What I don't understand is why anyone would pay for advertising here. According to my Google Toolbar in FireFox, the site has a PR of 0. I actually considered buying an incoming link for a dollar since it could have been worth getting alink from a PR 5 or higher site, but it has basically no linked value.
Maybe after all this press though, we'll see the page's PR go up and then make it highly worth it to buy a 1 dollar block just to get a link on that page.
.. but this is a type of story I expect to see on Digg.com.
This isn't a review, there are no benchmarks, there are no nVidia cards even listed and the site formats crappy in IE (just so happened to be using it because of CSS design issues). This has no place on Slashdot and the editor posting the story really should have read through the listings more carefully to see that this doens't extend past ATI cards.
I was hanging out with my 20 year old cousin today (I'm 27) and even those 7 years makes a huge difference in gaming aptitude. I grew up using the simplistic NES controller while he's been using the Xbox/Playstation style controller for as long as he has been gaming.
Today, i found myself instantly lost playing a sports game where you had to use the two joystick like thumb controls as opposed to the directional pad on the left side of the controller. To me, it seemed so intuitive to use the directional pad as opposed to these mini joysticks, but my cousin informed me that almost all the new titles he has uses that functionality instead.
Am I the only one who misses the simplistic controller without 16 buttons?
Matt Cutts offered his take on this article here where he talks about how Google can diagnose a lot of these black hat activities automtaically without any human intervention.
Personally, the "better mouse trap" addage definitely fits here. Black hat SEOs won't ever be stopped because of the way the web works currently. What I am wondering is when will domains that have a really early create date but are inactive are going to be realized for their SEO potential down the road. Older domains are definitely moving to the top of the list since the last Google update.
Does the world really need yet another elitist sport not played by the best athletes in the world and played only by those with the means to afford such a sport? How about we try using the thousands of baseball fields around the United States that go unused - even fields that exist in urban environments.
Maybe zero gravity development leagues will be part of the 2006 fiscal budget for inner city youth to participate.
The notion that security is a "never" seen is exactly the wrong thinking that causes security not to be a problem. Would a hacker announce that he's rooted your network??? You still need highly trained security professionals on your network for exactly this reason - security cannot be a "hide underneath a pile of coats and hope everything is fine" IT approach.
For most CIOs, their understanding of security doens't extend further than users having local admin rights, spam, viruses and spyware. Other than that, most CIOs barely even know what data they are sending off their network unencrypted.
At the last place I worked, the network admin had no packet sniffer, no IDS, no honeypot, applied weak password policies through Active Directory and ran one application (SpySweeper) to manage all the spyware on the network.
I've started a tech site/blog just like a million other people around the world in the hopes that I too could cash in on the online advertising scheme.
However, running a tech blog, I have noticed one definite fact - that Ad Munching occurs on almost 70% of the users that visit my site. That means that my "revenue stream" (I've made less than it would take to fill up my car's gas tank) is one Greasemonkey script, one AdMuncher default installation, one MSFT OneCare configuration away from being completely obliterated.
Technical users are already speeding up their web browsing experience and once default OEM computer installations come with ad blocking (MSFT could potential block AdWords ads with Vista out of the box), you could see a filtering of advertisements off the web. Especially since Google is relying on contextual ads, their JavaScript code is one security setting away from never even reaching the user - no less having them click on the ad and then actually buying something.
First, I tried to to click the Sign In link and got an IIS Runtime error (at least they turned off descriptive error messages) and then when I tried to authenticate with asdfg/asdfg I got a siezure enducing Authenticating message which never ended.
Guess that marketing slogan "Just Try It" isn't going to sell anything. And as I have read in the other comments, I would NEVER give out my credit card information to register for a service like this. With the nth degree applications being developed on the web, there is zero reason to give out my CC info.
It is a bit like Cisco fiasco recently: they give a smart guy a box, he can find some problems (and get in trouble at Black Hat) -- but if he finds flaws he can exploit thousands of boxes out there.
On the surface this sounds right, but be careful.
You basically just stated that closed source is more secure than open source in this instance and I think the *nix crowd may eat you for Thanksgiving Day dinner with that attitude. Closing the source and hiding your insecure code is not the way to secure a product. Google, who hasn't really had to worry too much about security before, is now finding themselves under the spotlight and they will have to react by placing alarger emphasis on security.
Wow, where do I even begin with this work of fiction.
As for the coming AJAX Office and other productivity apps, they'll sit locally, too. Two or three hops away from every user, they'll also be completely backed-up by two to three data centers down the line. Your data never goes away unless you erase it. Your latency and system response are as low as they can possibly be made for a network app.
Yeah, except for the first time your ISP has an issue (how many people can afford backup connections and dialup is just not an option, especially with slow AJAX applications) or you lose power. What about security? Is Google going to securely encrypt this transferring of data? Do I really want the sexual escapades of my fiancee and me to transfer in some low encryption method for anyone to sniff out of thin air?
And remember the Google Web Accelerator that came and disappeared? It's back! Only this time the Web Accelerator will have the proper hardware and network infrastructure to make it worth using.
Oh you mean the disaster that was the first Web Accelerator, whose demise had nothing to do with improper hardware is back? Oh joy, I'm going to start celebrating Christmas early this year.
And there lies the differences between the two companies. Last week, I wrote about Windows Live and Office Live as Microsoft's best attempts at pretending to be Google. And Google will do those kinds of applications, too. But they'll build them atop a network infrastructure that Microsoft can't match.
Yes, because the Internet in the US is so up to speed with the rest of the world already that the network infrastructure is in place for all to even have broadband at this point. Exactly, how has Google infiltrated the flatland states and what infrastucture do they have there? And the Internet does exist outside of the United States, something the author seems not even to brush up against.
Microsoft can't compete. Yahoo probably can't compete. Sun and IBM are like remora, along for the ride. And what does it all cost, maybe $1 billion? That's less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each year.
Where the author lost me for good on the objectivity scale. Exactly what resources does Yahoo! have that MSFT doesn't that makes them a "probable"? Internet advertising is one FireFox extension or hostfile entry away from being eliminated.
There will still be a need for mySQL/SQL Server/other DB options for certain types of applications like forums, etc. However, you're 100% right, with an API the possibilities are endless in terms of what you could include in their indexing.
The one factor that will keep this happening is performance and speed. Adding an additional 2 hops for database content won't make much sense for web applications. I can't see replacing local network queries with external queries to Google's Base system. Good call though on the API.
How about the millions of parents that only start their Christmas shopping after Thanksgiving is over? How about, oh I don't know, the 90% of their market share that didn't purchase an Xbox 360 through pre-ordering. Your idea that the market is basically dried up after the first run of consoles is so completely off base.
These reviews will be extremely useful for this Holiday shopping season. Oh and one more point - don't always believe the hype behind console shortages. With no next-gen console competition right now, Microsoft can effectively over produce this console and leak them into the market at a pace that makes sense for them. i, for one, don't buy the belief that their will be an Xbox 360 shortage come Christmas time.
Last text based game I played was the "easter egg" hidden in Google Talk called wumpus (which now seems to be offline permanently).
I wonder if games such as Bard's Tale would qualify (probably not as there was a visual map - although the game could easily be written as text only since some levels were completely dark anyways). Bard's Tale was a great game - in fact, I'm looking for the.exe now.
I'm not sure that I would spend my time coding a massive P2P application for a network that isn't what most consider an ISP..Edu networks are highly monitored and are not as "free" as the open, unfiltered networks provided to residential customers by ISPs.
I went to a university involved with the Internet2 project and even before Internet2 was even introduced their, the network administrators were already cracking down on high bandwith usage due to high bandwith costs per month that needed to be justified to the university's president.
College networks are usually stated as being "only for educational purposes" and students can't lash out at network policies teh same way paying residential customers can.
The text from their release:
***eBay Developer Challenge 2006***
November 14, 2005 | 10:33AM PST/PT
The eBay Developers Program, in conjunction with O'Reilly and Associates, is offering a contest for software developers. Winners will be selected in the Best Original Application and Best Open Source Collaboration categories. Prizes include $5,000 in cash, Xbox 360(TM) game consoles, iPod Nano(TM) music players, and the chance to demonstrate winning applications at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego from March 6-9, 2006.
To learn more about the eBay Developer Challenge, please see our information page.
To learn about the eBay Developers Program, please visit http://developer.ebay.com./
Well, when you make a blatant attempt at self-promotion over "filing a motion", don't expect me to jump to the skies in your support. Go get yourself a verdict or summary judgement in your favor and then the Slashdot community will rejoice in your efforts. In fact, I'll be the first one to tout how impressive your victory is to all my friends (especially with me being a NY resident). I just can't see how the filing of a motion (whether by your firm or some other) for dismissal based off your notion of inadequate evidence that is not going to withstand the scrutiny of the courts being newsworthy is beyond me I guess.
To be honest, it's not your fault. The fact that an editor found a motion filing "news worthy" just goes to show how Slashdot has fallen off.
... that if you're going to make a blog and then post your picture on it as a law firm you would:
1) Make sure your jacket and tie look slightly better than a hobo trying on donated formal wear at the local Salvation Army and
2) That you have some type of correct spacing when taking the picture.
Just from the picture alone, I wouldn't hire them. Their transparent publicity stunt is going to work due to the Slashot effect of users here who think they should be able to download/upload/share anything without it being "stealing", but you would think that they would at least link to a professional corporate site and not a free blogger site with a half-assed picture.
What? No mention of nmap? I mean, sure I see the writer might be Windows literate only, but come on now - nmap is ported to Win32 as well. At least with nmap, we could have seen some port scanning techniques or something.
Maybe next time, we'll get an Ethereal treat... this article was useless.
Although I haven't tested it yet (as I am having issues getting it to work here), I'm going to assume that everything is going to be passed at time of connection through HTTPS and then the L2TP connection will be established by grabbing the PSK in a similar manner of the../getpass/ page.
However, this is purely me guessing... I need to get it to work first here (different error codes on 2 machines - going to have to see if the router/NAT box is causing the problem here).
Actually, you can specify either PPTP or L2TP by going to network connections and drilling down on the properties of the GSA VPN. You can see screenshots (and more) here on my forums. (shameless plug).
Slashdot Mirror
Son of a ...
I just checked again and it does in fact have a PR of 7. You are correct dear sir and I eat my hat and beg for forgiveness.
What I don't understand is why anyone would pay for advertising here. According to my Google Toolbar in FireFox, the site has a PR of 0. I actually considered buying an incoming link for a dollar since it could have been worth getting alink from a PR 5 or higher site, but it has basically no linked value.
Maybe after all this press though, we'll see the page's PR go up and then make it highly worth it to buy a 1 dollar block just to get a link on that page.
Ahh the replier is right, my mistake.
Maybe I should have been nominated for the 2005 Foot in Mouth Award? : )
.. but this is a type of story I expect to see on Digg.com.
This isn't a review, there are no benchmarks, there are no nVidia cards even listed and the site formats crappy in IE (just so happened to be using it because of CSS design issues). This has no place on Slashdot and the editor posting the story really should have read through the listings more carefully to see that this doens't extend past ATI cards.
Funny you should mention this.
I was hanging out with my 20 year old cousin today (I'm 27) and even those 7 years makes a huge difference in gaming aptitude. I grew up using the simplistic NES controller while he's been using the Xbox/Playstation style controller for as long as he has been gaming.
Today, i found myself instantly lost playing a sports game where you had to use the two joystick like thumb controls as opposed to the directional pad on the left side of the controller. To me, it seemed so intuitive to use the directional pad as opposed to these mini joysticks, but my cousin informed me that almost all the new titles he has uses that functionality instead.
Am I the only one who misses the simplistic controller without 16 buttons?
Matt Cutts offered his take on this article here where he talks about how Google can diagnose a lot of these black hat activities automtaically without any human intervention.
Personally, the "better mouse trap" addage definitely fits here. Black hat SEOs won't ever be stopped because of the way the web works currently. What I am wondering is when will domains that have a really early create date but are inactive are going to be realized for their SEO potential down the road. Older domains are definitely moving to the top of the list since the last Google update.
Does the world really need yet another elitist sport not played by the best athletes in the world and played only by those with the means to afford such a sport? How about we try using the thousands of baseball fields around the United States that go unused - even fields that exist in urban environments.
Maybe zero gravity development leagues will be part of the 2006 fiscal budget for inner city youth to participate.
The notion that security is a "never" seen is exactly the wrong thinking that causes security not to be a problem. Would a hacker announce that he's rooted your network??? You still need highly trained security professionals on your network for exactly this reason - security cannot be a "hide underneath a pile of coats and hope everything is fine" IT approach.
For most CIOs, their understanding of security doens't extend further than users having local admin rights, spam, viruses and spyware. Other than that, most CIOs barely even know what data they are sending off their network unencrypted.
At the last place I worked, the network admin had no packet sniffer, no IDS, no honeypot, applied weak password policies through Active Directory and ran one application (SpySweeper) to manage all the spyware on the network.
We've previously discussed this story.
If I were the Slashdot editors, for dupe protection sake, I would add this statement at the end of every submission.
I've started a tech site/blog just like a million other people around the world in the hopes that I too could cash in on the online advertising scheme.
However, running a tech blog, I have noticed one definite fact - that Ad Munching occurs on almost 70% of the users that visit my site. That means that my "revenue stream" (I've made less than it would take to fill up my car's gas tank) is one Greasemonkey script, one AdMuncher default installation, one MSFT OneCare configuration away from being completely obliterated.
Technical users are already speeding up their web browsing experience and once default OEM computer installations come with ad blocking (MSFT could potential block AdWords ads with Vista out of the box), you could see a filtering of advertisements off the web. Especially since Google is relying on contextual ads, their JavaScript code is one security setting away from never even reaching the user - no less having them click on the ad and then actually buying something.
First, I tried to to click the Sign In link and got an IIS Runtime error (at least they turned off descriptive error messages) and then when I tried to authenticate with asdfg/asdfg I got a siezure enducing Authenticating message which never ended.
Guess that marketing slogan "Just Try It" isn't going to sell anything. And as I have read in the other comments, I would NEVER give out my credit card information to register for a service like this. With the nth degree applications being developed on the web, there is zero reason to give out my CC info.
It is a bit like Cisco fiasco recently: they give a smart guy a box, he can find some problems (and get in trouble at Black Hat) -- but if he finds flaws he can exploit thousands of boxes out there.
On the surface this sounds right, but be careful.
You basically just stated that closed source is more secure than open source in this instance and I think the *nix crowd may eat you for Thanksgiving Day dinner with that attitude. Closing the source and hiding your insecure code is not the way to secure a product. Google, who hasn't really had to worry too much about security before, is now finding themselves under the spotlight and they will have to react by placing alarger emphasis on security.
Wow, where do I even begin with this work of fiction.
As for the coming AJAX Office and other productivity apps, they'll sit locally, too. Two or three hops away from every user, they'll also be completely backed-up by two to three data centers down the line. Your data never goes away unless you erase it. Your latency and system response are as low as they can possibly be made for a network app.
Yeah, except for the first time your ISP has an issue (how many people can afford backup connections and dialup is just not an option, especially with slow AJAX applications) or you lose power. What about security? Is Google going to securely encrypt this transferring of data? Do I really want the sexual escapades of my fiancee and me to transfer in some low encryption method for anyone to sniff out of thin air?
And remember the Google Web Accelerator that came and disappeared? It's back! Only this time the Web Accelerator will have the proper hardware and network infrastructure to make it worth using.
Oh you mean the disaster that was the first Web Accelerator, whose demise had nothing to do with improper hardware is back? Oh joy, I'm going to start celebrating Christmas early this year.
And there lies the differences between the two companies. Last week, I wrote about Windows Live and Office Live as Microsoft's best attempts at pretending to be Google. And Google will do those kinds of applications, too. But they'll build them atop a network infrastructure that Microsoft can't match.
Yes, because the Internet in the US is so up to speed with the rest of the world already that the network infrastructure is in place for all to even have broadband at this point. Exactly, how has Google infiltrated the flatland states and what infrastucture do they have there? And the Internet does exist outside of the United States, something the author seems not even to brush up against.
Microsoft can't compete. Yahoo probably can't compete. Sun and IBM are like remora, along for the ride. And what does it all cost, maybe $1 billion? That's less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each year.
Where the author lost me for good on the objectivity scale. Exactly what resources does Yahoo! have that MSFT doesn't that makes them a "probable"? Internet advertising is one FireFox extension or hostfile entry away from being eliminated.
There will still be a need for mySQL/SQL Server/other DB options for certain types of applications like forums, etc. However, you're 100% right, with an API the possibilities are endless in terms of what you could include in their indexing.
The one factor that will keep this happening is performance and speed. Adding an additional 2 hops for database content won't make much sense for web applications. I can't see replacing local network queries with external queries to Google's Base system. Good call though on the API.
Who are they trying to convince then.
How about the millions of parents that only start their Christmas shopping after Thanksgiving is over? How about, oh I don't know, the 90% of their market share that didn't purchase an Xbox 360 through pre-ordering. Your idea that the market is basically dried up after the first run of consoles is so completely off base.
These reviews will be extremely useful for this Holiday shopping season. Oh and one more point - don't always believe the hype behind console shortages. With no next-gen console competition right now, Microsoft can effectively over produce this console and leak them into the market at a pace that makes sense for them. i, for one, don't buy the belief that their will be an Xbox 360 shortage come Christmas time.
Last text based game I played was the "easter egg" hidden in Google Talk called wumpus (which now seems to be offline permanently).
.exe now.
I wonder if games such as Bard's Tale would qualify (probably not as there was a visual map - although the game could easily be written as text only since some levels were completely dark anyways). Bard's Tale was a great game - in fact, I'm looking for the
I'm not sure that I would spend my time coding a massive P2P application for a network that isn't what most consider an ISP. .Edu networks are highly monitored and are not as "free" as the open, unfiltered networks provided to residential customers by ISPs.
I went to a university involved with the Internet2 project and even before Internet2 was even introduced their, the network administrators were already cracking down on high bandwith usage due to high bandwith costs per month that needed to be justified to the university's president.
College networks are usually stated as being "only for educational purposes" and students can't lash out at network policies teh same way paying residential customers can.
In tangential news, Ebay is sponsoring a developer's challenge. Information can be found here:
Ebay Developer Challenge
The text from their release:
***eBay Developer Challenge 2006*** November 14, 2005 | 10:33AM PST/PT The eBay Developers Program, in conjunction with O'Reilly and Associates, is offering a contest for software developers. Winners will be selected in the Best Original Application and Best Open Source Collaboration categories. Prizes include $5,000 in cash, Xbox 360(TM) game consoles, iPod Nano(TM) music players, and the chance to demonstrate winning applications at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego from March 6-9, 2006. To learn more about the eBay Developer Challenge, please see our information page. To learn about the eBay Developers Program, please visit http://developer.ebay.com./
Well, when you make a blatant attempt at self-promotion over "filing a motion", don't expect me to jump to the skies in your support. Go get yourself a verdict or summary judgement in your favor and then the Slashdot community will rejoice in your efforts. In fact, I'll be the first one to tout how impressive your victory is to all my friends (especially with me being a NY resident). I just can't see how the filing of a motion (whether by your firm or some other) for dismissal based off your notion of inadequate evidence that is not going to withstand the scrutiny of the courts being newsworthy is beyond me I guess.
To be honest, it's not your fault. The fact that an editor found a motion filing "news worthy" just goes to show how Slashdot has fallen off.
... that if you're going to make a blog and then post your picture on it as a law firm you would:
1) Make sure your jacket and tie look slightly better than a hobo trying on donated formal wear at the local Salvation Army and
2) That you have some type of correct spacing when taking the picture.
Just from the picture alone, I wouldn't hire them. Their transparent publicity stunt is going to work due to the Slashot effect of users here who think they should be able to download/upload/share anything without it being "stealing", but you would think that they would at least link to a professional corporate site and not a free blogger site with a half-assed picture.
... oh wait.
I seriously thought for a second that I was having a browser caching problem when I saw 2 dupes in a row.
What? No mention of nmap? I mean, sure I see the writer might be Windows literate only, but come on now - nmap is ported to Win32 as well. At least with nmap, we could have seen some port scanning techniques or something.
... this article was useless.
Maybe next time, we'll get an Ethereal treat
Although I haven't tested it yet (as I am having issues getting it to work here), I'm going to assume that everything is going to be passed at time of connection through HTTPS and then the L2TP connection will be established by grabbing the PSK in a similar manner of the ../getpass/ page.
... I need to get it to work first here (different error codes on 2 machines - going to have to see if the router/NAT box is causing the problem here).
However, this is purely me guessing
Actually, you can specify either PPTP or L2TP by going to network connections and drilling down on the properties of the GSA VPN. You can see screenshots (and more) here on my forums. (shameless plug).
Installed, icon shows up in the systray but I am getting the following error:
Secure Connection Failed:
(Error Code: 0x800702f4)