browser write permissions to system files! That won't weaken security, or raise the possibility of someone else working out how to do it too!").
"To make things worse, Windows update only works on Windows!"
Well duh. Nobody's saying Windows Update should work on anything but Windows, you tool. The key point here is that Windows update has/had to run through IE. Despite what Microsoft delight in telling everyone, IE != Windows. Push IE patches through IE if you want - you're downloading IE patches, so you're likely using IE (not always, but likely enough they could get away with it).
Pushing Windows patches through IE is completely unnecessary, and in fact is bad - it forces you to use IE (ok, good for Microsoft, but that's what this is all about), but also requires you to install ActiveX objects (and grant applicable permissions) for your browser to piss about with your system settings and code.
Even without Microsoft's execrable track record on security, this is clearly a stupid idea.
"They force you to use their platform to update their platform!"
Windows != IE. "Platform" is so vague a word that it's non-operative in this context. How would you feel if they unnecesarily forced you to go and buy a branded Microsoft Mouse and Microsoft Natural Keyboard before Windows Update would work? It's still part of a greater "Microsoft platform", right?
"Then again, maybe you're just another peevish Anonymous Coward on Slashdot. At least you're functional, though, right?"
ROTFL.
Dude, I wish I had mod-points right now. I'm no RMS fanboy, and think his attitude and methods sometimes works against him, but that was just priceless
Slashdot Mirror
"Invisible text works just fine, in this case I was referring to text that would be covered by the image, and thus would be treated identically to the text you propose using."
;-)
Riiight. That makes a lot more sense. I assumed by "invisible text" you meant setting the foreground text to the same colour as the background - the technique that every beginner SEOer reads about. This has been detected by Googlebot (and several other search engines) for years, and (because it's only ever really used for gaming the search engines) reduces the attractiveness of your site to them.
When this became well-known to blackhat SEOs, the usual technique changed to including text in a block-level element, but use CSS to set its X or Y co-ordinates to negative (or large positive) values.
I should mention that my current knowledge is a good couple of months out of date, but last I heard Google was also likely (everything in SEO is a bit vague, because the search engines modify their algorithms so frequently to avoid gaming them) downgrading keywords found in display:none or visibility:hidden text, for similar reasons.
Think about it - you're a search engine, and your one job is to maximise relevent results and minimize spam.
Your readers are viewing what's shown on the page, so this is only what's of interest to you. You can either treat invisible text as normal text (for no gain either way), or you can downgrade the importance of hidden text, slightly or a lot.
If you downgrade hidden text, you score some (but, to be fair, very few) "legitimate" pages slightly lower than they would otherwise be if all instances of their keywords were taken into account. However, spam pages (which typically use large amounts of hidden text, certainly compared to legitimate uses like custom "tooltips" or navigation menus) loose out a lot... a net gain in relevancy for your results.
Remember, Google isn't trying to maximise the number of results it returns for a given keyword, it's trying to differentiate between the relevant and spammy pages. Frankly, you could probably ignore all text with visibility:hidden or display:none, and still see a large jump in relevance.
"But of course you only advocate CSS, you don't actually have any clue how to use it."
Aaaah, baseless abuse. Constructive and persuasive.
"There are dozens of ways to make search engines see text that most browsers don't display, and most of them still work great."
There are indeed many ways of rendering text invisible that, as far as we know, don't hurt your rankings (or the text's value) in Google and other search engines.
Some, like setting foreground_colour=background_colour are already detected and penalised. Some, like visibility:hidden or display:none may or may not be penalised, or may only be penalised slightly since they have non-illicit uses.
However, the fact remains there are techniques which will flag your page as "spammy". Not every use of even one of these techniques will shitlist a page, but when enough (varies by search engine, but under 10) are used together, your page will be flagged and either reduced drastically in ranking, or de-listed altogether.
I'd love to point you at some beginner SEO resources, but there aren't many that are both comprehensive and up-to-date. SEOing is presently an industry dominated by charlatans and con-men, and anyone who knows anything about it (white or black-hat) is getting paid big bucks to do it, and has little or no interest in sharing the information since as soon as any given trick becomes public knowledge the search engines change their algorithms to prevent it working.
All I can recommend is that you read SEO "industry" forums like www.webmasterworld.com or blogs like GoogleGuySays . Oh, and also to not let your knee-jerk hatred of XHTML bigots lead you into arguments on subjects you obviously know little about...
"Ok, you have succeeded in convincing me. There is no clearer way for me to say THEY GET THE EXACT SAME RESULTS. If you cannot grasp this, and are too stupid to try it and see for yourself, then there is no point talking to you."
If you are incapable of providing any supporting evidence for your assertion, there is no point in listening.
Seriously - what leads you to believe that ALT text is exactly as important as content-text? Everything I've read and heard in a year or two of professional SEOing indicates the opposite.
You haven't offered one reason (or piece of evidence) yet - you've just re-iterated your position and added invective each time.
"Google for GD."
Brilliant! So, instead of text titles and a sprinkling of CSS, you're advocating dynamically generating or resizing images on the server-side and passing them to a browser whose dimensions you may not even know accurately.
Apart from the extra infrastructure, the extra server overhead and the extra download time that's still unnecessarily complicated and pointless.
Let me be clear: in certain situations, you might well want to have images generated server-side, but since you can't reliably and verifiably find out the browser dimensions[1], it's still pretty pointless to do it for this purpose, and certainly an enormously over-engineered solution for the website we're discussing.
[1] Even an AJAX call with the window dimensions won't work on mobile devices that don't support javascript, or on desktops where javascript is disabled, or...
"I am not asserting that at all. I am asserting that its a waste of time, gets you nothing, and makes your site uglier. And if alt tags don't help for google, then stick invisible text in there, who cares?"
1) Taking the time to correctly form and SEO your code is never a waste of time when "higher search rankings" are your aim. Neither is actually bothering to spend time on SEO message boards and watch people chipping away new bits of info from Google after every monthly reshuffle or few-monthly algorithm change, rather than blindly re-iterating your personal belief without actually providing a shred of evidence to support it.
2) It's certainly no more of a waste of time than generating at least two more server-round-trips per title, wasting more time per request on the server generating the images and yet more time downloading the images. Plus all the time to set up the additional back-end infrastructure for a site which really, really doesn't need such an over-complicated solution.
3) Images rarely work well for mobile browsing. Say you've got a cool font for a title that occupies 1/4 of your screen width, and it looks great on your 1600x1200 desktop screen. Now view your site on a mobile phone, with as little as 128 pixels across the screen. The title in your sexy "just gotta look right" font now occupies not 400 pixels, but 32, and is completely illegible. And before you dismiss the entire mobile sector out of hand, recall that decent websites aren't supposed to need recoding from scratch every year or two, and that by the end of the decade mobiles are expected to be the majority platform for web browsing.
4) Text/CSS doesn't have to make your site uglier. In fact, it's possible to make beautiful sites which use text for titles, and pictures for, y'know, pictures. Pop quiz - do the majority of sites on the web use images for titles? No, obviously not, and so using text sensibly for titles will make your page not "ugly", but "average" at worst. And with creative CSS it'll take it from "average" to "pretty".
5) Nobody said ALT text didn't help at all, merely that it wasn't given exactly the same weight as "natural" text. You're the one who wouldn't have it that it was given anything but identical importance.
6) Sticking invisible text into pages is one of the oldest known blackhat SEO tricks, and hasn't worked with any major se
"Search engines do not give a rats ass if your site is xhtml or not. Its really annoying seeing people constantly giving ridiculous reasons to move to xhtml that are complete nonsense."
Go read a fucking SEO book. Search engines do care if your site:
Validates according to a DOCTYPE, rather than is a mess of tag-soup. Although it's perfectly possible to code validating sites in HTML, it's easier to do it in XHTML (with all the formatting in CSS) than in plain HTML with mixed CSS and formatting markup. One of the design requirements of XHTML was that it promote well-formedness, a concept HTML 4- barely even has.
Is in semantic HTML rather than formatting-tag-soup. Search engines supposedly slightly prefer sparse markup and low-markup-to-content ratios over higher markup-to-content ratio pages, and the preference will only get stronger in the future, as major sites convert and more semantic markup becomes the norm.
Is in XHTML. SEO is a notoriously closedmouthed field, but there has been some evidence that search engines prefer XHTML to HTML 4.x, and search engine employees have dropped hints about it becoming more important in the future.
Go read a book. I do this for a job.
"Uh, images get alt tags. Google can index text in alt tags, so replacing images with text for SEO purposes is complete nonsense."
Except that some search engines give less weight to alt tags than regular text, because it's so easy for blackhat SEOers to stuff alt tags with keywords without affecting the readability of their pages.
And adding images with alt tags (rather than text with separate CSS file) increases the markup:content ratio, which can hurt your page rankings. Depending on how different engines calculate it, it may also reduce your keyword density, making the whole page that little bit less attractive to them.
I get the impression that you're some kind of rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth anti-XHTML bigot (or possibly, anti-bigot), and apologies if my advice triggered an episode. I agree that XHTML isn't the cure to all life's problems, but may I recommend in future you confine your frothing to situations where it's actually warranted, to save a lot of embarrassment?
Oh, and for heaven's sake strap down that jerking knee before you do yourself a mischief...
Disclaimer: I'm no Google fanboy (in fact, I can be downright wary about them at times), but this post has several problems and incorrect assumptions:
"Most people know how overrated google has become. Why then do we keep writting about only the good things?"
Maybe it's because (less a certain section of the Slashdot audience where it's trendy to bash Google), "most people" (you know, the 90% of people on the internet who barely know which way round a mouse goes) find Google works perfectly well for them. And from personal subjective experience, it's a lot better than the majority of other search engines out there, and vastly better than the state the search industry was in before Google came along.
And, to be fair, they are extremely innovative as a company - look at the sheer number of products launched (even if they are beta)... can you name many other companies who even beta-release quite such a number of products with quite such regularity? Google also have a good track record of entering a moribund field (search, webmail, etc) and kicking the already-entrenched players up the arse.
They've mastered the Richard Branson/Virgin technique of analyzing an industry, working out what's wrong with every offering out there, and offering something which fixes it. It's not always disruptive tech, but can sometimes merely be disruptive feature-offerings.
"I don't read Cringely very often, but I've never seen even him have anything really negative to say about google. What's up with this? Is it just because they put out some nifty tools that raise large amounts of privacy concerns? Is it because it was ONCE a killer search engine?"
Well, Cringely's a bit of a fanboy, but I've seen him post a few less-than-glowing things about Google before.
"Why aren't poor search results being reported? For example, in the city of Vallejo, CA we are the only facilities based DSL provider and we even own vallejodsl.com, but up until today (which is the first time I've done this search in 2 months) we weren't even on the first 5 pages."
So what? Did you ever think that the website of a single local DSL operator in rural america might not be especially interesting to an audience spread across the entire globe?
You also don't say what search terms you were chasing, which makes this entire statement non-operative in terms of judging Google's performance.
By giving this example you also raise the possibility of the usual scenario - someone who's pissed off with Google because they can't get good rankings for their own pet site, not because it's generally poor at search.
"I've been given huge amounts of excuses for why that could be, but when 80% of the results were blackhat SEO tactics that shoved us back I could care less about them."
Well, you very obviously haven't got good advice. Might I suggest you start by updating the site to XHTML 1.0 (ideally Strict, Transitional will do), and make sure the code validates . If you haven't done this you haven't even taken the first steps you should have taken.
You should also take a lot of that text on the site out of images and put it in lovely plain (but styled) HTML. Google can't index text in images - this is pretty much SEO Baby-Steps lesson #2.
"We are a well established company (15 years in business) and there should be no reason why we should have been so low on the results. We have plenty of backlinks but google only lists like 36 while others list as many 3000. We stood in that "state" for well over 2 years regardless of what we did on our end."
Yes, there is a good reason: your website is crap and hasn't been SEOed at all. Apologies for being harsh, but you need to realise there's a buttload of things you could (and should) be doing, rather than just sitting there blaming the seearch engines.
The age of your business is immaterial
"It is true that Microsoft is behaving monopolistically with Exchange and Windows Mobile, but that's an issue for regulators and the market to worry about."
Because they've been doing such a bang-up job so far, right?
Exactly.
US keeps control of the root DNS servers, citing the wish to keep them un-regulated by any government.
Next thing you hear, FCC is talking about regulating "the internet", because it's possible to write software that uses the net to perform one function that's functionally quite similar to their existing balliwick?
Sounds fishy to me.
Or, y'know, the original article's author is full of shit and speculating wildly and infeasibly about something he knows nothing about...
"I was wondering if using google now required an extremely crappy browser, a popup laden program installed permanently on your machine making it crawl, and a service which is free for the first 3 months, then too expensive for the bandwidth provided."
Or a happy thought for the christmas period:
Maybe from now on AOL will be 5% less crap?
"but for beginners a tools like Dreamweaver or Mozilla Composer or its next version nvu might be a good place to start."
;-)
No no no, no nono, nonono.
If you learn using a WYSIWYG editor you learn to use the editor - you don't learn to code websites. Learning to write code by hand is slightly more time-consuming while you're learning, but you're learning the skill you need to do the job, not learning how to instruct one of a selection of flaky, inconsistent, inefficient tools that, imperfectly, do the job for you.
"With NVU / Mozilla Composer, if you need something special in your source, you can switch to source-edit-mode and change or insert it."
Indeed. But how many users who learn using a WYSIWYG editor ever go on to properly learn the code that it writes for you? Almost none, comparatively - people are lazy.
Generalising wildly for a moment, I know two types of web designers: those who learned by hacking code, and those who learned by using Frontpage or HoTMetaL or Dreamweaver.
The ones who learned by writing code may subsequently use Dreamweaver or the like to quickly prototype pages, but they almost always end up dropping back into the code and optimising it by hand (especially with XHTML and semantic markup, which visually-oriented HTML editors almost by definition can't do for you).
The ones who learned by using an HTML editor use the editor, but it's because they find writing code difficult or frustrating, not generally through choice. It also means that when you want to do something unusual and you're forced to drop into the code-view, it's ten times harder because you aren't already familiar with the structure of the code in the way you would be if you'd written it yourself from first principles. And this is without even touching on the more advanced issues of bloated, tautological, machine-written code, or the undue influence on your design process of the visual angle over the semantic/navigational/informatics angles.
X/HTML isn't hard - it's not nearly as complicated as even the most basic programming language, and it doesn't come with all sorts of overhead and boilerplate code-cruft that makes using an IDE of any kind worthwhile (unlike, say, Java or Visual C++).
Short version: if a programming language requires three pages of boilerplate on every task, or you just want to get a job done quick 'n' dirty, use a visual editor.
If you want to learn a useful skill, and do the job right, use a text editor with syntax highlighting and a good reference resource.
Editors start you off quicker, but later on actively hamper your development into a coder. And by the time you've learned all the quirks and weird bits of a particular editor, I can guarantee you'll have less motivation to learn the actual stuff you need to know.
In my experience you'll get more instant return using Adwords, but it can be expensive to chase too many keywords, and it only gets more expensive.
Seeking natural listings is much harder, but ultimately cheaper. And as long as you've got a good webmaster who's prepared to stay up-to-date on the subject, it doesn't really get more expensive as time goes on.
So, short-term expensive boost, or longer (but free) slog? Personally I'd be tempted to start an Adwords campaign and follow it up with some serious SEOing of your site. The only trouble is, once you start an AW campaign it'll be very hard to give up those lovely reliable site hits, so you may find yourself suckered into carrying on with it, and suffering the rising expense.
First off I'd start asking for advice (and posting borderline adverts) on SEO messageboards, rather than asking on unrelated boards, especially ones populated chiefly by people who think SEOers are scumbags.
(Disclaimer: there were SEO elements to my last job - I stayed strictly white-hat, but will still agree that most SEOers (outside of those who simply "design a site properly"), as fucking scumbags who will quite happily piss in the communal well for their own selfish gain.)
Secondly, if you want your site to succeed improve your pagerank and advertise. You're like a runner asking "should I try to run faster or bother doing up my shoelaces?". Do both, or you aren't doing a proper job...
Shhhh! Don't go polluting the right-wing libertarian fuck-the-other-guy rhetoric with any of that vile, hippy reality or (hackcoughspit) commie empathy, y'hear?
America was built on fucking over the weak and powerless - first black slaves, then Mexican immigrants, now those in poverty (and, increasingly, normal voters). So refusing to help anyone else not fortunate enough to be born inside the USA's borders by pure, dumb luck is positively patriotic.
And if you don't agree, well, you're clearly a terrorist sympathiser.
"The last I checked, Linus moved to the U.S. many years ago, and large quantities of Linux have been developed by people from the U.S. and others funded by U.S. companies. Then of course there are the actual web clients used by people, versus say the work of Tim Burners Lee."
;-p
So what you're saying is that the US should retain absolute control of the internet because they invented it, and non-americans (who still played a great part in making the internet the truly ubiquitous, world-spanning network it is today), can go whistle.
On the other hand, US citizens should be allowed to use Linux because they played a great part in making it truly useful and wide-spread, even though Finland actually "invented" it?
I'm not saying for a second that anyone's "taking my toys and going home" position is anything but fucking retarded, but I just wanted to be clear on your incredibly consistent position and reasoning...
Since 12 parsecs is a measure of distance (not speed), you wouldn't expect it to change.
(Less stellar drift/varying relative velocities, etc, but they shouldn't count for much on the scale of parsecs, unless "a long time ago" is of the order of millions of years).
"With generally good, but less than perfect accuracy. Wikipedia is not the best source of information on a subject this hotly debated."
Of course I accept that Wikipedia isn't perfect, but with the greatest respect I don't think you can make a case that exit polls aren't:
i) Used the world over to predict election results, or
ii) Trusted by the majority of democratic processes as at least a good guide to election results.
Fact: Almost every major democratic election in the majority of democratic countries uses exit polls.
Fact: Exit polls have been trusted, ever since they were first invented, as a useful and accurate predictive tool to election results.
Fact: Since the 2000 presidential election, and increasingly, elections results have diverged from the exit-poll predictions. These divergences have closely paralleled the uptake of Diebold (specifically) electronic voting machines.
Fact: The 2000 and (specifically) 2004 elections favoured a party whose popularity was dropping. This is the same party with strong links to the Diebold and ES&S corporations, and the same party that's pushing to have electronic voting machines adopted more widely, while fighting to avoid them having to preserve a paper audit-trail.
Fact: The party pushing for a lack of audit-trail is also the one most opposed to releasing the source-code for the machines, when a right to examine the process by which an election is counted should be you inalienable democratic right to ensure fair play. You can inspect paper-vote counting (in fact, I believe it's required), but not electronic counting?
"Tha's somewhat oversimplified, There are -without doubt- problems. The immediate leap to deliberate tampering is not the only explanation, especially in light of historical incompetence of election workers. The reality is that finding, training, and supervising the volunteers who do the work is a large task filled with problems.
Many of the inaccuracies cited in Florida and Ohio in particular are not evidence of election tampering as much as evidence of the fact that election jobs are handed out to party hacks who aren't competent to do any real work.
Many pollsters are changing their methodologies to deal with problems that have been affecting accuracy for some time."
Granted, it could conceivably be lack of education or training, however:
Since the 2000 elections there hasn't been a radical change in the training processes of exit-pollsters, so the exit polls are unlikely to have suddenly become more or less accurate, meaning the election process itself is somehow at fault.
Given elections using Diebold machines statistically distinctly favour the Republican party, this introduces a party-specific bias which wouldn't be explained by anything to do with the election officials generally, unless Republicans were somehow infiltrating even Democrat-run areas and influencing people's votes somehow. TBH, if this was the case it more like specific and deliberate corruption than incompetence.
Even if pollsters are "changing their methodologies" (Source? Evidence?), the fact remains that nothing happened since 2000 that would cause the exit polls to suddenly (and increasingly) become innacurate compared to a fair, real vote. The only single significant change since then has been the introduction (and increasing adoption) of electronic voting machines, and again, they show a distinct statistical perference for republican wins.
"The problem is that they can only be used to support a -charge- that the election was botched. They can provide no value in determining the cause of inaccuracies, or determining culpability."
Indeed. However, an indication that something's badly wrong should be followed up, not ignored or played down, even by the party in power. And "any indication that something's wrong" is better than "no indication at all", which is what the current right is pushing for by campaigning against
Cheers for the link.
Indeed, soon after the 2004 election I was quite heartened by the lack of 2000-esque shenanigans.
Since then, however, it appears that the only difference was that in 2000 they got caught more.
Still, we don't need no independant oversight of election processes, and we certainly don't need no stinkin' paper-trail, right?
Touché, although in the present USA it isn't always easy to tell where the one stops and the other begins.
You get herpes in your ass?
"Uhmm, how is your lack of experience something that should be remedied by your potential employer?"
Because, y'know, if everyone wants 2+ years' commercial experience and nobody wants raw grads, eventually you'll have a situation like in the UK in the early 2000s, where there will be no-one but inexperienced unemployed ex-grads, because nobody will give them commercial experience.
Maybe it's different over here in the UK, but there's a big difference between "commercial experience" and "non-commercial experience". Commercial experience (doing it full-time, for a job) is what employers want, and while (all things being equal) NCE might swing the balance in your favour, turning up to a job that specifies "2+ years experience" and saying "Hey, yeah, I've been sat in my bedroom writing Perl and PHP for a hobby for three years" won't impress anyone.
Obviously an enlightened employer will look at what you were actually doing, not whether or not you were getting paid to do it professionally, but enlightened employers are hard to find in some areass of the UK, and the USA, too.
Oh, and recent UK grads? It's still worth applying for those "2+ years (commercial) experience" jobs, even with only non-commercial experience. If the employer's a good one they'll still be interested, and if they aren't there's a good chance they aren't the kind of employer you'd want to work for anyway.
"I figured someone would say this."
:)"
Be fair - it's not "someone" saying this... from the look of it, it's everyone.
"I don't think it's that dire, though."
With respect, you appear to be in the minority. As your problems hiring someone for this money would also tend to indicate.
"I'm the CEO of the company and my salary is less than $60K/year. My techs are paid hourly -- sometimes, during rough periods, they get paid more than I do. I maanage to live just fine here in San Jose on a $50K/year salary."
Funny thing - you're starting out on a new(ish) business. You admit you still aren't profitable. You (presumably) own the business, you have something invested in it, therefore you should accept lower wages since you're making an investment for the future. Your employees (from the sound of it) do not have any investment, therefore they do not stand to benefit substantially from your business growing, therefore they will require their motivation in decent wages and good working conditions, not in jam-tomorrow "if the company grows we all benefit" rhetoric.
The dotcom era is over. People no longer trust an entrepreneur with big ideas and a business plan that leads to staggering profits in five years, and certainly won't exchange their present comfort for what amounts to a bet on your success as a businessperson.
If people don't own part of the business, they won't be willing to trade present wages for future success. And frankly, even if you offer stock options or some other method of "ownership", you'll still have to find someone who really, really believes that you're going to be successful.
And, not to be rude, but you aren't Google, or Friends Reunited, where you could secure venture capital, grow exponentially and those stock options end up worth a lot. You're an ISP - essentially a commodity vendor, and one who could even ultimately end up being squeezed out by something like municipal wi-fi access.
"The highest salary I've ever had here in the Bay Area working for another company was $49,500. It wasn't easy to live on, but I did it."
Well then - there you go $50,000 wasn't easy to live on, and from the sound of it $60,000 still isn't easy to live on now. And how long ago was it that you were living on $49,500? Don't forget to factor in inflation...
"I'm a little bit better off now that I have my own business, but the fact is that most of my business's revenue gets reinvested into the business. That's what we have to work with. Sorry, folks.
Indeed, and this is the proper method for someone who owns a small business (I do too, so don't think I'm just talking out of my arse about this). However, you aren't going to find employees who are willing to take the same risk as you without the possibility of the same reward as you.
The company is your baby, so you'll make sacrifices to help it grow. Either make the company your employees' baby too, or make the pay for babysitting worthwhile.
Is that like offsourcing?
The first poster was paranoid, but you're wilfilly oblivious.
Exit polls have been used the world over to predict election results for decades .
The 2000 and 2004 elections were widely suspected to have been corrupt, and there's a positive litany of discrepancies, sketchy behaviour and incredibly convenient "co-incidences" around the personnel involved and results obtained. Then, after these useful and reliable exit polls disagree strongly with the "official" result, the administration says it doesn't want to do exit polls any more?
Have exit polls returned perfectly usable, useful results for the overwhelming majority of the time they've been used? Yes.
If "exit polls" had suddenly and spontaneously broken in this one case, does that justify not using them in the future? No, because statistical outliers aside, in general they're still very good.
Have we discovered any new maths, or a statistical theory that suddenly proves exit polls are dangerously misleading? No.
Were the exit polls wrong disproportionately more often in districts where Diebold machines were used? Yes.
So we have a single event where the long-working exit polls (which are normally accurate) are suddenly and significantly different from the final official tally. This could be written off as a statistical fluke, but the Diebold and ES&S machines are already suspected of widespread insecurity and/or deliberate tampering, and then when it all hits the media the administration announces it won't be conducting exit polls any more?
Why, when they've been used for decades without problem, are exit polls suddenly considered dangerous or misleading? Apart from, that is, their potential to provide an indication of election-tampering?
The internet is only as good as the information on it, which in turn is only as impartial as those putting the information there.
Google hard enough and you can find pages and pages of spurious "facts" supporting any position you like, from partisan/amateur bloggers, on-line tabloids, etc.
Of course, you'll also find a lot of credible stuff debunking that position, so ultimately it really depends on who you believe, which is a judgement call based on (you guessed it) your existing personal prejudices.
What all this fundamentally means is that the intelligent, enlightened self-questioning people will constantly check their opinions, and likely be right. The fat, stupid, bigoted, prejudiced ignoramuses will merely continue to believe whatever they like, and justify it by cheerry-picking the sources that agree with them.
Sure, in the future I sincerely hope there's some kind of impartial reputation system that would differentiate worthless or inaccurate information from respected, researched and evidence-based stuff, but I have no idea how it would work, or how it would be protected from common misconceptions of the majority...
Short version - yes, I'd love to see this, and it could help reduce the influence of fuckwits the world over. However, I think in reality it'll just change politicians from "liars" to "misrepresenters of statistics"... which is pretty much what they're all about now (less some members of the Bush administration, who apparently can't do anything as complicated as "spin", and so settle for just lying through their teeth).
But, but, it's still vital we all give up our essential liberties for a little temporary freedom, right?
Because the world's so dangerous, what with terrorists, rogue states, the completely proportionate concern about avian 'flu, nuclear proliferation and the tidalwave of violent crime that's sweeping the US, UK and entire western world... and not forgetting, of course, all those evil video games turning our kids into gun-toting killers.
Of course it's important - we're in so much danger it's amazing we make it through each day without being shot, stabbed, infected, exploded or bum-raped to death in an alleyway somewhere, and anyone who says differently is a loony liberal, terrorist sympathiser or against our boys in Iraq.
Right?
I really hope you are joking (as the modding suggests).
However, just in case you aren't:
"You can't update Microsoft's software on 3rd party platforms!"
Third-party nothing. They can either provide a separate Windows patching service that doesn't run on their hideous, insecure implementation of open standards (HTTP, HTML, ECMAScript, etc), or they can produce one which conforms to the standards and works on anyone's browser.
Frankly, it was a fucking stupid idea to ever run Windows Update through IE ("hey, let's deliberately give the browser write permissions to system files! That won't weaken security, or raise the possibility of someone else working out how to do it too!").
"To make things worse, Windows update only works on Windows!"
Well duh. Nobody's saying Windows Update should work on anything but Windows, you tool. The key point here is that Windows update has/had to run through IE. Despite what Microsoft delight in telling everyone, IE != Windows. Push IE patches through IE if you want - you're downloading IE patches, so you're likely using IE (not always, but likely enough they could get away with it).
Pushing Windows patches through IE is completely unnecessary, and in fact is bad - it forces you to use IE (ok, good for Microsoft, but that's what this is all about), but also requires you to install ActiveX objects (and grant applicable permissions) for your browser to piss about with your system settings and code.
Even without Microsoft's execrable track record on security, this is clearly a stupid idea.
"They force you to use their platform to update their platform!"
Windows != IE.
"Platform" is so vague a word that it's non-operative in this context. How would you feel if they unnecesarily forced you to go and buy a branded Microsoft Mouse and Microsoft Natural Keyboard before Windows Update would work? It's still part of a greater "Microsoft platform", right?
"It doesn't even work on Linux!"
Actually, it does.
"Then again, maybe you're just another peevish Anonymous Coward on Slashdot. At least you're functional, though, right?"
ROTFL.
Dude, I wish I had mod-points right now. I'm no RMS fanboy, and think his attitude and methods sometimes works against him, but that was just priceless