... when jumping the gun in response to your accusing me of jumping the gun.
I was the one who said that, and I stick by it. Your OP has all of the hallmarks of a dismissive, never having RTFA reply, and now you're just trying to defend it using poorly thought out, misapplied analogies.
What happens when you divide your shoebox into three sections? Do the molecules in the air divide themselves evenly between two of the sections, but leave the third empty? I think you missed a few details from the article.
Not to mention that for his shoebox example, the air would have to cluster into two small areas comprising probably less than 5% of the total surface area. I suspect that the poster simply jumped the gun without a clue of what the article was talking about, immediately dismissing it. They missed the fact that it's pretty amazing. Most amazing was how they separated into equal groups, but still preferred larger groups to smaller groups (e.g. with three houses, they still stayed in just two in equal sized groups).
Ok, I got it, I did the math wrong... How many posts will it take pointing this out before they start getting marked "redundant"?
Only 3 people pointed out that massive, enormous fault. If they should be moderated redundant, then your post should be moderated ignorant.
Regardless of that, the real problem isn't with the masses, its with the elite. My father is a plumbing and mechanics inspector in one of the richest counties in America. He recalls one house he inspected that had 7 heated swimming pools joined together with hottubs. The owner would keep them heated year-round just in case a random party broke out. He also had 10 furnace and airconditioning units in his 35,000 sqft. house that I'm sure he ran the hell out of. He also had a 6 car garage, one spot for each of his SUVs.
7 heated swimming pools and 35,000 sq. ft, eh? There are maybe a dozen houses in all of the US of that sort of size, if that (7 swimming pools? Might have been credible if you said 3). Sort of like your ridiculous CEO versus average worker comparison, your basic premise (that it's the gluttonous rich that are the real problem) is completely flawed.
There are a whole bunch of benefits from this, including making it more possible for people to telecommute, etc.
Huh? Are you responding to the right article? This is an enormously boring acquisition of a boring analytics company that makes boring scorecard type products for executives, alike to many similar products in a burgeoning marketplace. I mean, if you're an executive looking for scorecard software, it's mildly interesting that Microsoft might eventually integrate it to supplant its own, but otherwise...
I'm actually surprized this was posted to Slashdot.
I'm trying to guess what the grandparent means by hypervisor services.
I wasn't sure either, but presumed that they are simply referring to the concept of a hypervisor, which is the foundation of a multi-operating system platform. Regarding native instruction pass-thru, both Virtual Server/Virtual PC and VMWare's products do largely the same thing, passing most instructions through directly. What the article talked about regarding Microsoft's next version was support for Intel's new Vanderpool technology, which is basically additional support for virtualization on the chip itself. As it is the software expensively save and restore states between context switches to different virtual sessions, and Vanderpool offers some hardware that makes it much less costly. If you have a lot of CPU saturated virtual sessions, it can make a big difference.
As an aside, interestingly enough, I was surprised to find Microsoft's virtual server technology STILL does not offer hypervisor services... to give some perspective as to how far behind that puts them in "getting it", I worked on virtualized VM boxes on IBM 360 mainframes in school back in the mid-70s! These systems were implemented with hypervisor. Wow!
It wouldn't be virtualization if it didn't have hypervisor services. Maybe you're talking about hardware virtualization, which was just added by Intel, so it was somewhat difficult for Microsoft to support this before.
The article is just another guy giving his differing opinion on what "Web 2.0" is. You can find those in the thousands, and there is nothing about this one that makes it more compelling (in fact, and all apologies to Mr. Hinchcliffe, but his take seems even more vacuous and ignorant than most).
To quote from the article: "Web 2.0 is not a technology, it's a way of architecting software and businesses and companies see the value in the Web 2.0 way of doing business.". What an awesomely vague and useless statement that is. Basically what he's saying is "We'll pick whatever is successful and call it Web 2.0". The mention of MySpace is telling, given that MySpace is nothing more than a continuation of the sorts of social sites that appeared when HTML first hit the mainstream.
Most/. readers already know this. In fact it's pretty humorous that the submitter mentions MySpace, given that MySpace is very much Web 1.0.
More and more people are using the internet for more and more things. Woot. More like Web 1.1 than Web 2.0. The term rightly gets derision because it deserves it: the continual growth and continual technology evolution is suddenly noticed by some that are unaware, and they decree that they've witnessed a revolution rather than an evolution.
I like all the subtle little messages in this article, further reinforcing the fundamentalist Christian conservative stereotype and implying that the Christians are the ones feeding fuel to the ICANN vs. Europe dispute.
The way this article is presented is just bizarre. Quite apart from the fact that it is worded to imply that it's the Christian group that has veto power (when it really means the US. I realize some people get confused about the separation), one of the greatest opponents of the new domain were porn purveyors and fiends -- much as the abortion debate gets sidetracked by slippery slope arguments, they feared that the addition of an XXX TLD is the first step to segregating their businesses and interests. e.g. Follow it up by a law that all questionable sites have to be on the XXX TLD. Now that they're in the porn ghetto, it's pretty easy to cut it off. Many conservatives were for the new TLD, given that porn is already out there and pervasive, and if there was a way they could control their children/group's access to it via such a simple filter, more power to them.
The methodology described in the article simply isn't up-to-date. It worked well for a one-user-for-one-PC era, but that's not where we are at anymore.
XCopy apps still have the option to store settings in
a) User directories aliased into the application directory. b) User directories
There is nothing whatsoever in the linked article that is "outdated".
Holographic media has been a scam before and it'll be one until there is a box with a price tag in a store.
Way back in the late 80s, Atari was going to revolutionize the market with one of their recent acquisitions - Transmeta. Apparently a part of their amazing massively parallel computing system was a holographic storage system that was going to revolutionize the industry.
Holographic storage, like worthwhile image recognition, is always just >this much (two fingers held slightly apart) away from being practically worthwhile, yet the optimists, and scammers, always imagine that final portion to be much easier than it really is.
I think that it is bad, but I also hope that the patents are held as a defence (much like the M$ drednaught does with many of theirs).
The whole defensive line is complete B.S. (and note that Microsoft has recently started murmurs about attacking Linux based upon patents). This patent is a joke (not to mention that it harkens back to the ridiculous "everything for free if you just watch ads" days of the early.COM explosion), and it's an abuse of the patent system. Google is definitely swaying to the side of evil.
MythTV box plus Mac Mini = $Thousands versus DVR rental from your cable company $10/mnth. Sure the rented DVR will cost more in the long run but, people won't see that. All they'll see is $2,500 starting cost, forget MythTV.
So for the same upfront cost, they could rent a more purpose suited device (I have a PVR that works brilliantly, and receives and records HDTV, has the full online guide and two way communications, etc. I've done the media center PC thing, and in fact I HAVE a media center PC in my living room, but it has never been as smooth and -simply works- like the PVR) for 250 months? And somehow that "costs more" somehow? That PVR will be obsolete in 2 years, and they'll return it and get something new (I already did that, getting a two tuner version), and they'll keep doing it as we go to ultra-high def, super-9.1 sound, and so on. But somehow in your economics your $2500 of PC hardware will never need upgrading or changing.
but it seems that a lot of problems with IE are really a result of users who don't take the time to secure it in the options
I'm late to the party, but this is just ridiculous. This isn't the user's fault whatsoever, and basic, supposed-to-be-sandboxed scripting is essential for the browser to be marginally useful.
Oh please. TFA is just another knucklehead pontificating and rehashing the same old tired argument that has gone on for oh I don't know twenty years or better.
So very, very true.
This sure-fire conversation starter quickly gets the follow-ups about how lazy programmers are these days (because of course we could all open 20 tabs full of MBs of full colour graphics and anti-aliased vector fonts alpha blended atop the dynamically sizing backgrounds on our Atari STs), and how anyone should be able to get by just find on a circa-1995 computer. The same nonsensical, easily disproven arguments again, and again, and again.
Of course, I suspect that Mr. CIO himself (possibly born in 1969?) is the source of this submission -- why else does the submission mention "Hygeia CIO Rod Hamilton" -- who cares that he's the CIO of some random company. Ultimately it's just some blowhard writing an opinion piece on an online site. Woot. Nothing I see about Mr. Hamilton gives him any particular stand of credibility in my books.
In any case, most of the people buying the new dual-core laptops, or desktops, aren't running out to replace their obsolete Athlon 64 3200+. Instead they're people with either really old computers, failed computers, or who need to upgrade something else (like their display on their laptop). Whatdoyaknow -- for a very cheap price you can get a nice Centrino Duo. Win win for everyone.
Debating this is just the same old tired shit that people keep digging up to try to manufacture content when they have none.
Total nonsense. Read the book mentioned above. Linguists have long observed that babies' minds are already capable of doing all these operations of breaking down sound and processing individual elements.
There are countless early education experts who advocate deconstructing words, and individually naming objects to young children, but you've read one book from one author and now you're strongly refuting people who say otherwise. Amazing.
There's no need for a grown woman like their mother to act silly for no real reason, because her actions simply do not result in faster speech development or greater eloquence.
If you think a "grown woman" is acting "silly" when they baby talk with their child, an exercise that both of them generally enjoy, you really, really need to get some perspective, and to get a life. Desperately clutch onto your one author that shares your bile and feel delusionally confident in your superiority over those fools.
While this is true, it's almost impossible to recover the GUI using this method.
As the other poster mentioned, this is nonsense. Aside from the rare event of having explorer die on its own, I've intentionally killed explorer.exe and then restarted it myself. The only problem I've ever encountered are system tray icons for running apps that are no longer there (as many apps add the icons on startup), which is a bit of a nuisance. Apart from that there's no downside.
In fact, when my machine was a little less beefy I would kill explorer.exe with the task manager, and then launch games directly by "File/New Task (Run)". Explorer consumes a fair bit of resources, so it eases things up for the game.
Of course you might be talking about something different, as really explorer isn't "the GUI", but rather is just an application that sits behind all others providing a graphical shell. It is possible (usually DirectX game, and even then it is rare) to screw up GDI, and until Vista there isn't a way to fix it. Vista brings a new "reset" toggle for video cards that will clean that up.
If the actual algorithm were known, as you claim, then it would be much more trivial to design a page to be undetectably ranked highly.
No, it wouldn't. Many of the inputs to the equation are extremely difficult to intentionally manufacture (e.g. multiple featured links from long living, highly ranked domains). Couple that with the fact that the algorithm that we're talking about is only half the equation -- Google has a "mechanical turk" of sorts where they have teams of employees trolling the net looking for deviants, and manually overriding the algorithm.
How can you possibly engineer around people manually overriding rankings?
Deriving exactly what happens behind the scene would mean managing to reconstruct the Pagerank algorithm -- which hasn't happened yet -- and be able to reliably generate PR10 pages -- which hasn't happened either.
Just because the information is known doesn't mean that the exploiters have the means necessary to exploit it. Just because you have the schematics necessary for a nuclear bomb doesn't mean that you have the supplies, tools, and expertise to build one.
Does Google actually use this rule to compute ranking? It seems that the warez community could perform a DoS on a major publisher of proprietary software merely by linking to its website.
I've wondered the same thing about the purported "negative" influences of Google's rankings. I've found some spammer sites linking to my site, calling it a "related site". I have no idea what they're doing, but it'd be pretty dumb if Google penalized me because of it. Perhaps they've figured out that Google does reverse attribution as well (e.g. A links to B, so therefore A gets attributed with some of B's content).
This is one of the few cases where "security through obscurity" kinda works...the security of Google's page rankings depends on the secrecy of the algorithm itself. They have no obligation to reveal their algorithm to Kinderstart or anyone else.
Google's PageRank is no more protected by security through obscurity than anything else -- The exact same problem applies: While it superficially stops the casual exploiter from gaming the system, it's hardly rocket science to setup cases of various scenarios and derive exactly what they're doing behind the scenes (which is exactly what SEOs do). Furthermore you can be sure that there are current and former Google employees/interns that have sold the big secret. Something like that is impossible to keep secret.
This proves that you don't understand what ActiveX really is. Flash in IE? ActiveX. Java in IE? ActiveX. ActiveX is nothing more than IE's plug-in system, so to say that it's "close to non-existent" on the public Internet is completely fallacious.
ActiveX isn't "IE's plug-in system", it's used as IE's plug-in system. There's a huge difference.
Whether IE uses ActiveX,.NET, or VBScript to implement platform specific object handlers is irrelevant -- it is a platform implementation detail, and the same instantiation code works across platforms.
What I was obviously talking about is ActiveX specific or only functionality, which is non-existant. To use your own examples - Flash, Java, and so on all happily instantiate on Firefox on Linux as well.
Or the people who have a large investment in ActiveX, and other IE technologies.
I developed a solution in the late 90s that used ActiveX, and it was very good for the time. I'd use a different technology if I were to do it again.
In any case, the number of firms with solutions like that is absolutely miniscule. On the public internet ActiveX is close to non-existant, and in corporations it is certainly a rarity. That accounts for a tiny fraction of the users who use IE.
The sad truth is that most users stick with IE simply because it's there and it's easy (which normally qualifies as laziness), and even if it were a decade behind it would still see prevalent use. What we really need is a jazzy, cool looking Firefox (or Opera) by default, and installation by computer vendors. Corporation IT departments need to get off their asses and figure out how to do their jobs, and at least seriously consider alternatives to IE.
When Opera can handle more than a quarter of the pages on the internet correctly come back to me.
I love Firefox, but I'm not blinded by it. I use both browsers (Opera and Firefox) regularly, in fact they're both open as I write this, and I can say that Opera has just as much success as Firefox does. When I do have problems, it tends to be a problem in both (e.g. a page written purely for IE).
Slashdot Mirror
... when jumping the gun in response to your accusing me of jumping the gun.
I was the one who said that, and I stick by it. Your OP has all of the hallmarks of a dismissive, never having RTFA reply, and now you're just trying to defend it using poorly thought out, misapplied analogies.
What happens when you divide your shoebox into three sections? Do the molecules in the air divide themselves evenly between two of the sections, but leave the third empty? I think you missed a few details from the article.
Not to mention that for his shoebox example, the air would have to cluster into two small areas comprising probably less than 5% of the total surface area. I suspect that the poster simply jumped the gun without a clue of what the article was talking about, immediately dismissing it. They missed the fact that it's pretty amazing. Most amazing was how they separated into equal groups, but still preferred larger groups to smaller groups (e.g. with three houses, they still stayed in just two in equal sized groups).
Ok, I got it, I did the math wrong... How many posts will it take pointing this out before they start getting marked "redundant"?
Only 3 people pointed out that massive, enormous fault. If they should be moderated redundant, then your post should be moderated ignorant.
Regardless of that, the real problem isn't with the masses, its with the elite. My father is a plumbing and mechanics inspector in one of the richest counties in America. He recalls one house he inspected that had 7 heated swimming pools joined together with hottubs. The owner would keep them heated year-round just in case a random party broke out. He also had 10 furnace and airconditioning units in his 35,000 sqft. house that I'm sure he ran the hell out of. He also had a 6 car garage, one spot for each of his SUVs.
7 heated swimming pools and 35,000 sq. ft, eh? There are maybe a dozen houses in all of the US of that sort of size, if that (7 swimming pools? Might have been credible if you said 3). Sort of like your ridiculous CEO versus average worker comparison, your basic premise (that it's the gluttonous rich that are the real problem) is completely flawed.
There are a whole bunch of benefits from this, including making it more possible for people to telecommute, etc.
Huh? Are you responding to the right article? This is an enormously boring acquisition of a boring analytics company that makes boring scorecard type products for executives, alike to many similar products in a burgeoning marketplace. I mean, if you're an executive looking for scorecard software, it's mildly interesting that Microsoft might eventually integrate it to supplant its own, but otherwise...
I'm actually surprized this was posted to Slashdot.
I'm trying to guess what the grandparent means by hypervisor services.
I wasn't sure either, but presumed that they are simply referring to the concept of a hypervisor, which is the foundation of a multi-operating system platform. Regarding native instruction pass-thru, both Virtual Server/Virtual PC and VMWare's products do largely the same thing, passing most instructions through directly. What the article talked about regarding Microsoft's next version was support for Intel's new Vanderpool technology, which is basically additional support for virtualization on the chip itself. As it is the software expensively save and restore states between context switches to different virtual sessions, and Vanderpool offers some hardware that makes it much less costly. If you have a lot of CPU saturated virtual sessions, it can make a big difference.
As an aside, interestingly enough, I was surprised to find Microsoft's virtual server technology STILL does not offer hypervisor services... to give some perspective as to how far behind that puts them in "getting it", I worked on virtualized VM boxes on IBM 360 mainframes in school back in the mid-70s! These systems were implemented with hypervisor. Wow!
It wouldn't be virtualization if it didn't have hypervisor services. Maybe you're talking about hardware virtualization, which was just added by Intel, so it was somewhat difficult for Microsoft to support this before.
Read the article, it explains it in more detail.
The article is just another guy giving his differing opinion on what "Web 2.0" is. You can find those in the thousands, and there is nothing about this one that makes it more compelling (in fact, and all apologies to Mr. Hinchcliffe, but his take seems even more vacuous and ignorant than most).
To quote from the article: "Web 2.0 is not a technology, it's a way of architecting software and businesses and companies see the value in the Web 2.0 way of doing business.". What an awesomely vague and useless statement that is. Basically what he's saying is "We'll pick whatever is successful and call it Web 2.0". The mention of MySpace is telling, given that MySpace is nothing more than a continuation of the sorts of social sites that appeared when HTML first hit the mainstream.
Why do I have to tell this to /. readers?
/. readers already know this. In fact it's pretty humorous that the submitter mentions MySpace, given that MySpace is very much Web 1.0.
Most
More and more people are using the internet for more and more things. Woot. More like Web 1.1 than Web 2.0. The term rightly gets derision because it deserves it: the continual growth and continual technology evolution is suddenly noticed by some that are unaware, and they decree that they've witnessed a revolution rather than an evolution.
I like all the subtle little messages in this article, further reinforcing the fundamentalist Christian conservative stereotype and implying that the Christians are the ones feeding fuel to the ICANN vs. Europe dispute.
The way this article is presented is just bizarre. Quite apart from the fact that it is worded to imply that it's the Christian group that has veto power (when it really means the US. I realize some people get confused about the separation), one of the greatest opponents of the new domain were porn purveyors and fiends -- much as the abortion debate gets sidetracked by slippery slope arguments, they feared that the addition of an XXX TLD is the first step to segregating their businesses and interests. e.g. Follow it up by a law that all questionable sites have to be on the XXX TLD. Now that they're in the porn ghetto, it's pretty easy to cut it off. Many conservatives were for the new TLD, given that porn is already out there and pervasive, and if there was a way they could control their children/group's access to it via such a simple filter, more power to them.
What a confusing mess.
The methodology described in the article simply isn't up-to-date. It worked well for a one-user-for-one-PC era, but that's not where we are at anymore.
XCopy apps still have the option to store settings in
a) User directories aliased into the application directory.
b) User directories
There is nothing whatsoever in the linked article that is "outdated".
Holographic media has been a scam before and it'll be one until there is a box with a price tag in a store.
Way back in the late 80s, Atari was going to revolutionize the market with one of their recent acquisitions - Transmeta. Apparently a part of their amazing massively parallel computing system was a holographic storage system that was going to revolutionize the industry.
Holographic storage, like worthwhile image recognition, is always just >this much (two fingers held slightly apart) away from being practically worthwhile, yet the optimists, and scammers, always imagine that final portion to be much easier than it really is.
I think that it is bad, but I also hope that the patents are held as a defence (much like the M$ drednaught does with many of theirs).
.COM explosion), and it's an abuse of the patent system. Google is definitely swaying to the side of evil.
The whole defensive line is complete B.S. (and note that Microsoft has recently started murmurs about attacking Linux based upon patents). This patent is a joke (not to mention that it harkens back to the ridiculous "everything for free if you just watch ads" days of the early
MythTV box plus Mac Mini = $Thousands versus DVR rental from your cable company $10/mnth. Sure the rented DVR will cost more in the long run but, people won't see that. All they'll see is $2,500 starting cost, forget MythTV.
So for the same upfront cost, they could rent a more purpose suited device (I have a PVR that works brilliantly, and receives and records HDTV, has the full online guide and two way communications, etc. I've done the media center PC thing, and in fact I HAVE a media center PC in my living room, but it has never been as smooth and -simply works- like the PVR) for 250 months? And somehow that "costs more" somehow? That PVR will be obsolete in 2 years, and they'll return it and get something new (I already did that, getting a two tuner version), and they'll keep doing it as we go to ultra-high def, super-9.1 sound, and so on. But somehow in your economics your $2500 of PC hardware will never need upgrading or changing.
but it seems that a lot of problems with IE are really a result of users who don't take the time to secure it in the options
I'm late to the party, but this is just ridiculous. This isn't the user's fault whatsoever, and basic, supposed-to-be-sandboxed scripting is essential for the browser to be marginally useful.
Oh please. TFA is just another knucklehead pontificating and rehashing the same old tired argument that has gone on for oh I don't know twenty years or better.
So very, very true.
This sure-fire conversation starter quickly gets the follow-ups about how lazy programmers are these days (because of course we could all open 20 tabs full of MBs of full colour graphics and anti-aliased vector fonts alpha blended atop the dynamically sizing backgrounds on our Atari STs), and how anyone should be able to get by just find on a circa-1995 computer. The same nonsensical, easily disproven arguments again, and again, and again.
Of course, I suspect that Mr. CIO himself (possibly born in 1969?) is the source of this submission -- why else does the submission mention "Hygeia CIO Rod Hamilton" -- who cares that he's the CIO of some random company. Ultimately it's just some blowhard writing an opinion piece on an online site. Woot. Nothing I see about Mr. Hamilton gives him any particular stand of credibility in my books.
In any case, most of the people buying the new dual-core laptops, or desktops, aren't running out to replace their obsolete Athlon 64 3200+. Instead they're people with either really old computers, failed computers, or who need to upgrade something else (like their display on their laptop). Whatdoyaknow -- for a very cheap price you can get a nice Centrino Duo. Win win for everyone.
Debating this is just the same old tired shit that people keep digging up to try to manufacture content when they have none.
Oh for crying out loud...I really need to use the preview. Somehow I left a strong unclosed. Sorry for that.
Total nonsense. Read the book mentioned above. Linguists have long observed that babies' minds are already capable of doing all these operations of breaking down sound and processing individual elements.
There are countless early education experts who advocate deconstructing words, and individually naming objects to young children, but you've read one book from one author and now you're strongly refuting people who say otherwise. Amazing.
There's no need for a grown woman like their mother to act silly for no real reason, because her actions simply do not result in faster speech development or greater eloquence.
If you think a "grown woman" is acting "silly" when they baby talk with their child, an exercise that both of them generally enjoy, you really, really need to get some perspective, and to get a life. Desperately clutch onto your one author that shares your bile and feel delusionally confident in your superiority over those fools.
While this is true, it's almost impossible to recover the GUI using this method.
As the other poster mentioned, this is nonsense. Aside from the rare event of having explorer die on its own, I've intentionally killed explorer.exe and then restarted it myself. The only problem I've ever encountered are system tray icons for running apps that are no longer there (as many apps add the icons on startup), which is a bit of a nuisance. Apart from that there's no downside.
In fact, when my machine was a little less beefy I would kill explorer.exe with the task manager, and then launch games directly by "File/New Task (Run)". Explorer consumes a fair bit of resources, so it eases things up for the game.
Of course you might be talking about something different, as really explorer isn't "the GUI", but rather is just an application that sits behind all others providing a graphical shell. It is possible (usually DirectX game, and even then it is rare) to screw up GDI, and until Vista there isn't a way to fix it. Vista brings a new "reset" toggle for video cards that will clean that up.
If the actual algorithm were known, as you claim, then it would be much more trivial to design a page to be undetectably ranked highly.
No, it wouldn't. Many of the inputs to the equation are extremely difficult to intentionally manufacture (e.g. multiple featured links from long living, highly ranked domains). Couple that with the fact that the algorithm that we're talking about is only half the equation -- Google has a "mechanical turk" of sorts where they have teams of employees trolling the net looking for deviants, and manually overriding the algorithm.
How can you possibly engineer around people manually overriding rankings?
This is completely false.
Says you.
Deriving exactly what happens behind the scene would mean managing to reconstruct the Pagerank algorithm -- which hasn't happened yet -- and be able to reliably generate PR10 pages -- which hasn't happened either.
Just because the information is known doesn't mean that the exploiters have the means necessary to exploit it. Just because you have the schematics necessary for a nuclear bomb doesn't mean that you have the supplies, tools, and expertise to build one.
Does Google actually use this rule to compute ranking? It seems that the warez community could perform a DoS on a major publisher of proprietary software merely by linking to its website.
I've wondered the same thing about the purported "negative" influences of Google's rankings. I've found some spammer sites linking to my site, calling it a "related site". I have no idea what they're doing, but it'd be pretty dumb if Google penalized me because of it. Perhaps they've figured out that Google does reverse attribution as well (e.g. A links to B, so therefore A gets attributed with some of B's content).
This is one of the few cases where "security through obscurity" kinda works...the security of Google's page rankings depends on the secrecy of the algorithm itself. They have no obligation to reveal their algorithm to Kinderstart or anyone else.
Google's PageRank is no more protected by security through obscurity than anything else -- The exact same problem applies: While it superficially stops the casual exploiter from gaming the system, it's hardly rocket science to setup cases of various scenarios and derive exactly what they're doing behind the scenes (which is exactly what SEOs do). Furthermore you can be sure that there are current and former Google employees/interns that have sold the big secret. Something like that is impossible to keep secret.
For all we know Google could add a 50% bonus to sites that host AdSense ads.
This proves that you don't understand what ActiveX really is. Flash in IE? ActiveX. Java in IE? ActiveX. ActiveX is nothing more than IE's plug-in system, so to say that it's "close to non-existent" on the public Internet is completely fallacious.
.NET, or VBScript to implement platform specific object handlers is irrelevant -- it is a platform implementation detail, and the same instantiation code works across platforms.
ActiveX isn't "IE's plug-in system", it's used as IE's plug-in system. There's a huge difference.
Whether IE uses ActiveX,
What I was obviously talking about is ActiveX specific or only functionality, which is non-existant. To use your own examples - Flash, Java, and so on all happily instantiate on Firefox on Linux as well.
Or the people who have a large investment in ActiveX, and other IE technologies.
I developed a solution in the late 90s that used ActiveX, and it was very good for the time. I'd use a different technology if I were to do it again.
In any case, the number of firms with solutions like that is absolutely miniscule. On the public internet ActiveX is close to non-existant, and in corporations it is certainly a rarity. That accounts for a tiny fraction of the users who use IE.
The sad truth is that most users stick with IE simply because it's there and it's easy (which normally qualifies as laziness), and even if it were a decade behind it would still see prevalent use. What we really need is a jazzy, cool looking Firefox (or Opera) by default, and installation by computer vendors. Corporation IT departments need to get off their asses and figure out how to do their jobs, and at least seriously consider alternatives to IE.
When Opera can handle more than a quarter of the pages on the internet correctly come back to me.
I love Firefox, but I'm not blinded by it. I use both browsers (Opera and Firefox) regularly, in fact they're both open as I write this, and I can say that Opera has just as much success as Firefox does. When I do have problems, it tends to be a problem in both (e.g. a page written purely for IE).