I'm sorry that the association is so strong between the general term "blog" and the masses of faux-Cure fan livejournals.
I'm using the term blog as what it is -- a metaphor for a type of journal or website that facilitates community by allowing visitor comments.
SlashDot most certainly is a blog, even though it's been around since before the term. I've been reading it since 1999, as I'm sure you have, so spare me the history lesson.
There are basically two schools of thought in SEO as I've seen it. You can either try and be everywhere (spamming by creating zillions of pages and links) or you can be interesting (like this blog; people want to come here, instead of needing to be tricked).
Unfortunately, most people are about as interesting as watching grass grow, and they know it. So they spam the search engines and aim for the lowest common denominator. Sad, really.
There was a circle of people standing around a man borne up onto a pile of ground, and tied to a stake. The circled crowded the man, yelling insults and spitting in his direction. Just as the first person in the crowd picked up a stone to throw it, a hand siezed his wrist from out of nowhere.
It was Jesus. Jesus said "let he who is without sin throw the first stone." Everyone in the circle looked down, and the man on the stake looked hopeful . Slowly but surely, all eyes fixed on Jesus, who realized that it was only he who was without sin.
"My go then, I take it" Jesus said as he picked up and whipped a large rock right into the man's face.
So wrong, yet so, so right. Just like what should happen to keyword spammers.
I'm sorry - and sorry to hear that; not trying to offend. Having had the experience you've had, do you find that Americans like me just expect too much privacy, open preceedings, and access to government? I do understand the case for the patriot act; that is to say, I do understand when people claim that it will not be abused or a tool for silencing government criticism. I'm just pointing out, however, that there is no grey area in the matter of law. The PATRIOT simply violates the US Constitution, and in doing so, discounts 225 years of precedent.
Section 3103a of title 18, United States Code, is amended--
(1) by inserting `(a) IN GENERAL- ' before `In addition'; and
(2) by adding at the end the following:
`(b) DELAY- With respect to the issuance of any warrant or court order under this section, or any other rule of law, to search for and seize any property or material that constitutes evidence of a criminal offense in violation of the laws of the United States, any notice required, or that may be required, to be given may be delayed if--
`(1) the court finds reasonable cause to believe that providing immediate notification of the execution of the warrant may have an adverse result (as defined in section 2705);
`(2) the warrant prohibits the seizure of any tangible property, any wire or electronic communication (as defined in section 2510), or, except as expressly provided in chapter 121, any stored wire or electronic information, except where the court finds reasonable necessity for the seizure; and
`(3) the warrant provides for the giving of such notice within a reasonable period of its execution, which period may thereafter be extended by the court for good cause shown.'.
Combine this with the fact that there is no judicial oversight -- that is, no accountability, and that no charges need be levied against an individual to be detained, and you have a police state. What's omnipitence got to do with that?
This kind of mentality really breaks my little heart. Knee-jerk?
Dude, you live in a police state. You don't care.
Why is that?
Just because I haven't acquiesed to the idea of living in a police state doesn't make me reactionary. I'm not off to Canada - yet - but America is just not right in the head anymore.
The PATRIOT act may not have problems? Have you read it? I read it, the law itself, when it was passed. At any rate, I'm sure you're aware of its content.
It's dangerous to freedom; in fact, it's antithetical to freedom, hence Orwellian. It's an all access invitation to a police state; no need to RSVP. Secret wire taps, secret email reading, secret databases, secret trials, and we've begun to see discussion (on this blog) of secret laws.
Look, I understand what you're driving at here, but I simply refuse to have a conversation that presupposes that the very existence of the USA PATRIOT act is legitimate.
1. I'm fully aware of that. It was the article, and not the bird in the tree outside, that supplied that information to me. My question is: what about those? That's a huge number of complaints. I'm interested in the nature of those complaints. I'm also interested in what the rate of dismissal will be for those cases that fell outside of IOG's juristiction.
2. It is preposterous to suggest that the USA PATRIOT act, and subsequent government reports about it, should be accepted at face value, or at any other value for that matter. The law is flawed, fundamentally, and an investigation of its abuses taken on by a media outlet that would carry weight and credibility (hard to find in these times) is the ONLY way the law will ever be repealed or revised.
This isn't about them being "out the get me". This is about the use of words like freedom and partiot that bear no meaning in an Orwellian scenario. It's not Bush sycophant, on one hand, and total tinfoil-hatter on the other. There are legitimate reasons for real people, whatever that means, to be concerned about freedom in the USA.
1. What about of the one-quarter of all complaints that were outside of OIG's juristiction?
2. What is a rough itemization of the unwarranted complaints? The government's own PDF only gives cartoon-like examples of people who clearly need to adjust their tinfoil hats. This story is highly dubious since the wording, figures, and conclusions sseem to suggest that people who question the PATRIOT act are stupid, crazy or both. A story that would be much more illuminating would be one that investigates the government's report, instead of simply parroting it like a good comarade. But then, where are the names? How would a journalist even go about such a story? And more significantly for the times we live in, how would such a story ever see the light of day in the mass media. It wouldn't, that's how.
The Yahoo! Developer Kit has been very easy to use and very powerful. XML services are the future (or present, depending on how bloody you like your edge) of the web.
This is invigorating to see. It's interesting that we come full-circle back to punch cards with these polymer wafers. I wonder if it will suffer from any of the read/write limitations that exist with flash ROM storage?
At any rate, the fact that it requires so little energy and that it's orders of magnitude smaller than magnetic storage.. if it's as reliable as magnetic and optical discs, this would revolutionize storage even in long-term storage applications where data reliability is a factor.
I suppose I do show my age when suggesting BASIC -- like it's still the only game in town, as is was to me at age seven when I flipped on the CoCo. Another poster has recommended Smalltalk. Python seems like a great language for learning. I learned on Pascal and FORTRAN in intro comp. sci. courses, then took algorithms and data structures within C++ as the language. Pascal alone is a big step up from BASIC, but Python is an even better choice.
The original point I made was that it doesn't matter, and I'm not sure BASIC is harmful, but it is antiquated and clumsy by comparison to more modern scriping languages.
I kind of agree about BASIC. At the very least, I understand what motivates you to post that.
On the other hand, though, it seems like BASIC is a perfect choice for a K-5'er since it's relatively clean, and it great for very, very simple stuff, like demonstrating what a variable is. Or showing a simple for loop. Those concepts that are so elementary as to be transparent to you are the very ones that the COCO books showed me so well, and for which BASIC was a great platform for learning.
Night Vision Linux Webcams All the Rage?
on
Infrared Webcam HOWTO
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Infared web cam? Somehow I don't think Bubble Cam would be quite the same at night.:D
I do wonder what the most common applications for Linux/IrDA are, considering the trend I've observed where among the most commonly requested Linux HOWTOs recently have been 'laptop', 'infrared' and 'webcam'. Is everyone building infrared webcams?
Every so often you see a post from someone who's thankful that they learned on a C64, since it was possible to "know everything" about the system, down to the bit. For me, that same thing is true, except with a Tandy COCO1 (and later COCO2).
I found that the manuals they had, with the anthropomorphized computer dude, were exactly what I needed to learn. The funny thing is, those books were written for adults, but come across like child's manuals since it was assumed that even an adult would know *zero* about how computers work in the early 80's.
My recommendation for the kids is to have them see very basic principles in BASIC if possible, since it's so, well, basic - not that it really matters. What made it so exciting for me as a 8 year old kid was that it seemed possible to know and understand everything about the machine - especially since the book was comprehensive and it wasn't exactly huge. The combination of the cartoon character, the limited and reasonable limit on the total knowledge one could possess about the machine, and the simple, clear lessons engaged my child's mind completely and really sparked my imagination.
Not in a large organization, no. I did work for a few different outfits on the campus of Michigan State Univ., where I got a taste of how bizarre large beauracracies can be. Talk about the left hand not knowing what the right is doing...
But I've never personally seen the Machiavellian stuff you're alluding to, and that MS eats for breakfast.
Microsoft should see its day in court for this. This case was so clearly predatory and demonstrates the continued belligerence of Microsoft and its corporate strategy. I'm not sure if Burst.com decided that it was too expensive to take this to court, or if Microsoft simply made them an offer they couldn't refuse. Just shows how fluid the law is when there's enough money in the equation. With settlements being the de facto standard response to criminal corporate behavoir, it's no wonder anti-social companies like MS are more and more common - meaining known to the public to be criminals. What really blows me away is the public acceptance, or at least apathy, of companies like MS because it's more practical to look the other way.
Thanks for pointing that out. I flipped it in my mind. It does underscore that the climate is condusive to lone wolf success today. I'm gauging lone wolf success, though, much differently than I would for Google or Yahoo! of course. Modest success is something the savvy lone wolf can obtain pretty handily today.
There is a quote in that article by Rob Hersov that describes the way a lot of people felt at that time:
"Those were incredibly heady days," he says. "Fun - absolutely. We thought we were making a difference. We thought we were getting out there, shaking things up, doing something no one had done before. We really were pioneers - buccaneers."
That statement demonstrates the two truths of the dot com explosion: on one had, we really did make a difference - we built a huge IT infrastructure in, essentially, the blink of an eye. On the other hand, that statement is packed with the hubris and exaggerated sense of importance that also permeated the time.
The analogy was often made in 2000/2001 of the Detroit auto industry and the development of the US national highway system. The same thing happened with scores (or maybe it was hundreds?) of companies popping up with the word "motors" in their name during the period. And now there are 3; the big 3 left in Detroit.
Not only that, but barring e-Bay and a few other notables, the companies that made it out of the bubble are ones with unique brand names: Google, Amazon, Travelocity, Yahoo!, and GoDaddy.
I also disagree with the apparent conclusion that there are no lone wolves anymore. The climate is better for a savvy lone wolf than it was even in 1997, I believe.
Who came up with the e-Idea of e-Appending e-E to e-Everything anyway?
A lot of search engines would have just hardcoded their own result at or near the number one spot. Not trying to be a Google fanboy, but you gotta give them credit for at least cheating the hard way.
Graham writes that one of Google's three ideas was to provide "clean, simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads."
I remember in 2001/2002, when Google truly became a household name, there was little in the way of ad programs, and far fewer ads in their pages. And there certainly wasn't any of this going on.
The net mean age in the survey is more telling, I think, than the subject of the survey: MMORPG gamers.
~ 23 or 24 appears to be the net mean age of all survey groups, and in my experience, and as someone from that generation, we spend a lot of time online for many different reasons.
I'm a programmer and an information junkie who's never played a MMORPG in his life. When I was interviewed for my job last year, I was told the company was looking for someone who "lives on the web." All these people focusing on games don't realize the most obvious phenomenon: the web as a lifestyle.
There was a time, certainly, when it was true, but not anymore.
I've been playing around with my.yahoo.com lately. The level of customizability and ease of use is on par with anything Google does*. Not knocking Google, but only giving Yahoo! its due credit.
To answer the grandparent, of course not! I know this because, well, Yahoo's been doing this for a while....I didn't see a slashdot.org headline. Anyone else?
* the irony is that Firefox + RSS is just as, or even more, capable than either service.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry that the association is so strong between the general term "blog" and the masses of faux-Cure fan livejournals.
I'm using the term blog as what it is -- a metaphor for a type of journal or website that facilitates community by allowing visitor comments.
SlashDot most certainly is a blog, even though it's been around since before the term. I've been reading it since 1999, as I'm sure you have, so spare me the history lesson.
This is totally true.
There are basically two schools of thought in SEO as I've seen it. You can either try and be everywhere (spamming by creating zillions of pages and links) or you can be interesting (like this blog; people want to come here, instead of needing to be tricked).
Unfortunately, most people are about as interesting as watching grass grow, and they know it. So they spam the search engines and aim for the lowest common denominator. Sad, really.
There was a circle of people standing around a man borne up onto a pile of ground, and tied to a stake. The circled crowded the man, yelling insults and spitting in his direction. Just as the first person in the crowd picked up a stone to throw it, a hand siezed his wrist from out of nowhere.
It was Jesus. Jesus said "let he who is without sin throw the first stone." Everyone in the circle looked down, and the man on the stake looked hopeful . Slowly but surely, all eyes fixed on Jesus, who realized that it was only he who was without sin.
"My go then, I take it" Jesus said as he picked up and whipped a large rock right into the man's face.
So wrong, yet so, so right. Just like what should happen to keyword spammers.
I'm sorry - and sorry to hear that; not trying to offend. Having had the experience you've had, do you find that Americans like me just expect too much privacy, open preceedings, and access to government? I do understand the case for the patriot act; that is to say, I do understand when people claim that it will not be abused or a tool for silencing government criticism. I'm just pointing out, however, that there is no grey area in the matter of law. The PATRIOT simply violates the US Constitution, and in doing so, discounts 225 years of precedent.
Let's take section 213: Combine this with the fact that there is no judicial oversight -- that is, no accountability, and that no charges need be levied against an individual to be detained, and you have a police state. What's omnipitence got to do with that?
This kind of mentality really breaks my little heart. Knee-jerk?
Dude, you live in a police state. You don't care. Why is that?
Just because I haven't acquiesed to the idea of living in a police state doesn't make me reactionary. I'm not off to Canada - yet - but America is just not right in the head anymore.
Wha!?!?!
The PATRIOT act may not have problems? Have you read it? I read it, the law itself, when it was passed. At any rate, I'm sure you're aware of its content.
It's dangerous to freedom; in fact, it's antithetical to freedom, hence Orwellian. It's an all access invitation to a police state; no need to RSVP. Secret wire taps, secret email reading, secret databases, secret trials, and we've begun to see discussion (on this blog) of secret laws.
But, yeah, nothing to see here...
Look, I understand what you're driving at here, but I simply refuse to have a conversation that presupposes that the very existence of the USA PATRIOT act is legitimate.
It is you, sir, that comes bearing tripe.
1. I'm fully aware of that. It was the article, and not the bird in the tree outside, that supplied that information to me. My question is: what about those? That's a huge number of complaints. I'm interested in the nature of those complaints. I'm also interested in what the rate of dismissal will be for those cases that fell outside of IOG's juristiction.
2. It is preposterous to suggest that the USA PATRIOT act, and subsequent government reports about it, should be accepted at face value, or at any other value for that matter. The law is flawed, fundamentally, and an investigation of its abuses taken on by a media outlet that would carry weight and credibility (hard to find in these times) is the ONLY way the law will ever be repealed or revised.
This isn't about them being "out the get me". This is about the use of words like freedom and partiot that bear no meaning in an Orwellian scenario. It's not Bush sycophant, on one hand, and total tinfoil-hatter on the other. There are legitimate reasons for real people, whatever that means, to be concerned about freedom in the USA.
1. What about of the one-quarter of all complaints that were outside of OIG's juristiction?
2. What is a rough itemization of the unwarranted complaints? The government's own PDF only gives cartoon-like examples of people who clearly need to adjust their tinfoil hats. This story is highly dubious since the wording, figures, and conclusions sseem to suggest that people who question the PATRIOT act are stupid, crazy or both. A story that would be much more illuminating would be one that investigates the government's report, instead of simply parroting it like a good comarade. But then, where are the names? How would a journalist even go about such a story? And more significantly for the times we live in, how would such a story ever see the light of day in the mass media. It wouldn't, that's how.
It's way past 1984.
The Yahoo! Developer Kit has been very easy to use and very powerful. XML services are the future (or present, depending on how bloody you like your edge) of the web.
This is invigorating to see. It's interesting that we come full-circle back to punch cards with these polymer wafers. I wonder if it will suffer from any of the read/write limitations that exist with flash ROM storage?
At any rate, the fact that it requires so little energy and that it's orders of magnitude smaller than magnetic storage.. if it's as reliable as magnetic and optical discs, this would revolutionize storage even in long-term storage applications where data reliability is a factor.
Nice post KFG.
I suppose I do show my age when suggesting BASIC -- like it's still the only game in town, as is was to me at age seven when I flipped on the CoCo. Another poster has recommended Smalltalk. Python seems like a great language for learning. I learned on Pascal and FORTRAN in intro comp. sci. courses, then took algorithms and data structures within C++ as the language. Pascal alone is a big step up from BASIC, but Python is an even better choice.
The original point I made was that it doesn't matter, and I'm not sure BASIC is harmful, but it is antiquated and clumsy by comparison to more modern scriping languages.
I kind of agree about BASIC. At the very least, I understand what motivates you to post that.
On the other hand, though, it seems like BASIC is a perfect choice for a K-5'er since it's relatively clean, and it great for very, very simple stuff, like demonstrating what a variable is. Or showing a simple for loop. Those concepts that are so elementary as to be transparent to you are the very ones that the COCO books showed me so well, and for which BASIC was a great platform for learning.
Infared web cam? Somehow I don't think Bubble Cam would be quite the same at night. :D
I do wonder what the most common applications for Linux/IrDA are, considering the trend I've observed where among the most commonly requested Linux HOWTOs recently have been 'laptop', 'infrared' and 'webcam'. Is everyone building infrared webcams?
Every so often you see a post from someone who's thankful that they learned on a C64, since it was possible to "know everything" about the system, down to the bit. For me, that same thing is true, except with a Tandy COCO1 (and later COCO2).
I found that the manuals they had, with the anthropomorphized computer dude, were exactly what I needed to learn. The funny thing is, those books were written for adults, but come across like child's manuals since it was assumed that even an adult would know *zero* about how computers work in the early 80's.
My recommendation for the kids is to have them see very basic principles in BASIC if possible, since it's so, well, basic - not that it really matters. What made it so exciting for me as a 8 year old kid was that it seemed possible to know and understand everything about the machine - especially since the book was comprehensive and it wasn't exactly huge. The combination of the cartoon character, the limited and reasonable limit on the total knowledge one could possess about the machine, and the simple, clear lessons engaged my child's mind completely and really sparked my imagination.
COCO manual and another one.
ps, mffp? (my first first post?)
Not in a large organization, no. I did work for a few different outfits on the campus of Michigan State Univ., where I got a taste of how bizarre large beauracracies can be. Talk about the left hand not knowing what the right is doing...
But I've never personally seen the Machiavellian stuff you're alluding to, and that MS eats for breakfast.
Microsoft should see its day in court for this. This case was so clearly predatory and demonstrates the continued belligerence of Microsoft and its corporate strategy. I'm not sure if Burst.com decided that it was too expensive to take this to court, or if Microsoft simply made them an offer they couldn't refuse. Just shows how fluid the law is when there's enough money in the equation. With settlements being the de facto standard response to criminal corporate behavoir, it's no wonder anti-social companies like MS are more and more common - meaining known to the public to be criminals. What really blows me away is the public acceptance, or at least apathy, of companies like MS because it's more practical to look the other way.
Thanks for pointing that out. I flipped it in my mind. It does underscore that the climate is condusive to lone wolf success today. I'm gauging lone wolf success, though, much differently than I would for Google or Yahoo! of course. Modest success is something the savvy lone wolf can obtain pretty handily today.
You're right.
Most sincere e-pologies...
There is a quote in that article by Rob Hersov that describes the way a lot of people felt at that time:
"Those were incredibly heady days," he says. "Fun - absolutely. We thought we were making a difference. We thought we were getting out there, shaking things up, doing something no one had done before. We really were pioneers - buccaneers."
That statement demonstrates the two truths of the dot com explosion: on one had, we really did make a difference - we built a huge IT infrastructure in, essentially, the blink of an eye. On the other hand, that statement is packed with the hubris and exaggerated sense of importance that also permeated the time.
The analogy was often made in 2000/2001 of the Detroit auto industry and the development of the US national highway system. The same thing happened with scores (or maybe it was hundreds?) of companies popping up with the word "motors" in their name during the period. And now there are 3; the big 3 left in Detroit.
Not only that, but barring e-Bay and a few other notables, the companies that made it out of the bubble are ones with unique brand names: Google, Amazon, Travelocity, Yahoo!, and GoDaddy.
I also disagree with the apparent conclusion that there are no lone wolves anymore. The climate is better for a savvy lone wolf than it was even in 1997, I believe.
Who came up with the e-Idea of e-Appending e-E to e-Everything anyway?
A lot of search engines would have just hardcoded their own result at or near the number one spot. Not trying to be a Google fanboy, but you gotta give them credit for at least cheating the hard way.
Graham writes that one of Google's three ideas was to provide "clean, simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads."
I remember in 2001/2002, when Google truly became a household name, there was little in the way of ad programs, and far fewer ads in their pages. And there certainly wasn't any of this going on.
The net mean age in the survey is more telling, I think, than the subject of the survey: MMORPG gamers.
~ 23 or 24 appears to be the net mean age of all survey groups, and in my experience, and as someone from that generation, we spend a lot of time online for many different reasons.
I'm a programmer and an information junkie who's never played a MMORPG in his life. When I was interviewed for my job last year, I was told the company was looking for someone who "lives on the web." All these people focusing on games don't realize the most obvious phenomenon: the web as a lifestyle.
That's not true!
There was a time, certainly, when it was true, but not anymore.
I've been playing around with my.yahoo.com lately. The level of customizability and ease of use is on par with anything Google does*. Not knocking Google, but only giving Yahoo! its due credit.
To answer the grandparent, of course not! I know this because, well, Yahoo's been doing this for a while....I didn't see a slashdot.org headline. Anyone else?
* the irony is that Firefox + RSS is just as, or even more, capable than either service.