Yes, learning how to figure things out with pencil and paper is the basis of being a programmer or engineer. I also suggest plenty of art, and if available, start music lessons at a young age. We have three kids. With all those activities, they don't have too much time for watching movies (never commercial TV), nor playing computer games. Maybe 30 - 60 minutes per day of screen time should be the limit. Even a little kid (18 months) will get a big kick out of an appropriate computer game. It's just another toy.
Hey Jimbo, missed the interview... How will you prevent Wikipedia from becoming balkanized, just like ordinary society,
as groups of users with differing views form up their own projects, and
start slinging mud at each other and calling each other "trolls"? Won't additional
restrictions on editing, in the name of "quality," drive potential
contributors to other pursuits? How will you prevent
Wikipedia from turning into a collection of cranks, slackers, and trolls?
The truth doesn't matter in the law. No matter what RIM does, NTP will file a new motion. This is all posturing before a final settlement, or until USPTO throws out the patents. Even then NTP will just keep appealing. This dispute won't be settled for many years or until all the money disappears and there is nothing worth fighting about.
RIM has already stated that they have a technology workaround that does not infringe the "patents." When the injunction comes down,
they'll patch the software and go about their merry business. NTP will make another motion, and it will be boxed around by the courts for a few
more years. Hopefully, by which time, the USPTO will invalidate the bogus patents upon which NTP bases their claims.
If everyone excludes SE's from indexing their sites, then the SE's won't have any content to peddle, breaking their revenue model.
Already people are finding better ways to index the Internet, including Wikipedia and Del.icio.us. Yahoo! tries much harder than Google to monetize everything in their search engine. For instance, Yahoo!'s much-hated Paid Inclusion program allows garbage sites to improve their "natural" search ranking. As a result of money-induced bias, Yahoo! is rapidly losing market share to Google. When the "suits" take over Google, it's inevitable, they will destroy Google's appeal, and some other resource will become king of Internet indexing.
SE's are neither good nor bad. They are a tool that exists because people use them. When their usefulness is over, they will become extinct.
ScuttleMonkey's summary is bunkum. Einstein was unique because of his character, not his genius. The masses recognized that Einstein was an extraordinarily humane and humble man.
From Wikipedia:
Einstein himself was deeply concerned with the social impact of scientific discoveries.
His reverence for all creation, his belief in the grandeur, beauty, and sublimity of
the universe (the primary source of inspiration in science), his awe for the scheme
that is manifested in the material universe--all of these show through in his work and
philosophy.
Albert Einstein was much respected for his kind and friendly demeanor rooted in his pacifism. He was modest about his abilities, and had distinctive attitudes and fashions--for example, he minimized his wardrobe so that he would not need to waste time in deciding on what to wear. He occasionally had a playful sense of humor, and enjoyed sailing and playing the violin. He was also the stereotypical "absent-minded professor"; he was often forgetful of everyday items, such as keys, and would focus so intently on solving physics problems that he would often become oblivious to his surroundings. In his later years, his appearance inadvertently created (or reflected) another stereotype of scientist in the process: the researcher with unruly white hair.
After the war, though, Einstein lobbied for nuclear disarmament and a world government: "I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth--rocks!"
With the frequency of big companies losing personal data, if they were required to report it to us, we'd get so many useless form letters that it would all mean nothing. In practice, the great majority of identity theft involves small-scale cons, not backup tapes. Identity thieves do not have the motivation to systematically rip off large numbers of people. (Those with such skills inevitably find a way to manage a big company, or run for elected office.)
The great majority of identity thieves are skimming credit card account numbers at the restaurant point of sale, dumpster diving, or phishing for grandma's personal information.
When a good company buys a bad company, the result is usually mediocrity. It's can be much harder to fix a crap company than to start fresh and build it right.
However, that isn't what's happening here. Google is only buying 5% AOL, and they already have a business relationship. Google crunched the numbers and determined that one Billion dollars was the right price to pay for renewing their lucrative contracts with AOL, establishing some new contracts, and disrupting Microsoft's plans.
A great test of a web site tests is loading on a Blackberry. Sometimes I move blocks of code around and use absolute positioning so the good stuff renders first, to help reduce thumb pain. (/. has too many nav links at the top of the code, so you have to scroll a lot to see the stories.) Googlebot "sees" web pages much the same way as a Blackberry. Indeed, search optimization and accessibility have a lot in common.
I am not sure XHTML is the key to accessibility. XHTML allows tables, which are often misused to control layout. The code flow of a table is different from visual representation, causing loss of semantic information when the page is rendered on alternative browsers or spiders that don't assemble the table the same way.
These common SEO/accessibility strategies provide good results on mobile devices, even with HTML 4.01, and as an additional benefit, make it much easier to manage the site, and may help search visibility:
Fix all validation errors and warnings.
Replace Javascript menus, or provide alternate text menus wrapped in NOSCRIPT tags.
Add alternate plain HTML to any Flash OBJECTS.
Strip layout tables and replace with DIVs. Tables with tabular data are fine, but consider adding CAPTION, THEAD, TBODY and TFOOT for better control over appearance.
Rip out presentation attributes and replace with CSS formatting. This greatly reduces file size and simplifies the code reducing the potential for errors, speeding page loads, and saving Google some disk space.
Once the above process has been done, the resulting HTML 4.01 can be converted to XHTML with trivial easy.
Provide something unique and valuable on the site so people will link to it.
Advertise with Pay-Per-Click, even if it's just $50 per month. That will help you understand what keywords work best for your site, and which advertising messages resonate with the public
Validate your code. Program for accessibility using CSS layout. Standards-compliant HTML will load correctly and display useful information on browsers for Linux, Windows, Max OS, Blackberry, and other platforms. If your code is riddled with errors, or inaccessible links (Javascript, Flash), Googlebot won't be able to index your site or read all your content.
Do the above and you will be better than 99% of all web sites.
The new site and the old site must have competed against each other in the bidding if they ran at the same time. New Site probably lowered Old Site's click-through rate, so old site's rankings dropped, causing a downward spiral of lower click-through and lower ranking. Long ago the site rankings may have gone up in a virtuous circle of higher click-through and higher position - at a time when there was less competition. Just because it happened once, doesn't mean it can happen again the same way.
Old site didn't have the history of new site, so it wouldn't rank the same. The system is complicated, and just because some people don't understand it, doesn't mean that Google is being EVIL.
Google has explained the ranking algorithm. It is historical Click Through Rate (CTR) times Bid times 1,000, equals effective Cost Per Mil (CPM), thousand impressions. Google ranks ads by effective CPM, end of story. For new ads that have no history, Google assumes a low-side CTR.
The lesson: If you want to test Google Adwords, tinker with a few keywords or a few ads at a time, in case you get unexpected results, to avoid hosing your entire campaign.
Second lesson: Use the Google conversion tracker. For each keyword, set Bid = Conversion Rate * desired Cost Per Action (desired CPA = what you are willing to pay to get a conversion). That works real well.
The VoIP companies have to pay to terminate calls to the PSTN (Public Service Telephone Network), so free is difficult business model. They also have to provide servers, bandwidth, and pay their staffs.
You don't need to buy an international plan to make international calls. Most VoIP companies allow free calling to other subs, so if you have a friend overseas, buy two $5.95 setups, and then talk forever, no additional charge. Also, with the $5.95 you get the full range of services - inbound calls, voicemail, caller id, so it's really not a bad deal.
Vonage is currently spending about $200 to acquire each of their customers. When the customers pay only $24.95 per month, and there's plenty of churn, this is a sure fire way to blow gobs of cash.
The game plan at Vonage is to get big fast, then sell shares via IPO. To accomplish this, they want to maximize sizzle and attract as many suckers as possible to the IPO. Hence the massive (and inefficient) advertising campaign, and the go-in-all-directions business development strategy, accompanied by all-too-frequent press releases.
I just hope that Vonage doesn't implode too soon, giving the whole VoIP market a bad rap. There is even a chance that Vonage may succeed with the IPO, cut their costs, and start to make a profit.
The Russian mafia would never kill a valuable asset for fun, vindictiveness or competition. The only logical reason for killing is to keep somebody quiet. Punishments can be devised that are much worse than death. The right question to ask in this situation is, "What did this bloke know, and why did somebody need to keep him quiet?"
We could save lives by banning skydiving, skiing, candbars, and real butter. Why stop there, let's insist on wrapping telephone poles in bubble wrap. Every year a few kids are kidnapped by predators they meet online, so let's ban computer use too.
People are adults. They can decide what risks they want to take. Personal liberty is worth something too.
When you register a.com, you consent to jurisdiction by NAF, and yes, they have power. When somebody wins a case, NAF issues a written order that can transfer ownership of a domain name from one party to another. An example of a decision.
The decision reads, in part:
DECISION
Having established all three elements required under the ICANN Policy, the Panel
concludes that relief shall be GRANTED.
Accordingly, it is Ordered that the <intellitrack.com> domain name be
TRANSFERRED from Respondent to Complainant.
Will the next generation of BroadBand enable massive increase in pay-per-view programming? At those speeds you could download live or recorded TV and movies from anywhere, not just your local cable co. So content producers could sell directly to customers, and bypass their current distribution networks.
What does this mean for broadcast TV, movie houses, and the local cable monopolies?
I like Search Status, which conserves space. It installs on the lower right corner of the window, and provides Google Pagerank, and Alexa traffic stats. Very handy for comparing different web sites to see relative traffic or PageRank. With Firefox, the other Google toolbar features are not too exciting.
Find a hardware manufacturer desiring a cheaper, simpler, bigger boobed, whatever OS.
Write software for the OS to emulate an existing device with a large install base, while performing better.
How can a hardware manufacturer use a new OS?
Example: Lots of computers, especially mobile computers, but also fixed terminals, are needed in business and industry to collect data and feed it to a central server. Large organizations have gazillions of lines of old code that works perfectly fine, and is designed to interface with something simple, like a VT100 or 5250. These legacy applications are going to be around for a long, long time.
Want to market a new OS? Start by writing terminal emulation software. This is not too difficult. Ideally, you write the OS to run efficiently on a low spec, bulletproof computer. Now you've got a market to sell thousands, or tens of thousands of inexpensive, durable computers and OS's.
Threre's a little company in Texas that makes, as in manufactures, computer in the USA. AML mobile computers run Linux, and come packaged with terminal emulation software. They are used to imitate dumb terminals so people can wirelessly collect data on the shop floor, or in a warehouse. AML also manufactures stationary terminals. These low tech devices are reasonably durable, and cost hundred less per unit than competing devices that have to pay the Windows tax.
The simple fact is that AML uses Linux because it's convenient. They could just as easily use something else, if it existed. All they need to do is port one application. The clients literally don't care what OS the devices run. So long as the device can pretend to be the appropriate flavor of dumb terminal, it's good enough. The less it costs, and the less frequently it breaks, the better.
What OS is the Blackberry running? It has 3 million users.
Big phone companies will die by their reputations.
VoIP has been great for my small business. My VoIP line sim-rings my office, home office, and cellphone. No matter where I am, no matter if the power grid is working or not, I get every call. Customers love it, because they can always get through. VoIP voice quality is usually excellent. E911 has been mandated by the feds, so it will be up and running in a couple months. Just in case, I keep one copper line at home and office, both with minimal service.
Every small bus owner ought to start experimenting with VoIP. If one provider sucks, keep trying others until you are happy. Start with a lower cost plan, then upgrade when you feel confident to use it all the time. At $9.95 per month, learning to use VoIP is well worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, learning how to figure things out with pencil and paper is the basis of being a programmer or engineer. I also suggest plenty of art, and if available, start music lessons at a young age. We have three kids. With all those activities, they don't have too much time for watching movies (never commercial TV), nor playing computer games. Maybe 30 - 60 minutes per day of screen time should be the limit. Even a little kid (18 months) will get a big kick out of an appropriate computer game. It's just another toy.
Hey Jimbo, missed the interview... How will you prevent Wikipedia from becoming balkanized, just like ordinary society, as groups of users with differing views form up their own projects, and start slinging mud at each other and calling each other "trolls"? Won't additional restrictions on editing, in the name of "quality," drive potential contributors to other pursuits? How will you prevent Wikipedia from turning into a collection of cranks, slackers, and trolls?
The truth doesn't matter in the law. No matter what RIM does, NTP will file a new motion. This is all posturing before a final settlement, or until USPTO throws out the patents. Even then NTP will just keep appealing. This dispute won't be settled for many years or until all the money disappears and there is nothing worth fighting about.
RIM has already stated that they have a technology workaround that does not infringe the "patents." When the injunction comes down, they'll patch the software and go about their merry business. NTP will make another motion, and it will be boxed around by the courts for a few more years. Hopefully, by which time, the USPTO will invalidate the bogus patents upon which NTP bases their claims.
If everyone excludes SE's from indexing their sites, then the SE's won't have any content to peddle, breaking their revenue model.
Already people are finding better ways to index the Internet, including Wikipedia and Del.icio.us. Yahoo! tries much harder than Google to monetize everything in their search engine. For instance, Yahoo!'s much-hated Paid Inclusion program allows garbage sites to improve their "natural" search ranking. As a result of money-induced bias, Yahoo! is rapidly losing market share to Google. When the "suits" take over Google, it's inevitable, they will destroy Google's appeal, and some other resource will become king of Internet indexing.
SE's are neither good nor bad. They are a tool that exists because people use them. When their usefulness is over, they will become extinct.
communities plan for survival in a Mad Max type world with limited resources ruled by violent warlords.
We're already pwned by violent warlords!-
One Bush President
- Two Bush Governors
- A Governator
Ack!From Wikipedia:
With the frequency of big companies losing personal data, if they were required to report it to us, we'd get so many useless form letters that it would all mean nothing. In practice, the great majority of identity theft involves small-scale cons, not backup tapes. Identity thieves do not have the motivation to systematically rip off large numbers of people. (Those with such skills inevitably find a way to manage a big company, or run for elected office.)
The great majority of identity thieves are skimming credit card account numbers at the restaurant point of sale, dumpster diving, or phishing for grandma's personal information.
When a good company buys a bad company, the result is usually mediocrity. It's can be much harder to fix a crap company than to start fresh and build it right.
However, that isn't what's happening here. Google is only buying 5% AOL, and they already have a business relationship. Google crunched the numbers and determined that one Billion dollars was the right price to pay for renewing their lucrative contracts with AOL, establishing some new contracts, and disrupting Microsoft's plans.
Very good. Now send the robot to Iraq and see how it does against IEDs.
A great test of a web site tests is loading on a Blackberry. Sometimes I move blocks of code around and use absolute positioning so the good stuff renders first, to help reduce thumb pain. (/. has too many nav links at the top of the code, so you have to scroll a lot to see the stories.) Googlebot "sees" web pages much the same way as a Blackberry. Indeed, search optimization and accessibility have a lot in common.
I am not sure XHTML is the key to accessibility. XHTML allows tables, which are often misused to control layout. The code flow of a table is different from visual representation, causing loss of semantic information when the page is rendered on alternative browsers or spiders that don't assemble the table the same way.
These common SEO/accessibility strategies provide good results on mobile devices, even with HTML 4.01, and as an additional benefit, make it much easier to manage the site, and may help search visibility:
- Fix all validation errors and warnings.
- Replace Javascript menus, or provide alternate text menus wrapped in NOSCRIPT tags.
- Add alternate plain HTML to any Flash OBJECTS.
- Strip layout tables and replace with DIVs. Tables with tabular data are fine, but consider adding CAPTION, THEAD, TBODY and TFOOT for better control over appearance.
- Rip out presentation attributes and replace with CSS formatting. This greatly reduces file size and simplifies the code reducing the potential for errors, speeding page loads, and saving Google some disk space.
Once the above process has been done, the resulting HTML 4.01 can be converted to XHTML with trivial easy.Before spending any money on an SEO book, people should make use of the free online resources, for instance Highrankings Forums.
SEM is hard work. But if you want to do it yourself:
Do the above and you will be better than 99% of all web sites.
Did these people ever hear of Wener Heisenberg?
The new site and the old site must have competed against each other in the bidding if they ran at the same time. New Site probably lowered Old Site's click-through rate, so old site's rankings dropped, causing a downward spiral of lower click-through and lower ranking. Long ago the site rankings may have gone up in a virtuous circle of higher click-through and higher position - at a time when there was less competition. Just because it happened once, doesn't mean it can happen again the same way.
Old site didn't have the history of new site, so it wouldn't rank the same. The system is complicated, and just because some people don't understand it, doesn't mean that Google is being EVIL.
Google has explained the ranking algorithm. It is historical Click Through Rate (CTR) times Bid times 1,000, equals effective Cost Per Mil (CPM), thousand impressions. Google ranks ads by effective CPM, end of story. For new ads that have no history, Google assumes a low-side CTR.
The lesson: If you want to test Google Adwords, tinker with a few keywords or a few ads at a time, in case you get unexpected results, to avoid hosing your entire campaign.
Second lesson: Use the Google conversion tracker. For each keyword, set Bid = Conversion Rate * desired Cost Per Action (desired CPA = what you are willing to pay to get a conversion). That works real well.
The VoIP companies have to pay to terminate calls to the PSTN (Public Service Telephone Network), so free is difficult business model. They also have to provide servers, bandwidth, and pay their staffs.
A lot of people buy an ultra-lost cost plan, such as a BroadVoice BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) plan, starting at 5.95/mo, and use it with a free Xten softphone.
You don't need to buy an international plan to make international calls. Most VoIP companies allow free calling to other subs, so if you have a friend overseas, buy two $5.95 setups, and then talk forever, no additional charge. Also, with the $5.95 you get the full range of services - inbound calls, voicemail, caller id, so it's really not a bad deal.
A company is going to provide free information and research to the entire planet. How on earth could that be possible?
Vonage is currently spending about $200 to acquire each of their customers. When the customers pay only $24.95 per month, and there's plenty of churn, this is a sure fire way to blow gobs of cash.
The game plan at Vonage is to get big fast, then sell shares via IPO. To accomplish this, they want to maximize sizzle and attract as many suckers as possible to the IPO. Hence the massive (and inefficient) advertising campaign, and the go-in-all-directions business development strategy, accompanied by all-too-frequent press releases.
I just hope that Vonage doesn't implode too soon, giving the whole VoIP market a bad rap. There is even a chance that Vonage may succeed with the IPO, cut their costs, and start to make a profit.
The Russian mafia would never kill a valuable asset for fun, vindictiveness or competition. The only logical reason for killing is to keep somebody quiet. Punishments can be devised that are much worse than death. The right question to ask in this situation is, "What did this bloke know, and why did somebody need to keep him quiet?"
We could save lives by banning skydiving, skiing, candbars, and real butter. Why stop there, let's insist on wrapping telephone poles in bubble wrap. Every year a few kids are kidnapped by predators they meet online, so let's ban computer use too.
People are adults. They can decide what risks they want to take. Personal liberty is worth something too.
The decision reads, in part:
Will the next generation of BroadBand enable massive increase in pay-per-view programming? At those speeds you could download live or recorded TV and movies from anywhere, not just your local cable co. So content producers could sell directly to customers, and bypass their current distribution networks.
What does this mean for broadcast TV, movie houses, and the local cable monopolies?
I like Search Status, which conserves space. It installs on the lower right corner of the window, and provides Google Pagerank, and Alexa traffic stats. Very handy for comparing different web sites to see relative traffic or PageRank. With Firefox, the other Google toolbar features are not too exciting.
Also good for web developers: The Web Developer Extension
You should charge your friends and family. How do you expect the rest of us to make a living when you're giving it away?
How can a hardware manufacturer use a new OS?
Example: Lots of computers, especially mobile computers, but also fixed terminals, are needed in business and industry to collect data and feed it to a central server. Large organizations have gazillions of lines of old code that works perfectly fine, and is designed to interface with something simple, like a VT100 or 5250. These legacy applications are going to be around for a long, long time.
Want to market a new OS? Start by writing terminal emulation software. This is not too difficult. Ideally, you write the OS to run efficiently on a low spec, bulletproof computer. Now you've got a market to sell thousands, or tens of thousands of inexpensive, durable computers and OS's.
Threre's a little company in Texas that makes, as in manufactures, computer in the USA. AML mobile computers run Linux, and come packaged with terminal emulation software. They are used to imitate dumb terminals so people can wirelessly collect data on the shop floor, or in a warehouse. AML also manufactures stationary terminals. These low tech devices are reasonably durable, and cost hundred less per unit than competing devices that have to pay the Windows tax.
The simple fact is that AML uses Linux because it's convenient. They could just as easily use something else, if it existed. All they need to do is port one application. The clients literally don't care what OS the devices run. So long as the device can pretend to be the appropriate flavor of dumb terminal, it's good enough. The less it costs, and the less frequently it breaks, the better.
What OS is the Blackberry running? It has 3 million users.
Big phone companies will die by their reputations.
VoIP has been great for my small business. My VoIP line sim-rings my office, home office, and cellphone. No matter where I am, no matter if the power grid is working or not, I get every call. Customers love it, because they can always get through. VoIP voice quality is usually excellent. E911 has been mandated by the feds, so it will be up and running in a couple months. Just in case, I keep one copper line at home and office, both with minimal service.
Every small bus owner ought to start experimenting with VoIP. If one provider sucks, keep trying others until you are happy. Start with a lower cost plan, then upgrade when you feel confident to use it all the time. At $9.95 per month, learning to use VoIP is well worth it.