If you survey a bunch of people about what they wish they could do on Linux they'd probably say "the same stuff I do on Windows - browse the net, send emails, chatrooms, myspace, Google". All of which they can do on Linux.
Why can't they run PS on Linux anyway? Isn't OSX based on Linux?
Right. Cause industrial-strength photo manipulation is at the core of every job, and we should all blow $1600 on Photoshop. While we're at it, everyone needs the full Adobe (and former Macromedia) suites too.
The only thing this sort of survey shows is how much piracy goes on. There's no way in hell every kid under 20 has paid for PhotoShop, or Dreamweaver, or Flash, or all the other "must have" crap.
It doesn't need to spider a site in it's entirety. Chances are if a site is displaying one page for Google and another for users, it is site-wide. Random 'spot checks' would be more than ample.
A sampling of just 5 pages picked at random with a healthy interval between requests (for instance, an hour, a day or a week) would be enough to eliminate the majority of 'cloaked pages'.
The 5 visits/pageviews are not going to severely distort traffic analysis, or put an undue burdon on the server.
There's a few comments which talk about Google stripping the PR like that's the punishment.
The punishment is not the stripping of PR, but being delisted. There are no bmw.de pages in Google. The URL is not in Google.
PR is calculated by an algorithm. It has been reset to 0, but that is because the site has been DE-LISTED. It is 0 now, because the URL is not in Google.
When the site qualifies for reinclusion the site's PR will return to it's normal value. It is calculated by an algorithm on a computer, not a pen, paper and opinion.
Now, the relevance of PageRank.
PageRank is one of many deciding factors used to sort search results by relevancy. It is far from the only one, and if you use something like http://www.seochat.com/?tool=7&option=com_seotools you will see pretty quickly that the PR between results can vary greatly. You are quite likely to see lower-PR pages (or no PR pages) returned in the top 20 results, ahead of higher ones.
If PR was truly a critical factor, there would not be 3 pages with PR0 in the first 20 results, and PR5's would not dominate the results.
I'm disappointed that after 10 years Google can't write a spider that DOESN'T identify itself as GoogleBot and confirms that pages match what the spider sees. How hard could it possibly be to setup a few more spiders' whose sole job is to follow the real Googlebots and misidentify their UA to confirm what's been indexed?
What kind of dumb-ass uses a beta browser for their banking anyway? It's not going to kill them to flick back to whatever their regular (non-beta) browser is.
I don't just mean IE either. Firefox in it's pre 1.0 days had a bug where tabs could read form data from other tabs. Like credit card numbers. All the way up to 1.0.
Why aren't beta's being released with some sort of self-setting desktop wallpaper that says "Look dipshit this is a beta product, and not like Google Beta TM, like buggy beta, so spare a seconds thought before you go doing your finances".
In next weeks news: some stupid fuck loses his identity and $20000 minutes after using IE7 Beta to pay his bills, therefore IE7 is bad.
Digg and Slashdot aren't about content, they're about community and discussion. People don't visit either site to get the news they visit them to share their opinions, witty remarks, trollisms or commentary.
Del.icio.us isn't about content either, it's about taking a feature that's built into most browsers called "favourites" and hyping it up like it's something new.
Sharing favourites has been around as long as the commercial internet, email and MSN Messenger. The only 'new' aspect with del.icio.us is that you're sharing favourites with people you don't know. Except that's the same as the millions of sites that have a page full of links the author cares about.
I guess the only thing new with deli.icio.us after all is it shows the.us domain wasn't a one-hit wonder (imageshack). Only 8 more.us sites need to "make it" and there'll be enough for a top 10!
This is a shining example of Google innovation. There's a crapload of anti "badware" software out there already, and there's quite a good free one which coincidentally is provided by Microsoft.
Nagora - fixing bugs in the IDE can be done independently of the Flash Player. They are two independent pieces of software. One creates, one views.
There is no reason why they couldn't fix the IDE without "breaking" anything. Why have they written an entire new version of ActionScript and still not included basic string manipulation like.. String.replace?
Then there's the shitty for loops. Why does a for loop chew your computer a new arse once you hit 4 digits? I did an app recently that brought about 20,000 rows of data into Flash and I had to fuck around using setInterval's just to process it without melting my notebook.
I think it's a pretty crappy program when you've got to add a small library of functions to do normal, ordinary stuff just to compensate for Macromedia's half-arsedness.
Flash is crap. Macromedia's components are bloated pieces of crap. Flash ActionScript doesn't do 1/2 what it should. The newer versions don't address the older problems they just add more candy for trendwhore designer kiddies.
Given the option between using Adobe's version of Flash or using Microsoft's alternative, I will opt for Microsoft. Adobe will just slow it down to the point where you can go have a coffee/smoke/sleep/holiday while waiting for the plugins to load.
I noticed a lot of comments from people concerned about Google tracking their every move. But guess what? That's been happening for years.
- Ads by Goooooooogle don't "discard" the evidence that you were there. These would give Google a fairly clear idea on where you're going on the net.
- Toolbar, if you've got this you're consenting to them inserting tracking microchips in your sphincter.
- Search, everyone's heard about how they log all the searches, cookies that never expire etc etc.
- Accelerator... browsing through Google is sure to give them some idea of what you're doing.
- GMail... in case your browsing habits aren't enough they can go a little deeper.
It's super-duper-obvious that Google already knows way too much about way too many people, but they're only going to learn a *little* more with Analytics.
Analytics is all about measuring ROI - how those "Ads by Gooooooogle" are working for you. Over time Google is going to have a *very* good idea on what you and I and everyone else is actually spending $$$ on. I would not be surprised in the least if Analytics was *purely* a move to get that (goldmine) of data.
Having said all of that, I'm sure that 2006 or 2007 will see Google brought back to earth. There is no disputing that most people blindly love them, but there is also a growing number of people who have realised Google isn't what they used to be. Now they're just profiteering whores like all their competitors, playing in the crumbs of innovation.
For those who think Analytics is actually something new, it used to be a software package called Urchin. Google bought, badged and buggered it.
Those people are going to be getting less every year though. I think eventually a critical mass will be reached in the next 1 - 2 years where it stops being "worth" writing spy/adware because the numbers susceptible will just be too small.
For those witty people who've pointed out it's in Beta and therefore should not be judged too harshly.... NEARLY EVERYTHING BY GOOGLE IS IN BETA.
Google uses the term "Beta" they way regular people use the term "final release, further development will not occur ever".
I think Google News is the oldest service they offer that is STILL IN BETA - from memory it's 6 years old now.
If there's any tweaking on one of their (many) Beta services it's most likely going to be the advertisements tweaked to perform a little better.
Anyway. Google Video (the buying bit anyway) is a joke. I went there with the honest intent to purchase a flick, and couldn't find anything I wanted to see. Where's all the popular movies and tv shows??
Why they even bothered launching without amassing a huge amount of movies and shows (that people would pay money for) is beyond me.
I bought a shiney new laptop in September last year. Yesterday I finally downloaded MS AntiSpyware and ran it *for the first time*.
For the last 4 months or so, I've been casually browsing the internet, downloading at a whim etc, and all I've had between me and 'the bad guys' is: - Service Pack 2 which came pre-installed, - Symantec AntiVirus, - D-Link router.
In these 4 months I've had - no viruses *successfully* installed, - no spyware installed, - no browser hijacking/adware/whatever.
I'm using the computer with an Administrator account, and all the update/security settings are what XP recommended the first time I turned it on.
So I'm out and about browsing all over the web for the last 4 months and nothing's "got me". Who is still being "got" by spyware? The ones with bootleg XP's that can't install SP2?
This is presumably because each new release of OSX has enough cool features to give it some appeal, even without a bunch of critical security updates.
No. It's because software vendors stop catering for older Apple operating systems. If you want to upgrade your software, you have to upgrade your OS first.
Site design can be screwed up. It can also be done right. People regularly do it both ways. The database server usually isn't the reason. The people using it are.
You're entirely correct. But are [government drones] going to be anywhere near the standard that Google/Yahoo etc employ?
Obviously in _special_ areas they would be, but generally....
I've seen mysql die on countless websites. I shudder to think how it's going to handle something that's actually more important than someone's blog/forum/whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really think it's a bunch of 20 year old pirates who "must have" Notes, Quickbooks, Visio, Quicken, or Autocad?
No. I think that just emphasises there's a pretty obvious overlap between what kids 'need' and what businesses use.
With the exception of Autocad, the rest of the 'grown up stuff' are near-standard business tools.
If you survey a bunch of people about what they wish they could do on Linux they'd probably say "the same stuff I do on Windows - browse the net, send emails, chatrooms, myspace, Google". All of which they can do on Linux.
Why can't they run PS on Linux anyway? Isn't OSX based on Linux?
You make some very good points, I hadn't looked at it from that perspective.
Right. Cause industrial-strength photo manipulation is at the core of every job, and we should all blow $1600 on Photoshop. While we're at it, everyone needs the full Adobe (and former Macromedia) suites too.
The only thing this sort of survey shows is how much piracy goes on. There's no way in hell every kid under 20 has paid for PhotoShop, or Dreamweaver, or Flash, or all the other "must have" crap.
It doesn't need to spider a site in it's entirety. Chances are if a site is displaying one page for Google and another for users, it is site-wide. Random 'spot checks' would be more than ample.
A sampling of just 5 pages picked at random with a healthy interval between requests (for instance, an hour, a day or a week) would be enough to eliminate the majority of 'cloaked pages'.
The 5 visits/pageviews are not going to severely distort traffic analysis, or put an undue burdon on the server.
There's a few comments which talk about Google stripping the PR like that's the punishment.
s you will see pretty quickly that the PR between results can vary greatly. You are quite likely to see lower-PR pages (or no PR pages) returned in the top 20 results, ahead of higher ones.
The punishment is not the stripping of PR, but being delisted. There are no bmw.de pages in Google. The URL is not in Google.
PR is calculated by an algorithm. It has been reset to 0, but that is because the site has been DE-LISTED. It is 0 now, because the URL is not in Google.
When the site qualifies for reinclusion the site's PR will return to it's normal value. It is calculated by an algorithm on a computer, not a pen, paper and opinion.
Now, the relevance of PageRank.
PageRank is one of many deciding factors used to sort search results by relevancy. It is far from the only one, and if you use something like http://www.seochat.com/?tool=7&option=com_seotool
For instance, porn:
5 - 5 - 5 - 6 - 5 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 7 - 5 - 5 - 5 - 0 - 0 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 5 - 5 - 0
If PR was truly a critical factor, there would not be 3 pages with PR0 in the first 20 results, and PR5's would not dominate the results.
I'm disappointed that after 10 years Google can't write a spider that DOESN'T identify itself as GoogleBot and confirms that pages match what the spider sees. How hard could it possibly be to setup a few more spiders' whose sole job is to follow the real Googlebots and misidentify their UA to confirm what's been indexed?
AFAIK, IE7 replaced IE6
Eventually yes. When the word Beta gets scratched out.
It does install alongside 6 I believe, though people have had problems installing/uninstalling either or both from what I read.
What kind of dumb-ass uses a beta browser for their banking anyway? It's not going to kill them to flick back to whatever their regular (non-beta) browser is.
I don't just mean IE either. Firefox in it's pre 1.0 days had a bug where tabs could read form data from other tabs. Like credit card numbers. All the way up to 1.0.
Why aren't beta's being released with some sort of self-setting desktop wallpaper that says "Look dipshit this is a beta product, and not like Google Beta TM, like buggy beta, so spare a seconds thought before you go doing your finances".
In next weeks news: some stupid fuck loses his identity and $20000 minutes after using IE7 Beta to pay his bills, therefore IE7 is bad.
Digg and Slashdot aren't about content, they're about community and discussion. People don't visit either site to get the news they visit them to share their opinions, witty remarks, trollisms or commentary. Del.icio.us isn't about content either, it's about taking a feature that's built into most browsers called "favourites" and hyping it up like it's something new. Sharing favourites has been around as long as the commercial internet, email and MSN Messenger. The only 'new' aspect with del.icio.us is that you're sharing favourites with people you don't know. Except that's the same as the millions of sites that have a page full of links the author cares about. I guess the only thing new with deli.icio.us after all is it shows the .us domain wasn't a one-hit wonder (imageshack). Only 8 more .us sites need to "make it" and there'll be enough for a top 10!
I was being sarcastic
This is a shining example of Google innovation. There's a crapload of anti "badware" software out there already, and there's quite a good free one which coincidentally is provided by Microsoft.
... a Google Messenger? Oops.
What's next
Google Video sucks. I can't wait for a suckful Google iTunes clone that features a few hundred foreign songs I couldn't give a crap about.
and Google is greedy. Of course Google'll bend over for the commies, they represent how many 10's of millions of web users able to click Google ads?
XP loads faster than Acrobat for me. Coffee brews faster than Acrobat can open a PDF.
Nagora - fixing bugs in the IDE can be done independently of the Flash Player. They are two independent pieces of software. One creates, one views. There is no reason why they couldn't fix the IDE without "breaking" anything. Why have they written an entire new version of ActionScript and still not included basic string manipulation like .. String.replace?
Then there's the shitty for loops. Why does a for loop chew your computer a new arse once you hit 4 digits? I did an app recently that brought about 20,000 rows of data into Flash and I had to fuck around using setInterval's just to process it without melting my notebook.
I think it's a pretty crappy program when you've got to add a small library of functions to do normal, ordinary stuff just to compensate for Macromedia's half-arsedness.
Flash is crap. Macromedia's components are bloated pieces of crap. Flash ActionScript doesn't do 1/2 what it should. The newer versions don't address the older problems they just add more candy for trendwhore designer kiddies. Given the option between using Adobe's version of Flash or using Microsoft's alternative, I will opt for Microsoft. Adobe will just slow it down to the point where you can go have a coffee/smoke/sleep/holiday while waiting for the plugins to load.
Does that mean they'll pay people to use it? .NET Framework is free.
I noticed a lot of comments from people concerned about Google tracking their every move. But guess what? That's been happening for years.
... browsing through Google is sure to give them some idea of what you're doing.
... in case your browsing habits aren't enough they can go a little deeper.
- Ads by Goooooooogle don't "discard" the evidence that you were there. These would give Google a fairly clear idea on where you're going on the net.
- Toolbar, if you've got this you're consenting to them inserting tracking microchips in your sphincter.
- Search, everyone's heard about how they log all the searches, cookies that never expire etc etc.
- Accelerator
- GMail
It's super-duper-obvious that Google already knows way too much about way too many people, but they're only going to learn a *little* more with Analytics.
Analytics is all about measuring ROI - how those "Ads by Gooooooogle" are working for you. Over time Google is going to have a *very* good idea on what you and I and everyone else is actually spending $$$ on. I would not be surprised in the least if Analytics was *purely* a move to get that (goldmine) of data.
Having said all of that, I'm sure that 2006 or 2007 will see Google brought back to earth. There is no disputing that most people blindly love them, but there is also a growing number of people who have realised Google isn't what they used to be. Now they're just profiteering whores like all their competitors, playing in the crumbs of innovation.
For those who think Analytics is actually something new, it used to be a software package called Urchin. Google bought, badged and buggered it.
Very good points amias.
Those people are going to be getting less every year though. I think eventually a critical mass will be reached in the next 1 - 2 years where it stops being "worth" writing spy/adware because the numbers susceptible will just be too small.
For those witty people who've pointed out it's in Beta and therefore should not be judged too harshly .... NEARLY EVERYTHING BY GOOGLE IS IN BETA.
Google uses the term "Beta" they way regular people use the term "final release, further development will not occur ever".
I think Google News is the oldest service they offer that is STILL IN BETA - from memory it's 6 years old now.
If there's any tweaking on one of their (many) Beta services it's most likely going to be the advertisements tweaked to perform a little better.
Anyway. Google Video (the buying bit anyway) is a joke. I went there with the honest intent to purchase a flick, and couldn't find anything I wanted to see. Where's all the popular movies and tv shows??
Why they even bothered launching without amassing a huge amount of movies and shows (that people would pay money for) is beyond me.
There's probably a whole lot of keygen.zip's out there that contain all kinds of dodgy stuff including virus's and ad/spyware.
(Some) people will download "crack.zip" and then run "crack.exe" without even thinking.
Is spyware still a 'big issue' these days?
I bought a shiney new laptop in September last year. Yesterday I finally downloaded MS AntiSpyware and ran it *for the first time*.
For the last 4 months or so, I've been casually browsing the internet, downloading at a whim etc, and all I've had between me and 'the bad guys' is:
- Service Pack 2 which came pre-installed,
- Symantec AntiVirus,
- D-Link router.
In these 4 months I've had
- no viruses *successfully* installed,
- no spyware installed,
- no browser hijacking/adware/whatever.
I'm using the computer with an Administrator account, and all the update/security settings are what XP recommended the first time I turned it on.
So I'm out and about browsing all over the web for the last 4 months and nothing's "got me". Who is still being "got" by spyware? The ones with bootleg XP's that can't install SP2?
This is presumably because each new release of OSX has enough cool features to give it some appeal, even without a bunch of critical security updates. No. It's because software vendors stop catering for older Apple operating systems. If you want to upgrade your software, you have to upgrade your OS first.
Site design can be screwed up. It can also be done right. People regularly do it both ways. The database server usually isn't the reason. The people using it are.
....
You're entirely correct. But are [government drones] going to be anywhere near the standard that Google/Yahoo etc employ?
Obviously in _special_ areas they would be, but generally
I've seen mysql die on countless websites. I shudder to think how it's going to handle something that's actually more important than someone's blog/forum/whatever.