You mean everyone but Ballmer and Murdoch. I don't believe they think it is a bad thing to have a bunch of fragmented corporate ghettos. At least in Microsoft's case, it allows them to tramp all over industry standards and appeal directly to Business School Product running those corporations.
Well, in the long run, I think they'd lose, too. How are their programmers and journalists going to effectively do research without the open internet? They are sawing off the limb they're sitting on.
I wonder if Microsoft understand what they've started?
Excellent point. Although I think that this will never work (explanation here), if it does, it's bad precedent.
Currently, web sites compete to offer the best content, and search engines compete to help you most easily find the best sites. The best sites and search engines win. If somebody created a search algorithm tomorrow that kicked Google's butt, they could win the market.
If these guys succeed, search engines will stop competing on quality and start competing on their ability to make backroom deals about what they can index. Great new search engines and great new web sites will fail, because they're too small to make deals with the big players.
In short, this would ruin a lot of what makes the internet a worldwide competition for awesomeness, and turn it into a bunch of fragmented corporate ghettos. And everyone would lose.
Don't believe what? The post you're replying to says:
Google's main business is advertising. If you search, you are the product, not the customer.
That's just a simple fact.
Yes, they work hard to give you the best search results, and don't take payment for top listings. That's because if their search is sucky or biased, you won't use it. Just like if your local radio station sucks, you won't listen. But in both cases, delivering a good product is a means to an end: namely, selling advertising.
Do you pay Google for search? For Gmail? For any other service they offer? No? Then who does? The answer is: advertisers. Advertisers pay Google because they know you'll be using Google's services and seeing their ads. You don't pay for the "product" you get (search), so you're not really a customer. Advertisers DO pay Google for the "product" they get (your attention), so they are Google's customers.
That doesn't make them evil, any more than it makes newspapers or magazines or radio stations evil. But it is the truth, and we should keep it in mind. You can't understand a person or company unless you know their motivations.
...AND it would promote the.NET platform to a wider audience who might then be more willing to try other.NET apps after having a good experience with Paint.NET.
If they know what that means. Everybody that I tell about the software is intially confused.
Me: "It's called Paint.NET."
Them: "Oh, so www..."
Me: "No, sorry, it's not a website. It's a program you install."
Them: "What?"
Me: "It's built on a thing called the.NET platform, and I don't know why they included that in the name."
Them: "Oh."
Me: "But it's really good!"
GIMP isn't ready for serious users because its called GIMP.
I'm not familiar with the negative association you mention, but I do have a negative association with the word "Gimp": it's slang for a crippled person. Just what I need: software that hobbles along!
One thing that Linux seriously needs to get over is the need to name everything with acronyms. Mozilla didn't call their browser the Standard Link-browsing Universal Gui, because SLUG is a horrible name for a browser. And GIMP is a horrible name for... well, anything.
Then the icon is this crazed badger or something. I'm confused from the get-go.
The complete lack of marketing savvy is one thing that gives Linux the "not ready for prime time" public image. At least Ubuntu makes software that doesn't scare people.
1) Put cameras and microphones everywhere, for our "protection" 2) Don't share the video/audio outside your circle of power 3) Train computers to recognize your enemies 4) Know their secrets and whereabouts 5) Blackmail, murder and kidnap at will
If it doesn't happen under the current administration, it could happen under another.
If it doesn't happen in America, it will happen elsewhere (if it hasn't already).
Yes, it would be scary, regardless of who does it. But which is better: constant surveillance where everyone can monitor the feeds, or constant surveillance where only Big Brother can?
At least if it's publicly available, the stalkers get watched, too. Although personally I vote for none of the above.
On Windows there's also my personal favorite, Paint.NET. It does WAY more than Paint, it's fast, and it's free. It ain't Photoshop, but it's all I need.
Why, I did a Bing search myself just the other day. I was using IE for the one thing at work that requires it, and I didn't know that Bing was the default in IE.
It only took me about 15 seconds to change it, though.
Seriously, though, other than the fact that it's the Evil Empire's search, I think this is mostly good. Competition breeds better products.
Oh - and one more point. $1 million x 1,000 sites = $10 billion. That's more than a year's profits, even for Microsoft ("net profit for the quarter ended June 30 was $3.05 billion"). Try to explain a bribe that big to the stockholders.
im sorry but thats not the most thought out statement i've heard today. if you remove the top 1000 sites from Google then, yes, inherently you will have a new top 1000. the point of what Mark Cuban is trying to do, is remove the quality from Google.
Say for example, they remove ebay, amazon, and craigslist. Now using google, you'll never get a search result from those three websites.
This plan would never work. Here's why:
There is no upside, other than the cash. All these businesses are already in both search engines. So it's just "would you give up being searched by Google forever if I give you $1 million right now?"
This only makes sense if their expected returns from Google searches for the forseeable future are less than $1 million.
That, in turn, is only likely if their revenues are very small and/or if Google's market share dwindles to nearly zero.
How many of the top 1000 sites have very small revenues? (Not many, by definition.) How many would bet their business on Google's market share dwindling to nearly zero?
Amazon (which expects $300 million profit next quarter alone) probably gets $1 million in sales from Google search results each day. They'd never give that up. Most large sites would lose money on this bet, even in the short run.
Finally, even if the top 1,000 sites went along, and you "removed the quality" sites from Google, the next "top 1000" would get a surge in business and would rapidly improve their quality and economies of scale. Bing could not keep the search monopoly they bought, and unless their actual search algorithms were better than Google's they'd be pushed back into second place.
While you're right about human motivations, there's another reason why money will always have meaning: some things are inherently scarce.
Even in a world where you can snap your fingers and get a Porche and a five-course meal for free, there would still be a limited amount of (for example) beachfront property. Who gets it? Those who can trade some other good or service. Now if only we had some standard medium of exchange for these things, we could work out the supply and demand... ah yes! "Money!"
Voting doesn't work if there are too many stupid/ignorant voters.
Of course the "stupid/ignorant voters" are always "those other people." You know, the ones who disagree with us. For reasons that aren't valid... to us.
Hey, you know, it's hard to tell whose reasons are valid, isn't it? Maybe we should vote on it.
If you buy music as an investment, it's likely that you're also buying stuff that never becomes valuable. What's your average return rate? Is it better than the stock market? If so, I salute you.
In any case, this is irrelevant to most people, who buy music to listen to, not to resell.
FYI - If you're using Paint to crop photos, Paint.net is a free program that does much better resizing, cropping, saving in different formats, and a lot else (although the rest may not matter to you).
I don't do much with images besides crop and resize, but I still strongly prefer Paint.net to Paint.
Yes. Also, yes, there is some complexity involved: metabolism can vary by person, caloric intake, exercise regieme, etc.
But Hacker's Diet simplifies that: treat metabolism as a black box. Measure your calories going in, and measure your weight. If your weight is trending up, decrease calories until it trends down or decreases. You don't have to know how it works.
He does recommend exercise and a balanced diet, because they make you feel better and live longer. But not necessarily for weight loss.
Actually, all "unlimited" plans are limited. Just multiply maximum bandwidth by days in the month to figure out your monthly cap.
While you're technically correct, I don't think that most people understand "unlimited" to mean "infinite." I wouldn't say that I have "limited" water at home, even though, yes, technically, I can only fill a finite number of buckets in a month.
There's a big difference between "we're cutting you off" and "you can have as much as we can physically give you."
the customer can abandon ship to another provider..... precisely the way cellphones operate.
Well, cell phones are better, but there's not exactly a plethora of choices there, either. It's still the same problem of expensive infrastructure, owned by big incumbents, subsidized by the government, which keeps new players from being able to compete.
Actually, preferential voting (where you rank canidates) still keeps one big problem from our current system: the possibility of "throwing away your vote." You'd have to decide who to rank first: the candidate you really like, or the one you think can win. You don't want your vote for The Ideal Party to take votes away from The Tolerable Party and throw the election to The Horrid Party.
Range voting, on the other hand, lets you say "here's how much I like each candidate on a numerical scale." The "practical" candidate isn't hurt at all by your preference for an idealistic one.
This site gives a lot of info on why range voting tends to give the best outcome for the largest number of voters. They advocate for range voting to be used in any election - even school elections. I'd love to see it "trickle up," since it's clearly a better system.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in the long run, I think they'd lose, too. How are their programmers and journalists going to effectively do research without the open internet? They are sawing off the limb they're sitting on.
From TFA:
...and by "tame" we mean "already living peacefully in people's houses." And by "radical" we mean "awesome in theory."
Excellent point. Although I think that this will never work (explanation here), if it does, it's bad precedent.
Currently, web sites compete to offer the best content, and search engines compete to help you most easily find the best sites. The best sites and search engines win. If somebody created a search algorithm tomorrow that kicked Google's butt, they could win the market.
If these guys succeed, search engines will stop competing on quality and start competing on their ability to make backroom deals about what they can index. Great new search engines and great new web sites will fail, because they're too small to make deals with the big players.
In short, this would ruin a lot of what makes the internet a worldwide competition for awesomeness, and turn it into a bunch of fragmented corporate ghettos. And everyone would lose.
Don't believe what? The post you're replying to says:
That's just a simple fact.
Yes, they work hard to give you the best search results, and don't take payment for top listings. That's because if their search is sucky or biased, you won't use it. Just like if your local radio station sucks, you won't listen. But in both cases, delivering a good product is a means to an end: namely, selling advertising.
Do you pay Google for search? For Gmail? For any other service they offer? No? Then who does? The answer is: advertisers. Advertisers pay Google because they know you'll be using Google's services and seeing their ads. You don't pay for the "product" you get (search), so you're not really a customer. Advertisers DO pay Google for the "product" they get (your attention), so they are Google's customers.
That doesn't make them evil, any more than it makes newspapers or magazines or radio stations evil. But it is the truth, and we should keep it in mind. You can't understand a person or company unless you know their motivations.
Except that Microsoft doesn't let you fork their operating system and connect it to your own cloud.
If they know what that means. Everybody that I tell about the software is intially confused.
Me: "It's called Paint.NET." .NET platform, and I don't know why they included that in the name."
Them: "Oh, so www..."
Me: "No, sorry, it's not a website. It's a program you install."
Them: "What?"
Me: "It's built on a thing called the
Them: "Oh."
Me: "But it's really good!"
I'm not familiar with the negative association you mention, but I do have a negative association with the word "Gimp": it's slang for a crippled person. Just what I need: software that hobbles along!
One thing that Linux seriously needs to get over is the need to name everything with acronyms. Mozilla didn't call their browser the Standard Link-browsing Universal Gui, because SLUG is a horrible name for a browser. And GIMP is a horrible name for... well, anything.
Then the icon is this crazed badger or something. I'm confused from the get-go.
The complete lack of marketing savvy is one thing that gives Linux the "not ready for prime time" public image. At least Ubuntu makes software that doesn't scare people.
1) Put cameras and microphones everywhere, for our "protection"
2) Don't share the video/audio outside your circle of power
3) Train computers to recognize your enemies
4) Know their secrets and whereabouts
5) Blackmail, murder and kidnap at will
If it doesn't happen under the current administration, it could happen under another.
If it doesn't happen in America, it will happen elsewhere (if it hasn't already).
This technology is a Pandora's box.
Yes, it would be scary, regardless of who does it. But which is better: constant surveillance where everyone can monitor the feeds, or constant surveillance where only Big Brother can?
At least if it's publicly available, the stalkers get watched, too. Although personally I vote for none of the above.
On Windows there's also my personal favorite, Paint.NET. It does WAY more than Paint, it's fast, and it's free. It ain't Photoshop, but it's all I need.
Why, I did a Bing search myself just the other day. I was using IE for the one thing at work that requires it, and I didn't know that Bing was the default in IE.
It only took me about 15 seconds to change it, though.
Seriously, though, other than the fact that it's the Evil Empire's search, I think this is mostly good. Competition breeds better products.
Whoops! Thank you for the correction. :)
Oh - and one more point. $1 million x 1,000 sites = $10 billion. That's more than a year's profits, even for Microsoft ("net profit for the quarter ended June 30 was $3.05 billion"). Try to explain a bribe that big to the stockholders.
This plan would never work. Here's why:
Amazon (which expects $300 million profit next quarter alone) probably gets $1 million in sales from Google search results each day. They'd never give that up. Most large sites would lose money on this bet, even in the short run.
Finally, even if the top 1,000 sites went along, and you "removed the quality" sites from Google, the next "top 1000" would get a surge in business and would rapidly improve their quality and economies of scale. Bing could not keep the search monopoly they bought, and unless their actual search algorithms were better than Google's they'd be pushed back into second place.
While you're right about human motivations, there's another reason why money will always have meaning: some things are inherently scarce.
Even in a world where you can snap your fingers and get a Porche and a five-course meal for free, there would still be a limited amount of (for example) beachfront property. Who gets it? Those who can trade some other good or service. Now if only we had some standard medium of exchange for these things, we could work out the supply and demand... ah yes! "Money!"
Of course the "stupid/ignorant voters" are always "those other people." You know, the ones who disagree with us. For reasons that aren't valid... to us.
Hey, you know, it's hard to tell whose reasons are valid, isn't it? Maybe we should vote on it.
If you buy music as an investment, it's likely that you're also buying stuff that never becomes valuable. What's your average return rate? Is it better than the stock market? If so, I salute you.
In any case, this is irrelevant to most people, who buy music to listen to, not to resell.
News for nerds. Stuff that matters (to nerds).
FYI - If you're using Paint to crop photos, Paint.net is a free program that does much better resizing, cropping, saving in different formats, and a lot else (although the rest may not matter to you).
I don't do much with images besides crop and resize, but I still strongly prefer Paint.net to Paint.
Yes. Also, yes, there is some complexity involved: metabolism can vary by person, caloric intake, exercise regieme, etc.
But Hacker's Diet simplifies that: treat metabolism as a black box. Measure your calories going in, and measure your weight. If your weight is trending up, decrease calories until it trends down or decreases. You don't have to know how it works.
He does recommend exercise and a balanced diet, because they make you feel better and live longer. But not necessarily for weight loss.
While you're technically correct, I don't think that most people understand "unlimited" to mean "infinite." I wouldn't say that I have "limited" water at home, even though, yes, technically, I can only fill a finite number of buckets in a month.
There's a big difference between "we're cutting you off" and "you can have as much as we can physically give you."
And what are you responding to? That's right, an advertisement for a job.
So are ads always evil?
Well, cell phones are better, but there's not exactly a plethora of choices there, either. It's still the same problem of expensive infrastructure, owned by big incumbents, subsidized by the government, which keeps new players from being able to compete.
Actually, preferential voting (where you rank canidates) still keeps one big problem from our current system: the possibility of "throwing away your vote." You'd have to decide who to rank first: the candidate you really like, or the one you think can win. You don't want your vote for The Ideal Party to take votes away from The Tolerable Party and throw the election to The Horrid Party.
Range voting, on the other hand, lets you say "here's how much I like each candidate on a numerical scale." The "practical" candidate isn't hurt at all by your preference for an idealistic one.
This site gives a lot of info on why range voting tends to give the best outcome for the largest number of voters. They advocate for range voting to be used in any election - even school elections. I'd love to see it "trickle up," since it's clearly a better system.
I think of wisdom as being a "bigger picture" thing than intelligence.
Intelligence helps you do things. Wisdom helps you decide what's worth doing.